When Deepak Chopra was a child, his mother gave him one instruction before bed. It has informed his approach to living.

Deepak Chopra is the kind of person whose writings have a way of crawling from the page and into the cultural zeitgeist, travelling far and wide until they become so influential, it feels like they've been there all along.

It's likely you've absorbed the 78-year-old's work, even if you're entirely unaware of it. He was a prominent figure in the Transcendental Meditation movement in the 1980s, and went on to teach celebrities like Oprah Winfrey, Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Jackson and Madonna how to meditate.

He's a New York Times best-selling author, having written over 90 books, and for almost 40 years he's been a pioneer of New Age spirituality. Chopra writes extensively about how we take the miracle and mystery of our existence for granted, how many of us are stuck in social conditioning that limits our potential, how peace, and not happiness, should be the ultimate pursuit, and how true fulfilment comes only from getting in touch with your spiritual identity. He's responsible for pushing concepts like transcendence, abundance and manifestation into the mainstream, and while some of his ideas - particularly those around alternative medicine - are controversial, he has undoubtedly informed how millions of people worldwide think about their own wellbeing. 

So, when I found myself sitting opposite him in a podcast studio a few weeks ago, with an hour to speak to him about happiness, I barely knew where to start. But I usually begin my interviews on But Are You Happy by asking my guests about whether they had a happy childhood, and so that's what I did.

"I did grow up in a very happy family," Chopra said. "My father was an Army doctor, my mother was a storyteller, and they were always celebrative about everything. Looked at every challenge as an opportunity and enjoyed life."

Listen to the full interview of Clare Stephens with Deepak Chopra on But Are You Happy?. Post continues after audio.

Chopra was born in New Delhi, India, where he eventually studied medicine before moving to the United States. I asked whether, as a child, he had any challenges to happiness. Whether there was anything he contended with when it came to wellbeing or satisfaction or finding meaning.

As an aside, Deepak Chopra is famously stoic when speaking about his life and experiences. He does not wade into regrets or failures, he is optimistic about the future, and, as he said in response to one of my questions that began with "do you worry about…" he claims that he does not, in fact, worry. 

So, I did not expect answers about pain or trauma or depression. 

But he did share a fascinating insight into what his mother would say each night when she put him to bed. 

"As I mentioned, my mother was a storyteller," he said, "and every time before she put me to bed, she would… sing or read a story and then stop it at what we call a cliffhanger. Everything was going wrong, and then she would say, I want you to dream up the rest of the story, make sure it has a happy ending, and also make sure it's a love story. So I got to reframe every challenge as a love story with a happy ending."

This practice, it would seem, informed his approach to living. 

Chopra is a proponent of seeing every obstacle as an opportunity. This optimism has been a common thread in all his work, including his latest book Digital Dharma: How AI can elevate spiritual intelligence and personal well-being. In it, he argues that while we've demonised artificial intelligence, and often present it as a profound danger and a threat to the future of our species, there's a different way to perceive it.

"AI, as we know it, is a large language model," he told me. "It accesses all human languages."

"Having said that, AI is not even intelligent," he continued. "It's a huge database, a huge base of knowledge."

He believes that "if you disappeared today on a remote island, and you came back in 20 years, you wouldn't recognise the world you would be in. You would have leapfrogged into a new culture, a new civilisation."

Watch: Deepak Chopra talks about AI and Metaphysical Exploration. Post continues after video.

When I responded that such an idea was scary, he smiled. 

"The primates said the same thing when humans emerged and started to walk upright."

Ultimately, he says that it is always terrifying to be on the brink of change. But it is what we do with that change, and not the change itself, that matters. 

"A knife can be used to kill a person, but in a surgeon's hands, a knife heals. A hammer can be used to also knock somebody on the head, but in a carpenter's hands, it's an amazing tool. Also, once the technology comes it's irreversible. It's like a child that cannot return to the womb."

The same, Chopra argues, can be said for artificial intelligence.

"I actually believe that given shared vision and maximum diversity of storytellers and talent… we could use AI to create a more peaceful, just sustainable, healthier and joyful world, because all the challenges we have right now, like climate change, like social and economic injustice, like chronic disease, like an unsustainable biology, all these are reversible, and AI has the ability to tell us how to do it. We just have to have the collective will."

I left my conversation with Deepak Chopra full of unasked questions. But I also left it wanting to implement his mother's bedtime instruction in my household once my child is old enough. To give an unfinished story a happy ending, and to make it a love story. Because if we can approach our own lives, our own hardships, and the challenges of humanity with that optimism, perhaps we can solve problems and find solutions we thought were beyond our grasp. 

Read more from Clare Stephens:

• 'Wait. This film is about a crime.' A very 2024 recap of Bridget Jones' Diary.

• Donald Trump's victory has forced us to confront a difficult truth.

• 'What Zoë Foster Blake taught me about how to say no, and why it matters.'

Feature image: deepakchopra.com.