Metahuman: Unleashing Your Infinite Potential

Bestseller Chopra (You Are the Universe) exhorts readers to wake up to their infinite potential in this passionate but muddled testament. Chopra believes nearly all humans live in an illusion created and sustained through the self-imposed limitations of one’s perception. Behind this illusion, he writes, is a “consciousness that is the universe.” To illuminate this “metareality” that is “everywhere, always, and everything,” Chopra employs a wide swath of material—quantum physics and Einstein’s theory of relativity, quotes from the poet William Blake, research about mind-expanding psychedelics—to make his argument for the benefits of “going beyond” oneself into a universal awareness. While Chopra’s ideas are alluring, his scope and prose can be dizzying: “The entire three-dimensional world is based on a magic trick no one can explain, but it is certainly not a true picture of reality. The whole thing is mind-made.” Chopra acknowledges the complex and challenging nature of his beliefs, but does little to make them accessible. At the end, he lists a month-long collection of short lessons made up of daily axioms and exercises designed to aid the waking up process, but these action steps are hard to connect back to his text, so readers may wish he had interspersed them. Longtime followers of Chopra’s work will find new, exciting ideas to unravel here, but newcomers may be stymied by the heady concepts and frequent digressions. (Oct.)