MANIFEST Your Best

Author and spiritual guru Deepak Chopra speaks to Bazaar India about living a truly abundant life, and how to create it.

- RADHIKA BHALLA

Harper’s Bazaar: What, according to you, is the definition of wealth?

Deepak Chopra: “Wealth is a state of consciousness, where you have access to abundance because you have access to the source of all experience, which we call ‘pure awareness’. Pure awareness is a field of infinite possibilities. Wealth, as a state of consciousness, assumes that abundance is infinite—and not based on belief, which is a cover-up for insecurity. When we tap into pure awareness, or the soul or the domain of experience where everything is inseparably one, then that is infinite abundance.

I wrote Abundance: The Inner Path to Wealth [Penguin Random House] because I was once listening to Bob Marley, and he had said this important quote: ‘Some people are so poor, all they have is money’. I thought that was a very good place to take off from, because a lot of people confuse their net worth with their self-worth. And that leads to a lot of confusion over what is abundance.

Of course, money is a human construct to help exchange value. But abundance, on the other hand, also includes feeling secure, safe, loved, a sense of belonging, creative ideas, insight, intuition, imagination, higher consciousness, and transcendence. Abundance is much more than confusing it with just money, which is about 12 percent of your daily happiness experience.”

HB: What are the biggest blocks that people have when it comes to creating abundance in their lives?

DP: “The blocks are, simply put, the hypnosis of social and religious or spiritual conditioning. Religious institutions have built huge cathedrals around poverty, the vows of poverty, chastity, and so on. And there is a lot of guilt around physical pleasures. And yet, if you look at the