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Robert Chartoff is one of Hollywood’s legendary producers, behind commercial blockbusters like the Rocky movies and other critically acclaimed productions. He has had a long association with India, through his education foundation in Bodh Gaya.

What does spirituality mean to you?
I would not label myself as spiritual or not. But I admire people who are --- people at peace with themselves, open to honouring others, to paying attention to what is going on in life, for instance to social issues. I don’t relate it at all to a particular practice. It is irrelevant to what spirituality is.

what about your own attempt to be at peace?
I constantly do. And it is not a futile attempt. But it is a challenging one. It is something I have been recognizing more and more with age, trying to find peace after having been in an extremely competitive business, where being at peace is not the objective, only your accomplishments are. That is how the community judges you and how you end up judging yourself, unfortunately. So this quest for peace started when I began realizing that there are other values than these kinds of achievements.

What triggered that realization?
If there was one seminal triggering event, it would be drug experimentation, in particular MDMA. I took it many times with a Jungian therapist who would sit with me for eight hours, in silence or in conversation according to my needs. He was in his seventies and felt he could do far more good sitting with people taking MDMA and dealing with whatever their needs were under those conditions, rather than in more conventional therapy.

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