Opening the Doors of Wonder: Reflections on Religious Rites of Passage

16 · RELIGION IS FREQUENTLY IDIOTIC

16 · Deepak and Gotham Chopra, Father and Son 1 8 3 RELIGION IS FREQUENTLY IDIOTIC What do you do when Time magazine includes you in the top one hundred icons of the twentieth century, when Mikhail Gorbachev calls you “one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time,” when someone far less famous than Gorbachev compares trying to absorb your “ceaseless wisdom” to “attempting to take a sip of water from a fire hydrant”? What do you do? You enjoy it, and why not? But you also continue to write books—thirty-five at last count, with translations into over thirty languages and more than twenty million sold worldwide. And you offer your mind-body programs at the five-star La Costa Resort and Spa, just north of San Diego: the high-end mecca on the holistic healing/meditation/yoga circuit. And you produce TV specials about holism and spirituality and lecture at Harvard’s Divinity and Business Schools. That’s what we’d be doing if we were Deepak Chopra. But we’re not, so we watch at a remove how this former chief of staff at the New England Memorial Hospital morphed into a New Age guru extraordinaire in barely two decades. Trained at New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences in the 1960s, Chopra interned at hospitals in New Jersey and Virginia, specializing in internal medicine and endocrinology. In the early 1980s, he left traditional medicine when warned that he would suffer from heart disease unless he changed his lifestyle. Taking up Transcendental Meditation, he learned about the five-thousand-year-old Indian system of healing called Ayurveda. Attributing most disease to the accumulation of toxins, Ayurveda seeks to balance the doshas, the three basic metabolic principles connecting the mind, body, and soul. These principles are deemed to be responsible for regulating the body’s functions by cleansing physical, mental, and spiritual impurities from it. In India, being an Ayurvedic practitioner is a licensed profession, requiring almost as much training as a Western medical degree. One of Ayurveda’s many virtues, says Chopra, is looking at patients in their entirety: an Ayurvedic doctor doesn’t ask, “What disease does my patient have?” but “Who is my patient?”1 Now a one-man international conglomerate—Chopra virtually embodies spiritual globalization—Deepak tirelessly pursues his mission : “bridging the technological miracles of the West with the wisdom of the East.” He melds heart with mind and mind with body and both with meditation and herbal medicine and what he calls “quantum healing”—“healing one mode of consciousness, mind, to bring about changes in another mode of consciousness, body.” All this, he says, opens us up to “the infinite possibilities contained within human potential. . . . I want a day to come when perhaps we will see a world of peace, harmony, laughter and love.”2 You can’t argue with that. But many scoffers say Chopra is selling snake oil to the meek, the susceptible, the ignorant. Christian critics, especially, wonder if Chopra’s patients would practice Ayurveda if they knew that its “real purpose . . . is to contact the essence of the Hindu God, Brahman, and to . . . recreate oneself as God through occult practices.”3 The carping doesn’t bother Chopra. He’s busy saving lives, expanding consciousnesses, making this a safer, saner planet. Even Gandhi didn’t set his sights so high: he was only concerned with saving one country—India. Chopra has his sights set on the world. Since Chopra is the most famous Indian in the West, I figured he was also the most famous Hindu in the West. Not so. His father was a Sikh, his mother was a Hindu, and Chopra identifies with neither faith: “I am not at all religious. As soon as you label yourself, you confine yourself. I say that I was born a Hindu, but that I draw inspir1 8 4 HINDUISM ation from Vedanta, which is the eternal source of wisdom that Hinduism comes from.”4 Conceivably, living with a man whom millions believe has The Answer can be daunting. But to Chopra’s two children, both in their thirties, he’s just their father, not a sage. Mallika says she and her brother had “a wonderful childhood—not only because of the fascinating people we met, but because we were taught to look at the world with magical eyes, curiosity, and passion...