"We are not victims of aging, sickness and death. These are part of scenery, not the seer, who is immune to any form of change. This seer is the spirit, the expression of eternal being"
About this Quote
Chopra pulls a classic sleight of hand: he concedes the obvious (bodies age, bodies break, bodies end) and then immediately demotes it to stage dressing. Calling aging, sickness, and death "scenery" is doing the heavy lifting here. It reframes mortality as an external event you watch happen, not a reality that happens to you. The emotional pitch is obvious: if you can relocate the self from the body to the "seer", you can treat fear as a category error.
The subtext is less serene than it sounds. This is a bid for sovereignty in a culture that medicalizes, quantifies, and monetizes vulnerability. If the "seer" is immune to change, then the humiliations of decline become negotiable - not in hospitals, but in consciousness. It's an empowerment move, and also a bypass: suffering becomes something you observe rather than something with social, biological, and economic causes that demand confrontation. The line "not victims" signals resistance to a modern script where identity gets reduced to diagnosis.
Context matters: Chopra emerges from a late-20th-century wellness ecosystem that stitches together Vedantic concepts (witness consciousness, atman) with self-help cadence. The rhetoric is designed to be portable - clean nouns ("seer", "spirit", "eternal being") that feel both ancient and brand-ready. It works because it offers a metaphysical upgrade without requiring a monastery. But the price of that comfort is ambiguity: if the real self is untouched, what obligations remain to the touched self - and to everyone else still trapped in the "scenery"?
The subtext is less serene than it sounds. This is a bid for sovereignty in a culture that medicalizes, quantifies, and monetizes vulnerability. If the "seer" is immune to change, then the humiliations of decline become negotiable - not in hospitals, but in consciousness. It's an empowerment move, and also a bypass: suffering becomes something you observe rather than something with social, biological, and economic causes that demand confrontation. The line "not victims" signals resistance to a modern script where identity gets reduced to diagnosis.
Context matters: Chopra emerges from a late-20th-century wellness ecosystem that stitches together Vedantic concepts (witness consciousness, atman) with self-help cadence. The rhetoric is designed to be portable - clean nouns ("seer", "spirit", "eternal being") that feel both ancient and brand-ready. It works because it offers a metaphysical upgrade without requiring a monastery. But the price of that comfort is ambiguity: if the real self is untouched, what obligations remain to the touched self - and to everyone else still trapped in the "scenery"?
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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