IS REALITY WHAT WE THINK IT IS? SINCE WE ALL accept the existence of the material world, how could it possibly be the illusion Francisco describes to Mickey in “Why Is God Laughing?” After all, rocks are solid, air sustains life, and the planet revolves on its axis. Yet these facts are not what the word “illusion” refers to. A mystic and a materialist will both stub their toes if they kick a rock. But a mystic believes that the rock is a projection of a deeper reality, while a materialist believes that the rock is all there is—reality doesn’t go deeper than things. To a materialist, clouds and mountains are no more than things, their beauty being beside the point. A newborn baby is a thing, too, its humanity being equally beside the point. In a world of things, there is no room for a loving intelligence known as God who presides over creation and gives it meaning.
Yet on the path to joy you discover that meaning is the very basis of life. A baby is a thing only in the most superficial sense. In reality a baby is a field of infinite potential expressing the highest intelligence in Nature. I don’t think of this as a mystical belief, but as a truth that lies deeper than the surface picture—where life looks like a stream of random physical events. Meaning is born deep within. Spiritual optimism is also an inner experience. It is based on the love, beauty, creativity, and truth that a person discovers at the level of the soul.
When you explore yourself on the inner plane, you are working with intuition. It’s a common misconception that intuition is at odds with science, but Einstein himself said that what separated him from atheists was that “they cannot hear the music of the spheres.” In truth, science and spirituality both depend upon intuition, for the greatest scientific discoveries are made through creative leaps, rather than by following a linear trail of established facts.
You use your intuition every day to confirm that you are alive, or that daisies are pretty, or that truth is better than a lie. The path to joy consists of making your intuitions deeper and more accessible. Once my intuition tells me what it is to be alive, then I can explore what my life means, where it came from, and where it’s going. Fortunately, there is no force in the universe more powerful than intuition.
On the spiritual path you come to realize certain basic principles. As these principles unfold, reality shifts. Mere belief cannot transform the events around you, but realization can. It’s the difference between believing that you are blessed and actually observing the action of grace in the world.
The principles you will find below are powerful engines for change. As realization grows within you, there is no limit to what you may become; the only certainty is that you will be transformed.
1. THE HEALTHIEST RESPONSE TO LIFE IS LAUGHTER.
This first principle serves as an antidote to fear and sorrow by encouraging you to experience life as joyous. As we begin on the path, joy may come and go in small glimmerings. Yet in the end, laughter will dispel suffering like so much smoke and dust. Suffering is one of illusion’s most convincing aspects, but it is still unreal.
A golden rule applies here: What is true in the material world is false in God’s world, and vice versa. In this case, the material world seems to be dominated by crisis and suffering, and therefore the sanest way to approach life is with worry, anxiety, and defensiveness. But once your consciousness shifts, you realize that life itself couldn’t exist without an underlying creativity, and that this continuous act of creation is in itself an expression of ecstasy. These qualities are the basis of your life, also.
In fact, the lens of materialism gives us the least accurate view of the world, because through it we see consciousness as merely an accidental by-product of brain chemistry, and the powers of the mind as a myth. To equate the deepest reality with inert atoms colliding with each other in the dead cold of outer space denies all that sustains life and makes it worth living: beauty, truth, art, love, morality, community, discovery, curiosity, inner growth, and higher consciousness.
What do all these qualities have in common? They depend on intuition. There is no objective proof that love is beautiful, or that the truth can set you free. Rather, you must come to these realizations through your own inner experience. On the spiritual path everything depends on a shift in consciousness; nothing depends on atoms colliding.
What we have, then, is two opposing worldviews contending for your allegiance. Is it better to be spiritual or materialistic? Is God a mere add-on to physical existence, or at the very root of existence? This isn’t an easy choice to make, because the evidence is seriously out of balance. Most of us have extensive personal knowledge of the material world, but scant personal knowledge of God. God has a lot of proving to do. He must prove that he’s present and dependable, the same way a rock or a tree is. If we want to claim that God sustains life, he must sustain it as viably as air, water, and food do. In other words, to realize God is no small thing. It may take a lifetime—if you’re lucky.
To begin this journey, commit yourself to the possibility that everything you see around you is far less real than God. You want to see the truth “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind,” as Jesus says. This is actually a commitment to joy. When you feel momentary happiness, or you want to burst out laughing, or you smile for no apparent reason, you are glimpsing eternal reality. For a fleeting moment the curtain has parted so you can experience something beyond the illusion. In time these moments of joy will begin to knit together. Instead of the exception, they will become the norm. There is no better way to know that you are growing in God-realization.
2. THERE IS ALWAYS A REASON TO BE GRATEFUL.
This second principle is an antidote to victimization. It establishes that you are seen and provided for. The more you notice the truth of this principle, the less you will believe that you are a victim.
Looking around, it’s obvious that life is orderly. A bee flies from flower to flower, eating and pollinating in accordance with a magnificent, ordered scheme. Millions of years of evolution have exquisitely matched bee and flower so that neither can exist without the other. Why, then, do we believe that our own lives can’t be effortlessly sustained? One major obstacle is that we see ourselves as victims. Our bodies are subject to aging and death. Accidents are unavoidable. Catastrophe and disaster looms just around the corner, controlled by a whimsical destiny. And simply imagining the terrible things that can happen to you brings as much suffering as the events themselves.
Being a victim is the logical result of being in constant danger. If God sustains us, then surely he must reverse this whole scheme of random accidents that puts everyone in peril. This is a tricky point, however, because we are also surrounded by abundance in Nature. Optimists point to our green earth overflowing with life, nourishment, and beauty. However, can a loving God really supply us with life’s good things one day and pain the next? Most people who feel grateful to God tend to deny that he is also responsible for disease, calamity, and death. Yet an all-knowing, all-powerful deity can’t be responsible for only part of what goes on. Either he sustains everything or nothing.
The way to escape from living under a God who brings pleasure one day and pain the next is to realize that God isn’t a person. We only call God “he” because our minds resist thinking of God as a total abstraction. In truth, being total, God has to be abstract. You can’t wrap your mind around the All. Instead, we wrap our minds around the things we notice, and choose to believe in.
To the extent that you notice God in your life, acknowledge him with gratitude. God doesn’t need to be thanked—after all, he already has everything, including thanks. But by choosing gratitude you are selecting a benevolent aspect of the All on which you want to focus.
The purpose of gratitude is to connect yourself to a higher vision of life. You have the power to choose whether to activate the aspect of God that gives or the aspect that takes away. Whatever you pay attention to will grow. If you pay attention to those aspects of God that demonstrate love, truth, beauty, intelligence, order, and spiritual evolution, those aspects will begin to expand in your life. Bit by bit, like a mosaic, disparate fragments of grace will merge to form a complete picture. Eventually this picture will replace the more threatening one you have carried around inside you since infancy.
The external world claims to be real, but it, too, is an image created in consciousness and projected outward. Once you realize that you alone are the projector of reality, you will no longer be dominated by external events. You will correct the mistake that lies at the very root of victimization: a belief that the movie controls you, instead of the other way around.
3. YOU BELONG IN THE SCHEME OF THE UNIVERSE. THERE’S NOTHING TO BE AFRAID OF. YOU ARE SAFE.
The third principle is the antidote for insecurity. It tells us that fear can be totally convincing, yet there is no truth to it. Fear cannot be trusted.
In modern life we are taught to respect fear as an essential contributor to our survival, a biological signal that alerts mind and body to approaching danger. But the ancient sages of India taught that fear was born of duality; when human beings realized that they were no longer part of God, they immediately became afraid of what might happen to them. In the twentieth century, after two devastating world wars and the advent of the atomic bomb, this haunting insecurity was promoted into an inescapable fact of life, which came to be known as existential anxiety. You and I are children of an era when simply to be alive seemed to be taking the ultimate risk. As a result, we fall prey to anxiety about who we are and where we belong.
On the spiritual path you can completely recover from such anxiety. By rejecting fear a little at a time, you come to realize that life isn’t constantly at risk. You are safe, you are seen, and you are cared for. Moving from fear to fearlessness requires a shift in orientation because we live in a climate of fear, where it’s all too easy to succumb to a constant barrage of potential threats. The morning news pulls us into a dark world of constant disasters, which is reinforced by the evening news. To counter this, you must look to your own inner guidance. Realize that what makes you safe is a higher intelligence that resides within you. Potential dangers are illusions. Only what lies at hand is real.
I’m not saying that existence can be sanitized of all its discomforts and sudden reversals of fortune. I’m offering the possibility of approaching existence from a different perspective. You will be secure once you realize that God has provided you with everything you need to meet the challenges of life, whatever they may be. You are standing center stage in your own personal drama. Surrounding you is a much larger stage, and if you find yourself in dangerous times on that larger stage, danger will be present. However, this situation is very different from seeing yourself living inside a swirling chaos of impending doom. The point is to take your place inside the drama with confidence. Everything is as it should be.
The role assigned to you is right and proper. It is tailor-made for you, for your complete self. And your complete self won’t settle for a listless, uneventful existence. The fact that life isn’t completely risk free doesn’t change the fact that it’s driven by choices made at the soul level. The voice of fear tries to convince you that you are a helpless victim of chance. The very opposite is true. At the deepest level, the level of the soul, you are the author of everything that happens to you.
4. YOUR SOUL CHERISHES EVERY ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE.
The fourth principle is the antidote for feeling undervalued. It states that your worth is absolute, and that everything that happens to you—whether it feels good at the time or not—is part of a divine plan unfolding from the level of the soul.
As we’ve seen, the values that drive the material world must be reversed entirely if you want to realize God. In the conventional view, self-worth comes down to having a strong ego. People who possess strong egos feel self-confident. They enjoy asserting themselves against obstacles. They meet challenges, and in return life gives them money, status, and possessions—external rewards for external accomplishment.
In that light, it’s almost embarrassing that Jesus teaches exactly the opposite—to be loved by God, one must be innocent, humble, a servant to all men. But Jesus’ view accords with the great wisdom traditions, which hold that a person’s worth doesn’t change depending on external success and its rewards. A person’s worth is the value of a soul, which is infinite. Since every event in your life isn’t happening just to a person but to a soul, everything in life should be cherished.
We all know that life has its ups and downs, and that our sense of self-worth rises and falls accordingly. Napoleon was a titan when he won victories on the battlefield but a dwarf after Waterloo. In a world of change, we ego-driven people seem to be puppets to every whim of circumstance. Yet from the soul’s point of view, change occurs against the backdrop of nonchange; the basis of existence is eternal, unmoved, steady, and all encompassing.
How can you shift your attention away from change? I am largely unconvinced by people who say that they feel the real, immediate presence of God, Jesus, or their souls. Those are extremely advanced attainments on the spiritual path, certainly not among the first doors that open on the journey. But I do know that I can experience myself, so now my job is to find the part of myself that doesn’t change. Clearly my mind changes all the time, as quickly as the next thought, and so does my body, as quickly as the next skin cell sloughing off or the next heartbeat. So the search for nonchange must take me elsewhere.
This is where meditation proves most useful. When you meditate, you shift your focus. Instead of paying attention to the surface of the mind, which teems with constant change, you go deeper to experience silence. In and of itself, silence is pointless. Life is about action and response, not silent detachment. But inner silence is something far more profound: it is awareness being aware of itself, also known as wakefulness, or mindfulness.
In its silent depths, your mind knows everything that’s going on. Time collapses into a single focal point, where the one unshakable thing you know is “I am.” This isn’t passive knowledge. It is the center of everything, the source of all the activity that springs forth as thoughts, sensations, and external events. Silence, it turns out, is the womb of creation. Therefore, meditation is a creative event through which you are reclaiming authorship of your life.
Now we see what meditating twenty-four hours a day actually means: you retain your alertness and wakefulness all the time. Once you have authorship of your self, you come out of silence into activity to write your own story. Now there is no difference between sitting in meditation and living in the world. Both are expressions of awareness, the one silent, and the other active. Now you maintain two types of attention, one devoted to change, the other to nonchange. This is the shift in consciousness that allows you to live from the level of the soul.
5. THERE IS A PLAN, AND YOUR SOUL KNOWS WHAT IT IS.
The fifth principle is the antidote to meaninglessness. It states that your life has a purpose. You determine that purpose at the soul level, and then that purpose unfolds in daily life as part of the divine plan. The more deeply you are connected to the plan, the more powerful it becomes in your life. Ultimately nothing can stop it.
When writing about the spiritual path, I reach a point where I wish I could dispense with terminology like soul, God, and spirit. Because there is only one reality, we don’t need a separate, mundane vocabulary for everyday existence, and another, special vocabulary for higher existence. Either everything is spiritual or nothing is. In God’s eyes, walking on water is no more miraculous than the ability of hemoglobin to bond with oxygen inside a red blood corpuscle. Neither is readily visible, and both belong to the infinitely unfolding scheme of creation.
Yet it would seem that a life full of purpose and meaning must be closer to God than a life spent in aimless confusion. Dualism has a powerful hold on the mind, so we can’t help but think in terms of high and low, better and worse. What’s hard to comprehend is that God, wanting nothing, also demands nothing of us. In spiritual terms, no life is more or less worthy. Today’s thief will be reborn as tomorrow’s saint, and vice versa.
In a divine plan everyone has a part. And because God is within you, you yourself have an absolute right to choose your part in the divine plan. How does that plan work in practical terms? A central feature is the issue of perception.
When you were a baby, you perceived yourself in a very limited way. What you couldn’t handle or understand was given over to your father and mother. They fed you until you could feed yourself, provided shelter until you could provide it for yourself, and so on. As you became more capable, your sense of where you stood in relation to the world changed. In other words, with each step toward self-sufficiency, your perception shifted.
The divine plan is like that. At first, personal power is very limited. The ego assumes it must provide for itself by grabbing what it wants and rejecting the rest. Perception at this stage is limited to the individual; the scope for vision is quite narrow. What benefits “I, me, and mine” is all that matters. The ego has no regard for how the self is interconnected with everything else. Ironically, it’s at this stage, when we’ve given external forces the authority to dictate events, that the ego feels most powerful.
As perception expands, so does inner potential. Beyond the ego a wider circle that includes “I, me, and mine” expands in all directions. In the divine plan, a person can expand without limit on the level of the soul. You begin to witness how incredibly creation has been organized, with what perfect care and infinite intelligence. Since God has infinite intelligence, the more your perception expands, the closer you come to God. There’s not even a need to seek, only to see.
In the end, everything is already God, so it’s just a matter of seeing more and more deeply until God is revealed. You acquire a vision that is attuned to the finest aspects of beauty and truth. One of the great blessings of existence is that everyone is born with a desire to see more. That’s why the sages of India believed that even to think about God is a sign that surely he will one day appear. It turns out that expansion of consciousness is the divine plan. There is no other. As your awareness keeps growing, you become more and more certain that you are part of the divine plan as well. Nothing more is demanded of you, or ever was.
6. ECSTASY IS THE ENERGY OF SPIRIT. WHEN LIFE FLOWS, ECSTASY IS NATURAL.
The sixth principle is the antidote to inertia. It states that infinite energy is available to you. You are a co-creator with God. To claim your creative power, you need only connect with the primal energies at play within you.
How do you know if you are connected to God? One of the simplest indications is the way your life flows. If you feel stuck, if inertia and habit rule your day, then your connection to God is tenuous. On the other hand, if you are certain that what you want in life is unfolding day by day, your connection with God is strong. Creative flow is the operating rule of the cosmos.
Just as creation takes myriad forms, so does energy. On the spiritual path you discover many types of energy. Mostly we rely on superficial energies generated by the ego: anger, fear, competitive drive, the desire to achieve, and love that makes us feel desirable. There is no right or wrong in the domain of energy, but the ego falls prey to the illusion that only anger, fear, the drive to achieve, and so on, are real. It ignores higher energies and lower ones, which is why the ego becomes so isolated.
Lower energies dominate the body and its intricate operations. “Lower” is a misleading term, since the body’s intelligence is just as great as any in creation, but for all its astonishing organizing power, the body is satisfied to be guided by the mind. The body’s intelligence is humble, with no need to dominate or achieve; for the body, fitting perfectly into the natural order is joy enough. The ego could learn a lot from the body, but it rarely does.
At the same time, the ego also shuts out higher energies. These are the subtle forces of the soul: love, compassion, truth, and the knowledge of God. The soul has no reason to compete with ego because the soul has already attained the highest position in creation—unity with God. Like circles of angels in medieval Christian paintings, revolving around the heavenly throne singing God’s praises, the soul is content to experience its own ecstasy and to celebrate it without end. The ego believes, wrongly, that such bliss is either a fiction or can only be attained through externals—more sex, money, status, and possessions.
Finally, there is the subtlest energy of all, the original stuff from which everything else is made. This energy lies on the fine line between existence and nonexistence. It’s the first quiver of the creative impulse, the first wisp of God’s thought. In most spiritual traditions this vibration is known as “I am.” Nothing could exist without it, yet nothing is more delicate. When experienced personally, it feels like pure ecstasy, or bliss-consciousness.
The full range of these energies powers your life, and all of them are available to you. The kind of energy you can call upon at any given moment, however, depends on your level of consciousness. At a gross level, if someone wants an apple, she must work to get the money to buy one. At a more subtle level, if she wants an apple, someone happens to walk in the room with an apple in hand. At the very subtlest level, if she wants an apple, an apple appears. The ego—and the world at large—only believes in the gross level of energy. But all of us experience subtle energies from time to time: wishes come true, desires manifest, and invisible forces seem to be at play.
On the spiritual path a person proceeds into subtler and subtler realms of the mind, and with each step new levels of energy become available. Finally, when unity with God is attained, all energy becomes available. At that point, your wishes and desires are the same as God’s. You have always been a potential co-creator, and when you realize God, that potential is fully activated. Everything you imagine comes into being spontaneously, as easily as the thought itself. There could be no other way, since in unity a thought and a thing are one and the same.
7. THERE IS A CREATIVE SOLUTION TO EVERY PROBLEM. EVERY POSSIBILITY HOLDS THE PROMISE OF ABUNDANCE.
The seventh principle is the antidote to failure. It tells us that every question includes its own answer. The only reason a problem arises before its solution is that our minds are limited—we think in terms of sequences, of before and after. Outside the narrow boundaries of time, problems and solutions arise at the same instant.
Modern society is oriented toward solving problems. There is no lack of go-getters who dedicate themselves to finding new ways to do things, and no shortage of belief that progress can’t be stopped. Much of this confidence, however, is a distraction. By focusing on the next technology, the next engineering marvel, the next medical breakthrough, we lose sight of deeper problems that offer no solution. Buddha pointed to the problem of suffering, Jesus to the problem of sin and the lack of love, Gandhi to the absence of peace in a world of violence. What new technology will prevent me from attacking my enemy? What medical breakthrough will enable me to love my neighbor as myself?
You can look around and see how futile external solutions have proven. Crime, famine, war, epidemics, and poverty continue to baffle us, and yet society throws money at these problem over and over, as if a failed approach will succeed if only we persist. On the spiritual path you discover that all problems are rooted in consciousness, therefore the solution is always a shift in consciousness.
If you were to be happy from the soul level, totally in accord with God, what would that be like? In a word, it would be effortless. To be happy from the soul level, three things are required:
You act without effort.
You feel joy in what you do.
Your actions bring results.
All three requirements must work together if you want to experience the happiness God intended. It is already on display in the natural kingdom, where every creature acts spontaneously, and yet every action supports the entire ecological system. Human beings, however, primarily reside in a mental landscape. Our vision of ourselves rules what we do; the physical environment comes second (if at all), and it is expected to adapt to our demands.
In Nature, every challenge is met with a response. As dinosaurs die out, mammals thrive. As ferns give way to flowering plants, insects learn to feed on pollen. Creation and destruction move together, constantly in touch with each other. The same seamless interaction is also possible in a mental ecological system. In higher states of consciousness, no gap appears between desire and fulfillment. Few of us experience this spontaneous state, however. The conventional condition of separation is all about gaps and discontinuity. Desires seem to lead to failure. The best-laid plans seem to go astray, and our experience of separation seems to grow.
You might think it would take heroic efforts to solve the problems that face us. Spiritually speaking, the reverse is true. The soul’s vision isn’t about struggle and lack of results. It isn’t about failure. You only need to measure your actions against the three simple conditions I mentioned above.
Am I acting easily, without struggle?
Do I enjoy what I’m doing?
Are results coming of their own accord?
Answering “yes” means that spiritually you are going in the right direction; answering “no” means that you aren’t.
I have a friend who has spent years giving money and advice to his family. Of four brothers, he is the only one who went to college and became a successful doctor. He’s confident and quick to offer solutions, and for years he thought he knew what his less fortunate brothers should be doing with their lives.
Recently a crisis arose. The brothers, never very good at finding work, began to fall into debt. They wanted more and more money from my friend, and when he threatened to cut them off, they became angry.
“Look at this,” he said in disgust, holding up an email from his youngest brother. “He says that if I don’t give him more money, I’m guilty of abuse.”
I asked him how much gratitude his brothers had expressed over the years.
My friend shook his head. “They’ve taken my money and totally ignored me.”
“And yet you continue with the same program,” I pointed out.
“I have to. I can’t bear the idea of having my brothers wind up on welfare or going to jail after doing something desperate,” he said.
At this point I raised the three criteria for action. “Is it easy to help your brothers?” I asked. No, he admitted, they resisted every step of the way.
“Are you happy dealing with them?” I asked. No, he said. He was frustrated and miserable. He’d often considered changing his phone number so that he’d never have to talk to them again.
Finally I asked, “Are you getting results?” Clearly he wasn’t. Instead of improving their lives, my friend’s money and advice only enabled them to stay stuck in their old ways.
When no amount of thinking, scheming, struggle, persuasion, and force will alter a situation, it’s time to apply the three simple questions I posed to my friend. All you and I can do is to take on our own role in the divine scheme. Infinite intelligence provides solutions to every problem. In the case of plants and animals, ecology balances itself; the individual plant and animal only has to play its part. Human beings are more ambitious—we want to create our own visions and carry them out, which makes things more complicated. But the same basic laws apply.
This seems like a good place to bring up one of the persistent charges leveled against people on the spiritual path: they are selfish and self-indulgent; in a world suffocating with problems, spiritual seekers only think about their own well-being, using God as a convenient cover. Essentially, what this criticism comes down to is a claim that the ego dictates what so-called spiritual people do, just as it does for everyone. That can be a legitimate point. If you see yourself on the path to God because he’s the biggest prize of all, the ultimate lottery win, then certainly ego is in charge.
Yet when the spiritual path takes us beyond the worship of “I, me, and mine,” the expansion of consciousness melts the boundaries of separation. You begin to see yourself not in isolation but as part of the whole. It becomes possible to help others as you would help yourself, not because service and charity make you feel good, but because you recognize that you are the very person you serve. The ego is capable of offering service to the poor and suffering, but when it does, there’s an ulterior motive: giving to others makes the ego feel superior.
I know countless sincere seekers, however, who measure their rewards in terms of peace, compassion, and intimacy with their souls. Spiritual growth doesn’t require a life of service. Such a life can be as miserable and selfish as any other. But I would venture that spiritual seekers do more to alleviate human suffering than any government. Every step toward God-realization benefits humanity as a whole.
8. OBSTACLES ARE OPPORTUNITIES IN DISGUISE.
The eighth principle is the antidote to inflexibility. It tells us that obstacles are signals from consciousness that we need to change direction, to take a new tack. If your mind is open, it will perceive the next opportunity to do so.
When the ego encounters an obstacle, it responds by exerting more force. The ego’s world is a battlefield where you have to fight to win. There’s no doubt that this attitude can bring results—every empire was built by force of conquest—but it does so at a terrible cost: the tide of war, struggle, and destruction continues to rise. When you are attacked there is a great temptation to adopt the weapons of ego in retaliation. How many peace movements are full of angry activists? How many environmentalists love the earth but hate those who despoil it? As Mother Teresa famously said, she wasn’t willing to join an antiwar movement because it wasn’t the same as a peace movement.
The ego’s world presents a massive obstacle to spiritual growth. Therefore, the need to be flexible arises every day. You will meet with inner resistance as a constant occurrence, with intermittent victories and moments of joy. To avoid discouragement, you need to realize that obstacles come from the same source as everything else. God isn’t only present in the good moments. An infinite intelligence has found a way to fit every hour of your life into a plan. From day to day you can’t possibly comprehend the incredibly intricate connections between your life and the cosmos. The entire universe had to conspire to bring about this very moment in time.
You can’t plan in advance how to meet the next challenge, yet most people try to do just that. They protect themselves against worst-case scenarios; they cling to a small repertoire of habits and reactions; they narrow their lives to family, friends, and work. Husbanding your resources may bring a modicum of security, but by doing so you will have completely shut out the unknown, which is the same as hiding your potential from yourself. How will you know what you are capable of if you don’t open yourself to life’s mysteries, or usher in the new? For life to remain fresh at every moment, your response must break free from your established patterns.
The secret is to abandon old habits and trust in spontaneity. By definition, being spontaneous cannot be planned in advance. It doesn’t have to be. Whenever you catch yourself reacting in an old, familiar way, simply stop. Don’t invent a new reaction; don’t fall back on the opposite of what you usually do. Instead, ask for openness. Go inside, be with yourself, and allow the next reaction to come of its own accord.
A famous Broadway composer once was asked how he came up with his wonderful tunes. He had been known to pull his car off the side of the road in the middle of busy traffic to write down a hit song. What was his secret? “Wait, drift, and obey,” he said.
Exactly.
9. EVOLUTION LEADS THE WAY THROUGH DESIRE.
The ninth principle is the antidote to hypocrisy. It encourages us to act on our genuine desires, because they show the way to real growth. Don’t pretend to be better—or other—than you are. Don’t fall into the trap of having one face for the world and another for God. Who you really are is exactly who you should be.
Desire has become a huge problem for modern people. Two forces pull us in opposite directions. One liberates us from old values. The other wants to preserve those values. The resulting polarization can be seen in every sphere of life, especially the social and political realms. Churchgoers feel righteous, responsible, and obedient to God’s will. They view anyone unlike themselves as devoid of values, and therefore unworthy of God’s love. By denying God to all those who have strayed from the path of righteousness, the devout are unwittingly taking on themselves a role that belongs only to God.
This schism can also be seen in our inner conflicts. At bottom, the pull of old values is restrictive. Its God is judgmental, and his demands are not to be flouted. In other words, spirit exists to rebuke the flesh and keep its appetites under control. The force of liberation, on the other hand, evokes a God of tolerance who loves his creation and asks only for love in return. To heal this schism, we need to realize that God makes no demands and sets no particular limits of any kind, on thought, word, or deed.
At the beginning of the path, it doesn’t matter whether you are devout or atheist. What both sides have in common is constraint. The prevailing condition has a narrow vision—we all share it. So, how does God want us to grow, in what direction, according to what guidelines? None. You get to grow the way you want to, by following your own desires. You are already growing the right seeds. The things that deeply interest you play the role of God; you feel an irresistible attraction to them.
The visible world in all its details is a symbol for God. You can gaze at the sky on a warm June day, stay glued to TV looking at football, or watch your infant child asleep in the cradle. Whatever captivates you is also trying to wake you up. A friend of mine put it more bluntly: “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter where you start.” An impulse of love, if followed wherever it leads, will become richer and more intense, and in the end it will reveal itself as divine. An impulse of gratitude will do the same thing, as will compassion, kindness, charity, faith, devotion, appreciation, art, and science. Wherever the human mind wants to expand, God will be waiting at the end of the line.
10. FREEDOM IS LETTING GO.
The tenth principle is the antidote to attachment. It reminds us that striving isn’t the way to God. If you let go of what isn’t real in your life, what’s left will be real: what’s left is God alone.
Over the years I’ve found that letting go baffles people. They are eager to let go of things that bring pain and suffering, yet by some perverse irony, the shackles refuse to drop away. Abused spouses don’t walk out on their abusers. Addicts reach for more of what is destroying them. Anger, fear, and violence roam the mind at will, even though a person has tried with all his might to renounce them. How do you let go of stuff that is attached to you so stubbornly?
Telling someone who’s stuck to “just let go” is as futile as telling someone who is hysterical to “just calm down.” Negative things stick to us because they are tied to an underlying energy that doesn’t want to move away. Angry people don’t need a specific reason to get angry; they only need a pretext for releasing the pent-up energy that keeps them at a constant simmer. Anxious people are worried inside, not about any one thing, but about fear itself. To be free, you must find a way to let go of all the stuck energy that keeps sending out the same old messages. The ability to let go is more complex than it sounds, but nothing is more crucial.
Let’s look more closely at anger and fear, the two emotional energies that most persistently haunt us. Letting go of anger and fear requires a process, which includes the following:
Be alert. Don’t ignore your feelings when you are angry or anxious. Resist the impulse to look away and shove your feelings back down out of sight. The more alert you are, the easier it will be to access stuck energy and let it go.
Be objective. If you identify personally with negativity, you will never let it go. Learn to see anger as only energy, like electricity. Electricity isn’t about you. Neither is anger. It’s universal and sticks to anything that seems unfair or unjust. Fear sticks to anything that feels dangerous or unsafe.
Detach from the specifics. Energies get stuck to particular situations: a specific person rams your car from the rear, butts in line ahead of you at the supermarket, or cheats you out of money. These are the contents of the situation, its specifics, and you cannot completely let go of energy by living solely in those moments. Imagine having a fight with your spouse. You are sure you’re justified in your position. But if you refuse to stop being angry until your spouse says, “I was wrong; you were right all along,” you could wait forever. And even if he does apologize, your anger might not completely disappear. Detach from the contents of the situation and release your anger by yourself, for your own good.
Take responsibility. This goes hand in hand with detachment. Your energy is yours and nobody else’s. In spiritual terms, it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, who is the aggressor or the victim. The only important thing is how to win your own freedom. In a world of opposites, right and wrong are engaged in an eternal struggle. Your role is to let go of energy that has stuck to you for whatever reason. Once you take responsibility, you won’t be tossed about at the whim of circumstance.
Don’t expect anyone to do it for you. There is certainly such a thing as divine guidance, but the road to freedom is through the self. Most of us hope to gain strength from other people, not some divine agency. Yet there is no getting around the fact that all you have for the spiritual journey is your own mind, body, and soul. As much as others can offer solace and helpful wishes, only you can embark on the journey inside yourself.
Let your body participate. Letting go isn’t just a mental process. In fact, you have metabolized your past and given it sanctuary in your body. Or as someone put it simply, “The issues are in the tissues.” Many kinds of bodywork and purification therapies can be useful here. To begin with, let your body do what it wants to do. It knows how to tremble with fear and convulse with anger. Don’t resist the body’s natural reactions, but don’t inflict them on someone else, either. Throwing off stuck energy is a private process that belongs to you alone.
Explore and discover. I don’t want to imply that the spiritual journey involves laborious effort undertaken in solitude. Quite the contrary. Nothing is more fascinating than finding out who you really are, and what you are really about. The vast majority of people live secondhand lives. All they know about themselves is what others tell them; the voices they hear in their heads come from the past; their vision of possibilities amounts to what they were taught at school, in church, and in the family. The past creates unresolved energy. The need to conform creates a fear of breaking free. Fortunately, to the extent that you let go of these old energies, you will win a new bit of freedom.
Value freedom above everything. I said earlier that we all hear two impulses inside ourselves. One says, “This is what I want to do,” the other says, “This is what I’d better do.” The first is the voice of freedom; the second is the voice of fear. The divine plan is infinitely complex, but when it comes down to each person, it’s infinitely simple. You get to be whoever you want to be; you get to do whatever you want to do. That’s not the same as what your ego wants you to be or what your fantasies urge you to do. Spiritual freedom releases you into infinite Being. Then and only then will you encounter the real you. At that moment, all that you wanted to be in the past will be seen as a temporary impulse. And each impulse to be free will been seen to be leading you in the right direction.
YOUR STUCK ENERGIES force you to be someone who doesn’t exist anymore: the angry child deprived of love, the frightened child who doesn’t feel safe. The past is a false guide to the future, and yet it’s what most of us rely upon. By letting go of stuck energies, you let go of your past. Go deep enough and you can let go of time itself. In that release lies ultimate freedom. All of human history rests in you. Yours is the grief of the world and its sorrows, and its fear and anger. Some might feel despair to hear this truth, but why not feel joy? To think that in liberating yourself you liberate the world. What stakes could be higher?
I once read that Jesus, Buddha, and all the saints and sages exist for but one reason: “to precipitate reality upon the earth.” In that moment I saw humanity as a giant pyramid, with each person perched in his or her own unique spot. God descends to earth like fresh spring rain, and at every level his grace is received differently. For some it feels like love, for others like salvation. It feels like safety and warmth at one level, like coming home at another. I’m not sure where I belong in the pyramid, because I have chosen to be a climber. I push myself to keep moving up, inspired by occasional glimpses of the level of consciousness I must attain.
One day I will reach the very pinnacle. At that rarefied height I doubt that I will see an image of Buddha or Christ, or whoever has been blessed to come before me. They will have vanished into the ether. Above me will be only the vast expanse of All, the infinite blissful plenitude of God. But my impulse won’t be to look upward, but not because I am afraid to see the divine face to face. I want to look down instead, because you will be coming toward me, barely a few steps back. We will see each other at last in the light of God, and in that moment of recognition what I can only describe as love will arise like a never-ending dawn.