How the West was fleeced

By spoon-feeding a spiritually starved America with wisdom pellets from the East, Deepak Chopra has turned himself into a one-man publishing empire

By Cheryll Aimee Barron

Mar 9, 1996 |

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet...... -- "The Ballad of East and West," Rudyard Kipling

No one understands what the inner American is craving and yearning for these days as well as a genial, chubby endocrinologist-turned-guru from India called Deepak Chopra. Chopra has not one but two hardcover bestsellers on the current Publishers Weekly list: "The Way of the Wizard: Twenty Spiritual Lessons for Creating the Life You Want" and "The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success." And mighty New York publishers who consider guessing the needs of the great American public their prerogative are all but committing hara kiri in paroxysms of envy.

With the vengeful glee of an author forced by a string of rejections to publish his first book himself ("Creating Health: The Psychophysiological Connection," 1985), Chopra has scotched the efforts of any one publisher to harness him with the exclusive, multi-book contract to which bankable authors usually submit. His current bestsellers -- published, thanks to the labors of his team of ghostwriters and rewriters, within a year of each other -- were issued by two different firms. His 11 other titles in print are divided between five houses.

Whether or not Chopra's popularity survives the growing backlash against him, no one in the publishing establishment can think of another author with comparable latitude and clout. And oh, how this rankles! Last year, the head of one respected firm, incensed by Chopra's reversal of the usual balance of power, offered me, through my agent, a healthy advance for a book that would unequivocally expose Chopra as a charlatan. Yet not a single publishing executive of several I telephoned recently was willing to criticize him or his oeuvre on the record. "He wants to stay as far as possible from any comment on Deepak Chopra," reported the assistant to a top executive of HarperSan Francisco, a specialist in New Age thought.

"Of course. Because they all hope, for the sake of the bottom line, that he'll do a book with them," chortled Eden Collingsworth, once president and publisher of Arbor House, who maintains close ties with the Manhattan book business in spite of departing for Los Angeles six years ago to start the magazine Buzz. She ventured a barbed supposition of a sort book people are only muttering to each other in private: "I guess for a publisher, the trick with non-books like his is not to read them before you buy them."

But millions of Americans, tough-minded business executives among them, clearly disagree. Something in them is resonating resoundingly with, for instance, Chopra's quasi-Hindu "Law of Detachment" in "Seven Spiritual Laws." "Detachment," writes Chopra, "is synonymous with wealth consciousness....True wealth consciousness is the ability to have anything you want, anytime you want, and with least effort."

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