A lot of peace activists, who are very un-peaceful, end up winning the Nobel Prize, says Deepak Chopra

While most of us can only dream of writing one manuscript to fruition, Dr Deepak Chopra, arguably among the most influential thought- leaders of our times, has authored 90 books in 43 different languages, in a span of over three decades. At 76, Dr Chopra is more determined than ever to drive home the idea of the ‘self’ away from the facade of our material lives. Living in a hyperconnected society, we want to know a lot about the world around us when we understand very little about ourselves, argues Dr Chopra.

A pioneer of mind-body medicine in the 90s, he spoke about the transformative power of thought in relation to healing and mindfulness at a time when these ideas didn’t gather mainstream attention, which may have been a cause of receiving criticism for some of his early works. Thirty years on, Dr Chopra tells us that while ideas of self-transformation have now become much more widespread, the fundamental challenges still remain, with emotional predicaments in the form of stress and anxiety spreading like wildfire.

Ahead of his session at the Sharjah International Book Fair, we sat down with him to deconstruct the notions of the ‘self’, away from false identity and embracing all of life’s uncertainties as an opportunity for creative expression. Edited excerpts from an interview:

Q. Before you got onto this path, how was your relationship with emotions such as stress and anxiety?

Dr Deepak Chopra: As a young person I did experience stress, especially in medical school, and even in my residency and internship. It was much later that I realised the fundamental nature of reality is that it’s unpredictable. If everything is predictable, then life would be an algorithm, there will be no creativity, and creativity and unpredictability go together. So every morning I made a conscious effort to ask myself, ‘How can I be more unpredictable?’ and ‘How can everything be more uncertain today?’ because that would give me the opportunity to have a creative expression. If you start with that, then nothing in your life ever goes ‘wrong’. And if nothing can go wrong, there’s very little to be stressful about.

Q. But uncertainty and the unknown also have a degree of fear attached to them…

Dr Deepak Chopra: We live and move in the unknown. Everything that you call the known has already happened. We breathe, live and move in the unknown and thank god for that, because otherwise we would be doomed to eternal sameness.

Q. You’ve previously mentioned stress is the biggest ‘epidemic’ we’re facing right now. Almost two years and a pandemic later, where do we stand today?

Dr Deepak Chopra: Stress is the number one epidemic, which is based on perception, physical, psychological, emotional, or financial threat. Stress is also resistance to what is happening right now. I think a better definition of stress would be resistance to existence. Stress is always an opportunity for creative expression and higher consciousness. And the absence of resistance to existence is what we call flow or peak experiences, which artists, singers, poets, sages, geniuses and sometimes, psychotics also have. We’re a motley group of sages, psychotics and geniuses that have access to fundamental reality or what we call flow.

Q. This morning started with anxiety when I was thinking about the outcome of this interview. What helped me was switching my thoughts. I replaced the word ‘work’ with ‘play’ and found a shift in my energy as the word ‘play’ induces a feeling of excitement and thrill.

Dr Deepak Chopra: That’s beautiful because every child plays. We come into this world playing, and then as we grow older, we stop. The entire expression of creativity is when you play. Reframing your work as play is liberating.

Q. A simple shift in thought can evoke a different physiological response in the body. You speak a lot about this idea in your earlier work in mind-body medicine. How can we harness the power of thought in our everyday lives?

Dr Deepak Chopra: What you call thought is the interpretation of experience, which is entangled with sensations in our body. It’s also entangled with feelings or emotions, and with imagination. When you have a thought, let’s say ‘mother’, that could be entangled with the feeling called ‘love’, or the absence of love and it will also create images and sensations in your body. So, one way of tackling this through traditional wisdom is not by changing your thoughts because that could be stressful too. If you’re trying to be positive all the time, but you’re not feeling positive, that’s also a stressful experience. So it’s not having positive or negative thoughts, it’s actually quietening the mind because every positive thought is in contrast to a negative thought. All experiences are in contrast. The only way to actually tackle this is to settle the mind into stillness, which is a teaching in every tradition.

Q. This idea of sitting in stillness and being with ourselves, is often daunting for people, which is also an obstacle for those trying to meditate. How can we become comfortable with this idea of sitting in stillness?

Dr Deepak Chopra: Today, we are bamboozled by social media, news, movies, theatre, drama, melodrama. We’re distracted. We want to know everything about the world, but we don’t know who we are. We think we are our body or our mind or our personality. But we forget that there’s a deeper level of awareness, which is projecting as mind, body, and what we call the experience of the world. Essentially, we learn everything about the world, but nothing about ourselves. And today, that kind of education is irrelevant. I can go on Google and get all the information I want. Education needs to evolve. The word ‘education’ comes from two roots: edu means core, to bring out what is already at the core of a human being. And what is at the core of a human being is insight, intuition, imagination, creativity, higher vision and transcendence.

Q. You introduced this idea of the healing power of thought at a time when not many were talking about it. What led you to discover this path?

Dr Deepak Chopra: I trained as an endocrinologist and then in neuroendocrinology, which is a study of brain chemistry. So as a young fellow, in training, I was looking at what I called the molecules of emotion: serotonin, oxytocin, dopamine. And I realised that these were not only the molecules of emotion, but they also connected consciousness to our biology, and that they were also immunomodulators, modulating the activity of the immune system. That was a radically new idea back then, but now we have scientific validation.

Q. You mentioned that you spent a lot of time in emergency rooms, being close to pain and suffering. Does coming close to your own sense of mortality move you closer towards the journey of self-realisation?

Dr Deepak Chopra: According to wisdom traditions, human suffering is a result of clinging on to experience, which is ungraspable. Every experience is over, as soon as it happens. It’s a perceptual snapshot. Human suffering comes from recoiling what we call unpleasant experiences, which is a result of a false identity, a provisional identity that we call the ‘ego’. This also leads to the fear of death, which is based on false identity. So spiritual seeking is to understand how to overcome this false identity. How do you move from your selfie to your real self? In wisdom traditions, we call this the conceptual body. It’s a projection of all your concepts and ideas, feelings, and imagination, behind which lies a field of consciousness, which is totally independent of the experience. The awareness of an experience is independent of the experience because the awareness itself is not in time. Consciousness is not in time, but mind is in time, feelings are in time, sensations and images are in time. Once you get that, there’s no need to identify with an experience.

Q. Is that the state we should aspire to reach when we’re in meditation?

Dr Deepak Chopra: Yes, it’s called self-realisation, not self-improvement. Self-improvement is upgrading the illusion of the body, mind, the world. Self-realisation is getting in touch with the source of the illusion.

Q. In the age of social media, we are often at loggerheads with our ego, bombarded by reminders of our physical identity and not so much our higher selves. How do we rise above this?