Spiritual Transformation

The choice is to be conscious or not, which brings us to the possibility for transformation. No one disputes the fact that life consists of change. But can a person, simply by altering his or her consciousness, actually bring about a deep transformation and not just another superficial change?Transformation and change are two different things. The key to true transformation is that nature doesnt move forward in step-by-step movements. It takes quantum leaps all the time, and when it does, old ingredients arent simply recombined.Something new appears in creation for the first time, an emergent property. For example, if you examine hydrogen and oxygen, they are light, gaseous, invisible, and dry. It took a transformation for those two elements to combine and create water, and when that happened, an entirely new set of possibilities emerged with it, the most important from our point of view being life itself.Your body, which is bonding millions of molecules every second, depends on transformation. Breathing and digestion, to mention just two processes, harness transformation.Food and air arent just shuffled around, but, rather, undergo the exact chemical bonding needed to keep you alive. The sugar extracted from an orange travels to the brain and fuels a thought. The emergent property in this case is the newness of the thought: No molecules in the history of the universe ever combined to produce that result.While still remaining who you are, you can bring about a quantum leap in your awareness, and the sign that the leap is real will be some emergent property you never experienced in the past.Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004).