Sages & Scientists: A Symposium of Exploration

By Kim Marshall

When I got the invitation to The Chopra Foundation’s Sages & Scientists Conscious Collaboration for Global Transformation at Harvard in mid-September, suffice it to say I was intrigued. 

It seemed to me that after 45 years of pioneering mind-body wellness, Deepak Chopra, MD, has accumulated quite the rolodex—and it showed on stage. Many of the symposium presenters, of course, already had ongoing programs with the foundation. There was the beauty industry executive who shared a cab with Deepak, which resulted in them starting a Joy project together. There was a developer who is creating a hot springs wellness community near Deer Valley, Utah, where Chopra will guide programming headquartered out of a Well-being Center/longevity think tank. And then there was the travel entrepreneur who is gearing up to take a group from The Chopra Foundation supporters to the Antarctic. 

Notable Attendees

There were several household names in attendance—like AI pioneer Sam Altman and Dr. Dean Ornish—and also a few surprise elements. The 77-year-old Chopra even made sure there was a panel on Gen Z whose presenters were Gen Z. They included a young woman who started the mental health platform during COVID called Girl Well and the actress who voiced the main character in Amy Poehler’s popular Inside Out movies. They explained that their generation lives in fear of the planetary conditions we’ve created for them. Bottom line: Take the time to talk to them and listen to find out what their generation really cares about.   

The final panel was entitled: “Are We Alone? Exploring the Universe for Signs of Life”, which featured astrophysicists from MIT and Harvard, physicists, and Leonard Mlodinow, PhD—Steven Hawking’s co-author and a script advisor to Star Trek—who first met Deepak when he was taping an ABC special. The story goes that Mlodinow told Deepak at a break in filming that he thought his conclusions on consciousness were “full of shit”, and thus began a decades-long friendship. Panel takeaway? Oh, the hubris of us to think we’re the only conscious beings among three trillion galaxies...

My Key Takeaways

• For Parents: Children are suffering from the disease of entitlement.  Parenting has lost its way in the last 40 years. Please stop coddling your children. They’re unhappy because it’s not the way the world works. They need to learn resilience and grit. We are raising zoo animals that need to learn how to survive in the wild. 
• Hope for Alzheimer’s: Rudi Tanzi, PhD, was the first researcher to identify amyloids in the brain as the cause of Alzheimer’s disease. He revealed that it takes 30 years to happen in a brain and their research is showing that lifestyle changes can reverse the effects.
• Prevention through Precision Medicine: AI will help since it’s data-driven, personalized, and identifies your 1-to-20-year risk for major diseases.
• Importance of Attitude: What we think might be possible. Don’t get stuck in a negative impression of yourself. Learn who you are when you fail. You are the best version of yourself when you are faced with challenges. We’re all just astronauts going around the sun. 
• Leadership: The average tenure of CEOs is going down. Fifty percent of CEOs report being incredibly lonely. Leaders care more about P&L than the humans who buy their products. Leadership is about learning to manage energy, making people do what you want them to at a given time. Figure out the emotional, mental, and spiritual parts of leadership. Build trust by trusting first. 
• Longevity: Genetics loads the gun. Lifestyle pulls the trigger.  
• Brain Health: What’s good for your heart is good for your brain. When you change your lifestyle, it can change your gene expression. There must be a quantum element to how rapidly the brain communicates with the heart.  Inflammatory thoughts—guilt, shame, anxiety, sadness—turn on destructive genes. More than two drinks a day are harmful to the brain.
• Awareness: Eavesdrop on your body and try to regulate it. We teach children and puppies how to regulate their bodies with potty training. Yoga and vagal stimulation can change negative thoughts and habits.
• Faith: In Eastern traditions, faith is obvious—like electricity. An inner experienced conviction of the invisible makes the visible possible. Ethical moral behavior is natural. Studies show that there is a direct correlation between a child being raised with faith traditions (even if they don’t believe them) and their mental wellness.    
• Medical Milestones: The gut microbiome is more important than ever.  Nutritional psychology is a growing field. Ketamine, obesity drugs, messenger RNA, CRISPR, and the link between alcohol and autism were all highlighted. 
• Science: It’s not the universe—it’s what we know about the universe.
• Consciousness: It is species-specific.

And I didn’t even touch on Africa RISING, sustainability, the power of mushrooms to make the world nicer, VCs who help rehabilitate veterans into society, and responsible tourism.  

Of all the info shared, I’ll leave you with two of my favorites: 1) Take care of each other. View it as an investment in self. We are interconnected, and we are only as healthy as the healthiest among us. And 2) Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.