Refuting Deepak Chopra’s Impostor Jesus

Welcome to the Counsel of Trent podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Does the Counsel of Trent exist if no one is here to watch it? Yes, it still exists, so snap out of your Deepak Chopra woo woo if you think otherwise. Welcome to the podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Answers Apologist and Speaker Trent Horn. Today, I’ll be showing what’s wrong with the guru Jesus that is pedaled by people like Deepak Chopra. However, even though the Counsel of Trent exists when you don’t watch it, it can’t exist for long in that way, because we rely on viewer support. So, if you could click the subscribe button and not merely manifest it in your consciousness, but actually click that subscribe button, I’d be very grateful. All right, so Deepak Chopra is an alternative medicine doctor self-help advocate whose advice that he gives to people, it sounds profound to some people, at least, who hear it, but when you examine it closer, you see that what Deepak Chopra says really turns out to be a bunch of gibberish.

One good way to see this is on the website Wisdom of Chopra. So, Wisdom of Chopra uses a random phrase generator to create fake Deepak Chopra quotes that sound a lot like things he actually says. So, consider these two quotations. The first one, “Attention and intention are the mechanics of manifestation.” Here’s the second one. “Your consciousness quiets an expression of knowledge.” The first one is a real Deepak Chopra quote, and the second one comes from the Wisdom of Chopra quote generator. You can see that it’s hard to tell them apart because Deepak Chopra’s wisdom, it’s mostly just vague assertions about the mind creating reality combined with scientific jargon. If you just add quantum to everything, it sounds smart, apparently.

So, in one article, Deepak Chopra claims the following. “Quantum theory implies that consciousness must exist and that the content of the mind is the ultimate reality. If we do not look at it, the moon is gone.” Don’t think Deepak Chopra is just being poetic here. He really believes that the most fundamental element of reality is our own consciousness and that we create the world around us, including the moon. If we were not here, it wouldn’t exist. Here’s atheist Michael Shermer, challenging Chopra’s metaphysics.

… but the moon is really there, whether you look at it or not, it doesn’t apply to the macro world.

In the absence of a conscious entity, the moon remains a radically ambiguous and ceaselessly flowing quantum soup.

Deepak, that is-

You have to have a conscious-

Chopra says that once we attain a high enough level of consciousness, we can manipulate reality and we can do amazing things like even heal ourselves of diseases like cancer. According to Deepak Chopra, Jesus is somebody who achieved this high level of knowledge that leads to ultimate human fulfillment, but we can all do the same thing. So, that would make Jesus a guru, not God, or if Jesus is God, then we are all God, according to Chopra. In his book The Third Christ Deepak Chopra writes, “Jesus did not physically descend from God’s dwelling place above the clouds, nor did he return to sit at the right hand of a literal throne. What made Jesus the son of God was the fact that he has achieved God consciousness.” So, Jesus is God in the sense that we are all God or we all have that spark of God consciousness within us just waiting to be actualized. That’s why Chopra tells us, “Jesus intended to save the world not by dying for our sins, but by showing others the path to God consciousness.”

… and the third Jesus is a state of consciousness. When Jesus says, “I and the Father are one”, or “The kingdom of heaven is inside you”, or “I’m in this world and not of it”, what’s he talking about? Is it something that I can also experience? On our Eastern wisdom traditions, we say yes, because Jesus is a state of consciousness. You can call it Christ consciousness. If we aspire to Christ consciousness, then we create within our own biology, and within our own perception, and our cognition, and our moods, and emotions, and our personal relationships the attributes that he was talking about.

Here’s another example of Chopra teaching this with him reinterpreting what Jesus meant about heaven in John 14:2 where our Lord said, “In my father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Here’s Chopra on that.

Rooms are dwelling places. I don’t think Jesus meant anything as simple as there’s plenty of room in heaven. He’s referring to God’s, or the Divine’s omnipresence, or as we might say it, the many dimensions that divine consciousness pervades. People remain anxious about enlightenment and whether or not a place has really been made for them. On the spiritual part, however, you discover that you are multidimensional.

All right, so what’s wrong with Chopra’s position? Well, three things. First, his claims about Jesus have no good historical evidence behind them. In his 2008 book, Jesus, A Story of Enlightenment, Deepak Chopra creates this really fanciful story to explain how Jesus became so enlightened. Chopra takes advantage of the 30 years of Christ’s life between his birth and the start of his public ministry that are not described in scripture except for the time when Jesus’ parents found him in the temple at the age of 12. He uses that to claim that during Jesus’ teens and twenties he actually went on a spiritual journey to India where Jesus learned the secret of enlightenment from other wise men there before returning to Galilee. Honestly, this kind of story isn’t new, it’s just another in a long line of speculative stories about Christ’s hidden years. They go all the way back to medieval writers who imagined that when Jesus was young, he traveled to England with Joseph of Arimathea who was a traveling tin merchant.

This idea was later popularized in William Blake’s 1808 poem, And did those feet in ancient time. The claim about Jesus going to India, however, comes from Nicolas Notovitch’s 1894 work, The Life of Saint Issa, in which Notovitch claims to have seen an ancient document in a Himalayan monastery that describes how Jesus Christ studied Buddhism in the region. However, when other journalists went and visited the same monastery, they learned Notovitch had never even been there, but it turned out to be a very lucrative hoax for him. In his book, Jesus Outside the New Testament, the scholar Robert van Voorst says, “There is no good evidence for Jesus’s alleged travels to either India or Tibet.”

Chopra even admits there’s no evidence for this theory in the Bible or in ancient history. After claiming that an unknown German scholar made these claims in the 1940s, Chopra probably mistook that person for Notovitch, Chopra says the following, “I went into incubation, meditation and I allowed this story to unfold. It fits into the category of religious fiction.” In other words, it never happened and Chopra made it all up. Number two, the real Jesus preached salvation from sin, not enlightenment from ignorance like an Eastern guru. Chopra likes to compare Jesus to Buddha in order to make Jesus just another wise teacher.

Jesus Christ took the same journey as many others have taken, Buddha for example, and it’s a journey that has a very specific map.

It’s true that some of Jesus’ ethical teachings are similar to those of Buddha, but this does not mean that Jesus learned those teachings from the followers of Buddha during some spirit quest in his twenties. In Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings, the liberal New Testament scholar Marcus Borg says, “Explanations like that are unlikely and unnecessary. The similarities between Jesus’ and Buddha’s teachings are not of the kind that suggests cultural borrowing. They are not of the level of specific images and language. A more plausible explanation is that the fundamental elements of morality in the natural law can be known by anyone through the light of human reason. That explains why a variant of the golden rule in Luke 6:31, ‘Do to others as you would have them do unto you’, can be found in many other cultures, including in Buddhist cultures that cite Buddhist teachings like consider others as yourself.”

But when it comes to theology, Buddha and Jesus are as different as night and day. For example, Eastern religions preach the need to adopt certain behaviors or attitudes in order to be saved from the trials we face in this life. In Buddhism, this is called the noble eightfold path. It consists of practicing right kinds of views, intentions, speech, conduct, likelihood, effort, mindfulness, and samadhi, which is a kind of meditative consciousness. This path does not include faith in the traditional western view of God and the Buddha himself rejected the existence of any such divine being. Buddha also did not verify the truth of his teachings through miracles. He even denounced such methods. Buddha also did not consider himself a personal savior who could deliver people from their suffering. On the contrary, Buddha would tell other people things like, “Be islands or lamps unto yourselves, refuges unto yourselves, seeking no external refuge.”

Now, compare this to Jesus Christ who said many things to lift up his own identity as being the thing people should root their own identities in. Like when Jesus said, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness but will have the light of life” in John 8:12. So, notice Buddha tells people to be lamps or lights unto their selves, but Jesus tells people he is the light of the world. Indeed, Jesus reassured his disciples that they should believe him precisely because of the miracles that he had done. He says, “The Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father in me, or else believe me for the sake of the works themselves.” What made Jesus unique were not his teachings about the way we should live or mere truths we should believe. It was the teachings about himself that made Jesus unique, that he is the way, he is the truth, and how it is only through Jesus we gain access to the Father and have eternal life.

What made Jesus unique was him and his divine identity and radical connection to the Father, since both are of the same divine substance, a substance that we do not share because Christ is the creator of the entire universe and we are but mere creatures that he has created. Of course, for Chopra’s perspective, that is not who Christ is at all. He is just another enlightened creature like the rest of us. So, Chopra contradicts himself in order to try to prove this because he dismisses passages from the Bible that show Jesus is God or Jesus created everything by saying, “Well, the Bible is unreliable. We can’t trust it was transmitted or it was recorded accurately.” But then, Deepak Chopra claims that the scriptures are reliable whenever he can cite anything in them that makes Jesus sound like some kind of an Eastern guru. You can see this in how Chopra contrasts his Jesus, which he calls the third Jesus, with the first Jesus of the Bible, who he says we can know little about, and the second Jesus who is invented by the church who doesn’t reflect the real historical Jesus.

Very little is known about the actual person Jesus historically. The second Jesus is the theological Jesus, the Jesus built up by different sectors of the church. It’s the theological Jesus that we use to attack abortion, to attack gays, homophobia. It’s the theological Jesus that was responsible for the witch hunts, for the Crusades, and on and on. So, I thought I would focus on the third Jesus and the third Jesus is a state of consciousness.

But how does Chopra know he has the right Jesus and all the other scholars don’t? Well, because Chopra has the correct interpretation of the sources obviously, and that leads us to the third problem, Chopra’s misinterpretation of the Bible. Let me give one example. Chopra likes to cite Jesus’s words in Luke 17:1, which the KJV renders this way. “The kingdom of God is within you.” Modern translations usually render this passage, “The kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” But even if the Greek word translated in the midst, or entos, does mean within or inside, we should not conclude that the kingdom of God exists only in the consciousness of individual believers. The previous verse says that the Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was coming. Jesus said to them, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Lo, here it is or there.'” In other words, God’s kingdom would not be a visible earthly kingdom like David’s.

As Jesus would later tell Pontius Pilate, his kingdom would not be of this world as recorded in John 19:38. His kingdom would be an invisible spiritual kingdom. The kingdom is not generated within us through Eastern practices like meditation. It is instead received within us from a God who exists quite apart from our own consciousness. The church father Ephrem the Syrian said that Luke 17:21 refers to, “the heavenly joy of the Spirit being active in the soul that is worthy of it.” Origen said this verse referred to the logos, God’s very word, dwelling in our souls. Indeed, this corresponds to when Jesus said the following when he promised, “If a man loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.”

We don’t create God within our own God consciousness. God comes to dwell within our very hearts. This also mirrors what Saint Paul said in Ephesians 3:17, “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith.” Chopra’s guru exegesis, it perverts the meaning of the gospel because it takes the awesome mystery of God humbly coming down to humanity to save us and redeem us from sin and replaces it with us going up to God through our own clever consciousness raising. This is evident in Chopra’s claim that, “You don’t need to have faith in the Messiah or his mission. Instead, you have faith in the vision of higher consciousness”, as well as his baffling claim that, “I and God become one and the same.” But when we think about the times we’ve failed others and have failed ourselves, all the times we apologized to other people and say, “This isn’t who I am”, that’s evidence of the reality that we are not God.

We are not the ultimate consciousness. We instead possess a tarnished image of God within us. We are not gods and we cannot save ourselves merely through our own meditative efforts. Instead, we as sinful creatures, must turn in repentance to the perfect standard of goodness itself. Remember that standard, Jesus Christ said, “I am the vine. You are the branches. He who abides in me and I in Him, he it is that bears much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing.” John 15:5. All right, well I pray that was helpful for you all and I just hope that you have a very blessed day.

If you like today’s episode, become a premium subscriber at our Patreon page and get access to member only content. For more information, visit trenthornpodcast.com.