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Deepok Chopra Interview (January 20, 1999) |
Jalal-ud-Din Rumi In his book The Way of Passion Andrew Harvey says of Rumi. “He is the greatest of all mystic poets, and Easterners worship his work second in grandeur, depth, mystery, and holiness only to the Koran. Through all the centuries since his death and all the vicissitudes and tragedies of Moslem history, his odes have been chanted by crowds on pilgrimages and sung with the highest reverence in religious assemblies.” Rumi was born into a distinguished family of jurists and religious scholars on September 30, 1207 in Balkh, a town in Khorassan (now Afghanistan). His father, Baha-ud-Din Walad, called by his contemporaries the “Sultan of scholars,” was a famous theologian, Sufi, and mystic. The epoch Rumi was born into was one of terrifying turmoil, not unlike our own. The Ottoman empire was menaced from within and without: from within by religious decadence and rampant political corruption; from without, by the Christian Crusaders on the one hand and the Mongol armies of Genghis Khan on the other. At the age of twelve, ahead of the Mongol armies, Rumi fled Balkh. A decade of wandering over Asia Minor and Arabia followed. In that decade Rumi met the great Persian Sufi poet Attar, who predicted “this boy will open a gate in the great heart of Love.” Years later Rumi went with his father to Damascus. There they met the greatest Sufi meta-physician of the age, Ibn-Arabi. When Arabi saw Rumi walking behind his father he exclaimed, “Glory be to God, an ocean is walking behind a lake.” In 1229 Rumi’s father was invited by the Sultan of Konya (now southern Turkey) to found a college. Two years later, his father dead, Rumi found himself his father’s successor at the astonishing age of twenty-four. His own education and rise to preeminence continued until his age of 31. By then he was a brilliantly articulate, accomplished, pious, ascetic young scholar with his fathers blessing on his head. By 1244 Rumi has “ten thousand disciples.” All this could have conspired to keep him frozen and limited. Rumi himself admitted for all his brilliance, accomplishment and training that he had had no fundamental spiritual breakthrough. All that changed by December 1244 when he met Shams-I-Tabriz. Shams became his beloved teacher and plunged him into the fire of divine transformation. “I was raw,” Rumi wrote later, “then I was burnt; then I was cooked.” For three years Shams and Rumi entered an ecstatic relationship which would alter their lives and the course of Moslem and human history. Shams continued Rumi’s mystical transformation and they became inseparable. Rumi’s other disciples became concerned by the influence Shams held over their esteemed teacher and jealous of the time that they spent together. In 1247 Shams was murdered, probably by Rumi’s on disciples. The death of Shams was the final blow which blasted open Rumi’s heart and completed his transformation. In the insanity of his grief Rumi began to spin and utter poetry. He became the first Whirling Dervish. By his death on December 17th, 1273 at the age of sixty-six, he had lived for almost thirty years in the radiance of enlightenment. He had composed 3,500 odes, 2,000 quatrains, a massive spiritual epic called the Mathnawi, and founded the Mevlevi order (the Sufi Whirling Dervishes) that, under his son Sutan Walad and his successors, was to spread the glory of his work and sacred vision throughout the vast extent of the Islamic world. From Tangiers to Cairo, Lahore, and Sarajevo, into the humblest, most remote villages of Afghanistan, Turkey, Iran, and India.
In an exclusive interview with Uptown Health & Spirit Dr. Chopra speaks of Rumi, Tantra, the future of medicine, his own spiritual practices and what he does for fun. Alan Davidson: Your new work is about the Islamic mystic Rumi. Dr. Deepok Chopra: Yes. I would like to know how you were first introduced to his work. Rumi is a Sufi whose poetry, in the original Farsi, is recited and sung in Northern India. When I was a child my father would take me to events which were basically poetry readings and recitations of great mystical works. I heard Rumi during the recitation of the Sufi poetry. He is the greatest poet of love and life. At the same time I grew up listening to the poetry of a great Indian mystic Tagore. I’ve always wanted to do a translation of Rumi. I just finished that project and I am in the middle of finishing a similar project of the poetry of Tagore, which surrounds the theme of death. What is the meaning of death? It’s a passionate relationship that I’ve had with those poets as long as I can remember. One of the questions I wanted to ask you… Have you heard the album, by the way? Yes, I’ve enjoyed it very much. I have been a reader of Rumi for many years. Coleman Barks and Robert Bly are the readings that I’m most familiar with. They use a beautiful incantation when they read his poetry. You called Rumi the poet of life, and certainly of love and the ecstatic love. One of the consistent themes in Rumi’s poetry is the annihilation of the self. Yes, the annihilation of the ego if that’s what you mean by the self. That of course is the path to enlightenment and is also the path to love. That would be when you have surrendered to the mystery, completely and totally and with total detachment. When you have lost all need to control or manipulate or convince or cajole. If you can’t find enlightenment with another soul its very unlikely that you’d find God through a book of religion. So, yes, Rumi very closely resembles, Sufis in general, resemble the Bhakti yoga tradition of Vedanta. Bhakti yoga is the path to enlightenment, worship through love and through relationships. Rumi and so many of the yogic and Buddhist traditions talk about the annihilation of the self with almost a sense of violence. A sense of what? Violence. One of the images that Rumi uses is “I am the grapes beneath the wine-makers feet. I am trampled over and over again to make your sweet wine.” It’s that sense of being crushed repeatedly on the path to enlightenment. Yes, but I wouldn’t term it as violence. I do agree it’s ruthless one-pointed intention to destroy a monster. The ego has been called the thousand headed monster. That makes it necessary for you to remain offended all your life, that makes it necessary to indulge all of your desires. It creates your reactive response to every situation, circumstance and event. So it is your worst enemy and it doesn’t even exist. It is a figment of the imagination. If you think you are a personality then obviously you will be burdened by a personality and you will see personalities everywhere. And that is an illusion. What we call a personality is nothing other than a set of images that have come about as a result of the interpretation of past experiences and they keep us in the world of illusions. There is no such thing as a personality. There is only twists and threads of memory and habits that keep repeating themselves and undergo very slow transformations. The burden of personality is what allows you to not see your real self, which is the witness of that personality. The real self is full of ecstasy and joy and love and knowingness and intuition and creativity. That real self is overshadowed by the ego. When Rumi and others speak of the annihilation of ego they speak of destroying the personality and allowing this real self to fully express itself. The physical body is the house of your ego, the house of your spirit is the whole universe. So in order to incarnate we do need a little bit of that ego. What happens is it starts to dominate our existence. It overshadows the experience of our soul, our spirit, which is the source of all joy, all bliss, all creativity, all love, all compassion. If you look at creative minds, whoever they were, at some point or another, if they were really genuinely creative, they had to relinquish the known. They have the freedom from the past. The ego is always stuck in the past. They were comfortable with uncertainty and paradox and ambiguity and they were able to spontaneously generate love and compassion. They had spontaneous capacity for joy and had the ability to spread it to others. They had a sense of meaning and purpose in their lives. They had a sense of connection to the creative power of the universe. All of that is not possible if your ego is your internal reference point. The literature said that you helped to do the translations. How did this work? Fereydoun Kia is a Sufi scholar who is Persian and lives in Argentina. Fereydoun would look at the original Persian translations and he would pick out phrases. Then we would go back and forth. If you do a direct word by word, phrase by phrase translation into English, it really does not sound like poetry. We had to polish the phrases. He gave me the literal translations and then I refined them and put them into a format of poetry. Many times we did not use Rumi’s words. We tried to get the sense of what he was saying, the emotion rather than the vocabulary. The thing about Rumi’s work that is so evident, is his passion. Right, he’s one of the most passionate poets ever. How did you come to chose the celebrities that are speaking with you on the recording? It was basically whoever I thought might be already interested in Rumi or a student of Rumi. Madonna happened to be at the center and I learned that she was a great fan of Rumi. So I asked her. She was the first one to say yes, that she would do it and she was extremely enthusiastic about it. Then I asked my assistant to call every body else on the album and let me speak to them. I didn’t have to convince anyone. They all said they would be pleased to do it. When you do your recording on the poetry of Tagore, will you use celebrity speakers like this one? You know I don’t know at this point. My main focus has to be how can we really portray the passion and the sensitivity of Tagore. For anyone to really do that convincingly, they have to already either be familiar with his poetry. If not they have to become familiar and really enjoy it. Once they start doing that then there is a possibility. I haven’t decided at this moment. I’ll finish the book. I’m doing a fund-raiser for the Manhattan Theater Club in New York on the 1st of February. I’m basically doing the evening as one of Tagore’s poetry. I’m going to recite this to music. Adam Plack, the same producer who did the music for the Rumi recording, is going to be there ( Adam Plack is also the creator of the best-selling Nomad CD). Maybe my son might join me. I haven’t at this moment decided whether I am going to use celebrities of not. The thing with Rumi was they were already very familiar with him thanks to Coleman Barks and others. Rumi is well known in this country, Tagore is not that well known. Right, I hear reference to him regularly by the great mystic scholars, but I have not personally seen any of his work. It’s exquisite. It’s absolutely, totally exquisite. It’s of a completely different type of sensitivity than Rumi. Let me read to you one of Tagore’s poems that I just finished. This translation is easy for me because I speak Hindi and understand Bengali. So I don’t need to go to another translator. I’m doing these myself. It says,
It’s a very magnificent feel to these words. Only a very grand sage could say these things. I’m hearing this on two different levels. Rumi’s poems are the same way. One, it’s so easy, particularly in our culture, to think that they are just talking about the great passionate love between a man and woman. But there’s also the great ecstatic longing for the divine. Well he says in other places that because his life is so full of love, that he knows his death will also be like that. Particularly with Rumi there is this personal whirling union with the divine. He is. Yet he did have a relationship with his teacher Shams of Tabriz. It was a guru/disciple relationship more than any thing else. He felt a great reverence and love for his teacher. I had the great opportunity to attend a lecture that Andrew Harvey did on Rumi. What a magnificent speaker he is. Dr. Harvey asserted, actually stated he thought perhaps Shams and Rumi had a tantric-sexual relationship. Could be. That is an interpretation of our time. We weren’t there. We don’t know. The interpretations are from the poetry and certainly that is a possibility. Tantra is one of the things that fascinates me. It is respected as a pathway to god. Someone once told me, “It’s like riding to nirvana on the back of a tiger. You can get distracted.” Maybe so. In particular in this culture because tantra is frequently thought of only in terms of sexuality. Sexuality is only one component of tantra. Tantra, taken in its full context, I don’t think there is that problem that you mention. Tantra is more about trapping attention, trapping information, trapping energy, trapping power and then transforming it. Tantra is the closest you can get to magic or alchemy or transmutation. Tantric rituals are basically spiritual disciplines that allow you to trap and transform power and energy. When properly understood, tantra is one of the most dynamic and most consistent paths to enlightenment. Of course sexuality is component of it. Tantra acknowledges that sexual energy is the most powerful energy in the universe because it is the creative energy of the universe. Tantra is cultivating the quality of awareness. With these qualities of awareness you will experience joy. In Tantra this joy is often created in relationship with another human being. A lover and committed partner. One of the great gifts that you bring to your teaching is the synthesis between quantum mechanics, science and mysticism. How they merge together in what we call alternative ways of healing. As a medical doctor and a mystic , what do you see for the future synthesis of alternative therapies and the more traditional medical therapies? I think our scientific understanding of how the human biology functions is going to see some really remarkable advances in both diagnosis and treatment. Big breakthroughs in technology and even genets is a definite possibility. I am a big fan of science and I think that science is one of the best ways to understand the mind of God. After all, God doesn’t think in English. God’s mind works through mathematics and with mathematical precision orchestrates the nature of disease and how to get rid of it. However; modern science has focused only on the physical body. As a result in modern times it is a technology more than anything else. Modern medicine creates excellent technicians who know everything about the human body and don’t know anything about the human soul. So even though these are great technicians, they are not great healers. In order to be a great healer, you don’t need to be a great technician. You do need to know wholeness. The word healing comes from the word holy, whole, wholeness. Which means you have to go beyond the physical body and out of the mind, and the emotions, and the intellect, and the ego. You have to go deeper. You have to explore the realm of soul and spirit. Today, because of science, we are beginning to understand the realm of soul and spirit as well. And it is science that is making this a legitimate area of knowledge. If you’ve kept up with the advance in neuroscience’s and all, you’ll see that there are models that quite clearly indicate that the world of matter is really a function of the world of energy and information. That our most intimate thoughts and feeling and emotions are nothing other that clusters of photons. Fine-tuned rapidly changing de-polarization’s and hyper-polarization’s of action potential along neural networks. Just as you have information transfer in cable networks or along the phone lines you and I are speaking on. There are frequency modulated broadcasts occurring in the nervous system all the time. The trains of frequency coded information that ultimately results in the production of neuro-chemicals. So you can see the interplay between the quantum world and the material world even in thinking a thought, but where is that thought coming from? Scientific models are now suggesting that your personal memories, all your declarative memories, what happened to you yesterday and what you did in your childhood and all the things that you can remember which is who you really are. You’re a bundle of memories and as a result of those memories you are a bundle of desires and dreams and wishes and ideas and these are not even generated by your brain. The y come from a pre-quantum or virtual level of reality. They are only actualized in the brain just like the soap operas are actualized in the television set but is not actually happening in the television set. Or the Beethoven symphonies actualized in your radio set but its not really happening in the radio set. The radio or the TV is just the instrument through which virtual reality is converted into quantum and then into physical reality. But I think we are coming closer to a future where for the first time where what has been part of the spiritual insights of ancient wisdom traditions is going to find a home and a place in a world of science and scientific. Understanding of soul and spirit is at hand. The only problem is other world religions are already steeped in superstition, as well a lot of nonsense and a lot of garbage based on their religious texts. So we confuse the genuine religious experience with religious dogma or ideology, belief systems, and fanaticism. More people have died in the name of religion and the name of god than for any other cause. I think we are moving into a exciting time where we will have a genuine spirituality which doesn’t seem to regard God as a dead, white male in the sky. (Laughter) Thank goodness. One of the things curious to me as an alternative practitioner is so many of my clients experience benefits during a bodywork session. They’ll talk about how they feel better or improved. We call that kind of feeling an anecdotal response to a session. But your whole history, your life history is a collection of these anecdotes, isn’t it? Yes. Where would you be today without these anecdotes? (Laughter) But in trying to integrate more traditional medical therapies in the alternative community, the empiricists (scientists) are saying there’s no real documentation for this. The alternative therapists are saying people continually come away with these dramatic changes in their attitudes and their feelings in their relationship to their body. Well that’s all that matters. What we’ve done is in the name of science is to sacrifice wisdom for knowledge. We then sacrifice knowledge for information. Then we sacrifice information for data and then we sacrifice data for meaningless. My answer to all these scientists who are obsessed with data all the time is, Who cares? When people start feeling better about their lives. When their attitudes and their behaviors and their outcomes begin to change the data will come. When I was in medical school I used to hear over and over again my professor telling me that there is no data that smoking is harmful. My grandmother said they are wrong. Smoking makes people stink, makes them short of breath and gives them heart attacks. It took a few billion dollars worth of research to get that data. If that’s what science is all about, then sometimes as I said, we sacrifice wisdom for this desire to always get data. In certain things it is so obvious that you know you don’t need data for it. I’d like to ask you what spiritual practices you use in your own life? My personal spiritual practice revolve around three words and they are seva, which means selfless service, not all the time, but at least some of the time to do something without personal motivation whatsoever. Seva, the closest translation of that, is work without compensation…for charity, for benefit of others. Switch your internal dialogue from what’s in it for me to how can I help; to devote 10 to 15 percent of your time doing that. So I do that. The second is satsanga, which is the collection of people who are all seeking the same thing. Through discussion, through workshops, through seminars, through dialogue, but also through reading and listening. And the third is Simron. Simron is the remembrance, invoking the memory. That comes from meditation and for me principally through meditative discipline. Every 3 to 4 months and I am going to do one in a couple of weeks, I go into a week of total silence where I have no communications with anyone, not even my family, not with phone or fax or a book or a magazine or a radio set or a television set. Total silence for about 5 days to 7 days. Those are the three things I do. That must be a welcomed retreat for a man as busy as you are. I heard you speak years ago as a doctor you were introduced to TM and that was your doorway to the metaphysical and mystical world. It was one of the things certainly that influences me and I practiced TM for a long time and I still practice other forms of meditation but I’m no longer doing TM. What forms are you using now? I practice several types of mantra meditation with specific physiological benefits, they are called Primordial Sound Meditations. I practice something called sutra meditations, which is opening the different chakras through certain types of mental practices. I also practice meditations that involves refining the subtle senses of listening, of tasting and smelling and seeing with the eyes closed. Has your work as an endocrinologist helped you to see the validity of the chakras and their relationship to the endocrine glands? It has, on the other hand, I don’t feel it is necessary to make that correlation. The chakras offer up their own reality, the endocrine glands offer up their own reality. When you start to want to make a strict one to one parallel then you run into problems, but certainly there is a relationship. My understanding has always been the root chakra’s related to the adrenal glands and that you can adjust imbalances in the adrenal system by working… Yes, you can make that suggestion, the root chakra is about survival and the adrenal gland is also about survival through flight or flight, so that way there is a correlation but I would not suggest that you try and make a one to one correlation. You know it is not necessary, you can work in the chakra reality without having to think of the adrenals. Okay, so you’re saying by working with the root chakra you can still affect the whole endocrine system? Yes. What’s next for you, Dr. Chopra? I have four books I have to finish this year. There’s the book on God I’m doing called I Want to Know How God Thinks, Everything Else Is a Detail. That was a quote borrowed from Einstein. That book is coming along. I have another book about daily spiritual practice that’s called Everyday Mortality that’s coming out in about two months. Then I have this book on the meaning of death called The Dance Beyond Death. That’s the new translation of Tagore’s poetry. And I just finished a fiction called The Lord’s of Light which is about the nature of evil. It’s based on certain interpretations of the Kabbala and the phenomena that is described in the kabbala as the Yetzirah, the evil seed hidden in all of us. It also deals with the concept of critical mass and collective consciousness. That is going to keep me busy. Of course I’ll probably do a music CD with the Tagore poetry. I have a new documentary on Egyptian and Indian mythology. How those mythical figures influence our subconscious mind and how we are driven by mythical needs. It will be offered to PBS. A few little things like that. A few little things! Well hearing all this great work that your doing brings another question for me, what do you do for pleasure or for fun? I take silence every three months. That gives me an immense amount of pleasure and fun. I also take one trip per year with my kids somewhere I go scuba diving. One trip a year where we go skiing and one trip a year towards the end of the year where we go to sacred sites all over the world. That totals up to about 4 to 5 weeks in a year that I spend with my kids and my wife doing those wonderful things. |
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