Notes & Quotes: Life After Death: The Burden of Proof by Deepak Chopra

Here are my favorite quotes from Deepak Chopra's Life After Death: The Burden of Proof.  I've bolded my absolute favorites.

1. Any drop of water inside my body could have been an ocean, cloud, river, or spring the day before.
2. After we die, we remain motivated.  A soul moves according to its desire from one astral plane to another, projecting as in a dream whatever sights and people, guides and astral entities it needs for its own advancement.
3. (on yogis) By having a desire at a deep enough level of awareness, they went through a process that parallels death.
4. The senses fade one by one.  The last to leave when a person dies is sound, which is the first to come in at birth.  Since sound is the equivalent of vibration, which holds the body together, it makes sense that it would be the last to go.
5. Suicides experience the same inner pain that led them to take their lives.
6. Karma is wound around the soul like thread around a spindle.
7. The main reason for the sleep of the soul is to shed its attachments.  The strength of its attachments will determine how long it takes to shed them.  When the soul awakens it can only enter a plane of existence that is familiar.  You cannot go backward in your evolution: you can only progress.
8. We go where our deepest desires take us.
9. In India, someone dies after reaching the maximum evolution allotted to that lifetime; they have come to the end of what their karma can teach them.
10. When you are born, you bring along the talents you have developed from all your previous existences.
11. Since the Middle Ages we have become fully entrenched in the desirability of being here.
12. In the field of infinite possibilities you exist on all those levels at the same time, but at the level of experience you exist on only one.
13. Once you truly realize that the whole scheme of worlds is imagined by Spirit, from the lowest to the highest, from demons to angels, there can be nothing dangerous about creation.
14. At the moment life ends, 99% of our cells are typically still functional, and all 3 billion codons, the individual letters in the book of DNA, remain intact.
15. Death accomplishes the following miraculous things:
1. It replaces time with timelessness
2. It stretches the boundaries of space to infinity
3. It reveals the source of life
4. It brings a new way of knowing that which lies beyond the reach of the five senses
5. It reveals the underlying intelligence that organizes and sustains creation
16. Our fault it not that we fear death but that we don't respect it as a miracle.
17. There are two paths in life, the path of wisdom and the path of ignorance.  The path of wisdom is to pursue the self.  The path of ignorance is to pursue pleasure.
18. What you choose today will ripple for a thousand tomorrows.
19. Only the wisest know the secret that God was created to do our bidding, not we to do His.
20. If heaven is the supreme reward, is euthanasia a crime or a gift?
21. Heaven is an inward experience -- an experience in consciousness.
22. Every act of kindness adds another brushstroke to the picture; every insight draws you nearer to your essence.
23. The unpredictable tug-of-war between old patterns and new situations makes it impossible to pin down desire.
24. Not only can the mind "Google" itself for info with incredible swiftness, it performs multiple operations with backup plans if they fail.
25. We don't go through life simply making good choices and bad ones.  We go through life making who we are.  Choice is the hand that shapes the raw clay of a person.
26. The soul, it is said, shows itself to our subtle senses as a pearlescent lustrous glow.
27. There is no permanence in this life.  Possessions come and go, as do other people.
28. The more boundless your vision, the more real you are.
29. Underlying all human action is the search for love, and when people are driven to evil actions, the root cause is lack of love.
30. According to the richis, we move between 3 levels of awareness that accounts for all experience:
1. Consciousness filled with physical objects
2. Consciousness filled with subtle objects
3. Consciousness filled with nothing but itself -- pure consciousness
31. It's just as easy to be happy as angry.  You can make this a positive situation.
32. When you die, you will be forced to lose everything, yet something will remain.  It is the soul, which is real.  Therefore, you should celebrate loss.  The trappings of existence can fall away at any time; the essence will always remain.  And that essence is you.
33. Projection creates meaning.  By themselves, events are meaningless until we give them value.
34. Everything that is real at one level of consciousness is unreal at another.
35. Nature depends on the mechanism of rebirth.
36. There are examples of children who remember being shot to death in a previous life and whose bodies show a scar as if a bullet had entered the body, with an opposing exit scar.
37. What we say and do changes the brain.
38. To fight your karma is just as frustrating as accepting your karma.
39. At some deep level mind and matter are one.
40. A direct link to the field of information seems possible and we move closer to the possibility that the brain is the receiver of mind, not its creator.
41. Two people with different worldviews can see the same fact and give totally divergent interpretations of it, because no fact or event is perceived by itself.
42. "The highest form of human intelligence is to observe yourself without judgment." J Krishnamurti
43. 7 steps to opening your mind:
1. Know that you are going to identify with your worldview at every stage of personal growth.
2. Accept that these identifications are temporary.  You will never be truly yourself until you reach unity.
3. Be willing to change your identity every day.  Take a flexible attitude.  Don't defend and "I" that you know is just temporary.
4. Allow your ability to quietly observe without judgment to replace the ingrained ideas you reach for automatically.
5. When you have the impulse to struggle, use that as an immediate signal to let go.  Open a space for a new answer to unfold on its own.
6. When you can't let go, forgive yourself and move on.
7. Use every opportunity to tell yourself that all viewpoints are valid, every experience valuable, every insight a moment of freedom.
44. When we look at DNA we are told by geneticists that life emerges not from the bits of amino acids strung ont he double helix, but from the space between them.
45. Patients who were prayed for recovered faster and with fewer side effects than those not prayed for...we are all connected by the same sphere of consciousness.

I hope you enjoyed these 45 quotes from Life After Death: The Burden of Proof.  Consider picking up a copy for yourself.  A link to Amazon follows.