From across the room, his Amazon Alexa device says, “Deepak, as of now here’s your daily reflection.” It continues in Mr. Chopra’s voice saying, “Topic: Creating a joyful energetic body.” Mr. Chopra suddenly shouts, “OK stop!” Alexa doesn’t listen, so Mr. Chopra stands up and walks toward it. “Alexa, stop!” he exclaims. “I never listen to my own voice, ever,” he says. “It makes me too self-conscious.”

But Mr. Chopra, 72, is not too bashful to broadcast his daily meditations to potentially millions of Alexa users. His new Alexa meditation program, a daily “flash” of a short message of reflective advice that launched this month, is the latest way that the best-selling author, professor and doctor is peddling his view of the future. The self-fashioned wellness guru, who has written or co-written 86 books, including “Perfect Health” (1990), “The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success” (1994) and “Grow Younger, Live Longer” (2001), believes that consumer technology and artificial intelligence can play an important role in personal health care.

He dismisses critics who consider his prescriptions, which include meditation, yoga and Ayurvedic medicine, as New Age eccentricity. “What was ‘woo woo’ is now mainstream,” he says. “I have a professorship at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine after all these years.” He notes that his for-profit Chopra Center, which provides education in Mr. Chopra’s wellness principles, has published research attesting to the benefits of lifestyle changes in treating chronic diseases.

In recent years, technology and social media have comprised a greater portion of Mr. Chopra’s repertoire. Two years ago, he launched his own wellness app called Jiyo, which helps users monitor their daily habits. He broadcasts Facebook and Instagram videos and posts every morning, using a camera on his dining room table.

Long a believer in self-awareness as a path to spiritual enlightenment, he says that technology can expedite the journey. Lately, Mr. Chopra has been looking into the ways that health apps and virtual reality technology can not only help people track sleep, exercise and nutrition but also help treat conditions such as anorexia and depression. Watching oneself in virtual reality as a healthy person could “possibly rewire neural networks,” he says. “You can see yourself as a healthy person or you can see yourself as ideal weight.” He grants that none of these techniques work so far, but he thinks that they will “by the next generation.”

Born in New Delhi, India, to a cardiologist father and homemaker mother, Mr. Chopra initially trained as a practitioner in traditional medicine. He went to medical school in New Delhi and moved to the U.S. in 1970 to take a job at a hospital in New Jersey. He worked at several hospitals in Boston and obtained his board certifications in internal medicine and endocrinology and metabolism. By 1980, he was chief of staff at the now-closed New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Mass.

As an endocrinologist, he studied the emotional effects of dopamine, serotonin and other neurotransmitters. Back then, he says, his research connecting those chemicals with psychology was controversial, as was his belief in the efficacy of lifestyle and alternative treatments. “Thirty years ago we were suggesting these were molecules of emotion, and now that’s accepted,” he says.

In the mid-1980s, he left the hospital to branch out on his own, first running a meditation center and later co-founding the Chopra Center in 1996. He says that his experience as a doctor in seeing the benefits of lifestyle changes and alternative treatments fueled his own embrace of them. “You recognize you have two patients and they have the same illness…but they have different outcomes,” he says. “This person lives and this person dies, so for me that was the opening.” He started writing books, hosting workshops and hiring researchers and employees to spread his gospel.

Today, he picks up his iPhone to show the many apps that he uses to track his own health. He calls selfies “wellfies” and thinks that someday soon our devices will be able to diagnose our health issues just by looking at an image of our face and hearing the tone of our voice.

He lives in New York and San Diego, spending much of his time with his wife, two children and three grandchildren. He says that he spends most of his time thinking, practicing yoga for one hour a day and meditating for two hours. “These days I meditate on my death, because we all have to die,” he says, but he’s “in very good health” with what he says is a “biological age” in his 40s.

His next book, “Metahuman,” which will be published next year, explores Mr. Chopra’s belief that we are living in virtual reality, merely creating our experiences in our minds. “There’s no such thing as the real reality,” he says. “The universe is a human construct.” He considers the body purely a perceptual experience too.

Baffled, I ask if there’s no reality, why people are motivated to write books or make money. “Money is a construct,” he says. “Now it’s been going on for thousands of years so it’s our collective virtual reality.” He quotes the Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein: “We are asleep. Our life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”

I ask: If our lives are just a form of virtual reality, then what’s the point of all the exercises in self-awareness, sleep tracking and yoga that he recommends? He smiles and says, “So when you’re in the dream, you upgrade the dream.”

Write to Alexandra Wolfe at alexandra.wolfe@wsj.com