Power, Freedom, and Grace Read online

  All relationship is a mirror to the self. Those whom you are deeply attracted to or repelled by are both mirrors of you. You are attracted to those in whom you find traits that you already have but want more of, and you are repelled by those in whom you find traits that you deny in yourself. Identify the qualities that attract you to others, and the qualities that repel you. Write them down on a piece of paper. This is who you are. And if you accept yourself as you are, and love yourself as you are, you become immensely attractive because you are natural.

  Why not make yourself irresistible? Embrace your shadow, understand your shadow, forgive your shadow. Embrace the fact that you are the many faces of the divine: You are the prisoner, and you are the prison; you are the jailor, and you are the freedom also. It is your destiny to play an infinity of roles, but you are not the roles you play.

  Right now I’m playing the role of an author. When I think of my children, I’m playing the role of a father. When I think of my wife, I’m playing the role of a husband. When I think of my parents, I’m playing the role of a child. When I think of a patient, I’m playing the role of a doctor. But I am none of these roles that I play. I am the eternal spirit, the silent witness who plays these roles.

  In the great chain of being, where birth and death are the opening and closing of acts in the eternal drama of existence, we have all played an infinity of roles for ages beyond our imagination. Even after death, our spirit will continue to play other roles. To be independent of the roles we play, and yet to play the roles with passion, is detached involvement. As we will see in Chapter 8, this happens naturally when we abide in cosmic consciousness. We are involved and yet we are free at the same time. In cosmic consciousness, the whole process of life begins to blossom effortlessly. We experience more joy, greater ease, and the state of grace because we allow universal intelligence to play itself through us.

  Whatever is happening around you is transient. If it’s joy and pleasure, you can be sure there’s a bit of the opposite around the corner. If it’s suffering and misery, you can be sure there’s a bit of the opposite around the corner, too. But in cosmic consciousness you are independent of the play of opposites; you are independent of both hope and despair. Hope is nothing but a sign of despair. When you say, “I have hope,” you are implying that you are in despair. You have to go beyond hope and despair, and you can only do that if you ground yourself in the wisdom of who you really are — not just intellectually but experientially.

  Anything and everything in existence can be mastered when you experience the truth of who you are. Once your mind is absorbed in the unbounded nature of pure consciousness, you are no longer upset by the play of opposites. You witness the world of duality, but you live in the field of pure potentiality. This is living from the source of lasting happiness — the source of power, freedom, and grace.

  KEY POINTS

  The key to lasting happiness is to identify with the unchanging essence of your inner self, your source. Then you no longer look for happiness because you know that you already have it.

  More important than a positive mind is a silent mind. A silent mind is a nonjudgmental, nonanalytical, noninterpretive mind.

  When you can accept all the contradictions that life offers, when you can comfortably flow between the banks of pleasure and pain, experiencing both while getting stuck in neither, you have achieved freedom.

  7

  How can I live with effortless ease?

  Flow: To move easily and gracefully with unbroken continuity; to hang loose.

  When you are conceived, all you are is a double strand of DNA — a speck of information and intelligence that differentiates into a hundred trillion cells, which then become a fully formed baby with eyes, nose, ears, brain, arms, legs, genitals. You didn’t do anything to make that happen, and yet you made it happen. In that blueprint, that speck of information, is a plan for when your teeth will grow out, when you will reach puberty, when you will generate sex hormones so you can produce another human being. It’s all there in the speck, and it happens with effortless spontaneity, with effortless ease, with no resistance. The impulse of the universe is coming through you in the form of that double strand of DNA.

  Now, if you can make a hundred trillion cells without any confusion, if each cell can do its own unique thing and correlate its activity with every other cell without any confusion, it’s because the intelligence of the universe is flowing through that speck of DNA, which you can’t even see under a microscope. So the best thing you can do is to allow it to happen. It isn’t wise to interfere with it.

  And how do you interfere with this intelligence? In spiritual terms, we can say that you interfere when you identify with your self-image and lose your inner self; when you lose your sense of connection with your soul, your source. In more common terms, we can say that you interfere when you start worrying, when you start anticipating problems, when you start thinking, What can go wrong? When you try to control everything, when you are afraid, when you feel isolated — all these things interfere with the flow of nature’s intelligence.

  Your inner self is your innate intelligence; it is Being becoming. It is your ability to create, to grow, to evolve, to express. Your self-image is the indoctrination by society, by education; it’s the image you have created of yourself based on what other people think of you. As soon as you sacrifice the Self for the self-image, you lose divinity for something that is illusory and doesn’t exist. The self-image is a hallucination; it isn’t even real, but it interferes with the flow of intelligence.

  Innate intelligence is spontaneous, intuitive, evolutionary, and whole. It is the flow of the whole universe acting through you. But fear, doubt, concern, and worry put you in a contracted state that interferes with the spontaneous flow of intelligence. What we call stress is that which actually constricts the flow of intelligence as it moves from the unmanifest to the manifest.

  Anytime you feel resistance, anytime things are going wrong, anytime you feel frustration, anytime there is too much effort, then you are not connecting with your source, the field of pure potentiality. The state of fear is the state of separation; it is resistance to what is. If you don’t have resistance, then it’s all spontaneous, effortless ease.

  The mind, being everywhere, is nonlocal, and through the process of attention we localize it. So if we want something to become our life experience, then we put our attention on it. If we don’t want something to become our life experience, we take our attention away from it. In fact, the whole mechanics of creation is just that: a certain quality of attention of the Self to itself.

  Right now, you’re probably not aware that your foot is touching the sole of your shoe or that your naked skin is touching your clothes. As soon as you put your attention on this fact, it becomes your reality. The basic principle is this: Whatever you put your attention on grows stronger in your life.

  When people experience pain, they try to avoid it or they want to escape from it. And the more they try to do that, the more their attention is on the idea of pain. The idea of pain gets magnified, and of course that creates more pain. So if you have a headache and you want to get rid of it, then simply be with the headache; be with the pain. Don’t analyze, don’t interpret, and don’t try to judge the pain. Feel the sensation with your full awareness. Put your attention on the sensation, and you’ll see that it dissipates. Pure consciousness is a healing force, so when you put your attention on the sensation, consciousness gets into it and saturates it with the healing force of life. If, however, you put your attention on the idea of pain, then the pain will become more pronounced.

  When you go beyond thought, beyond the idea of pain, then you are Being. And when you are Being, you are not thinking. From that level of awareness, you simply put your attention on the body as a witness, not thinking this or that notion, just being aware. Anything you can think of is a notion. Pain is a notion; suffering is a notion; happiness is a notion; time is a notion; wealth is a notion; poverty is a n
otion. There is nothing that exists that was not a notion first, or an idea, or a concept, or some form of desire. But the source of the thought, the thinker behind the thought, is not a notion. It is pure Being, pure potentiality.

  What does Being do in order to manifest as matter? It has an idea, it has a notion, and that notion immediately localizes the field of all possibilities into this or that reality. The scriptures say, “In the beginning there was the word, and the word was made into flesh, and the word was with God.” This is the exact mechanics of manifestation. What is the word? The word is an idea, it’s a notion, it’s a concept, and that concept is the spontaneous manifestation of an impulse in consciousness. That’s all it is.

  Being is not a concept because Being is nonconceptualizable; it is beyond all concepts. Being has no beginning in time, no ending in time, no edges in space. We are really being humans instead of human beings. We have found the mode of expression to be human, but essentially we are pure Being. This may seem like an abstract notion, but if you go beyond thought and experience Being, you will realize that it isn’t.

  Most people get attached to concepts and notions rather than the experience of Being. This is analogous to mistaking the map for the territory. The territory is the experience of Being, and it’s the reality that we want to experience. The map is just the labeling of a territory, and yet we mostly identify with the map. What we have to understand once and for all is that we are not the thought, but the one who generates the thought.

  Being is the source of thought, and it’s also where fulfillment of desire comes from. What is desire? Desire is pure potentiality seeking manifestation. But fulfillment of desire requires that we first Be, and then simply having the notion in our awareness spontaneously creates the reality. This is the mechanics of creation; it’s how the universe comes into being. The universe is a field of all possibilities that interacts with its own self. Therefore, inherent in every desire is the mechanics for the spontaneous fulfillment of the desire. All that is required is attention and noninterference.

  When I have the desire to walk from here to there, my body does it. I don’t fully verbalize the instructions for my body to move from here to there; it happens spontaneously. When I go to sleep at night, I don’t lie down in the bed and say, Come on, body, change your state of consciousness to the sleep state. I don’t try to go to sleep. Inherent in having the desire is the mechanics for the transformation of my physiology to go to sleep. In fact, anything that happens in my body is a faint desire, and the less I worry about the mechanics of it, the more efficient it is. The moment I start worrying about the mechanics of it, it loses its efficiency and interferes with the flow of innate intelligence.

  No matter what the desire, we don’t want to interfere with it. To interfere means to produce an unwanted result, and the way we interfere with the manifestation of desire is by trying too hard, by using too much effort. We interfere when we doubt, when we listen to others’ opinions, when we get lost in our attachment to the result, instead of just being and having the notion, the desire.

  If you watch a ballplayer hit a ball, and a fielder go after the catch, do they worry about the mechanics of the sport? No, their actions are completely spontaneous. Even before the batter has hit the ball, the fielder has started moving, intending nonverbally in awareness the mechanics of going after the ball. The game plays itself out through the athletes. Once desire begins to flow, thought is not involved at all; everything is completely nonverbal. The players simply move spontaneously and effortlessly in the right direction. This is the key to fulfilling any desire, and it’s also the key to efficient action.

  The universe expresses itself through effortless Being. It is pure potentiality seeking manifestation by having the desire and just letting go. Good musicians will tell you that peak experiences come when they don’t seem to be playing the music; the music is playing itself out through them. Accomplished dancers will tell you that after a while it doesn’t feel like they are doing the dance; the dance is expressing itself through the dancer. This is how inspired poets write poems or lyricists write lyrics; the words just come to them. This is magical thinking, and once you’ve had a little taste of it, it’s enough to change your whole life.

  When gardeners plant seeds, they don’t try to make them sprout, they don’t doubt that the seeds will grow into plants. Other people’s opinions do not interfere with their conviction that within each seed is everything necessary to create a plant. And gardeners don’t get lost in their attachment to the result; they know the result is there. So to use our power effectively when it comes to our own desires, we have to relinquish our attachment to the outcome. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t want the outcome. Of course we prefer the outcome to anything else, but we are not rigidly attached to it.

  Attachment is a form of fear, doubt, and worry, and this constricts the flow of nature’s intelligence. When we have a desire, we know what our intention is, and we just let go, trusting the universe to organize all the details for its manifestation. There’s no concern about the outcome; we just release our desire from our heart, and let it flow through us with the impulse of the universe. The more we detach and let go, the more spontaneously our desires are fulfilled.

  The old belief in suffering says, I have to work hard to accomplish my goals, and the harder I work, the more likely it is that my goals will get accomplished. This is a very Western concept, but does nature work like that? Do you see any effort in the migration of a bird from Siberia to South America? Do you see any effort in the ability of the body-mind’s intelligence to orchestrate an infinite number of things while monitoring the movement of the entire cosmos? Do you see any effort in a seed becoming a tree and bearing fruit?

  Nature functions with maximum efficiency, and this principle in nature is do less, accomplish more. This is the law of least effort. If we mirror the way nature works, we can also do less and accomplish more. We can go to that field of silence from where all creativity comes; we can have a desire, let go, and watch the results as they come. And when things don’t seem to go our way, we let go of our idea of how things should be, trusting that for the moment at least, we do not know the larger picture. In the overall context, that larger picture is good for us. We understand that our life has a purpose that fits into the overall purpose of the cosmos. Our attitude, therefore, is one of detachment and acceptance because we know that the universe is on our side.

  The universe is handling all the details for everything and everybody else, and we know that it is doing so for us. We have complete confidence in universal intelligence to take care of all the details. This intelligence is, after all, managing all the details of our body-mind. This intelligence is managing all the details of the natural world; it’s keeping the stars and planets in their position. If we can trust it to do all of that, then we can trust it to handle the details of our desire. Trust in nature’s infinite organizing power is an important component of the state of grace. To live in grace is to live with ease and lack of struggle because we trust that nature’s intelligence is flowing through us. We don’t interfere.

  Remember, gardeners plant seeds and then let go. They give their garden attention — their unconditional attention — and they have no doubt. It’s the same thing for you. Have a goal in your awareness, give it your attention, and have no doubt. Be effortless about it, and the desire will manifest. Desires are like seeds left in the ground. They wait for the right season, and then spontaneously bloom into beautiful flowers and majestic trees.

  KEY POINTS

  You can live with effortless ease by allowing universal intelligence to flow through you without interference in the form of fear, resistance, or attachment.

  Inherent in every desire is the mechanics for its spontaneous fulfillment. Desire is pure potentiality seeking manifestation.

  When you are stressed, when you anticipate problems, when you use too much effort, you constrict the flow of nature’s intelligence as it moves from the unmani
fest to the manifest.

  8

  When will I be fully awake?

  Wholeness: Containing all the elements;

  complete in itself; not divided; unity.

  Some people believe that our relationships, our environment, and the situations and circumstances around us create our state of mind. Others have proclaimed that it’s the other way around — that our state of mind creates our relationships, our environment, and the situations and circumstances of our life. Neither of these perspectives is true. Both our inner world and our outer world interdependently co-arise, depending on the level of vibration of our spirit. They form a feedback loop that continues to perpetuate itself unless we move to a different vibrational quality of awareness. Both the world around us and our state of mind are expressions of where we are in our evolution at this moment.

  Every day we normally experience three states of consciousness: waking, dreaming, and sleeping. But only by spending time in silence, stillness, or meditation do we experience a fourth state of consciousness where we start to glimpse our soul. When we glimpse our soul, we become a little more intuitive. We start to feel that things are not just what they seem to be; there is something more behind the scenes.