Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (41 page)

A week later he returned to the office and told my assistant that he did not have an appointment and wanted to see me for a couple of minutes. He walked in with a big smile.

“Dr. Chopra,” he said. “For more than ten years you have taken good care of me. You’ve done liver biopsies, all kinds of tests, and you even got me three months of treatment from the drug company on a compassionate basis. You’ve always treated me with dignity and respect even though I don’t have insurance.” He then handed me a baseball signed by the great Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez as well as an autographed photo. He told me he worked part-time in the dugout at Fenway Park and Pedro had walked up to him and said, “You don’t look good, you look pale. Is everything all right?”

My patient told him that he had chronic hepatitis C, cirrhosis of the liver, and had failed treatment, and that he might need a liver transplant. Pedro asked him who his doctor was and then signed the baseball and photograph for me. But the best part of the story is that he then turned to my patient and said, “Don’t you worry one bit about that liver transplant. If the time comes, I’ll take care of it.”

Subsequently Pedro Martinez moved to New York to play for the Mets, but kept in regular touch with the patient, who miraculously did well for years.

It’s experiences like this that are truly rewarding and fulfilling.

23

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American Dreaming

Deepak

Deepak and President Bill Clinton, Oval Office, 2005. Deepak gave a lecture to the White House transitional staff.

W
HEN YOU TURN AROUND
to glance over your shoulder, your children are looking back at you, only now they are adults. My cultural genes were tossed into the air and landed to form new patterns. My son changed his name from Gautam to Gotham so that Americans could pronounce it. He liked the echo of Gotham City, where Batman swoops down from the night sky, just as Rita and I once liked the echo of the Buddha when we named our baby boy. My daughter, Mallika, earned an MBA and married a venture capitalist from India, even moving back there for a time to experience how it felt to live as an Indian. Now much of her energy is devoted to using social networking for furthering goodness in the world. She has inherited her mother’s quiet grace.

There is no genome for the soul. If there were, we’d have the real code of life. Gotham is bemused by my soul. As a budding filmmaker, he decided to follow me around for a year, and the result is a documentary entitled
Decoding Deepak.
No father can fathom what his son really thinks about him. Gotham, who narrates the film, begins by saying that people have asked him all his life what it’s like to be the son of that spiritual guy. His answer: “It’s strange.” The person whom other people point to in airports is just his dad, a constant around the house since he can remember.

A celebrity, so it’s said, is famous for being very well-known. On the frequent-flyer list of United Airlines there were thirty-seven Deepak Chopras the last time I checked, but when I walk down the street and someone yells, “Hey, Deepak!” I know that I’m the one who should turn around and smile. Opinion polarizes around me. I’ve won the Ig Nobel Prize for the most ridiculous misuse of science and I’ve published an article in the
Journal of Cosmology
(the title was “How Consciousness Becomes the Physical Universe,” and one coauthor is a chaired professor of physics). I’ve received book
endorsements from the Dalai Lama and been excoriated by a conservative Catholic website as “the dress rehearsal for the Antichrist.” Rita was asked a question about
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,
a book she hadn’t read yet, and she commented with a smile that if the whole world followed me, my family wouldn’t. That is a blessing she has created, so why was Gotham left with such a sense of strangeness?

When Gotham was seven or eight, he looked at me out of the blue in an uncanny way and said, “We’re having it good this time around, aren’t we?” I had a sudden visual image of two old men standing on a bridge in a mountain valley below the Himalayas, superimposed over a suburban doctor patting his son affectionately on the head.

In
Decoding Deepak
his viewpoint begins tongue in cheek. Carrying a handheld camera, Gotham says, “Shh, my dad is meditating.” He cracks the door open, and I am found stretched out on the floor roundly snoring. I get my head shaved to enter a Buddhist monastery on a retreat in Thailand, and as I pad away in my monk’s robe, I say to him, “Remember to text me.” I’m a cell-phone-addicted, middle-aged man tramping through the snow in New York City, hardly looking up as taxis nearly graze me.

Midway through the film, the viewpoint begins to shift, and so does Gotham. He assembles a mental picture of his father that he can absorb into himself. We are back at Haridwar, where I cremated my own father, and I unfurl the scrolls that contain the greetings written by our family ancestors. The fragrance of old souls fills the air. Gotham finds himself choking up, as if some dormant cultural genes have kicked in. He has always gone his own way. He wanted to be a Boston Celtic as a kid, a dream he kept alive even after it was clear that his height was a foot or two shy of what professional basketball players need to be.

In another segment he has coaxed me into his backyard in Santa Monica, where there is a basketball hoop. I look owl-eyed with bewilderment as he points out that he has dressed me in a LeBron jersey while his own jersey is a Kobe. Who? The following dialogue takes place:

Son: Do you have a life purpose?

Dad: Yes, this. (Attempts a free throw facing backward from the hoop. A swish!)

Son: What makes you joyful?

Dad: Scoring everything in life with effortless spontaneity. (Attempts a shot sitting in lotus position. Another swish!)

Son: Do you believe in God?

Dad: I think we’re all God in drag.

The swishes were camera tricks (except for one that I made accidentally), but in his sideways journey Gotham has always been paying attention. I don’t pretend to see the invisible bricks that are building a self for him. How could I when I can’t even see my own?

While Gotham questions every step of the way, Mallika has never voiced any spiritual doubts. He has mastered the image of the carefree guy who loves sports; she is effortlessly kind and caring. If the ancient rishis are right, our relationship goes back hundreds of lifetimes, which makes their journeys as wise as mine—and just as unknown.

Later in the documentary Gotham asks, “Do you really think you can change the world?”

I reply, “Me personally? No. But the world is changing, and I’m part of the transition team.”

When I stepped away from the pack, I realized that you can’t be a lighthouse without also being a lightning rod. Certain things must be said, as loudly as possible and in public. Become the change you want to see in the world. There is no way to peace—peace is the way. Slowly but surely a separate culture, almost a separate world, has grown up around the truth. As part of the general skepticism that has corroded our confidence as human beings, people bristle at the word “truth,” as if a capital T is silently implied. There should be a capital T, I believe, but not for a set of dogmatic beliefs. Instead, there must be recognition of truth as universal. I remain deeply moved by a quote from the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore: “Love is not a mere impulse. It must contain truth, which is law.”

Tagore had a famous meeting with Albert Einstein in 1930 inside Einstein’s small house outside Potsdam, Germany. It lasted three days, and their conversation became world news, with reporters anxiously waiting on the steps to record what had been said inside. Tagore cut an exotic figure in his white robes and long snowy beard; Einstein wore his professor’s suit and wise expression, topped by the familiar whirlwind of hair. Their meeting was billed as a great soul comparing notes with the world’s greatest mind. Despite cordial exchanges, neither could reconcile his world view with the other. Tagore spent most of the time arguing that physics had missed the most important thing about creation: We live in a human universe. It is through us that creation lives and breathes. Everything that happens is happening in the mind of God. Therefore God is thinking through each of us, right this minute.

Nazism was already on the rise in 1930, and the Great Depression had begun its devastating spiral. In the midst of terror and hardship, no one was likely to accept a philosophy of divine love. Tagore’s prestige, which was immense after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, quickly waned. Human beings were too busy savaging one another to think about our role in the cosmos. For me, however, Tagore has been an abiding influence, one of the first to awaken me to a world where you don’t have to pray for transformation—it is happening all around you. The transition team is worth joining, no matter how ugly the evening news looks.

I wrote a book called
Peace Is the Way,
which addressed the whole issue of overturning the aggressive behavior that causes wars. People don’t wake up in the morning wondering how to kill their enemies, but societies devote blood and treasure to doing it for them. Krishnamurti was once asked how to end war, and he gave a blistering reply. “Sir, war begins in you. Find out why. Until you do, trying to end war is a self-indulgent illusion.” It’s a sober answer that marks out a rigorous path of self-examination. I wrote in the book that people can develop peace consciousness along an easier path. The essential question is how the nonviolent people in the world, who amount to
billions, can acquire enough power to overthrow the power devoted to violence.

The answer lies in three words that begin with the letter
S,
inherited from Sikhism, one of the newest faiths to branch off from Hinduism. These are
Seva, Simran,
and
Satsang.
These three Sanskrit words describe the ideal life of a spiritual person as service (Seva), remembrance of your true self (Simran), and being part of a community based in truth (Satsang). But these things need to reach a critical mass. If practiced by very large groups of people, they unlock a power that materialism can’t defeat, as a rock can’t defeat the rain even though one is hard and the other soft, as a tree can’t defeat the wind, even though one is solid and the other invisible.

A daily way of life is implied by peace consciousness.

Seva: Your actions harm no one and benefit everyone. Seva brings the joy of knowing that your daily actions support life as a whole. You become part of the planet’s evolution, not its wholesale destruction. You live in peace with your conscience because you have fulfilled your duty to be a steward of every aspect of Nature, down to the most sacred level.

Simran: You remember your true nature and your purpose for being here. Simran brings the satisfaction of expanded possibilities. You are not limited to being one individual lost in a sea of humanity. You find your authentic self and your authentic truth. A unique path to mastery is opened for you and you alone.

Satsang: You join in the community of peace and wisdom. Satsang brings the satisfaction of having no enemies. You are at home in the world. The rest of the human family is part of you. Older and younger generations are no longer separated by a gap but work together toward the vision of a world without poverty, ignorance, and violence.

None of these are hopeless ideals. Behind the welter of violence that makes headlines, each of these behaviors is a strong trend in the world already. What is most useful is for you, as a peaceful person, to see that you matter and that you are not alone. In 1988 a housewife walking in the rain to get bread in the shadow of the Berlin Wall
might have had no idea that her suppressed will to be free was more potent than the wall. What is will compared with bricks, machine gun towers, and barbed wire? Will is an inner force, and that is its secret strength. Will is an aspect of consciousness that cannot be destroyed, and the trend of time must obey consciousness whenever it decides to change.

Which is why I loved making a fool of myself shooting baskets with Gotham in my LeBron jersey. I knew that walls were about to fall.

When he was a teenager and the first Iraqi War was underway, I asked Gotham what he and his friends thought about the whole issue of going to war.

“War?” he said in bewilderment, as if the word didn’t compute.

I had arrived in New Jersey at the height of Vietnam and the antiwar movement. I’d seen guns, attack dogs, and tear gas turned against kids not much older than my son was then. But something invisible had shifted. We sat down and had a talk. I discovered that, in so many words, war was inconceivable to him. When asked why she didn’t join the antiwar movement, Mother Teresa of Calcutta replied that she would join a peace movement, if one ever came about. An antiwar movement is fueled by righteous anger. A peace movement would look very different. It might need no parades or demonstrations, hardly a voice at all. It is based on the growth of peace consciousness, one person at a time.