The Chopra-Epstein files and the only solution that actually works
This is the second in a series I am trying to keep up to response to current events from what I call "the ground floor".
By now you've probably seen it. Deepak Chopra — Mr. Enlightenment, the man who sold oneness to millions and somebody I followed for a long time — appears thousands of times in the Jeffrey Epstein files. Late nights described as "a blast." Requests to bring "your girls." The texts trailing off in 2019, three months before Epstein's arrest.
And then the silence. From Mel Robbins, Brené Brown, Eckhart Tolle, Oprah. The entire apparatus of the modern spirituality industry, suddenly mute. Do they have nothing to say to that? Why are they not distancing themselves?
The Facebook truth influencer Tiffany Walker put it plainly: "If you can't speak up for trafficked children, your message is meaningless."
And it isn't only children. The same silence that fails trafficked girls also protects what happens to grown women inside these same networks — women coerced, women passed around, women reduced to "cute girls" and "prey" in casual correspondence between powerful men. The harm doesn't end at eighteen. Neither should the accountability.
She's right, and I connect with her message even though we don't know each other. And I want to go one layer deeper, because this is not about Chopra's character. It is about a structural failure, a failure of the whole setup we are living in. And the structure is one I have been watching from the inside for forty years.
What happens when you brand oneness
I just don't believe that genuine oneness — the felt, embodied, lived experience that we are not separate from each other — is compatible with a personal empire. I have not been able to reconcile that and after this news I stopped trying... I have enough proof now.
It cannot be, because oneness means the child somewhere you have never met registers in you the same way the child in your house does. It means the woman spoken of as "prey" in a rich man's inbox registers the same way your own daughter would. There is no smaller category of harm just because the person harmed is grown. It means the silence you keep to protect your brand is felt by us as violence, not strategy we can forgive. It means there is no "my audience" or "my message" — there is only what is true, and whether you are saying it.
You cannot run a $50 million personal brand on that.
So what gets sold is not oneness. What gets sold is the feeling of oneness — in a retreat, in a book, in a guided meditation, in a moment of dissolution that costs $299 and sends you home before anything changes. The product is the experience without the accountability. The elevation without the ground.
And an empire built on that needs protection. It needs access. It needs to be connected to the right rooms, the right dinners, the right networks. Jeffrey Epstein was exceptional at exactly that. He was a room that led to other rooms.
This is not a story about bad people. It is a story about what happens when sacred things get put into the market and the market wins.
The silence is the proof
What I find most telling is not the relationships they have and display to boost their marketing... — it is the silence after.
These are people who built entire careers on the premise that truth-telling is the path. That courage is the practice. That speaking what is real, even when it costs something, is the whole point.
And when the test came — when children were the stakes — they ran the numbers and chose the brand.
Not out of cowardice. Out of internal consistency. Because what they built was never actually about truth. It was about the idea of truth, marketed to people who needed to feel like they were living it.
Real oneness has no brand to protect. It cannot go silent when children are harmed because the silence would be a violation of itself. It speaks because anything else is impossible.
What the only solution actually looks like
I want to be careful here, because "oneness is the answer" sounds like exactly the kind of thing a spiritual brand would say.
So let me be specific about what I mean — and what I don't mean.
I don't mean a feeling of connection you arrive at in a workshop and then take home.
I don't mean a philosophy about interconnectedness that you post about and believe in while making calculations about your follower count.
I mean oneness as a practice with actual teeth. Where your accountability to a child you have never met is structural — built into how you live, not a value you hold. Where the question "will this cost me followers?" cannot arise, because the answer is irrelevant. Where silence in the face of harm registers in your body as pain, not as a reasonable strategic choice.
This is not aspirational. This is what happens when embodied practice — real practice, repeated over time — actually changes your nervous system's relationship to separation.
Forty years in this work. I have seen it. It is slow, uncomfortable, and not marketable. It cannot be packaged. It will never trend.
It is the only thing that works.
Because the Chopra problem is not a bad apple. It is what commodified spirituality reliably produces. The incentive structure of the brand selects for exactly this — warmth in the content, calculation in the relationships, silence when the cost of speaking is too high.
You cannot fix that with better values statements or accountability culture or new spiritual teachers with cleaner reputations.
You fix it by building something that cannot be a brand in the first place. Where the practice produces people for whom the silence is simply not an option, because it would hurt too much.
The trail this belongs to
Last I wrote about Dario Amodei's AI essay — 20,000 words about the most important technological transition in human history, and not a single word about the body.
This time it is about the most prominent spiritual teacher of the last thirty years in the Epstein files, and the silence of everyone who built their careers on his coattails.
These are the same story.
Both are symptoms of a civilization that has been running on disembodied intelligence — ideas without ground, consciousness without contact, connection without accountability to actual living beings. The AI crisis is what happens when that produces technology. The Chopra crisis is what happens when it produces spirituality.
The ground floor I keep writing about — the body, the breath, the felt experience of being genuinely connected to another living person — is not a supplement to these problems.
It is the only foundation from which a different outcome is possible.
That is not a comfortable thing to say. It means the work is longer and slower than anyone wants. It means the retreat and the app and the book are not enough. It means the question is always: what does your practice produce in you when no one is watching, when the cost is real, when the child is not yours?
I have been working on that question for forty years. I will keep working on it.
And I will keep writing from the ground floor, for the people who are building there too.
Update, July 2026 — Since I wrote this, the story has moved exactly where it needed to go: past the man, into the structure. UC San Diego formally ended Chopra's affiliation on June 30. More significantly, a movement is now forming — organizations like Seek Safely pushing for actual regulation of the wellness industry, naming coercive control and undue influence as the real disease. The industry has stopped asking "how could he?" and started asking "what did we build that made him inevitable?" That's the right question. It's the one this piece was always trying to ask. And the answer hasn't changed: nothing that runs on guru dependency will survive it. Only practice you own yourself — in your own body, at your own pace, with no one to worship — stands outside the wreckage.
Daniel Hirtz is a consciousness teacher, breathwork facilitator, and author of the forthcoming book "Breath is Your Friend: Conscious Adaptive Breathing for Daily Life." He has spent 40+ years integrating breath, music, energy, and consciousness work across every major breathing lineage.