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Chopra hits the streets with God

A P Kamath

Deepak Chopra is on the road again.

The best-selling author does not believe in taking things for granted. Just because the hardcover version of his book How to Know God was a best-seller and garnered praise from the likes of the Dalai Lama, actress Shirley MacLaine and the controversial columnist Arianna Huffington, Chopra does not want to take chances on the just released paperback version of the book.

So he's started a multi-city tour to promote the book. In between, he will stop by in San Jose on March 2 to join Bill Clinton and actress Sharon Stone in raising money for the Gujarat earthquake victims.

Chopra, who lost his father recently, says How to Know God has special appeal to him, since it is about finding God here and on this earth. His father instilled that thought in him many, many years ago.

From his father, too, Chopra understood that the soul was the culmination of an evolution that enables man to find God. "God is a process," he observes.

The celebrated author of Ageless Body, Timeless Mind and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, whose books have been translated into more than 30 languages, says this is his most ambitious and important work yet.

Asserting that the brain is hardwired to know God, Chopra notes that the human nervous system has seven biological responses that correspond to seven levels of divine experience. These are shaped not by any one religion (they are shared by all faiths), but by the brain's need to take an infinite, chaotic universe and find meaning in it.

How to Know God describes the quest each of us is on, whether we realize it or not, and Chopra makes it clear that even a non-believer can experience God through spiritual action. In fact, no one can escape knowing God, Chopra argues, since "God is our highest instinct to know ourselves".

Robert Thurman, professor of religion, Columbia University, and one of the most influential Buddhist thinkers is among Chopra's admirers. "The most important book about God for our times. This book is a magical stairway to ascend to a life-changing experience of the sacred," he wrote.

Chopra feels that the book has been brewing in him from his childhood.

"As a child growing up in India I saw signs of spirit all around me -- in the faces of near-naked sadhus, or holy men, in the saffron-robed monks who begged for rice in the streets, and in the people rich and poor who thronged the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh temples," he says. His parents sent him to Catholic nuns who taught him to respect Christ. But even at that early age he understood "that these expressions of divinity must have something in common, despite their obvious differences".

"After many years of study I have come to the conclusion that all human beings are actually hardwired to know God," he notes. "Our brains are structured to make sense of the world around us, and spirit is necessary to limited in our ability to know God by our minds, through which we filter experience. "

Einstein once said, "I want to know the face of God. Everything else is detail," Chopra notes. "My goal is to make the face of God available to all of us, and with it the power to make miracles in our lives. "

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