Power, Freedom, and Grace Read online

  The table and chair are made of wood, and every grain of the wood contains the entire history of the universe. The wood comes from trees and forests. The trees and the forests are made of sunlight and rainfall, earth and air, and the infinite void beyond the deep of space and the dark of time. The trees and the forests are inseparable from the squirrels and the birds’ nests, and the whole web of life in the great chain of being. The table and chair are inseparable from the entire universe and all that it contains. They are the carpenters and factories, the employers and employees, the retailers and customers. They are all of these people and their lives and their loves, their hopes and their despair, their anguish and their pleasure, their joy and their pain.

  Now you are not perceiving bits and pieces anymore; you are seeing. When you are fully awake, you open your eyes and really see. And what do you see? You see the whole in every part. The whole universe is in every part of the universe. You see the ocean in a drop of water, and perceiving that which is whole, your vision is holy. When your vision is holy, you are healed.

  To heal is to return to the memory of wholeness or holiness. There is an ancient saying from India: “All this struggling to learn, when all you have to do is remember.” And what do you have to remember? Your true nature.

  Once you discover your real identity, you are healed on every level, and your transformation begins. A Zen poem says, “Autumn leaves, snow in winter, summer breezes, spring flowers. If you are fully awake, this is the best season in your life.”

  KEY POINTS

  You are fully awake when you see and feel the presence of spirit in everything.

  The universe flows through you and plays through you in many different frequencies simultaneously.

  When you remember your true nature, you return to the memory of wholeness, and you are healed.

  9

  What is power and how do I obtain it?

  Power:

  The ability to create, to accomplish, to act effectively.

  Power is the ability to manifest anything you want, including any reality that you want to experience. Real power comes from the essence of infinity, which is your source; it comes from the source of all power, the one Being. In the vast ocean of infinite consciousness there is infinite power, and it is yours on demand. Most of it you may never need to use, but it is yours all the same.

  If you can hold on to the essence of Being at the root of your being, if you can anchor yourself in its infinite wisdom, you will have real power. When you are firmly established in the knowledge of your true self, the nature and purpose of existence is understood, and immense power is generated. This kind of power leads to greatness, success, and a life free of suffering.

  Take a moment to become aware of who is reading this book. Do you feel a presence? That presence is not your mind; it’s your soul. The mind might be saying, What am I going to have for lunch? or I wonder what time it is. The inner dialogue happens in the presence of the soul. Thoughts come and go, feelings come and go. The molecules of the body come and go. But they come and go in this presence.

  This presence, the soul, recycles itself as your memories, your moods, and even your personality, because you don’t have the same personality today that you had when you were five years of age, or when you were fifteen. It would indeed be a sorry state if you did. Your personality is an expression of the evolving universe; it’s constantly changing, growing, evolving, transforming. Everything in your life is constantly transforming, but it’s transforming in a presence that’s always there. That presence was there when you were a newborn baby, it was there when you were a little girl or a little boy, it was there when you were an adolescent, just as it’s there right now. And it will be there tomorrow when you are very old.

  Who is going through this experience? The real you — the you that we call pure consciousness, the field of intelligence, the inner self, the soul, the spirit, the infinite consciousness, the Being within you. Here, we have used all of these terms synonymously. If you get in touch with this presence, if you really become intimate with it because it’s your own inner self, then you will know experientially, without anybody telling you, that this presence was there before you were born, and it will be there after you die.

  There is an ancient saying from India about the soul: “Fire cannot burn it, water cannot wet it, wind cannot dry it, weapons cannot cleave it. It’s ancient, it’s unborn, and it never dies.” The soul is the source of all reality, but the domain of the soul is beyond your everyday reality. That’s why you need to experience the domain of your soul to stay in touch with your soul, to experience the qualities of the real you.

  How do you experience the domain of your soul? By spending time in silence, by quieting the time-bound conversation in your head and tuning in to the timeless, peaceful quiet of your soul. When you experience complete silence in your body-mind, then you recognize that you are not your thoughts but the Being who is having the thoughts.

  Slowly, by spending time in silence, you notice that the scenery comes and goes, but the seer is always there. You realize that you are not the scenery; you are the seer, the witness of the scenery. As you shift your identity from the scenery to the seer, everything starts to slowly awaken. You glimpse the soul, and you begin to experience more expansive states of consciousness: cosmic consciousness, divine consciousness, unity consciousness.

  By spending time in silence, you begin to realize that no matter what the scenery is, you are painting it. You have always painted it. In the past you did it unconsciously, randomly, chaotically. Now, like a great Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci, you consciously create a masterpiece that influences your destiny and the destiny of others.

  As we have seen, when you want something to become your life experience, you put your attention on it. So if you want to experience the reality of your soul, then put your attention on your soul. Take your attention off the world of the intellect and the ego, and tune in to your soul. Commune with your soul. Feel your soul. Just being in the silence of your soul will connect you with your source. And how do you know that you are connected to your source? Certain signs tell you that you are connected, that you are living from the source. And you can monitor your spiritual progress by paying attention to these signs.

  The first sign that you are living from the source is a lack of worry. You don’t worry about anything. If you’re connected to the source, what is there to worry about? So you feel lighthearted, happy. You don’t get offended by the comments of others, you don’t feel obsessive about having your own way, and you don’t experience resistance to what is. You experience effortless ease, spontaneity, and no resistance to whatever is happening around you.

  The second sign that you are living from the source is the experience of synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. Why synchronicity and coincidence? Because both of these are expressions of the infinite organizing power of pure consciousness. Synchronicity and coincidence are orchestrated in the place beyond space, time, and causality — the domain of the soul known as infinite correlation, where things happen at the same time. Chronos means time, and when everything is synchronized in time, or coincidental, then you know it’s a message from your soul.

  Coincidence means many incidents happening together that would not likely happen together; it is a conspiracy of improbable events. Though a coincidence may seem to be an accident, in truth there is no such thing as an accident or random event. What we call an accident, or a random event, is the nonlocal correlation of the universal mind. Every event is being orchestrated by infinite consciousness, and every event is a conspiracy of an infinity of events. For anything to happen in your body, in your mind, in your life, the entire universe has to conspire.

  Though we may not understand it, the essential truth of the universe is that it’s synchronistic and coincidental. Everything is connected with everything else, and if we are in synch with the universe, then we experience synchronicity. The more connected we are, the more we experience coi
ncident or simultaneous events.

  Therefore, never ignore coincidences. When a coincidence happens, ask yourself, What does this mean? What is the significance of this coincidence? Coincidences are messages from your soul; they are clues to the nonlocal Self. The local self is the person that you think you are. The nonlocal Self is the unbounded spirit. You experience both, so when coincidence happens, in that moment you have glimpsed your soul, the nonlocal Self. When you have a conscious awareness of your soul, you experience everything as a miracle. You feel happy, and your life begins to transform. You see the connection between your inner world and your outer world; you see that every event in your life is being orchestrated by the entire universe.

  And when you realize this fact, your mind reels with bewilderment and astonishment at the miracle of spirit. This bewilderment produces gratitude, and gratitude activates even more miracles. This shifts you into a higher state of consciousness. As you elevate your attention from the world of the humdrum and trivial to the world of the magical and miraculous, your life becomes magical and miraculous. Your attention is spontaneously alert to the fact that life itself is a miracle. And the more you put your attention on miracles, the more you become the conscious creator of miracles.

  Lastly, the third sign that you are living from the source is that you know yourself as a creator, not a victim. You realize that the world is a mirror of your thoughts, your feelings, your desires, your interpretations. You know that every situation, every relationship, every event you experience is mirroring something inside you. When you don’t like what’s happening in your world, you don’t try to correct it by looking outside yourself. That would be like polishing the leaves of a plant instead of watering the roots.

  If something you’re experiencing in life is causing you to be unhappy, you recognize that it’s your creation. Otherwise, you stay in the victim mode: Poor me. This is happening to me, and I am powerless to change it. Why wait for the world to change when, in fact, you are creating the world? Whatever is happening is because you are creating it, so you ask yourself, What do I need to shift inside of me so this doesn’t happen?

  No problem on Earth can be solved by addressing it at the level of the problem, but every problem can be solved at the level of spirit. So you go beyond the world of illusion, the mask of appearances, to the invisible world of spirit. In the world of spirit, you find the creator of both the personal body-mind and the cosmic body-mind. At this level, you do not even struggle with the problem; you rise above the problem. And in doing so, you create a new solution.

  No circumstance can overshadow the experience of unboundedness that comes from experiencing pure consciousness. And the only way to really experience pure consciousness is to transcend thought and enter into silent communion with your soul.

  THE EXPERIENCE AND PRACTICE OF POWER

  Spend Time in Silent Communion with Your Soul

  If you were to ask me what I consider the most important experience of my life, I would say it is the experience of transcending to a place of stillness and silence — twice a day, every day. Through meditation, I experience the state of Being that is the ground state of my body-mind, of my life. So to me, this is one of the most important things we can do to evolve to a higher state of consciousness.

  Take a minute right now to close your eyes. When you close your eyes, thoughts automatically start to come, right? If I ask you to do nothing except sit and close your eyes, one of your biggest complaints is likely to be “I have too many thoughts.” This is great, because most people won’t have this complaint. They just act out their thoughts, and they aren’t even aware that they are not their thoughts. So the first thing you learn through silent meditation is that the “I am” is witnessing your thoughts.

  Then, as you witness the effortless way that thoughts start to come, you introduce a mantra. What is a mantra? A mantra is a sound or nonverbal incantation that you mentally repeat over and over again without moving your tongue or your lips. General mantras include “so-hum,” “ah-hum,” or just “I am.” By repeating the mantra, what happens is that your thoughts interfere with the mantra, and the mantra interferes with your thoughts. Then, if you just stay in that feeling, in that state of stillness, sometimes the thoughts and the mantra totally cancel each other out. This is when you slip into the silent gap between thoughts.

  In the gap between thoughts, you become the witness, the observer. From here you can observe your thoughts, feelings, emotions, and reactions. As the witness, you observe without labels, definitions, descriptions, analysis, evaluation, or judgment. Krishnamurti, the great Indian philosopher, said that the highest form of human intelligence is the ability to observe yourself and not judge yourself.

  Keep observing, keep observing, until you enter the soul’s domain. Here you witness the presence of spirit in everything you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. At this level, there is only one witness, one Being, and the whole universe is the physical body of that Being. In the soul’s domain, you have a heightened sense of knowingness, and you can eavesdrop on the cosmic mind. This is when questions answer themselves, and problems solve themselves because the ego’s world is transformed into the world of spirit, pure potentiality, and infinite possibilities.

  By spending time in silent communion with your soul, you gain knowledge of the Self, the maker of reality. This kind of knowledge cannot come to you through books or in universities of learning; this is a knowledge that you become. When you become this knowledge, you are free of grasping, clinging, repulsion, fear, and flight. You are free of both past and future. In this knowledge, you are empowered, you are free, and you live in grace.

  I encourage you to make a commitment to enjoy periods of silence and solitude, to be with yourself, to connect with and enjoy nature, to be happy in quiet surroundings. Make a practice of sitting in silence or meditation every day. Sitting in silent meditation quiets the mind, and allows you to go past the dark alleys and ghost-filled attics of the mind, into the world of the transcendent. By spending time in silent meditation, you cultivate the peace of inner silence.

  Studies have shown that when people meditate their physical and emotional health is measurably improved, including lower blood pressure, greater resistance to disease, less stressful response to challenging situations, better work performance, greater self esteem, and more nourishing relationships. People who have practiced regular meditation for five years have a biological age that is twelve years younger than their chronological age. But the most important reason to meditate is to connect with your soul.

  The soul is the domain of your awareness where you are simultaneously personal and universal. When you connect with your soul, you connect with the field of intelligence that is orchestrating the infinite and diverse activity of the universe. The more you connect with your soul, the more you become the alert witness of your thoughts and feelings, your aspirations, your intentions and desires, and even the nuances of change that appear as comfort and discomfort in your body.

  In the seamless web of intelligence where everything is connected with everything else, even the slightest disturbance in one part of the field affects the whole web of life. If you are sensitive and alert to the fluctuations in the microcosm that is you, then you are more alert to how these fluctuations affect the macrocosm that is the universe. As a result of this awareness, you consciously choose to align yourself with the most evolutionary impulses of intelligence that are manifesting as the infinite diversity of the universe.

  Uni-verse, being a melody or a song as the word implies, is one verse, one song. Di-verse means many songs or different verses of the same melody. When you align yourself with the infinite diversity of the universe, your personal desires harmonize with the desires of the one mind. They become more evolutionary because the one mind moves in the direction of increasing evolution. An evolutionary desire is one that brings simultaneous fulfillment to all those who are affected by the desire. So even though your individual desire is going to b
enefit you personally, it’s also going to ripple across the ocean of universal consciousness and simultaneously benefit all those who are affected by it.

  One technique for entering the soul’s domain is to close your eyes and go into silence, or meditation, for twenty minutes. After twenty minutes of silence, open your eyes and invite your favorite archetypes, your heroes and heroines, to come and express themselves through you. You might relate to a religious figure, such as Buddha, Jesus Christ, Mother Mary, or Mohammed. You might relate to your spiritual ancestors or to one of the mythological gods and goddesses of antiquity. Begin by asking yourself, Who are my role models, my heroes or heroines in history, in mythology, in religion? Who inspires me? They are the seeds of greatness in me.

  During the rest of the day, feel the sensations in your body, and whenever you feel challenged or in trouble, ask your role models to incarnate through you and to guide you. Then, before you go to sleep at night, witness the whole day and tell yourself, It’s already a dream. It’s gone. Just observe what happened throughout the day. Don’t analyze it, don’t evaluate it, don’t judge it. Just witness the day and say, It’s gone. Then say to yourself, Just as I witnessed the day, I’m going to witness my dreams. When you wake up in the morning and remember your dreams, just say, It’s gone.

  Spending time in silence and solitude allows you to escape the prison of the intellect, and awaken from the hypnosis of social conditioning. As you quiet the mind, you enter the realm of pure consciousness. The realm of pure consciousness is infinitely silent and infinitely dynamic at the same time; it is pure creativity in its essence. In silence and solitude, you are being with the one Being, and this puts you into harmony with the cosmos.