DAVID SIMON, MD

"...every being being born
on this planet has a
purpose in life..."

phenomeNEWS: We’re happy to have you here, Dr. Simon.

David Simon MD: Thank you for having me.

What was your inspiration for writing The Ten Commitments?

There are several different threads that came together and really after it got going it felt more that this book was writing me than I was writing this book.

Most of my personal spiritual exploration for the last three decades has been looking at Eastern philosophy. I was raised in a fairly traditional Jewish family but there was something about my religion of origin that didn’t quite touch me at my core and so – starting really in high school – I started looking to alternative philosophies. I felt that there was a lot of value in Vedic study, Buddhism, Taoism and Eastern studies and so between college and medical school, I became a yoga and meditation teacher.

In undergraduate college I studied anthropology and actually did a thesis on shamanism, so when I started medical school – I went to the University of Chicago – I thought I had all the right ingredients. I had my basic pre-med requirements, my chemistry and biology. I knew about witch doctors and I was a yoga and meditation teacher. But when I entered into medical school, I realized that my view of the world was not the way that it was being taught in medical school. So I really spent a lot of the last 30 years of my life trying to integrate a Western model of reality with a more Eastern model of reality. The essence of yoga – the word yoga means union.

Two years ago I just started getting the sense that it was important for my own personal integration to see if I could go back to my religious traditions of origin – Judaism and Christianity – and find the truths that would resonate with what I’d been studying for the last 30 years. So the motivation really was to bring about a unity to these different components in my nature.

I was raised in one tradition for 20 years, then I’d been studying another set for 30 years. I wanted to find a way to bring them together. At the same time, I have been blessed with two young children. I have two girls, ages four and eight and what I realized is that first, it’s not easy to parent. Anybody who has been around kids realizes that even though they’re in little bodies, they’re incredibly powerful beings. In some ways they’re more powerful than adults because they’re not as tired as we are. But what I realized is that whenever you really demand something from a child, they end up resisting you. In fact, it seems almost as if the stronger the commandment, the more the resistance, even if what you’re commanding them to do is what they want to do or they know they should do. So, what I realized is that what commandments do to people is they lower their self esteem. It naturally provokes resistance. Kids say, “no.” They’re totally exhausted. They can’t keep their head up. You say it’s time to go to bed and they’ll say, “No, I’m not tired! I want to stay up!” I realized that the 10 Commandments, which is kind of the essence of the Judeo-Christian ethic, was almost an extension of “if you don’t clean up your room...” There’s always this implied threat or punishment if you didn’t follow a certain prescription and the consequence of it is, even as adults, lots of people are continuously in resistance to these demands that are being placed upon them. So that’s the second thread, seeing my kids.

The third thread really is, I’ve been practicing holistic medicine now for 30 years. I’m board certified in neurology and psychiatry, but I’ve always felt there was more to healing and transformation than pharmaceuticals. Particularly, since Deepak and I have hooked up, which is now almost 15 years and I’ve been seeing patients at The Chopra Center, I find myself often seeing a person’s situation and knowing very clearly that if they were willing to make some changes, if they were willing to translate their intentions for better health into actual choices for better health, that often their needs for medication would be eliminated.

Funny thing is that doctors notice but they don’t believe it. Someone comes in to a doctor’s office who’s 25 or 30 pounds overweight. They’re starting to spill some blood sugar. Their blood pressures are rising. The doctor knows that if they can encourage this patient, if this patient can lose that weight, they probably won’t need to go on blood pressure medicine and they probably won’t need to go on diabetes medicines. But the doctor doesn’t actually believe that it’s possible for people to change their behaviors.

At The Chopra Center, my experience now is, given the right context, given the right information and aligning that with the person’s own personal intentions, people really can change their behaviors. And the consequence of it is greater health, greater vitality, more nourishing relationships, a greater sense of purpose in life.

And so it was really these three threads: the thread of wanting to integrate my Judeo-Christian background with my Eastern philosophy, understanding that my kids didn’t respond very well to commandments and the idea that patients wanted to make good choices, they just needed some help. They almost conspired together to have this book manifest.

That’s fabulous. We’ve heard this before and we like the phrase “the book almost wrote itself.” Do you feel that other energies were guiding the writing of this book?

What’s interesting about this book is it’s still writing itself. As I’m on the road and bringing this into everything that we do, almost every day this framework opens up some new insights for me. I feel that this set of glasses that I’m wearing right now, these Ten Commitments glasses, are allowing me to see life in a new light. So the way that I see this is that every one of us has these different dimensions to our being so that most of us walk around a good part of our lives thinking of ourselves as skin-encapsulated egos that are squeezed into the volume of a body for the span of a lifetime. In that kind of ego-based internal reference point, it’s all about I, me, my and mine. But I think also that all of us, if we look a little bit deeper, if we’re able to quiet down some of that internal dialogue and access a deeper dimension of our being – also recognize or get in contact with the fact that underlying that individuality there’s universality, that on some level all of us are the divine expressing ourselves as this particular individual form and phenomenon.

It’s like a wave. If you’re living your life as a wave, then you see yourself as separated from everything else and your conversation as a wave is about how do I compare to everything else. I’m skinnier, I’m older, I’m younger, I’m richer, I’m poorer. But if the wave begins to look deeper than its own nature, at some point it dawns on the wave that I’m actually the ocean in disguise and as I connect more deeply with my own oceanic nature, then I see my connection with every other wave. In fact, I see every other wave as a reflection of my own self and my fears that are associated with trying to uphold my individuality become less, which also allows for more creativity. So in that way I feel that the ocean had a lot to do with writing this book.

That was beautiful! At this point, could we talk about the commitments?

As I’ve been talking to people around the country, most people that I see were raised either in a Christian or a Jewish tradition and they certainly know of the 10 Commandments. But when I ask people to tell me what the first commandment is, one out of 100, if that many, can actually bring it into conscious awareness. What that tells us is that information is in there, it’s just been suppressed. It’s at this unconscious level and when things are at an unconscious level, they tend to choose us. Whereas when we bring something into a conscious level, then we get to make the choices.

The first commandment is generally expressed as I am the Lord thy God, who brought you out of the house of slavery. The usual way of interpreting that is kind of a declaration by Yahweh or Hashem or Jehovah that I am your God so you can’t worship any other god. When you think about it from a more expanded perspective, it’s hard to imagine that the Creator of this vast universe really cares what name you call it. So I think that the essence of the first commandment is freedom. So the first commitment is I commit to freedom, because the whole purpose of the first commandment is to tell you that I bring you out of bondage and I think that’s really the essence of spirituality, that spirituality is the path to freedom. It means freedom from constriction, freedom from limited ideas of ourselves, freedom from the pain from the past, freedom from anxiety, freedom from blame and also freedom to express ourselves, freedom to enjoy ourselves, freedom to have gratitude for what we’ve been given in our lives.

In the Eastern traditions, the whole purpose of life is freedom. It’s called musha or enlightenment or nirvana. It means freedom from conditioning, freedom from a restricted view of yourself, freedom from the sense that I’m just that wave without understanding that you’re actually the ocean, because if all you know yourself as is an ego, then that can be a very constricting, imprisoning mindset. But if you recognize that at the core of your being you are the unbounded, infinite field of creativity manifesting yourself as this individual body-mind, then suddenly all the anxieties and fears that come with that very limited view of self dissipate. That’s really the essence of the first commitment. The way that you use that commitment, is you really take time to listen to your body and use your body to guide you into places where you’re holding restrictions. Usually when you’re living in a prison, there’s some aspect of your being, of your heart, that feels uncomfortable. It’s trying to get your attention, to get you to open the door to freedom and if you listen to your body and say, “Where am I holding restriction? What can I change now to bring more freedom into my life?” That may have served me in the past but I’m still holding on and it’s time to let go and open up to something now. All those kinds of internally-directed practices can help us identify where we’re holding ourselves in prison and where we need to start opening up.

And the second commitment is about authenticity.

Right. The second commandment is not to make a graven image. The way that we normally talk about this is you’d better not have any false idols. So that means don’t have a Buddha sitting on your mantelpiece. But if you look at it at a deeper level, what’s a false idol? A false idol is anything that we surrender, that we sacrifice to, hoping that it’s going to bring us peace or happiness but knowing that it won’t. Everybody tends to worship false idols. It could be you worship at work. You sacrifice your life for a job, hoping that when you finally get enough money and in your retirement time in you’ll be happy, but nobody ever gets that happiness by sacrificing to a job. For women, more than men but certainly for both, there’s often worshiping at the false idol of beauty. The idea is that if I just have the right plastic surgery or if I just have the perfect weight or if I have the perfect hair style, then I’ll be happy. But of course, that’s another false idol because it doesn’t get you where you want to go. People often engage in a lot of false idols in terms of their addictions. I’m exhausted, I’m anxious, I come home and drink a few martinis and now for a few moments I’m feeling more comfortable or have a smoke or I go gambling or shopping. These can all become false idols because I’m sacrificing a more lasting sense of happiness and peace for some temporary relief. Again, it’s helpful to just go inside, ask yourself the question. It doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy shopping or having a glass of wine or doing those things. It’s just a shift in the attitude. Is this really going to bring me what I’m looking for or is it a temporary anesthetic that I’m applying, that’s keeping me from addressing the deeper needs that will ultimately allow me to be more authentic?

It’s actually a cool word, because the word authenticity, which is how I see the second commitment, comes from the same root as the word for author. That’s great, because what is called to is to become the author of your own life. Instead of reading somebody else’s script and trying to play the role that someone else has determined for you, decide that I’m going to start writing the next chapter of my life. I’m going to figure out what I need to be happy or bring peace or create the love that I want and start living my life according to my own authenticity.

That’s great! It’s going within and finding out where you’re at.

Right. Everybody has this conversation going on in their mind which is about should or should not do something. That came in very early, before we could filter it. Our parents gave us a script and most of us have been reading from it for a long time. It’s just a question of taking a little time and saying, “OK, is this who I am? Is this who I want to be in the world?” And the way that we know is, if you’re feeling comfortable and happy and free and creative and joyful, then the answer is yes, you’re reading the right line. But if you’re struggling or feeling anxiety or depression or have some physical symptoms, aches, chronic pain or digestive problems, then it’s really your body telling you that you’ve got to start taking control over the script. That’s really what that second commitment is, the call to authenticity.

A lot of the teenagers say, “Get real, man!” And what they’re really saying is be honest, be true, be authentically you.

Absolutely.

The third commitment?

The third commitment is to acceptance. The commandment is Thou shall not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain. But what’s the deeper significance? Why do we swear? And it’s usually because we have an idea of how things are supposed to be, but the world, nature, the divine, has a different idea.

So whenever there’s a conflict between my sense of how it should go and the universe’s sense of how it should go, then that creates a frustration for me so I lash out. I swear.

I think the essence of that commandment is really this commitment to acceptance, to being in that state of awareness of mind where you’re just open to things unfolding as they’re unfolding. Clearly you still have your own intention, but you practice this consciousness of acceptance, which is basically, if things aren’t going the way that I think they should, accepting the fact that there may be a deeper meaning and may be a deeper significance and if I’m open to that I can learn something, rather than continuously projecting my needs for control onto my environment.

Again, going back to this idea that we all have egos and then we have these souls, individuality and universality. The ego, because it has this very constricted sense of its own identity, tries to continuously control the situation. It really lives in fear of losing control and losing approval. The consequence when we have ego as our internal reference is that we’re always taking ourselves very seriously and we’re preparing ourselves to be offended. Like when you’re driving on the highway and someone cuts you off. What’s this guy doing in my lane? Or you think you deserve a promotion at work and someone else gets it. You get offended because your ego says this is what I should be having and why isn’t it going the way that I want? But when we increasingly surrender our individuality to that more universal aspect of our nature, then more and more we have this sense that things are unfolding the way that they should and I can be a quiet witness to the steady unfoldment of situations and circumstances in my life. When something is happening that isn’t exactly the way that I think it should happen, rather than trying to impose my will on it and stress myself out and everyone around me, I can just take a breath and say “OK, something else is happening. I should pay attention.”

Everybody’s had that experience where, at the time a relationship that you wanted to work didn’t work or a job that you wanted to happen didn’t happen. And at the time there’s a lot of stress and resistance and anger and frustration and sadness. But then, time passes and suddenly that very thing that you thought was so important has faded away and as a result of that not coming to pass, something else better has come around. Maybe you were ready to get engaged and you found out that your intended was having an affair. So you’re terribly hurt and go through grief. But then a year or two later you meet somebody else who’s much more suited for you and then you realize that the situation, which at the time seemed so painful and created so much resistance, was actually in some way opening up the possibility that something greater, more fulfilling, was going to come around. If you can live in that state of acceptance, then life becomes much more fun, much more interesting, much less challenging and there’s less of this impulse to swear, to take the name of God in vain, because you’re in that state of practicing acceptance.

Is that like being in a state of allowing?

Absolutely. Allowing is a beautiful word.

We’ll skip ahead to one more commitment. Abundance. That’s a big one, especially in our area right now.

It’s a challenging thing, particularly for people who see themselves on a spiritual path. We’ve gotten a lot of messages that you can either be spiritual or you can make a lot of money, but you can’t have both. My sense of it is that, if you look at this creation, if you look at this universe, it is unbelievably abundant. Look around and see the diversity of plants and animals. Look up in the sky and see the hundreds of billions of stars systems in the galaxies. And you realize that the creative essence, the essence of spirituality, is phenomenally abundant. So if we are a part of that, if we are connected to that, then abundance should be our birthright. Again, it’s not a certain number in the bank. It’s a state of consciousness. My experience is when people are so desperate to make money, they’ll do anything, which sometimes, when you can’t feed your family, it’s understandable. But if you’re willing to do things just to make money, as opposed to discovering what the essence of your reason for being here is, you may make a little bit of money, but there will be a strain associated with it.

It’s my belief that every being born on this planet has a purpose in life and that if collectively as a society, as communities, we can help children figure out what they are good at and how can we guide them to express that deep, innate creativity, then abundance becomes a natural state of mind. We have plenty to go around. We have plenty of resources to share, but we have a lack of creativity. We have a lack of abundance of creativity.

I just heard recently that Brazil is basically energy independent because 20 years ago they decided to go to primarily ethanol-based fuel. Who’s making the cars? GM and Ford. So in Brazil, which is energy independent because they have this 75-25, ethanol to gasoline mix, every car is designed to run on that and every filling station has that mix available. They’ve devoted a certain amount of land to growing corn or other source of ethanol and they’ve done it. So we have a Latin American country being supplied by American automakers, yet we haven’t used that same creativity to apply to our own current situation.

Part of the process of commitment to abundance is casting off the idea that we’re not creative, that we can’t solve our problems, that each one of us doesn’t have the potential to create more abundance for ourselves. That really means encouraging people to ask themselves, “What am I good at? What can I do well? What do I like to do and how can I break out of some constricted view of myself?” Sometimes when kids are raised in families where there’s not a lot of security they get bombarded with a lot of negative messages like, “You’ll never amount to anything.” People internalize that mindset, which leads to, “I guess I don’t deserve to have anything in my life.” We have to throw out those negative messages. We have to connect more deeply with that divine aspect of our being and we have to ask ourselves why am I here and how can I be of service to myself and to the world? And then go for it. Take a step in that direction. Then people will start to see that incrementally abundance beings to grow.

I tell this story in the book, which is a sweet story, about a wealthy man who bought a piece of property and he would go there occasionally to take a few days vacation. He began to notice that every time he went to this property, there was a poor guy who would go to this lake, fish for an hour and then go home. So the same scene was repeated for several years until finally the rich guy approaches the poor guy and says, “I’ve been watching you and I’ve been thinking about your situation and I’ll tell you, if I were you, instead of just fishing for an hour, I’d fish for several hours and I’d take those extra fish and go to the market and sell those fish and save up the money and after six months or so, I’d buy a small boat and some fishing equipment and would start fishing several hours a day. I could hire some other people to fish. I could buy some more boats. Pretty soon I would have a great thriving business and with that money, I could do anything that I wanted.” And the poor guy is looking at him and says, “Thank you sir, but to tell you the truth, I am doing everything I want right now.” The poor guy actually had more abundance in his awareness than the rich guy who was feeling he didn’t have enough and needed more.

So it’s the simultaneous state of feeling gratitude for what I have but also tapping into my creativity to create something that hasn’t been seen before.

The fisherman had simplicity in his life and he was content with it.

Absolutely. And you know, when you’re content, your mind is quiet. Then it’s natural for you to create new ideas of how to express your gifts to the world and the world will respond to them.

Of all the commitments that are in the book, what affected your life the most?

For me it’s really that last commitment, which is the commitment to peace.

What I realized is that the way that most of us live our lives is in terms of right and wrong. That’s what we were taught early on. There’s right and wrong. There’s good and evil. And the consequence of thinking of life in terms of right and wrong means that if I’m going to be right, then somebody else has to be wrong. So the consequence of a right-wrong, good-evil mentality, is conflict. Because if I’m right and you’re wrong, chances are that you’re going to think that you’re right and I’m wrong and then we have something to argue about or fight about. In the world today, we call the enemy “the axis of evil,” and they call us “the great Satan.” So that’s the consequence of living life in terms of right and wrong, good and evil.

If we make a commitment to peace, peace really means how do we find the underlying unity. How do we look through all the distinctions, all the differentiations of our lives and see where we can come to some common alignments, common appreciation of our essential humanity.

It’s my experience that when we shift our internal conversation from I’m right and you’re wrong to how can we express ourselves, that deep level of ourselves that recognizes you in me and me in you, then the need to defend and to fight and to argue dissipates and then we can use all that energy. Conflict only creates a lot of friction, a lot of heat but not much light. And so rather than wasting all that energy in conflict, we can really look at how we can come up with creative solutions to the problems of our planet. Basically if we commit to peace, we’ll be able to find ways to solve the problems of our planet.

Doesn’t it start with you and me and then reaches out?

It starts with our family and each of us. You can’t be angry in the pursuit of peace. You have to start with making peace with your family, with your friends, with your children, with the people you work with and that will ultimately lead to more peaceful communities and societies and hopefully, interactions between our countries.

Excellent! Your website?

It’s www.chopra.com. On the main website there’s lots of ways to access The 10 Commitments.

Thank you! We so appreciate your talking with us.