Dr. Deepak Chopra, please welcome Dr. Deepak Chopra to the stage.
Deepak Chopra is back to tell you that you can live to be 120 years old.
I wouldn't lie to him.
Dr. Chopra, welcome.
Welcome.
The last time I was in his company, you know, it's been over six years since you were here.
Look at this tape. Here we are. Six years ago, he's giving me an evaluation.
Watch. Six years ago.
Wait a minute. Let me just relax a little bit.
Yeah, yeah. That's all right.
Well, Phil, actually, he has a streak of romanticism underneath this veneer.
He's a romantic. He's charming.
When he's under stress, he can be a little, get angry quite easily.
And if he's under a lot of stress, then he would be prone to something like an ulcer.
Now, let me see that now.
Six years later, see if I've changed at all.
You know, believe it or not, you're getting younger.
Well, thank you. Thank you.
The impatience, the anger has mellowed down, and the chivalry and love is still there flourishing.
So you're doing good.
You study Ayurveda, the 5,000-year-old philosophy of health care, bringing your mind in touch with your body.
You've heard about this. You know about mind over matter.
You know that people in love, when you just met your girlfriend and she loves you and you felt you, you will never catch a cold.
Your immune system is better. Am I lying to these people?
Absolutely right. Your immune system is constantly listening to your conversation which you're having with yourself.
And that conversation that you have with yourself, it generates these chemicals which are very powerful,
and the immune system has receptors to these chemicals.
So the immune system is constantly eavesdropping on your internal dialogue.
If that is a happy conversation, then the immune system is happy.
You're an endocrinologist by training, hormones in the pituitary and all that other stuff.
You're New Delhi-born. You've been attached to Harvard?
I did residencies and fellowships at institutions that were connected with various universities.
This is not the body I had last year. Is that what you do?
Yeah, this is your 1993 model because the fact is that we replaced 98% of all the atoms in our body in less than one year.
You make a new liver every six weeks, a new stomach every five days, a new stomach lining.
Even the skeleton, which seems so hard and solid, it's replaced once every three months.
So if you think you're your material body, then you certainly have a bit of a problem. Which one are you talking about?
The one we saw a little while ago was your 1987 model, and this one seems to be a little better.
You do, thank you. The average life expectancy of men is what?
75.
What is it for women?
80.
The girls are stronger than the boys.
That's because they're smarter.
I don't understand. We should study that more. We should be taking estrogen or something.
No, no, no. It has to do with their mind, Phil.
You think so?
Men are more intuitive. They use both sides of the brain.
They have not this kind of linear cause-effect right-wrong orientation.
They're more relational, contextual. It's about time we learned something from them.
You honestly believe that if we concentrated on it, if we brought this new notion,
if we used our brains to their maximum capacity in terms of understanding our health and influencing our health,
we could live to be 120, 130 years old.
Yes, I believe that. The human potential is about 120 in the absence of preventable disease,
which means we don't begin middle-aged till 60. We're in the prime of our youth.
Even knowing that will influence your expectations, and expectations will influence the outcome.
I wish we didn't know we were mortal.
I have no interest in telling a chimpanzee that he's mortal, for example, and the chimp, he doesn't know.
This is an advantage we have, because the human nervous system is the only nervous system on our planet
that is consciously aware of the fact of mortality and therefore of the fact of aging.
But the human nervous system is also the only nervous system that is consciously aware that it's aware.
And by using our awareness, we can consciously influence the biological expression of information and energy in our physiology.
You also feel that there are three ages of man and woman.
Right.
The first age would be the chronological age.
When you were born.
Okay. What's the second age?
The second is your biological age. If a scientist were to come to measure your biological age,
like your blood pressure, the level of your sex hormones, how well you hear.
Without knowing how old you are on the calendar.
Yes, and he would have about 13 measurements, so she would have 13 measurements.
And this would be your biological age.
And then there's a third one.
What is that?
That's your psychological age. How young do you feel inside?
Do you feel like you were when you were 19 and in love?
And scientists show now that our psychological age correlates much better with our biological age than our chronological age.
You can have somebody who's 25, and they're burnt out physically and emotionally, and their biology reflects the age of 50.
On the other hand, you can have somebody who's 65, such as yourself.
Thank you very much.
Chronologically. But their biology reflects the biomarkers of somebody 30, like yourself.
Thank you. A sort of a semi-recovery doctor.
As a matter of fact, I'm 57. How old are you?
Chronologically, I've forgotten.
Why would a man in your game be self-conscious about sharing your chronological age with this audience?
Because it is one of those ages that you should not put your attention on.
People say, well, I'm 65. What do you expect? Like that, you see?
It's the biological age that is important.
I'm 57, and I earned every year of it.
Yeah, but you should be proud of the fact that you're biologically much younger than that.
I think so. I believe that, too.
And that's what you pay attention to.
I'm 47, by the way.
Thank you. Thank you. So we're looking at 10.
But you've got those great genes. You probably never have gray hair.
In fact, the studies show that if your parents live to be over age 80, that adds only about three years to your life.
But how you think, how you behave, how you eat, most importantly, how you perceive yourself and your relationship with other people.
Do you consider yourself constantly under threat or do you feel loved and influence your biological age by 30 years?
I'm going to show you, just a moment, share with you the 10 secrets to the fountain of youth.
This is interesting.
Before we do, do you wear contacts?
No.
You have uncorrected vision?
Yes.
You can read small print?
I can.
This must be Indian, is it? I mean, it's got to be.
Do you have any caries, dental caries?
No, I don't. It's not Indian. Just because gravity was discovered in England doesn't make it necessarily English.
Ayurveda was discovered in India, but that doesn't make it Indian.
You're not going to tell me there is no difference.
The Chinese, you go to Chinatown here in Manhattan, you see 100-year-old people routinely.
It's the cultural mindset.
It's not the pathology, the genetics?
In those cultures, where to grow old means to become wiser, to be looked up to, to be venerated, to be honored, to be cherished, to be loved.
Those cultures, people live longer because growing old is synonymous with becoming glamorous.
Whereas in other cultures, where to grow old means to go to Florida and retire in a nursing home, the social expression of that is different.
So it's the cultural mindset that influences it.
Very interesting. We're very ageist, as I don't have to tell you, in this culture.
Yes, we are.
We kind of turn our backs on...
But we're going to change that.
Well, we're going to change it simply because of the numbers.
Yes.
Do I understand that at the turn of the century, I think the people over 65 in the United States will equal the population of Canada?
They will, and then in a few more years, they'll outnumber the people who are in the younger age groups.
In fact, before the turn of the century, the average life expectancy in this country was 49 years.
I understand that. Think about that. This century, 49 years old.
Bye-bye, dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the long life of so-and-so who lived 49 years.
We forget.
Now it's what? 75 for the boys, 80 for the girls. Terrific.
And in the Roman Empire, it was only 28 years. So what the future beholds is beyond our imagination.
It's fabulous. I'm telling you. I'm telling you.
All right, here we go. Ten secrets to the fountain of youth.
Number one, get to know your spirit as a real force through meditation and silence.
You know, Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher...
This is going to be a tough one for me. Excuse me.
Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, said,
All of man's misery comes from his inability to sit quietly in a room, close his eyes and do nothing.
We are human beings. We're not human doings and human thinkings.
And if we want to really get in touch with our souls, then we have to take the time to be quiet
and discover that we do indeed have a soul, a spirit that transcends our daily worries
and the mundane activity of our lives, that we need to get in touch with that force.
Sit down twice a day. All right.
Number two, you'll like this one, get rid of all the toxins in your life,
your environment, your food, your drink, your emotions, your boss.
Because toxins, and this includes toxic food, toxic drink, toxic smoke, toxic relationships, toxic emotions,
they all create the same thing in your body,
a generation of toxins that accelerate the aging process.
So I ask my patients to make a list of all the toxins today in your life
and see what you're going to do about each one of them.
You probably include red meat in that too, don't you?
Not necessarily, because there are certain body types that may require that and certain that don't.
In fact, you know, you can't say this is good for this person and this is not good
because each person responds very uniquely.
Did you ever have Haagen-Dazs ice cream?
Oh, yes. I love it. Yes, yes, yes.
Well, that's encouraging.
And I don't consider it toxic so much.
Good. Well, the people at Haagen-Dazs will be grateful for your commentary.
Here, this one's interesting. This is number three.
This is interesting. You ready?
Shed the need for approval.
And the reason is that the real you doesn't need anyone's approval.
No external authority is here to tell us what to do.
And yet most people live their lives in need for approval.
It's the ego that needs approval.
What is wrong with that? Why is that a bad thing?
Because you're constantly, then your behavior is influenced by anticipation of response.
You live a fear-based life.
Is so-and-so going to approve of what I do?
We are constantly in need of approval of our parents, of society, of religious indoctrination and dogma and ideology.
You spend your life in fear.
On the other hand, once you shed the burden for the need of approval, you live with freedom, which is what is necessary.
It's fear that accelerates the aging process.
Number four. Use the mirror of relationships for your own evolution.
I don't understand.
Relationship is a mirror.
When you love somebody, for example, you love them because you're seeing in them something that you want in yourself.
Anytime we are attracted to someone, it's because you're finding in them something that we want in our own selves.
Similarly, when we are repulsed by somebody or we dislike somebody or hate somebody,
then we are seeing in them things that we are denying in ourselves.
If you're indifferent to somebody, you don't have to worry about them.
So once again, make a list of all the people that you love and all the people that you dislike,
then find out what it is you're seeking and what it is you're denying,
and use that as a means to get to a higher level of awareness, to evolve.
Number five. Change your inner dialogue from what's in it for me to how can I help.
Well, that's pretty sound.
The ego's inner dialogue is what's in it for me.
Again, it's fearful. How can I help?
It's the dialogue of the spirit, the way we feel our universality.
And once you change that, then what's in it for you also improves.
We'll save the other five for later in the program.
Let me just, number 25, Brian. We mentioned this.
We renew our entire body once a year.
Look at this. We make new skin once a month.
We get a new skeleton every three months.
Well, you know, let's not say literally, huh?
No, literally. Every single carbon atom in your skeleton today
is different from the one three months ago.
So the question is, who's the real you?
Is the real you your body?
Are you a physical machine that manufactures thoughts?
Or could it be that your thoughts that manufactures the body?
We get a new stomach lining every six weeks.
And in one year, we replace 98% of the atoms in our body.
The body is like a river of energy and information.
And just like you cannot step into the same river twice,
you can't step into the same flesh and bones twice.
You're renewing it more easily than you can even change your clothes.
Okay. You also say that when we're depressed, the whole body is depressed.
The mind manifests itself throughout the entire body.
Right. When you say I have a gut feeling about such and such,
your gut is making the same chemicals that your brain is making
when it's having those thoughts.
But you can trust your gut feelings,
because they haven't yet learned how to doubt their own thinking.
When a person says my heart is heavy with sadness,
it's loaded with sad chemicals.
When you say I'm bursting with joy and exhilaration,
your skin is loaded with happy molecules like interleukins
and interferons and imipramine.
And some of these are powerful anti-cancer drugs.
So this is a pharmacy that we have here.
It makes anti-cancer drugs, immunomodulators, antidepressants.
You name it, it makes it in the right dose for the right organ,
no side effects, and all the instructions are there in the packaging.
It's you.
And the way the pharmacy dispenses the feel-good-feel-bad pills,
so to speak, to continue the metaphor,
is by way of the brain, which in turn is determined by moods.
It's determined by mood, by feeling, by emotion, by desire, by memory.
Let me give you a good example.
I had a patient recently, 65 years old, who had a heart transplant.
And as soon as she came into the recovery room,
the nurses asked her if she would like something to drink.
She said she wanted a glass of beer,
and everyone was really surprised,
and she was too, because she didn't care for beer.
At night, she asked for chicken McNuggets,
which surprised her even more.
Well, six weeks later, she's at home.
She has a dream, and in the dream, a young man appears to her.
He says, my name is Timmy L.
I really love you because you have my heart.
She goes to her library, looks at the obituary columns, finds Timmy.
He had had a lot of beer.
He had just come out of McDonald's when he had his car crash,
and she was carrying his heart in her body.
When Shakespeare says...
Listen...
That's all right. Nobody's walked out yet. Go ahead.
Go ahead.
When Shakespeare says, in one of his great lines,
we are such stuff that dreams are made of,
he's speaking literally.
The body is just the place that your dreams and memories call home
for the time being.
You are not the body.
You're the one who's expressing yourself through these molecules,
and you can confuse the horse with the rider.
And that makes death easier, doesn't it?
Yes, because then death and birth are like flickers in eternity.
They're like parentheses in eternity,
just like the flash of a firefly in the middle of the night,
and we don't mind it because we know that our essential spiritual nature
is one of eternity, timelessness and agelessness.
Ageless body, timeless mind.
Oprah is its author, M.D., to be sure.
Here comes another look at how we might just make life
a little bit more interesting for ourselves, among other things.
We are already the pharmacy we're looking for.
We are already our own magic bullet.
The problem or the challenge is to bring our mind to the business
of ensuring that these wonderful elixirs that are already there
are usefully applied to make us feel happier, live longer, feel better.
It evolved over billions of years of evolutionary time.
You can't mistake God's plan for your own.
You just shouldn't try, even.
My partner and I?
I know this man, or woman, excuse me.
We'll be back in just a moment.
To be part of the audience, please send a postcard to Donahue Tickets,
care of NBC, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York, 10112.
Remember, postcards only, please.
We are joined by Bruce Kumar Francis,
for whom we have solicited the help of my colleague here.
You had a serious accident, is that so?
Didn't the doctor say you wouldn't walk again?
In 1981, I went off the side of a hill in New Mexico.
I was 15 feet up in the air, looking upside down from the car.
Down I came, bounced and rolled.
Afterwards, a few other things happened.
They said, you're going to be living in a wheelchair, you're not going to move.
I'm lying without my legs and feeling.
Through what I learned in China, I was able to get the feeling back in my legs.
I was able to get everything more or less moving again,
but then after that, by going back to China, I was able to completely fix my back.
I studied Qigong medicine for a lot of years in China,
so thank God I knew about it.
What's it called? Qigong?
Chinese therapeutic exercise.
Let's leave all the foreign names out of it.
People have probably heard things like Tai Chi,
they see something coming from China,
and you were talking about those people who lived to be 100 years old, the Chinese.
This is what they do, and this is realistically how they've been doing it for thousands of years.
My one visit to China, a treasured opportunity for me, this was 10 years ago.
I'll never forget, outside of Shanghai, we were traveling to the airport or somewhere,
and there they were at 6.30 in the morning, of all ages.
The people who were cleaning the streets, the workers who were in construction,
and they were all doing it together,
so that quite obviously Chinese culture came to respect
the importance of this fabulous biological expression called the human body,
long before we have in the West.
Completely. What Dr. Chopra was talking about,
that in China the people revere age.
For example, when most of us think of a person who's 80, what do we think of?
Put yourself in your body, and you start thinking of a baby.
It's like this, and you watch a person slowly start to contract.
In Chinese culture, they how to get the energy of a baby,
how to get the vitality of a baby, the softness of a baby,
and yet have a fully comprehending adult mind that gets more intelligent as it gets older.
That's the wisdom of experience with the biology of youth.
That's right.
Bernard Cho said,
youth, oh, what a pity to waste it on the young.
I don't think we have to do it.
As people grow older, they become wiser, more flexible, more dynamic.
I'd like to speak from the practical point of view.
I went to China, and like an American, I was an average American.
When I was younger, I was into martial arts and things,
and it's pretty freaky to have a person who's 70 years old beat you up,
and then they have one of their students who's 60 years old give you a hard time,
and then they have his wife come on and give you a hard time.
Yeah, they're pretty good.
I figured, what are they going to do, bring on the five-year-old next?
I mean, let's get out of here.
I was an old Japan karate champion, so I wasn't like an amateur.
These things, and I started finding out that they have these systematic ways in China,
practical ways of bringing about this youthfulness into vitality.
Tell me about the correct body alignment using the skeleton.
This would be something that those of you who have bad backs
might want to at least give some thought to.
We're not going to pretend that you can put your hand on the TV set and be cured,
but this is interesting.
What Bruce wants to share with us includes, are you saying,
the ability, a Chinese technique, to actually release, for example, a pinched nerve?
To move the vertebrae of the spine individually,
to move the plates of the skull individually,
to be able to move your joints without using your muscles,
because what the Chinese believe is that the body is composed of fluids,
and if you get all these fluids to really move,
and you get your mind and your energy to move the fluids,
everything else takes care of itself.
On the matter of back, the backs about which everybody seems to complain,
there are so many increasing, that has to do with the misalignment of vertebrae.
Often, not always, and we're not going to...
Commonly.
Often it's a matter of a pinch, isn't it,
or one of these coming together and pinching on a nerve.
I want you to see.
You can work right from there.
Basically, what occurs is, for sure,
what you have with all these vertebrae, when they're pushed this way,
or pushed this way, or crunched this way, or backed up,
they put pressure on the nerves, which cause problems,
which back pain, neck pain, up here, shoulder pain.
You get down here, that's right.
And then your head, and then your lower back,
get your neck to start crunching, and this is aging.
This is what it is.
So to get the spine to be able to be, if you can just see this,
to be like really just completely loose, completely strong,
and every day to do something to put this signal back in the back
so it knows what to do.
Just make your vertebrae literally move by themselves.
Not your muscles, I'm not even using my muscles.
Just your breathing, you're doing more respiratory.
Actually, you can do it with or without breath.
And so the point is what, that you're actually making,
you're challenging this area of the body?
What you're doing, what Dr. Schober was talking about with your mind,
you want to be able to put your mind in your body,
all the important systems in your body,
your mind's going to tell your body what to do,
and it's going to start doing it.
Inside, your internal organs, your neck, the inside of your brain,
the inside of your joints, arthritis and rheumatism,
and you're going to start having the ability
to have your body literally just become like liquid.
I get more rubber bandy then, isn't that it?
You get more rubber bandy.
So I'm not, then if I pick up a flower pot or something,
I'm less vulnerable to going and having a bad thing.
Absolutely, and when you have to just pick something off the floor,
there's no effort in it, it's easy, it's comfortable.
Yeah, this is Chinese, isn't it?
This is Chinese all the way.
You buy all this, don't you?
Yes, because flexibility, there's a Vedic expression,
infinite flexibility is the secret of immortality.
Be like a reed that flows, that bends with the wind,
rather than like tall oak that stands rigid and crumbles.
The classic thing, what he's using, the reed,
is the one that's been used in the martial arts for thousands of years,
been like a reed in the wind.
It's actually from Japan.
But leaving all these orphanism, India, China, Japan,
how do you practically get your mind to go in your body?
Practically do things where you make that connection
between your mind and your body,
and then if you keep all this energy inside your body moving,
you get younger.
That's what youth is about.
Youth is about having energy, like you.
You run up and down these stairs, you've got chi, you've got energy.
If you didn't have energy, you'd be like, excuse me.
Well, also it's an attitude.
If I didn't, if I thought, oh, I'm this age,
therefore, boy, I can feel the gravity getting me.
Yes, like most politicians.
Yes, ma'am, you wanted to add.
All right, all right.
I see you there.
Okay, go.
It is wrong, and if it's illegal, it doesn't apply.
How old is the baby they want to have?
I'm sorry, what?
Well, it should also be said that they should.
Right.
Well, thank you for the little aside there.
There we are.
You know, it is exercise.
I've got to tell you, it is exercise, you know.
But I just want to make sure they get this.
So if I think I'm old and I think, holy cow, I'm 50, oh, I'm 55,
pretty soon I start to get, and the next thing you know,
you know, you're, what?
What?
That's a person who's behaving like a person
he thinks should behave at this age.
It's a stereotype which need not fulfill itself.
That's only one part.
It's one part, your attitude, your psychology, your mind.
Right.
In Chinese call, as they say,
your body wants to be very comfortable inside,
happy, happy, comfortable.
And your mind wants to be very still.
Now, if you have that, then you,
but you have to do something to physically and mentally
exercise your body and your mind every day.
So the more you use it, the more you have it.
Right.
You know, at Tufts University, scientists did a study
where they took people between the ages of 87 and 96,
put them on a movement program,
and after a few months, their biomarkers had reversed
very dramatically.
As I share with you, Mr. Francis' book,
Opening the Energy Gates of Your Body,
Gain Lifelong Vitality,
we are here to say, among other things, that,
no, this is not a miraculous,
nobody's claiming miracles here,
nobody is putting hands on,
nobody is, this, what we should do,
for those of us who are skeptical about this,
I think we have an obligation to remember
that we have been sold a very narrow protocol
of healing and medicine in the West
that has been very, very dominated
by traditional cut and probe and push and pull
and transplant, and that's not necessarily
in the best interest of all people,
and I'll give you a chance to make your case even further
as the hands start to go up in this audience
of unusually youthful, good-looking, vibrant people,
and we'll be back in just a moment.
APPLAUSE
Yes, ma'am?
I've seen documentaries where surgeons in China
are actually performing brain surgery
while the person is awake and conscious of it.
Is that actually happening there?
Without sedative?
Completely.
As a matter of fact, right now,
surgery can easily be done with half the amount of anesthesia
if you don't, if, you know, if you use acupuncture,
but the difficulty is that culturally,
a lot of people have a real problem
with sitting in a place and having all of their guts exposed
and all of a sudden going, they freak,
they just really, they get upset,
and this is about what it boils down to.
See, but the brain is one part of the body
which you can do surgery without anesthesia
because the brain doesn't have pain fibers,
it doesn't perceive pain.
Only the rest of the body, the brain perceives pain,
not its own pain.
So the more dramatic thing is what he was saying.
If you do surgery elsewhere in the body without anesthesia.
Over here.
My question is addressed to the doctor.
I'm 30 years old.
My toes hurt, my knee hurts, I have all these pains,
and how can I get rid of them?
Because these pains are really real.
Uh-huh.
Well, we talked about the five keys earlier.
We're going to talk about five more keys,
but basically question, go inside and question
what is it in your life that you're doing
that's causing you not to have the experience
of exhilaration and energy?
What are you concerned about?
Are you living totally in the present?
Question your relationships, your job,
the food you eat, the way you think.
Number six, we showed you five.
Be sensitive to the needs of your body,
including its sensuality.
Because the body has only two messages that it gives.
One is the message of comfort,
the other is the message of discomfort.
Listen to that and ask what it's saying.
Number seven, stay in the moment.
What in the world does that mean?
The present moment is the only moment you have.
The past is gone, the future is not yet.
This is all you've got.
So have your attention on this moment.
This is life.
I mean, we can't live amongst flowers and birds.
Life is so beautiful when you're in the moment.
I would say something.
But the moment is you go to work
and you're sitting on the subway,
you're having a miserable time,
everybody's bothering you.
Because your attention is either on the future,
you're anticipating something in the future,
or it's the pursuit of a memory.
Are you enjoying the show?
You do?
I'm not having a good time, but I can't wait.
Number eight, stop kvetching.
No, no, no.
Number eight is don't constantly judge.
This is interesting.
This is important.
Remember eight there?
This is good.
Don't constantly judge.
I love that one.
Wouldn't it be great if we didn't?
Well, there's an ancient expression.
It says the sinner and the saint are merely exchanging notes.
Therefore, shed the burden of judgment.
Number nine, replace fear-motivated behavior
by love-motivated behavior.
Ask yourself, anytime you're doing something,
am I being motivated out of fear
or am I doing this because of love?
Whenever confronted with a situation such as a conflict,
look for inner solutions, not outer solutions.
The solutions are always here.
Always seek peace and harmony and laughter and love,
and the externals change spontaneously.
Dr. Chopra is talking about meditation,
and in China, part of Chinese therapeutic exercises
comes from the whole tradition of the Tao.
And, you know, the one thing they say is
life is a bit like a river.
The fact is that it's always changing.
If you look at so many things that upset you now
and you see it ten years from now,
you're going to wonder why you're getting so upset.
And we'll be back in just a moment.
Show them Jill.
Jill DeVincennes happens to work with me
in the Donahue office.
This beautiful young woman is about to be aged.
Not because she didn't...
I don't know if she volunteered for this or not,
but watch what happens here.
Yes, it is not something we can do anything about in turn...
Well, sorry.
Dr. Chopak would be among many who would say
there are some things we can do.
Now show them Scott.
Here's the young man in our office, Scott Davis,
and we've asked him to kindly sit still while we age him.
Look what happens here.
You're doing the wrong thing.
You're doing the wrong thing.
You're programming.
They're making them think this is how they're going to look,
and they fulfill the prophecy.
They should do the opposite.
Show them the other guy in the office, Brian.
Here's the other guy.
I think I'm about 21 here.
I'm 28 here.
I'm 34 here.
Look at those sideburns.
Uh-oh, here we go.
Look at the hairs.
And now, here I am.
Phil, can I say something?
Sure, please.
I think this is...
I'm focusing on what you look like.
And I've got to say something.
The fact of the matter is that people are going to get
chronologically older.
Now, what would you rather do?
Look beautiful or be able to get up, bounce around,
be loose, be happy, be 95,
have a couple of girlfriends, a couple of boyfriends,
depending upon what your situation is,
or would you rather look very wonderful,
fit in a perfect dress?
Well, you know...
It's an issue.
You know, the man who invented collagen...
Retina.
Thank you.
What is it called?
Retina.
Retina. Takes the wrinkles out.
Was on and said,
the people aren't afraid of getting old.
They're afraid of getting ugly.
And I thought, whoa.
And you're saying that it's the culture
that causes it.
Among people over 75 years old,
40% of them can't
walk two blocks.
You can't lift
10 pounds. That means you can't
go to the grocery store, you can't
lift things up to buy your groceries.
I think there's something more
important than just vanity, and there's
actually how you feel inside about yourself
and are you functional?
Dr. Chopra, in your practice, have you been
able to witness a person who looks good,
has nice skin, no gray hair,
but are internally sick,
ill? Yes, many times,
many times, the outer expression
will not replicate what's going
on inside. But at
other times, you know, what's the function of
age? Creativity is something. Look at
Stephen Hawking, who is completely
totally paralyzed, and yet
he's reaching the farthest
edges of outer space
in his imagination. Look at Michael
Angelo and Picasso and George
Bernard Shaw and Tolstoy, who
made major contributions to civilization
in their eighth and ninth
decades. You mentioned a moment
ago, it was a woman
who received the heart
of a beer-drinking young
man who loved Chicken McNuggets.
That
woman was on The Donahue Show.
Post-op, she had
received the heart. She is on the program
with a member of the family
of the donor, this young man who
died tragically. Here's
she is talking about not being able to
walk fast. Watch this,
has the young man's heart. What was the
franchise that you couldn't drive
past? Tell them that.
Oh, the first thing I wanted after
the transplant when I was
able to drive by myself
was I had this yen
to get Chicken Nuggets at a
Kentucky Fried Chicken place,
which I did, and it's something that I
normally don't do. When I met the
family
two years later, they told me
that Timmy was carrying
Chicken Nuggets in his shirt when he was killed
on the motorcycle. It was his favorite
food.
What do we think about that,
Jerry? Yeah.
Consciousness in the West is
considered in the brain. So
this lady had this heart transplant
and suddenly in her dreams, she was
dreaming about what Tamil was
eating. There was some communication.
So where is the consciousness? Was the
consciousness in the organ? No. What is your
consciousness? Consciousness is not
in the brain, it's not in the body.
You know, Dr. Wilder Penfield
once was trying to study this
and he was stimulating the brain to see
where the thinker of the thought was,
could never find the thinker of the thought,
could only find the thought, but not the
thinker of the thought. So where's the
thinker of the thought? It's not in the brain.
Consciousness begins before thought.
It's like listening to Beethoven's
Symphony on the radio and you
take the radio apart, trying to find
Beethoven inside, you're not going to find him there
because he's not there. But he is
there. That is the expression through which
he reaches me. You see, the funny
thing is, Phil, we talk about out-of-body
experiences. How do we end up getting
an in-body experience when we're not even
here? You're the spirit that's
trapped in the body for the moment. And we'll
be back in just a moment.
Thank you.
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,
Deepak Chopra, M.D.,
brings his own
special insight to this. Here's
a man trained in the East and the West, New Delhi
Born, and yet has been attached to
Tufts University and others here
in the Eastern part of the United States.
Opening the energy gates to your body is
B.K. Francis' work, Gain
Lifelong Vitality. Here's a man
who, using Chinese
knowledge from centuries,
improved his own
– healed himself after a very serious
accident. Sir? Yeah, I wanted to know.
I have a sister who's 23, she has arthritis.
How could this
help her? Very good question. There are many
things she can do to stimulate that
internal pharmacy. One of the things I would
recommend is massage, which stimulates
healing chemicals, especially
oil-based massages with
antioxidants and herbs. Another
is meditation. A third is movement
exercises, such as the one that
Francis has been talking about. I'd like to
possibly help your sister a little bit, too.
Right now, we
look at the body in terms of – when I
was showing about alignments in the body,
we also need to look that there's energy
inside the body, that it actually moves.
Energy moves inside the body. Put your hand
on yourself. Does something hurt? Do you have a
place where your body hurts? Well, you're feeling energy.
How do you change it? What do you do with it?
Chinese play around with a lot.
I wait for it to heal, and the older I get,
the longer it takes. So what's new? That means
that you probably will just
endure pain, so you have to deal with it.
But if you know how to move energy in the channels
of your body, if you can make your
joints be able to move from the inside,
if you can change the way the flows
are inside your body, these things just go
away. You don't have to live with pain.
There are practical ways things – and it's not
just physically moving. It's having
your mind move inside your body.
My grandmother has Alzheimer's.
With a family history
of something, how do you start
preventing or preparing? First of all, a lot of things
that go by the name of Alzheimer's aren't.
There are many reversible causes
of senility, like malnutrition, like
inactivity, like smoking,
like drugs, like dehydration,
alcohol, depression,
and hypothyroidism, endocrine
disorders. One should look first
at the reversible causes,
because 90%
of senility is not Alzheimer's,
and then one increases sensory
stimulation. I had the idea, Phil,
that we could actually show people how to
activate the energy in their own body right now.
Let's do that in just a moment.
In other words, this
is a technique that will help this audience activate
the energy. Very good.
Speaking of energy, here's
one of the things – you had two young men
who do this crazy thing the last time you were on the show.
They fold in the yoga position.
Come on, get in the act.
I mean, talk about a ham.
I mean, is it any wonder I have
my own talk show? Watch this. Six years ago.
Talk about showing off.
And we'll be back
in just a moment.
To be part of the audience, please
send a postcard to Donahue Tickets,
care of NBC,
30 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, New York,
1-0-1-1-2. Remember,
postcards only, please.
Give us a little
demo here. Okay, everyone in this audience,
just put your hand out there in front
and put all your attention in it.
Just put your awareness in your hand
and see how many people, as they do
that even now, putting their
attention, can feel either
some tingling or some rise
in temperature, some warmth. How many
people can do that right now?
Okay, there you are. Warmth?
So already, just your awareness
is causing a change in the
experience. Now, take that hand
and just move it lightly across
so that your fingers are pointing
to the palm of your left
hand. And how many people can transfer
the warmth from a distance into?
How many people can do that right now?
So there you are.
Just your attention
and awareness.
What you're doing is you're
activating your own biological
energy. What he calls chi, what we call
prana. Yes. Hi.
In July, I fell and broke my wrist
and have a steel plate. Oh, you sure
do. Yeah. I have therapy
four times a week, but I still can't move those fingers.
Again, you need exercises
and awareness. Attention
and intention are the triggers
for moving biological energy
over there, rather than just
passive or physical
exercises, mental exercises
to activate the energy there. You must be a picnic
at the airport going through that security.
If you can pulse your joints.
What? If you can pulse
your joints, if you've had a plate in your hand like
this, if you start literally
just making the distance in between your
elbows start moving a lot, make
everything move from your shoulder down to your hand
and the last thing is going to be your fingers
because that's the end of your energy channel. Yeah.
Give us your demonstration here with not much
time left. Okay. What is the point
you want to make now? The point I want to make is I just like to show
people how to breathe because most
people don't. I'd like you all to put your hands
on your stomach, on your solar
plexus and on your stomach, on your stomach,
up here, top two, two hands and now
I want you to breathe and just look.
I want you to physically
make everything inside your stomach.
Breathe, physically
move, get the internal organs inside
your body, get all your blood,
get all your lymph, get everything that's in there, get
it to move. Yeah. I want you to put your hands on your
kidneys. That's right.
And I want you
also, is the camera on this?
Do you want to have a camera? I want you to get your
kidneys to move.
That's right. You want to put your hands on my back Phil?
You can feel it. I can feel you.
Absolutely.
Oh yeah, there's your kidney
all right. Your back's going to move.
If you can make, and your
sides, if you can make the whole of your
inside move, all your
organs and everything, you're going to be exercising
24 hours a day. And that's some of the
best exercise you can get in your life.
Stimulate yourself on the inside.
It can be done. You don't even have to go to the gym
to do it. After all, they are your
body organs. Huh? Who says
just your knees should be
moved around? So should everything
on the inside. And we'll be back in just a moment.
Hey, we ought to...
Thank you.
Would you let your son find you a date?
These moms did. You didn't get me a doctor?
Sons fix up their single moms
next on a hue.
Sir. Doctor, what are the limitations
as to what we can do with our mind? How old can we hope to
live? We can't predict
because we couldn't have predicted what's
happening now. Just remember one thing.
People don't grow old. When
they stop growing, they become old.
As long as you have something to look forward to,
a horizon, a purpose in life.
There are three aspects to purpose
in life. One is, find out
how you can help other people. Two,
discover your own spiritual nature.
And three, express your unique
talents. Because everyone in this room
has a unique talent.