Rationalists tend to dismiss miracles. The new age guru Deepak Chopra however believes that there are more things on earth than the human mind can comprehend. He discusses the rationale behind miracles.

A miracle is a display of power from beyond the five senses. Although all miracles take place in the transition zone, they differ from level to level. In general, miracles become more “supernatural” after the fourth or fifth brain response, but any miracle involves direct contact with spirit.

Level 1 (Fight -or -Flight Response)
Miracles involve surviving great danger, impossible rescues, a sense of divine protection.

Example: A mother who runs into a burning house to rescue her child, or lifts a car with a child trapped underneath

Level 2 (Reactive Response)
Miracles involve incredible achievements and success, con­trol over the body or mind.

Example: Extreme feats of martial arts, child prodigies with inexplicable gifts in music or mathematics, the rise of a Napoleon from humble beginnings to immense power (men of destiny)

Level 3 (Restful Awareness Response)
Miracles involve synchronicity, yogic powers, and premonitions, feeling the presence of God or angels.

Example: Yogis who can change body temperature or heart rate at will, being visited by someone from far away who has just died, visitation by a guardian angel.

Level 4 (Intuitive Response)
Miracles involve telepathy, ESP. knowledge of past or future lifetimes, prophetic powers.

Example: Reading someone else’s thoughts or aura, psychic predictions, astral projection to other locations.

Level 5 (Creative Response)
Miracles involve divine inspiration, artistic genius, sponta­neous fulfillment of desires (wishes come true).

Example: The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, having a thought that suddenly manifests, Einstein’s insights into time and relativity.

Level 6 (Visionary Response)
Miracles involve healing, physical transformations, holy apparitions, highest degree of supernatural feats. Example: Walking on water, healing incurable diseases through touch, direct revelation from the Virgin Mary

Level 7 (Sacred Response)
Miracles involve inner evidence of enlightenment.

Example: Lives of the great prophets and teachers-Buddha, Jesus, Lao- Tze

I am not imagining that every skeptic and atheist reading this book has suddenly jumped to his feet proclaiming that God is real. This will have to go by stages. But at least now we have something to hold on to, and it is something extremely useful. We can explain those mysterious journeys that mystics have taken into God’s real­ity. Such journeys have always deeply moved me, and I remember exactly where my fascination began. The first such voyager I ever heard of was called the Colonel- his story is one of the seeds of this book. As I retell it, I can feel my mind experiencing his reality, which passed through so many phases from danger to compassion, from peace to unity. He will serve as a promise of the unfolding truth that is possible in any of our lives:

I was ten and my father, a doctor in the Indian army, had moved his family to Assam. No part of the country is as green and idyllic. Assam is an Eden, if Eden were covered with tea plantations as far as the eye can see. I could literally hear a song in my heart as I walked to the high-perched school on the hill. It must have been the magic of the place that made me notice an old beggar who used to sit by the road. He was always there under his tree, dressed in tat­ters, rarely moving or saying a word. The village women believed absolutely that this unkempt figure was a saint. They would sit beside him for hours, praying for a healing (or a new baby), and my grandmother assured me that our neighbor lady had been cured of arthritis by walking past him and silently asking for his blessing.

Strangely, everyone called this old beggar “the Colonel.” One day I couldn’t control my curiosity and asked why, and my best friend from school, Oppo, found out for me. Oppo’s mother had once been healed by the Colonel, and Oppo’s father, who was a newspaper reporter in town, had a remarkable tale to tell me:

At the end of World War II, a large force of British troops, the doomed “forgotten army,” had been pinned down or captured by the invading Japanese in Burma. Because of the unending mon­soon rains, the fighting had been tough and miserable; the treat­ment received by the prisoners of war was atrocious. Indians served in the British army, and one of them was a Bengali doctor named Sengupta.

Sengupta was on the verge of starving in a POW camp when the Japanese decided to retreat from their position. He didn’t know if the British army had somehow advanced close by, but it didn’t mat­ter. Instead of marching the POWs to a new prison, their captors lined them up and shot each one in the head at close range with a pistol. This included Sengupta, who was in some way grateful to die and end his torment. He heard the gun blast at his temple, and with a jolt of searing pain he fell over. Only this wasn’t the end. By some miracle he regained consciousness several hours later-he judged the passage of time because night had fallen and the prison camp was dead quiet.

It took some moments before Sengupta who felt that he was suffocating, realized with horror that he had come to under a heavy pile of corpses. In the rush to abandon camp, no one had checked to see if he was really dead, and his limp body had been thrown onto the pile with the others. It seemed like an eternity before Sengupta gathered enough strength to crawl out into the open air; he staggered to the river and washed himself, trembling with fear and revulsion. It was obvious that he was alone and that no Allies were coming to rescue him.

By morning he had made the decision to walk to safety. Deep in a war zone with no sense of Burmese geography, he could only think to return to India - and that is what he did. Surviving on fruit, insects, and rain water, he traveled by night and hid in the jun­gle by day. The terrain consisted of hill after hill, and the ground was deep in mud. Although he passed occasional villages and peas­ant farms, he didn’t dare trust anyone enough to ask for refuge. He could hear unknown wild animals in the dark at a time when tigers were still found in Burma, and he stumbled over snakes that terri­fied him.

Sengupta’s trek took months before he stepped across the bor­der into Bengal, and eventually the emaciated hero walked into Calcutta, heading for British army headquarters. He made his report and recounted his achievement. but the British, far from believing him, immediately had him arrested. He was put in irons as a probable Japanese spy or collaborator. Broken emotionally as well, as physically, he lay in his dark cell and contemplated the fate that had taken him from one prison to another.

Somewhere during this period of disgrace, under daily interrogation and a later court-martial, Sengupta went through a supreme transformation. It wasn’t something he ever spoke about, but the change was startling-in place of bitterness he gained complete peace, he healed his wounds both inner and outer (fitting for some­one who would turn into a healer of others) and he stopped strug­gling waiting calmly for the inevitable sentence of the court. Amazingly the inevitable never came. In a sudden change of heart the British chose to believe that his story was true, prompted by the immediate end of hostilities when the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on Japan.

Within a week Sengupta was dragged out of prison, awarded a medal for valor, and paraded through the streets of Calcutta as a hero. He seemed as strangely oblivious of the cheers as he had been of the suffering. Leaving medicine behind, he became a wandering monk. When he finally grew old and found his resting place under the tree in Assam, he didn’t tell anyone his story. It was the locals who dubbed him the Colonel, perhaps tipped off by Oppo’s father, the newspaper reporter.

Naturally my first, burning question at the age of ten was how a man could be shot in the head with a pistol at point-blank range and survive. Oppo’s father shrugged. When they were captured, most of the British soldiers were armed with ammunition made in India. The Japanese executed them with their own pistols, and no doubt one of the bullets had been defective, filled with powder but no shot. Anyway, that was the best rational guess. So much for the miracle.

Today I ask another question that means more to me: How does such extreme torment, which provides every reason to abandon faith, turn into absolute faith instead? No one could doubt that the Colonel had arrived at some kind of saintliness from his ordeal. He made the mystic journey; he hunted God to the finish. I now real­ize what a profound miracle the human brain actually is. It has the capacity to see spiritual reality under any circumstance. In Sengupta’s case, consider what he might have been overwhelmed by: the terror of death, the possibility of being here one day and gone the next, the fear that good will never prevail over evil, and the frag­ile freedom that could be extinguished by cruel authority.

It is clear, despite the turmoil that makes belief in God harder than ever, that every level of revelation still exists. Redemption is just another word for calling on your innate ability to see with the eye of the soul. Two voices are heard in our heads every day, the one believ­ing in the dark and the other in the light. Only one reality can be really real. Our new model, the “reality sandwich,” solves this riddle. Sengupta took a journey into the transition zone where transforma­tion occurs. Here, where the material world transforms from dense matter into invisible energy; the mind gets transformed as well.

Sengupta’s soul journey passed through fight or flight, restful awareness, intuition, and vision, eventually finding the courage to live entirely in the visionary response for the rest of his life. He ensconced himself in a new way, clothed in love and serenity. The brain discovered that it could escape the prison of its old reactions, rising to a new, higher level that it perceived as God.

So now we have the outline for the entire spiritual journey in our hands: the unfolding of God is a process made possible by the brain’s ability to unfold its own potential. Inherent in each of us is wonder, love, transformation, and miracles, not just because we crave these things but because they are our birthright. Our neurons have evolved to make these higher aspirations real. From the womb of the brain springs a new and useful God. Or to be precise, seven variations of Gods which leave a trail of dues for us to follow every day.

If asked why we should strive to know God, my answer would be selfish: I want to be a creator. This is the ultimate promise of spirituality, that you can become the author of your own existence, the maker of personal destiny. Your brain is already performing this service for you unconsciously. In the quantum domain your brain chooses the response that is appropriate at any given moment. The universe is an overwhelming chaos. It must be interpreted to make sense; it must be decoded. The brain therefore can’t take reality as it is given; one of the seven responses has to be selected, and the quan­tum realm is where this decision is made.

To know God, you must consciously participate in making this journey-that is the purpose of free will. On the surface of life we make much more trivial choices but pretend that they carry enor­mous weight. In reality, you are constantly acting out seven funda­mental choices about the kind of world you recognize:

The choice of fear if you want to struggle and barely survive.

The choice of power if you want to compete and achieve.

The choice of inner reflection if you want peace.

The choice to know yourself if you want insight.

The choice to create if you want to discover the workings of nature.

The choice to love if you want to heal other and yourself.

The choice to be if you want to appreciate the infinite scope of God’s creation.

I am not arranging these from bad to good, better to best. You are capable of all these choices; they are hardwired into you. But for many people, only the first few responses have been activated. Some part of their brains is dormant, and therefore their view of spirit is extremely limited. It is no wonder that finding God is called awak­ening. A fully awakened brain is the secret to knowing God. In the end, however, the seventh stage is the goal, the one where pure being allows us to revel in the infinite creation of God. Here the mystic Jews searching for the Shekhinah meet the Buddhists in their search for satori, and when they arrive, the ancient Vedic seers will be wait­ing in the presence of Shiva, along with Christ and his Father. This is the place which is both the beginning and end of a process that is God. In this process things like spirit, soul, power, and love unfold in a completely new way. Here certainty can replace doubt, and as the inspired French writer Simone Weil once wrote about the spiritual quest, “Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.”

(Courtesy: How to know God by Deepak Chopra)

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