When reader Ant sent me a link to this tw**t by Deepak, I realized that I had no choice but to post it, for, like all of us, I lack free will. But if I need to confabulate, I have no choice but to add that Deepak’s lucubrations are a very reliable source of amusement.
Check out this nice Deepity which Chopra uses to tout his new book The Future of God—and he’s been touting furiously all over social media. The Amazon summary:
Can God be revived in a skeptical age? What would it take to give people a spiritual life more powerful than anything in the past? Deepak Chopra tackles these issues with eloquence and insight in this book. He proposes that God lies at the source of human awareness. Therefore, any person can find the God within that transforms everyday life.
Umm. . . .I think Chopra has a problem with the word “know” (and maybe “mystical”, too).
…and the dog god lies at source of dog awareness, and the cat god at the source of cat awareness, and …
What does that even mean? To dream the impossible dream?
It’s a song from Man of LaMancha, that’s all I know.
What he’s clearly trying to say is:
“Experiential truth corresponds to unbridled bliss”.
I interpret that to mean:
“Self power is inside objective brightness”
I hope this has left you with a deepker understanding that transforms your every day life.
You realy must stop playing with that website and get some work done!
It’s mildly funny, not one of his better pearls of spiritual mumbo jumbo. Still, those of us who are on Tw***er should have some fun with the #FutureofGod hashtag.
It’s more pathetic than amusing, but really shows the kind of phony equivalence between science and spirituality that Chopra is trying to foist on the public.
On a more serious note: Why is Copra allowed to run infomercials on PBS !?! Selling snake oil on publicly funded TV is disgusting.
Yes I know they aren’t funded properly any more and need new revenue sources, but at least ShamWow’s work! (arnt a total sham?)
ShamWow then would be a much better name for Deepak’s “product.”
ShamWoo?
Even better. 😀
Nice, microraptor !
But wait, there’s more!
Call now and we’ll double your order!
Nah…Chopra’s woo isn’t fake; it’s very much real woo.
b&
Wait a minute… Maybe knowing that the Earth moves IS mystical. Maybe all knowing is mystical.
Dr Who can feel it moving.
Just saying.
Miss Tickle made my Earth move, once upon a time.
More chopralites, I see. x
There’s a chopraphage born every minute!
That’s good in so many senses. I mean, there’s the obvious one, of course, then the straight reading, then the “lite” implication…
The “h” in Chopra is silent, ans the “a” is a typo for an “o”.
So let me get this straight. God completely transcends our puny understanding, which is why it is impossible to define, and attempts to do so (esp. by atheists/agnostics) are doomed to relegate the definer as an unsophisticated boob.
But then on the other hand, *knowing* God is not mystical. (i.e. does not transcend our understanding whatsoever).
This is very, very deep stuff. The picture is quite apt, too. It looks kind of like a road to nowhere. Or perhaps a road that takes one off the deep end.
Where’s Butter?
The little dear is at the back window absolutely howling his brains out at the rival kittehs. …seems to be nothing mystical about his behavior: proclaiming his territorial imperative (both of his land, and that his human is taken).
Video or it didn’t happen.
…and right on cue, the scoundrel plunks down and goes nappy-time. Grr.
You’ll have to start wearing a body cam.
I hope that Deepak remembered recompense the owner of that picture for his use of it.
The unpredictable quiets descriptions of choices.
Quick question,bit off topic. Why do you use tw**t? Why the asterisks?
On this site it is d*gs and bl*gs and tw**ts. Local dialect.
Our host has his q**rks that we learn to accommodate. I am starting to think that when it comes to tw**ts, he may some day go over to the dark side.
Okay, I thought maybe it was to trip up a search engine Web crawler or something. Like writing out an email as Bill AT Hotmail DOT com.
More like the Jewish “G*d”.
/@
Yes. It is my understanding that the *’s are a spin-off of there being a prohibition against writing the name of g*d. So it extends to other prohibited things.
One day I will without thinking put an * in a comment at a different web site. Only then will I realize eternal bliss and be as one with the spiritual mind of the internet.
‘Ramen.
No, they are ugly words, that’s all. Abominations.
🌍
Is it just me, or is this horribly written and hard to understand? How about…
I mean, it’s still crap, but I can parse it.
and now that I read it again, I don’t think “that” needs to be there, so…
Again, still crap. But readable crap.
I can simplify it even more: “Knowing God isn’t any more mystical than knowing that the earth moves.”
Yes, even better!
Very clear. Too clear. When you are clear like that something has to give. Deepness, sophistication.
Fortunately it is only the superficial type of deepness and sophistication, that relies on the ingorance of the audience, that suffers with increased clarity.
Genuine deepness and sophistication relies on just the opposite. It relies on the audience coming to a clear understanding of some amazing aspect of reality.
Even shorter:
“‘Knowing God’ is ridiculous.”
Wait a minute, stand by and Deepak will tell us who moves the earth.
Everything Chopra says is what Sam Harris calls woo woo.
Unprovable useless nonsense. Does anybody know the number of books that Chopra will end up selling?
It reminds me of that terrible book called the secret that was put out a while ago.
More woo woo.
There should be some kind of Surgeon General’s warning printed on the side of books like this……
“The surgeon General warns you that this book contains woo woo and may cause uncontrollable laughter and brain rot.
Anyone remember that old ad jingle: Woo woo Welches?
He proposes that God lies at the source of human awareness.
(Poorly) masking his fundamental proposition – that money in your pocket does him no good.
To paraphrase the old Ferengi saying: intellectual honesty and an empty sack are worth the sack.
I have a sneaking agreement with Chopra … more on the nature of consciousness rather than the associated gobbledygook.
If it is physical processes that result in consciousness then fair enough … If we counter point it with Susan Blackmore’s “Am I conscious now?” where she comes to the conclusion she is not … and by my extrapolation nothing is.
Isn’t nothing is conscious and everything is conscious two sides of the same coin?
No
I read all of the sample material on Amazon. It certainly is Deepak at his wooiest…
I posted a review under the name “John Schneider”. Go see it for some lolz.
I love “stream-of-lack-of-consciousness.”
😀
If there’s nothing mystical about knowing God then it must be really galling to Deepak Chopra that his books are found in the – gasp! – spirituality section of the bookstore. The Future of God is obviously “Earth Science” I mean it’s rght there in the title.
His arrogance is astonishing! Aren’t there a lot of people who are into spirituality specifically for the mysticism? He claims to be “reviving God” (also arrogant, like the creator of the universe needs reviving), but he is putting the lie to the best part of the goddy stuff! If there’s nothing mystical to faith – no magic, no awe, no mystery – WTF is it good for?
This is hijacking awe and wonder for the purpose of slipping nonsense past people’s radars. No wonder atheists are treated as strident philistines; we’re not wearing badges proving that we can feel these “uplifting” emotions that apparently you can only get in strength if you buy into a spiritual life.
Pah! I would like to ridicule and expose this mind trickery to its victims as the embarrassing, snobbish garbage that it is. This uplifting of religion and spirituality as some sort of bastion of virtue and goodness implies that the non-religious and non-spiritual are lacking in this area. It is just another form of elitism. No wonder dysfunctional societies are more prone to religiosity.
I agree. In addition to it being just another form of elitism, it is a primary feature of religion. It is the way they establish and justify, among themselves, how and why they are special compared to outsiders.
I’m having a difficult time distinguishing this blurb of Chopra’s from fake viagra spam….
b&
How do you know they are fake?
Anyway, Deepak has the opposite effect.
Because they’re selling prescription medication without a prescription? Once you’ve put yourself on the hook for that serious a crime, it’s stupid to waste money selling an expensive drug for, I’m sure, much less than MSRP.
b&
To know: God is no more.
Mystical, knowing that…
The earth moves.
Nicely parsed.
/@
I think for Deep, that writing a book is no more mystical than having a bowel movement.
And the end product is very similar …
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LOL!
Isn’t “the earth moves” an euphemism for sexual ecstasy? Just asking…
That’s what Miss Tickle told me.
“He proposes that God lies at the source of human awareness”
All evidence indicates that my “awareness” is due to my material brain. Therefore, my brain is God. Now, all you heathens bow before the God that is my brain!
Oh wait, you all have material brains too. So, should we all be worshiping each others brains? Of course another possibility is that god(s) are just a concept produced by material brains and have no connection to external reality.
Of course as we have recently learned whether the earth moves is really just a matter of relativity.
Gee, since he can’t use the word “quantum” correctly, I see no reason why one should expect him to use “mystical” correctly.
It is always a sign of bad thinking when one redefines words to other than their ordinary meaning !*especially when not admitting you are doing it.*! (I’ll give Karen Armstrong limited credit for openly stating she is using a different definition of “God”.)
The psychologist Edmund Cohen calls this “logocide”.
Now when Carole King sings “I Feel the Earth Move Under My Feet”, well from a certain POV that really could be mystical! 🙂
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGdyMgvRNEg
“To know God isn’t mystical any more than knowing that…”
Well, Deepak could’ve chosen many ways of finishing that (ungrammatical) sentence. But he chose one which I think is particularly misguided (as I said in my email to Jerry).
We’ve discussed how we know that the Earth moves in a couple of recent posts. But it seems very natural for people to have assumed that the Sun went around the Earth rather than the Earth was rotating. And does anybody even today know that the Earth moves in the same personal, intuitive, revelatory way that they “do” when they say they know God?
Even Galileo “Eppur si muove” Galilei didn’t have conclusive evidence that he was right. Neither the Earth’s orbiting the Sun or its diurnal rotation were proven until the eighteenth century. It took a lot of effort be many people over many, many years for us to know that the Earth moves (and how, and why).
So, Deepak’s not-very-deepity denigrates generations of scientists.
Which I find deeply insulting.
But I shan’t punch him.
/@
But will you join with me in farting in his general direction?
b&
He’s hardly worth the gas.
/@
That’s basically all he’s composed of….
b&
The Spiritual have a love/hate relationship with “faith.” On the one hand they adore the idea of knowing things through special means, a privileged epistemic stance which leaves the poor, benighted skeptics in the dust.
But on the other hand they recognize that our modern understanding of faith is only invoked in response to skepticism and doubt — and it used to be unknown (or so they believe.) Ancient and primitive cultures didn’t bother dividing their world into the natural and the supernatural, the sacred and profane. The fact that ancestor spirits watched over you and neighbors could kill your yam crop by using the Evil Eye was as obvious and unquestioned as dark clouds leading to rain or mountains being high. These were all truths available through simple experience. They weren’t particularly remarkable. It is known.
Encountering tribes which believed different things simply meant that different areas had different rules. Or that the gods had different rules for that tribe than for yours. Still no need for faith: all the beliefs fit into a harmonious whole.
The Spiritual and New Age are very envious of that simple-minded type of belief system. Faith is an evolved immunizing strategy to protect you from doubt — and doubt comes from modern life and the modern mindset. New Agers (and a lot of the more traditional believers) yearn for what they believe to be the natural state we were meant to live in. They wax nostalgic for the certainties of childhood and the ancient past, a place in their mind where there is no such thing as faith because God or Spirit is so close that you can no more doubt its existence than you can doubt your own.
Chopra is both trying to use “human awareness” as evidence for God AND as a manifestation of God itself. Back and forth, forth and back, until the need to go beyond the evidence is meaningless. YOU are the evidence. He then rests the case that never needed to be made.
It will be like in the old days, when nobody questioned, nobody doubted, reality was unified and all was holistic and harmonious.
I think it’s time to adapt Mary McCarthy’s description of Lillian Hellman:
“every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’ .. “
The feud between McCarthy and Hellman was turned into an amusing musical stage play by Nora Ephron called “Imaginary Friends” in the early 2000s.
One wonders if one could make a good stage play about the disputes between Chopra and Harris/Shermer/Randi et al.
More info about that play here.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2002/12/imagining_enemies.single.html
Crazy name, crazy guy.
Well, I think that’s the one thing we can’t hold against him…it’s just ethnic, don’t you think?
Yeah — you should see what “dzhim bob” means in Sanskrit!
/@
Every time I see something written by Deepak, I think of this.
Umm, shouldn’t someone tell the Pope and all the other religious leaders that they can retire now? Like, Deepak has taken over responsibility for G*d from now on. So they can all save themselves the bother of writing sermons and suchlike and just link to Deepick’s Tw*tter feed.
Reminds me when we had a philosopher explain a new agey book on God to us. When we asked if the definition of God was ‘The Universe’ (’cause it seemed that was what the person was getting at), he replied “Ummm…not really.”