From Publishers Weekly
Chopra's latest work is prefaced by endorsements from four Nobel Peace Laureates, Muhammad Ali and an impressive array of other notables. Here, the Indian-born doctor and author of the bestselling The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and other popular spiritual guides contends that the deeply ingrained human habit of resorting to violence can be ended by raising the consciousness of individuals until there is a global change in awareness, similar to the shift that took place when the age of science took hold. Chopra, whose bestsellers and celebrity-friendliness have saddled him with a reputation for being guru to the rich and comfortable, is refreshingly honest about the way our comfort and security are ultimately the fruits of war. "The satisfaction of waging war cannot be replaced by philosophy or religion," he writes. In addition to analysis, he offers daily practices of meditation, thought and actions on behalf of others as a way to live the truth of Mahatma Gandhi's famous quote: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." Ultimately, however, the ego itself has to be disarmed to live the way of peace, he says: "For me as an individual to be free, I have to confront myself with questions about who I really am, and this is done in large part by examining the layers of false identity that I mistakenly call me." This is clearly harder to practice than it is to read. Still, Chopra's affirmation that "our true identity is at the level of spirit and nowhere else" has the ring of truth and so does the rest of this simple, practical, inspiring book. Major ad/promo. (Jan. 18) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Chopra takes his belief in the ability of the mind to move mountains and applies it to the biggest mountain of all--war. Taking the title of his book from Ghandi ("There is no way to peace. Peace is the way"), Chopra begins with the observation, "Today is a good day for war to come to an end." For all those who hunger to make that statement true, he offers what he believes is a pathway. He begins with a discussion of the reasons for war--it's a habit, and it has the eternal appeal of good battling evil--and then shows how the myriad justifications are all illusions. Also discussed is the toxicity of nationalism, a notion that is applied to the U.S and to those who believe in this country's right to make the world adhere to its will. Whether Chopra's admonitions will have an effect on the powerful around the world is certainly arguable, but he counters such skepticism with the unswerving belief that change occurs only when there is a leap of consciousness. If enough people change their minds about peace, the world can transform itself. Not content with broad platitudes, Chopra offers a seven-point plan for every individual; each step, from meditating for peace to acting peacefully, seems painfully simple, but Chopra makes a convincing case that peace must begin with each of us. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
“Thinking about peace is already a powerful means to contribute to peace. I recommend this book to all those who want to create peace.” —Boutros Boutros-Ghali, President, Egyptian Commission for Human Rights, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations

“Deepak Chopra brings the idea of peace and the power it has over conflict, hatred, and despair into focus. He offers a clear pathway to make this world a better place for us all. Deepak often says what you think about and bring into consciousness expands. He invites us all to bring the vision of peace to the forefront of our individual and collective consciousness, where our thoughts will manifest into reality. Oh what a wonderful world this could be.” —Muhammad Ali, U.N. Ambassador of Peace

From the Inside Flap
Deepak Chopra’s passionate new book, Peace Is the Way, was inspired by a saying from Mahatma Gandhi: “There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.” In a world where every path to peace has proved futile, the one strategy that hasn’t been tried is the way of peace itself. “We must not bring one war to an end, or thirty,” Chopra tells us, “but the idea of war itself.”

How can this be done?

By facing the truth that war is satisfying, and then substituting new satisfactions so that violence is no longer appealing. “War has become a habit. We reach for it the way a chain smoker reaches for a cigarette, promising to quit but somehow never kicking the habit.” But Chopra tells us that peace has its own power, and our task now is to direct that power and multiply it one person at a time.

Behind the numbing headlines of violence running out of control there are unmistakable signs of a change—Chopra believes that a majority of people are ready to see an end to war. “Right now 23 million soldiers serve in armies around the world. Can’t we find ten times that number who will dedicate themselves to peace? A hundred times?”

Peace Is the Way challenges each of us to take the next leap in personal evolution. “You aren’t asked to be a saint, or to give up any belief. You are only asked to stop reacting out of fear, to change your allegiance from violence to peace.” In a practical seven-step program, Chopra shows the reader how to become a true peacemaker. “Violence may be innate in human nature, but so is its opposite: love. The next stage of humanity, the leap which we are poised to take, will be guided by the force of that love.” This is more than a hope or an aspiration. It is a new way of being in the world, giving each individual the power to end war in our time.

About the Author
Deepak Chopra is one of the world’s bestselling spiritual authors and the founder of the Chopra Center in Carlsbad, California.

If you would like to become part of a global community of conscious peace makers, please visit www.chopra.com and click under “News from Deepak.” Also visit Alliance for the New Humanity at www.anhglobal.org.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
War Ends Today

Today is a good day for war to come to an end.

The symbolic number of 1,000 U.S. casualties was passed today in Iraq—I am writing this on September 9, 2004—most of the deaths occurring after victory was declared over a year ago. What is the world like on the day you read this? I cannot predict, but I know, even if this particular war is over, you will be confronted with terrorism, suicide bombings, insurrections and civil war somewhere on the planet, and nuclear threats from rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. Violence will still be raging out of control, no matter what day you read these words.

At the outset of 2003 it was estimated that thirty military conflicts were being fought around the world. It's a good day for all these wars to come to an end. But will they? And if they do, what will replace them?

To end war, you have to think of ending not just one conflict, and not just thirty. What we have to end is the idea of war, which has turned into the habit of war, and then into the numbing constancy of war. The last time the U.S. wasn't on a war footing was December 6, 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor inflamed the U.S. into declaring war against Japan. Since then, America has accepted the need for a huge standing army, the growth of arms manufacturers and merchants into a massive part of the economy, thousands of troops stationed around the world, intensive research into new technologies of death, and a political climate in which it is suicide to come out against war. This whole situation, which reaches into every home, keeps us on a war footing even when there is no declared war to grab the headlines.

Like any habit, war has worn a groove in our minds, so that when we become very afraid or very angry, the response of war comes naturally. It has an easy track to follow. Even as the body count rises in the Sunni Triangle and the photographs of torture from Abu Ghraib prison stun one's conscience, the groove is still there, deep and familiar. War has almost become a secret pleasure. It brings excitement and revs up the routine pace of life. In Mira Nair's film adaptation of Vanity Fair, a woman comments smugly at a party, "War is good for men. It's like turning over the soil." We reach for war the way a chain-smoker reaches for a cigarette, muttering all the while that we have to quit. In the past four decades America's war habit has led us into Iraq, Afghanistan, Kuwait, Somalia, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Vietnam, and Cambodia, not to mention more covert military operations into places like Laos, Nicaragua, and Colombia.

This book is about erasing that groove and substituting a new way to respond when we are very afraid or very angry, or even when we aren't. The way of peace has to become a new habit. To do that, it must offer a substitute for every single thing that war now provides. You may feel immune to the appeal of war, but everyone has benefited from war's gifts in some measure.

War provides an outlet for national vengeance.
It satisfies the demands of fear.
It brings power to the victor.
It provides security to the homeland.
It opens an avenue for getting what you want by force.

By contrast, living in peace one breathes easily. There is space to allow for connections with other people. Arguments proceed with mutual respect for either side. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa lived different aspects of peace. We learned from each that the way of peace can end suffering and oppression, not by warring against an enemy but by bearing witness to wrongs, and by allowing sympathy and common humanity to do their patient work. War smothers all of that.

War's gifts may prove bitter and empty in the end, but that hasn't eroded the groove of war in our minds. Today, after a century in which more than 100 million people died from war, we survivors still turn to war because we think it does some good. The satisfaction of waging war cannot be replaced by philosophy or religion. The Buddha and the Prince of Peace could not have spoken out more strongly against violence, yet their beliefs have been distorted into a cause for bloodshed at the hands of their followers.

Our age is steeped in mechanized warfare that is totally terrifying in human terms. Somewhere in this country teams of scientists are working on a bomb that will vaporize human beings on contact without destroying the buildings they inhabit. Somewhere in this country other scientists are figuring out how to disrupt an enemy's water, electricity, communications, and transportation using signals delivered by the Internet. Soon we may be able to cripple other nations without even having to set foot in them.

We are almost there now, thanks to high-altitude pinpoint bombing and long-range "smart bombs" that can guide themselves to their targets while our soldiers remain safely out of harm's reach. This technology makes some people, even in the military, very queasy, for it means that our army can kill at leisure without loss of life on our side. The last vestige of honor on the battlefield was respect for the enemy, but no more. The satisfaction of managing death so efficiently has to be added to the list of war's gifts.

Can the way of peace really substitute for all that? Can it succeed where centuries of wisdom and morality have failed?

It can, because the way of peace isn't based on religion or morality. It doesn't ask us to become saints overnight, or to renounce our feelings of anger or our thirst for revenge. What it asks for is something new: conscious evolution.

The time has come for us to stop being passive, and to take control of our own destiny, one person at a time. What keeps war alive? Backwardness of response, a reliance on reactions that human beings have followed since the beginning of history. Violence is not the essence of human nature. It is prevalent, yes, and it is innate. But so is the opposite of violence: love. The way of peace is love in action. Although humankind, explicitly or implicitly, seems to believe that violence is more powerful than love, this is the same as saying that death is more powerful than life.

That simply isn't so. Humanity has evolved to transcend many things that once seemed innate. We have learned to use reason triumphantly. We have overcome superstition and disease. We have exposed the darkness of the psyche to light. We have delved deep into the workings of nature. All these successes point the way to the next step, which is the realization that human beings have outgrown war.

Today isn't the day that I or anyone else can say that human beings are finally and forever beyond war. The only recent news item that gives hope is a small one, a piece of reported data which says that the last twelve months, despite the headlines from Iraq, brought the fewest deaths in war since 1945, the end of World War II. The total body count from all conflicts over the last year was 20,000 worldwide. So the trend may be starting already. You and I, in our anguish to end war, may be catching tremors from the future.

Today is the day to act on them. Just as Newton's formulation of gravity meant that human beings were finally and forever on the road of a new science, a road that has led to a completely transformed world, you and I can create a new turning point. I would argue that for the majority of people in America--and many other parts of the world--the tide of the future has turned already. People are ready to follow the way of peace, if only they can learn what it is.

The way of peace is based on the same thing that ushered in the age of science: a leap in consciousness. When they witnessed demonstrations of steam engines, electric lights, and vaccines, people adapted to them at the level of their own awareness. The idea of being human could no longer be consistent with reading by candlelight, traveling by horse, suffering through high rates of death in childbirth, short life spans, and the ravages of disease. A leap in collective consciousness took place.

The way of peace, I believe, can change the future in the same way. If you and I demonstrate that peace is more satisfying than war, the collective consciousness will shift. Today you and I woke up and found it easy not to kill anyone. Our society, however, can't say the same. It's time for society to take a direction that conforms to what the individual wants. There can be no excuse for living our comfortable lives embedded in a culture of mechanized death and violence. You and I are not innocent bystanders to war. We depend upon it politically, economically, and socially. I will show in detail why this is true, and how we can shift our allegiance to a way of life that is not entangled in war or death. The more people who join us, the faster war will come to an end. Instead of wishing that others would stop killing, you can become a force for peace, and in so doing make the ultimate contribution.

If you shift your allegiance to peace, war ends for you today. This happens one person at a time, but it works. A million tiny earthquakes move more ground than a single cataclysmic quake. There is no better or easier way to live than by catching the wave of evolution. How hard is it to look up and say, Today is a good day for war to end. If your consciousness follows these words and remains true to them, war will never return to your life again.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Deepak Chopra￯﾿ﾽs passionate new book, Peace Is the Way, was inspired by a saying from Mahatma Gandhi: ￯﾿ﾽThere is no way to peace. Peace is the way.￯﾿ﾽ In a world where every path to peace has proved futile, the one strategy that hasn￯﾿ﾽt been tried is the way of peace itself. ￯﾿ﾽWe must not bring one war to an end, or thirty,￯﾿ﾽ Chopra tells us, ￯﾿ﾽbut the idea of war itself.￯﾿ﾽ

How can this be done?

By facing the truth that war is satisfying, and then substituting new satisfactions so that violence is no longer appealing. ￯﾿ﾽWar has become a habit. We reach for it the way a chain smoker reaches for a cigarette, promising to quit but somehow never kicking the habit.￯﾿ﾽ But Chopra tells us that peace has its own power, and our task now is to direct that power and multiply it one person at a time.

Behind the numbing headlines of violence running out of control there are unmistakable signs of a change￯﾿ﾽChopra believes that a majority of people are ready to see an end to war. ￯﾿ﾽRight now 23 million soldiers serve in armies around the world. Can￯﾿ﾽt we find ten times that number who will dedicate themselves to peace? A hundred times?￯﾿ﾽ

Peace Is the Way challenges each of us to take the next leap in personal evolution. ￯﾿ﾽYou aren￯﾿ﾽt asked to be a saint, or to give up any belief. You are only asked to stop reacting out of fear, to change your allegiance from violence to peace.￯﾿ﾽ In a practical seven-step program, Chopra shows the reader how to become a true peacemaker. ￯﾿ﾽViolence may be innate in human nature, but so is its opposite: love. The next stage of humanity, the leap which we are poised to take, will be guided by the force of that love.￯﾿ﾽ This is more than a hope or an aspiration. It is a new way of being in the world, giving each individual the power to end war in our time.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Chopra's latest work is prefaced by endorsements from four Nobel Peace Laureates, Muhammad Ali and an impressive array of other notables. Here, the Indian-born doctor and author of the bestselling The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and other popular spiritual guides contends that the deeply ingrained human habit of resorting to violence can be ended by raising the consciousness of individuals until there is a global change in awareness, similar to the shift that took place when the age of science took hold. Chopra, whose bestsellers and celebrity-friendliness have saddled him with a reputation for being guru to the rich and comfortable, is refreshingly honest about the way our comfort and security are ultimately the fruits of war. "The satisfaction of waging war cannot be replaced by philosophy or religion," he writes. In addition to analysis, he offers daily practices of meditation, thought and actions on behalf of others as a way to live the truth of Mahatma Gandhi's famous quote: "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way." Ultimately, however, the ego itself has to be disarmed to live the way of peace, he says: "For me as an individual to be free, I have to confront myself with questions about who I really am, and this is done in large part by examining the layers of false identity that I mistakenly call me." This is clearly harder to practice than it is to read. Still, Chopra's affirmation that "our true identity is at the level of spirit and nowhere else" has the ring of truth and so does the rest of this simple, practical, inspiring book. Major ad/promo. (Jan. 18) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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