Healing the world!
Deepak Chopra's interest in Hinduism and medicine evolved while observing a mind-body connection in his research, and a chance encounter in 1985 with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at a conference in Washington, DC.

"I first leaned toward Ayurveda medicine and then actually went on to study other wisdom traditions of the world. This happened during my training in neuro endocrinology, where I saw what happened in consciousness in biology," Chopra explains.

"I was just extending my understanding of healing from physical to mental to social to environmental. That's what the Alliance is all about -- healing the body politic, healing the world."

He is at ease quoting from the scriptures or talking quantum physics. He has studied the Bible closely. Though The Third Jesus was on his mind for 25 years, it took him six months to complete it once he began writing. His next book will be a fictional account of Jesus's missing years.

"Where else do you read a story of the Son of God being executed by their own?" he says. "It is dramatic. It is three years of his teaching and it has shaped the world for 2,000 years."

In a review, Harvey Cox, Hollis professor of Divinity at Harvard, said The Third Christ is 'bound to provoke both admiration and condemnation'.

Chopra references the New Testament and Gnostic Gospels to deconstruct church doctrine and conservative Christianity on issues such as war, abortion, women's rights and homophobia.

"I see blogs every day that are negative and very nasty because this is not a literalist interpretation of Jesus," Chopra says. "My book is about Jesus as a state of consciousness. If I can aspire -- maybe not achieve, but aspire -- to be in that state of mind, and if a lot of people were aspiring to be in that state of mind, this would be a better world."

"I emphasise this over and over again: whatever we do is about improving ourselves and improving the world."

By Tania Fuentez/AP