A sad post and now another review of a self-help book? Is Obi going through it? Uh well yes and no, but to be blunt, I was gonna do a New Thought podcast so I bought a bunch of books but then I lost interest in the project. I still have the books, though, and I want to get rid of them but I don’t want to waste them, so here we are. This time the book was a short one, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success by Deepak Chopra.
One of the main things I wanted to do with the New Thought podcast was to explore the magical claims made by guys like this. They are definitely there, but it’s less of a focus than I thought it’d be from the outside. Most of what you’ll find in this book is vaguely Buddhistic advice about life and success; if I’m not mistaken, Chopra is actually more connected with Hinduism, but I use “Buddhistic” here as a genre descriptor more than anything.
I do think that I’ll discuss the more magical aspects of these works at some point, but it’s probably better done as a round-up after I’ve cleared my shelf. For now, I’m going to focus my discussion on the main messages I’m seeing in the work.
Summary
- The Law of Pure Potentiality is about how silence and stillness is the font of all creativity and potentiality.
- The Law of Giving, or the Law of Giving and Receiving, is about how everything works on a cycle, so one must give to receive, and when one receives one should then give, and that is how to get abundance.
- The Law of “Karma” or Cause and Effect is about how each action affects another, and how one’s actions are affected by all those one has taken in the past.
- The Law of Least Effort is about how right action can usually be identified by having to expend the least effort.
- The Law of Intention and Desire is about how one has to use intention in order to get what one wants without succumbing to attachment.
- The Law of Detachment is about the power found in rejecting attachment.
- The Law of “Dharma” or Purpose in Life is about how realizing that one has a purpose is what can truly generate the benefits of these laws.
Opinion
I found that there was less to like in this book than in Tolle’s The Power of Now, and part of that is probably that this is a digest version of Chopra’s work. That said, there’s a lot that unites them. They both have a high degree of focus on “the unmanifest” and silence, on the power of the mind to affect concrete reality, on the goodness of nature, on freedom and ease being associated with naturalness. As far as their ideologies go, the main difference is that Chopra (in this book) is focused on personal success and affluence whereas Tolle focused on a kind of self-actualization. Each promised what the other promised, too, though; Chopra does work to broaden his suggestions for people who aren’t just interested in making bank.
What both of them are doing is grinding down Buddhist and other mindfulness-type messages and strategies in order to get people to go along with the ideas they are pushing. That’s one of the issues, I think, in going over this stuff. I am used to thinking that the way to handle these works is to go through them and point out the stuff they get wrong, proving that they’re overblown hacks. When I reviewed a book by Joe DiSpenza, it went pretty much that way.
With Tolle and Chopra, however, it’s harder to do that because they aren’t interested in making the more detailed claims that DiSpenza did in his book. Chopra isn’t really telling you to do anything that isn’t decent advice at worst, as far as the specific instructions go. When he talks about why detachment from certain emotions is helpful, the words are well-taken, even if they aren’t revolutionary.
The major problem with Chopra’s work, to focus on him for the moment, is that he continually tells you to disbelieve your eyes. He is very big on the idea that what one thinks and believes internally will shape what happens externally. If you are all right with yourself on the inside, everything will start working for you. If you’re not right with yourself, your life will start to fall apart. And that sounds like it should be the way things go. That would be a great world to live in.
Okay, Deepak. What about P. Diddy?
Diddy is a man who lived on top of the hip-hop world for decades doing nothing but ripping and robbing, scamming, stealing, and shuffling his enemies off of this mortal coil. Are you saying that he was right with himself while he was (allegedly) committing sexual assaults and filming it? Did he somehow become not-right with himself recently? Or is it that Diddy’s ego-driven false power was working hard all this time? If that’s the case, is that false power actually worse than the real mindful power?
What do we do when we’re faced with a guy like Diddy, or Harvey Weinstein, or Vince McMahon? Chopra and Tolle and their type never have anything to say about that. They go so far to equate wealth and success and popularity etc. with being well-balanced and mindful, then not only do they not deal with the obvious counter-examples, they don’t give you any warning about what you do when you are faced with people like that. Does non-judgment help you there? Does detachment help? Because I don’t think that they do.
If the sweetest person in the world keeps having their disability needs refused by the government, and the people who she was interacting with show her that they really didn’t care once she can’t come by with snacks anymore, what was her problem? Did she secretly not have her shit together? Because that happens, too. People who have been good and kind all their lives have everything ripped up in front of them. The universe doesn’t swing around and help them, they end up dying on the street. There is nothing in Chopra’s book to help them.
Let’s move to another aspect where this anti-materialism simply fails to reflect reality. When he talks about detachment, he says what you need to do is “give up your attachment to the result.” (page 83) I dislike when people say things like this because it’s misguided on two fronts. First of all, why are you assuming that people are overly attached to the result just because they disliked what happened? Maybe someone was dedicated to the work, they were going to an athletic meet and they were all about training and learning more and doing better, and at the end they lose. Why must they not be disappointed about that? Why does disappointment at the result invalidate their investment up to that point? Secondly, at times, the result has real material effects on a person’s life. If winning that meet was the difference between ramen for a year and a comfortable living situation, that result is important and it makes complete sense to be attached to it.
The problem isn’t that what Chopra is saying is wrong. Obviously, it’s better if you can avoid being disappointed by things that happen. The problem is that he’s making a completely reasonable reaction into an issue that you have to solve, but not making it clear why it’s an issue. Just deciding to be non-attached is not necessarily helpful to someone’s emotions and it is almost certainly not constructive in helping one to reverse that result or prevent it happening again in the future.
It would be one thing if Chopra was just saying that this was the wrong way to be in life; he would still be wrong but his ideas would make sense on their own. Chopra is saying that these are the rules to success, though, and they aren’t. What these “laws” would primarily have the effect of doing is to get someone who is complaining to shut up. They don’t teach you how to gain success. They just tell you that success is not actually material so that you can’t judge it that way, but also that you will get material success if you master the internal success. But if you aren’t getting material success, you can’t be upset about that. Do you see how this creates a loop of injustice? If you succeed, you’re great. If you didn’t succeed, you never will succeed because you will never look at what’s happening.
I think what Chopra and Tolle and their ilk would say is that they’re just trying to get people to look at their lives differently, and that people should use their common sense tools etc. to deal with situations in life. But that is not what their works are actually saying. What these books are saying is “don’t analyze, don’t judge, don’t think about your situation, just Be”. That is the message. Give, act without thinking, don’t hold back, and everything will work out. There’s nothing in that core message about being responsible.
I also wanted to bring out this quote from chapter 6: “True wealth consciousness is the ability to have anything you want, anytime you want, and with least effort.” (Chap 6, p 85) If it wasn’t clear, Chopra identifies wealth and success and well-being quite explicitly throughout the book, so when he talks about “true wealth consciousness”, he’s saying that this is what the ultimate goal is. This is what you should want. And this is pure luxury politics. Ultimately, what Chopra is pushing here is not mindfulness or a way to be. What he is pushing is that luxury politics are good, it’s good to want everything for nothing, and you shouldn’t have any further thoughts about that.
If Chopra had thoughts about justice that he wanted to put in here, he should have done that. He didn’t. Ultimately, both Chopra and Tolle are arguing for an explicitly amoral world, but doing so in a way that doesn’t require them to say that. They have put no thought into what a world would be like where no one works, where everybody gets “anything you want, anytime you want, and with least effort”. Either they don’t intend the message for everybody or they aren’t interested in the message actually being followed.
I’ve got at least one more Chopra book on my bookshelf so look forward to that.