Great Books of the World – Part 15

“Every action generates a force of energy
that returns to us in like kind…..
What we sow is what we reap.
And when we choose actions that bring
happiness and success to others.
The fruit of karma is happiness and success.”

Deepak Chopra

The writer whose work I am covering today is a well-known Indian-American doctor who is devoted to promoting alternative medicine, and has been involved in the Transcendental Meditation movement for several years now, after meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in 1985. During my research, it became clear that all the writers about whose teaching I already have written, have a different way of presenting their views but a very similar spiritual understanding of what will provide a successful and happy life. There is a universal truth in what is the unquestionable set of moral principles.

Today’s author is Dr. Deepak Chopra.

Dr. DEEPAK  CHOPRA

Born 22 October 1946 in New Delhi. His father, Krishan Lal Chopra, was a prominent cardiologist in New Delhi’s Moolchand Khairati Ram Hospital.

Moolchand Hospital, New Delhi

As a child, Deepak attended St. Columba’s School, a highly acclaimed Christian Brothers institution. Amongst the best schools in the country, it is widely known because of its prime location in the very heart of Lutyen’s Delhi, because of its long list of distinguished alumni, because of its dedicated staff, its exuberant present students and its leadership in education.

St. Columba’s School, New Delhi

His further studies were at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi.

All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi

After graduation, he spent his first few years in rural India. Chopra’s interest in the workings of the human brain compelled him to study endocrinology, particularly neuroendocrinology, in order to find a biological basis for the influence of thoughts and emotions.

The Indian government had banned its doctors from sitting the exams needed to practise in the USA and for that reason Chopra had to travel to Sri Lanka to take them. After he passed the exams and having got married, he moved to the USA and started working at Muhlenberg Hospital in Plainfield, New Jersey. This was the place where doctors from overseas were recruited to replace those serving in Vietnam.

Muhlenberg Hospital, Plainfield, New Jersey

Shortly after meeting Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, he left the official post and established the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management in Lancaster, Massachusetts, shown below:

Chopra’s beliefs attracted a huge following and he was interviewed on many shows, including Oprah Winfrey’s, Larry King, and Good Morning America.

Deepak Chopra (left) and Larry King (centre), the famous American television and radio host, and Sanjay Gupta (right)

Chopra’s teachings are controversial and criticised by the medical profession for joining Ayurveda with quantum mechanics. He believes that an individual can attain “perfect health and live free from disease and can avoid aging.” The human body is “undergirded by a quantum mechanical body compass, not of matter but of energy and information,” that is why according to Chopra, “human aging is fluid and can be changeable, could be even reversed or stopped.”

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and further down below with The Beatles

To put these beliefs into practice, Chopra set up his own Center for Wellbeing in California, shown below:

It is understandable why so many people find his teaching seductive, as most people dread old age and would pay anything to stop it, preferably forever.  There are many cases in history that tell of the powerful and rich employing alchemists, lately even scientists, to discover the secret of staying forever alive and healthy. So far to no avail. While we cannot live forever, there are things that everyone can incorporate into their daily life, and this is the topic of Dr. Chopra’s bestseller book, “The Healing Self,” written with Rudolph E. Tanzi, Ph.D. The two bestselling doctors write about the supreme importance of protecting our immunity in order to ensure lifelong health. They also provide compelling evidence that ultimately, we are responsible for our own health, and not the doctors or pharmaceutical industry, on which many of us rely. The book covers many aspects of achieving a healthy, satisfying, and happy life, and is one of the best that I have read. Highly recommended.

Deepak Chopra and Rudolph Tanzi

I will concentrate here on both of Chopra’s teachings – health, and more accessible and easier to practise spiritual rules to obtain fulfillment and success through spirituals laws of nature.  Deepak Chopra, M.D. is one of the world’s bestselling authors, and his 85 books have sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, and were translated into over 43 languages. He has appeared on many major American shows and was the subject cover story in Time magazine, where he was described as “one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century.” His book “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” is a No.1 New York Times Bestseller.

In his bestselling book, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, Chopra explains in 7 chapters what the rules are:

The Law of Pure Potentiality

The Law of Giving

The Law of “Karma” or Cause and Effect

The Law of Least Effort

The Law of Intention and Desire

The Law of Detachment

The Law of “Dharma” or Purpose in Life

 

To illustrate Chopra’s way of explaining his rules, I will give a few extracts here:

“You can use the ‘The Law of Karma’ to create money and affluence, and the flow of all good things to you, any time you want. But first, you must become consciously aware that your future is generated by the choices you are making in every moment of your life. If you do this on a regular basis, then you are making full use of the Law of Karma. The more you bring your choices into the level of your conscious awareness, the more you will make those choices which are spontaneously correct – both for you and those around you.”

“I will put the Law of Karma into effect by making a commitment
to take the following steps:

1) Today I will witness the choices I make in each moment.
And in the mere witnessing of these choices, I will bring
them to my conscious awareness. I will know that the best
way to prepare for any moment in the future is to be fully
conscious in the present.

 

2) Whenever I make a choice, I will ask myself two questions:
‘What are the consequences of this choice that I’m making?’
and ‘Will this choice bring fulfillment and happiness to me
and also to those who are affected by this choice?’

 

3) I will then ask my heart for guidance and be guided by its message of
comfort or discomfort. If the choice feels comfortable, I will plunge
ahead with abandon. If the choice feels uncomfortable, I will pause
and see the consequences of my action with my inner vision.
This guidance will enable me to make spontaneously correct choices
for myself and for those around me.”

From the Law of Intention and Desire:

“On the material level, both you and the tree are made up of the same recycled elements: mostly carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and other elements in minute amounts. You could buy these elements in a hardware store for a couple of dollars. The difference. therefore, between you and the tree is not the carbon, or the hydrogen, or the oxygen. In fact, you and the tree are constantly exchanging your carbon and oxygen with each other. The real difference between the two of you is in the energy and in the information.

In the scheme of nature, you and I are a privileged species. We have a nervous system that is capable of becoming aware of the energy and informational content of that localised field that gives rise to our physical body. We experience this field subjectively as our own thoughts, feelings, emotions, desires, memories, instincts, drives, and beliefs. The same field is experienced objectively as the physical body  – and through the physical body, we experience this field as the world. But it’s all the same stuff. Your body is not separate from the body of the universe, because at quantum mechanical levels there are no well-defined edges. You are like a wiggle, a wave, a fluctuation, a convulsion, a whirlpool, a localized disturbance in the larger quantum field. The larger quantum field – the universe – i.e. your extended body.

From The Law of “Dharma” or Purpose in Life:

“Everyone has a purpose in life, a unique gift or special talent to give to others. Dharma is a Sanskrit word that means “purpose in life”. The Law of Dharma says that we have taken manifestation in physical form to fulfill a purpose. The field of pure potentiality is divinity in its essence, and the divine takes human form to fulfill a purpose. According to this law, you have a unique talent and a unique way of expressing it. There is something that you can do better than anyone else in the whole world – and for every unique talent and unique expression of that talent, there are also unique needs. When these needs are matched with the creative expression of your talent, that is the spark that creates affluence.”

“The third component of the Law of Dharma is service to humanity  –  to serve your fellow human being and ask yourself the questions, “How can I help? How can I help all those that I come into contact with?” When you combine the ability to express your unique talent with service to humanity, then you make full use of the Law of Dharma. That is the real way abundance is achieved, not by asking the question, “What’s in it for me ?”  Discover your divinity, find your unique talent, serve humanity with it, and you can generate all the wealth that you want. When your creative expressions match the needs of your fellow humans, then wealth will spontaneously flow from the unmanifest into the manifest, from the realm of the spirit to the world of form. You will begin to experience your life as a miraculous expression of divinity- not just occasionally, but all the time. And you will know true joy and the true meaning of success – the ecstasy and exultation of your own spirit.”

There is quite a large part of Chopra’s writing dedicated to yoga and meditation. He explained the remarkable benefits of yoga, which include improved flexibility, balance, muscle tone, endurance, and vitality, only hinting at the extraordinary power of this deeply spiritual practice. When adhered to and practised mindfully, yoga can unlock your full creative potential, your capacity for love and compassion, and your ability to find success in all areas of life. Yoga provides you with breathing exercises, meditation techniques, mantras, and much more enlightenment. This applies only to those who are spiritually connected with yoga. Others, especially in the Western world, who practise yoga for a health benefit or because it is a trendy thing to do, will not experience anything close to Chopra’s prediction of enlightenment. An example would be the celebrity actress Gwyneth Paltrow selling her Goop heated gemstone-embedded yoga mat for £700.

Extract from Dr. Chopra’s book “The Healing Self”:

“The total immunity is the measure of holistic health.

Benefits of the Healing Self

• It is non-invasive and involves no reliance on external therapies.

• It maintains natural balance and boosts your immune system
through lifestyle choices.

• Lifestyle choices can prevent many forms of cancer and hold promise for
preventing Alzheimer’s disease and even reversing symptoms of dementia.

• Successful aging will consist of a long healthspan as well as a long lifespan.

• Drug dependency is staved off because healing occurs before the stage of symptoms begins. The vast majority of drugs are prescribed late in the disease process, a stage you don’t have to reach if you act early enough.

• This is true for almost every lifestyle disorder, including heart disease, and other disorders that create the strongest need for drug treatment.

All living things need to repel outside threats to their DNA. Modern medicine recognises two types of immunity, passive and active. As the term implies, passive immunity is beyond our control, being genetically based. The other kind of immunity, active immunity, fights disease organisms (pathogens) directly in the front lines. All living creatures above a certain level have innate, or inborn, immune defenses, including plants, fungi, and multicelled animals. The innate immune system is very general. It can detect that a pathogen is invading the host and then release chemicals to fight back. But active immunity in higher animals, including humans, has evolved far beyond this stage. We have specific immune cells (for example, T-cells and B-cells) that have evolved to a nearly miraculous capacity for responding to invaders.

An extract on diet:

“Foods That Fight Inflammation

Fatty cold-water fish ( such as salmon, tuna, mackerel, herring)

Berries

Harvesting cranberries

Tree nuts ( such as walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, but not peanuts and groundnut)

Seeds

Whole grains

Dark leafy greens

Soy (including soy milk and tofu)

Tempeh

Mycoprotein (from mushrooms and other fungi)

Low-fat dairy products

Peppers (bell peppers and various chillies)

Tomatoes

Beetroots

Tart cherries

Ginger and turmeric

Garlic

Olive oil

On Harvard Medical School’s recommendation, also:

Cocoa and dark chocolate

The healthy way to indulge!

Basil and many other herbs

Black pepper

other additions:

Cruciferous vegetables ( cabbage, bok choy, broccoli, cauliflower)

Avocados

Carrots

Cucumbers,

Turnips

Zucchini

Leaving aside their anti-inflammatory effects, these are all healthy whole foods, and making them a mainstay of your diet can only be beneficial.

The last extract is interesting to those who love coffee:

The coffee connection

“Many studies have validated the health benefits of drinking coffee, and quite often the mechanism is unknown. A 2015 study of more than 200,000 subjects whose health was assessed for thirty years found a 15 percent lower risk of mortality among those who drank 1 to 5 cups of coffee a day. We’ve used this as our guide, but drinking at the higher end (four or more a day) seems to increase the benefits. There are improvements in the risk for type 2 diabetes (perhaps connected with coffee’s ability to lower blood sugar), heart attacks, and strokes (probably linked to an anti-inflammatory effect), liver cancer (cause unknown), suicide (cause unknown), and disorders as diverse as gallstones and Parkinson’s.

Because the most probable link with living longer is reduced inflammation, we’ve chosen this as the best reason to drink coffee. For longevity, it doesn’t seem to matter whether the coffee is caffeinated or decaffeinated. Since coffee drinkers are more likely to smoke, it is important to note that increased longevity applied after removing smoking from the equation. Also, tea and especially green tea are claimed to have broad health benefits, most likely due to an anti-inflammatory connection, but research is less extensive and conclusive than for coffee. Rather than jump on coffee as a magic elixir, you should add it to the list of beneficial foods while keeping the broader picture in mind.”

This post is based on all the books shown below.