Interview By Eliza Thomas

Deepak Chopra

This month, Deepak Chopra celebrates the release of — by our count —his 50th book, The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore. Next month, the beloved physician, poet, prophet and author travels to Costa Rica to lead The Human Forum, a three-day gathering of 500 environmentalists, economists, peace workers, artists and musicians dedicated to creating a more sustainable and compassionate world. The forum, which is open to the public, is an offshoot of Alliance For a New Humanity, Chopra’s ambitious mission to merge the millions of initiatives and individuals working for social change into one great “movement of movements.” “Creativity is the highest expression of spirituality,” Chopra told us, in between taping “The Happiness Prescription” for San Francisco public television. If the social change movement can be organized into one grand symphony, then Chopra, who creates like a man possessed, is our pick for conductor. What is “The Happiness Prescription?”Over the last five or six years, I’ve been looking at the relationship between happiness and subjective wellbeing. Science has focused on stress and disease for years. We know that when you’re stressed it leads to all kinds of problems. Epidemics of our time — cardiovascular disease, cancer, infectious disease and addiction — these are all connected to stress. But [I’ve been focused on] the opposite — if you’re happy, are you healthy? Most people have the idea if I’m healthy, if I have a good relationship, or if I’m successful, I’ll be happy. But it’s the other way around. Life situations don’t make much of a difference. If you win the lottery, you’ll be happy for a little while, but after a year, you’ll be exactly where you were. People have certain set points in their brains for whether they look at things as problems or opportunities. That set point is determined almost genetically, but it can be influenced by meditation, cognitive therapy and, for some people, by antidepressant drugs that act in the very short term but can change your set point. I’ve seen the studies correlating winning the lottery to stress and anxiety in some situations.Yes, this is true. Even if you have a tragedy — let’s say you have a death in the family — after a year or so you’ll be back where you started. Life situation adds about 8-10 percent to your happiness quotient. What makes a significant difference — other than from, say, spiritual discipline or meditation or cognitive therapy — is if you make other people happy, you’re happy. If you do something meaningful, you’re happy. If you have a sense of accomplishment, of creativity, you are happy. If you make a significant difference in your community, or to the environment, you’re happy. But given all that research, there’s something that’s called “existential outcome happiness,” which comes from questions like, “Is there any meaning to our existence?” “Do I have a soul?” “Does God exist?” “What happens to us after we die?” You can have everything, but still have this existential unhappiness. What I’ve been doing is looking into all the research, but then looking deeper into Buddha’s teachings on impermanence, the non-self nature of objects, the non-self nature of our own being, interconnectedness. It has been a great adventure to introduce Buddha’s story as well as his wisdom into this search. I’m hoping it will revive interest in wisdom traditions. If you had to distill your best advice down to one key piece, what would it be?Really understand that you are not a separate self. We are all connected, and everything we call “life” is actually a relationship — even our bodies, which are relationships of organs, which are relationships of tissues, which are relationships of molecules, which are relationships of atoms, which are relationships of subatomic particles. And ultimately there’s only the relationship of consciousness to itself. Somebody totally gets that when they say, “as long as there is me and mine, and me and mine is the predominant internal dialogue, then I will be unhappy.” Because the person you think you are doesn’t exist. You’re a confluence of relationships. If you pay attention to relationship, you will solve even the problem of existential unhappiness. From there, it all includes compassion, which means to be able to suffer with other people. It means to feel the pain of the environment, or what we call the environment, which is really our extended body. It means to be able to help brothers in distress, to understand at the deepest level you wouldn’t exist except in terms of the other. Jesus says to love your neighbor as you love yourself. The deeper meaning is that the other is you. You define yourself. You define even your enemies. You know, George Bush defines himself by looking at his enemies -— Osama Bin Laden, and so on. They’re explicit enemies but they’re also allies, because everything co-creates everything else. To put it simply, the only way to freedom is through compassion. And when there’s compassion there’s love, and when there’s love there’s healing. Not love just as a sentiment, or an emotion, but love as the deepest doing-ness, that we’re actually a single consciousness differentiating into many observers, many points of view and, ultimately, many objects of perception. So in that way, a practice of giving back is like an active expression of our inherent interconnectedness.Yes. But love without giving and love without action is meaningless, and also action without love is irrelevant. There’s lots of angry activism in the world. That’s happened with the environmental movement. If you understand that consciousness is a field, then even justifiable moral outrage adds to the anger of the field. True healing requires activism of a sacred kind, coming from a place of creativity and sobriety, when you’re not outraged even by the gross injustices of the world. Outrage adds to the drama. When you get involved with the melodrama of it all, creativity is lost, and the highest expression of spirituality is creativity, not holiness in the traditional sense, but creativity. We talk about God as the Creator. The more we have access to our own creativity and our collective creativity, the closer we are to the Creator, whatever that mystery is.It seems like you’ve been making a concerted shift towards speaking and focusing on environmental issues.It was a natural evolution. I started as a physician. First you’re treating the body, then you’re treating the mind, then the spirit. Then you realize you can’t treat someone separate of their social interactions. And you can’t look at social interactions isolated from the environment. It’s all one continuum. But the theme remains the same — healing. You have said that humankind’s next evolution will be an evolution of consciousness. What does that mean?If there were a critical mass of people employing insight, imagination, the power of intention, conscious choice making, creativity, inspiration, higher guidance and the awakening of dormant potentials which come about from experiencing our non-local self — which is not the personal self but the transpersonal self — the world would transform, because the world is an expression of our consciousness. Consciousness is a field, and our individual consciousness is just an outcropping of the field. This field transcends space and time, so it would be possible to reach a critical mass that would affect the field itself, transforming even individual consciousness. So that even if you are totally unaware of the greater issues confronting humanity, if there is a critical mass of coherence in that field, your consciousness could spontaneously be affected.In very simple terms, our individual mind is part of a larger mind, whatever you want to call that — “cosmic mind,” “the mind of God,” whatever — we are all contained in one mind. And if there’s turbulence in that mind, then our [individual] minds are in conflict. What keeps you up at night?Meditation. I wake up every hour to meditate for half an hour. I’ve been doing that for almost twenty years; it’s a habit. I meditate in a practice that’s called “witnessing awareness,” and even when my body is fast asleep my consciousness is awake. I get a lot of rest that way. If your mind is still, then even in the waking state your body is completely rested. Sometimes I get so rested that I have to go to the gym.What keeps you focused and motivated and hopeful?I don’t believe in hope. I think hope is a sign of despair. You know, only people who are in despair use the word hope. You have to be in a state of consciousness that is beyond hope and despair, which means a state that is creative, peaceful, not melodramatic, not hysterical, anchored in sobriety and in touch with your soul. Transcendence means beyond hope, beyond despair, beyond pleasure, beyond pain and yet still being conscious of choices you can make that are creative. The best way to change the future is to be fully in the present and to practice intention. But intention not as attachment or addiction.How do you know if your intention is being motivated by attachment or addiction?As long as there is addiction or attachment, there is anxiety. When it’s creative, it’s inspiring and it’s very pleasant. The worst state is addiction. The second is attachment. The third is craving or desire. The fourth is intention. The fifth is just the seed of intention. The sixth is choiceless awareness, which is when you have no choices but you’re so grounded in choiceless awareness that your choices become the ecstatic evolutionary impulse of the universe. So it’s total flow. You don’t make any choices. You allow the universe to choose.What issues are most woefully ignored in public discourse? I would like to hear people talking about economic disparities — really addressing the fact that 50 percent of the world lives on less than $2 per day, 20 percent on less than $1 per day, while we have people who are actually proud to fly private airplanes and display obscene extravagance. It’s already not even politically correct, or won’t be, I hope. [We] must address the fact that there are 250,000 sexual contracts in the brothels of Bombay, that women don’t have any choice because they’re so disempowered. Society has been so primitively sexist. If you empower the women, economy improves, AIDS rates drop and children go to school. So, the answer to AIDS is not retroviral drugs or condoms; it’s the empowerment of women. Extreme poverty can’t be cured by giving aid. The only thing that has been shown to work against poverty is transformation of leadership.What are some of the most exciting ideas or organizations or people that you’ve run across? What’s on your radar these days?I think leadership is the most exciting thing. I teach corporate leadership through a program called “The Soul of Leadership.” Right now I’m working with Frito Lay, a division of Pepsi, which is going to start nutritious projects, completely carbon-neutral manufacturing and consciousness work with 49,000 people next year. So that’s the corporate world, but then there’s the world of the UN which is very grassroots in villages with women and children — and that’s even more exciting.Okay, the final question: what question do you wish our readers would ask of themselves?“How can I help?”Perfect