Deepak Chopra Nonsense Thread

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- Here is a game in which you post the most new-agey trash that you can think of.
- Essentially you post a quote that uses physics, philosophical or science base terms, and make a useless new age or Deepak Chopra style platitude.
- They must be funny, not too generic, and amusing
MODS: I feel this post can belong in this subforum as it is in somewhat of a gray zone between 'Philosophy and Politics' and 'Forum Games'

- Consciousness can only penetrate the stratosphere; imagination penetrates eternity.
- A single good deed is only exceeded by the electromagnetic state of the heart.
- A quantum act merits only the most tender classical response.
- For only a wise heart sees the beauty in ionization, a fool trusts dark energy.
- Classical mechanics is a game for the vibrating and a joyful human soul.
- A mind can die swiftly, but the soul is swifter because of acceleration due to gravity.
- For every hallucination yields a correspondence with the most truthful reality.
- Only in General Relativity can a soul find true classical peace.
- The universe is a bubble that bursts of magnetic quantum peace.
- The mind is a tool of spectroscopic significance.
- The goodness of the atomic nuclear forces is only exceeded by the serenity of the mind.

1:00 minute:

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I'ts five o clock somewhere in the multiverse, so don't have a care, cause it's five o clock somewhere.

Some platitudes are mere platitudes.

Others have a basis in important facts.

It should be noted that I'm pretty radically anti-New Age.

Meditation makes anything possible; it's the conscious observer that ruins it.

(Joke about the "observer effect" of collapsing the wave function from all possible states to one state)

The Tortoise and the Hare: your average speed is the secret to winning in life

Oh yeah, I remember those. When those were popular, the Sacramento Kings (basketball team) had the company whose name was on their arena, Arco Oil, yank their sponsorship of the arena, forcing their name to be removed. Since the arena was old and crappy, and the team was just crappy, nobody wanted their company anywhere near both arena and team. Finally, the Power Balance company that made those stupid bracelets said yes, and so we had Power Balance Pavilion. The name was on the arena longer than the company was in business. Ultimately, the name only came off when a local entrepreneur who ran a chain of mattress stores took pity on the whole situation, and coughed up the money for Sleep Train Arena.

I can't stand Deepak Chopra, but to his credit, I don't get the sense that he's a 100% deliberate conman, unlike most new age gurus. He strikes me as deeply damaged, like he's desperate to believe his own nonsense because it makes him feel special.

don't they all ?
all liars believe themselves deeply, much more then you can believe yourself,
maybe its the other way, in order to be able to believe something deeply, it needed to be an falsetruth first
or whatever, count me on kraftie's raft, on this part of the world i found newagers to be the sjw's of bs and groupthink and exclusion

That could be true but I don't think we'll ever know for sure. Anyway he was connected to Maharishi at some point what makes both situations possible: he's been either one more "successful victim" of Maharishi like all the Transcendental Meditation celebrities we know of, or he was arranged with his mentor in a means to rip people off.

You're right that we can't know, but even if part of him knows he's ripping people off, I find it hard to imagine that he's cynically viewing it as purely a con. One comparable new age guru to both of them is Osho. I bring him up because Osho's been analyzed a lot, and many psychologists speculate that he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. So even as Osho was spouting out half-baked nonsense he'd lifted from world religions, he likely truly believed in his own profundity, seeing himself as God's gift to man. It's harder to prove the shallowness of a spiritual leader when they're so delusional/insane that they sincerely believe in their own nonsense. What muddies things even more is the fact that these gurus aren't coming up with their philosophies out of nowhere - they're spouting out things that sound nice to them from world religions and philosophies, then mixing them up in a nonsensical stew. When they make connections from one religious idea to another unrelated one, even if it's contradictory, it's easy to imagine how they could trick themselves into thinking they've gained some special insight.
It's also easy to imagine how this sort of thing could spiral out of control: you have some mentally unstable person who's been reading up on philosophy and religion, then parroting it out, and they're intensely charismatic. The people who are most open to listening to them are people who are extremely vulnerable - people going through periods of transition, trauma, desperation, etc., and they're desperate to find some anchor, so they start following this guru. Before you know it, this mentally unstable person has a group of over 20 people hanging on their every word. The guru realizes that they're suddenly powerful, and all this praise feels really good. If they're having second thoughts, they also must realize that backing out would feel awful and be intensely shaming, so it's just easier to keep going with the con. I find it hard to believe a mentally healthy person would ever find themselves in that situation in the first place.

Sam Harris and Michael Shermer seem to have Deepak's goat:


And the classic Deepak lecturing about science to Dawkins: