In this groundbreaking guide to spiritual and personal wellness, Deepak Chopra unveils profound discoveries on how we can connect with our true self and construct a life free from fear. Building on decades of spiritual teachings, Chopra illustrates through enlightening sutras how to move from a state of simply surviving to leading an awakened life that unlocks the dormant potential within each of us. He also offers a Wellbeing Index by which we can track our progress on this journey towards awakening, helping increase intuition, access to insight, and a growing sense of ourselves as constantly changing beings which are part of a larger whole. 

Awakening offers the power to free you from the limitations of ego into a life marked by inner and outer peace, purpose, and boundless possibility. Featuring mental exercises, meditations, and personal stories from his own spiritual journey, Chopra shakes us from the nightmare of a limited self, where worry and anxiety reign.  

Chopra's Awakening not only invites you to embrace a new way of being—conscious reality—where miracles are everyday occurrences, but also offers visionary guidance to access the boundless potential of your soul, realized here and now. Ultimately, through the practices in Awakening, Chopra aims to propel all humanity toward an epoch of unprecedented transformation.

The following excerpt is the book's Introduction.

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Invitation to a New Life 

A new way of life—the awakened life—opens up with a single decision: to know the truth about reality, including the truth about yourself. To be awake is to be fully conscious about what is real and what isn’t. Every step along the way brings a greater sense of lightness and freedom. Nothing feels freer than being yourself, as most people realize when they reach a point when simply being here is enough. But mostly it isn’t enough. Everyone is preoccupied with an unending stream of desires, duties, and demands. We are so accustomed to this existence that being told to wake up is hard to fathom, or outright impossible. 

What keeps us in thrall is a waking dream that is collectively shared with everyone else. Without the strangely surreal happenings in the dreams we have when we’re asleep, the waking dream is totally convincing and crystal clear. Once you stretch your arms in the morning after a night’s sleep, you automatically enter the waking dream with no thought that you need to wake up twice. 

This second awakening is so important that in the Indian spiritual tradition it is called a “second birth.” Clarity dawns about who you really are, where you come from, and why you are here. Modern people struggle with all these issues. Even if you don’t give a thought to India or any spiritual tradition—East or West—a deep intuition motivates anyone who heeds it; that life can’t be as mundane, conflicted, fearful, difficult, and full of pain as the life we have accepted without question. 

The awakened life has always been an alternative. Its promise is renewed with every generation. The present generation, particularly in the West, has set up its own standards of proof. Awakening must be described in ordinary language, rationally laid out, presented with convincing logic, and, above all, suited to solving the array of problems—both personal and global—that afflict our troubled times. For the vast majority of people, reverence for ancient traditions doesn’t enter the picture. 

Nodding to those demands, the following pages provide a guide to the awakened life that anyone can follow. There is nothing the reader needs in the way of faith or belief. The argument for awakening is couched in straight talk without offering either a carrot or a stick. The truth must be convincing on its own. Only then can you make a choice about whether or not to open the door to a new life. 

I’ll ask for only one article of trust. Trust that awakening is natural. All creatures and plants survive because they follow their own nature, without deviation or doubts. A predatory wolf or lion isn’t weighed down by its history of past decisions or pining over lost love. There is no reason for Homo sapiens to be excluded from this scheme. We have evolved beyond it. As the most privileged life-form on Earth, we are free to make choices, including the choice to wake up. In awakening, we are liberated from the nightmare of our personal and collective suffering, by the natural process of reconnecting with our true nature. We are designed to wake up, which will reveal who we really are. 

At the same time, we relinquish the separate, isolated self. This isn’t a sacrifice but an immense gain. Seen clearly, human beings are an expression of pure consciousness, which is the boundless, infinite source at the root of existence. 

If I had to describe my entire career in a single phrase, it would come down to awakening as a possibility for everyone. Awakening isn’t reserved for a select group of sages, saints, visionaries, and poets, inspiring as they are. By its nature, human awareness expands. Yours has been expanding since birth, and if you don’t feel aware all the time, the pattern of stressful modern life is chiefly to blame.  

Awareness cannot be destroyed; it is the basis of having a mind in the first place. But most people are distracted by the constant activity of the mind as it thinks, feels, and senses experiences. Screened behind this activity, your awareness goes unnoticed because it has no voice and doesn’t attract attention to itself. 

Nevertheless, your state of awareness determines in huge measure how your life will turn out and how your everyday existence is proceeding here and now. A major revelation in the awakened life is that existence is conscious. There is nothing in creation without some degree of awareness. This revelation deposes human beings as the only creatures who possess consciousness. The long journey begun by our hominid ancestors did not start from a blank slate of unconsciousness. Certainly a journey occurred from origins over millions of years, but consciousness guided our evolutionary ascent.  

If this proposition overturns the apple cart, it is only one of the realizations that arrive spontaneously when someone awakens in consciousness. For the moment, set this aside. The practical challenge I faced when conceiving this book was how to give readers an experience of pure consciousness as the fundamental source of their lives. You can’t think yourself awake, and no one can talk you into it.  

After pondering this question, I decided that nothing would do but the truth. Give the reader the most profound truths about consciousness and trust that, in the end, the truth will win out. In one sense this is like presenting evidence in court that piles up until guilt or innocence becomes undeniable. In another sense, I’m giving a secular version of Jesus’s teaching, “Know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” 

At its most profound, the path to the truth was meticulously laid out in the Vedic tradition thousands of years ago in India through Gyan Yoga. The purpose of the eight branches, or “limbs,” of Yoga is to unite a person with pure consciousness. Gyan in Sanskrit refers to knowledge or wisdom. So this is the path of wisdom to achieve a high state of consciousness. 

Although my daily routine includes several other limbs of Yoga, among them the postures of Hatha Yoga taught in yoga classes, what comes naturally to me is Gyan Yoga. I thirst for knowledge, read voraciously, revere ancient texts, and feel great inspiration whenever I discover an expression of wisdom. I am going to do my best in these chapters to forge a bond with you, the reader, based on a similar thrill of discovery. 

Although Gyan means both knowledge and wisdom, I want to distinguish between the two. Knowledge is generally the word we choose when speaking about external facts and information. You get a college degree based on the field of knowledge you major in. Wisdom is interior; it comes in the form of insight, realizing the truth behind the knowledge your mind acquires. 

In the modern secular world, wisdom has become suspect, largely because skeptics apply the wrong tests to it. They judge wisdom by the same standards used to validate fingerprints or to measure the molecular weight of plutonium—tests suited for objective facts, but not for subjective insight. 

An insight has no molecular weight and leaves no fingerprints behind. Deciding that wisdom is unreliable, like other subjective experiences, is a perfect example of asking the wrong question to begin with. Wisdom is truth gained through inner discoveries in consciousness. I always compare the ancient seers, or rishis, of Vedic India to Einsteins of consciousness. Einstein unveiled the hidden principles governing the physical universe; the rishis uncovered the inner path to pure consciousness, which is just as universal. The legacy they left behind constitutes Gyan Yoga. It reveals a hidden dimension of life that is more real than the physical world because Gyan Yoga can explain the physical world, while science cannot explain consciousness. 

It is fascinating to discover that truths revealed in the ancient past pertain to your life today. Pure consciousness embraces everyone. This makes the possibility of the awakened life open to everyone.  

To reach the state of awakening, you need access to the deeper truth of who you are and what life is all about. I’ve chosen the most authentic written form that Gyan Yoga takes—the axioms known in Sanskrit as sutras. There are thirty-three sutras here, modified for modern understanding. Each presents one angle of wisdom in concentrated form, followed by a practical section that addresses how to find your own personal wisdom. The infinite potential that is the essence of being human can’t be realized in the written word—only the experience of insight is ultimately valid. But for millennia the sutra has come closer to expressing the truth than any other form. The exalted role of wisdom needs to be revived in our time, which is dominated by external knowledge. If wisdom can be resurrected, untold horizons lie ahead and, more immediately, the urgent global problems facing us can be solved at the source. 

Excerpted from Awakening: The Path to Freedom and Enlightenment by Deepak Chopra, published by Harmony, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2025 by Deepak Chopra. All rights reserved. 

About the Author

Deepak Chopra, MD, founder of the Chopra Foundation and Chopra Global, is a world-renowned pioneer in integrative medicine and personal transformation. He is also the founder behind DigitalDeepak.ai, a groundbreaking initiative utilizing advanced AI technology to communicate his timeless wisdom worldwide, helping and guiding individuals on their path to well-being and personal growth. Chopra is the author of more than ninety books, including numerous New York Times bestsellers. Time magazine has described Dr. Chopra as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.”