Deepak Chopra: the extended interview

His reflective books have brought comfort to millions of readers. But in person spiritual writer Deepak Chopra proves surprisingly down to earth. He explains why the key to fulfilment lies in making others happy and says there is a little bit of the divine inside all of us.

Deepak Chopra is stuck in a Californian traffic jam on his way to work.

“There’s a construction site and the traffic is horrible,” he says. “And my gas meter shows that I’m probably going to run out of gas at any time.”
“You seem pretty relaxed about that prospect,” I reply.
“What else is there to do? It’s a conspiracy of the total universe.”
I worried that Chopra, a best-selling new age guru, with his wide-ranging ideas and interests, might find it tricky answering my first question succinctly; but he’s as concise and clear in his spoken language as he is in his writing.
“What’s the fundamental concept behind all your work?” I ask.
“The fundamental concept,” he proffers, “is that consciousness is the only reality. That everything else is a projection of consciousness. Which means that our behaviour, our biology, our perception, our way of thinking, our emotions, our personal relationships, our social environment, even the forces of nature as we experience them, are a reflection or a mirror of what’s happening in our consciousness.
“And if we understand that, then the expansion of consciousness allows us to change what we call reality in everyday life. This is not an easy concept for most people to understand, because they confuse consciousness with the mind. But the mind is not consciousness; the mind is one expression of consciousness, like the other things that I just mentioned.”
So what is consciousness?
“Consciousness is the ground of being that differentiates into space, time, energy, information and the objects of the universe. It’s the only reality. It exists outside of space and time, therefore it is eternal. It has no beginning in time, it has no ending in time. And the person that we call ‘ourself’ is one projection of that infinite consciousness.
“Now if you were religious, you could say that’s the mystery that we call god. But as soon as we say ‘god’ then we have our own ideas and concepts and images about god, and then we start fighting and then we go to war. So it’s better not to use that word.”
So you consciously try to avoid using the word ‘god’?
“I do, but I succumb to it. Because I’ve just written a new book called The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore. I’ve used the words that are familiar to Christian theologians, because otherwise nobody would understand what I’m saying, and since obviously if I’m using the words of Christ I have to use the word ‘god’ frequently, and I do, but then I go on to explain what I mean scientifically.”
In his book, The Seven Spiritual Laws Of Success, Chopra describes the principles that nature uses to create everything in the universe. He then provides a clear blueprint that people can use to practice these same principles in their daily lives, one principle for each day of the week. Meditation is an important element. Through practising this and the other ‘laws’, Chopra asserts that people can learn to align their deepest desires with their true purpose and talents in the service of others, thus creating fulfilment and affluence in their lives.
By planting the seeds of their intentions in the fertile soil of ‘consciousness’, Chopra claims that practitioners of the ‘seven laws of success’ can learn to manifest their own desired realities.
“Once you understand consciousness,” he says, “you can influence it in the direction that you want.”
Obviously people would become much happier if they felt they could influence their lives like that?
“Of course they would. Happiness is the final goal of all other goals.”
Is happiness the ultimate goal?
“Well yes, happiness, which includes peace of mind, which also includes fulfilling your desires, which also includes the ability to love and have compassion; but true happiness has to be in touch with the creative source of the universe, which we all have access to.
“There’s a lot of research on happiness,” continues Chopra. “People have found that there’s something called a brain-set point for happiness. Some people look at a situation and they see a problem, other people look at the same situation and they see an opportunity. Can we change that brain-set point? Yes. Through cognitive therapy, through meditation.
“The conditions of our lives have very little to do with happiness. So let’s say you win the lottery, yes, you’ll be ecstatically happy. Within a year you’ll be exactly sad, happy or as unhappy as you were before you won the lottery. Similarly, if you have tragedy, you’ll be very upset and sad, but after a year or so you’ll be exactly where you were before you had the tragedy. “The most important thing that brings us happiness is making other people happy. So people, when they focus on making other people happy; when they meditate and silence their minds; when they let go of their limiting belief systems – then they’re much happier. That doesn’t mean that they’re totally in bliss, because we have something called ‘existential unhappiness’ as human beings, which, say, a dog doesn’t have, because we wonder about our existence. We want to know why do we have to grow old and suffer and die, does god exist, and if he or she exists does god care about us, do we have a soul, what’s the mystery of death…
“So it’s a big problem of human existence, to find a cure for our so-called existential unhappiness, which is at the root of all the problems in the world. And the only way we can solve this problem of existential unhappiness is also by understanding the way consciousness operates.”
Spirituality often seems to be found through crisis, I suggest. It has to get really dark before a lot of people can turn towards any kind light.
“St John of the Cross calls that ‘the dark night of the soul’.”
Did you experience that in your own life?
“In a sense I did. When I was a practising physician and just finished my training in medicine, I found myself addicted to cigarettes, frequently drinking too much alcohol, working too hard, taking care of patients but not taking care of myself. And so there was a deep unhappiness at that point. Not a true life-threatening crisis, but certainly a dark night of the soul. An existential angst about the meaningless of how I was living my life.”
You’ve written a book about addiction. You seem to view it as a potential gateway into spirituality.
“Yes, addiction is a frequent gateway because addiction is a search for exultation and ecstasy. We all want to experience ecstasy… that’s why people take the drug called ecstasy. Because it’s a very primordial human need to want that experience. And when we don’t have it, we use substitutes, and the substitutes are drugs. So addiction is a sign of spiritual seeking. And it’s a sign that we want exultation of our own spirit. And when we don’t get it, we go through these taking drugs substitutes.
“I think when a person is addicted, it can be a good sign; because they are at least searching. A lot of the people on the street are not even searching.
“I help people who have addictions to deeply question their motivation, and soon they find that their motivations are actually quite laudable, and they begin to go on a deeper search for meaning in their own lives.”

In his new book, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, Chopra delineates “three Jesuses”.
“The first is historical,” he explains, “about whom we know very little from the historians. The second is the Church, which has actually helped us a lot but also messed things up in the world, with everything from the crusades to the Spanish inquisition to witch-hunts to homophobia, to the bombing of abortion clinics, to messing up politics in the US, the anti-sexuality thing… because the Church has literally institutionalised guilt and made it a virtue. That’s the second Jesus.
“But the third Jesus is a state of consciousness that we can all aspire to. When I read the Old Testament, it became very clear to me that Jesus wasn’t being literal when he said he was the son of god. What he was really saying is I am ‘rauc adoni’, which is the Hebrew word for the spirit, the spark of divinity. And that same spark exists in everyone.
“So I decided to read the New Testament all over again with that in mind. And the more I read, the more I came away convinced that there is a third Jesus: a state of consciousness that we long for, that we aspire to, and that we can become.”
As someone from a culture that’s had an anti-pleasure, anti-sexuality, anti-sensuality form of religion, it’s lovely to read in Chopra’s work how a person’s deepest desires and the pleasure of their senses are considered “the royal roads to divinity”.
“Otherwise we wouldn’t have them!” he laughs. “Sexual energy and spiritual energy are the creative energies of the universe. They’re actually the same energy. So whenever we experience passion for anything, or when we are energised, or feel excited or aroused, or stimulated or alert or sexual, these are the different flavours of our spirit or our sex, which are the same thing.”
One of Chopra’s recent books is Life After Death: The Burden Of Proof. Assessing the seven varieties of afterlife espoused in world religions, it offers the controversial proposal that a person’s awareness of the present shapes existence after death: i.e., the afterlife is created uniquely for each of us by our present level of consciousness.
“Our consciousness is constantly projecting our reality,” its author explains. “And because it exists outside of space-time, it survives what we call physical death. And then it recycles itself based on its experience and its imagination. So Life After Death is an examination of the scientific, theoretical and experimental evidence for the survival of consciousness after our physical bodies are no longer there.
“The findings are that we survive death and that we are projected in other realities, based on our expectations and our imaginations, just like we’re doing right now. Everything that you call your physical reality is what you have projected, what you wanted and what you have imagined. It’s the same thing.”
But what of suffering? Are people creating it themselves?
“It’s called the mystery of karma and it’s a very deep subject. We are all co-creating suffering, yes. Not at a personal level and not as a person, but at a deep level; because we’re all connecting with each other, we co-create those realities. Good and bad.
“So at a deeper level for example, George Bush and Osama Bin Laden are co-creating each other. They are explicit enemies, but they are implicit allies.
“Opposites always co-create each other. Unless you have opposing energies there is no creation. Without Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, George Bush wouldn’t be who he is today. He should actually put their portraits on the walls of the White House and pay homage to them everyday, and they should do likewise, because they wouldn’t go down in history as the diabolical people that we perceive them to be without this enemy.
“So enemies demonise each other. And of course they think, ‘We are on the right side’. This is how it works. When we understand it, then we can go beyond all this and say there are creative solutions to these problems, because everything is our co-creation.”
How can we achieve peace if creativity demands this flow between two opposing energies?
“It depends on where we put our collective intention. Wherever we put our attention, that becomes the dominant force. With the Alliance for a New Humanity, what we’re trying to do is create world peace by creating global communities of consciousness.”
Spirituality and peace sound like they should go together. But why, in countries where people are still spiritual as opposed to secular and materialist, is there chronic poverty and violence? How do you marry these things?
“Well first of all,” says Chopra, “when you say countries are spiritual… mention one?”
Unsure of my ground, I mumble, “In a western mind, India would be seen as a spiritual country, where people still have spiritual beliefs….”
“That’s such a misconception that India is a spiritual country,” he avers. “What happens is that we take a few luminaries from a culture, and then we have a romantic notion that we apply to everyone. Like when we say Ancient Greece was a great culture, because we’re thinking of people like Socrates and Plato and Pythagoras. But the Greeks were barbarians; they believed in slavery, they were sexist. They played gladiators.
“To say India is a spiritual country, it’s not true; India’s very materialistic, very violent… They just happen to be vegetarians. It’s a very romantic idea of spirituality. I would say there is no spiritual culture at the moment. And the spiritual culture that we have to manifest in the future has to be done through a deep understanding of consciousness.”
Are all the people who go to your talks middle-class and educated?
“They used to be all middle-class and educated and it seemed to be mostly women in the past, but that’s changing now and many other people are coming.”
How do you reach people who are uneducated, and contending with the daily struggle of getting enough food into their mouths?
“You know, there’s a stage in our evolution where we want transformation. A lot of people don’t want it. If you go to a hungry person and you say let’s talk about the evolution of consciousness. They say get out of here I want to worry about my next meal. So you don’t convince people against their will. You educate them and if they’re ready then they’re ready, and if they’re not ready, then they’ll be ready when they’re ready.
“Those of us who are in better positions need to help people who are in poverty and we need to help them through creative means, not just through charity, which doesn’t really work. So one of the goals for our Alliance is to address this problem of radical poverty that exists in the world through creative solutions: helping people get better jobs through helping them with their unique talents, connecting them to people who can use their services etc, etc. There’s lots of creative ways to help alleviate poverty which are based on a better way of understanding consciousness.”
And once you understand that helping people increases your own happiness, there’s a huge motivation there?
“There you are.”
Are we approaching a tipping point in human and world consciousness?
“The goal of the Alliance is to reach that sort of tipping point. To reach a critical mass for personal and social transformation. But I don’t think about when in time that might happen. I think if we start worrying about that we won’t do anything. So we just do what we need to do and then we leave the results to the unknown. It’s the law of detachment.”
Do hard emotions like anger have a place?
“Yes they do have a place. Anger is an outburst sometimes the release of which causes you to feel less stressed. But cynicism doesn’t have a place. Cynical mistrust is a risk factor for sudden death from premature heart disease. As is hostility. Hostility is anger with a need for vengeance. Anger without a need for vengeance is actually a harmless emotion when it’s occasional. And politically it can be very effective, when pushing for change.”
Your books recommend an early bedtime. Do you ever stay up and party all night?
“Not most of the time because I have a busy life and I also want to be alert and fresh when I wake up, but once in a while, yeah. Last time I was in Ireland I had a late night. I was there for the Late Late Show, and on the show was your film director, Neil Jordan. Afterwards he said let’s go to a bar and we went and I didn’t get back to the hotel till five o’clock in the morning. Then I had to rush straight to the airport.”
What do you make of the criticism that here you are, such a spiritual man… yet you’re absolutely loaded? (With his millions, Chopra is a shining example of created abundance.)
“That whole conflict between spirituality and wealth and success is a misconception. When we finally reach the tipping point, that’s the only way to make money, rather than selling cigarettes and weapons and drugs. 2.2 trillion dollars are circulating in the world’s markets every day. Less than two per cent goes to the provision of goods and services that make people happy.
“The rest is like a casino, and the goods and services that come off that kind of speculation are mostly destructive to society. So it’s a misconception that spirituality and affluence should not go together. I think that’s the only way they should go together.”

* On April 12, Deepak Chopra gives a seminar entitled ‘Explorations in Consciousness’ at the National Concert Hall in Dublin. For information visit www.seminars.ie
* On July 7-12 at the City West Hotel, Co Kildare, Chopra and Dr David Simon give their first-ever European presentation of the ‘Seduction of Spirit’ course, a “beautifully designed journey of self-discovery and transformation”. For information visit www.innerbliss.ie
*For information on the Alliance for a New Humanity, visit www.anhglobal.org

INSET

After graduating as a medical doctor in his native India in 1968, Deepak Chopra moved to the US, where he became an early trailblazer in the ‘evolution of consciousness’ movement. He is now famous internationally as a spiritual luminary, and has been hailed as such by the likes of Bill Clinton and Michael Gorbachev.
Chopra is the prolific author of over 40 books, including bestsellers on health, the ‘spiritual laws of success’, creating affluence and abundance, parenting and the creation of world peace. He’s also written novels, edited collections of spiritual poetry from India and Persia, and produced a version of the Kama Sutra, India’s classic text on eroticism. (The divine nature of pleasure, ecstasy and sensuality are central to Chopra’s philosophy.)
In his 1986 book, Creating Health, Chopra asserted the ‘connection between mind and body’, claiming that meditation and self-awareness are primary factors in healing. Quantum Healing uses quantum physics as a means of understanding mind-body connection, arguing, as in many of Chopra’s other books, that consciousness is the basic foundation of nature and the universe.
Chopra’s 1991 book, Perfect Health, became the first widely-read text in the west on Ayurveda, the traditional system of Indian medicine. Some consider that Chopra’s greatest success has been to expose Americans and the western world en masse to ancient Indian philosophy and healing techniques.
Not surprisingly, Chopra’s book Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative To Growing Old has proved massively popular in the US. Here Chopra claims that ‘contrary to our traditional notions of aging, we can learn to direct the way our bodies metabolize time.’
Chopra’s recent books have turned to larger spiritual questions. How To Know God (2000) and The Book of Secrets (2004) argue for an all-pervasive intelligence that unites every living thing rather than the traditional western concept of God as a person, ‘a venerable white male sitting on a throne in the sky.’ Chopra sees god as a projection of human awareness who becomes more expansive and universal as individual consciousness expands – opinions that have aroused fierce reactions in some parts of the States and Europe, at times making it difficult for Chopra to find venues for his talks.
In 2005 Chopra became a staunch advocate for disarmament and international peace. In Peace Is The Way he argues that a ‘critical mass’ of people who band together in their spiritual worldview can defeat the age-old ‘addiction to war’ that continues to create mass suffering. He became president of a broad-based organisation, the Alliance for a New Humanity, which seeks to form ‘peace cells’ around the world and to foster environmental healing and sustainable economies in developing nations.