Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old

Chopra (Quantum Healing) is one of our perennial gurus, appealing to millions but offering them a suspect brew of panacea and escapism. The message of his new book? "We are not victims of aging, sickness, and death. These are part of the scenery, not of the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being." The basis for his belief, Chopra argues, is quantum physics and the work of such scientists as Heisenberg, Bohr and Einstein, with whose help Chopra proposes to tell us how to stave off the inevitable changes brought on by mortality and the passing of years. He advises us on how to "defeat entropy," to "believe" enough to offer palpable resistance to processes of physical alteration, and to "reinterpret your body" such that renewal will come of it. He himself believes in "a land where no one is old," and where "we create our bodies as we create the experience of our world." He is also a proponent of "the science of longevity," and cites research by doctors (sometimes nameless) to back himself up when expounding upon it. But alert readers will finish the book with unsettling questions, the result of a book that is rife with inspirational conviction but at times thin on substance.