Continued from Pg1

DEEPAK - I think the most important thing in health care reform is education. And that education has to start in the schools with children, and that has to be an education that is enjoyable - not just knowing in terms of rules and regulations of morality and how to behave and how to not take drugs. It has to be experiential to allow people to experience the exaltation of their spirit, you know? I think education has to involve yoga and meditation and movement and music and dance and mind-body coordination, and really enjoying the sensual nature of our relationships with the natural universe. It would require a whole reform of education to bring about the reform in health care. If done rightly, we could have a technology that would be amazing in its diagnostic precision; and a technology that is not only amazing in the treatment of acute illness, but also in wisdom traditions that allow people to take care of themselves and not have to use that technology unless there's an emergency.

WTB – Currently Ayurvedic medicine is illegal to practice in most states across the country. Do you find it's gaining more acceptance in terms of alternative health practices?

DEEPAK - We teach a course in Ayurveda at the Chopra Center which is now recognized by the American Medical Association, and physicians can get healing credits for the course. As long as we understand that everything has its own limitations, that everything comes from a certain framework, that everything is based on a certain philosophy, a certain map … and the map is not the territory, although it certainly allows you to explore that territory in a different way, then Ayurveda has a role as does everything else. And the future of medicine should be that: an integrative form of medicine where you combine the best of technologies with the best of healing traditions - not just from Ayurveda, but from everywhere else in the world.

WTB - Speaking of maps, the debate still rages today about evolutionary theory, versus intelligent design theory. It seems the mapping presented by intelligent design theory is making headway. Where do your ideas and philosophy place you in this debate?

DEEPAK - You know, intelligent design is a very good phrase. Unfortunately, it got hijacked by a Christian fundamentalist. So many people, when you say intelligent design, they see it as an argument for the Christian fundamentalist story of creation … of a designer that is designing the universe. So the debate sometimes gets into meaningless confrontation. Evolutionary biologists imply that everything is a random adaptation of biological organisms to environmental forces and that there is no creativity involved in the process, and therefore no role for consciousness. And yet, when you examine the whole evolutionary tree, there are certain gaps in Darwin's theory which totally imply that unless we fill in those gaps with an understanding that nature itself is creative; that nature has consciousness; that nature is imbued with subjectivity; that scientific evidence now actually indicates that there are leaps of creativity in nature, which are non-algorithmic, that are discontinuous, that can never be programmed in a computer; that even mathematical laws talk about discontinuities…. then I think there is room for understanding evolution in the traditional sense. But with an additional understanding that evolution is not accidental, that design is an inherent attribute of creativity, and creativity is an inherent attribute of consciousness, and consciousness is an inherent attribute of the universe.

I mean the fact that I imagine…. let's say, I imagine. It's not my imagination. Nature is imagining through a human nervous system, because a human nervous system is also an extraction of nature. So why do I think that my imagination, my fantasies are inherently my own? They are nature using my nervous system to take leaps of creativity. Just because I imagine in English with an Indian accent, I don't own my imagination, you know? And once we start to understand that everything is a pattern of behavior of nature, even human imagination, then I think we've come to a place of understanding intelligent design for what it really is.

WTB - And if we're ever going to evolve and continue as a race, we have got to imagine peace as something more than just the end of war.

DEEPAK – Yes, peace is not the end of war. Peace is the end of duality.

WTB - And therefore the end of conflict.

DEEPAK – Yeah, therefore the understanding of reality.

WTB - Is that the premise of your book Peace is the Way?

DEEPAK – Yeah, it was inspired by Mahatma Gandhi's statement, "Be the change that you wish to see in the world." So, you know, if you can't have peace with yourself and your family and your friends, why do we think we can have peace in the world?

WTB – So nature, in essence, is pressing us in our evolution through our nervous system to dream differently and become something different?

DEEPAK - I think I would like to believe that the human nervous system is that instrument that nature has chosen to become aware of herself and to take the next leap. You know there's a beautiful poem of Rumi where he says, "When I die, I will soar with the angels. But when I die to the angels, what I shall become you cannot imagine."

WTB - In 1985 you walked away from your chief of staff position at the New England Memorial Hospital. What prompted you to do that?

DEEPAK - I don't know. I think I wanted to stop smoking. So I thought a good way to do it was I should meditate. It did help me, and then one thing led to another.

WTB - You're serious?

DEEPAK - I'm serious. You know, things happen that you don't know why they're happening at that moment and in hindsight they were great things that happened, you know? Series of coincidences.

WTB - So basically, you walked away from that to experience a more inner path and that led you on the rest of your life's journey?

DEEPAK – Well, you want to know the real story? I was an endocrine fellow with a very famous endocrinologist who took six or seven fellows out of a few thousand applicants. And it was a great privilege to work with him, and it was at Harvard, and I'm not going to mention his name. And as soon as I joined him, I realized that the whole quest for a Nobel prize in medicine was one-upmanship - you know, it was one ego against the other. We would sit around tables and see what other people had published, and then decide to do the experiments that would beat them out of the race. And it got to where I found the whole experience very uncomfortable.

A few months into my fellowship we were sitting around a table, and the professor asked me a question. I still remember the question. It was about how many milligrams of iodine certain rats received in a paper that had been published in 1958 by two scientists called Milney and Greer. And he asked me how many milligrams of iodine did those rats get and I reached for my briefcase, and I said, “I think it was 2 mg, let me check for sure.” And he looked at me in a very condescending manner, and he said “You should have that in your head by now.”

And so certain things had been building up inside me. I was questioning the authenticity of what we were doing. So I picked up the sheaf of papers and I dumped them on his head and I said, “Now you have it on your head.” And I walked out. And he said, “Your career is ruined. You’ll never be able to achieve what you want.” And I suddenly realized it wasn't what I wanted to do. So I joined an emergency room, and I would see patients and in that time I got into Zen meditation. I was frustrated by my inability to stop smoking cigarettes, and one thing led to another… and I realized this is what I wanted to do rather than injecting rats with iodine and seeing what happened to their thyroid gland. So that's how it started really. And then I met Maharishi from the TM movement and had at first a wonderful experience and then a dysfunctional relationship with them, and so I left. And I started to write. And basically, the things that I was struggling with at that time, or trying to understand - one the best ways to understand something is to explain it to somebody else. So that's how it all happened.

WTB - Would you say that as you've moved along this path that you have consciously dreamed the continuation of this role that you've taken on, orchestrating a blending of eastern and western healing modalities?

DEEPAK – Yeah, to a great extent. I have the advantage of being trained in medicine and biology. I can speak the language of my colleagues, and at the same time I have delved into the spiritual wisdom traditions. So somehow, that combination seems to have struck a chord.

WTB - What's your focus for the future?

DEEPAK - My new book is called Life After Death: the burden of proof. I’m also doing a book called Cosmic Christ, and I'm doing a book called The Soul of Leadership. And then the novel Buddha is coming up in January and the movie is starting next year. As soon as Shekhar finishes his current movie in England, which is called Golden Age. And then what else? I have a foundation that's called Alliance for the New Humanity, and I would love it if you went to the web site www.anhglobal.org.

It's a putting together a grassroots level ngo’s from across the world that are engaged in conflict resolution. … The presumption is that if we can create virtual and geographic communities that are doing some kind of evolutionary work on our planet and we can connect them with each other, that we create a collective intelligence that will be more than the sum of its parts. That somehow there is an emergence of collective intelligence that hopefully can solve any problem around the world. Right now, I think the four major global issues are 1) conflict, more terrorism; 2) is ecology and ecological imbalance; 3) economic disparities - huge economic disparities, where, as I said, over 50% of the world is living on less than two dollars a day; and 4) social injustice… lack of respect and dignity, human rights.