Sleeping With Deepak.

Byline: Rob Long

Ok, let's begin. Sit comfortably. Eyes closed. Hands in a relaxed posture. Now slowly, effortlessly, begin silently repeating your mantra. Do this for 30 minutes, twice a day and you will, if the gurus and experts are correct, transform yourself into a more centered and peaceful person.

Or maybe, like me, you'll just fall asleep in your meditation chair and wake up 30 minutes later with a slight crick in the neck and a thin thread of drool leading from your lower lip to your shirt front.

Which, actually, isn't such a bad outcome, when I think of all of the other useless things I could be doing instead, like surfing the Net in slack-jawed stupor, or revising my enemies list, or staring into the middle distance while robotically eating Fritos. And anyway, meditation is a practice , not a result. It works its magic slowly, by the doing of it, not by any goal-driven attitude.

At least, that's what Deepak Chopra says. I spent a few days recently at the Chopra Institute in Carlsbad, California, on the grounds of the swank and luxurious La Costa Resort and Spa. I went there because it suddenly seemed to me that a life spent surfing the Net in slack-jawed stupor, or revising an ever-lengthening enemies list, or staring into the middle distance robotically eating deep-fried snacks, was probably a life that could use a little fine-tuning in the care-and-feeding-of-the-soul department.

There was a lot of talk about diet, of course, and yoga, and body types, but the fundamental keystone of the Chopra philosophy is meditation, which was enormously attractive to me because it involves two of my most favorite activities: sitting, and closing the eyes. Ah , I thought during the meditation lecture, now we're talkin'! For some reason, though, it's not so easy. The sitting, no prob. The eyes closing, check. But then, ...