Desi News Corp - Index

Desi News Corp - Desi News - May 2009 - Index

Icouldn’t decide if Roy Thomson
Hall was half empty or
half full. Oh well, I thought,
8 pm on a Monday evening is
perhaps not the ideal time to schedule
a Deepak Chopra lecture.
But even as I thought these
thoughts, I saw the hall brimmeth
over with people who were
there to take his word for it on
everything from the metaphysical
to the fiscal.
So many voices in so many
languages, but there was an instantaneous
hush when the
good doctor stepped on stage
in a black Nehru jacket.
Followed by the rock star
welcome. Wooh!
“How’s everyone?” he asked.
“Good!” chorused everyone.
“How are you?” asked one. “I’m
good,” he responded. “Is everyone
happy already?”
Niceties over, he got down
to the business of the day.
“These are tough times for
the world,” he said in that sonorous
voice of his. “We need
creative solutions. I hope you
will be able to take away something
today for creative transformation.
As my new president
Barack Obama says, we are the
ones we’ve been waiting for.”
His message hasn’t changed
much over the years, though the
stories that illustrate it are different.
The doctor of internal medicine
and neuroendocrinology told
us about how immune cells eavesdrop
on our “internal dialogue”,
how they participate in this conversation
as conscious cells.
Our minds extend beyond the
barriers of body and time. “I am
not in the world, the world is in
me; I am not in the body, the
body is in me; I am not in the
mind, the mind is in me,” he said,
quoting from the Vedanta.
Genes are the metabolic endproduct
of experience, he said.
They are memories of billions
of years of evolution.
Consciousness constantly
outlives death of molecules
through which we express our-
14 Desi News May 2009
room WITH A POINT OF VIEW
selves – proof of life after
death!
Dr Chopra spoke extempore,
without notes, for close to twoand-a-half
hours while many in
the audience scribbled furiously.
At its fundamental level, nature
is a discontinuity, he said.
The physical world out there is
a vibration. It is solid and real
only in our consciousness.
Imagine a sunset, he said. The
picture is in our consciousness, he
explained. What’s in our brain are
just electricical impulses.
“Who am I? Where am I in
this body?” he asked. “I am a
handful of nothingness. The
essential ‘I’ is an interpreter and
a choicemaker that can over-ride
the commands of the brain.
“You and the universal consciousness
are the same,” he said,
laying the ancient Advaita philosophy
in a scientific context.
He asked everyone to think of
things they were grateful for, followed
by what they wanted to see
manifested in their lives. Close
your eyes and chant ‘I am’ in your
head for 15 minutes, he said.
We closed our eyes obediently.
There was no shifting in seats, or
shuffling of feet, just the occasional,
hastily smothered cough,
as we all sat in deep silence.
And then I cheated. I sneaked
a look around the auditorium.
Maximum Guru
for the maxed out age
People sat with their eyes closed
all around me. Deepak Chopra
was leaning against the podium,
drinking water and looking, or
so it seemed to my guilty mind,
straight at me. I quickly closed
my eyes again.
He described his personal
spiritual experience while in
Haridwar for his father’s cremation.
He talked of seeing everyone
and everything as though he
was seeing himself in a picture,
of a feeling of total love. And I
thought irreverently, of The Love
Guru, which he acknowledges he
was the inspiration for.
We can harness creativity, compassion,
and yes, love, to counter
the economic downturn, global
warming and war on terror with
our collective intent, he said. We
co-exist in consciousness and the
easiest way to be happy is to make
someone else happy.
I attended my first Deepak
Chopra lecture back in 1999
convinced I’d never wrap my
head around it. I now think that
perhaps I can, if he would break
it down for me in bite-sized
pieces. On the surface, the evening
was a lot of sound bites. Quotes
from the Bible, the Gita, from
the Vedas and from Rumi, from
Greek philosophers and from
Stephen Hawking. But he distills
the vast knowledge contained
in ancient philosophies
and in modern science and presents
it to us as on a smorgasbord
of ideas.
I was frustrated at times by his
moving on to the next thought
just as I was grappling with one.
Before I could sort out the difference
between mind and consciousness,
he was on to my soul.
But I guess that was the idea.
Deepak Chopra presents the
possibilities. He seeds the questions,
it is up to us to find the
answers.
As he says, there are no questions
for which there are no
answers – ultimately, it’s about
self-realization. And I have seen
the Deepak at the end of the
tunnel. – SHAGORIKA EASWAR