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

was that I had been hauled off into the night to witness a medical monstrosity. Instead, an English gentleman in a frock coat and spectacles mounted the stage to loud applause. He bowed slightly, then began to lecture with fuzzy slides projected on a makeshift screen, his voice proper and dull. The slides showed lots of white dots with halos around them.
    My father was enraptured. I was an overstimulated seven-year-old. I quickly fell asleep leaning against my father’s warm side.
    Daddy was still exuberant when he woke me up and perched me back on the handlebars. We pedaled home slowly, his hand on my shoulder to steady me.
    “Do you know who that was?” he asked. “He’s Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin.”
    “Where is Penicillin?” It sounded farther away than Pondicherry or even London.
    To which my father laughed. He told me the story of the little white dots and the lives saved because of the curative powers of common bread mold. For centuries, he explained, moldy loaves of bread had been thrown away without anyone suspecting that a miracle lay hidden inside the fuzzy green growth that made the bread unfit to eat. It was a boon to humanity that Sir Alexander Fleming had paused to look more closely instead of throwing out some petri dishes of bacteria that had been “ruined” by the same mold.
    Everyone agrees that miracles lie hidden. A yogi meditates in a remote Himalayan cave; penicillin sat under our very noses. The question is: What brings the miracles to light? There seem to be only two choices. Either the grace of God reveals miracles, or the rational mind uncovers them by going deeper into the construct of the physical world. Strangely as I grew older, I seemed to belong to the small camp that rejected either/or. Couldn’t a miracle be right under our noses, woven into the fabric of nature, and still be evidence of God?Imagine a world where Sir Alexander Fleming shows slides of a levitating yogi with a halo around him. That would come very close to my ideal.
    I never heard any complaints from my father about the superstition that was rife in his own family. He avoided the irrational with polite silence and was blind to anything that could not be explained by science. All around him, however, human nature took its course, falling in love with anything that was as irrational and inexplicable as possible. A special focus of our credulity—I was part of the irrational pack for a long time—was my uncle Tilak, who was five years younger than my father.
    At the age of four Tilak began to have vivid memories of a past life. He described every aspect in detail, including where he had lived and the names of his family. Such an event is not uncommon in India. (In fact, decades later, researchers at the University of Virginia, beginning in 1989 under Dr. Ian Stevenson, would find that it isn’t uncommon anywhere in the world. Hundreds of children, usually between the ages of two and eight, have been documented as having detailed recollections of a previous lifetime.) My father’s family, who already considered Tilak an unusual child, decided to investigate his new memories. As a matter of course, this meant consulting an astrologer.
    A neighborhood astrologer can be brought in to tell a young girl the most propitious day for her wedding or to predict whether a boy will travel abroad (a calamitous turn of events in traditional Indian society). But there is a special class of astrologers who specialize in past lives, known as Bhrigu readers. Here we can’t go in for a penny without going in for a pound, because Bhrigu comes from the pure world of miracles. When you consult a Bhrigu reader, he doesn’t draw up your astrology chart himself. Instead, he finds the exact chart that was already written for you centuries, even millennia, ago. In essence, an astrologer who lived at the time of Shakespeare or even Jesus, perhaps, knew that you were going to arrive for a Bhrigu reading on a certain day in the