Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (36 page)

One Friday afternoon I hobbled into her office. An hour later the session was over. I got off her examining table and looked at my knee. The swelling was gone. As I wrote in my book,
Live Better, Live Longer:
“My first reaction was,
My goodness, how did this happen?
My second reaction was,
There’s still daylight, maybe I can play nine holes!
” Which I did, with alacrity and without pain.

I don’t have to see scientific evidence to know that in certain situations acupuncture can be beneficial. Using that same criteria I can’t dismiss the possibility that Ayurveda is beneficial just because there isn’t a lot of science to support it. My general feeling is that Ayurveda or, in fact, any type of holistic medicine, may have a role in prevention. But I’ve yet to see a single non-Western drug that eradicates the hepatitis C virus; or if a patient needs a liver transplant or bypass surgery or a replacement for a broken hip, I haven’t seen any alternative to traditional Western medicine that would be effective. When you get a rusty nail in your leg you need a tetanus shot to prevent infection; as far as I know there isn’t any Ayurvedic medicine or Chinese herb that will replace that shot. If a patient has reoccurring pneumonia due to a bacterium, that patient better get the right antibiotic. So don’t tell me that this is six thousand years old and it has been practiced through the centuries and therefore that in itself makes it meritorious. Certainly there may be benefits to it, but what I find appalling
is when people believe they can abandon all of the miracles of Western medicine and safely replace them with alternative treatments.

They are not alternatives. The term that is fortunately now commonly used is “complementary medicine,” or “integrated medicine,” which means a practitioner can integrate all or some of it into his or her practice. But to me it’s not a replacement for Western medicine.

When Deepak initially became involved in this we would discuss it, debate it, the way we had discussed so many other topics through our life. Deepak, being a forceful debater, always brings insight to the discussion. We had our arguments about it.

“It has a role in prevention,” I would agree. “But show me a patient with long-standing diabetes who no longer needs frequent daily doses of insulin because of an herb or Ayurvedic medicine that you give him. Show me a single patient.” And of course he couldn’t.

My brother has never been afraid to take on difficult or controversial issues, but I was especially concerned that his work might prevent people from getting the care that they need. Unfortunately I have seen that happen in other instances. There is the story of one patient who had a neuroendocrine tumor in his pancreas and spent more than a year trying to treat it with non-Western medicine. More than twelve months. A neuroendocrine tumor generally is slow growing. If it hasn’t spread, the prognosis is extremely good if it’s removed surgically at an early stage. But in this instance by the time a year had elapsed it had spread to the liver and the patient eventually died. If you have a malignant tumor in your pancreas, you should see an excellent surgeon, have an operation and get that damn thing taken out. You shouldn’t procrastinate or waste a year seeking alternative treatments.

“Deepak,” I told him, “you have to be very careful when you’re dealing with the lives of patients.”

But at least some of what Deepak has said about Ayurveda has been misunderstood. He has always been very clear about the fact that there are medical issues that require treatment by accepted Western methods. The patient with the neuroendocrine tumor was not one he
consulted on, for example. If he had, he probably would have given him the same advice he has offered to many other patients. “Here’s what I recommend,” he explains. “Talk to your oncologist or liver specialist and follow my recommendations only with their approval.” Wise advice indeed.

It also turns out that there are lots of herbal and Ayurvedic medicines that have significant and detrimental interactions when they are taken together with medicines that are prescribed by physicians practicing Western medicine. Years ago I reminded him of a patient of mine, who had undergone a liver transplant. He was on a drug called tacrolimus. A friend told him that grapefruit juice had miraculous health benefits, so he started taking it. Guess what? That was dangerous advice. There is a well-recognized interaction between grapefruit juice and the way tacrolimus is metabolized. This advice could have caused an extremely serious reaction.

Deepak assured me that when one of his patients has lung or colon cancer, for example, he always tells them to follow the recommendations of their oncologist. The advice he gives to them, he points out, is not in lieu of the therapy, but rather something that will help them with the surgery or its side effects. He has been very careful about making sure they discuss everything with their primary care physician and their specialist.

But I also listened to my brother. And indeed, over the years I have taken a number of Ayurvedic medicines and supplements and found some to afford singular relief.

21

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Birth Pangs

Deepak

Chopra family celebrating Gotham and Candice’s wedding, New York, 2002.

W
ITHOUT MEANING TO, I BECAME
a walking culture clash. Limousines met me at the airport to take me to a luxurious home in the Hollywood Hills or a president’s palace in South America. I would absentmindedly run my hand over the butter-smooth leather seats and wonder how to explain Vedic knowledge to the person who had invited me—an actress who had become the highest paid in the world, the head of the Czech Republic, a Hollywood mogul, the prime minister of wherever I had landed. I was a version of them all, a spiritual seeker who presented the image of success to the world.

These two impulses came to a head in a book that brought me more attention than any other I’ve written,
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.
It argued that success must be measured in fulfillment, not in terms of external rewards. The world’s wisdom traditions map the road to inner fulfillment, and if you distill them to their essence, they speak about the value of achieving what you wanted by relying on spirit. This became the Law of Least Effort in my book, and I was consciously separating it from Christianity, even though Jesus said, “Ask, and you shall receive,” while also not referring to Maharishi, who said, “Do less and accomplish more.” The Law of Karma derives from a worldwide belief going back many centuries that good actions lead to good results, bad actions to bad results. I didn’t have to quote the New Testament when it said, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

This effort to treat every wisdom tradition as equal was ingrained in me. I have no tolerance for dogmatism (I love the bumper sticker that reads
MY KARMA RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA
), and in our house when I was growing up, the kids running in and out were Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Parsi. But more than an ecumenical impulse was at work. I refused to write about anything I had not personally
experienced. Everyday life didn’t deliver the sort of inner experiences I wanted. Being with Maharishi did. The key is that gurus break down boundaries. They aren’t your best friend; they may look like wise grandfathers, but in Maharishi’s presence the situation could be maddening, exhausting, boring, and sleep-inducing as well as inspiring, joyous, and full of light. He and I had a special relationship, and when I told that to a man who had been in the movement for decades, he laughed.

“That’s the big secret,” he said. “Everyone thinks they have a special relationship with Maharishi—because they do, in here.” He pointed to his heart.

For all the tales spread about spiritual charlatans, no one knows what it’s like to enter into intimacy with a guru until they actually do. Externals are misleading. Imagine trying to explain love to someone who has never felt it. Ah, but he’s seen people who are in love. They are distracted, moody, fixated on their beloved, and torn between laughing and crying. You can’t talk to them any more than you can talk to a madman. None of this behavior comes close to the actual experience of falling in love. From personal experience I can testify that the cauldron of emotions that is love comes close to the inner turmoil aroused by a guru. Arrows that aren’t romantic can still pierce the heart.

After one ridiculously exhausting and ultimately pointless campaign to establish a thousand Ayurveda centers in America—Maharishi wanted it accomplished over a weekend!—an old TM hand shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s always been like this,” he told me. “Wherever Maharishi is, you find pure creation and pure destruction. It keeps you churning.”

This accords with Indian texts that speak of the spiritual disciple’s lack of equilibrium: “always stumbling but never falling.”

When my relationship with Maharishi came to a crisis, the cause was petty, and to me it seemed unreasonable. I had returned home from a speaking tour to find Maharishi fuming. A TM group in Australia had promoted my lecture with a poster that sized my picture larger than his. Even though I had no control over publicity in a
country thousands of miles away, he was cantankerous and put out. Clearly the messenger was about to be punished for the message.

“You need a rest,” Maharishi said. “You’ve been working too hard. Stay with me for a while.” Any disciple in a Buddhist parable or the New Testament would have rejoiced over the opportunity to spend a year with the master. But I had seen Maharishi put more than one important member of the inner circle out to pasture this way. “Rest” was code for being shunted aside.

I sidled away from his offer. My workload was heavy, I explained, but it had been like that ever since I became a doctor. Taking a year off posed risks for my livelihood if I stopped seeing patients and giving talks. Maharishi listened impatiently, shuffling his silk shawl from shoulder to shoulder as he did when he was agitated. He insisted. I resisted. Then he laid down an ultimatum. Either I would stop touring for a year and stay by his side, or I could leave. It was a stunning moment, and many threads began to unravel.

Without another word I got up and walked out of the room. The next day, as I heard later, Maharishi looked around and asked in bewilderment, “Where’s Deepak?” He didn’t understand that I had taken his ultimatum seriously. In his mind, shifting from one mood to the next was perfectly normal. I had to live with the guilty knowledge that I had been wanting to run away for a long time.

I felt hemmed in. I wanted a creative outlet while the movement wanted an official spokesman. Which showed just how much I had become a walking culture clash. It wasn’t America that rejected India; it was the American in me. At one point I met the aging Laurance Rockefeller, one of the legendary five Rockefeller brothers. Their mother was an intense Buddhist (her private collection of Buddhist art was unmatched in the West), and Laurance, I believe, was the one son who carried on her spiritual interests. He was soft-spoken and gracious when we met, and he let me do almost all the talking.

At the time, I was seeing at least six people a day, so I don’t recall exactly what we spoke about. But as I was leaving, he said, “You’re going places. You’ll go even farther if you aren’t hanging on to the Maharishi’s coattails. Cut yourself loose.”

The remark startled and tempted me at the same time. In my mind my relationship to Maharishi was pure. It mirrored the classic guru-disciple role that I had read about in ancient texts. A guru has the right to put the disciple through any number of tests. In one classic story a disciple is told to build a stone hut by hand. He labors at the task, and when he is finished, the guru looks at his work and says, “Now move it three feet to the left.”

I had spent seven years moving the hut.

When I couldn’t get Rockefeller’s advice out of my head, it wasn’t because I was ready for another impulsive leap. I began to see a pattern inside me, and it wasn’t about cutting and running. Instead, I somehow was tuned into a silent voice, and when I made sudden changes, it was as if I observed myself going through them. My behavior spoke of someone who had reached a breaking point and needed to be free. But inside I felt calm, and the freedom I needed was inexplicable. It was the soul’s absolute freedom, which is why Krishnamurti was right to call it “the first and last freedom.”

The paradox was that by walking away from Maharishi in 1992 I became more certain than ever of my spiritual mission.

Every self is built like a mosaic, piece by piece, with the baffling difference that no matter how many pieces fit in, you still don’t know what the picture is supposed to be. I spent years constructing a version of Ayurveda that fit Western needs, but somehow the picture wasn’t about Ayurveda. It was about reinventing the human body. I briefly touched upon this theme, and now it needs to be fully expanded, because in or out of the TM movement, stark realities have to be faced about what healing and medicine actually mean.

In my forties I could see, from an experienced doctor’s perspective, the rifts and tears that were happening in old conceptions that once seemed completely true. Treating the body as a machine, which is fundamental in science-based medicine, is a flawed approach to begin with. Machines wear out with use; our muscles and bones grow stronger with use. Machines are assembled from separate working parts. The human body is a holistic system that is organically knit together.
Every cell is a microcosm of intelligence inside a macrocosm of intelligence. What excited me about Ayurveda was that it could be the opening wedge for changing the whole system, but reinventing the body had no chance as long as mainstream medicine stood in the way.