Lisa Schneider:

Deepak Chopra: The evolution of our consciousness and with that, the dominant impulses become compassion, understanding, meaning, purpose, love, creativity, imagination, understanding the part of intention, intuition, these are the evolutionary impulses that will overwhelm the violent impulses.

One of the obstacles toward peace you refer to is the uneven distribution of wealth. You point out that five per cent of the world’s population uses one third of the world’s resources. It seems to me the New Age movement is based in this five per cent. How do you motivate “the richest” to make a personal transformation toward peace?

Right now, the way technology is moving, weapons of mass destruction can be miniaturised and made inexpensively. And that will render the military irrelevant. You could be sitting somewhere, in a remote part of the world with a computer and shifting electrons to basically destroy a city.

So if we understand that there’s no way to fight stateless terrorism, then we might start to spend some significant amount of energy and effort and resources in understanding human behavior, in making friends, in understanding other people and cultures, in understanding that economic factors or disparities in social justice are all part of this tangled hierarchy. If we do that, then we could hope for a more secure and safe world. Right now, we have a myth of security and that myth says that security measures: nuclear shields, anthrax vaccines, and military make us secure. But we have all of that and we’re still very insecure. In fact, the more we have, the more insecure we become. — Beliefnet.com, concluded