WTB – What do you think of the new movie, What the Bleep – Down the Rabbit Hole?

DEEPAK – I haven’t seen it yet. I want to see it. I think the first movie definitely made some inroads and shifted people, which has been good. I think movies like What the BLEEP!? are breakthroughs, good breakthroughs. They start telling us that there's more to reality than meets the eye, and that's a great step.

WTB – Historically, Hollywood has avoided topics of overt spirituality in films. Do you see that changing?

DEEPAK - Slowly I see that changing. I see that historically, people have only focused on what's going to make money although coincidentally, I got a call from Fox that they wanted to turn my book How to Know God into a movie. And so we're doing it. One thing leads to another.

WTB – I understand you were recently tapped to write a screenplay about Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha?

DEEPAK -Yeah, I finished it. Shekhar Kapur, the director, is going to do that movie. And I've also written a novel about the Buddha that HarperCollins is coming out with in February.

WTB - How was it different writing a screenplay? Did you have to get into a whole different mindset?

DEEPAK - I did. But, you know, I sat with Shekhar and we spent lots of time together. What we would do is we would go over each scene and then we ended up doing 108 scenes, which is the total movie. And that gave me the template to do the novel as well. And of course we know so little about the youth of Buddha. There are a few stories … but we had a lot of liberty to exercise our imaginations. So we put in a lot of sex and violence and made it really commercial.

WTB - You're joking?

DEEPAK – No, I'm not joking. In fact, we met the Dalai Lama and told him that he was going to be very … that his sensibilities might be violated by all that was in the movie. And he still gave his blessing. He said, “No, go for it.” He's actually more tolerant than anybody else I've met. He's not a fundamentalist.

WTB - So, what inspired you to make the choice to bring those elements into a movie about the Buddha?

DEEPAK - It was to show that Buddha was totally a human being until he became what we think he became. He was a man who was struggling. And so the theme really is his struggle with Mara. Mara is his own shadow self, you know? And they are kind of in a constant battle with each other. Mara is the god of death and is also the god of temptation, and he's also the shadow. He's also the dark side of our collective human soul. And the whole screenplay, the whole movie, the whole novel is all about Buddha's struggle with himself. And even though in the end, in a sense, Buddha wins and vanquishes Mara. Mara says “I'll come back.” And the Buddha says, “Well, if you do, it will be a long time.” And Mara says, “What’s a long time? In eternity it's a blink.” It’s a bleep.

So it's an entertaining movie. When I sat down with Shekhar and said “What do you want from this story,” he said, “I want a 16 year old girl in Wisconsin or Montana to say ‘I want enlightenment.’” And so that is the way we wrote down the story. You know, I think if we are to make something commercial, that's how it's got to be.

WTB - If we can’t appeal to the mainstream mind, then how are we ever going to effect change?

DEEPAK – Yeah, we've got to appeal to mainstream mind, and we've got to recognize where we are, you know? We are a collective species, and we're in a place where every day there are 25 wars going on in the world; where 50% of the world lives on less than two dollars a day; where human beings slaughter each other in the name of God; where there's total ecological devastation, and yet we pretend that we are on a spiritual path.

If we can't translate our spirituality into the deeper issues of our collective humanity, then it's meaningless self-indulgence. So I think we have to really use everything that's here, whether it's media, whether it's entertainment, whether it's music, whether it's the Internet, whether it's information technologies, whether it's storytelling... to change the narrative that we have as a collective humanity. We've got to change our collective narrative. Right now. It's too self-centered and too self absorbed. Unfortunately, I think even in spirituality we have to go through that route, we have to go - it's all me and mine. But at some point me and mine have to translate into we and us, and our collective soul, you know?

WTB - Do you see that the paradigm is really shifting, that this whole shift in consciousness is really gaining momentum?

DEEPAK - You know, the real honest answer is I don't know. I think I'm confused. I think we're at a crossroads. Nature might be saying human beings are a good experiment that didn't work, so let's move on. I mean, where at the stage where information technologies themselves, the cell phone I'm talking to you on, this cell phone is a sophisticated computer. In 10 years I won't need nuclear weapons. I can use my cell phone to hijack all the planes in the sky by interfering with their traffic signals. I can cut off electricity in New York City, and cause a nuclear plant to leak. And I could be anywhere in the world. So the very technologies we have created can have diabolical purpose. And this will make superpowers like America, totally irrelevant. What good is a $2.5 billion B-52 bomber when a cell phone can do a better job - or a handheld computer can do a better job?

So, you know, we have to shift in our consciousness and recognize that security doesn't come from military strength or weapons; that money doesn't buy you happiness, and that technology doesn't make you happier - or healthier for that matter. We have to have a real internal shift in our collective psyche, in our collective consciousness, or I would say we're doomed. Although it has been said before that we are doomed, right now is a very very, very dangerous situation. It is a combination of ancient habits, tribal ethnocentric racist, bigoted, ignorant and self-absorbed; and the combination of those ancient habits and modern technologies. You combine the two and you have a devastating situation.

There is no solution other than a shift in our collective psyche and the healing in our collective souls. And if movies and books and entertainment, music, and our collective gatherings can move us in that direction, then even if we don't do it in our lifetime maybe we will do it for our children or for their children. We can be part of the transition team.

WTB - Bridging technologies of the West with the wisdom of the East has always been a theme that has run through most of your books and is a stated goal of the Chopra Center for Well-Being. How exactly are you going about combining two such different modalities?

DEEPAK – Well, I don't know if you have seen this new video game called Journey to Wild Divine. [See The Bleeping Herald issue # 8 at whatthebleep.com/herald8 ]