Deepak Chopra returned to India last month to bathe, anoint and cremate his late father's body. "He was 81 years old," Chopra explains, "he was totally healthy. He was a cardiologist; he had even seen patients on the day before his death. But at 1:30 a.m. he woke up and said to my mother, 'Please hold my hand, I'm leaving now.'"
After 15 years as one of the world's best-known authors and lecturers on psychological and spiritual health, Chopra was inspired by his father's "conscious dying." And he began to ponder some of the most basic questions posed by religion: "Where do we come from?" he asks. "Why do some people have such a blissful life and conscious death, and others just the opposite?"
Now Chopra is writing a novel to explore this grand theme of death and dying. He hopes it will become his 27th book, part of an oeuvre that stretches from "Quantum Healing" to "How to Know God: The Soul's Journey Into the Mystery of Mysteries."
He recently spoke from his office in La Jolla, Calif., where he runs the Chopra Center for Well Being.
Your books cover such a range of subjects. What's the connecting thread?
The thread is the evolution of our understanding of ourselves, which is an ongoing process. When I'm writing a book, it helps me to understand myself better. In turn, I'd like to trigger people into exploration.
Right now I'm writing this novel about death and dying. After my father's death, I went to India and went through rituals that you in the West would find strange. I bathed and anointed my father's body, then carried it on my shoulder, stoked the cremation fires and watched his body burn. I took his remains to the mouth of the Ganges and watched them float away to return his dust to where he came from. And there was a part of me that was grieving, and yet there was also a part that was celebrating the great, joyous life that he had.
Will you tell me something about your father's life?
His name was Krishan Chopra, a very colorful person. He was a prisoner of war, held by the Japanese during the second World War. He was a private physician, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Heart Hospital in England. My father recorded the first instance of mountain sickness at high altitudes. He was an adventurer, explorer, scientist and humanist. I idolized him.
What new ideas are occurring to you as a result of his death?
I am questioning the whole idea that there is such a thing as a person.
In India, death is much more dramatic: I'm cremating him and 300 yards away there are kids flying a kite, using the draft of the cremation fire to fly the kite. And you know, in a few hours the person has totally disappeared. You collect the bones; they're like little pieces of ivory. You wash them in the Ganges, and then the person merges back into the energy and intelligence of the universe from where he came.
So you start to wonder: For all eternity, we are there in that primordial quantum soup. And for a few years, which is nothing it's like the flicker of a firefly in the middle of the night we are individuals. And so we identify with the flicker instead of the real home that we have. And if we did identify with that real home, I think we would have a lot more love and compassion.
Your most recent book is about "How to Know God." The one you're writing is about dying. What's the connection?
The grand theme of "How to Know God" is reaching the stage where you stop being a person. You recognize that there is no such thing as a person that ultimately we might all be the same being in different disguises.
Can you explain that?
Beneath your social mask, you're not who you think you are. Remove the social mask and there's only one presence there and that is spirit.
As long as you think of yourself as a person, you're trapped. And you're first of all trapped in the body; you're squeezed into the volume of your body and the span of your lifetime. It's only when you relinquish and let go of your person that you find the universal behind the scenes. You find the seer behind the scenery.
Those who don't have a social mask are very giving people. If I think of someone like Mother Teresa or His Holiness the Dalai Lama or even my father, those people have or had no self-concerns. They were totally giving. And because there was no self-concern, there was no worry, there was no anxiety, there was no need to fear anything, because all your fears are about yourself.
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