Oh Chopra, my Chopra

Here is a list of surprising things I discovered at the Deepak Chopra lecture I attended tonight. I only stayed for the first half, though I did not leave out of boredom, but out of fatigue. I actually wish I had stayed for the second half; I'm pretty sure that's when the enlightenment takes place. I am ashamed to admit I retained almost nothing that I could express to you in a way that will not sound foolish, but it entered me at a cellular level and maybe later I can reiterate it.

1. He's funny! I mean stand-up comedian funny. This is all about timing. He knows how to work a crowd.

2. He's not a Dr. Phil style megalomaniac giving away free nirvana with every lecture and throwing in a George Foreman grill if you buy his book. Or, if he is one, he hides it very well.

3. He quotes poetry! We got quotes from Blake, Whitman, Rumi and even Shakespeare in that hour...I liked a guy who uses intelligent poetry.

4. He's a medical doctor. I was amused by him saying something wry like, "Yes, you are trained as a doctor to understand life...by looking at dead bodies! Very practical."

5. He talks quantum physics, not pre-packaged eastern spirituality, which was the biggest surprise. I expected more spoon-fed buddhism, but it was more like layperson's quantum physics.

6. He delivers his lectures without notes. Not a single note. This lecture was three hours (I only caught 1.5 hours of it).

7. His accent is mesmerizing. I don't think I'm a vastly hypnotizable person, but if he was dangling the little pendulum, I think I'd go under in a second.

8. He reminded me of some of the principles I've been dabbling in all year, all of which got me reinvigorated in my spiritual practices, things like daily writing, meditation and keen awareness.

9. He talked about the soul in a way that did not make me cringe. He compared our soul to the "empty" space scientists have discovered exists between all other matter (matter, he says, is just energy and information, vibrating at different frequencies). The soul, he says is the space that, as physics is discovering, is just pure potentiality. It's a kind of no-matter/no-space that is unaffected by physical laws, and can neither die nor be born. It's just what came into being when everything came into being at the big bang. This just feels right.

10.So it goes to show you that if you eschew something because it's popular (ahem...guilty), sometimes you really are just missing out on something.