His notions for how to tap into the power of coincidence and into the intelligence of the body don’t exactly fit with the conventional views in Western culture. But they certainly are intriguing. To offer an unconventional lens through which to view the world of business, Context Editor-in-Chief Paul Carroll and Managing Editor Pegeen Hopkins recently sat down with Chopra to have him explain some of his provocative ideas.
 

CONTEXT: Many people say technology is antispiritual. Do you agree?

DEEPAK CHOPRA: Actually, technology is the best thing we have right now. It will give us more clues about the connections among the mind, body, and spirit than any spiritual tradition ever has.

Biotechnology, in particular, gives us insight into the intelligence within our bodies. For instance, I am wearing a watch that tells me my current pulse rate, as well as my average pulse rate since I woke up this morning. The tool tells how many calories I expended in my workout and how many I am expending now. It also tells me when I am stressed. Having that information at my fingertips is enormously helpful, because I can manage my health better.

CONTEXT: Do we know yet how what happens in our minds translates into physical conditions or problems?

CHOPRA: We are starting to. The interactions between the mind and body can be measured by tracking the electrical field around a person’s heart when he is asked to think about specific things. Ask someone to think of a business competitor, and the field will vary noticeably from what it is when he thinks about someone he loves.

Recent cardiology research shows that more people in industrialized countries die on Monday at 9:00 a.m. from heart attacks than at any other time during the week. It is an extraordinary accomplishment for which only the human species can take credit because, presumably, no other animal knows the difference between Monday and Tuesday and develops stress as it thinks about returning to work.

The truth is that the body responds contextually to everything that happens in the mind. The mind doesn’t have a specific location in the body. It isn’t just in the brain.

If you say, “I have a gut feeling about such and such,” you aren’t speaking metaphorically. The phrase is rooted in science. The cells in your gut make the same peptides that your brain makes when it has ideas. You probably can trust your gut cells even more, because they haven’t yet evolved to the stage where they doubt their own thinking.

I once interviewed Masaru Ibuka, founder and chairman of Japan’s Sony Corp. [www.sony.com], who was supposed to have great business instincts. I asked him, “What is the secret of your success?” He said he had a ritual. Preceding a business decision, he would drink herbal tea. Before he drank, he asked himself, “Should I make this deal or not?” If the tea gave him indigestion, he wouldn’t make the deal. “I trust my gut, and I know how it works,” he said. “My mind is not that smart, but my body is.”

We can use our entire bodies as instruments, or fields, of intelligence, rather than simply relying on just our minds, or what we think of as our minds.

CONTEXT: How can people use your ideas to be better leaders?

CHOPRA: I have asked all kinds of people, from corporate executives to heads of state, “How did you get where you are?” They all said, “I happened to be at the right place at the right time.” That is a very interesting answer.

There are many people with extraordinary talent, who have access to the same information. Many are disciplined, have ambitions, and work hard, but some reach the pinnacle of success while others don’t. The achievements depend on something.

I think much of success is embodied in this idea of being in the right place at the right time, which I call synchrodestiny. People need to understand that such a thing exists and even that it could be a learned practice.

CONTEXT: You have a whole set of principles related to synchrodestiny, but I would like to zero in on two. First, can you spend a minute talking about the importance of archetypes?

CHOPRA: Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Jung expressed the idea beautifully. He said our unconscious motivations lie in kind of a mythical world, and we are motivated by mythical needs. A hostile corporate takeover is nothing other than the Argonauts seeking the Golden Fleece. Climbing Mount Everest is like Icarus flying toward the sun. We all enact mythical themes, especially when we want to do extraordinary things.

It is important to understand which of these mythical themes you are participating in. Look at great leaders—Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. and others—and you will find that they are relating to a mythical archetypal being. People who truly stand out are acting out their mythology.

CONTEXT: Would you also explain what you see as the importance of coincidences and problems?

CHOPRA: When things are really going wrong and when things are really disruptive, it is a signal for a quantum leap of creativity. At that moment, one has to embrace the uncertainty and take the leap.

Never ignore a coincidence. Ever. It is a message that breaks through the same old patterns and often is a golden opportunity. You just need to figure out what kind. The important part is letting go of the idea of how things should be and trusting that you don’t know the big picture.

Here is a perfect example. I was once at the airport and called my voice mail to check my messages. I got a recorded message from AT&T saying my calling card wasn’t working, because I hadn’t paid the bill. The normal response would be to get upset at my office and ask, “Why didn’t they pay the bill?”

My response was to pay attention to the fact that something wasn’t going my way. I assumed there was a deeper significance. I still needed to call my office, and I couldn’t use my credit card, so I went to a nearby gift shop to get change, with the complete expectation that there was something brewing. The cashier told me, “I don’t have any change. Go away.” Nothing was going my way.

As it happened, I was on the cover of Newsweek magazine that week. I saw the magazine there, so I asked, “Can I buy that magazine, please?” The cashier gave it to me, not looking at my picture. I gave her $10, but she said she still didn’t have any change. She was in a really foul mood. Now, if I reacted to her, I wouldn’t have gone further. I would have just stymied myself there and then.

Instead, I said, “Well, give me another magazine.” I randomly chose a men’s health magazine with a picture of a guy with muscles on it. I got my change and called my office. It turned out that we had switched phone companies. My assistant gave me a new calling-card number.

I stepped onto the plane, and in the third seat I saw some guy with huge muscles. I looked at my magazine again. It was the same guy.

The next thing you know, he and I started talking. Ultimately, we did a television program called Body & Soul. It was a big success. As a result, I got interested in the reversal of aging. The aborted phone call spawned a series of things that I wouldn’t be doing now if I had become reactive instead of open. My whole life is like that.

I use coincidences as a way of thinking creatively. I used to go to Boston from San Diego once a month. My office would arrange a black sedan to pick me up. One morning a yellow cab arrived instead. I thought, “Yellow. There must be something magical about that color.” At the airport, I saw a big yellow advertisement for Dollar Rent A Car.

Immediately, I connected dollar with yellow in my mind. Is there a real connection? No. The universe is radically ambiguous. We give meaning to everything. So I gave this meaning and said, “Yellow is dollar.” Then, I saw another big sign that read, “If you need a second mortgage, and you need money, call 1-800....” The word money was in yellow. I now had two omens about the color yellow.

When I changed planes in Denver, I saw yet another yellow ad in the distance, this one for Celestial Seasonings Tea. Once on the plane, I was sitting in seat 1C. The guy in 1A helped me with my jacket, telling me he was a big fan. I asked him about himself, and he told me he was the general sales manager for Celestial Seasonings. I said, “Yeah? I’ve been looking for you all morning.”

This guy gave me the idea of creating the herbal teas that we now make. We make a lot of money on those products.

My point is that you can take a coincidence and interpret it with meaning. This starts a process of associations that you normally wouldn’t have been aware of.

CONTEXT: Are there business leaders you have observed or dealt with who you think have been able to use the principles you describe?

CHOPRA: Ibuka, at Sony, was in tune with these principles. He consciously used his intuition and creativity, practiced meditation, and believed in coincidences as a means for opportunity.

Steve Ross of [what was then known as] Time Warner Inc. [www.timewarner.com] was another. He was very tuned into the idea that coincidence was a way of finding something different. He also was a master at the web of relationships. He nurtured them. Ross put me together with any number of people who you wouldn’t think had anything in common with me.

CONTEXT: You mentioned that people might be able to learn to tap into synchrodestiny. How might they do that?

CHOPRA: Through biofeedback, I think. The Chopra Center for Well Being [www.chopra.com] works with the Institute of HeartMath in California [www.heartmath.org], which has a biofeedback machine that monitors heart wave coherence [how much in sync the electrical waves of the heart are with each other]. It feeds the information into a program and turns it into visual representations of what is going on internally. Because of the link between a person’s heart-wave coherence [the medical term is r-r variability] and his thoughts, which I talked about earlier, this program literally shows what you are thinking. The more harmonic the electrical activity is, the prettier the picture. So if you think of someone you don’t like, the picture turns black and blue.

The point is, now that we have such sophisticated technology, I believe we can train people on these biofeedback apparatus to do amazing things. They will be able to improve their golf games and maybe even kill their own cancer cells.