New-Age Daydream: Deepak Chopra's Philosophy
Most famous thinkers leave behind only needles of wisdom within haystacks of conjecture. The philosophy of Deepak Chopra, however, becomes more relevant each time a megabyte passes through the ether. In an exclusive interview he offers insights into the nature of — and route to — success.
"They have a deep passion for what they do. They have a deep hunger for success, and they’re driven by a vision.”
To call Deepak Chopra an authority on what makes leaders effective would be a tepid understatement. The 78-year-old Indian-American philosopher and alternative medicine guru has authored dozens of New York Times bestsellers whose overarching theme is human effectiveness, and he was named by Time as one of their top 100 influencers of the last century for his work in the field.
His list of close friends and collaborators includes the most renowned spiritual figures in the world (the Dalai Lama) as well as pop-culture giants past (George Harrison, Michael Jackson) and present (Lady Gaga, Alicia Keys, J. Balvin), and his social media following has reached 20m. In short, if Dale Carnegie hadn’t got there first, the title How to Win Friends and Influence People might plausibly have become one of the 94 books on Chopra’s C.V. (and its sequel might have been named ‘How to Find Peace and Stimulate People’).
While passion, hunger and vision are the holy triumvirate, there’s plenty more, he says, to becoming, and staying, successful: “The key traits are the ability to listen, the ability to create a vision, to be emotionally secure, to harness intuition and creativity, to be a dreamer, to take responsibility for your wellbeing and for those you work with. Then there’s always the uncertain element that some people call good luck, some people call synchronicity, and some people call meaningful coincidences.”
Meaningful coincidences? He says: “I think good luck is just opportunity meeting preparedness — when you have a coincidence that, to me, suggests there is an opportunity there. There are lots of books on the subject, including one that I wrote called The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire.”
I feel we can create social networks with shared vision... so we can aspire to a more peaceful, just, joyful world.
The emotional security he refers to, he says, is achieved, not innate: asked where the greatest leaders of the past 2,000 years sit on the scale, he says: “They’re driven by insecurity. At some point the greatest of them realise there is wisdom in uncertainty. That’s a kind of a paradox. Once you’re comfortable with uncertainty, it brings about security because the biggest reason for insecurity is the search for security... I’ve done a lot of research, and the scale moves from deep insecurity to adaptation, to thriving, to flourishing, to flowing, and then, ultimately, awakening. That’s the journey.”
The question that arises, especially with the world changing exponentially quicker than it has before, is how to navigate the journey in the digital age. Chopra is a strong advocate of embracing, rather than fearing, its potential, and approaching it “from a more holistic and broader perspective”.
It’s an attitude that may be partly attributable to his unique relationship with technology over the years. “When I came to the United States, at the age of 22, from India, I had never seen a television set,” he says. “Then we got fax machines. Then the internet, then there was social media, and now there is Zoom. Email, Instagram, artificial intelligence — the bottom line is, just as a born child can’t return to the womb, once a technology emerges it cannot go back. Humans have been the only species that has created technology since the discovery of fire.”
The danger-benefits dichotomy, when it comes to the fruits of ingenuity, go back to the dawn of mankind, he says: “When we developed opposable thumbs and created knives, I’m sure there was somebody who said, ‘No, you can kill a person with a knife’. But then a surgeon said, ‘Well, I can save a person’s life with a knife’. And A.I. — which is going to leapfrog both our cultural and our biological evolution — like anything else comes with its own hazards. Nuclear technology came with its own hazards. Now you have cyber-warfare. You have drones. You have poison in the food chains. You have eco-destruction. You have climate change. A.I. is just one element among the evolution of technology which is irreversible. Either you adapt to it and make the best use of it, or you become extinct. That’s how natural selection and evolution works.”
Chopra’s Digital Deepak initiative — which uses A.I. to create (to quote from the company’s own description) “personalised plans that address sleep, nutrition, exercise and other vital aspects of wellbeing” — is an example of how it can be harnessed for the greater good. It may be just the start of his plans in this realm. “I personally feel we can create social networks with shared vision [and] maximum diversity, complementing each other’s strengths and creating spiritual and emotional bonds across the globe so that we can aspire, at least, to a more peaceful, just, sustainable, healthier and joyful world,” he says.
Chopra is also an advocate of mantra meditation. He says it has a mindfulness and that it works well in tandem with other disciplines, such as reflective inquiry and interoceptive awareness (a discipline involving staying in tune with your internal sensations). A perhaps more controversial area of interest for him, though, is the therapeutic potential of psychedelic substances (his Chopra Foundation announced, in 2022, a partnership with the leading ethical biopharmaceutical company Cybin). Aldous Huxley’s dense but seminal tome The Doors of Perception is a cultural milestone in this field; Chopra concurs with the late English thinker on the notion that the titular doors need to be ‘cleansed’ so that “everything would appear to man as it is — infinite”.
Chopra says: “The average mind is under the hypnosis of social conditioning. That’s been going on since 40,000 years ago, so it’s only gotten worse. And psychedelics is one way to [clean the doors of perception] because they decrease the activity of something called the default mode network in our brains, which is the neural correlate of our ego mind. It gives us an opening to the larger, you might say, cosmic mind.” There’s better news, though, for any anti- drugs campaigners raising their hands at this point: “Because of A.I. and the metaverse, you will [soon] be able to replicate the effects of psychedelics with what I think we will be calling ‘metaceutical’. You’ll be able to immerse your virtual self in an immersive virtual reality.
“Then, actually, that will epigenetically modulate your gene activity and also your neural activity. I think we might be on the brink of both leapfrogging in cultural evolution [and] even biological evolution, because as our experiences change, our brain and genetic activity follow. The psychedelic revolution is opening the window to other technologies where the metaverse and virtual reality and augmented reality and extended reality will allow us to play with virtual reality, [which] will shift our biological landscape, even our neural and
genetic landscape, because I believe, like a few other people, that we are already in a virtual reality. What we call everyday reality is a simulation in a non-local mind.”
We are already in a virtual reality. What we call everyday reality is a simulation in a non-local mind.
We’re edging now towards the territory of The Matrix (or potentially Huxley’s other seminal work, Brave New World). Alternatively, religious historians might draw a comparison to the Sanskrit term māyā, a fundamental concept in Hindu philosophy that means illusion or magic.
The questions that Chopra’s thoughts raise — as well as those found within his latest book, Digital Dharma, for which the OpenAI Chief Executive, Sam Altman, was an adviser — are compelling. Could those ingredients for success — passion, hunger and vision — be engineered by the same digital revolution that has unfolded so rapidly that even Homo sapiens the right side of 50 can remember Ceefax? What happens to the concept of ‘success’, and its reliance on competition to have any true meaning, if everyone’s capacity for it is hiked by immersion in a computer-generated world?
Meanwhile, at 78, Chopra’s passion, hunger and vision show no signs of abating. He is fighting on behalf of global mental health via his Never Alone campaign, which has intervened in hundreds of suicide attempts (the site’s URL is suffixed ‘.love’). He’s also recently launched
RAKxa, a wellness retreat outside Bangkok, and partnered with Kate Moss on her wellness brand Cosmoss, while his launch late last year of an education platform promoting the benefits of equine therapy — a partnership with Stella McCartney — was motivated in part by an ideological attachment to McCartney’s commitment to veganism (asked whether people who spurn meat are happier, he says, “I would say more at peace rather than just happy”).
As the digital revolution rumbles on, one of Chopra’s quotes from the past — “The greatest mystery of existence is existence itself ” — could become more profound with each passing year.
Deepak has been a collaborator with, and an inspiration to, some of the world’s most powerful figures, including Michael Jackson, Oprah Winfrey, Barack Obama, the Dalai Lama, and Michelle Obama.
