So Rich, So Restless

Deepak Chopra--New Age superstar, guru to the rich and famous and millions of others, praised and damned for his beliefs about the mind’s dominion over the body--is about to settle into a couch in his intimate, soft-toned La Jolla office and explain his latest projects.

His movie screenplays. (One is described as “Independence Day” meets Siddhartha.)

His hip-hop CD from Time Warner’s Tommy Boy Records division (and maybe a cameo in the video).

His interactive CD-ROM, “Deepak Chopra’s The Wisdom Within: Your Personal Program for Total Well-Being.”

His performances on the TV show “Politically Incorrect” (which he enjoys immensely, even though the host accused him of spreading “preposterous psychobabble”).

His self-help books, novel, poetry, seminars and videos.

His essay for Playboy (“Does God Have Orgasms?”) and his newfound kinship with Hugh Hefner. (“It is obvious we hold very similar views on sex and spirituality,” Hef wrote.)

His fund-raiser in Costa Rica for the world peace movement of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Oscar Arias Sanchez.

His year-old Chopra Center for Well Being, which offers meditation sessions and spa-like rejuvenation treatments in addition to a store selling 150-plus products, all personally approved by Chopra.

But first, Chopra must talk to a visitor.

The visitor, accompanied by his much-younger wife, would be honored to have his picture taken with Chopra. He is a big believer in the Indian-born, Western-educated endocrinologist who veered from conventional medicine in search of answers from the ancient Indian folk wisdom of ayurveda (from the Sanskrit words for knowledge and life), a holistic approach to well-being that stresses yoga, meditation, nutrition, herbs, aromas and a mind-set free of anger and envy.

The visitor, who often comes to the center to meditate, believes that Chopra has much wisdom to bestow on this health-obsessed country--advice about slowing down, mellowing out, thinking positive, avoiding toxic foods and toxic emotions and stifling the impulse to pop a pill.

The visitor is Dr. Benjamin Spock, the baby doctor, himself a praised-and-cursed guru who has often challenged convention.

Spock has provided a blurb (“profound and fascinating”) for Chopra’s latest book, “Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents,” due in bookstores by the end of September. What’s more, Spock’s latest edition of his renowned “The Common Sense Book of Baby & Child Care” will be chockablock with references to Chopra-iana.

Now in his 94th year, Spock is still looking for better ways to provide instruction about the care and feeding of children. His attentive wife, Mary Morgan Spock, does much of his talking.

“There is going to be much more spirituality in this edition, and he mentioned you many times,” she tells Chopra. “He’s thrilled and privileged to get such attention from Dr. Chopra.”

With the Spocks, Chopra is gracious and modest and possessed of that unfailing courtesy and gentleness that millions of followers know from his seminars and television appearances. There is another Chopra--the angry, take-no-prisoners, you’re-all-scum litigant--but more about that Chopra anon.

The immediate talk is about Chopra the phenomenon. In the crowded field of New Age health advocates, Chopra, 50, is at the pinnacle of popularity and profitability. He estimates his annual gross at $15 million and says profits are plowed back into “the growth of my company” (although he does seem to favor Donna Karan suits).

His best-selling tomes provide a mystical pathway to finding spiritual fulfillment, rekindling your love life, thinking your way to wellness, losing weight, achieving success, aging gracefully (if at all) and, soon, raising healthier, better-adjusted children. His 19 books have sold millions and been translated into 25 languages.

Still, he is restless. He is on the road half of the time. Now at Michael Milken’s birthday bash at Lake Tahoe, now hobnobbing with Hollywood celebrities and business titans, now serving as headliner for a symposium organized by Mikhail Gorbachev.

“My life is a spontaneous, evolutionary process,” Chopra says softly, “and I write about stuff that I am exploring in my own consciousness. A lot of things are happening. It’s still all connected to well-being, so you have this definition of health as the absence of disease, but, in fact, well-being is about having a higher state of consciousness. That’s basic to all the things I’m exploring. I’ve never really planned out ahead of time what I’m going to be doing. There’s a Chinese saying, ‘A good traveler has no well-defined plan and is not intent on arriving.’ I’ve been like that. I do and write about what I like.”

What he likes now is movies. Chopra has written two screenplays, one for venerable London Films (tentatively titled “Lords of Light”) and another for Kushner-Locke Co. (“Juggernaut”) in Hollywood. The screenplay for London Films is set in Jerusalem.

“The basic theme is that Satan has escaped and surfaced in the Middle East, the birthplace of the three major religions of the world,” Chopra says, “and it is affecting the collective psyches of our world and creating a lot of devastation. We have become predators. The CEO of London Films says it’s ‘Independence Day’ meets Siddhartha.”

For Kushner-Locke, the Chopra screenplay tells of an American assassin who flees to India and experiences a spiritual rebirth. There will be talk of man’s relationship to the cosmos but enough muscularity to satisfy the action-picture genre.

Like many a mega-figure in American life, Chopra has developed a certain wariness with the press. He’s been mocked more than a few times in print (the New Yorker devoted a full page to a sendup titled “Car Talk With Deepak”). These days, he generally gives interviews only when a new book is due. Once engaged, however, he is cordial and open--a mix of charisma and diffidence.

Asked to explain his success, Chopra wanders a bit in metaphysics and then lands on a cinematic simile. “I happened to be at the right time for a lot of people obviously interested in this stuff,” he says. “So I come along, and if I didn’t come along, somebody else would have. We’re all just blips on the ocean of consciousness. They come, they go. They seem very important because you are in them, but when you look at it in the span of time, it’s not important. It’s like a good movie. For those who saw it, it’s significant.”

*

The oldest son of a British-trained cardiologist in India, Chopra grew up in a privileged, intellectual household permeated with talk of poetry (particularly his favorite, Tennyson), Hinduism and cricket. He graduated from the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and in 1970, at 23, he came to the United States to practice medicine.

He completed residencies in internal medicine and endocrinology, lectured medical students at Tufts University and Boston University, and by 1980 was chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital. He was also smoking a pack a day, getting looped on Friday nights to unwind and was stressed to the hilt by the medical politics of a big hospital. As he recounts in his 1988 memoir, “Return of the Rishi: A Doctor’s Story of Spiritual Transformation and Ayurvedic Healing,” he happened during this period to pick up a book about transcendental meditation.

Through TM, he quit smoking and drinking and learned to decompress. Later, on one of his frequent trips to India, he began to learn more about the traditions he had left behind. He was captivated by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru who burst onto the world stage in the 1960s as a regular on the “Tonight Show” and spiritual advisor to the Beatles. Chopra became the tinny-voiced, bearded one’s acolyte and corporate officer.

In 1989, Chopra published “Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine,” in which he marshaled poetry, Hindu aphorisms and current advances in Western medical science to argue that the body is controlled by a “network of intelligence” that--once programmed correctly through meditation, clean living and a new way of viewing the world--can vanquish disease and forestall aging.

The rest is history: “Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide” in 1990, “Unconditional Life: Discovering the Power to Fulfill Your Dreams” in 1991, and in 1993, Chopra’s masterpiece, the book that landed him on “Oprah” and in People magazine, “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old.”

By 1993, Chopra had split with the Maharishi, in effect, to go into business for himself. Chopra says the split was over the Maharishi’s attempt to control Chopra’s writing and speaking. The Maharishi, now living and teaching near Amsterdam, is not offering his version.

Joan Duncan Oliver, editor of New Age magazine (circulation 250,000), says that the Chopra explosion represents a perfect joining of man and moment, of message and market. “He really has everything society wants right now,” she says. “He has credentials since he’s a doctor, he has the Eastern perspective that people tend to value and he has absolutely mastered the ways of media. He communicates in short, concise ways, and he promises that success, fulfillment, happiness and health are attainable. What a guy!”

To be sure, much of what Chopra preaches is opaque, ethereal, just out of reach. Anyone who has grappled with Shelley or Keats or a course in physics knows the feeling. If only the veil of this parallel universe, where truth is beauty and beauty is truth, could be pierced and those intimations of immortality be made accessible.

Chopra admits that many of his teachings have a quicksilver-like elusiveness. Like a modern-day Romantic poet, he asks that people experience his words without trying to fully comprehend them. “We live in a multidimensional universe all the time,” he says. “It is multidimensional in space as well as in time. Depending on the frequency you’ve tuned into, you create your own perception of reality.”

He delights in telling of a skycap at the Chicago airport who told him: “Deep stuff, man. I’m going to keep listening to it, man, until I get it.”

In 1993, Chopra moved his deep stuff, his wife and their son and daughter from snowy New England to the warm sunshine of La Jolla. Mallika, now 25, a graduate of Brown University, runs her father’s Asian operations in India and hopes to attend graduate business school at Stanford or Harvard. Gautama, 22, a recent graduate of Columbia University, is a novelist and a correspondent for “Strange Universe,” a syndicated television show dealing in the paranormal.

Soon after relocating, Chopra became associated with Sharp HealthCare, which owns seven hospitals, 23 clinics and three affiliated medical groups. Sharp adroitly used Chopra’s growing celebrity as a drawing card in the highly competitive medical marketplace of San Diego County. The move was not without irony, since Chopra has opted not to seek a medical license in California, preferring instead to shift from seeing patients individually to writing mass prescriptions in the form of best-selling books.

Critics are especially suspicious of his lack of a California medical license. “He’s gotten out of medicine and become a news event,” says Dr. Stephen Barrett, a retired psychiatrist who has listed Chopra on his World Wide Web site, www.quackwatch.com. “He’s talking such mumbo-jumbo nonsense, but it’s hard to pin him down since he’s no longer engaged in attempting measurable medical events.”

In 1993, Sharp opened the Sharp Institute for Human Potential and Mind-Body Medicine with Chopra as executive director and guiding spirit. Sharp received a $30,000 grant from the Office of Alternative Medicine in the National Institutes of Health to study the impact of ayurvedic methods in controlling blood pressure, cholesterol, weight and stress in healthy adults.

Chopra’s plan to answer his critics by co-authoring a book providing proof that ayurveda works has been shelved. Pressed for time, Chopra is instead writing an introductory chapter to a book by Dr. David Simon, a board-certified neurologist, meditation expert and medical director of the Chopra Center for Well Being.

Sharp, undergoing a wrenching change in ownership, ended its relationship with Chopra and the mind-body institute last year. Shortly thereafter, the Chopra center opened in the 14,000-square-foot building on Fay Avenue in downtown La Jolla.

When Chopra speaks of his success, he talks of maintaining ambition and serenity in a state of yoga-esque balance. He is the lecturer par excellence, speaking effortlessly, without notes, his warm eyes covering the room, his sense of humor cloaking the seriousness of the subject, all done in the lilting tones of his native land.

Chopra sees himself not as a solo practitioner of unique ideas but as a synthesizer, a popularizer, a team leader of sorts, pleading for society to cleanse itself of emotional toxicity. “I have really learned, myself, to have intention and detachment at the same time,” he says. “Detachment is very empowering, because I can do what I really enjoy doing. And if you do what you enjoy, then you have all the energy in the world.”

*

Part of Chopra’s popular appeal has been his impeccable medical credentials. But his relationship with establishment medicine and establishment science has been rocky. One of Chopra’s earliest and most frequently repeated dictums is that Western doctors probably kill more patients than they cure, because their mechanistic views of old age and death virtually scare patients to death.

In “Return of the Rishi,” he wrote: “I do not promote spontaneous remissions among cancer patients. But I am convinced that doctors hold inner beliefs that affect the course of their patients’ illness. Even if the doctor says nothing to bring his feelings to the surface, the patient knows. There is no such thing as a value-free silence.”

In an early essay titled “The Spell of Mortality,” Chopra wrote that modern medicine, in some ways, has increased human suffering rather than alleviated it: “Nature did not put up a wall between mind and body. Our own boundaries are real only because we have conditioned ourselves to believe in them.”

Despite his misgivings about Western medicine, Chopra never suggests that patients quit their MDs and use only ayurvedic methods. He sees the two approaches as complimentary, not competitive.

In 1991, Chopra and two other Indian-born physicians accused the Journal of the American Medical Assn. of defaming them by printing a lengthy rejoinder to an article the three had written touting the benefits of ayurveda. The original article had spoken of ayurveda in such glowing terms that some of JAMA’s readers asked why the journal had not demanded greater proof before publication.

The rejoinder, written by the magazine’s associate editor, accused the three authors of having a financial stake in peddling ayurvedic products, mocked the Hindu belief in “yogic flying”--that is, flying carpets--and blasted ayurvedic medicine as practiced by Chopra as nothing more than warmed-over TM.

An association of ayurvedic physicians, with Chopra as the founding president, struck back with a lawsuit saying that JAMA was guilty of defamation and religious bigotry and, what’s more, was wrong on a key point, that Chopra and the two others allegedly had a financial stake in the products in dispute. The lawsuit was settled out of court, with hard feelings all around and a pledge of silence.

Dr. Stephen Barrett, author of “The Health Robbers: A Close Look at Quackery in America,” and William Jarvis, a professor of public health at Loma Linda University and president of the National Council Against Health Fraud, are implacably opposed to Chopra.

“This whole idea that happy talk will make happy molecules is ridiculous,” Barrett says. What annoys Barrett, Jarvis and others is that Chopra has not submitted his claims to peer review by publishing in scientific journals. “Before you induce people to spend tens of millions of dollars on his approach to health,” Barrett said, “you would think a medical doctor feels some obligation to test his theories scientifically.”

Others in the medical and academic worlds take a more measured response to Chopra. Says Paul Saltman, professor of biology at UC San Diego and an expert on nutrition and diet: “Chopra really doesn’t do science. He’s articulating a belief system. He’s offering inner strength and peace, but that’s not science--it’s metaphysics.”

Still, Saltman, a bit of a scientific iconoclast himself, is quick to appreciate Chopra’s appeal and slow to criticize him: “There is a major phenomenon going on in this country as people become more disillusioned with the so-called miracles of modern medicine and the magic bullets. People are listening to other voices, and Deepak Chopra is one of those voices.”

Dr. Ka Kit Hui, director of the UCLA Center for East-West Medicine, says Chopra has captured the imagination of aging baby-boomers who “who are still working and walking but they don’t feel well, they’re under a lot of stress and are looking for ways to achieve mental peace. When Chopra says it doesn’t make sense to look elsewhere for solutions to our problems when the solutions may be within ourselves, it strikes a chord.”

That chord plays particularly well on television. Public Broadcast System stations use Chopra’s video, “Body, Mind and Soul,” during pledge week. When Oprah devoted an hour in 1993 to Chopra, sales of “Ageless Body” zoomed.

Of late, Chopra has ventured onto ABC’s “Politically Incorrect,” a riskier venue. On one show, Chopra appeared with journalist-author Jim Lehrer and actors Patrick Duffy and Maria Conchita Alonso, just as host Bill Maher launched into a tirade against Woody Allen for Allen’s love affair with Soon-Yi Previn, the adopted daughter of Mia Farrow, Allen’s longtime lover. Maher had read Farrow’s book and was in the mood for some Woody bashing.

“When you are angry about that, you should actually question your own motivations,” said Chopra, interrupting Maher. “Whenever you’re negatively charged like that by anyone’s behavior, what is happening is you’re denying those traits in your own self--that’s a spiritual principle.”

Maher, unamused: “That is the kind of preposterous psychobabble that is ruining this country.”

Chopra, unwilling to budge: “Absolutely not. That’s an easy out. You just say preposterous psychobabble and that’s out--just because you don’t understand the terminology.”

Chopra had two points to make: that discussions of a celebrity’s morals and love life are an indication of “how psychotic our society is,” and that no one should overlook the spiritual aspects of sex.

Chopra: “Sexuality is a window to true spiritual liberation.”

Duffy: “Hallelujah!”

Chopra: “The peak of sexuality, orgasm, is characterized by a sense of timelessness, a loss of ego, completely natural--unless you’re faking it--defenselessness, communion and surrender. These are saintly qualities.”

Maher, still annoyed at Woody: “Not within the family, doc.”

*

His Jousts with Bill Maher notwithstanding, Chopra’s public persona is one of tranquillity: the serene mind seeking higher meanings and detached from naysayers. But when the matter is litigation, not karma, and the rules of evidence, not the rules of ayurveda, are in play, Chopra is an aggressive adversary.

Earlier this year, a $35-million libel suit by Chopra forced the Weekly Standard, a Washington-based political magazine bankrolled by Rupert Murdoch and edited by William Kristol, into a humiliating apology. The suit against the Weekly Standard (circulation 70,000) began with the publication of a story on July 1, 1996: “Leader of the Deepak: The Strange Career of a Multimedia Guru.” The tone of the 5,306-word cover story was unrelentingly hostile, with references to Chopra as a “huckster” and “Hindu televangelist.”

But the story went further and asserted that Chopra had hired a San Francisco prostitute on three occasions in 1991. The woman was quoted as calling Chopra arrogant, smug and insulting. The story included denials by Chopra’s attorney, Mike Flynn, who branded the credit-card receipts as forgeries and noted that the prostitute had shopped her story to other media outlets, which didn’t bite.

In December, the prostitute recanted her story and said she’d never “met, talked to or had any relationship” with Chopra. In June, the Weekly Standard printed an apology and agreed to pay Chopra’s legal fees, which one source put at more than $1 million. Kristol, best known as a conservative talkmeister on ABC’s “This Week,” has declined to comment.

Although Chopra rejoices in his victory, he is quick to point out his admiration for Murdoch and hints that he may some day be doing business with News Corp. He displays a picture of himself, Murdoch and Milken being chummy at Milken’s birthday party.

As in the JAMA lawsuit, Chopra feels he was singled out for the Weekly Standard attack because of his national origins and beliefs. “I’m perceived as somebody who is bringing alien spirituality or religion to mainstream America,” he says. “Mainstream America is being influenced by some of these ideas. If you are a very staunch right-wing conservative fundamentalist, then I’m a threat to the culture.”

Chopra is also being sued by a Stanford biology professor who says Chopra pilfered part of the professor’s work for “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind.” And two women, Jyl Auxter and Joyce Weaver, have filed sexual harassment lawsuits stemming from their association with Chopra and the center.

Auxter claims she was harassed by Dr. David Simon, the neurologist who worked with Chopra first at Sharp and now at the Center for Well Being. Weaver, a former Sharp employee, claims that Simon and Chopra made “numerous unwelcome sexual overtures,” and that she felt harassed by having to answer a telephone call from the San Francisco prostitute and from women with whom Chopra was having extramarital affairs.

Chopra and Simon have denied all the allegations. In November, they launched the first lawsuit, accusing Weaver of being in cahoots with the prostitute.

Flynn, Chopra’s attorney, has also filed a suit against Dennis Schoville, one of San Diego’s premier plaintiff attorneys, best known for having won a $6.7-million judgment for former Navy Lt. Paula Coughlin against the Las Vegas Hilton in the Tailhook scandal.

Schoville represented Weaver in her attempt to reach an out-of-court settlement with Chopra but, for reasons that are undisclosed, withdrew as her attorney before her lawsuit was filed.

Chopra and Flynn accuse Schoville and his former firm--Gray, Cary, Ware & Freidenrich, one of San Diego’s blue chip firms--of making a thinly veiled extortion attempt. They maintain that Schoville and his firm knew that Weaver’s charges were false but tried to extort money from Chopra by threatening to make the charges public. One point of contention is a letter sent by Schoville to Flynn seeking a settlement prior to filing a lawsuit. In it, Schoville writes: “Given the allegations contained in the complaint, I would not be at all surprised if Ms. Weaver’s case garnered a high degree of publicity. At this early stage, Ms. Weaver is not heavily invested in litigation and remains willing to negotiate a confidential settlement agreement.”

Chopra’s suit could twist on whether that letter represents extortion or just tough lawyering. The claims and counterclaims are nasty. Chopra’s attorney, Flynn, asserts that Schoville hired an unlicensed private eye to steal his trash.

Chopra’s stance is that the Weaver and Auxter lawsuits are small-fry stuff compared to fighting and beating Rupert Murdoch. But he still wants Schoville and his co-counsel to pay and also wants to know who is paying the legal bills for the accusers.

“These guys here, they were idiots,” Chopra says. “They got greedy, and they had no ethics and they were trapped.”

Isn’t this tough talk for someone whose persona is the model of serenity? Yes, but Chopra worries about letting allegations go unanswered. “Every time you look at Lexis/Nexis, it pops up,” he says. “So it’s part of history, you know. So you say, gosh, am I going to let this lie become part of history? If you are Mahatma Gandhi or Christ, you say, great, so what? But I’m not Mahatma Gandhi or Christ, and I’m not there yet, so I want to correct it.”

Stanford biology professor Robert Sapolsky, an expert on neuroendocrinolo- gy and stress, claims that Chopra lifted several pages of his work for “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind.”

A similar assertion was made by Dan Georgakas, author of “The Methuselah Factors.” In that instance, settled without litigation, Chopra’s publisher promised that in the next edition, the section discussing Georgakas’ work will be rewritten to provide additional attribution. Georgakas is already cited elsewhere in the book, and Chopra and his publisher say the flap was the result of sloppy editing.

The Sapolsky case should be heavy on fireworks. Court papers filed by Sapolsky’s lawyer suggest that Chopra is dependent on others to do much of his writing--a charge he adamantly denies.

On the other hand, the Chopra camp maintains that Sapolsky has no legal standing to bring his lawsuit, since the passages in question were not original research but merely the professor’s summation of research done by others.

Chopra says a year of litigation has taken a toll: “It takes you from the exalted to the absolutely trashy world of scum.”

On Aug. 13, the New York Post ran a column item poking at Chopra’s essay in Playboy. A day later, Chopra fired off a letter to a Post executive claiming inaccuracies. “I have no problem with the fact that some of the New York Post articles are inane, trivial, sleazy, scandalous and stupid,” he wrote. “People can only write from their own level of consciousness, and I presume that they are doing the best that they can.”

The letter was signed, “Love and warm regards, Deepak.”

*

For someone who enjoys the company and adoration of celebrities (Demi Moore, Naomi Judd, Michael Jackson, Steven Seagal, Madonna, Bonnie Raitt and George Harrison are believers), Chopra insists he is not hooked on success or acclaim.

“I keep asking myself: When is it going to stop?” he says. “In my mind, I’ve decided that it would be really good sometimes to sink into total anonymity. It’s bound to happen sometime.” Meanwhile, Chopra is toying with his latest project: an explanation of the afterlife by reference to quantum mechanics and different kinds of electromagnetic vibrations. “It’s going to be very daunting, very challenging, to try and explain that and make it rational, intellectually satisfying, and I think I can do it,” he says.

Meanwhile, in the lobby of the Chopra Center for Well Being, customers are perusing brochures advertising a full schedule of special events, workshops and lectures starring Chopra and others.

And, yes, sales of Chopra’s books and tapes, and the books and tapes of like-minded thinkers, and dozens of varieties of fragrances, herbs, knickknacks and other items, are doing quite well.