from Creating Affluence by Deepak Chopra.

Excerpted from Creating Affluence by Deepak Chopra. Copyright © 1993 by Deepak Chopra.

Affluence is the experience in which our needs are easily met and our desires spontaneously fulfilled. We feel joy, health, happiness, and vitality in every moment of our existence.

Affluence is reality, and the true purpose of this book is to give us an insight into the nature of reality.

When we are grounded in the nature of reality and we also know that this same reality is our own nature, then we realize that we can create anything, because all of material creation has the same origin. Nature goes to the same place to create a cluster of nebulas, a galaxy of stars, a rain forest, or a human body as it goes to create a thought.

All of material creation, everything that we can see, touch, hear, taste or smell is made from the same stuff and comes from the same source. Experiential knowledge of this fact gives us the ability to fulfill any desire we have, acquire any material object we want, and experience fulfillment and happiness to any extent we aspire.

The principles expressed in this book relate specifically to the creation of unlimited material wealth, but these principles can be applied to fulfill any desire, because they are the same principles that nature uses to create material reality out of a nonmaterial essence.

Before we go into these principles, I would like to discuss in a little detail what science, and particularly physics, has to say about the nature of this universe we live in, the nature of our human bodies, the nature of our minds, and the relationship of all these to each other.

According to quantum field theorists, all material things – whether they are automobiles, human bodies, or dollar bills – are made up of atoms. These atoms are made up of subatomic particles which, in turn, are fluctuations of energy and information in a huge void of energy and information.

Elsewhere in my books and tapes I have explored in detail the nature of quantum reality. Without going into detail, the basic conclusion of quantum field theorists is that the raw material of the world is nonmaterial; the essential stuff of the universe is nonstuff. All of our technology is based on this fact. And this is the climactic overthrow of the superstition of materialism today.

Fax machines, computers, radio, television – all these technologies are possible because scientists no longer believe that the atom, which is the basic unit of matter, is a solid entity. An atom is not a solid entity at all; it is a hierarchy of states of information and energy in a void of all possible states of information and energy.

The difference between one material thing and another material thing – for example, the difference between an atom of lead or an atom of gold – is not on the material level. The subatomic particles such as protons, electrons, quarks, and bosons that make up an atom of gold or lead are exactly the same. Moreover, although we call them particles, they are not material things; they are impulses of energy and information. What makes gold different from lead is the arrangement and quantity of these impulses of energy and information.

All of material creation is structured out of information and energy. All quantum events are basically fluctuations of energy and information. And these impulses of energy and information are the nonstuff that make up everything that we consider stuff or matter. So it becomes clear that not only is the essential stuff of the universe nonstuff, but that it is thinking nonstuff. For what else is a thought but an impulse of energy and information?

We think of thoughts as occurring only in our head, but that is because we experience them as linguistically structured thought that is verbally elite and speaks to us in the English language – in my case, with an Indian accent. But those same impulses of energy and information that we experience as thoughts – those same impulses – are the raw material of the universe.

The only difference between thoughts inside my head and those outside my head is that I experience thoughts inside my head in linguistically structured terms. But before a thought becomes verbal and is experienced as language, it is just an intention. It is, once again, an impulse of energy and information.

In other words, at a preverbal level, all of nature speaks the same language. We are all thinking bodies in a thinking universe. And just as thought projects itself as the molecules of our body, so too the same impulses of energy and information project themselves as space-time events in our environment.

Behind the visible garment of the universe, beyond the mirage of molecules, the maya – or illusion – of physicality, lies an inherently invisible, seamless matrix made up of a nothingness. This invisible nothingness silently orchestrates, instructs, guides, governs, and compels nature to express itself with infinite creativity, infinite abundance, and unfaltering exactitude into a myriad of designs and patterns and forms.

Life experiences are the continuum in this seamless matrix of nothingness, in this continuum of both body and environment. They are our experiences of joy and sorrow, of success and failure, of wealth and poverty. All these events seemingly happen to us, but at very primordial levels we are making them happen.

The impulses of energy and information that create our life experiences are reflected in our attitudes toward life. And our attitudes are an outcome of and expressions of self-engendered impulses of energy and information.

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