The U.S. Geological Survey is blaming day-to-day seismological changes for Sunday's 7.2 earthquake along the U.S.-Mexico border. But Deepak Chopra, the famed alternative-medicine practitioner and transcendental meditation guru, is pretty sure he knows what really happened.
"Had a powerful meditation just now -- caused an earthquake in Southern California," Chopra wrote to his nearly 179,000 Twitter followers shortly after the quake.
And then, to clarify: "Was meditating on Shiva mantra & earth began to shake," he tweeted. "Sorry about that."
Chopra might want to apologize directly to those in California, who haven't suffered significant infrastructure damage but are still bracing for more temblors, and to those in Mexico, where two are dead, hundreds are injured and thousands are still without power.
Transcendental meditation (TM) was largely popularized by Chopra, who's been dubbed "McMeditation" for the multimillion-dollar profits he's earned off books, DVDs and his Chopra Center for Wellbeing in Carlsbad, Calif. -- where a six-day mind-body wellness program runs around $2,500.
According to Chopra, at the crux of the meditation practice is "the field of possibilities, creativity, correlation ... where intention actualizes its own fulfillment."
Let's hope he's wrong about that, or the guru might have some explaining to do about what exactly his meditation session Sunday was hoping to actualize.
An hour after Chopra's Twitter confession, he vowed to one Twitter user, @WhiteMoon7, "Won't do it again -- promise."
But even the guru himself must not know his own strength. Since the promise, dozens of aftershocks have rattled the U.S.-Mexico border.
All the while, Chopra's staying safely above the reach of the ongoing quakes. According to his Twitter feed, the guru boarded a plane from California to Denver earlier this morning.
