Pet pronouncements include the prediction that bodies will be piled as high as mountains in the coming Armageddon between the Antichrist and 200 million Chinese. Book your pew now, as only those faithful to his church will survive. Indian-born executive director of the Sharp Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body Medicine, San Diego, and unblinking exponent of New Age mysticism. Guru read by millions and much courted by celebrities from Prince Charles to Michael Jackson, who were no doubt soothed by his assertion that wealth is a divine blessing.

Demi Moore believes that Chopra’s health-and-wealth-oriented teachings may help her live to the age of 130. Chopra dispenses spiritual advice in bestselling manuals and from his popular Internet homepage, which also offers immodest summaries of his “life and work”.MATTHEW FOXSan Francisco-based New Age Christian, ex-monk, founder of Creation Spirituality, a “prophetic, sensual” religion which argues that any form of ecstasy – drugs, sex, yoga, drumming – is “the experience of God”. Advocate of the notion of Original Blessing (as opposed to original sin). He is often dismissed as a charlatan by the church establishment, his world-wide following includes many in the UK, who thrill to the rhythmic prose of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ (1988); Chris Brain’s Nine O’Clock Service was Fox-inspired.

Lately, Fox’s Reinvention of Work (1994) suggests how to “reconnect the postindustrial world with the Great Work of the Universe”.MARIANNE WILLIAMSONHugely influential proponent of New Age Spirituality – lightweight theology mixed with ecology, feminism and anti-racism. Currently engaged in an Internet-based project, “Renaissance America”, promoting social regeneration through a spiritual “cybercommunity”. Bases her teachings on a “channelled” book of spiritual psychology, A Course in Miracles; she officiated at Elizabeth Taylor and Larry Fortensky’s wedding. “As we pray and meditate and actualise our highest potential,” she claims, “we become shock absorbers for the excess electro-magnetic energy that bombards the planet.

If we do this en masse, the earth will calm down”.CULTUREJEAN BAUDRILLARDPremier pundit of post-modernism, who contends that the media is vandalising history, and – most provocatively – that the Gulf War didn’t happen. He envisions a future of bewildering digital chaos in which “events have no more meaning than their anticipated meaning, their programme and their broadcasting.” With this comes the threat of a new barbarism, fleshed out in The Transparency of Evil (1993). “Everything we thought left behind forever by the ineluctable march of progress is not dead at all, but on the contrary, likely to return … and to reach into the very heart of our ultra-sophisticated but ultra-vulnerable system”.WILLIAM GIBSONFounder of the “Cyberpunk” school of science fiction: author of anorak classics like Neuromancer (1984), in which he coined the word “Cyberspace”; now exploring virtual reality in his fiction. His latest work, Idoru (1996), features a marriage between a corporeal man and a computer-generated woman. The structures of the Internet, he argues, “could one day be seen as being terrifically significant: something akin to the building of cities”. It’s widely held that those working on real VR are chasing his ideas, not vice versa.