Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (42 page)

Some dreams come true before people realize that they are waking up.

Tell me the meaning of one word, and I can probably tell you how your life will turn out. The word is “destiny.” For many people destiny means something like being rear-ended when you’ve stopped at a red light—an unexpected force shoves you from behind and makes you go forward. For others it’s like winning the lottery, one chance in a million that fortune will pluck you out of an ordinary life. Or is destiny simply a mystery that cannot be solved?

Anyone could fairly say that my life has been shaped by destiny.
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
had a quirky birth. The publisher of a tiny unknown press asked if she could turn a lecture of mine into a little book. The proposed title was
The Seven Spiritual Laws of the Universe
—substituting the word “success” came about at the last minute. The little book did nothing for a year. We all forgot about it. Then out of the blue a business writer at the
New York Times
began an article with the sentence, “If you only read one business book this year, it should be
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.
” This, from a newspaper that has reviewed only one book of mine in twenty-six years. (When I had two books on the
Times
bestseller list, my exasperated publisher called up the editor of the book section to ask why neither had been reviewed. The editor’s tart reply was, “We review books that people should read, not what they do read.”) Within a week the
Wall Street Journal
also mentioned
The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,
and after that the inexorable American media machine did the rest.

It felt like organized serendipity. It felt like being a bug under a magnifying glass, except that the light didn’t burn. The ingredients of destiny do not form a confused jumble; they fall into a pattern. The mystery lies in figuring out what the pattern is showing you. What feels like pure chance might be inevitable. Without coming from India and being trained in medicine, there would be no foundation for all that unfolded in my future. When destiny shapes a life, it arises from the tiniest details. At the beginning of my speaking career, I’d hear muttering that some in the audience couldn’t understand my accent. What if the accent had been a little thicker? The whole auditorium might have cleared out. This is more than “everything happens for a reason.” As a famous South Indian guru said, “You must realize that the entire universe has to collaborate in order for this precise moment to happen.”

The real question is how to respond to destiny, because its influence isn’t as simple as being rear-ended at a stoplight. Destiny is a mixture of accident, predisposition, desire, intuition, and the unconscious. You find yourself acting on a whim, only to discover that your whim was one link in an iron chain of events. There is no map to follow.
The wisdom of uncertainty enters into the picture, and yet you cannot live your days in total uncertainty.

I can only conclude that destiny is like a spark. In India there’s an aphorism that I’ve carried around in the back of my mind for decades: One spark is enough to burn down the whole forest. The implication is spiritual. Once you are touched by the spark of self-awareness, the forest of ignorance will eventually be destroyed. When I refer to “the process,” what I mean is that consciousness snowballs, starting from a speck of motivation and building up, year after year, until you look around, and in all directions what you see is eternity.

I got a chance telephone call in February 2008, just as I was stepping outside the door to go to dinner. A friend at the other end asked if I had heard the news. Maharishi had just died. I sat down heavily, looking out the window at the snow falling over Manhattan, pure white flakes that had no thought of how dirty they would soon be when boots trampled on them. My life is modest compared with that of a man who grabbed destiny by the throat (or was it the reverse?).

As a young college student Maharishi liked to visit the saints, just like my uncle Sohan Lal. One evening he went to a home where he had heard a great saint would be staying for a few days. It was growing late, and in the dark he sat in an upstairs room beside a meditating swami. From the road outside, a passing car’s headlights swept the room.

The beams of the headlights fell on the meditating swami, and at that instant, Maharishi recounts, he knew that he had met Guru Dev, his great spiritual teacher. Within a year of graduating from college in 1942, the young Mahesh had become a monk working as his master’s assistant—as it turned out, Guru Dev was the most eminent spiritual figure in northern India. Maharishi’s future was set in place by a glance.

His funeral took place in India, although I didn’t go. For a flashing second the glare of fame returned to him. I saw photos of the body arranged in lotus position surrounded by acres of flowers. Word came to me through old TM connections that Maharishi had anticipated his passing. Two weeks before, he made a conference call to all
the TM centers declaring that his life’s work was done, that he had accomplished what needed to be achieved for the good of the world. It is part of the lore of the enlightened that they undergo a conscious death, known as
Mahasamadhi.
The meditative state is samadhi, to which the word “great” (maha) is added, indicating that wherever the enlightened one goes when he shuts his eyes, this time he will never return.

In my family we wonder if my father took mahasamadhi. The night that he died, when he entered my mother’s sickroom to kiss her good night, she thought it was like a final farewell. Or maybe not. Indians, like everyone else, love to fit events into sentimental patterns, the difference being that our sentimentality is spiritual.

Thinking back I see that it was never an either/or decision to walk out on Maharishi. A short while later, after I had definitively moved on, he called the house in Boston. Rita answered the phone. Hearing that I wasn’t home, Maharishi told her that I had to reconsider coming back. He would give me “the whole kingdom.” I would be his spiritual heir. Taken aback, Rita minced no words and told Maharishi that I had no interest in his offer. Eventually Maharishi caught up with me on the phone, and I repeated in my own words what she had said. When he was finally convinced that I had left for good, Maharishi’s last words were, “From now on, I will treat you with indifference.” One could hear an iron gate come down.

I was unconsciously following the same maverick pattern that crops up again and again in my story. Unconsciousness is the true enemy of destiny. Awareness is its greatest ally. Destiny awaits everyone, because each day brings a spark, which is to say a clue about higher reality. The best are clues that indicate something better than everyday life: a sudden surge of joy, a feeling that you are safe and cared for, a sense of lightness in the body, a sudden intimation that time is standing still. The poet Wordsworth called these interruptions in daily existence “spots of time,” but they could be called spots of eternity. Our minds yearn to know the truth. Sometimes that means that the clues coming our way are painful, because untruth hurts, if only at a subtle level. Feeling drastically unsafe, alone, uncared for, and
empty is not just a pain that you wish would go away. If you take the longest view, such feelings are hints that you have taken a wrong turn; negativity is a detour from the truth. Destiny helps anyone who picks up the clues that the soul strews in our path. The fact that accidents are mixed with desires, obstacles with open roads, is irrelevant. Reality uses whatever it takes to get people back to dharma, the force that upholds life absolutely.

An article about my work that
Time
magazine published in 1996 began with the story of a doctor, a Florida internist, whose daughter, coincidentally, had been the publicist for
Quantum Healing.
He had leafed through the book but put it aside. Its message was not for him. Then he was diagnosed with advanced, inoperable prostate cancer. The standard hormone therapy at the time had a patient survival rate of about two years. According to
Time,
“He retrieved the Chopra book, which claimed that meditation, the right diet, and a Westernized version of Hindu mysticism could prevent or even reverse disease. [The man] became a Chopra maniac. He meditated thirty minutes a day, prayed for five, and recited Chopra’s ten Keys to Happiness… and then he got well. The tumor disappeared. Tumors sometimes do that, of course. But he knows who to thank. ‘My professors would be turning over in their graves,’ he says with a grin. ‘It’s a shame more doctors don’t listen to him.’”

Will there ever be a time when such a story becomes normal? If so, it won’t be because of “a Westernized version of Hindu mysticism.” Instead, the body will become transparent to the mind. The intent to heal will not be blocked; a way to reach into the diseased area will open at the touch of consciousness. I’ve called this vision reinventing the body, because as long as the body is a dense package of matter, we will be moving in the opposite direction, making consciousness appear to be no more than a ghost in the machine.

My medical partner, David Simon, never stopped pushing the standard model of the body, and at the Chopra Center he worked on all fronts. He went deeply into Ayurveda. He proved to the California licensing authorities that our brand of medicine met the standards
for courses in continuing medical education (CME) that doctors take annually to recertify their boards. Slowly but surely the legitimacy of integrative medicine advanced. David tirelessly taught courses at the center, wrote books, and kept faith that a new model of healing was emerging.

All diseases are multifactorial, and often when you reverse the detrimental factors in their lifestyle, people get better. You can’t have physical well-being in someone who is unemployed, for example, who spends all day stressing about what he’s going to do with his life. He’s going to get angry at his situation, perhaps drink or eat too much, even smoke a cigarette to calm his nerves. Well-being requires a balance between all the elements of a person’s life, but society poorly prepares us to think in holistic terms. David used to say, “If the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail.”

At the Chopra Center he and I set out to provide people with a complete toolbox. We particularly focused on what we considered the three pillars of ancient wisdom, Ayurveda, meditation, and yoga, which were broken down further into the areas of physical healing, emotional well-being, and spiritual awakening.

The signature course that we created is called Journey into Healing, which is intended for the general public as well as health care professionals. It opens the door to the mind-body techniques that can affect their own and their patients’ lives. When the course was certified by the American Medical Association for twenty-four hours of CME credits, we felt that a historic breakthrough had been made. CME credits are a stamp of professional approval. We had arrived. Journey into Healing continues to expand. At first it was taught by David and me, but now there are eminent guest speakers who cover everything from lifestyle prevention for heart disease to mind-body therapy during pregnancy.

Once the gates opened, there was no limit to what we wanted to teach. The Seduction of Spirit is a week-long dive into meditation; Perfect Health is a five-day course in which participants consult with our doctors for personalized care, then spend the next few days learning
the essentials of mind-body care for themselves. Several years ago it became clear that calling ourselves holistic made little sense if any us-versus-them thinking existed. Walls had to be knocked down so that every field could see the light in every other.

From that impulse a yearly conference sprang up called Sages and Scientists. Ten years ago anyone who called himself a scientist would have circled anyone who called himself a sage like two wary cats. The very word “consciousness” wasn’t a respectable field of research. Being conscious was a given. It meant that you weren’t asleep or knocked over the head. But creeping gradualism is a powerful force. The thing that crept in was my old ally, quantum physics. If the basic building blocks of the universe were invisible, mere possibility waves in an infinite quantum field, how can anyone maintain that any part of the physical world isn’t affected?

The question can’t be begged, but people did, all over the place. Doctors weren’t the only guilty parties, although most would shake their heads to hear that the placebo effect, for example, might have quantum roots. How? Through the well-established observer effect. In the standard model of quantum physics, there must be a way for invisible possibility waves to turn into physical objects. The observer seems to be the pivot point. Insert an observer into the system, and suddenly the infinite quantum field undergoes a transformation (known as the collapse of the wave function) by which all the properties of matter emerge.

Applying this knowledge to medicine meets with strong resistance, as I well knew. But there were dog fights over such newborn concepts as quantum biology as well. The moment Sages and Scientists was announced in 2009, I was astonished to discover that a considerable number of farseeing scientists were willing to risk derision by coming forward. In small groups that kept gaining in strength, consciousness had become a genuine topic of research. Holes in all kinds of standard disciplines needed filling. Quantum biology set out to build a solid chain from the quantum field to the cell. Derision wasn’t a threat in the safe setting we provided, although an open door was left for skeptics.

The mind field, which was once as dangerous as a minefield, is blossoming. The wait has been long. Max Planck, the German physicist who is credited with starting the quantum revolution more than a century ago, also foresaw the mind field when he made a mysterious remark: “The universe knew that we were coming.” Consciousness, in other words, is at least as old as the universe. To me these aren’t rarefied speculations. Human beings exist in three states: unconscious, aware, and self-aware. Years ago, while I was still at the VA in Jamaica Plain, I treated a patient with chronic obstructive lung disease. He was on a ventilator for two weeks before we finally managed to wean him off so that he could breathe on his own. He had a hole in his throat from the permanent tracheotomy that had been performed to assist him in breathing the next time his blood oxygen fell dangerously low.