Best-selling author and alternative medicine specialist Deepak
Chopra has amassed a great following in the United States mainly
due to his popularity among high-profile Hollywood clientele.
The founder and CEO of the Chopra Center for Well-Being is gaining
much notoriety and respect of late as Time magazine selected
him in 1999 as one of its 100 icons and heroes of the 20th century.
In his latest book, How to Know God (already a best seller in
the United States), Chopra enunciates his views on man, God and
spirituality. Why would believers especially need to beware of
Chopra's teachings concerning the aforementioned issues? Because
his book is full of false teaching, yet he claims that a devout
Christian could read his latest book and agree with his conclusions.
On March 18, 2000, Larry King interviewed Chopra for a full hour
on Cable News Network's Larry King Live Weekend program. Chopra
discussed his book and his beliefs concerning God and spirituality.
His man-made religion draws from a mixture of the teachings of
New Age mysticism, Eastern religions, Christianity and Judaism.
Concerning Jesus Christ, Chopra claims that "Christ was
one of the greatest mystics of all time who knew everything that
has been ever said in the Eastern traditions." He told King,
"I don't think Christ was a Christian" but noted that
Christianity was merely an ideology, a dogma, "that came
for political reasons afterwards."
Concerning man's connectedness with the ecosystem, he teaches
that all humans are part of a larger "web of life"
who possess a unique "harima" or special relationship
with the ecosystem. He told King:
Because the Earth, and the planet and cosmos is your extended
body-the trees are your lungs in a sense, and the Earth is your
mother, etc.-because we're all inseparably connected, once we
damage that larger web of life ... we're abusing our larger self,
we end up hurting ourselves.
Concerning death, Chopra is an avid proponent of the Hindu
belief in reincarnation. In describing what happens when a human
being dies, he said:
The soul goes into a period of incubation ... it goes into
what is called the virtual domain, which is just a field of possibilities.
The context, the meanings, the relationships, the archetypal
energies incubate, and then the soul takes a creative leap into
a new context, a new set of relationships, a new pattern, a new
location, in space time, a new body.
Concerning God, Chopra believes God is only an experience
which he defined as "the absolute certainty of the immortality
of existence. " He said, "God is that part of our awareness,
where we experience our universality, where we experience love,
where we experience healing, where we experience the world of
the magical and the miraculous." Chopra gave an illustration
of where man can find God: "Next time you look at a flower,
see that it is also rainbows and sunshine and earth and water
and wind and the infinite void and the whole history of creation.
Go beyond that and you'll feel the presence of spirit. If you
can't find God in a flower, you're not going to find God in a
book of religion." He said he does not believe in the existence
of a God who judges mankind and sends men and women to either
heaven or bell. He also rejected the idea that man must believe
in God. He told King, "If something is real, you don't have
to resort to belief ... nor should I have to believe in God to
experience God."
Concerning evil and tragedy, Chopra believes two forces are always
competing with each other-entropy, or decay, and creativity,
or evolution. He told King, "We participate in the balance
of these forces by our collective choices." When King asked
Chopra how to explain tragedies, disasters and the evil deeds
that men inflict upon one another, Chopra said that humans actually
create everything that happens and explained it in the following
manner:
When our collective choices damage the biosphere or the ecosystem,
then you see havoc in nature ... your mind and the information
and energy fields of your mind are part of nature's mind ...
we are not outside nature ... When we have great turbulence in
our collective psyche, when we have a collective madness, when
we have a collective psychosis, then we create tyrants. We create
the Saddam Husseins, we create the Hitlers ... we collectively
participate in the creation of everything that happens.
Deepak Chopra is certainly a false teacher who is leading
millions of people away from eternal life revealed only through
Jesus Christ who is "the way, the truth and the life."
Chopra rejects the truth of God's Word, yet he quotes Christian
terms and Bible verses throughout his books and speeches, making
his teachings and writings only more deceptive and dangerous
to both the saved and unsaved alike. His latest book How to Know
God will, actually, only direct men and women away from God.
Do not become enticed by the smooth sounding New Age rhetoric
of Chopra and other self-help gurus.