Deepak Chopra: February 2009 Archives

The government is trying to solve the problem of toxic assets that have infected America's biggest banks. But apparently it hasn't disinfected its own toxic asset -- political ideology. It was ideology that made House Republicans vote against the first bailout in September, a bailout proposed by their own party. Ever since, the same ideological stubbornness has led to constant obstruction of any Democratic-endorsed plan to end the economic meltdown. Since time is of the essence, it's a race between history and ideology at this point. Hanging over us is the memory of the Great Depression, when Republican obstruction was a constant, year after year, no matter how dire the economy became.

What is ideology, and why does it have such a tight grip on the mind?

In its simplest form, ideology is group think. Neocons on the right think alike, as do liberals on the left. Each has an ideology. The problem is that group think can become so rigid that it forbids actual thinking, which needs to be open and flexible. We hear euphemisms like "philosophy," "tradition," and "mind set" that cloud the problem and make it hard for people to admit that they are victims of rigid ideology. Many Republicans feel that they are opposing every rescue plan that involves government spending because it isn't part of their philosophy to be big spenders. This flies in the face of reality, however. Ronald Reagan tripled the national debt, and the past eight years under George Bush repeated the feat through runaway spending led by House Republicans.

The key point is that a philosophy opens your eyes to reality, while an ideology blinds you to reality. When ideology gains power, it forces blindness on others. North Koreans are starving but must still worship their benefactor, the "dear leader," or else. (This recalls the Soviet Union seventy years ago, when starving Russians lived in "a workers' paradise" and the mass murderer Stalin was benign "Uncle Joe.") It becomes habitual for ideologues to turn suffering into a false rosy picture. Thus Iraq was touted by neocons as a fledgling democracy when in reality it was a killing ground for hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.

Ideology freezes the mind. It substitutes a dogma for rational thought, and the dogma cannot be shaken. At this moment, free-market ideologues are unshakably wedded to permanent tax cuts that would beggar future government programs. Michael Steele, chairman of the Republican Party, absurdly declared that government has never created a single job. To an outsider, these are irrational lapses of the mind, but they are symptoms of a fixed ideology. If your dogma tells you that government is bad while creating jobs is good, then like a mathematical formula, government never creates jobs. How can bad create good?

The toxic asset of ideology, when masked by power, can force dissenters to keep quiet. But by extending a hand to the right wing, President Obama is doing more than promoting bipartisanship. He's running a reality check. So far, the Republicans have stuck to their ideology in the face of dire need in the country. They are turning the free market into a morality-free market. The suffering of ordinary citizens demands as a duty that government relieve that suffering. The moral choice couldn't be clearer. But the embattled Republican minority feels that its only chance for survival is to wish failure on the stimulus, the rescue, the bailout, and Obama's administration in general. There is another alternative, however. The right wing could actually help in restoring hope and prosperity to the shattered economy. To do that would mean abandoning, or at least altering, their ideology. Blindness isn't the only way to live, but it is if you refuse to open your eyes.

Published in the San Francisco Chronicle

The Bhagavad Gita says "the course of karma is unfathomable." And so it is.
In Sanskrit the word karma means action. Sanskrit provides a precise vocabulary for this abstract field that can help us navigate through it with more assurance. Every action creates an experience, and the memory of that experience is referred to as samskara. They are the mental impressions or patterns formed by repeated experience. These are seeds of memories both in our personal and collective consciousness a s a result of past experiences. As samskaras aggregate and combine with each other, they generate what are called vasanas . These are the latent tendencies for future actions. They are attitudes, inclinations and the seeds of desire. It would be fair to say that karma, memory, and desire are the software of our soul as it travels through cosmic time. The Samskaras and vasanas are the applications that our thoughts and action writes. The output or display of this process is referred to as samsara the wheel of time. It is like playing a computer game that continues to direct, limit, and reinforce our choices based on our past decisions. Time plays out like a wheel, going around and around, repeating the same patterns again and again.
A very simple way to interpret karma is that it is conditioned response, the past influencing the circumstances of the present as well as our tendencies to act in conditioned patterns of behavior. We become bundles of conditioned reflexes constantly triggered by people and circumstances into predicted outcomes. Hence karma is considered to be a prison, a bondage. The goal of the spiritual journey is to escape the prison of karma and bring about the true response of our soul which is creativity. The more creative and unpredictable our response to the world, the more we are aligned with the creator of the universe. That's why the freedom that arises from transcending karma is referred to as liberation or moksha. In knowing our true essence beyond time, space, and causality, we become free of the wheel of samsara.
Frequently when people refer to karma, they ask "Does karma imply a deterministic universe?" The answer seems to be that the universe is simultaneously deterministic and creative. Where we fit in on this immense landscape depends on our state of consciousness. The freer our consciousness is, the more freedom of choice we experience. In the state of avidya (ignorance) we function deterministically, in the state of vidya (enlightenment) we have infinite creativity or choice. Although the past determines the circumstances of the present, the choices we make in the present are a function of our state of awareness. The more awake we are, the more unconditioned and creative our responses to those circumstances will be.

The Vedic seers made distinctions between different types of karma. The first type is called sanchita karma. This constitutes the entire database of all our past actions. And because the seers did not look on human existence as limited to one physical lifetime, they understood sanchita karma as the vast stockpile of karma that encompasses countless lifetimes in our past.
The second type of karma, prarabdha karma, is the particular actions that are programmed to be experienced in this lifetime. Prarabdha karma is actually a subset of sanchita karma in that it represents a small fraction of the karma from the pile of sanchita karma that is activated and ready to be experienced during the span of a lifetime. It is like taking a plateful of food from the kitchen for your meal--there is a lot more food in the kitchen to be eaten, but one plateful is all that is served up and ready to be eaten and it is all you need at this time and place. These two types of karma represent past actions that will have consequences in our present and future circumstances. This is the part of karma that feels like fate and determinism.
Kriyamana karma is action that we create in the moment. It is the choices we make in our life now--what socks we put on in the morning, or what salad we order at lunch. Agama karma is the action of planning in the future. It is about the goals and intentions we have for what we want to happen in the future. Both kriyamana and agama karmas are actions that represent our creativity and it is the action feels free and undetermined.
But all these aspects of karma blend into each other as well. The free choices we make now, then go to become our determined karma in the future. We can also perform spiritual actions now that modify or transcend the binding influence of our past actions. When we experience our non-local Self , the Atman, in meditation we awaken that inner essence that is beyond the influence of time, space, and karma. So even though we think and act in the world of karma, we are no longer identified with it and therefore our Self is no longer bound to it. Also, as the silent witness or sakshi¸ develops over time through meditation, simply being aware of our karmic patterns or vasanas, will gradually dissolve their intensity and grip on us, and thus more creativity and choice is available to us under whatever circumstances we find ourselves in.
Finally, we can use the tool of sankalpa or intention, in order to create new karmic patterns in our consciousness that will be supportive of our spiritual freedom, instead of enmeshing us in samsara further.
Karma is a prison to the soul, but the action of spiritual practice is karma that can liberate us from it as well. The Bhagavad Gita also says "yoga is skillful karma." If we learn to act from Self-awareness, every action is an act of creativity and freedom.

What can we do when one man's Paradise is another man's brutal dictatorship? This question faces the world once again with regard to Pakistan. It was announced on February 16th that the Pakistani government had reached an agreement with the pro-Taliban insurgents in the turbulent northwest region of that country. In exchange for peace, the government agreed to institute Shariah law, based on Islamic principles of jurisprudence.

The news sent a shudder through much of the world, even among those who fervently extend respect and good will toward Islam. Although the Pakistani government tried to put a good face on it, calling the agreement essentially a technicality (apparently there has always been a statue that prohibits any law that contradicts the Koran), it's obvious that the rebels were winning. With 3,000 fighters in the mountainous Swat Valley, the main area of conflict, the pro-Taliban forces were vastly outnumbered by 12,000 army soldiers. But as so often happens, guerilla tactics had the upper hand over tanks, trucks, and artillery. The rebels were merely gaining official sanction for the stranglehold they already have in the region.

Why does Paradise enter into this uneasy truce? When they seized control in Afghanistan, the Taliban declared that they were turning it into an Islamic Paradise. The implications of that term are now being repeated in Pakistan: denial of all women's rights, including medical care and education, the destruction of girls' schools, public beheading of offenders against the faith, without trial. Already the rebels have forbidden dancing, watching television, and the shaving of beards. In exchange for an end to the insurgency, the Pakistani government has consigned a once-mainstream area of the country to a forced regression back to medievalism.

The world found this to be an intolerable state of affairs in Afghanistan a decade ago, but without the 9/11 attacks, no country was willing to intervene. Now the dilemma has multiplied in difficulty. Pakistan is an ally who doesn't want American military intervention. It possesses nuclear weapons and a weak regime increasingly powerless in the face of extremism. President Obama's promise to find and capture Osama bin Laden is basically nullified now that the region where he is likely to be hiding has officially become a de facto Taliban province.

I've laid this grim situation out in order to pose the question: When oppression strikes, is there an alternative to military intervention? The unilateral invasion that the Bush administration engineered in Afghanistan isn't an option here and has proved a failure in any case. Nor can we ignore the outside destabilization that allowed extremists to arise in the first place. The basic issue is whether the moral outrage of the non-Islamic world has more right on its side than the general approval (or passive acquiescence) of hundreds of millions of Muslims. They are in uneasy accord with the Taliban's Paradise. This is an acute case of the post-colonial dilemma. The unlawfulness of colonial rule doesn't escape the mind of any Arab; therefore, insistence from the West that Muslims must change their ways -- including Shariah law -- creates resistance, anger, and intransigence.

Nor is this a case where negotiation holds any short-term promise. It is a cultural belief among Muslims, going back many centuries, that religious law and medieval social norms should be honored and upheld over any incursion from non-believers. The educated elite in Muslim countries are Westernized, yet they pay lip service to the rule of mullahs, ayatollahs, and clerics in general (the Taliban holds itself to be a clerical reform movement, "reform" meaning the extirpation of secular modernism).

Thus the Muslim world stands between two stools. The vast majority lead lives steeped in modern amenities like electricity, television, cars, antibiotics, etc. But spiritually there is a yearning for a long-lost and largely mythical Paradise in which the Prophet's every word is reality. Today each of us must ponder this dilemma as uneasily as past history pondered slavery, imperialism, fascism, and militant Communism. What to do? Our only tools are negotiation, humane entreaty by the UN, persuasion, moral witness, patience, and a change in consciousness. In the long run, the trend has always been to benefit and uphold tolerance over intolerance, freedom over oppression, and common humanity over inhumanity. But the long run can seem like an eternity, and it does no good for the innocent citizens held in the vicious grip of extremists.

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