I can’t remember just what got me interested in “The Return of the Rishi” by Deepak Chopra. He finished his medical training up to the residency in India. Educated there, he saw things such as a yogi being buried alive in a box for 5 days and then happily emerging from the box when it was dug up and opened.
His residency began in an American east coast hospital a day or so after his arrival in the US. He reports hearing his name called over the hospital loudspeaker. As resident on duty, he was needed to pronounce a recently deceased patient dead. He thought it was odd that he should be asked to so since the nurse on duty was quite experienced and knew that death had occurred. That was why he had been paged in the first place. As he approached the deceased’s room, he saw the family sitting in a waiting area at the end of the hall. He saw that the room itself was too crowded with machines and equipment for anyone to sit in there. That arrangement contrasted in his mind with what he was used to in India, where he had just been a few days before. There, the dying would have been in the company of their family at the time of death, not surrounded by machines.
Chopra went on to become a practicing endocrinologist in America. He steadily increased his awareness that mental, ethnic and religious ideas and customs in India had something to offer Western medicine. Over time, he was written zillions of books, which seem to me better than the average self-help. I did read his “Buddha: A Story of Enlightenment” but I think Herman Hesse’s novel “Siddhartha” is a better tour of Buddha’s life. The Chopra work that has done much for me is “The Higher Self”, in audio form. Chopra speaks with an Indian accent and in a charming voice.
His background, experience and knowledge are such that he is very good at showing, step by step, how we can increase our awareness of our lives and bodies and move toward living life as we would like it to be. He mentions an anecdote where miners were trapped with insufficient air. One of them had a watch and called out the time each hour but actually allowed two hours to pass for each call. When they were rescued, the only one that had died from suffocation was the man with the watch. He convincingly emphasizes the impact of our thinking and what we believe to be true of the world on our health and lives.
He shows that other living creatures can sense heat in a way we cannot and that small animals can feel tremors in the earth that we cannot. There are many realities that we are normally not privy to. His use of over-the-top superlatives is a little hard to take in this age of hype and bull but he examines things carefully and with a good eye. He knows we can all lift ourselves to a better plane. He shows quite clearly that our attitudes, our moods, our spirit exist and matter, in a practical hour by hour way. The best way, but not the only way, to become aware of parts of our lives that we normally ignore is to meditate. Practicing turning the mind off and only being aware of all we can be aware of – that increases our use of our other tools and feelings.
