Deepak Chopra presents The Return of Merlin
The Return of Merlin: A Novel
In July of 1995, Deepak Chopra was welcomed by a capacity crowd in the Bodhi Tree Bookstore Event room to hear him introduce his first novel The Return of Merlin. Not content to rest on his laurels of such seminal books as Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Chopra has turned to fiction. Fiction, he says, compels the writer to be clear about truth, because this is the medium in which we must really reveal ourselves.
“Life is full of mystery and magic and the miraculous and the wondrous. And when we have flashes of wonder, that’s when we experience the world of the wizard.” –Deepak Chopra
The Return of Merlin: A Novel by Deepak Chopra (448 pp.)
Deepak Chopra shows himself to be a natural storyteller. This book, his first fiction novel, reverberates with the spiritual themes and insights that have made this author essential reading. With each new chapter and intriguing plot twist, we are transported to a world of despair and decay. In this modern day fable set in twentieth century England, we discover a mysterious murder, a stone with a cryptic message, a dazzling sword, forbidden lust, an eternal love story, and an irresistibly imaginative, page-turning adventure. And while we are steeped in this entertainment, we are also encountering a miracle of life: that the wizard resides deep within us, and that we can reclaim the field of pure knowledge to bring a new world into reality.
What follows is an edited version of Deepak Chopra’s Bodhi Tree Bookstore presentation.
Deepak Chopra: As I look back over the last fifteen years at my own spiritual journey, I see that it has unfolded in a very sequential manner. My own quest started with a simple desire—to quit smoking. And now I find that I’m looking for God. And once in a while I have glimpses of her. I started in a place where I felt very insecure and uncomfortable about who I was. Then I went through a phase where I became very sure of myself and what the truth was. Now I’m back in a place of slight confusion. It’s a good place to be.
Vaclav Havel, the founding president of Czecholovakia once said, “Seek the company of those who are looking for truth but flee from those who have found it.” So, I hope you’re not here because you’ll find the truth today.
Nietzsche, the great German philosopher once said, “You must have chaos within you to give birth to a dancing star.” It is in that turbulence, in that chaos, that one finds the seeds of creativity.
And T. S. Elliot said, “The end of our exploring is to arrive where we started from and know the place for the first time.” Over the years my interest has been mainly in the notion that the mind and body are inseparable, that the two are exactly different expressions of the same field. Now my interest is in the existence of the human soul.
In truth, I’m not my thoughts and feelings and emotions, nor am I my body—the molecules of my body change at least once a year. So these things happen to me, they come and go. I’m not even the experience of the world, which also changes.
I’m the experiencer. I’m the timeless factor in the midst of every time bound experience. All experience has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. This lecture is an experience. After this lecture, we’ll go our separate ways, but there’s a factor here which will remain unchanged. That’s the experiencer, only the experience changes.
Every religious tradition has called this animating force of life the soul. But if you go to a scientist and tell him you have a soul, he’ll say, “I’d like to believe that, but where is it?” In fact, in the last century some scientists would go to the extraordinary measure of weighing a person just before the person died and then they’d weigh them immediately afterwards to see if anything left. And since they couldn’t find any difference in the weight they at last came to one good conclusion. If we do not have a soul, it probably doesn’t weigh anything.
In our own century [1900s] Dr. Wilder Penfield, a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist actually won the Nobel prize for elucidating the mechanisms of motor and sensory control; how the mind and body are connected.
On day, while Dr. Penfield was examining a patient, he stimulated a part of the brain called the motor cortex. As he did so, the patient’s arms started moving up because he was stimulating that part of the brain that causes that movement. He asked the patient what’s happening and the patient said, “My arm is moving up.” And Dr. Penfield asked, “Are you moving your arm?” And the patient said, “No, my arm is moving up.”
Then Dr. Penfield said to the patient, “Even as I stimulate your brain, why don’t you decide to not let your arm go up, move it somewhere else.” Instead of letting the arm go up, the patient moved it around in a circle. So Dr. Penfield came to an astounding conclusion. He said the brain is telling the body to go one way, but there’s somebody who’s telling the brain, “I’m not going to do that—I’m going to move it another way.”
This third entity, this thinker of the thought, this choice maker that can override the commands of the brain to the body must be the soul. In every moment of our lives we are confronted with an infinity of choices. Right now I have made the choice to give you this lecture, but I could stand on my head, I could make a phone call, or I could go and buy ice cream. I have an infinity of choices available to me in every moment of my life.
This essential me is also making interpretations of what’s happening to me. And this me, the interpreter, cannot be found in the brain or the body.
I’m not my thoughts, I’m the one who’s having thoughts. With all the technology today, you still can’t find me in this body. You can measure the effects of a flicker of an intention a micro-second after I have it, but you still won’t be able to find the intention, the motivator, this person inside. I’m not really there.
If you look at serious spiritual texts like the Kabbalah in the Jewish Tradition or the Vedas in Hinduism or Buddhist philosophy, you’ll find statements like “Your are in this world but not of it.” What does that mean? Imagine listening to Beethoven on the radio and tearing the radio apart hoping to find Beethoven inside. Of course you won’t find him, because he’s not there. The radio traps a non-local field of information and energy and creates a spacetime event out of it. And a spacetime event is an event that has a location in space and has moments in time.
It has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. My body is a space-time event. It occupies different locations in space and it has moments in time. Once this body was just a speck of information on DNA and people added food to it . . .and now I have this thing which goes around giving lectures and signing books. But it’s just a space-time event. The real me is a non-local field of information and energy. More than that, it’s a non-local field of intelligence.
Information that’s alive is intelligence. It is information that has a self-referral feedback loop. It feeds back upon itself and influences it’s own evolution. It learns through memory and through experience. If you say, “Where the heck is this non-local field of intelligence, if it’s not in the body?” Well, that’s the wrong question. As soon as you say where, you imply location and space to something that doesn’t occupy space. You imply moments in time to something that’s timeless—eternal, ineffable and abstract—event if it is real.
When Krishna talks about the soul in the Bhagavada Gita, he says, “Water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it, weapons cannot cleave it, fire cannot burn it, because it’s ancient, it’s unborn, and it can never die.”
We confuse ourselves with the roles we are playing. Yet it’s our destiny to play an infinity of roles which are motivated by an abstract field of intelligence.
My book Merlin is about this field of intelligence: the soul. It’s who you really are. Once you’ve glimpsed your soul, you set off on a journey and there’s no going back, like a child that is born cannot return to the womb. It gives you access to states of awareness that are beyond ordinary waking, dreaming and sleeping.
Unfortunately, most people’s lives are caught up in trivialities. And as a result of the superfluous stuff that occupies our attention, we squeeze the gap between our thoughts, which is the connecting link to the soul.
It is only by glimpsing the soul that we see that reality without consciousness is just a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup. It is our consciousness that takes that quantum soup and decodes it into experience, both material and otherwise.
Transcendental consciousness—or glimpsing the soul—is the fourth state of consciousness. When we begin to experience our souls in the little spaces between our thoughts, then we begin to experience meaningful coincidence in synchronicity. We have an intention and somehow that intention seems to orchestrate an infinity of space time events in order to fulfill itself.
Then, as we carry the consciousness of spirit wherever we go, we enter the fifth stage of consciousness. Now we experience the soul and spirit in the field of matter. When we carry the experiment of eternity in the field of time, we realize that time is nothing more than a tiny punctuation point in eternity. Many people who have had near death experiences will tell you that.
Gautama, the founder of Buddhism said, “This lifetime of ours is as transient as autumn clouds: to watch the birth and death of being is like looking at the movements of a dance; a lifetime is like a flash of lightening in the sky.” As we begin to see that, we begin to peel the layers of our souls and we discover that we are really ancient beings from ancient places and ancient times. That’s when miracles open up to us because we no longer see things in the context of time but in eternity.
Time is nothing but quantified eternity and mortality is nothing but quantified immortality. And cosmic consciousness is the simultaneity of local and non-local awareness. All the great religions speak of the state of God Consciousness or Divine Consciousness, where the same animating force is seen in the objects of our perception. Not only do we carry awareness of our spirit wherever we go in the field of space, time, and matter but we see that the same animating force is bubbling everywhere we go.
A great Indian poet said, “The same stream of light that runs through my veins, runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measure. It is the same light that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth into numerous blades of grass and tumultuous waves of flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean cradle of birth and death in ebb and flow And my pride is from the life throb of ages dancing in my blood at this moment.” We too can begin to experience such ecstasy.
Ecstasy is a primordial energy that occurs when you begin to see divinity wherever you go. If you cannot see God in a flower or a child or in another human being, you’re not going to find God in a book or religion. Once you begin to experience the miraculous in your life—like meaningful coincidence and synchronicity—you almost expect it to happen, and you’re never disappointed. You go beyond that to the final state of consciousness which is called unity consciousness, where the spirit here merges with the spirit everywhere.
So the universe itself becomes your body. For example, in Judaism, Abraham becomes the primordial human experience. He is the experiential knowledge of the immortality of the soul. And as that knowledge wakes up within you, then the wizard blossoms as well. Merlin is not a person, but the symbolic expression of the spirit that is awakened when you go beyond the ghost filled attics of your own mind. You have to go beyond normal human experience, which is full of ambiguity.
The great Sufi, Rumi, was once asked, “Who are you?” and he replied, “If you try and label me with your definitions then you starve yourself of yourself. Nail me down in a coffin with cold words and that coffin is your coffin because I do not know who I am. I am an astounding, lucid confusion. I’m your own voice echoing off the walls of God.”
God is the infinite possibilities in you own voice, echoing off your own intention that can create anything out of eternal, infinite possibility. This may seem like intellectual knowledge, but it is actually experiential knowledge. And I think fiction is a good medium to bring some insight to it.
The Return of Merlin takes place in contemporary England. A murder has taken place and some children—who represent innocence—find a sword, a stone, and a battered cup. The sword represents the power of the spirit and the power of the ego, both the false and the real. The stone represents knowledge, which has infinite organizing power. The cup represents the grave.
Those artifacts spark awareness in the characters and a series of events begin to unfold, that take them into ancient places and ancient times. Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, Galahad and Merlin all represent archetypal energies that we all have access to. If you look inside yourself, you’ll find that there are many people competing for the same body.
We are a conglomerate of archetypal energy states. We have impulses of lust at the same time as we exult the spirit. There’s always the divine and the diabolical. There’s always the sinner and the saint, the sacred and the profane. Only when you can comfortably embrace all the components of yourself—including your dark side—are you ready to face reality. Without doing that you’ll just be another self-righteous person. But when you’re comfortable with it then you’ll see that even the criminals, the deluded dreamers and the misfits of our society are nothing other than the projection of our collective dark side. It will make you much more tolerant and much more forgiving. It will make you more loving.
The journey is ultimately one of love after all. And love is more than mere sentiment or romance. It includes those things, but it is life in all its expression. As Merlin unfolds, in the end this is a story about love.
Rumi said, Wherever you go and whatever you do, be a passionate lover. And then if you have possessed love, you will be a lover at the moment of death, you will be a lover in the tomb, you will be a lover on the day of resurrection, a lover in paradise and forever. And if you have not been a lover, then count not your life as having been lived. On the day of reckoning, it will not be counted. It’s not a day of judgment or punishment, it just won’t be counted.”
Merlin is about the experience of unity consciousness and love as the ultimate truth of the heart of creation. It’s about the coherent, collective mass of consciousness, because we are all like ripples in the vast ocean of consciousness. And because we are part of the ocean, when we are sick or upset we disrupt cosmic harmony. In a sense, it is our duty to remain in a state of ecstasy. Because when we lose it, we seek substitutes for it in the form of addictive behavior.
Addictive behavior is nothing but a second class substitute for that primordial energy state which can only be called the exultation of spirit. And as we go back to it, we go back to the place that we started from. Then addictive behaviors are automatically overshadowed. Addiction is nothing but the search for something that has been ours forever and has been ours always.
Right now The Return of Merlin is the best that I have. It’s the best of my expression. The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success was like opening the doors to a mansion, but this is what happens once you get inside. If you’re going to read this book, I’d be grateful if you would read it three times. First read the story. Then read the key to Merlin. And then go back to the story, look at the archetypal energies and see how they are reflected in the hologram of you. Then begin to live that mystery. Life is full of mystery and magic and the miraculous and the wondrous. And when we have flashes of wonder, that’s when we experience the world of the wizard.
