Definition: Healing Power of the Mind

Healing Power of the Mind
Deepak Chopra is an Indian medical doctor and writer. He has written extensively on spirituality and diverse topics in mind-body medicine. He states that he has been influenced by the teachings of Vedanta and the Bhagavad Gita from his native India, and quantum physics. He also said that he has been profoundly influenced by the teachings of J Krishnamurti. His teachings have had a profound influence on the The New Thought Movement which has embraced him in the U.S .

Principal themes

Many of Chopra's themes and beliefs are stated in his first book, "Creating Health". He launched himself as a staunch advocate of the interconnection between mind and body, advocating meditation and self-awareness as primary factors in both illness and healing. He deepened these themes in "Quantum Healing" (1989), where he examined the mysterious phenomenon of spontaneous healing of cancer. Here he introduced quantum physics as a means of understanding the mind-body connection, arguing — as he would in many other books — that consciousness is the basic foundation of nature and the universe.

In "Perfect Health", Chopra authored the first widely read book on Ayurveda, the traditional system of Indian medicine. Besides outlining the Ayurvedic concept of body types (Prakriti), Chopra emphasizes that the roots of Indian healing lie in changing the holistic balance of mind and body.

Subsequent books have turned toward larger spiritual questions. In "How to Know God" and "The Book of Secrets" an argument is made for an all-pervasive intelligence that unites every living thing, rather than the traditional Western concept of God as a person, "a venerable white male sitting on a throne in the sky." Chopra sees God as a projection of human awareness, who becomes more expansive and universal as individual consciousness expands.

In his book "Life After Death: The Burden of Proof", he extends personal consciousness beyond the "artificial boundary that separates the living from the departed." Assessing the seven varieties of the afterlife espoused in world religions, Chopra offers the startling proposal that a person's awareness in the present shapes existence after death; that is, the afterlife is created uniquely for each of us by our present level of consciousness.

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