Followers Flock to Hear Mind-Body Guru Deepak Chopra
Dr. Deepak Chopra walks to center stage and his followers erupt in applause.
“When I saw him, my brain had trouble accepting the fact I was seeing him in the flesh,” said Vivian Lozano, 37, of Torrance.
Lozano was among 300-plus Chopra followers who paid $165 each--or $300 a couple--for his seminar titled “The Mirror of Relationships” at the Red Lion Hotel in Culver City.
At age 47, Chopra has the world by the tail with his books, tapes and alluring, intellectually opaque message that thinking healthy is the first step toward being healthy and vanquishing the frets and fevers of modern life.
His book “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind” has sold upward of a million copies, building on the success of his “Quantum Healing,” “Perfect Healing” and “Unconditional Life.”
Born in New Delhi and educated at India’s best medical school, Chopra immigrated to Boston and built a lucrative practice in endocrinology and internal medicine. He became disenchanted with American life and turned to the ancient mind-body science of ayurveda.
He started a stress clinic using ayurveda in 1986 and last year accepted an offer to move to San Diego and become the executive director and guiding spirit of the Sharp Institute for Human Potential and Mind-Body Medicine there.
“We have a new science,” Chopra told the Red Lion gathering, “and the new science aims at nothing less than the climactic overthrow of the superstition of materialism.”
His books and lectures offer an intriguing yet often inscrutable glimpse of the infinite intellectual possibilities available if only one could pierce the veil. He sprinkles his lectures with poetry and references to quantum physics.
He glides from 5,000-year-old Sufi poetry to a discussion of the information highway as a metaphor for a new medical paradigm. “To the extent we can change our consciousness,” he says, “we can change our printout.”
His lectures have lists of threes and lists of sevens and pithy propositions.
An example: “If you just relinquish your need for control, approval and power, all your relationships would be healed.” And: “Intuition is nothing more than slipping into the gap (between thoughts) and tapping into the cosmic computer.”
He has a tape for people trying to lose weight and a book for people trying to make money. He is writing four more mind-body books and a novel about two levels of simultaneous reality.
His seminars attract believers, skeptics and those in between.
Dr. Gary Foresman, an internist from Mission Viejo, attended the Culver City seminar and one in San Diego for health professionals. But he is not without some doubts.
He finds Chopra charismatic but told him during a question-and-answer period that he finds his logic hard to follow. Chopra replied calmly that Foresman should not worry: A new way of thinking is not easily absorbed. Foresman was impressed. “He has a great inner peace about him,” he said.