No system of thought has access to reality. For Deepak Chopra, this is less provocation than premise. A physician by training and former Chief of Staff at New England Memorial Hospital, Chopra is one of the world’s best-known advocates for alternative medicine and mind-body wellbeing. He rose to prominence in the 1990s with bestselling books like The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success and Quantum Healing. Over the decades, Chopra has built a global following through his writing, teaching, and collaborations across neuroscience, consciousness studies, and integrative medicine.

Though grounded in science, Chopra challenges its limits, arguing that consciousness is not a byproduct of the brain, but the foundation of all experience. For him, joy is a more meaningful metric than output, and death a more honest teacher than data. As automation reshapes our working lives, he invites leaders to turn inward, asking not just how we perform, but who we are.

In association with Finnish Flow, at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, Adam Penny – co-founder and CEO of The Beautiful Truth – discussed with Chopra perception, wellbeing, and the inner world we’ve been taught to ignore, yet may now urgently need to recover.

Read a writeup of the interview below, condensed and edited for clarity.

Adam: You’ve spent decades at the intersection of science and spirituality. What was the pivotal moment that led you to bring these two worlds together?

Deepak: My background is as a physician and endocrinologist. I went on to study neuroendocrinology, focusing on the molecules of emotion, neuropeptides, and I came to realise that these molecules also function as immunomodulators. That was my initial foray into what many credit me with pioneering: mind-body medicine. This eventually led to integrative medicine and a deeper interest in consciousness.

Over time, I came to a profound realisation: no system of thought has access to reality. Science is a system of thought. It has no access to reality. Religion is a system of thought, it has no access to reality. Philosophy is a system of thought, it has no access to reality. Mathematics is a system of thought.

They’re all concept-based. Spirit, which gives rise to concepts, is not itself conceptual. What we call spiritual consciousness or fundamental reality is neither conceptual nor perceivable, yet without it, nothing conceptual or perceivable could exist.

Science is a fascinating human endeavour for understanding reality, but ironically, it increases our ignorance of fundamental truth. It’s successful because it expands our experience of what is ultimately an illusion, what we call ‘matter’. There is no such thing as matter, only sensations: tactile, visual and otherwise. The hand touching a chair, the chair itself, these are all sensations, filtered through the conditioned mind and brain, which themselves are constructs of consciousness.

As Max Planck said, consciousness is without cause. Once you posit a cause, you’ve entered the conceptual realm of spacetime. But consciousness itself is beyond form, infinite, irreducible, timeless, faceless and incomprehensible. Once you accept this as the starting point, you understand that all systems of thought merely offer small windows into reality and in doing so, they actually expand our ignorance of that reality.

If you understand this one idea, that you and what we call fundamental reality are neither conceptual nor perceptual, you grasp something essential. You are, in truth, without cause, incomprehensible and non-conceptual. Yet without you, none of the above exists.

Adam: You were speaking about this to a group of business leaders here at Davos last night. Why is this conversation relevant to them now?

Deepak: I attend these conferences mostly out of curiosity. What I find is a hustle culture, everyone’s selling a product or service with a narrative around it. They talk about their last successful ‘exit’, but never consider the final exit: death.

It’s almost humorous. The so-called business leaders of the world are not even enjoying themselves. My criteria for success in business are simple: Are you joyful? Are you having fun? Do you have stress? If the answer is yes, I don’t want to work with you. I don’t want your stress to affect me.

I have no stress. I’m full of joy, and I’m having fun. I like to spend time with people who are joyful, stress-free and playful. Our mission should be to help create a joyful world. Joy is the only true measure of success. If you don’t have that, you’re wasting your day.

Too often, business is just a promise of success that has nothing to do with bodily goals, creative playfulness or the ability to love and be compassionate. True success is the progressive realisation of worthy goals, and it must include love, compassion and connection with your playful, creative soul.

Adam: As the world gets more chaotic, people seem to go in opposite directions, either waking up to deeper questions about consciousness, or doubling down on fear, anxiety and the chase for more. How can business leaders move beyond that fear?

Deepak: Change doesn’t come from motivation. Motivation is of the mind, it’s mental, and it rarely works. Think of the promises people make to lose weight or stop smoking. Motivation fades. Inspiration, however, means to be ‘in spirit’.

In today’s world, people often only reach that state through crisis, be it death in the family, illness, divorce, addiction or something else. Even then, few truly shift.

For the past 35 years, I’ve worked with organisations like Gallup on measuring wellbeing. We categorise it into five areas: corporate, social, physical, community and financial wellbeing. Financial wellbeing isn’t about wealth, it’s about security and peace of mind.

Ironically, the most anxious people about money are the extremely poor and the extremely rich. Financial wellbeing is about managing the exchange of values. Money is just that, an exchange of values.

Your values matter. If your values are aligned with pornography or drugs, you can make money in Las Vegas or online. But there’s an ecosystem for financial wellbeing at every level, from survival and safety to love, creativity and transcendence. You must ask: What are your values? What’s your story?

People don’t buy products or services. They buy stories. FedEx is a story. Mercedes is a story. Apple is a story. Business success comes when your story resonates with others who share your values. Whether it’s Elon Musk or Trump or Putin, hang out with people who share your values and you’ll be financially successful, though not necessarily joyful.

Adam: Can AI help us measure things like happiness, success or wellbeing more accurately?

Deepak: These things are measurable. Corporate, social, physical and even financial wellbeing can all be assessed using metrics, heart rate variability, sleep quality, immune and endocrine function, for example.

Even happiness is measurable. Bhutan has a Gross National Happiness index. But that’s not the same as spiritual wellbeing. In fact, I don’t talk much about spiritual wellbeing because few are truly interested.

Spiritual wellbeing involves three things. Finding your true identity, beyond space and time. Spontaneous ethical morality, truth, beauty, love, compassion, joy, without needing commandments. Loss of the fear of death.

None of that is currently measurable. But with AI, I’ve found a map, a menu, but not the meal. No guru or prophet can give you the experience of freedom. They can only point to it. Worshipping the finger pointing to the moon, instead of looking at the moon itself, is where we often go wrong.

Even figures like Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad existed within the illusion of spacetime. What interests me is not their teachings but their experience. What did they experience, and how can I experience that?

Adam: You also said something interesting: “Seeing is believing,” but also “believing is seeing.” Can you expand on that?

Deepak: Belief is often a cover for insecurity. I don’t need to believe in electricity, it powers all my appliances. I don’t believe in gravity, I’m sitting here, not floating.

We see only what we believe. It’s how perception works. But belief, in many cases, masks uncertainty. Faith, on the other hand, is certainty in the invisible through experience.

You can’t have form without formlessness. We experience space and time, though we can’t see them. These are emergent, experiential realities.

So faith is rooted in experience, not belief. Once you experience the non-conceptual and non-perceivable, without which nothing conceptual or perceivable can exist – that is unshakeable faith.

Adam: You spoke about humanity’s potential to be both angelic and demonic, and that creativity arises from this tension. Can you elaborate?

Deepak: Creativity comes from our capacity to be comfortable with paradox, ambiguity and contradiction.

Freud said neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. Most people want simple binaries – this or that. But nature is full of paradox and contradiction, and human beings are the pinnacle of that divine and diabolical. 

This interview took place at Davos 2025 in association with Finnish Flow. Finnish Flow coordinates the Finnish business community’s participation in the side events of the World Economic Forum’s Annual Meeting held in Davos, Switzerland.