DEEPAK CHOPRA knows what we want: perfect health, success, spiritual fulfillment. Also maybe weight loss and a good night's sleep. And also we'd like to live longer.
Deepak Chopra knows what we want and he knows how we can get it, and he has taken those answers and turned them into a little industry: 15 books, 30 video and audio series, two PBS specials, appearances on "Oprah," seven-day workshops, three-day seminars, two-hour lectures."Live! Deepak Chopra, M.D., at a location near you," reads an ad for one of the seminars.
And sure enough, Deepak Chopra was in Salt Lake City last weekend. More than 2,300 Utahns paid between $25 and $40 to hear him speak, a ticket price usually reserved for rock stars and the NBA.
Gloria Spiking is one of Chopra's fans. At Abravanel Hall last Sunday she stood in line to get Chopra's autograph on his latest book, "The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want." The book is No. 2 on the New York Times best-seller list, one notch above his earlier "The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success" ("Over one million copies sold!").
"I always did like a bargain," laughs Spiking, who figures she got 13 extra spiritual teachings by buying the newest book.
Spiking, like many others in the audience, first heard about Chopra on "Oprah," where he spoke with authority about the "physiology of immortality."
The eloquent Chopra has reached a new audience on TV, helping to close the gap between the Newt Age and New Age - and emerging as America's current favorite guru.
`Maybe it's my Indian accent," says Chopra, trying to explain the phenomenon he has become.
He is being self-deprecating, of course. Also, he knows that he has allotted only 15 minutes for this interview with yet another newspaper reporter and that to discuss the nuances of his success would take more time.
But the truth is probably that the Indian accent doesn't hurt. The gentle cadence brings with it an aura of mystic wisdom. The M.D. after his name helps, too.
Chopra grew up in New Delhi, the son of a prominent cardiologist. In high school he memorized Tennyson. In college, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, he studied medicine but also read Sartre. At 23, newly married, he got a job at a hospital in Plainfield, N.J.
Chopra worked hard. By 26 he was board certified in internal medicine and endocrinology, moved to Massachusetts, worked harder, and by 35 was chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital. Pretty soon he was a pack-a-day smoker.
He knew he needed to change his ways. And he also suspected that Western medicine, although it knew a lot about germs and drugs and life support machines, didn't understand or even explore the mysteries of health.
He began studying the very medicine he had dismissed while growing up in India: the 6,000-year-old traditional Indian medicine known as Ayurveda. He also took up transcendental meditation, a new take on an old practice, updated for 20th century marketing by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (perhaps most famous for meditating with the Beatles). At the core of both Ayurveda and TM is the belief that only in stillness can we reach a higher state of consciousness that will ultimately heal us.
A decade ago, Chopra met the maharishi, who could see right away that this Westernized Indian doctor was the perfect vehicle to bring Ayurvedic medicine (and his Maharishi Ayur-Veda herbal products) to the West.
So Chopra quit his two endocrinology practices and began writing books.
The Golden Braid bookstore in Salt Lake City carries thousands of New Age and alternative medicine titles. But Deepak Chopra has produced so many books and tapes that he needs a table all to himself, and even then it's crowded.
Jackie Pratt, owner of Golden Braid, assesses Chopra's popularity this way: People like him because he seems more credible than other authors who write more "from their intuition, or from channeling."
Chopra started out writing books about Ayurveda as a "mind-body" alternative to Western medicine. They were upbeat books with marketable titles: "Perfect Health," "Quantum Healing," "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind." He still writes about health (recent titles include "Perfect Digestion" and "Restful Sleep"), but more often now his books, tapes and lectures are about spiritual transformation.
The "mind-body-spirit continuum," he calls it. Like other practitioners of mind-body medicine, Chopra can tell you the ways in which our cells and our thoughts are linked, through our emotions, by a system of receptor sites and neuropeptides. But Chopra goes a step further. We can not only heal our bodies with our minds, he says, we can also tap into the source of all creation, the "universal intelligence."
Reduced to its most basic, Chopra's pitch is this: You can create your own reality. That's about as New Age as you can get, of course. But Chopra brings to this mantra the weight of his M.D., the breadth of his vast studies, and his way with words.
He quotes Harvard research, ancient Vedic rishis, Walt Whitman, Albert Einstein, Buddha, Franz Kafka, Jonas Salk, Emily Dickinson and Friedrich Nietzsche, all in the same two hours. And he does it all without notes, striding back and forth, microphone in hand.
He can both explain medical research poetically and make mysticism sound scientific. "Quantum mechanical body" is the term he uses for the mysteries of human physiology. "Self-correcting cybernetic feedback" is his definition of sickness.
The world, including our bodies, may look solid, says Chopra, but this is only the "superstition of materialism." We're not really solid at all. The molecules are just a facade. We, like the universe we live in, are really just pulsating energy and intelligence.
Reality as modern medicine and pre-quantum physics has long defined it isn't real at all, says Chopra. That reality makes us prisoners of our limitations. The real reality is one in which everything is part of cosmic consciousness. Tap into that consciousness, and you can create any reality you want.
"Mortals believe they are physical machines that learned to think," the wizard Merlin tells young Arthur in Chopra's retelling of Camelot. "Actually they are thoughts that learned to create a physical machine."
To create your own reality, here's all you need to do, says Chopra: "Slip into the gap between your thoughts . . . into the transformational vortex that connects the universal mind with the local mind." You do this, he says, through meditation. Once in the gap, "release your intention." Relinquish your attachment to the outcome of the intention. "Let the universe handle the details."
Get in touch with your "inner wizard," says Chopra, and anything - from health to success - is possible.
The last time Chopra was here, in the spring of 1994 (both visits were sponsored by Unity of Salt Lake), he spoke at Skyline High School. He brought the same suitcase and in fact wore the same suit.
"But not the same body," Chopra explained to his audience at Abravanel Hall, because the human body replaces 98 percent of its cells every year.
The real us is not our bodies, or even our egos, but our spirit.
Chopra's own particular body - or space-time event, as he sometimes calls it - never gets sick, he says. "I've never been sick in my life," he said in a phone interview from his home in California (where he is now executive director of Sharp Health Care's Institute for Mind/Body Health). He wonders, even, why his wife keeps buying health insurance, because she never gets sick either, and neither do their two children.
"I think it's because we're all pretty carefree," he says. Also, he meditates at least an hour and 40 minutes a day, exercises an hour and is a great sleeper.
It's hard not to be so perfect, and so optimistic and so successful and so rich, though, without getting your share of critics.
Some people charge that he oversimplifies the science he quotes. Others criticize him for being too commercial, even though he did finally break off from the maharishi and the maharishi's herbal products. Esquire magazine wrote a profile with the headline "Deepak Chopra Has (Sniff) a Cold."
Chopra prefers not to defend himself but to remain upbeat. "By the way," he told a skeptical reporter from Forbes magazine in 1994, "one of the things that accelerates the aging process is cynical mistrust."
The truth is that people like his books and his lectures, even if many of them are simply a retelling of ones that came before.
"The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success" is a reworking of his "Creating Affluence." "The Way of the Wizard" is a non-fiction version of his fairly unsuccessful first novel, "The Return of Merlin," and quite similar in many ways to "The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success."
Chopra himself sees his books as evolving. He's already planning several more, including a novel about Satan escaping from hell in the form of light, and a book that examines all aspects of love.
And also, because he is after all a guru - full of boundless potentiality - he plans to write a book about "how the universe thinks."