Deepak's Instant Karma

IF A BEARER OF TRUE enlightenment arrived among us, what would he leave on your voice mail? Perhaps something like this: ""Listen, this is Deepak. I just had a funny feeling that there was a karmic connection somewhere when I saw you. . .I send you lots of energy, love and the spontaneous fulfillment of your desires in the field of infinite possibilities.'' Or like this: ""This is Deepak, calling from the unified field ... I want to tell you about my experience with space. I've developed a very intimate relationship with space, and it's a great relationship ...'' Or, if you had enough room on your machine, like the former CEO of his company, Infinite Possibilities International, he might improvise whole book chapters from remote hotels--enlightenment on the fly, inscribed onto the ones and zeros of a modern digital answering device. You pick up the phone, and in the realm of infinite possibilities, you don't know where or when you're going to get off.

Right now, though, the Bearer of True Enlightenment--50, graying slightly at the temples, with a distinct Indian accent--is in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York, where the field of infinite possibilities is dwindling to a nettlesome one. His new best seller, the ""The Seven Spiritual Laws for Parents,'' is not on evident display. It is a karmic how-to manual (""Today we tell our children, "Don't say no--go with the flow' ''), and its lack of full frontal ubiquity is getting under the Armani of the BTE. This is a bad bit of broccoli in what he calls the ""quantum soup,'' the field of energy and information of which our material bodies are merely illusory space-time manifestations. And at the moment, a particular space-time manifestation whose name tag reads ""Eddie'' has little to offer in the way of enlightenment. ""I am the author,'' Chopra prods. Eddie taps dully at a computer and asks, ""That was Chopra, right?''

Deepak Chopra, M.D.--educator, author, lecturer, endocrinologist, Hollywood guru and scribe of the Playboy essay ""Does God Have Orgasms?''--is, by his own metaphysical lexicon, a manifestation of our collective conscious. In a culture that craves a spiritual, mind-body fix, he is a fixer: handsome, charismatic, an erudite amalgam of hard science and celestial seasonings, drawn selectively from the Vedic texts of ancient India. To his critics, he is a dabbler with an M.D., making millions by conflating sound medicine with New Age hoo-ha. But to the growing legions inside his tent, dissatisfied with the parental shadow of both mainstream religion and medicine, he is a gift: the Buddha as benevolent technocrat. A classic immigrant success story, he came to this country in 1970 as a Western-styled physician and conquered it as the credentialed point man--Lord of Immortality--for the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation movement. Since then he has sold more than 10 million books, in 30 languages. Now he wants to expand his reach: into movies, TV series, a spiritual cable channel, CDs, a chain of healing centers on which the sun would never set (graphic). And like many modern moguls, he has tapped a self-sustaining cycle where our anxieties and our media feed each other: after a 1993 appearance on ""Oprah,'' where he told viewers they didn't have to grow old, his book ""Ageless Body, Timeless Mind'' sold 130,000 copies in one day. ""It was a media-generated phenomenon,'' he says. From then on, he was golden.

To roll with Chopra for a couple of days is to enter a secret fraternity: baggage handlers, shoppers, nurses, attorneys, waitresses, students, maybe you, me--all game, apparently, to consider a universe that is something other than what their senses tell them it is. As Chopra writes in ""Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,'' ""In their essential state, our bodies are composed of energy and information, not solid matter ... [Y]ou can change your world--including your body--simply by changing your perception.'' His first lecture on this jaunt, in the small Canadian city of London (it's on the Thames), draws nearly 1,100, at $35 a head, which doesn't count the dozens who stop him on the street, in restaurants, in airport lounges. They are mostly female, mostly professional. Chopra immerses himself in them as in oxygen, courteously asking each for an address and promising to send a book. ""Women are more open,'' Chopra posits. ""And they're better healers.''

In a shopping mall in London, Chopra is explaining the connection between a journalist and his coffee cup. ""This is you,'' he says, pointing to the cup. ""You think it's a cup, but it isn't.'' Dressed in workout clothes, with no cell phone or watch, Chopra seems admirably at ease in the mall, so much so that he doesn't even check his placement at the bookstore. ""It's the conscious energy field that is manifesting as the cup and yourself. The same field.'' On the five-day ""silent'' retreats he takes every three months, sometimes with his wife, Rita, Chopra says he can actually see this field.

""I've never really explained this to anyone like this before,'' he says, launching into an explanation he appears to have delivered countless times. It is a careering ride through Shakespeare, Blake, the Songs of Solomon, Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Carl Sagan, the Persian poet Rumi, the Gospel According to John, Kafka, T. S. Eliot, ancient Vedic texts and a tumble of technical medical literature--from neuropeptides to the healing powers of meditation, in a single leap of faith. Largely through meditation, he says, we can live to 120, lower our blood pressure, control our weight, stave off stress-related illness. Or, as he writes in ""The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success,'' ""when your actions are motivated by love ... the surplus energy you gather and enjoy can be channeled to create anything that you want, including unlimited wealth.''