M.J. Rose

Four questions for Deepak Chopra

Caille Millner, Chronicle Staff Writer

Deepak Chopra is one busy spiritualist, physician, alternative medicine guru, author, motivational speaker, philosopher, radio host and celebrity. Somehow, Chopra also finds time to write a weekly column for The Chronicle’s SFGate.

Chopra keeps a furious pace of world travel for his appearances, but he says he always looks forward to going home to San Diego. He’s written scores of books, including his latest, “Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul: How to Create a New You” (304 pages, Harmony), which he was promoting in San Francisco recently. After his morning routine of working out and meditating, Chopra sat down with us and talked about the state of things.

Q: With so many people out of jobs and facing a less certain future, what is your advice for living well in these changing times?

A: De-clutter your life. Give away things to Goodwill or to people in need. When you buy something, give away something. When you buy a new pair of shoes, give a pair to somebody who needs them. Focus on relationships, not consumption. Take part in the “gift economy” – giving away things to help others.

(For the complete article, please click here to visit SFGate.)

…I read an explanation in a book that humans aren’t supposed to wind up with our soul mates in any given lifetime – that we do meet them and they often have a deep purpose, but it’s not in the plan for soul mates to be together in life. It is said that it’s actually not beneficial to be with one’s soul mate in some situations.

I can’t find the book I read that discusses this, and I want to find the exact explanation – does anyone know what it is?

A compelling book tells the story of human sacrifice in North America. It seems the natives were not always the peaceful teepee dwellers we’d like to think they were…

Sacrificial virgins of the Mississippi
Archaeologists are slowly unearthing the ghastly secrets of Cahokia, an ancient city under the American heartland

By Andrew O’Hehir

Ever since the first Europeans came to North America, only to discover the puzzling fact that other people were already living here, the question of how to understand the Native American past has been both difficult and politically charged. For many years, American Indian life was viewed through a scrim of interconnected bigotry and romance, which simultaneously served to idealize the pre-contact societies of the Americas and to justify their destruction. Pre-Columbian life might be understood as savage and brutal darkness or an eco-conscious Eden where man lived in perfect harmony with nature. But it seemed to exist outside history, as if the native people of this continent were for some reason exempt from greed, cruelty, warfare and other near-universal characteristics of human society.

As archaeologist Timothy Pauketat’s cautious but mesmerizing new book, “Cahokia: Ancient America’s Great City on the Mississippi,” makes clear, Cahokia — the greatest Native American city north of Mexico — definitely belongs to human history. (It is not “historical,” in the strict sense, because the Cahokians left no written records.) At its peak in the 12th century, this settlement along the Mississippi River bottomland of western Illinois, a few miles east of modern-day St. Louis, was probably larger than London, and held economic, cultural and religious sway over a vast swath of the American heartland. Featuring a man-made central plaza covering 50 acres and the third-largest pyramid in the New World (the 100-foot-tall “Monks Mound”), Cahokia was home to at least 20,000 people. If that doesn’t sound impressive from a 21st-century perspective, consider that the next city on United States territory to attain that size would be Philadelphia, some 600 years later…

Click here for the rest from Salon.com.