Deepak Chopra and the fall of gurus – failure to clear the lower body
As I write this, New Age guru and spiritual super-author Deepak Chopra faces a social media backlash following disclosure of his links to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Wikipedia—which hasn’t yet caught up with Chopra’s Epstein connection—states that “According to publishers HarperCollins, Chopra has written more than 80 books which have been translated into more than 43 languages, including numerous New York Times bestsellers in both fiction and nonfiction categories.”
Deepak Chopra’s books
Chopra’s books include Ageless Body Timeless Mind, Creating Affluence, and The Seven Laws of Spiritual Success. Like many, he was one of the authors I turned to when I went through my own ‘spiritual awakening’—both are terms I have become deeply mistrustful of—back in the 1990s. I still have a copy of The Seven Laws of Spiritual Success on my bookshelf; don’t imagine I’d get much for it now.
Chopra was popular because he seemed to offer fulfilment of two powerful dreams: more health and more money. The implicit byproduct of the two is more sex.
Chopra is not the first notable spiritual figure to have fallen from grace after sexual impropriety allegations—nothing has yet been proven—and likely won’t be the last.
American televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, Paul Shanley (Catholic priest at the core of the Boston clergy abuse scandal), Brian Houston (co-founder of the Hillsong megachurch), Indian gurus Asaram and his son Narayan Sai have all been laid low by sex-related allegations—and they’re just some of the headline names.
The lower body
The reason for their fall is always the same: failure to clear the lower body, the body’s energetic centres (chakras) that govern our relationship to food, sex, and money. It turns out that Chopra has had legal challenges around the latter.
Wikipedia states that Chopra contributed to a 1991 article in the Journal of the American Medical Association where the lead author was found to have conflicts of interest. JAMA “was highly critical of Chopra and the other authors for failing to disclose their financial connections to the article subject.” He was also sued for appropriating material for Ageless Body Timeless Mind without proper attribution. The case was settled out of court. Both are suggestive of lower body blockages.
How can such a timeless mind not have realised this?
The Eighth Law of Spiritual Success
Chopra didn’t see it—or the Epstein dangers—coming because his book stopped at seven laws. He failed to perceive the Eighth Law of Spiritual Success: worldly success trumps spiritual success.
Spiritual progress has long been understood as a process of opening the mind to receive higher sources of intuition and insight—e.g., clairvoyance and clairaudience. Since the advent of the New Age movement this has been wildly appealing. Chopra fulfilled the promise of his own books—health, wealth, fame and prestige beyond his wildest dreams.
History is littered with spiritual figures, business magnates, politicians, artists, and sportspersons who gorged on the gluttonous thrill of worldly success. The feeling of belonging to humanity’s elite, gods among mortals, is so addictive it blinds almost everyone to the dangers of an unbalanced energy system.
What’s not generally understood is that genuine ‘spiritual progress’, i.e., the stable and integrated raising of consciousness, takes place in two directions: (1) opening the mind and (2) clearing the lower body.
We can only expand our consciousness toward the heavens in a stable manner to the extent that we ground more deeply into the earth. Otherwise, when success makes us a magnet for opportunity, we’re susceptible to the lower body’s desperate desire for unlimited everything: health, wealth, fame—and, of course, sex. (For a dive into the origins of this lower body pattern, click here.)
All of us carry these wounded patterns to some extent; most of us are never exposed to enough opportunity that they destroy our lives. The guru, who positions himself—it’s pretty much always a ‘him’—above such fleshly temptations, is most at risk.
Regardless of what we think of Chopra’s teachings, here he gives us the gift of truth: clear your lower body before opportunity knocks and derails your life.
Clearing the lower body
Clearing the lower body is known as ‘shadow work’ or ‘inner work’ and no one ever does it except by necessity. Why? Put simply, because it hurts.
Meditation, breathwork, affirmations and other tools for mental opening don’t require you, in the American phrase, to leave any skin in the game. Shadow work brings you into searing, visceral contact with your traumas, unmet needs, projections, compensations, and coping mechanisms.
No one wants to take responsibility for the emotional mess inside them that craves excess consumption, possession, and victimisation—a bottomless hole of failed nurturing that many have fallen into and few have clambered out. I’ve written about Epstein’s compulsive behaviour here. It brought him down, too.
The greater the rewards of the external world, the greater the disinclination to attend to the fault lines in the lower body. And so, giants fall. In the spiritual/New Age world, there are—or were—no bigger giants than Chopra.
Destiny
Opening my copy of The Seven Laws, unread for a quarter of a century, I find this:
You are what your deep, driving desire is.
As your desire is, so is your will.
As your will is, so is your deed.
As your deed is, so is your destiny.
— Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.4.5
Is Deepak Chopra’s “deep, driving desire” expressed in his email exchanges with Jeffrey Epstein? You may think you know your deep desire, your will, your deed. You don’t. They dwell in your deep unconscious, ready to wreak havoc in your life—unless you do what so many supposed spiritual gurus have failed to: clear your lower body.
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