Evolutionary_Mystic Post

Like millions of people around the world, I’m a fan of Deepak Chopra. But for me it wasn’t reading his books or hearing him speak or seeing him on Oprah that did it—it was getting to know the man himself.

Over the last couple of years I’ve developed considerable respect for Deepak’s sheer creative capacity and seemingly boundless energy. I’m a bit awestruck by the amazing pace with which he lives his relentless globe-trotting life while writing bestseller after bestseller, giving lectures, teaching workshops, leading retreats, making movies, coordinating conferences, and, like a many-armed God from an Indian myth, keeping a hand in more projects than could be contained in most mortal minds at one time. If you get to know him, you’ll find him always on fire and full of passion, enthusiasm, and goodwill.

I must admit, however, that I didn’t always see Deepak in this light. Indeed, my original—and erroneous—impression from his public persona (and I hope he will forgive me for saying this!) was that he was kind of a lightweight salesman whose ambition superseded his spiritual depth.

Ten years ago, we even did a mildly disparaging interview with him for WIE entitled “The Man with the Golden Tongue.” But after getting to know him over the past few years, spending some intimate time together, and even teaching together, I realized how wrong I had been.

So the idea for this interview came up partly because I wanted to make up for my error in judgment, and partly because I hoped to be able to portray a side of him that most people never get to see.

On the day of our interview, Deepak was in the midst of taping his weekly three-hour show on Sirius Radio, so he invited me to come on as a guest before having lunch and then heading over to the Chopra Center in midtown Manhattan to conduct the interview.

Only two days before, Deepak told me, he had flown to and from Bahrain, where he participated in a prestigious leadership conference. On his way back, he stopped in Boston, where he gave his annual talk at the Harvard Medical School.

And the next day, back in New York, he addressed a packed house of delegates at the United Nations. As we walked together through the crowded streets, he was approached more than once by enthusiastic and grateful strangers thanking him effusively for changing their lives. As always, he remained gracious and took it all in stride.

As someone who at one time didn’t take Deepak very seriously, I have grown to appreciate what a significant figure he has become on the world stage as an advocate for consciousness and social transformation.

He is passionate in his commitment to overturning the materialist worldview rampant in Western thinking, not only as it relates to medicine, his original profession, but as it affects our fundamental relationship to the universe we live in.

His sheer omnipresence, whether—it be on Larry King, your local PBS channel, or the cover of Newsweek—represents a growing acceptance of his authority as a spokesperson for nondenominational East-meets-West spirituality able to comment on every subject under the sun. One doesn’t have to be in complete philosophical alignment with Deepak to appreciate and respect the positive significance of his influence on mainstream culture all over the world.

As we sat down for this interview in his tiny office at the Chopra Center, my personal curiosity was to find out how he does it all and what his inner life is really like. And while I can’t say I found the answers to all my questions, I did discover that the life that Deepak Chopra lives has always been of mythic proportions.

Andrew Cohen: Who are the people who have most influenced your spiritual evolution, and what effect did they have on you?

Deepak Chopra: In order of importance: my mother, my father, and my grandmother on my father’s side, and later on, J. Krishnamurti and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Cohen: Could you describe the influence that your mother, your father, and your grandmother had on you?

Chopra: My grandmother used to tell my brother and me mythical stories. And then she used to explain the mythical stories. This was when I was only four or five years old, but I still remember every story that she told us. My mother would then later sing those stories in the original Sanskrit from the Vedas. They were very powerful stories, and she would tell us that we have to be like this god or this goddess—be like Ram, or be like Lakshmi. Anytime we had a dilemma she would say, “How would Saraswati or Lakshmi or Ram behave in this situation?”

When I was only about six or seven years of age, my father got a scholarship to go to England to train in advanced cardiology. And for a short while, my mother joined him, so my brother and I were left with our grandparents in Bombay. One day we got a telegram from England that my father had passed his exams; he was in the Royal College of Physicians. There was lots of celebration. My grandfather was thrilled his son had become a consultant to the royal family, and so he took out his rifle and shot it into the sky. We went to see a movie called Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and then we came home. That night my grandfather died.

We were woken up in the middle of the night, my brother and I, and the servants took us to a neighbor’s house. But we could hear the wailing of women. The next day they took him for cremation. They came back with a jar of ashes, and my grandmother said, “That’s your grandfather.” I went into a huge existential crisis at the age of seven. And my brother’s skin started to peel. He went to all kinds of doctors, and nobody could understand what was going on, until one doctor said, “He’s feeling vulnerable and this is a sign of his vulnerability. If his parents come back, he’ll be fine.” A short while later my parents returned—in those days it took three weeks by boat—and literally within a week, my brother’s condition went away. Now, in hindsight, I think that was my first insight into the relationship between what we call biology and what’s happening in consciousness.

My father was totally trained in the Western model, a cardiologist. He was very well known and respected, and he was very much into the materialistic reductionist model of medicine. But then in his later years he suddenly became extremely spiritual. He was, for me, a role model—I never saw him angry; I never saw him upset. He used to come home and tell my mother about all his patients, and they would pray for the patients. He was very successful, but on Saturdays and Sundays he would see patients free of charge.

We lived in a small town, Jamalpur, and patients used to come from all over the country to see him, and he would not charge them. My mother would even cook food for the patients, and when they left he would buy the train or bus ticket if they didn’t have money. So this was extraordinary to see. When I was about ten years old, we left this town, because he was an army doctor and had been re-posted to Shilong, in the Himalayas. And ten thousand people came to the railway station to see him off!

Cohen: That’s extraordinary.

Chopra: He was so loved. And then when we left the next town, three years later, the same thing happened: Ten thousand people came to see him off. But he didn’t take it too seriously. He just said, “This is my yoga.”

Cohen: He sounds like a very spiritual man. But didn’t you say he was a materialist?

Chopra: He was a materialist in the beginning, in a huge way.

Cohen: So his selfless compassion was inspired, I guess, by a love for humanity, not necessarily a love for God in the traditional sense?

Chopra: Yes, not a love for God in the traditional sense, a love for humanity. But he used to talk about karma yoga. He used to quote the Gita. And he lived an amazing life. He lived to eighty-five or eighty-six and saw patients till the last day of his life. He died, incidentally, on the day that Bush came to the White House, the first time around. He watched the news on CNN in India and said to my mother, “I think this is a bad sign. I’m leaving.” Literally. And he said, “Say good-bye to the kids,” and then he closed his eyes and left. But till the day he died, he was working, seeing patients, teaching medical students. And toward the end of his life, he was lecturing at the Vedanta Society in India about health and well-being from a holistic perspective. So he had become very spiritual.

Cohen: That’s quite a role model. It sounds like your father was a saintly man.

Chopra: He was. In fact, I used to ask my mother, “Is he always like this?” because he was like that with us. We would be playing cricket, and he’d notice that the bat was worn out, and he had just come home from work, and he would go the store and buy a new bat and leave it at our door. He noticed these things. So I used to ask my mother, “Is he always like that?” And she would say, “Your father is a saint.”

Cohen: Your grandmother was very devout. What influence did that have on you?

Chopra: She was very devout, religious in the traditional sense, yes. But that just influenced me via osmosis. My mother was like that too. My father was not overtly religious—he didn’t go to temples or pray. He prayed for his patients, but he wouldn’t talk about God. We went to the rituals and the ceremonies with my mother and my grandmother.

Cohen: But you weren’t brought up as a religious person?

Chopra: No, religion was not something we talked about. You know, I went to an Irish Christian missionary school. The reason we went to Irish Christian schools, even when we were traveling, was just because they were the best schools. But it was very strictly Catholic, so I attended every catechism class. I knew the whole New Testament, all the four gospels. I could recite them, and I was totally into the whole Catholic thing in school. When I was twelve, some of my classmates were joining the seminary to become priests. I found that very enticing. I would come home and talk about it, and my parents would say, “We’re sending you to that school not because the Christians are going to convert you but because you’re getting a good education.”

We also had Muslim friends. In fact, my best friend was a Muslim; his father was a prince from Afghanistan. There had been a revolution in Afghanistan, so the royal family was in India, and the young prince was my best friend. And I had Sikh friends, Zoroastrians, Hindus. We even had some Jewish friends. We used to celebrate Christmas with our Christian friends. So religion, in my mind, meant festivals. It was always associated with festivity and celebration. It didn’t mean God. It meant going to my best friend’s house to have some sumptuous Afghani banquet.

Cohen: You describe in your early autobiographical book, Return of the Rishi, that your nanny had a boyfriend who was an atheist and a communist. You write that he was very confident in his atheism and that had a powerful effect on you as a young teenager.

Chopra: Yes, “Uncle.” He was flamboyant. He was confident. He was Anglo-Indian, and he came from a totally different background. He was an avowed communist and atheist. He used to paint great pictures and smoke cigarettes, and in the evening he would have a glass of Scotch and talk endlessly about why there is no God. We were very impressed with him.

Cohen: You describe an experience when he told you he didn’t believe in God, and you admit that “his logic held a guilty appeal” that left you feeling “strangely free.”

Chopra: Yes, because my idea about God, as a child, was from Catholic school—

Cohen: The mythic God.

Chopra: The God who punishes, rewards, judges, watches your every move. So that was a relief, yes.

Cohen: So after that conversation, were you less religiously inclined than you had been up until that point?

Chopra: Yes. And by the time I got out of high school, I was not at all religiously inclined. My friends who had joined the seminary would talk to us sometimes, and all those things that you hear about the Catholic Church—the scandals of pedophilia, etc.—I heard all that and was totally disgusted. So I didn’t want anything to do with God or religion or anything like that. I wanted to be a journalist, a writer. When I finished high school, which I did early, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, my father wanted me to become a physician, but I said, no, I’m going to be a writer. So I went to college at the age of fifteen or sixteen to study English literature.

Cohen: That must have been young to go to college.

Chopra: Yes, but we were precocious, my brother and I, and we were pushed. We were very good academically, and it was just expected in our family.

So when I entered college, I went in with the idea of doing English literature. But on my sixteenth birthday, my father gave me some books as a present. The books were Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge by William Somerset Maugham, and then a couple of others—Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis and Magnificent Obsession by Lloyd C. Douglas. Of Human Bondage was about a young doctor who sees human suffering and redeems himself by becoming a truly compassionate healer. Magnificent Obsession was about a neurosurgeon who accidentally kills somebody in an automobile accident and then becomes obsessed with helping people anonymously. Arrowsmith was also about a doctor or a healer. The Razor’s Edge, of course, was a classic, and on the very first page, it says: “The path to enlightenment is not easy. It’s like treading the razor’s edge.” I didn’t know what that meant, but the story captivated me.

So then I started to experience a lot of struggle within myself. I was studying English literature, but now I wanted to be a doctor. The problem was, I had not taken biology in high school. So I went back to my father.

Cohen: Obviously, giving you those books was his way of trying to convince you.

Chopra: Yes, totally. He was very good at that. So I came back to him, and I said, “I’ve changed my mind; I want to be a doctor.”

Cohen: He must have been very happy.

Chopra: He was happy, but then he said, “You didn’t do biology.” I said, “I want to do it now.” So he got me a private tutor, and while I went through college learning English literature, every day I had private tuition in biology. At the end of college I passed my exams in English literature. You could appear for an exam in pre-med without having done the course, so I did that one, too, and I passed. Then I applied to the best medical school in India, which used to take only thirty-five students out of five thousand people who applied. It was all based on exams—no recommendations, nothing else. So I got into medical school. I really wanted to be a doctor now, at any cost.

Cohen: So you were studying very hard then?

Chopra: Very hard. The school was called the All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences. It was competitive; it was American, founded by the Rockefellers, who had financed it partially.

Cohen: And how old were you then?

Chopra: By the time I got into medical school I was seventeen and a half. I spent five years in medical school, from 1964 to 1969.

Cohen: Were you very inspired?

Chopra: I was inspired, but by now, I had kind of fallen into interesting habits: smoking, drinking—sometimes a lot of drinking. We tried LSD, etc.

Cohen: That was the time for LSD!

Chopra: We had lots of American students, hippies, in our school, and even professors who were hippies. I used to get some money from my parents, but it wasn’t enough for the lifestyle I was leading, so I used to debate as a professional debater. It was a tradition in colleges and in professional schools. You would just show up for the debate, they would announce a topic, and you would have to speak about it.

Cohen: Any topic?

Chopra: Any topic, ridiculous topics. “In the opinion of the house, Christopher Columbus went too far . . .”

Cohen: So this was in elite intellectual circles?

Chopra: Totally. What happened was I started winning the debates, and the judges of these debates were very accomplished, well-known personalities on Indian radio. Once I started winning the debates, they called me and said, “We could use somebody to substitute for us at night, reading the news on All India Radio.” So they would leave at eleven, and All India Radio used to broadcast news every hour throughout the night. So from eleven to seven, I would go and read the news. Soon I had a fan base all over East Africa and Mozambique! I was eighteen.

I loved the lifestyle. I was one of the few people who could afford a Lambretta scooter. I used to ride that, and I used to read the news, and I used to have a good time. I was not interested at all in spirituality throughout medical school.

Cohen: When did you study if you were up all night on the radio?

Chopra: I just knew how to do this. I could study and be on the radio. I was a workaholic. I still am, in many ways, but now because I don’t have those toxic habits I can go even longer.

Cohen: So when did you sleep?

Chopra: I got used to sleeping only two or three hours. Even after I came to the United States, the working conditions of interns and residents were terrible. The Vietnam War had just ended, and there were no doctors. So I got used to barely two or three hours of sleep.

During my residency, I arranged my work in such a way that I could go to all these different hospitals for training. But we weren’t paid. You got a basic stipend, and everything extra you did for training was on your own.

I had this great vision of being a neuroendocrinologist and getting a Nobel Prize. So I used to train at these places and not get paid for it, just to work as an apprentice to someone famous. But my stipend was only $202 and my rent was $120. By then I was married and I had one child. There’s no way you can live on $82. So I used to work throughout the day, and then there was a little hospital outside of Boston where I would go in the night and work as an emergency room doctor. I used to work twenty-four hours—and in between, get some sleep!

Cohen: That’s impressive.

Chopra: There’s one incident I should tell you about, which was the pivotal incident. I was interested in neuroendocrinology, because the field was all about the “molecules of emotion.” I didn’t know back then that I was going to get interested in spirituality, but I was fascinated by the idea that there were molecules that represented emotions. So I got a hard-to-get fellowship with the president of the Endocrine Society. He was very ambitious, and the organization used to publish hundreds of papers in the field. He was ready to be nominated for the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology, so for me, it was the best thing that could have happened.

But soon after I entered the fellowship, I realized that these guys were not about science in the true sense of the word. They were about who could publish faster. We would sit around every morning, and he would go through all the journals and see who had published papers in our field. Every time somebody else had published a paper in our field of research, the professor, who I idolized, used to throw the journals around and go into tantrums. So within a month or two, I was feeling quite disheartened. I had come here to do research in this amazing new field with the team that was going to win the Nobel Prize one day, but then I realized that it was all about one-upmanship.

About six weeks into my training, it all came to a head. He berated me in front of the entire research department for not remembering the exact amount of iodine that had been fed to some rats in a 1959 research paper. “I’m so disgusted,” he shouted. “You should have that information in your head by now!”

So very impulsively I picked up my bag and dumped it on his head and said, “Now you have it on your head, and I’m done. I’m leaving.” He looked at me in amazement and said, “Do you know what you are doing?” And I said, “I’m walking out on an asshole.” He said, “You know that I’m the most important endocrinologist in the country, that people from all over the world want to work with me?” I said, “I don’t want to work with you.” And I walked out. He followed me into the parking lot, screaming at me: “You ruined your career. You’re finished. You’re history.” I got into my little beat-up old Volkswagen beetle and just drove away. I didn’t go home. I went to a bar and got drunk.

My wife was pregnant with our second child at that time, and she was dismayed, upset, fearful. The next day we didn’t have any salary or job or stipend, and nobody in academia would talk to me. That’s when I took a day job in the emergency room, and that’s where I met somebody who said, “You know, Deepak, you should learn meditation.” So that’s how it all started. If I hadn’t walked out on that professor, I’d still be in some lab putting iodine in rat thyroids and maybe hoping for a Nobel Prize.

Cohen: You said that your biggest spiritual influences were J. Krishnamurti and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Did you get interested in Krishnamurti before or after you started meditating?

Chopra: Krishnamurti was before I started meditating. I didn’t have a job; I didn’t have a fellowship. I’d gone through this whole crisis, questioning what I was doing in the lab. So I was reading a lot, because then I didn’t have much to do. I was in the emergency room, only working one shift, and for me an eight-hour shift was nothing!

Cohen: So you were questioning what you were doing because in this great doctor who you had looked up to and idolized, you just saw pure ambition and you felt disillusioned?

Chopra: Yes. I saw pure ambition, and also I saw that in academic medicine, it was not about patients. So I was totally disillusioned.

Cohen: And that’s what inspired you to start inquiring spiritually?

Chopra: Inquiring and reading. I was reading mostly Krishnamurti at that time. And then he gave a lecture here in New York City at Madison Square Garden, at the Felt Forum. It was January 8, 1977.

Cohen: I might have been there! I saw Krishnamurti at the Felt Forum in Madison Square Garden about that time—it was in the late seventies.

Chopra: I remember, he ran up the stairs, and people started to clap. He looked at the audience and said, “Why are you clapping? If you want entertainment go to Broadway.” He was really harsh at times. But I was fascinated by him. So then I started going to his lectures, and I started reading even more. I also didn’t fully understand him. Then there was an inner voice that started to speak to me. “He is speaking the truth; he doesn’t know how to explain it. You have to do that one day,” the voice said. “He’s speaking the truth. He’s not explaining it well, but that’s your job.”

Cohen: Can you describe your first spiritual experience?

Chopra: In hindsight, I’d had spiritual experiences all my life. As a child, I had experiences playing. I used to do theater, Shakespeare, and now I realize that during the play itself, I’d be playing Julius Caesar, and my body was lying there, and I was watching it from the outside, right in the middle of a play. So in hindsight, I had these experiences all my life.

Cohen: Out-of-body experiences?

Chopra: Yes, totally nonlocal, to use today’s language. I had tried LSD in medical school twice. One experience was with these American hippie medical students. We’d all taken LSD, and we were on a train from Delhi to Madras. We were looking at this poster of Mother Teresa, and we all started to cry. For that entire trip we wanted to be with Mother Teresa. So these were all very interesting experiences, but I never put them in the context of spirituality. But then when I started meditation, suddenly it clicked.

Cohen: What was the original reason you started to meditate?

Chopra: I was reading a lot about meditation itself, reading Muktananda’s Play of Consciousness. I had always loved the theories of consciousness. I could tell you everything from Ludwig Wittgenstein to Schopenhauer to the Upanishads—I’d read it all by now. I just kept reading and reading voraciously. Then I started to read Vedanta and realized, “Oh, I’ve had these experiences.” So when I finally took up transcendental meditation (TM), I really woke up. It was an amazing thing. I completely lost my desire for alcohol, for cigarettes, for meat, etc. It was transformative, absolutely. So when later I had the opportunity to meet Maharishi, or actually to see him in a lecture, I jumped at it. I was like a new convert. I started telling everybody why they should meditate.

Cohen: You wrote in your book Return of the Rishi that right after you started meditating, you were experiencing a kind of joy that was so profound that you were almost embarrassed.

Chopra: Right. I was experiencing joy and ease, not thinking about the future at all.

Cohen: How did that compare with your experience before that?

Chopra: It was a huge contrast. I had been on a treadmill—like everybody else in residency, training, and fellowship. You worked hard, you played hard, you were always trying to be better than the other guy. It was just the way it was—even the professors were doing the same thing.

Cohen: So this shift happened almost instantaneously when you started meditating?

Chopra: Yes. The contrast was instantaneous. But it did remind me of previous spiritual experiences I’d had.

Cohen: Can you describe a little bit about what started happening inside you?

Chopra: I started feeling light. Started feeling bright. Started feeling joyful. Started feeling ecstatic. Started feeling that I loved everybody. Started feeling that I wanted to help everybody. I also started feeling that everybody in the world should meditate! That was instantaneous.

Cohen: In the book, when you describe your first meeting with Maharishi, you explain that sitting in his presence your mind became totally quiet. You write: “I felt completely unselfconscious. It didn’t usually cross my mind that I carried the weight of my own self-consciousness until that moment, when it dropped off.” I thought that was very compelling.

Chopra: Yes, because the silence was very profound. It was, as they say, deafening. And even though I’d experienced it before, it wasn’t this sustained silence.

That first meeting was, to me, seemingly accidental. My wife and I had flown from Boston to Washington to hear him speak. After the lecture, I had just come out of the men’s room, and suddenly there he was, coming round the corner. He walked right up to us and said, “Come up to my room.” We followed him upstairs, and after asking me a few questions about myself, he started telling me I should do Ayurveda, and I should talk about consciousness to the world.

My wife was not so influenced by him as I was, and I could see just by her body language that she wanted to get the hell out of there. We had left the kids in Boston with babysitters, and she wanted to get home. At one point he said to me, “You should drop everything and you should work with me and I’ll teach you about consciousness, and you can talk to the whole world about it.” She looked at him and asked sarcastically, “So who’s going to pay the mortgage? Where is the money going to come from?” And he bent forward and said, “The money will come from wherever it is at the moment.” I had never heard a statement like that! But she brushed it off and said, “Let’s go home.” So we left.

We went to the airport and there, by chance, I met an old colleague from Australia who had gone to medical school with me. He told me he was interested in meditation, and he gave me a book. It was Vasant Lad’s Ayurveda: The Science of Self-Healing.

Cohen: Now I know why you’re so enthusiastic about synchronicity!

Chopra: Synchronicity, yes! So I read the book on the flight from Washington to Boston. When we got to Boston, I said to my wife, “Rita, you go home and take care of the kids. I’m going back.” She said, “Are you crazy?” “Yes, I’m crazy,” I said. So I took the next flight back.

By now Maharishi was busy with other people, and they said, “He’s not making new appointments.” I said, “You tell him that I’m outside this room, and I’m not leaving till he sees me.” I waited for three days. Finally I got in, and I said to him, “Okay, I’m ready. Show me what to do.” That’s when he took me under his wing. I started going back and forth to India to be with him. Soon I was spending half my time in India, going to Ayurvedic doctors and sitting in Maharishi’s presence while they talked to each other about Vedanta. And he would send me to give lectures here and there.

Cohen: So was that when you decided to become a disciple, to give your life to the study of consciousness and also to Ayurveda?

Chopra: Yes. Then I spent all my time with Maharishi. By then, I had written a little book called Creating Health: How to Wake Up the Body’s Intelligence, but no publisher would accept that book. So I self-published it—I got five hundred copies printed. A couple of my friends in Cambridge took the books on their bicycles, and we convinced the Harvard Coop manager to put it in the window for three days.

And an agent picked it up, and she called me and said, “You should get this published.” “We tried,” I told her. “It didn’t work.” So she said, “I’ll get you a publisher,” and she got me a $5,000 advance. The book was published by Houghton Mifflin. It was a simple book with lots of examples of my patients’ mind-body effects, mostly questions, but I don’t think there had been a book at that time, popular or otherwise, that said, your mind can create the difference between health and sickness. So that book became a national bestseller.

The next thing I know, I’m lecturing in Paris with Maharishi, and I’m getting calls from people like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis at Doubleday: “We want you as an author.” I’m getting calls from Peter Guzzardi, editor of Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time: “We want you.” Some of them even started to fly over to where I was to recruit me. I signed up with the New York publisher Bantam Books, which used to publish a lot of this kind of stuff. And of course, every book did better than the previous one. Suddenly it was huge. It was totally unexpected.

Cohen: And that was in the early eighties?

Chopra: Yes. It was 1984. The next book I wrote was Return of the Rishi, which nobody noticed except the New York Times, which gave it a good review. But then the third book, Quantum Healing, was big. It was on the cover of many magazines. And then there was Oprah, in 1992, which was huge. After Oprah, in twenty-four hours there were 130,000 books sold. In the first week, 800,000 books sold. In the first month, one million books sold. It just didn’t stop—it hit the roof. And in my mind, I gave all the credit to Maharishi at that time, because he had said, “The money will come from wherever it is at the moment.” I told my wife, “See what he said?” So I gave him all the credit for everything.

Cohen: At that time, when you were teaching and lecturing, it was under his auspices?

Chopra: Yes. I was teaching and lecturing under his auspices throughout the world—Japan, the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe. The first time we went to Moscow, I gave a lecture to a thousand people about meditation. The next day, six hundred people learned to meditate! It was an amazing time. People all over the world were learning meditation. It was fabulous. It was thrilling. It was easy. There’s no English word for this, but it was sattvic. It was beautiful. And soon I became Maharishi’s substitute.

Cohen: His number one representative?

Chopra: Number one representative. He had stopped traveling by then.

Cohen: So why did you eventually leave him and go off on your own, and what changed in you as a result?

Chopra: Well, first of all, he got sick, in India. We don’t know what the cause of it was, but it was rumored that it was poisoning. My father was his physician, and he said, “He’s not going to survive unless he gets dialysis.” They had no dialysis in India at the time, so I flew to England and registered him in a hospital. This is not public knowledge, but I don’t care anymore; sometimes the history has to be told.

I registered him under a false name, a Muslim Arab name. Then my father and two other doctors flew to England with him. He had a cardiac arrest, he was put on a pacemaker, and he was given up for dead. We were trying to contact the next of kin, which was a slow process because he was a sannyasi, and there were lots of Indian rules and regulations about this, spiritually. So while that was all being done, he suddenly started to recover. It was quite inexplicable. His kidney functions came back. His heart function came back. His pacemaker was no longer required, and he just sat up in bed. We said, “Maharishi, what happened?” He said, “I must have hurt my ribs or something.” He was very casual about it.

So I started to nurse him. Rita and I moved to England for a while. First we had him in a hotel in London, and we would take walks in Hyde Park every day. Occasionally, we would meet somebody who would say, “Hey, that’s the guru of the Beatles.” And my wife would say, “No, no, that’s my father-in-law.”

Then he got even better, and we moved him into a place outside of London, in the country. He was convalescing. There was no one there except for a couple of servants. Rita used to shuttle back and forth between Boston and England; I stayed, and for twelve, fourteen hours a day we would talk about Vedanta, about consciousness.

Cohen: Just you and him?

Chopra: Just me and him. And I would challenge him; I would ask him questions. He would laugh; he was very happy. And so was I. Twelve hours, fourteen hours, doing nothing—talking only about consciousness. He would go into great detail about how consciousness is silent, then the first impulse arises, and how that impulse comes from the unmanifest, and what is the edge of the manifest and the unmanifest. He could go on for hours like that—the impulse of consciousness hovering on the edge of the manifest and the unmanifest. I could see the extreme joy in him as he would explain that, and I could feel the extreme joy. I was just with him, and the world was luminous. So this went on for a whole year—just me and him.

One very interesting thing happened during this time. We were in the southwest of England, near Devon. He used to sleep in the afternoons, so I would take a bike and visit the ruins around there. I started to buy little postcards of Arthurian legends—Lancelot, Arthur, this, that, and the other. I knew nothing about King Arthur or anything like that, but during this phase, I suddenly had a whole book come through me, The Return of Merlin, which made it to the New York Times fiction bestseller list. It was about a period that I knew nothing about personally! It just came to me during this time. Just by picking up these little postcards, I wrote that book.

Cohen: So this book was not the result of any kind of study?

Chopra: Not other than the postcards.

Cohen: So it had some kind of fantastic, miraculous dimension to it?

Chopra: Absolutely, yes. That was the feeling. And then many things like that started to happen to me—lots of what you call cognition—sudden experiences, like suddenly understanding what Maharishi was saying about the Rig Veda, very transformative shifts inside, seeing the world completely differently.

A year later, we moved him from England to Vlodrop, which is outside of Amsterdam. And then, since he had completely stopped traveling, I became the traveler. I went everywhere.

That was when I started to notice that people were giving me homage in a traditional Indian guru sense. I would step out of an airplane, and people would place garlands round my neck. They were treating me like Maharishi. I didn’t feel comfortable with this. I didn’t even feel up to it; I didn’t feel that I was at that level. I’d say ninety-five percent of the people in the movement were treating me in that manner.

And then there was another five percent who were very angry. I had just joined the movement a few years earlier; they had devoted their whole lives to it. Suddenly I was the heir apparent, the prince being groomed for the throne. So the majority of the people literally loved me, and we’re talking about three million people! And then there were the few in the hierarchy who were very angry.

Something else was also happening, in that I started to feel that there was not much tolerance within the structure of the movement for anything that was outside.

Cohen: It was too insular?

Chopra: Very insular. So that was bothering me. I felt constricted by the vocabulary and the structure of the movement, and also by having to stay within the philosophical framework, which is purely Vedantic—which is great, but you know, it’s not everything.

It was Guru Purnima day* in 1993. The whole day was a celebration, and everybody used to get some private time with Maharishi. Around midnight on Guru Purnima, Rita and I went to his room. I don’t know what was happening inside me; I was feeling very restless. He said, “Deepak, people are saying that you are competing with me.” It came as a shock, but also not as a shock, because that was what people were saying.

And I said, “Maharishi, first of all, I would not have even the imagination to compete with you. Secondly, I don’t have the desire to compete with you. Thirdly, I’m feeling very constricted.” He said, “Why don’t you stop lecturing for a while, stop writing, come and be with me for a while and think about what you want to do.” I said, “Maharishi, I don’t need to think about it. I want to leave now.” He was very shocked. He said, “No, no, think for a little while.” But for whatever reason, I found myself saying, “I don’t want to think for a while.” I took Rita’s hand, and I touched his feet, and I said, “We are leaving.” And he kept looking at me, not believing that I was going.

It was the middle of the night when we left the ashram. I rented a car, and we drove to Amsterdam and then flew to Boston. As soon as we came to the house, the phone was ringing. It was Maharishi, and he said, “You’re like my son. I said something to upset you.” I answered, “No. You didn’t say anything to upset me. But I needed an excuse to leave.” Then he said, “You don’t realize”—he used this word—“we have an empire and it’s yours.” “Maharishi,” I told him, “you don’t understand. I don’t want that empire. I want freedom. I want to think the way I think. I want to write the way I write. I want to speak the way I speak. I don’t find that I can do that here.” “You will be able to,” he insisted. I replied, “No, I won’t. It’s a system, now, and it’s a system that has created something that makes it impossible to work outside the system.” He asked, “So what do you want to do?” And I told him, “I want to leave.” These were his last words: “Then go. I will love you, but I will be indifferent to you, and you’ll never hear from me again.” And I said, “Okay. God bless.” That was the last time I spoke to him.

But I’m happy, because after that I suddenly found the freedom to be creative in a way I never could be before. It’s now been fifty books or more, and at that time it was only four or five. Most of my productivity came after I left. But he, of course, groomed me for it. They say that the fruit takes a long time to ripen, and then it falls. At that moment it fell. And I felt, “Now I don’t have to report to anyone. I can do what I want.” Then everything happened by itself. There was no strategy at all.

Cohen: So it sounds like the main catalyst for your leaving was the fact that your own creative inspiration was transcending, pushing beyond the sphere of the TM movement. What did you do after you left?

Chopra: I went to California to give a lecture, and I met David Simon, a very remarkable doctor who actually knows as much about consciousness as I do, if not more. We’ve been working together now for about fifteen years; we’re a perfect team. If I have to go on CNN or something, I now get called at the drop of a hat. “President Clinton announces the genome project. Dr. Chopra will be commenting on Larry King.” And what do I know about the genome project or stem cells? So I call David. There’s nothing in the world of mind-body medicine that I need to know that David can’t give to me within a few hours—not only the information, but he also hashes it out in terms of consciousness.

So we’re partners now in everything we do. There are a few books we’ve written together, and he’s an influence in everything I do. But he stays behind the scenes. He has a lot of self-esteem, in that he’s grounded in this knowledge of consciousness in a way that he’s not competing for attention or anything like that. That’s a partnership for life.

*The traditional Hindu day for celebrating the guru, held on the first full moon in July.

Cohen: Since the initial awakening you had, after you started meditating, have you had any other significant spiritual experiences?

Chopra: You know, I don’t even tell this to people who come to our courses, because we never share anything personal. But what has happened is that for the last ten or twelve years, at night when I go to sleep, I meditate for half an hour, then sleep for half an hour, meditate for half an hour, sleep for half an hour. When I’m sleeping it’s a totally witnessing sleep.

My wife knows this, because she sees me sitting up in bed. And I’ve started to have a very sober, nondramatic but distinct, ever-present witnessing awareness, whether I’m sleeping or dreaming or in a waking state. The witness is always there; it’s there now, for example. It’s not dramatic, but it’s very much part of who I am at the moment. And I don’t prepare anymore. I used to prepare lectures, like speaking at Harvard Medical School, where my brother is a dean, which I do once a year. But now I find that I give my lectures very naturally. It comes spontaneously, and there is a witnessing quality as I am speaking.

Cohen: When you say “witnessing quality,” can you describe what that experience is?

Chopra: My body is asleep, but I’m observing my body in deep sleep. My body is dreaming, and I’m observing my body in the dream state. My body is speaking to you; I’m observing my body as it sits with these two people in this room. I might be doing anything, but that witness doesn’t leave me; it’s here. And it’s who I really am, I think.

Cohen: So that is the part of the self that never moves?

Chopra: It never moves. And it’s great, because I can go from here to Bahrain, where I was a few days ago, but that part is always watching. It’s one of the reasons that I don’t get tired. I really do not get fatigued. I mean, it’s not like I have the best habits in the world; I still have one or two cups of coffee a day. I exercise every day, of course. But my life is all over the place with doing different things.

I just did this “Iconoclasts” show with Mike Myers. We did improv theater off-Broadway. Whatever people tell me to do, I do it. I just go and join them in their thing. Mike Myers made this silly but very funny movie called The Love Guru, which is coming out in June. It’s about this guy who wants to be Deepak Chopra. Mike wanted me to make a five-minute cameo appearance, so I went to do that. But then suddenly when I was doing that, I realized, he’s doing a parody of me, so I should do a parody of him.

So I just finished a book called Why Is God Laughing? It’s about a comedian who has existential dilemmas but covers them up with his jokes. These things just happen to me. And there’s a part of me that is totally not involved. It’s been like that now for ten, twelve years.

Cohen: So this started about ten or twelve years ago. Was there anything that catalyzed it?

Chopra: Leaving Maharishi. I’m positive it was leaving Maharishi. You know, when I was with him, that silence would permeate everything. But then when I’d leave the room, or he’d leave the room, it would be like I was hit by a truck. The contrast was so much—with him, total bliss, and then as he leaves, boom. You’d be hit by a truck, and you can’t even get up because as soon as you get up, it hits you again. I used to feel that contrast.

I remember one day a Brazilian reporter said to him, “Don’t you ever sleep?” And Maharishi looked at him very lovingly and said, “My waking state is more restful than your deepest sleep.” He wasn’t showing off; he was just saying what he felt. I didn’t understand it then. But I now understand it, because I feel like that. I don’t get tired. I don’t get fatigued. During the night I sleep and meditate, sleep and meditate, throughout the night.

I get up at four or four-thirty and meditate for two hours and then go to the gym, and then, honestly speaking, I don’t know what the day is going to hold. I call my assistant and I say, “Tell me, what am I doing?” This morning she said, “You have a radio show, and then you’re meeting Andrew. You’re going to walk with him somewhere and have a little lunch, and then you’re going to do this interview.”

So that’s how my days go now. Tomorrow I happen to know that I’m doing the Virtual Pledge Drive for PBS, but there’s lots of other stuff I’m doing tomorrow that I don’t know. It’s on my schedule; it’s probably on the website, but I pick up my voicemail and I listen in the morning to what I’m doing, and then I go with it. It’s very spontaneous. For me it’s effortless now.

Cohen: Because you travel so much, your schedule must be completely erratic, in terms of sleeping.

Chopra: If I’m on the plane, either I’m writing or meditating or I’m sleeping. But when I get to some place, no matter where it is, I’m there, fully with it. I don’t experience jet lag, or anything—that’s just the way it is now.

Cohen: When you’re sleeping and meditating throughout the night, is it spontaneous now?

Chopra: Yes. Totally. It’s happening.

Cohen: Did you decide at any point that you wanted to do that, or did it just start happening?

Chopra: I think I started to do it about twelve years ago. Maybe I wasn’t sleeping, so I thought I’d meditate. And so I started to do it like that. But then it became a habit, and then I started to notice this witnessing.

In the old days with Maharishi, some people used to say to him, “I’m not sleeping well.” And Maharishi would ask, “Are you tired when you wake up in the morning?” And they would reply, “No.” He would tell them, “Then you’re fine, because if you’re not tired, you must be getting the same rest.” I remember him also saying that when you start witnessing, your body might be sleeping, but you are not. So now I know, very clearly, that my body is sleeping during those periods but I’m not. It’s a good experience. And by the way, it’s never been as good as it is now. I used to think it was going to plateau, but it’s always increasing a little bit.

Cohen: In terms of the energy and the witnessing awareness?

Chopra: Yes.

Cohen: What do you think the relationship is between the boundless energy that you’re experiencing now and the unusual confidence you had in yourself as a young man? From the very beginning, it seems that you were destined for some kind of greatness. You even said at one point you wanted to win a Nobel Prize in medicine. One way or the other, you have been driven, in a positive sense, and inspired to achieve great things and to really make a mark—long before your spiritual interests awakened. What is the relationship between your early ambition and the energy that is driving you now? Obviously, there is a difference, but there also has to be a connection. I’m interested in what the connection is.

Chopra: I’ll tell you what the difference is. The difference is that now I don’t have a personal stake in what I do. I really can say that with conviction—that I don’t have a personal stake in anything that I do. I do it because it’s fun. I do it because it gives me energy, and I love doing something that’s different, creative, and that has something to do with consciousness. It’s almost as if I’m driven by it, rather than I’m driving it. And there is no personal stake in terms of money, recognition, fame, or fortune.

It was difficult for me to translate that into my relationships, with my wife and with my children, because you always have a personal stake in your family. But funnily enough, I’m realizing that I actually don’t have the personal stake in my family that I used to have. I mean, I want my children to do well; I want my wife to be happy; I really want us to be together, to have the best convivial time. But I am not now rooting for my son’s success, or my daughter’s success—they do what they do. And I can say I don’t have a personal stake.

Then my daughter has these babies, and my son has a child, and suddenly I start to have a personal stake in my grandchildren, which is a very interesting thing! If you were to ask me if I have a personal stake emotionally with anything in the world, I would say it is with those kids. But even there, I can see that as the years pass, it’s going to go. It’s not that I don’t love them. I love them perhaps even more, but there’s not that emotional attachment. That has given me an immense ability to do things that I would not have done in the past.

What’s that expression—“You can do anything you want when you have nothing to lose”? Well, I am in that position right now, where I can do anything I want, and I have nothing to lose. There was a point in my life when I used to be really hurt by criticism, by attacks, by stories made up by the media. I would react to it. But three days ago there was an eight hundred–page comment on my blog, calling me all kinds of names, and I found myself totally not reacting to it. In fact, I was trying to see how one could have a compassionate view of the guy who posted this.

At least I was asking myself that question. So I asked myself, why is that? Partly it’s that I’m sixty-one years old. When you enter the autumn of your life, and you have maybe another twenty years or so, what are you going to do with the rest of your life? Is it going to be all about yourself, as it has been up to this point? Or is it going to be about other things?

I was always ambitious, I realize in hindsight—wanting to do this, wanting to do that. I guess I still am. But the personal stake is not there any more. That’s the only way to describe it. It’s a very freeing position to be in.

Cohen: Thinking about your life, it seems to me that you were almost born with a very powerful intention. Obviously, that’s not an ordinary thing. There are not many people who have that kind of confidence in themselves and their capacity to accomplish great things from such an early age.

Chopra: That’s partly because of my mother. When we were very little, she would drum this into us: “You’ll change the world. You’re bound to create extraordinary difference. You should rule. Saraswati and Lakshmi will follow you.” All these little stories: “You’re a prince,” etc. Mothers like to say these things to their children. And at some level, those muffled tapes keep repeating themselves in the back of my mind.

Cohen: So at this particular point in your life, beyond the incredible amount you are already doing, is there anything specific that you want to accomplish?

Chopra: Yes. It sounds kind of lofty and idealistic, but I think that if I can somehow draw the world’s attention to all the people who are actually contributing in their way, perhaps we can create a new conversation. The world is a collective conversation at any time, and the media controls that. In the old times, in the village square, the guy who had the megaphone was the guy in charge.

At this moment, the guys who have the microphone are telling a very sad story. We see that story being acted out every day. So now I’ve reached a certain kind of credibility where the mainstream is willing to invite me to speak, whether it’s CNN or Harvard Medical School or Bill Clinton for Save the Children. So I want to take advantage of this mainstream exposure. I ask myself, “What am I achieving with this?” Well, if we can suddenly have that microphone in the village square for people like you and myself, people who are exploring the field of consciousness, there are a lot of people in the square who want to listen.