The Business of Being Deepak

Now 60, the bliss guru shifts priorities

by Pamela Post

Just before my appointment to interview Deepak Chopra by phone from California, there seem to be some disturbances in the quantum field.

A mere hour before the interview, Chopra’s people advise SharedVISION there are two topics he wants to discuss in the 15 minutes they have granted: his latest book, Buddha, and his new non-profit organization.

This ruffles some editorial feathers. There’s concern over attempts to steer journalistic direction, especially at the 11th hour. We have our own agenda, our own questions, and only 15 bleeping minutes.

Tense phone calls and e-mails crackle through the information matrix. As the seconds tick down to the actual interview, I can’t help but think this is the wrong “energy” just before a chat with the guru of holistic health, quantum physics, and bliss consciousness.

It’s starting to remind me of the battlefield scene in the Bhagavad-Gita, the sacred Hindu text of the spiritual warrior that Deepak Chopra cites as a key influence. In this moment, I share Arjuna’s distaste for conflict.

“Let’s just go with the flow,” I say to my twitchy editors, feeling all warm and quantum-y.

Turns out all the sabre-rattling was just the tinkling of wind chimes.

“Whatever you want to talk about,” Deepak assures me in a relaxed, fully engaged, and honey-toned Indian accent, oozing with equanimity. Clearly, he’s blissfully unaware of, or unconcerned about, any intrigue.

Chopra is coming to Whistler at the end of July to lead a meditation retreat organized by the California-based Chopra Center. There’s already close to 400 participants signed up, each paying up to $2,000 US for a week of meditation with the master.

In the past, the vast majority would have been women. But, as Chopra says, that’s changing.

“It used to be 80 per cent women. Now, it’s about 55 per cent women and 45 per cent men. Women got this first because I think women are more likely to pursue something that sounds intuitively right. Men are more analytical. Women are more intuitive, generally speaking. I think they are biologically structured that way. Having to nurture a baby in your womb for nine months makes you more tuned into, if nothing else, your physical body. When you tune into your physical body, that’s a little computer that’s plugged into the cosmic computer. We’re part of a field of intelligence. If you’re in touch with your body, you eavesdrop on other things as well.”

More men at his workshops mean much more than a spike in sensitive, new-age guys, says Chopra. It’s a harbinger of change in collective consciousness.
“I think this very masculine, predatory energy that has dominated western culture for several hundred years has now reached an extreme. It is resulting in disastrous effects like war and terrorism, global warming, climate change, environmental degradation, unsustainability, fear, greed. These are predatory energies. We’ve reached a point where either Nature is saying ‘the human experiment didn’t work, let’s move on’ or ‘we need to harmonize the masculine with the feminine and move to the next stage.’ I think survival of the fittest was a phase of our evolution which is very masculine and now, hopefully, we are moving to survival of the wisest, which is more feminine, more intuitive.”

Yet in this whole yin-yang rebalancing, hasn’t Chopra himself been exercising a lot of masculine yang energy in creating a global, multimillion-dollar empire that includes the Chopra Center, media companies, a satellite radio show, regular spots on CNN’s Larry King Live, and a list of books longer than a sadhu’s beard? Hasn’t he been the Donald Trump of healing and spirituality?

Maybe at one time, he muses. But now, at the age of 60, Deepak Chopra has shifted priorities.

“My life is now relatively simple. I meditate two hours a day. I spend an hour in the gym and do yoga. So that three hours is very self-indulgent, no matter where I am. I’m fully present when I do anything. I don’t even look at the next day’s schedule. I go with the flow. I have no driving ambition. I have no exacting plans. I am in the autumn of my life and my inner attitude is, as far as fame and fortune are concerned: been there, done that.”

As for money, he says the only business from which he profits personally is the sale of his books. He works for the Chopra Center organization, which he doesn’t own. “I give them 20 per cent of my time, and they pay me a minimal salary which doesn’t even cover my expenses. I’m at a stage of my life now which is about giving back.”

Chopra relates the recent experience of immersing his father’s ashes in the Ganges, which inspired him to tell the story of the life of the Buddha, in his latest book. It struck him that Hollywood types who followed the Dalai Lama around and espoused Buddhist principles knew nothing about its founder. “They think Buddha is just a fat guy outside the Chinese restaurant. That was very shocking to me.” He’s demurred at offers to make a film about the life of the Buddha. “I just want to sit with the experience of the book for a while.”

His latest passion is for his non-profit group, Alliance for a New Humanity (anhglobal.org), which is devoted to peace, justice, and sustainability at the personal and collective levels. “We ask people to undertake and make a commitment to their own transformation, to be the change they seek in the world.”
The interview has gone twice the length it was supposed to. All topics covered. He is in no hurry to go. We wrap up the call warmly, with him asking for my address so he can send me a copy of Buddha and my daughter one of his books for teens. No need for war. The quantum field was blissfully undisturbed, after all.

Pamela Post is a CBC News reporter and broadcaster. In her spare time, she wanders through the maze of the quantum cornfield with her friends Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Man, in search of the cosmic Auntie Em.

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