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Deepak
Chopra (born October 22, 1946) is an Indian-American medical doctor
and writer. He has written extensively on spirituality and diverse topics
in mind-body medicine. Chopra says that he has been influenced by the
teachings of Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita, as well as by Jiddu Krishnamurti
and by the field of quantum physics. Deepak Chopra has had a profound
influence on the New Thought Movement that has embraced him in the United
States. Chopra was born in Delhi. His father, Dr. (Col) K.L. Chopra, was a cardiologist in Mool Chand K.R. Hospital, Lajpat Nagar, New Delhi (India) and served as a lieutenant in the British army. Chopra's grandfather practiced Ayurveda.[2] He completed his primary education at St. Columba's School in New Delhi and eventually graduated from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences. Having graduated from AIIMS in 1969, Chopra emigrated to the US in 1970 with his wife, Rita, to do his clinical internship at a New Jersey hospital, followed by residency training for several more years at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts and at the University of Virginia Hospital. He specialized in internal medicine, in which he is board-certified], and endocrinology. Dr. Chopra is licenced to practice medicine in the states of Massachusetts (since 1973) and California (since 2004), is a member of the American Medical Association (AMA), and a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. Chopra taught at Tufts University and Boston University Schools of Medicine, and became the Chief of Staff at the New England Memorial Hospital (later the Boston Regional Medical Center) in Stoneham, Massachusetts. Chopra also established a large private practice. Inspired after meeting New Delhi Ayurvedic physician Dr. Vaidya Brihaspati Dev Triguna,in 1981, Chopra became a spokesperson in the Transcendental Meditation movement. Later, Chopra branched off on his own to pursue broader aims in mind-body treatment including, in 1993, the position of executive director of the Sharp Institute for Human Potential and Mind–Body Medicine, affiliated with Sharp Healthcare, in San Diego. Chopra is the co-founder of the Chopra Center, which he founded in 1996 in La Jolla, California with Dr. David Simon. In 2002, the Center moved its official headquarters to La Costa Resort & Spa in Carlsbad, California with a branch in New York City. He has plans for other centers. In 2004, Chopra was recruited to co-write a script with Indian film director Shekhar Kapur on a proposed film to be made about the life of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, but the plans were later dropped for unstated reasons. In 2006, Chopra launched Virgin Comics LLC with his son, Gotham Chopra and Richard Branson, famed entrepreneur and thrill seeker. The aim of the company is to promote and examine South Asian themes and culture through comic books. Deepak co-authored 'Ask the Kabala' with Mike 'Zappy' Zapolin and Alys Yablon in 2006, which is a set of 22 cards, each one representing a story or character from the Old Testament and a life lesson based on that story from a Kabalistic perspective. Many of Chopra's themes and beliefs are stated in his first book Creating Health, in 1986. He launched himself as a staunch advocate of the connection between mind and body, advocating meditation and self-awareness as primary factors in both illness and healing. He deepened these themes in Quantum Healing (1989), where he examined the mysterious phenomenon of spontaneous healing of cancer. Here he introduced quantum physics as a means of understanding the mind-body connection, arguing—as he would in many other books—that consciousness is the basic foundation of nature and the universe. In Perfect Health (1991), Chopra authored the first widely read book on Ayurveda the traditional system of Indian medicine. Besides outlining the Ayurvedic concept of body types (Prakriti), Chopra emphasizes that the roots of Indian healing lie in changing the holistic balance of mind and body. Subsequent books have turned toward larger spiritual questions. In How to Know God (2000) and The Book of Secrets (2004), an argument is made for an all-pervasive intelligence that unites every living thing, rather than the traditional Western concept of God as a person, "a venerable white male sitting on a throne in the sky." Chopra sees God as a projection of human awareness, who becomes more expansive and universal as individual consciousness expands. In his book Life After Death: The Burden of Proof (2006), he extends personal consciousness beyond the "artificial boundary that separates the living from the departed." Assessing the seven varieties of the afterlife described by various world religious traditions, Chopra offered the proposal that a person's awareness in the present shapes existence after death; that is, the afterlife is created uniquely for each of us by our present level of consciousness. In 2005, Chopra became a staunch advocate for disarmament and international peace in Peace Is the Way, where he argues that a "critical mass" of people of like mind can defeat the global "addiction to war." In the same regard, he became president of a broad-based organization, Alliance of a New Humanity, that seeks to form "peace cells" around the world and to foster such related goals as environmental healing and sustainable economies in developing nations. IIn August 2005, Chopra posted a series of articles in the blog The Huffington Post, to which he is a frequent contributor, offering his solution to the creation-evolution controversy. In doing so he expressed support for Intelligent design without the Bible, or the politics of religion. According to Chopra, Nature itself displays intelligence. In the article, Chopra states: "To say that Nature displays intelligence doesn't make you a Christian fundamentalist. Einstein said as much, and a fascinating theory called the anthropic principle has been seriously considered by Stephen Hawking, among others." "It’s time to rescue 'intelligent design' from the politics of religion. There are too many riddles not yet answered by either biology or the Bible, and by asking them honestly, without foregone conclusions, science could take a huge leap forward." Chopra also believes Jesus was possessed of esoteric wisdom and may have studied Kabbalah. In March of 2008, Deepak and his daughter Mallika Chopra, did their first Christian radio interview with host Drew Marshall in which they discussed his book The Third Jesus. |
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