The End of History and the Last Guru
LABASH, MATT
The End of History and The Last Guru By Matt Labash Deepak Chopra has just about reached the pinnacle of the multimedia age: synergistic omnipresence. His 1993 Ageless Body, Timeless Mind topped...
...But a MAPI spokesperson released a statement to me that said: "During the dates in question . . . [Dr...
...His chart has a striking counterpart on page 152 of Chopra's Ageless Body...
...Last year, he was charged with plagiarizing a passage in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind...
...Chopra left the TM organization in 1993, claiming he was never comfortable as a leader and saying the movement was "too dogmatic...
...Though I told him 8 times that I wanted nothing to do with this story if he could prove it false, Flynn threatened repeatedly to sue for libel...
...Package platitudes about positive thinking, prayer or affirmation therapy as sure-fire, scientific techniques...
...Plagued with breast cancer, Thompson had undergone a mastectomy...
...One geriatric gentleman who told me his wife had dragged him there insisted: "This is not quack medicine, there's a lot of truth to it- it's science...
...It may seem silly on paper, but in person, the effect can be mesmerizing...
...But his own techniques are plenty odd...
...Similarly, his OptiMind "aids mental activity," his OptiWoman "nourish[es] and balanc[es] a woman's vitality...
...Overall, I asked Flynn to corroborate his assertions or offer evidence to discredit Judy Bangert 26 times in the course of our interview...
...He says these remedies contain antioxidants that neutralize free radicals, which cause medical problems...
...On page 312 of Behavioral Endocrinology, Sapolsky summarizes the effects of prolonged exposure to stress...
...Quite literally...
...Olivia Newton-John, renowned physicist and star of Xanadu, extols his scientific bona fides...
...But it is hardly Bangert's word against Chopra's lawyer's...
...He also oversaw a spa/treatment center called L'Auberge, where traditional Ayurvedic treatments like double-team sesame-oil massages, meditation, and colonics were administered to an elite clientele at Maharishi-like prices (around $4,000 a week...
...Chopra, it seemed, had precisely the kind of scientific stock the Maharishi needed to advance Ayurvedic methods and products...
...There are overt shortcomings, primarily involving the questionable promises he makes to his readers...
...Ask them why they're here, thinking thoughts they haven't thought since college when they dreamed of packing up their bongs and heading for the ashram, and the answers of many of these self-professed "skeptical," "reasonable" people who "don't usually go in for this sort of thing" is nearly universal...
...And according to the dictates of the Caraka Samhita, anyone with an aversion to ablutions would have a serious problem with ancient Ayurveda...
...And he gives it to them...
...Actually, everybody from the National Council Against Health Fraud to the Journal of the American Medical Association (which Chopra and cohorts sued for nearly $200 million, though the suit was dismissed) has taken great pains to show just how unscientific it all really is...
...Chopra does not make specific health claims for the remedies-that would require approval by the Food and Drug Administration-but the products are the subject of hyperbolic advertising...
...After all, no gratuity is excessive for a man whose advice you hope "will even help me produce the baby boy Bruce [Willis] and I want so badly...
...To disarm skeptical Occidentals, he tosses off well-measured references to Herodotus, St...
...And while Maslow had his "peak experiences," Chopra has his "bliss...
...His role was that these guys were authorized by him to sell his products...
...Tyler said none of these herbs was proven to have the alleged effects, though he did allow that products like OptiCalm contain ingredients that can be calming...
...Male potency was supposedly enhanced by 216 different kinds of enemas, including the testicles of peacocks, swans, and turtles...
...We sent them to Ann Hooten, a handwriting expert...
...Take his Biochavan herbal jam and tablets...
...THE WEEKLY STANDARD has discovered another apparent act of plagiarism in the very same book, as well as strong evidence that the new guru to the stars has hired a prostitute on numerous occasions...
...Chopra recently told Publishers Weekly upon publication of his first novel, "I'm going to write fiction from now on...
...It's a formula easy to distill, as Wendy Kaminer did in her book I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional: "Promote the prevailing preoccupation of the time-the acquisition of either health or wealth-as the primary moral imperative...
...Fair enough...
...Since Bangert alleges he paid in cash on one occasion, she can't be sure of the second of the three dates she says Chopra hired her...
...I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said before...
...With his first 14 books, he's had plenty of practice...
...While calmly and steadily pacing the stage with a panther-like soft-shoe, he holds sway with his jet-black hair and saddle-bag eyes...
...He even gives the occasional ecumenical nod-"Be still and know that I am God," he says, is a scriptural affirmation of the need to meditate...
...As far as we're concerned, it's not an issue...
...Norman Vincent Peale had his "10 rules for getting effective results from prayer...
...Georgakas charged that a third of the material from a nine-page section of Chopra's book was taken "sometimes directly, sometimes with modified phrasing, sometimes in unattrib-uted quotations" from his...
...Last summer, the Washington Post reported that Dan Georgakas accused Chopra of plagiarizing his book The Methuselah Factors in a chapter on longevity in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind...
...Hill had his "autosuggestion...
...He headed an exorbitantly priced Lancaster, Mass., retreat and was cofounder and president of Maharishi Ayur-Veda Products International (MAPI), which peddled his books and the Maharishi's line of herbal remedies...
...Without values, there is confusion and chaos...
...They have promised a correction in subsequent editions...
...Likewise, he writes in Creating Affluence, "It is not necessary to consciously practice the attitudes I am about to describe in order to materialize wealth...
...But Chopra is still treated as a quasi-religious figure by his followers, in whom he inspires a kind of reverence...
...Chopra's pseudomedical treatises are noticeably devoid of specific references to peer-reviewed studies, and in recent years, he's pressed his publishers to remove the "Dr...
...MAPI Inc...
...Even many vehement critics like William Jarvis of the National Council Against Health Fraud believe Chopra is honest when he defends and praises the Ayurvedic system...
...Chopra plans on setting up shop again in La Jolla, Calif, later this summer...
...Fortunately for us, Biochavan "nourishes the potential for overall health, longevity, and well-being...
...Renner talked to numerous ophthalmologists who concurred this was a dangerous procedure with no proven benefits, especially since mouth bacteria could cause corneal ulcerations...
...Chopra was the sole possessor of this card and totally responsible for it...
...She said no and passed...
...But Crown Publishing spokeswoman Tina Constable said that, though Sapolsky's lawyers had presented them with the information, "Our lawyer's position is that it was not lifted from the book...
...Chopra was former president and a consultant to MAPI at the time...
...Until recently, Chopra was associated with Sharp HealthCare, a behemoth of a San Diego hospital consortium that had him executive-directing its Institute for Human Potential and Mind-Body Medicine...
...What is this nothingness from where we all come...
...Presently, Chopra cashed out of his lucrative practice, joining the even more lucrative field of New Age guruism-a $2-billion-a-year industry...
...It's all so . . . restrained-no histrionics, no ululation, no gymnastic pirouettes through the crowd, no embarrassing audience participation...
...He's concurrently haunting the lists with The Way of the Wizard and The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success...
...He recently told the Associated Press, "I don't consider myself scholarly or academic...
...So just as Napoleon Hill wrote Think and Grow Rich, Chopra wrote Creating Affluence...
...The idea was that AIDS was a . . . disease of the skin and blood," said Knapp...
...He told the Chicago Tribune, "A good family life...
...Flynn also claimed that other employees of MAPI were using Chopra's credit card at the time...
...Though some of the anecdotes, word emphasis, and conclusions are straight out of a chapter in that book, Chopra appears to have taken care to mix up the language...
...I have that...
...Absent is the Stephen Covey mind-numbing paradigm-speak, as well as the gimmickry of the mobile-miked, cheerleading, coal-walking Tony Robbins...
...In addition to meditation and yoga exercises, patients "had to take a course of herbs that would cleanse their blood...
...Just as his former boss, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, had his George Harrisons and Mia Farrows, Chopra counts Naomi Judd, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Lunden, Michael Milken, Diane Von Furstenburg, and other glitterati-in-the-know among his followers...
...Zealots don't know where to stop...
...Or just about everything, at least according to Judy Bangert, a former San Francisco call girl who says she's now a college student...
...He has said he wants to be seen as "a good person...
...You know," Flynn said of Bangert, "that she went to like four or five different sources trying to sell the story...
...And there are more potent herbs like Opti-Cardio and OptiRheum, which a disclaimer says should only be taken when recommended by a professional trained in Ayurveda (you can become one by attending Chopra seminars...
...The Demis and Donnas either don't notice, don't acknowledge, or don't care to learn about Chopra's shortcomings...
...they also are associated "with the acceleration of the aging process...
...She has produced Chopra's American Express credit-card vouchers with the imprint of her escort service (which she owned), showing two different billings in June 1991 and August 1991, as well as copies from American Express that show she sent the bills through...
...Paul Brown, a TM teacher who worked at the clinic, concedes this but says the patients "we worked with stayed alive longer...
...Total horse-," he called them...
...After numerous stints at respectable hospitals spanning the northeastern seaboard, he was chief of staff at New England Memorial Hospital by age 35...
...Chopra's publicist wouldn't return my phone call requesting her response to the charge...
...But she did obtain a receipt from the Stouffer Renaissance Stanford Court Hotel in 1995 (called the Stanford Court Hotel in '91...
...Then in 1995, she saw him on PBS...
...His 1993 Ageless Body, Timeless Mind topped the bestseller list with millions sold in both hardcover and paperback...
...You have the Karma, we'll take the Coca-Cola, a metaphysical soft drink for a physical one...
...often they were cured with the wearing of gems and the use of fragrances...
...It acts about a third of the time in a positive fashion-especially for subjective sensations like headache pain...
...There's no Susan Powter-ish barking at the audience, nor is there any relationships shtick begging to be sopped up with cornbread, such as the "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus" pablum of TM alum John Gray...
...Nevertheless, toeing the Maharishi's line has been extremely profitable-both before and after the fissure...
...Chopra's spokesmen claim the whole mess was an editing error that divorced attribution from the material, though Georgakas was mentioned some six pages later with no apparent connection to the prior material and with his name misspelled...
...Through his teachings I hope to live to a great age, even 130 years isn't impossible...
...A mere desire becomes the trigger for transformation...
...Chopra] was issued an American Express MAPI corporate credit card under his name...
...Chopra's pitch goes down a bit easier than others in the genre...
...The only response came from a reporter for the daily TV show American Journal who had recently completed a story confronting Chopra with lab reports that showed high levels of bug parts and rodent hairs in Chopra's herbal products...
...Augustine, Huxley, and Blake...
...Though Chopra refused to speak to me for this story, even after I approached him twice at a conference after flying crosscountry (well before I'd heard Bangert's allegations), his lawyer, Mike Flynn, vehemently denied the charges...
...Though Chopra's brand of Hinduism is rather short on conventional moral dogma, he appears to eschew much of the promiscuity that permeated mystic ashrams of the 60s and 70s...
...And the two journalists she had previously dealt with both told me she never asked for a dime...
...Bangert says that at the time of the alleged incidents, she had no idea who Chopra was: "He told me he was a doctor and a poet and had written something for Michael Jackson...
...They weren't there for religion...
...Knapp says he saw staffers give patients the idea that Ayurvedic treatment would "help their immune system...
...I wasn't able to find references to this version of Ayurveda in any of Chopra's books...
...Diet Karma Cola Chopra says we "are in the midst of what can only be called the climactic overthrow of the superstition of materialism," when speaking of the evils of Western medicine...
...But unlike, say, the soiled-drawered, marathon abuse sessions of Werner Erhard's est, or the pore-opening ga-ga speak of Inner Child role-play, Chopra's TM-lite methods are highly palatable...
...lissome flesh-and-silicon oracle!-spouting, "He's my guru now...
...Scientific claims aside, he's largely received a free pass, the kind usually reserved for Billy Graham and other occupants of the spiritual pantheon...
...He really projects warmth and happiness, but he's got a heart of ice, because he's willing to give sick people false hope...
...John Renner reported in the Kansas City Star in 1991 that Chopra had encouraged conference attendees to "wash the eyes out with saliva" as "an effective treatment for even well-established cataracts" and that "sometimes they claim that they can be reversed and we have some experience with this...
...The credit card reads, "Dr...
...Chopra has his "mantras...
...In Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, one of the major factors said to retard aging is "a happy marriage...
...Reading My Own Prose' Chopra has found self-effacement effective...
...But even with such minimal effort, all one has to do is read his books, or "literally metabolize" them "again and again," which should be made "a lifelong habit," and Chopra promises that you will attain Nirvana on earth, or at the very least, that "wealth in all its forms will follow you wherever you go...
...I thought he really wrote well," Georgakas told me...
...Calling Bangert "a screwball," Flynn insisted: "The whole thing is a scam, she's an extortionist...
...Got constipation...
...It has since been changed, but Bangert produced documentation from Pacific Bell confirming that the number had indeed been hers...
...And there are the shortcomings that he goes to great lengths to keep secret...
...Have you ever wondered what a thought is-where it is from...
...Of course, Chopra stressed one's mouth must be clean, which can easily be achieved with one of his silver tongue scrapers ($10.95 from his mail-order catalogue...
...But when repeatedly pressed, he offered the name of no specific news organization...
...Unlike cults that promise character transformation through strict adherence to a charismatic leader's demands, the cult of Chopra requires only that you purchase his wares...
...I first saw him on PBS-a special from which he raised $2.5 million in six months, causing a swooning pledge driver to call Chopra "a gift to public television" and "a gift to humanity...
...Epilepsy was treated with ass urine...
...Hemorrhaging was a nice break from the regimen, since it was treated with an enema of the fresh blood of a rabbit, deer, cock, or any one of numerous other beasts...
...After obtaining a list of the herbs present in these remedies from Quantum Publications, I ran them by Purdue University's Dr...
...Coming at the problem from separate directions, both parties have chanced upon the same conclusion, namely, that the most effective weapon against irony is to reduce everything to the banal...
...After attending the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, he chose Western medicine, emigrating to the United States in 1970 and becoming a licensed endocrinologist...
...Or at least that's the idea that's supposed to come across...
...Thus, healing is simple...
...On a May evening, I saw them pack the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, Catholics and Methodists and fundamentalist Christians all, with nary a TMer or even a Hindu in sight...
...But not always...
...A Gift to Public Television' "I still don't know w hat the fuss is abou t," Chopra frequently protests to full auditoriums of rudderless upper-middles who have paid $40 for three-hour oral renditions of his books (or as much as $600-$1,500 for extended seminars...
...Most diseases were originally attributed to demons...
...You improve your vision...
...If you get a message of comfort, then it's karmically appropriate...
...These days, the anti-materialist Chopra mostly cranks out slim volumes of fortune-cookie aphorisms, retreaded nuggets from prior offerings so readers can more readily skim their pocket guides to wealth and immortality...
...And, he added, "anything has a placebo effect if you believe it...
...In Creating Affluence, a book of alphabetical aphorisms, "'V' stands for Values: Truth, Integrity, honesty, love, faith, devotion...
...Flynn offered an additional defense-that Chopra was in India speaking at a conference on the dates mentioned on the hotel receipt...
...They were there for generic spiritual renewal through the good doctor's healing techniques...
...MAPI's understanding was that Dr...
...Yet like transcontinental swamis past-Rajneesh with his Rolls Royce fleet and the Maharishi bottling his "Himalayan Bliss" mineral water-there Chopra is, hawking his herbal potions and massage lotions, his aroma kits and tongue scrapers...
...But he also adopted the anesthetic rituals of stressed-out Westerners, taking nightly tipples and smoking a pack a day...
...Ayurveda is a folk medicine based on ancient Hindu Vedic texts that the Maharishi distilled and then updated in the early and mid-80s to spur waning interest in TM...
...Bangert was later approached by an Esquire reporter, who elected not to use her account in his Chopra profile...
...Bangert alleges that Chopra paid her for sex on three different occasions in the summer of 1991-two times by credit card and once with cash...
...But according to a report by Pat Ryan, a former high-level TMer now involved in counseling people coming out of cults, the editor of the seminal Ayurvedic text called the Caraka Samhita actually dates from 200 B.C...
...Because the mind influences every cell in the body," he writes, "human aging . . . can speed up, slow down, stop . . . and even reverse itself...
...That is, if Demi Moore doesn't first help him make it into a movie...
...Bangert volunteered to take a lie-detector test, which we took her up on-and which she passed, even after our examiner asked her the same questions four times...
...Do not trust the voice of reason...
...Numerous patients also died...
...But, Chopra's catalogue warns, free radicals don't merely cause cell damage...
...Indeed, if one were picking a Billy Graham of the New Age movement, Chopra would be a candidate, largely because of his ability to flesh out his essentially Hindu orientation in ecumenical language...
...He speaks to corporate titans at Time Warner and Sony, he calls Oprah amiga, and he's represented by International Creative Management, which is hawking his novel The Return of Merlin-a New Age take on the Arthurian legend-as a TV series or Broadway musical...
...Forbes recently put his two-year take at $11 million...
...the third is actual flying, which no one has ever achieved...
...Though she says Chopra was in no way threatening, "he just had this kind of smug arrogance like everybody is beneath him...
...If the choice feels uncomfortable, I will pause and see the consequences of my action with my inner vision...
...The signatures," Flynn said of the credit-card receipts, "are a forgery...
...After applying Chopra's techniques of meditation and experiencing inner bliss-along with chemotherapy-she said, "I'm in complete remission," and, "I feel that the Ayurveda, especially the psychophysiological technique, allowed the chemotherapy to work...
...Poor digestion was treated with goat feces prepared by washing with urine...
...Just a little Ravi Shankar-ish sitar riff coming back from pledge breaks, with Chopra standing on a thick Persian rug set off by comforting balsa earth hues...
...He is just a humble seeker walking point on the road to Enlightenment, for which he is paid a generous stipend...
...Curtis Mailloux, former head of the Washington TM Center and now a mortgage banker, thinks otherwise: "Chopra's a charming kind of guy...
...But he would not provide me any documentation or phone numbers to prove it...
...Hooten said the signatures on the vouchers matched the signatures we gave her from other Chopra promotional material and correspondence...
...Maybe not, but Flynn, whose in-your-face tactics a former New York magazine fact-checker described as "one of the most unpleasant things I've ever endured," spent nearly 30 highly combative minutes on the phone with me, bandying countercharges, offering a host of defenses, and providing no documentation for either...
...THE WEEKLY STANDARD discovered he's not the only person to have that sensation...
...The receipt bears a folio printout of Deepak Chopra's stay on June 13-14, 1991, copied on hotel stationery from 1995, which a hotel source verifies as an authentic receipt...
...Seven passages over seven pages in Chopra's book appear to track exactly or approximately with material from a three-page spread (without any attribution, misspelled or otherwise) in the textbook Behavioral Endocrinology, by Robert M. Sapolsky, published by MIT Press a year earlier...
...In 1987, during a triumphant Donahue appearance, Chopra spoke about studies demonstrating that "when people undergo these techniques, their immune system builds up, so it's easier for them to fight the disease, the cancer...
...if you get a message of discomfort, it's probably not...
...They traditionally deify the inner self while simultaneously absolving that same self of responsibility...
...Born in New Delhi to a physician and educated in a Christian missionary school where he was steeped in the likes of Tennyson and Chaucer, Chopra did not start out on the mystic's track...
...And lest he sound undoctorly, he reminds us of the source of illness: Through conditioning, through memory...
...In Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, the man whom the Maharishi once anointed the "Lord of Immortality" advertises nothing less than the reversal of the aging process...
...There's a little quantum physics here, a little metaphysics there, all wrapped up in an existentialist biscuit that asks the unanswerables: "What is life...
...It seemed like every time I turned on the TV, they were promoting him," she says...
...Three years later, the immediate cause of death listed on her death certificate was breast cancer...
...Deepak Chopra Pres...
...Varro Tyler, a professor of pharmacognosy (the study of drugs that come from natural sources...
...There, the Maharishi gave him a long-stemmed rose and an invitation to join the team...
...However ancient, the Ayurveda of yesteryear is basically different from today's sanitized Maharishi-Chopra version...
...A woman named Marian Thompson was brought out as a guest to prove it...
...But, Jarvis told American Health, "zealotry is more dangerous than fraud...
...There is something of a trade-off in the jetstream guru endgame, as Gita Mehta explained in her brilliant 1979 book Karma Cola: "The westerner is finding the dialectics of history less fascinating than the endless opportunities for narcissism provided by the Wisdom of the East...
...Some of that hope is dispatched through his many mail-order herbal remedies...
...Included on that receipt: Chopra's name and the same credit card number that appears on the other vouchers, as well as two calls to Bangert's home number...
...John Knapp, a former TM "governor" who now heads TranceNet, an online TM tracking group, says he used to be a volunteer at Ayurveda Health and Education Resources of San Francisco, an AIDS clinic...
...the show's editors decided to pass...
...Brown said the clinic even did a study to try to solicit government funding, but the results were inconclusive and therefore never published...
...As a doctor and not a poet, he assures us that "the heart has a computer system which is far more accurate," and so, when faced with difficult choices, the heart is where you should first check your messages...
...Do not trust your brain, but go to your heart...
...It is only important to "be aware of them," since conscious effort could cause "stress and strain...
...Chopra appears to have plagiarized a second time in another Ageless Body chapter entitled "The Invisible Threat: Aging, Stress, and Body Rhythms...
...Doctor to the Maharishi In the last eleven years, eight spent serving at the pleasure of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Transcendental Meditation movement, Chopra has written 15 books (translated into 25 languages) on spiritualism and Ayurvedic medicine...
...we generate the same intelligences, the same quantum events, the same waves of information and energy, that give rise to the same molecules, that give rise to the same biochemicals, that give rise to the same physiology, and ultimately the same problems...
...Audiotapes based on his books net around $300,000 annually...
...It "is nothing other than the return of the memory of wholeness," which is reached through heightened consciousness, which is mainly achieved through meditation, which puts us right back in the Maharishi's playbook, though he is rarely mentioned...
...The trick is to disengage your intellect, suspending rational judgments and critical thinking: "If you want to make karmically appropriate choices," he says, then "do not trust your intellect...
...And he even has Demi-O Demi...
...And all these workadaddies and carpool mommies lap it up, third eyes aflutter, mouths agog, preparing for The Moment when Shiva comes down and French-kisses them into enlightenment right there in the air-conditioned amphitheater, their credit cards still warm from Chopra's imprint...
...from his book covers-the very title from which he derives much of his authority...
...And for all Chopra's hifalutin TM-talk of taking a spin on the "cosmic computer" or a dip in the "quantum soup," his message at its core is no different from any red-blooded American huckster's...
...Among them: an herb and fruit paste called Maharishi Amrit Kalash that TM researchers represented as effective in combating cancer...
...These have no accompanying descriptions, but their very names hold great promise...
...Then I realized I was reading my own prose...
...And his 1991 book Perfect Health is dedicated to his family-he has a wife and two grown kids-"for their deep love and support, which is the basis for everything I do...
...He explains the transcendence of everyday reality to a higher consciousness...
...While Knapp says Chopra did not treat patients, he contends, "We reported to Chopra...
...He told People, "Get rid of toxic relations . . . and you can influence your life span by 30 years...
...When I inquired whether Chopra would be willing to take a lie-detector test, his lawyer said, "You think Chopra's gonna spend five minutes on this stupid thing...
...such is the claim of any over-the-counter Vitamin E supplement...
...I thought it was disturbing because I know how he treated me...
...Sapolsky declined comment, as he is strongly considering litigation...
...the second is hovering...
...In his search for higher meaning, he chanced upon a TM title in a used bookstore in 1980, became a regular meditator independent of the movement, and within five years, gained an introduction at a Washington conference to the Yogi himself...
...Attaining divinity, of course, is appropriate status for Chopra's contingent karmic delivery system, which is a handy euphemism for the usual relativism: "If the choice feels comfortable, I will plunge ahead with abandon...
...They offer an effortless existence for the laziest self-reformer: "The higher self is that place where everything is accomplished by doing nothing...
...Which is perhaps why she has now, like Ringo before her, trekked to India in a sari and offered (along with Donna Karan) to rent Chopra a crash pad in East Hampton...
...Revolted by what she perceived as the hypocrisy of a highly lauded dispenser of spiritual wisdom seeing "a working girl and giving her a hard time, besides," Bangert sent a letter outlining the story to various newsmagazines, most of which rejected her charges out of hand...
...The clinic folded amid financial problems after losing three key administrators to AIDS...
...She describes him variously as "an arrogant man," "supercilious," "argumentative, abrasive in conversation, dismissive and insulting...
...In the polygraph test, we asked Bangert if she had ever asked Chopra or his associates for money...
...Bangert's pitch letter made no mention of recompense...
...While psychologist Abraham Maslow, dean of self-actualization, hints at the god within, Chopra comes right out with it: "We are divinity in disguise, and the gods and goddesses in embryo that are contained within us seek to be fully materialized...
...Drink milk-with urine...
...He writes lyrics and yogic hops with Michael Jackson (yogic hopping is the Maharishi's first stage of levitation...
...It also dovetails nicely with self-help movements of the last 40 years, which have conditioned Westerners to accept loosely affiliated teachings as a kind of nerf religion...
...If that didn't work, one was supposed to follow up with an enema of urine...
...According to Knapp and other employees, Chopra was chief consultant, flying in three or four times a year to instruct the staff...
...If [Chopra] wants me to tell you to go jump in the f-ing lake-print whatever you want, and then we'll bring a lawsuit to expose the truth," was one of his gentler admonitions...
...A Holy Man, at Night Chopra has attained a rare status as a secular Holy Man-what one supporter calls a "Hindu tele-vangelist," but without the seedy Western connotations...
...Chopra offers The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success...
...The More Ancient the Wisdom, the Better Chopra claims Ayurvedic medicine is a 5,000-year-old health system-a mark of distinction for a Western audience which, slavishly adhering to the "wisdom" of the ancients, knows that the more ancient the wisdom, the better...
Vol. 1 • July 1996 • No. 41
