Free Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream by Deepak Chopra, Sanjiv Chopra

know that airplanes fly because of a principle in physics, Bernoulli’s principle, which allows flowing air to lift a wing. Millions of people trust airplanes to work without understanding Bernoulli’s principle, because they know that science is more reliable than faith. Miracles are flashy, but you wouldn’t bet your life on one at the airport.
    When I was growing up in India, this whole scheme of the rational and predictable hadn’t yet taken hold. As wobbly as miracles are considered in the West, they were cherished in the East. A miracle didn’t defy the laws of physics or make everything uncertain. It proved the existence of God (which no one doubted anyway). More than that, a miracle justified the entire world of my ancestors. In their reality God had a finger in every pie. That fact was deeply reassuring. God saw you. He cared for your existence, and the fact that miracles were so slippery—they always happened to someone you didn’t know or someone who had been conveniently dead for several hundred years—only added to the glory of a divine mystery.
    My father, as a Western-trained physician, was one of those who shredded the mystery. He was surrounded by people who clung to a miraculous reality. One of his brothers, a traveling salesman for field hockey equipment, was fond of visiting every holy man he could find. He firmly believed that simply sitting in the presence of a saint, as all holy men were commonly called, brought him closer to God. In my father’s eyes this behavior was a holdover from the old, superstitious India that needed to disappear. By implication he wasn’t just embarrassedwhen poor villagers revered him. They were displaying ignorance about modern medicine, something he spent his life trying to wipe out.
    But there were still things to marvel at, even revere, in my father’s rational scheme. One evening, when I was seven, he came home from work in a state of barely suppressed excitement. I think this was the first time I ever saw him break out of his normal reserve.
    “Quickly, son. Wash your face, straighten your clothes. We leave in two minutes.”
    By the time I was ready, my father was straddling his bicycle outside.
    “Come. Hurry!”
    He tapped the handlebars, and I hopped on. We rushed into the twilight together, leaving my mother and four-year-old Sanjiv at home—he was too young for this adventure, whatever it was, and she had to take care of him. Daddy pedaled furiously through the balmy streets of Pune, refusing to tell me where we were going.
    “You’ll see. Just hold on.”
    Together his secrecy and excitement made my imagination run away with me, or would have if I didn’t have to focus on not pitching off the handlebars as he veered around corners. We weaved through the same assortment of vehicles and animals you still find outside the main cities: cars, motorbikes, scooter rickshaws, other cyclists, and bullock carts. Only in my childhood, there were fewer cars and more carts. We raced through the city’s bazaars, and in my mind I remember—adding to the romance of our adventure—that I begged Daddy to stop and let me watch a snake charmer by the side of the road. He was about to pit a cobra against a mongoose in a deadly fight.
    But memory plays tricks after so many years. I was a seven-year-old boy on an adrenaline high who had seen more than his share of those fatal combats. It is unlikely that a snake charmer would have been performing after dark on those dimly lit streets.
    The crowd that awaited us wasn’t imaginary, though. It was just disappointing: a large group of properly dressed men sitting in an assembly hall. No wives or children. My father found two of the lastremaining chairs and greeted a few of the other men. We were in the British army barracks where he worked. The hall was part of the small brick building known as the MI Room (short for military incidents), where the doctors treated every form of illness and injury.
    My one remaining hope