Spirituality and Ego: Thoughts on Deepak Chopra

My wife Kathy and I recently saw “Decoding Deepak,” the new movie about Deepak Chopra, made by his son Gotham Chopra. It’s well known that most spiritual teachings tell us that we have to go beyond the personal ego. In the movie, Deepak denies that his many books and his constant appearances on TV have anything to do with his ego. Gotham responds with a disbelieving snort, but his father concedes nothing on the point. Deepak is evidently convinced that his life is in line with what he teaches in his books.

Kathy and I both have major doubts about Deepak’s supposed lack of ego-involvement. These doubts are encouraged by our experience with our own high-energy, charismatic fathers. Like Deepak though on a smaller scale, our fathers fascinated many of the people they knew and met. Both of our fathers also had major, but usually well-hidden insecurities, which they dealt with by developing the charismatic personalities that fascinated people. They had certainly not gotten beyond the ego.

If I myself were beyond ego, I doubt I would be a writer. I would feel no need to share my experiences with people I don’t know face-to-face. I would trust the divine in the world to bring illumination to everyone when it’s appropriate. 

I have no inside knowledge of Deepak Chopra’s life or his relationships. I have a lot of sympathy with the broad lines of his Vedanta-based teaching, and I’m happy that he has directed many readers to Buddhism, Vedanta, Sufi mysticism, and so forth. But because of my experience of other charismatic people and of myself, I’m deeply skeptical about his claims to have no ego investment in his activities. The ego can express itself in people’s lives in ways that they themselves have little or no awareness of.

Because of this tricky nature of the ego, spiritual and psychological teachings that don’t address the ego in some detail seem to be asking for trouble. I don’t think you can truly go “beyond” the ego without first having a healthy one, to go beyond. Judging from this movie and from some acquaintance with his books, I doubt that Deepak Chopra has shown us how to do this.  

"Broken Open"

Around the internet, in academic and twelve-step meetings, and in churches, I've made an observation. The people who respond with sympathy to adumbrations of mysticism tend to be people who are or have been in love, or who have experienced some other major interruption of their normal lives—a health crisis, a bankruptcy—which (as we say) "broke them open." 

A skeptic might wonder whether people who are "broken open" have lost some of the reasoning powers that would otherwise make them suspicious of the apparently unreasonable claims that mysticism makes. (Namely, the claims that we are fundamentally one with each other, and one with God.) 

A mystic might suggest the opposite, that people who can't take mysticism seriously are prevented by their normal, healthy egos from seeing or feeling the "One-ness" that mystics talk about. Whereas experiences like falling in love, health crises, and bankruptcy break the normal ego down, and thus allow a person to perceive connections that the ego ordinarily obscures.

The other side of the coin of the healthy ego is shame. Like the healthy ego, shame too obscures the way we're one with each other and one with God. This is because shame, like the healthy ego, is self-centered. 

An ego is a valuable thing. It encourages us to resist being mistreated by others, to avoid mistreating ourselves, and so forth. Shame too is valuable, when it's for something that we should be ashamed of. 

But the ego and shame may at the same time obscure deeply important facts. When Dr. Eben Alexander writes that his discovery of cosmic love, during his coma, was "like being handed the rules to a game I'd been playing all my life without ever fully understanding it," those of us who've been "broken open" know what he's talking about.