The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life Page 5
When your heart grows sick of the violence and divisiveness in the world, starting over is the only choice. You stop looking at the reflections and turn instead to the source. The universe, like any mirror, is neutral. It reflects back whatever is in front of it, without judgment or distortion. If you can trust that, then you have taken the crucial step of renunciation. You’ve renounced the belief that the outer world has power over you. As with everything else on the path to unity, living this truth is what will make it true.
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE THIRD SECRET
Finding a path back to your source is a matter of letting life settle down to where it wants to be. There are gross and subtle levels of every experience, and the subtler levels are more sensitive, awake, and meaningful than the gross. As an exercise, begin to observe when you touch upon subtle levels in your own awareness. Notice how these feel compared to the grosser levels. For example:
To love someone is subtler than to resent or push the person away.
To accept someone is subtler than to criticize the individual.
To promote peace is subtler than to promote anger and violence.
To see someone without judgment is subtler than to criticize the person.
If you let yourself feel it, the subtler side of each experience puts the mind at ease, decreases stress, and results in less restless thinking and less pressure at the emotional level. Subtle experience is quiet and harmonious. You feel settled; you aren’t in conflict with anyone else. There is no overblown drama or even any need for it.
Once you have identified it, begin to favor the subtle side of your life. Value this level of awareness—only if you value it will it grow. If you favor the grosser levels instead, the world will reflect your perception back to you: It will always remain divisive, disturbing, stressful, and threatening. The choice is yours to make at the level of consciousness because, in the infinite diversity of creation, every perception gives rise to a world that mirrors it.
Exercise #2: Meditation
Any experience that brings you into contact with the silent level of awareness can be called meditation. You may have spontaneously hit upon a routine that allows you to experience a deep settling in your mind. If you haven’t yet, then you might adopt one of the more formal meditation practices that appear in every spiritual tradition. The simplest, perhaps, is breathing meditation, as follows:
Sit quietly with your eyes closed in a room with the lights low and no distractions from the telephone or knocks at the door. Shut your eyes for a few minutes; then become aware of your breathing. Let your attention follow your breath as it gently, naturally draws inward. Do the same as the breath flows outward. Don’t make any attempt to breathe with a certain rhythm and don’t try to make your breath deep or shallow.
By following your breath you are aligning yourself with the mind-body connection, the subtle coordination of thought and Prana, the subtle energy contained in the breath. Some people find it easier to stay with their breathing if they repeat a sound: one syllable for the out breath, one for the inner. Ah-Hum is a traditional sound useful for this purpose. (You can also adopt the seed mantras or ritual sounds as described in any text on Eastern spiritual teachings.)
Perform this meditation for 10 to 20 minutes twice a day. You will become aware of your body relaxing. Since most people are storing massive amounts of fatigue and stress, you may even fall asleep. Don’t worry about this, or about any sensation or thought that crops up as your mind grows quieter. Rely on the body’s natural tendency to release stress. This is a gentle meditation that has no negative side effects or dangers as long as you are healthy. (If you feel pain anywhere or a repeated sense of discomfort, these may be symptoms of undiagnosed illness; in that case, should such feelings persist, you need to ask for medical help.)
The relaxing effect will continue, yet you will also begin to notice that you are more self-aware. You may gain a sudden insight or inspiration. You may start to feel more centered; sudden spurts of energy or alertness may occur. These effects vary from person to person, so be open to whatever comes. The overall purpose of meditation is the same for everyone, however: You are learning to relate to awareness itself, the purest level of experience.
Secret #4
WHAT YOU SEEK, YOU ALREADY ARE
WHEN I TURNED TWENTY-ONE as a medical student in New Delhi I had my choice of two kinds of friends. The materialistic kind got out of bed at noon and went to all-night parties where everyone drank Coca-Cola and danced to Beatles records. They had discovered cigarettes and women, perhaps even bootleg liquor, which was much cheaper than imported Scotch. The spiritual kind got up at dawn to go to temple—about the time the materialists were staggering home with hangovers—and they ate rice out of a bowl and drank water or tea, usually out of the same bowl.
It didn’t seem strange at the time that all the materialists were Indians and all the spiritual types were Westerners. The Indians couldn’t wait to leave home and go someplace where Coca-Cola, good tobacco, and legal whiskey were cheap and plentiful. The Westerners kept asking where the real holy men were in India, the kind who could levitate and heal lepers by touching them. As it happened, I ran with the materialists, who were all around me in class. Nobody who was actually born in India ever saw himself the other way, as a seeker.
Today I wouldn’t have two types to choose from—everyone around me seems to be a seeker. In my mind, seeking is another word for chasing after something. My Indian classmates had the easier chase because it doesn’t take much to get money and material things, whereas the spiritual types from the West almost never found their holy men. I used to think that the problem was due to how rare holy men actually are; now I realize that what defeated their thirst for a higher life was tied up in the act of seeking itself. Tactics that will successfully get you whiskey and Beatles records fail miserably when you chase holiness.
The spiritual secret that applies here is this: What you seek, you already are. Your awareness has its source in unity. Instead of seeking outside yourself, go to the source and realize who you are.
Seeking is a word often applied to the spiritual path, and many people are proud to call themselves seekers. Often, they are the same people who once chased too hard after money, sex, alcohol, or work. With the same addictive intensity they now hope to find God, the soul, the higher self. The problem is that seeking begins with a false assumption. I don’t mean the assumption that materialism is corrupt and spirituality is pure. Yes, materialism can become all-consuming, but that’s not the really important point. Seeking is doomed because it is a chase that takes you outside yourself. Whether the object is God or money makes no real difference. Productive seeking requires that you throw out all assumptions that there is a prize to be won. This means acting without hope of rising to some ideal self, hope being a wish that you’ll get somewhere better than the place you started from. You are starting from yourself, and it’s the self that contains all the answers. So you have to give up on the idea that you must go from A to B. There is no linear path when the goal isn’t somewhere else. You must also discard fixed judgments about high and low, good and evil, holy and profane. The one reality includes everything in its tangle of experiences, and what we are trying to find is the experiencer who is present no matter what experience you are having.
Looking at the people who race around trying to be models of goodness, someone coined the apt phrase “spiritual materialism,” the transfer of values that work in the material world over to the spiritual world.
SPIRITUAL MATERIALISM
Pitfalls of the Seeker
Knowing where you’re going.
Struggling to get there.
Using someone else’s map.
Working to improve yourself.
Setting a timetable.
Waiting for a miracle.
There’s no better way to be a genuine seeker than to avoid these pitfalls.
• Don’t know where you’re going. Spiritual growth
is spontaneous. The big events come along unexpectedly, and so do the small ones. A single word can open your heart; a single glance can tell you who you really are. Awakening doesn’t happen according to the plan. It’s much more like putting together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing the finished picture in advance. The Buddhists have a saying, “If you meet the Buddha on the path, kill him,” which means if you’re following a spiritual script written in advance, bury it. All you can imagine in advance are images, and images are never the same as the goal.
• Don’t struggle to get there. If there were a spiritual payoff at the end of the trail, like a pot of gold or the key to heaven, everyone would work as hard as possible for the reward. Any struggle would be worth it. But does it help a two-year-old to struggle to become three? No, because the process of child development unfolds from within. You don’t get a paycheck; you turn into a new person. The same is true for spiritual unfolding. It happens just as naturally as childhood development, but on the plane of awareness rather than in the realm of physiology.
• Don’t follow someone else’s map. There was a time when I was certain that deep meditation using one specific mantra for the rest of my life was the key to reaching enlightenment. I was following a map laid down thousands of years ago by venerable sages who belonged to India’s greatest spiritual tradition. But caution is always required: If you follow someone else’s map, you could be training yourself in a fixed way of thinking. Fixed ways, even those devoted to spirit, are not the same as being free. You should glean teachings from all directions, keeping true to those that bring progress yet remaining open to changes in yourself.
• Don’t make this a self-improvement project. Self-improvement is real. People get stuck in bad places that they can learn to get out of. Depression, loneliness, and insecurity are tangible experiences that can be improved. But if you seek to reach God or enlightenment because you want to stop being depressed or anxious, if you want greater self-esteem or less loneliness, your search may never end. This area of understanding isn’t cut-and-dried. Some people feel tremendously self-improved as their awareness expands; but it takes a strong sense of self to confront the many obstacles and challenges that lie on the path. If you feel weak or fragile, you may feel weaker and more fragile when you confront the shadow energies within. Expanded awareness comes at a price—you have to give up your limitations—and for anyone who feels victimized, that limitation is often so stubborn that spiritual progress becomes very slow. To the extent that you feel any deep conflict inside yourself, a large hurdle stands before you on the path. The wise thing is to seek help at the level where the problem exists.
• Don’t set yourself a timetable. I’ve met countless people who gave up on spirituality because they didn’t reach their goals fast enough. “I gave it ten years. What can I do? Life is only so long. I’m moving on.” More likely they devoted just one year or a month to being on the path, and then the weekend warriors fell away, discouraged by lack of results. The best way to avoid disappointment is not to set a deadline in the first place, although many people find this difficult to do without losing motivation. But motivation was never going to get them there in the first place. Discipline is involved, no doubt, in remembering to meditate regularly, to keep up Yoga class, to read inspiring texts, and to keep your vision before you. Getting into the spiritual habit requires a sense of dedication. But unless the vision is unfolding every day, you will inevitably get distracted. Rather than a timetable, give yourself support for spiritual growth. This can be in the form of a personal teacher, a discussion group, a partner who shares the path with you, regular retreats, and keeping a daily journal. You will be much less likely to fall prey to disappointment.
• Don’t wait for a miracle. It really doesn’t matter how you define miracle—whether it is the sudden appearance of perfect love, a cure for a life-threatening disease, anointment from a great spiritual leader, or permanent and everlasting bliss. A miracle is letting God do all the work; it separates the supernatural world from this world, with the expectation that one day the supernatural world will notice you. Since there is only one reality, your task is to break through boundaries of division and separation. Watching and waiting for a miracle keeps the boundaries up. You are ever at a remove from God, connected to him by wishful thinking.
If you can avoid these pitfalls of spiritual materialism, you will be much less tempted to chase after an impossible goal. The chase began because people came to believe that God, disapproving of what he sees in us, expects us to adopt a certain ideal. It seems impossible to imagine a God, however loving, who doesn’t get disappointed, angry, vengeful, or disgusted with us when we fall short. The most spiritual figures in history were not totally good, however, but totally human. They accepted and forgave; they lacked judgment. I think the highest forgiveness is to accept that creation is thoroughly tangled, with every possible quality given some outlet for expression. People need to accept once and for all that there is only one life and each of us is free to shape it through the choices we make. Seeking can’t get anyone out of the tangle because everything is tangled up. The only thing that will ever be pure and pristine is your own awareness, once you sort it out.
It’s much easier to keep up the fight between good and evil, holy and profane, us and them. But as awareness grows, these opposites begin to calm down in their clashes, and something else emerges—a world you feel at home in. The ego did you a terrible disservice by throwing you into a world of opposites. Opposites always conflict—that’s the only way they know—and who can feel at home in the middle of a fight? Awareness offers an alternative beyond the fray.
Last night in bed, I was dreaming. The usual kinds of dream images were passing back and forth; I don’t remember much what they were. All at once I became aware of the sound of breathing in my dream. After a second I realized that it was my wife, who was moving in her sleep beside me. I knew that I was hearing her, and yet I also knew that I was dreaming at the same time. For a few seconds I was in both worlds, and then I woke up.
Sitting up in bed, I had the strange sensation that it was no longer important that a dream isn’t real. Being awake is more real than a dream only because we have agreed that it is. Actually, the sound of my wife breathing is in my head, whether I am dreaming or not. How, then, could I tell one from the other? Someone else must be watching. An observer was aware without getting caught up in being awake, asleep, or dreaming. Most of the time I am so caught up in waking, sleeping, and dreaming that I have no other perspective. The silent observer is the simplest version of me, the one that just is.
If you strip away all the distractions of life, something yet remains that is you. This version of yourself doesn’t have to think or dream; it doesn’t need sleep to feel rested. There is real joy in finding this version of yourself because it is already at home. It lives above the fray, totally untouched by the war of opposites. When people say that they are seeking, it’s this level of themselves that is calling to them in its silent, untroubled way. Seeking is really just a way of winning yourself back.
But to win yourself back you have to get as close to zero as possible. At its very core, reality is pure existence. Meet yourself there and you will be able to create anything in existence. The “I am” contains all that is needed for making a world, even though by itself it consists of nothing but a silent witness.
You’ve already undertaken the exercise of looking at a rose and breaking it down from the level of a physical object to the level of energy vibrating in empty space. The other side of that exercise consisted of seeing that your brain can also be understood the same way. So when you are seeing a rose, is nothing looking at nothing?
So it would seem, but the real phenomenon is more amazing: You are looking at yourself. One part of your awareness, which you call yourself, is gazing upon itself in the form of a rose. There is no solid core to either the object or the observer. There is no person inside your head, only a swirl of water, salt, sugar, and a hand
ful of other chemicals like potassium and sodium. This whirlpool of a brain is always flowing, and thus every experience is swept along in currents and eddies as swiftly as a mountain stream. So, where is the silent observer located if not in my brain? Neurologists have found locations for all kinds of mental states. No matter what a person is experiencing—depression, elation, creativity, hallucination, amnesia, paralysis, sexual longing, or anything else—the brain displays a signature pattern of activity scattered across various locations. Yet there is no location or pattern for the person having these experiences. The person could be nowhere, at least nowhere that science will ever spot.
This is a cause for incredible excitement because, if the real you isn’t inside your head, you have been set free, like awareness itself. This freedom is limitless. You can create anything because you are in every atom of creation. Wherever your awareness wants to go, matter must follow. You do come first after all and the universe second.
I can hear the cries of outrage from those who claim that today’s worshippers think they are larger than God, that instead of obeying his laws they arrogantly want to define life any way they choose. There is some truth to this criticism, but it must be put into context. Imagine an infant who has been crawling for several months and who suddenly finds that there’s a new mode of travel called walking. Everyone has watched a toddler find his legs—the baby’s face shows a combination of unsteadiness and determination, insecurity and joy. “Can I do this?” “Should I fall back down and crawl, the way I know how to do?” What you’re reading in a baby’s face is exactly the same tangled experience of anyone caught at a spiritual crossroads. In both cases, everything is on the move in a new way. The brain is motivating the body; the body is bringing new information to the brain; unexpected actions begin to emerge from nowhere; and even though the whole mixture feels scary, a certain exhilaration drives us forward. “I don’t know where I’m going, but I have to get there.”