The surprises revealed in the Epstein files also extend to my spiritual life. I recently learned that bestselling author, meditation teacher, doctor and philosopher Deepak Chopra was a close friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Searching the publicly accessible Epstein Library of the US Department of Justice shows that it might have started as a spiritual quest of Epstein’s, which then turned into a friendship and mutual visits, including the ‘Epstein Girls’.
“God is a construct. Cute girls are real“
(Mail communication March, 8th 2017 by Chopra to Epstein)
Since these encounters took place between 2016 and 2019, long after Epstein’s first conviction for underage prostitution in 2008, I cannot excuse Deepak. To have advised such a perverse man and maintained contact with him is proof of ruthlessness and complacency. We are talking here about older men (Deepak was around 65 at the time) who lived out their sexuality abusing teenagers.
“The experts said crimes (…) were committed against a backdrop of supremacist beliefs, racism, corruption and extreme misogyny. The crimes, they said, showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls. So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls, that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity”.
Paedophilia is diametrically opposed to Deepak’s noble teachings. So how does this horrific story affect me?
I have had enough of spiritual corporations that squeeze more and more money out of seekers. Last year, Chopra even launched a generative AI that offers advice to people seeking guidance, using his recorded voice. The AI is based on the Chopra Centre's library, which contains all his books, seminars, meditation series and lectures.
Religious scholar Liz Bucar describes how dubious it is to feed highly personal thoughts to AI. The AI market is profit-driven, opaque, and the companies operating within it are not subject to any internationally recognised legislation or ethical regulation.
PR expert Lisa Braun Dubbels knows the spiritual money machine from the inside and explains the data protection risks that seekers expose themselves to when they share their most secret desires and questions with a machine. We do not know how our AI-powered spiritual conversations might be exploited.
In recent years, I have been comfortably leaning back into the Chopra Centre’s 21-day guided meditation series. Universal themes, such as ‘faith’, “abundance”, ‘divine femininity’ or ‘desires and abundance’ are unravelled over 21 days and wrapped up in meditative morsels with mantras. The duration of these meditations varies between 10 and 25 minutes, depending on whether Chopra’s introduction has been translated. Daily meditation thus becomes an easily digestible consumer product, requiring no real effort.
That is over for me now, and I have started meditating without crutches, as I used to do. My spiritual path is thus independent of gurus who pretend to be wise and enlightened but are slaves to their sexual instincts.
Entering into independent meditation is somewhat more lengthy, as the stream of thoughts hardly ever stops initially. What helps to calm down, for example, are breathing exercises at the beginning and a comfortable posture. It may also be useful to set a timer and play meditation music to mask any background noise.
I regard trains of thought as clouds, between which the blue sky, the eternity, repeatedly peeks through. I let the clouds drift by without trying to hold on to them.
Thoughts can also be seen as boats on an eternal stream. I then label their sails with headings such as ‘unpaid bill’ or ‘Epstein fuss’ and let them float on. The stream is beyond time and space, and we are in the present moment.
Our souls need no one but ourselves to talk to the universe.
Sources:
Text written by me, translated using Deepl; thanks to Lorna for proofreading.
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