<quantum physician: deepak chopra>

According to Time, Deepak Chopra is ‘A renowned physician and author’, ‘undoubtedly one of the most lucid and inspired philosophers of our time’ and one of the top icons of the Twentieth century. But the great man appears modest about all these accolades. ‘It's just a magazine,’ he says. ‘Ignore it’.

One would, yet there is such a lot to ignore. Chopra is the prolific author of 42 books, as well as audio-books and videos, all translated into 35 languages and with total sales in excess of 20 million. In 1995 he set up the impressive Chopra Center for Well Being in California, and he has many awards to his name. These include the Quill award for Peace Is the Way (2005) and the Nautilus award for The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life (2004).

Chopra has written extensively on mind-body health and spirituality, having been influenced by the teachings of Bhagavad Gita and Vedanta, as well as theory in quantum physics. The themes of his books are outlined in his debut book Creating Health (1986) where he establishes his advocacy of the mind-body connection, focusing on transcendental meditation and self-awareness as contributary factors in illness and healing.

In Quantum Healing (1989), quantum physics was used as a means of elaborating on his belief that consciousness is the foundation of all nature. Lately he has deployed these ideas to call for a ‘critical mass’ to engage in environmental healing and to defeat the current ‘addiction to war’ (see Peace Is the Way).

If he could use one word to describe the world of conventional medicine it would be ‘unhappy’. ‘The relatives of patients, with whom physicians deal, are demanding, litigious, intimidating. Most of my fellow colleagues were very stressed; a lot of them were addicts’. It’s a case of Physician heal thyself, since doctors are in the same boat as everyone else. ‘The experience of alienation, fragmentation, isolation ultimately leads to all of the problems, like contamination of our environment, hostility towards each other, poor nutrition, and hard work, too much work’.

Chopra sees his techniques in fighting anxiety as an antidote to the age of the tranquillizer. ‘Quantum Healing looks past all the wonder drugs and modern technology to a natural way of healing which speaks to an integration of mind and body,’ he says. The body converts our experiences into natural drugs at the molecular level. ‘The body is the end product of intelligence and how that intelligence shapes your reality will shape the reality of the body. The body is a field of ideas and it is a field of interpretations and when you change your experience of your own identity to a spiritual being, the body expresses the physical manifestation of that spiritual reality’.

And we can deploy the same powers to heal the world, so Chopra reckons. ‘We're moving towards a more healing world, more loving and compassionate. I just happen to be part of the tide’. Indeed, Chopra is optimistic about how technology will benefit humanity in spreading the word. ‘Technology makes it easy for everyone to share information. And when there are no secrets left, it's very difficult to create separation’.

Deepak Chopra's many titles are currently on sale at the edition bookstore.

Deepak Chopra's Book Choice:

I Am That by Nisargadatta Maharaj