THE WISHING TREE AND THE SCIENCE OF LIFE
by Deepak Chopra, M.D.

If a person could find the banyan tree in India that is said, by the ancient sages, to grant any wish to anyone sitting under it, that person would have to be careful. Too many good wishes have gone awry, leaving evil in their wake. Let us suppose that the person knows all about the ravaged rain forests, the hole in the ozone layer, the stockpiled warheads. This person doesn't want to assign blame for these horrors and realizes instead how intimately his future is tied up with everyone else's.

How could he possibly make a wish only for himself? He would want to desire a world that everyone can share -- and that poses a problem. There is no single happiness that applies to everyone. Looking up from his seat under the banyan tree, he would observe the bullock carts carrying farmers who have not changed their way of life for centuries. Perhaps a black Mercedes overtakes them, and the impatient industrialist inside scowls as he drives the carts out of his way. A jet breaks the silence overhead, scaring up a flock of kites who have nested in the same tree since humanity first appeared.

How to satisfy the needs of the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, the virtuous and the not-so-virtuous? How to permit us our ingenuity and creativity without laying waste to the green planet and the animals and birds who accept their existence upon it so innocently? The wisher imagines the hateful conflicts that would arise from even the most benignly conceived future.

But we must wish for some better world! The one we now inhabit contains too much destruction. We did not put the destructive power into nature. As a primal force, destruction is linked to creation and is just as necessary. But we drove it beyond some invisible limit that was not foreseen. The troubling truth is that human creativity, far more than our greed or hate, tipped the balance of nature. The same DNA gave birth to the rain forests, the animals, and humanity itself. Through human beings, the intelligence of life kept pushing its way into the future; it discovered how to unleash any force in nature, and at that point something broke down. We are living in someone else's idea of a brave new world, as it was wished for by past generations. Why has humanity's DNA turned against its own interests, threatening to topple everything?

"Ignorance," our wisher thinks, "all this evil has come out of the potential for good -- it is sheer ignorance." In that thought, the wisher would have the seed of his wish. The only survivable future is one in which ignorance has been abolished. Humanity is not a cancer let loose on the face of the earth; our DNA is the DNA of all life. Its interests have been safeguarded by nature for 600 million years, and its basic atoms have been protected from destruction since the Big Bang.

What we fail to grasp is a way to return to the broad, shining river of evolution that has sustained us for eons already. A return implies a path. This path is hard to conceive of, unfortunately, since there is nowhere to go. We are already in nature; the forests, however ravaged, are obeying the same laws as before. The plankton and whales and seals which we devastate have no way to live other than the way they have always lived. The root of the damaged world is in our interpretation. We got this world because it suits our vision of ourselves. From one grim Roman saying -- "Man is the wolf to man" -- we can see the origin of war, degradation, prejudice, rivalry, and hate. The same holds true for any other evil in the world: it is the visible evidence of an invisible weakness or fault in us.

"To restore nature," our wisher concludes, "I must change my own nature." Certainly the wisher is right -- the path out of ignorance begins and ends in our minds. At this point I believe we must take a leap and believe in the resilience and final goodness of the life in us. To change human nature seems like the most impossible task of all unless this mounting nightmare has all been a mistake. The Upanishads, the most ancient record of humanity's self-knowledge, declare, "Of bliss these creatures were conceived, in bliss they live, and into bliss they will merge again." The horror of history may not confirm these words, but humanity's aspirations do. We are not just wolves; we are free intelligences who have chosen to be wolves.

The collected wisdom for returning to Humanity's true nature takes the name Ayurveda in Sanskrit, which means "the science of life." Conventionally, Ayur-Veda has been interpreted as a system of medicine, but we must understand that in the broadest terms. Health, as Ayur-Veda aims to uphold it, means not just a sane mind in a sound body (the classic ideal in the West), but a full expansion of humanity's inner potential. "I am the universe" is the primary intuition of a healthy person. The ideals of love, compassion, and freedom are fully alive in such a person; such a person's comprehension of the human situation includes all life.

If I were the wisher under the banyan tree, I would wish for all people to recover their own true inner nature. In seed form, this is already occurring -- the movement to spread Ayur-Veda to every country has been thriving for more than a decade. (The direct inspiration came from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the founder of Transcendental Meditation, who revived this ancient knowledge in the early 1980s.)

Ayur-Veda began in India, but its essence is universal, and the kind of future I foresee will have many Ayur-Vedas in it, as each person and nation finds its own path back to the stream of evolution. It is not that we must perform the heroic task of saving nature. Nature is self-sustaining, once we cease to interfere. The same pulsation of life flows through the whole world, emanating from the gods of God. That unimaginable force created the galaxies and at the same time preserves the most fragile mountain flower. All around us life gushes forth and meets itself coming back, curving in joy onto itself and leaping in jubilation at its own infinite strength. We are part of this stream too. We issued from it, and our destiny continues to ride its crest.

Deepak Chopra, MD., who has practiced endocrinology since 1971, is the former chief of staff of New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He is a Fellow of the American College of Physicians. He is also the president of the American Association for Ayurvedic Medicine and the medical director of the Maharishi Ayurveda Health Center for Stress Management and Behavioral Medicine in Lancaster, Massachusetts. Dr. Chopra is the author of Creating Health, Return of the Rishi, Quantum Healing, and Perfect Health. He lectures around the world and his work has been published in twenty languages. He lives in Lincoln, Massachusetts, with his wife, Rita, and their children, Mallika and Gautama.

Copyright © 1996. The Light Party.