Chopra would spend it on transformation and healing.

Question: If you had $100 billion to give away, how would you spend it?

Deepak Chopra: If I had $100 billion to give away, I would spend it in creating immediately a network of people in the world that would engage in personal transformation, in collective transformation, and in creative problem solving to solve the four major areas in our world that need to be immediately healed: the environment, social injustice, conflict resolution, and poverty, which is the cause of so many other problems, including diseases.

I think I would use the $100 billion to create a worldwide net of consciousness much more than the Internet. It would be a net where I would be able to harness the collective creativity for problem solving.

There is already great data in the fact that if you put a few people together in the room and you give them a problem, if they’re not specialists they will solve it. If they’re specialists, their minds will never go out of the box.

So this is the opportune moment to harness the collective caring and the collective creativity, and recognize that human development is much more important than development in the classical sense. So no longer pouring money into, you know, solving  one problem at a time.

We seen it in medicine. As soon as you treat one disease, something else pops up. You have to create balance in the total mind-body system, and establish that integration between body, mind, soul and spirit.

And I think $100 billion could be used to just focus on one idea. And that idea is well being of the individual; well being emotionally; well being of our relationships; well being of our businesses; well being of our economy; well being of our ecosystem; and well being of the world at large. It’s a broad term, but all it means is restoring balance.

If you can think of all the ways that we can harness the collective intelligence and the collective compassion; and one of the ways to do that, by the way, is through story telling. There is nothing more transformational than storytelling. So I would create a huge information network which would take everything into account: educational institutions, entertainment, music, news networks, information technologies, the Internet, and saturate this network and these technologies with stories that have the power to transform us.

Recorded on: Aug 17, 2007