Rational Perspective

Rational Perspective host Alec Hogg had his first direct exposure to Deepak Chopra this week when among the full house of 2 900 who were in the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank. The unusual flavour of this episode is the consequence of a conversation with the brilliant Claudius van Wyk, who has met Chopra and is a great admirer of his work. Chopra, a 71 year old who looks 20 years younger, is a best selling author whose books have made him a household name worldwide. A licensed physician, he has become a massively disruptive force in traditional medicine by preaching the benefits of meditation, sleep and reducing stress over pharmaceuticals. Van Wyk is probably the pre-eminent living expert on Holism, a concept promoted in the 1920s by South African polymath Jan Smuts, who was the Prime Minister of his country, an Allied Field Marshall in World War Two and the only non British chancellor of Cambridge University. Smuts is one of a handful of foreigners (Mandela, Gandhi and Lincoln are others) whose