Chopra had a bad attack of Maru’s Syndrome on Twi**er yesterday. In tw**t on HIV/AIDS, he compounds his confusion:
Umm. . . I don’t think so: it worked for smallpox. If the virus is eliminated, PRESTO—No more AIDS, regardless of people’s lifestyles.
In another tw**t, Chopra mentions “unprotected sex” as a factor contributing to AIDS. If that’s not “concentrating on the pathogen,” I don’t know what is. This man is a practicing doctor, and claims to push a purely scientific view.
In the meantime, the deepities continue. What distresses me more than the fact that this clown thinks he has wisdom is the fact that many people (see the comments on the right) actually lap up that faux wisdom.
And a quiz. . .
Any ideas?
No idea, I’ll have to guess this one.
Is it a squirrel?
A formless void… That’s the best description ever of DC philosophy. Provided that a void can be gluey.
We are part of the whole. The host for the virus. The food for the worms. The micronutrients for the plants. We are part of an endless cycle of birth, death, and renewal. ‘Ramen.
Can I haz my Tw*tter followers now?
How would he explain the 200+ Cambodian villagers believed to have been infected with HIV by an unlicensed doctor reusing syringes? They would have been ok if the doctor had been “aware” he was acting immorally? Or if they had been “aware” of what he was doing and not taken the injections? Is he just being really “tricky” with how he uses “aware”?
It’s all too stupid for words.
My guess is that the nightjar is in the lower left hand corner, just to the left of the ‘D’ in Deepak.
This is the closest I’ve ever come to spotting that thing! Maybe I need more coffee…
The nightjar is wearing Bono’s sunglasses so I did not recognize him.
Yes, jeezus, that Positive Affirmation Poster seemed to invoke its own feelings of inadequacy. Could he have made it any harder to read? It’s confusing on even more levels than it needs to be.
Maybe that’s the point. It’s a tactic. By the time you’ve deciphered the actual words you’re feeling a rush of accomplishment. Now you’re on a roll.
The quiz answer is simple:
Cat evolution!
This defines ‘mash-up’.
“What can we take away from the eternal dance ….”
An order of Szechuan chicken, a little carton of steamed rice, and a couple of egg rolls would be nice.
We are *so* on the same wavelength!
Pork Chow Mien (#34) for this hibou.
That evolution needs death so get over it or we would still be single called bacteria!
Admittedly a guess, but I’d say Track 2 Side A Disc 3 “Boogie Wonderland.”
http://www.amazon.com/Eternal-Dance-Earth-Wind-Fire/dp/B000009RB7
Shining Star just played on my iTunes a few minutes ago.
“We are stardust” – I liked it much better when Joni Mitchell said that.
But are we golden? And why do we have to get ourselves back to the garden?
🙂 Some of my favorite lyrics.
Me, too! She even gets the science right in that one.
I’m terribly partial to the CSNY version, though – rockin’!
Mitchell and Carl Sagan, too.
🙂
And NdGT.
Since earlier he tweets:
“The imaginary being is you :)”
the answer is that we can take nothing since imaginary beings do not exist….unless you exist in the deepakiverse.
I knew the random Deepak generator would have the answer:
“Your body comprehends the flow of molecules.”
But being a skeptic, I needed a second opinion:
“Self power influences intrinsic brains.”
And a third:
“Innocence depends on the expansion of brightness.”
(The real answer? Chopra make it up as he goes along just like this eponymous generator.)
http://www.wisdomofchopra.com/
I think you have found the best answer(s). Even the great and powerful Oz (I mean Deepak; the doctor is another problem) could not argue with it.
That’s brilliant! It would work for Heidegger, too…
It told me “mice are birds.”
At that point, my coworker and I realized we’d been playing with it far too long.
The question is whether I should leave the quotes as they are, or add extra off-color bits?
I think the mystery word that deepak is looking for is sex. It is far too simple for his goofy mind but if he would just check out a book on biology he might discover it. And that dance between birth and death – that would be life.
Quantum sex?
Unfortunately our species will always have to contend with our production of snake oil salesmen…..
‘…the eternal dance between life and death.’? A finite infinitude, according to Wideepakia. x
What can we take away from it?
MONEY!!! Money, money, money, money / muh-knee! All from bilking the well-meaning and desperate.
Unless he means ‘what can we take away from it when we die?’, in which case the answer is ‘bugger-all, besides an expensive burial’. And even then his family’ll probably use the money on a well-deserved holiday. I know I would. Imagine having that pillock around every thanksgiving.
A duck!
She turned me into a newt
Comment #14 suggests a test. Randomly mix Deepakities with random Deepak generated statements. Have subjects identify which statements are true Deepakities. Two sets of subjects could be compared: Deepak followers and a random population. It would also be of interest to see how many statements Deepak himself could correctly identify.
I love that idea. Why don’t you politely tweet it to him? If he genuinely stands by his statements and believes that they are intelligible, as opposed to tossed off semantic spaff, he’d accept. We all know he’ll wriggle out of it of course, but as long as it’s politely offered to him I don’t see how he can refuse without looking like a shyster. Your test is essentially identical to the ones conducted on astrologers and their forecasts.
Many spiritual ‘guides’ emphasize that they are only guiding — the real work is going to be done by YOU. You will find the meaning, you will discover the connections, only you will be capable of interpreting what the Universe sends you. Their role is to work only as a conduit or prompt: they are far too modest and humble to claim any wisdom or power for themselves. Oh, no, dear me, no.
It’s the classic dodge of the cold reader but it works. It would even work with Chopra’s Wise Words of Woo. He could and probably would patiently explain that if someone sees meaning even in randomly-generated gibberish there was nothing ‘random’ about it. The cosmos knows what people need to inspire them. What happened was also magic, also wise, also beyond the material capacity to explain.
They don’t just need to wheel this one out to explain a failed test, you know. They’ll proudly use it to avoid testing in the first place.
And how many statements are actually more coherent than the typical Deepakity, and there will likely be many. You could literally splice random bits of fortune cookie slips together and get more poignant sayings.
And this tweet BTW is a uniquely tortured one: what do we take away? Meaning, what do we learn? or what shall we remove from the process to frustrate it? The dance of birth & death? Would that refer to the dance of the two forces, the “circle of life” in nature? Or the timeframe between the two events, which we call “life”? And is it really the dance itself that makes “all of creation possible”? “Creation” might be less sustainable if no living things died, but would the physical universe literally not exist if creatures were immortal? or were never born at all? Does he really think the lifecycle of organisms drives the formation of stars? or is it just that the organization and rearrangement of inanimate matter is akin to ecology?
A Buddhist koan is effective because the statement is simple and syntactically correct, so the punchline (that our experience is an illusion, for example) does not get stepped on – and its power resides in undermining the ego which resists mindfulness and living “in the now.” Deepakities have the exact opposite objective and affect: vague nonsense onto which the credulous can project their own biases, thereby rewarding them for holding onto mistaken impressions of reality.
Whatever. He’s entitled to make a living. I Would add his work to “laws” and “sausages” (and their respective forms of “pig killing”) on the list of “things I’d just as soon not see.”
Speaking of fortune cookies: My family likes to say “on the toilet….(read the fortune from the cookie)while reading out our fortunes at a restaurant (or if kids aren’t around: “in my bedroom….” It’s always more meaningful this way.
Let’s see: “on the toilet we are stardust beings …..”
“On the toilet focusing only on the pathogen and not the total context of disease will never eliminate it.”
Yeah works pretty well here too.
And as bored church attenders as kids, we used to say “between the sheets”. For example, “the blood of the lamb between the sheets”.
Ice-cream koan?
That is one tasty pun! Ice cream koans are fine, but until you try a zensicle, you haven’t tasted nothing!
An ice cream koan: The Buddha licked ice cream for forty-nine years but his tongue never moved.
A bit like a Turing test, eh?
I doubt whether there would be any detectable difference. Where do you suppose Deepak gets his deepities from in the first place? 😉
You can dance till eternity if you want. Might be some fun in that. What he can take away is money. Lots of money. He’s been doing this dance for quite a long time now.
Can’t you just see Deepak dance a la a belly dancer, pole dancer or male strip dancer with
money tucked around his ample belly?!He may
dance into the cosmos, but I think his money will do him very little good there.
Just out of interest, how many Salon articles have there been that lay into Deepak and the very real dangers of some of his ideas?
“What can we take away from the eternal dance between birth & death that makes all of creation possible?”
1. I don’t know, but we better give it back.
2. If this dance is eternal, I am going to need new shoes.
Re no. 2: ‘They shoot horses, don’t they?’
i think what we take away at the end is…. death? yeah. think that’s it. happened to everyone so far.
birth too. yeah. birth and death. profound.
Man, woman, birth, death, infinity.
(Some here will recognize that.)
Confabulation – a psychological term for unorganized, rambling responses. Also known as bullsh!t.
or Palinese
The “We are stardust” graphic is just horrible.
This must be the dance of the dancer who reaches ecstatic apotheosis in the form of a baby born with AIDS because of “[t]heir own interpretations of the whole reality they’re participating in.” My command of invective is woefully inadequate to the task of expressing how I feel about this sleazy, vicious, morally bankrupt huckster.
“What can we take away from the eternal dance between birth & death that makes all of creation possible?”
We could do without Deepities! Mr Deep End is not required either, although he probably thinks the opposite.
I don’t have the best understanding of immunology, but even I know that if germ theory wasn’t accurate that antibiotics and vaccines wouldn’t be effective.
We can take away much after birth, but death ends the taking. I’ve taken away that Deepak is a credulous fool, but after death, I won’t know about him anymore, which is a relief.
Deep poetry from someone going off the Deep end.
Goodbye, Chopra. Hope you enjoy the Ziprasidone you’ll be receiving shortly.
This is a classic deepity because it’s either true but trivial …. or extraordinary but false. Then the two are blended together.
Of COURSE “focusing only on the pathogen” and avoiding context is useless idiocy if one visualizes this as treating disease by spritzing poison onto the microscope slide with the nasty nasty bug on it. Which is the implication.
No scientist has failed to consider the way the pathogen spreads in the body and in the population, the effects and side-effects, the entire relevant history of the patient including diet, smoking, job, family history, etc. Developing a treatment can even involve explorations in evolution. The image of the narrow materialist scientist trying to eliminate disease by blindly giving each patient in line a germ-killing toxin is a Straw Man.
But that’s not what Chopra means. He means that the root cause of disease is spiritual weakness of some sort. Which is not true. But mix it up with the idea that any version of “big picture” thinking is anti-mainstream-science and the stupid interpretation gains automatic credibility.
It’s that last paragraph that outlines probably the biggest problem I have with Chopra – he sells books by blaming the victim. If you just live life as he describes, you will never get sick.
He is the best example it’s not true. The lies he pedals to make money should be poisoning him, body and mind. The quantity of that poison should have killed him long ago. Physically, he no doubt has a healthy lifestyle, which is keeping him in good shape.
One of the ways New Thought proponents (who think all negative occurrences whatsoever happen because of guilt, fear, resentment, negative thoughts, and/or believing that they can happen) dodge the accusation of ‘victim-blaming’ is to simply seem to shift the blame.
“Find the bullies in your past who made you feel so bad you gave yourself cancer. See how I’m not blaming you?” They therefore approach the medical victim like a trauma victim. Poor negative thinker, made that way by meanies. If you can’t think the cancer away that’s really their fault. They convinced you that you have no real power even though you do.
It’s one of the reasons they can pull this crap and still seem like they’re so empathetic and compassionate.
Anyone who thinks they’re important is usually just a pompous moron who can’t deal with his or her own pathetic insignificance and the fact that what they do is meaningless and inconsequential.
William Thomas, US athlete
I just checked the comment I posted on the YouTube Channel (see No. 24 from Jerry’s piece on Chopra yesterday). It hasn’t been deleted, and many other people are also posting comments slamming the video.
“Moonspirit1” who posted the video has this to say, “I’m just bewildered by all these highly intelligent comments! (not)” Sadly, I don’t the almost universal negative comments have had any affect on her admiration of Chopra.
As has been observed on this site before, once people have bought into an idea, it’s hard for them to let it go, whatever the evidence that it’s false.
The Koolaid is tasty (and the purple kind is the best!).
“What can we take away..”
Deepy is always looking for a bargain..
If life is an eternal dance you had better have the correct footwear? or marry a podiatrist.
That creation is not discrimnatory in who it lets talk and fill in space.
Some medical school gave that clown a degree? Where does he practice and what’s his specialty so I can stay far away?
Atoms. We take away atoms. Stardust. 🙂
You know those two examples people usually trot out as comparisons for how dopey it is to not accept evolution?:
1. Gravity
2. The germ theory of disease
Guess what, the Deepakster doesn’t believe in the germ theory of disease. That’s what a (paleolithic) tool he is.
Anyone who has lived through the history of AIDS from San Francisco days to the present, has lost friends, family and loved ones to this terrible disease. I get so tired of Deephole blaming the individual for the disease and speaking his idiocies. Deepak’s parents should have used some absolute means of “protected sex” before he was born. Would, perhaps, have saved us from his Deepakitous drivel. Send him out into the cosmos now, anywhere away from us where we don’t have to hear him.
“hidden meaning creates unparalleled boundaries”
-wisdomofchopra
I’m sorry. Is that an actual Deepakity? Or just insanely clever satire on your part? It’s like a koan of a koan. I’m breathless.
I went to wisdomofchopra.com and it was the first sentence it generated. It was too good not to share!