If you go into any bookstore—some of them are still around—and throw a rock, it has a good chance of hitting a book about science and religion. The vast majority of these books call for a truce between two camps that have traditionally struggled against each other. In July 2005, science had no choice but to shake hands with its old nemesis: The prestigious journal Science celebrated its 125th anniversary by citing 125 open questions that science had yet to answer. The top two were these:
What is the universe made of?
What is the biological basis of consciousness?
After so many years of tremendous scientific achievement, it’s shocking that no one even has come close to answering these questions—in fact, the latest investigations only deepen the riddle. As we saw, just 0.01 percent of the cosmos is filled with atoms forming all the visible stars and galaxies. Roughly 4 percent of the cosmos gathers in the remaining invisible atoms, as interstellar dust and free-floating hydrogen and helium atoms. The remaining 96 percent of “stuff” appears to be nonatomic, and it disobeys basic rules about gravity and the speed of light. So it isn’t stuff at all, not by any measure of the visible world. To say that physics explains space and time is like saying that someone with 4 percent eyesight sees the whole landscape.
As for the biology of consciousness, no one has shown that consciousness even has a biology. Brain imaging, although a huge advance in looking beneath the skull, reveals where blood is flowing. That isn’t remotely the same as showing how a chemical soup—a mélange of water, blood sugar, DNA, and potassium and sodium ions—learned to think. It is just as likely that a thinking universe decided to create the brain.
If you can’t answer the preceding questions, which are like the ABC of reality, your theory of where human beings came from is, to say the least, questionable. As a scientist, you have no choice but to keep insisting that the answer will be found one day, probably soon. (This was Science’s position. The editors based their list on a survey of one hundred leading scientists, asking them to focus on questions that might be answered within twenty-five years.) It’s rather late in the day to ask for more time when what you are after isn’t a grand goal (like the long-awaited Theory of Everything) but only a credible starting point. God is all about starting points. A matchup between spirituality and science is inevitable. Both of them peer into a level of reality across the border from the visible world. Both confront the wonder of nature and the strangest of all phenomena, as Einstein saw it: that nature can be understood in the first place.
I’m calling the invisible domain the subtle world. We’ve arrived there by the path of faith. Science gets there by using a chain of steps that peel away reality like an onion or a Russian doll, with smaller and smaller matryoshkas nested inside each other. But the subtle world isn’t exclusive territory for either side. If it’s real, it’s real. Science may disdain the path of faith, but that only shows its disdain for the very consciousness that links all mental activity, whether it is prayer or bombarding protons to release Higgs particles.
The onion layers as peeled back by science are straightforward propositions that all scientists agree upon:
Is life reducible to biology? Yes.
Is biology reducible to chemistry? Yes.
Is chemistry reducible to physics? Yes.
Is physics reducible to mathematics? Yes.
Is mathematics an activity in consciousness? Yes.
In public forums and private conversations, I’ve presented a number of prominent scientists with this sequence, and they show no hesitation all the way to the end (only a slight suspicion, perhaps, about walking into a possible trap). The squirming begins when I say, “It looks like life is reducible to consciousness, right? We’ve used your own methods to get there.” Generally they meet this conclusion with a shrug of the shoulders. One neurologist conceded that this was the hardest chain of questions he had ever confronted. A cosmologist accused me of reductionism. But I hadn’t laid a trap. Consciousness pops up as the basis of creation, whether you start from God or from the test tube. In one case, matter disappears into mind; in the other case, mind emerges as matter. The subtle world is their common denominator.
Faith is supported by logic, but it’s hard to convince someone if your logic isn’t theirs. Dawkins has alienated even those who share his atheism because he arrogantly supposes that he took out the patent on rationality. No logic works but his. Even so, until very recently, forcing science and religion into a shotgun wedding satisfied no one. Dawkins and company reflect a social rift as much as anything else—if you “do science,” you aren’t likely to keep professional company with those who “do religion.” The two courses of study don’t overlap at university; the two kinds of work don’t share the same building.
Yet the tools for making God real are the ones that construct the real world. They can be stated in a small handful of principles. No one needs to take out a patent on them. If they pertain to reality itself, they should be acceptable to both believers and skeptics.
Principle 1—You are not a passive receiver taking in a fixed, given reality. You are processing your experience at every second.
Principle 2—The reality you perceive comes from the experience you are processing.
Principle 3—The more self-aware you are, the more power you will have as a reality-maker.
None of these principles will come as a surprise. Consciousness and creator have been important words in my argument all along, but you must test each principle; you have no other way to reclaim your role as a creator. If you don’t test them, you have passively accepted the skeptics’ position, which maintains that consciousness is totally unreliable because it is subjective. “I like lollipops” can’t be equated with “The sky is blue.” One is a fickle personal experience; the other is a scientific fact. But as we’ve seen, the distinction is baseless. It takes consciousness to make the sky blue. It takes consciousness to think in the first place. Skeptics warn us not to trust the events that happen “only in your mind,” when the truth is that the entire world happens only in your mind.
The real question is “How far can you trust?” Can you trust your mind when it takes you across the border from the visible world? That’s the crux of it. Consider what it means to surrender to God. This has always been portrayed as an act of faith, which means—if we are brutally frank—that most reasonable people will reject it out of hand. Surrendering means trusting in an invisible force beyond the five senses. Obviously you wouldn’t let God drive your car. No invisible force is going to cook dinner tonight. The material world works according to its own rules. If you stop there, surrender isn’t really necessary—you can trust the material world in an everyday way. No one has ever surrendered to God except by mistrusting the material world and following hints that lead in another direction. These hints are like peeks behind the smoke and mirrors of a magic act. They show you how the tricks are done.
Since the subtle world touches all of us, hints about it cross your path every day. Reflect on how many of the following things have happened to you. The list is long, but it’s important to realize that you are already connected to a deeper level of consciousness, if only through momentary glimpses.
You have an “aha” or “eureka” moment.
You feel a burst of heightened reality, as if things suddenly became clear to you.
You are struck by awe and wonder.
You are visited by a sudden sense of pervasive peace and calm.
Inspiration comes to you. You have a leap of creativity.
Events seem to form a pattern, and suddenly you see what the pattern is.
Unexpectedly, you feel loved, not by a specific person but simply loved.
You think of a person’s name, and the next minute that person telephones you.
A random word comes to mind, and you then run across it in your reading or conversation immediately afterward.
You foresee an event, and it comes true.
You have a particular desire, and it gets fulfilled as if on its own.
You run into meaningful coincidences, when two events coincide and mesh.
For a whole day, things seem to organize themselves, falling into place without effort.
You feel the presence of someone who has passed away.
You see another person’s aura, either as visible light or as a subtle sensation of light.
You detect charisma, a strong personal force, from someone else.
You feel that someone else radiates pure love or a holy presence.
You sense that you are guided.
You are certain that your life has a purpose, which may feel predestined or beyond what your ego wants.
It takes only a speck of self-awareness to notice such hints. They present flashes of mystery. Something is asking to be noticed. Now ask yourself a key question. How many of these hints did you trust? Did they make a difference in your outlook or your everyday response to life? The amount of trust people place in them varies enormously. One “eureka” moment can change an entire life, but that is rare. What is far more common is to receive a hint about the subtle world, only to let it pass as you return to living the way you normally do.
The arena of subtle perception is fragile at first. This is the main reason doubt arises about the power of consciousness. We take awareness for granted, and when events jump out of their usual groove, we don’t know how to respond. A friend told me about visiting an Indian holy man—in this case, a woman, actually, born in poor circumstances who grew up to be surrounded by devotees. My friend was quite reluctant to go. “I was asked by a follower of the holy woman, and I’ve always been embarrassed to tell him that his beliefs lowered him in my eyes. The notion of surrendering to someone else appalled me. Why on earth would a person give up their freedom that way?”
My friend arrived to find the holy woman sitting in a large tent; it was crammed with people and redolent of sandalwood incense. She sat on a low dais, a small figure dressed in a sari, to all appearances indistinguishable from anyone else.
My friend had a surprising reaction. “I expected to shut down, seeing hundreds of people focused on this unknown person, most of them bowing down as they approached her. She smiled at each and gave them a light embrace. It was a strange sight, the very picture of what I disliked about the whole guru science, but for some reason I felt quite relaxed and comfortable.”
Shy to approach the holy woman, my friend sat in the back of the tent. But she had heard about darshan, the traditional Indian practice of receiving a blessing in the presence of a holy person. An impulse told her to go forward and receive darshan, so she gradually made her way toward the front.
“I have no explanation for what happened,” she later told me. “People were jostling me on either side, but I kept inching ahead. As I did, my mind became quiet. The crowd didn’t make me feel agitated or impatient. A little closer, and this inner quiet became very peaceful. Closer still, and I sensed a sweetness inside, the way you’d feel around a happy infant—only this sweetness went deeper.
“Finally I was next in line. The holy woman smiled at me and lightly put her arms around me. She uttered a few words in my ear that I didn’t understand—later I was told that this was her blessing.
“What if I had been given a photograph of that moment? It would show a tall white Western woman stooping over to be hugged by a little brown Eastern woman. Yet the experience was indescribable. I felt an intensity in her presence that only the word ‘holy’ can describe. At the same time, it was like meeting myself. The little brown woman wasn’t even there. She was—what?—the symbol, the carrier, the messenger of a divine encounter.”
A powerful hint indeed. Afterward my friend found herself puzzled and deeply touched at the same time. She’s still working out what happened. I’m using the word hint because plunging directly into the subtle world would be so overwhelming that our minds shut out the possibility. We permit ourselves only hints and glimpses. The world would be a strange place if every other person were blinded by the light, like Saul on the road to Damascus. We’ve conditioned ourselves to see through a glass darkly. When his traumatic conversion turned Saul into Paul, he used the metaphor of seeing through a glass darkly because his perception had changed forever. The subtle world became his home, compared to which the normal world was a place of dingy shadows.
The hints won’t stop coming unless you persistently block them out, which some people do. The subtle world awaits the moment when these scattered signals begin to matter. Then a shift occurs. Your consciousness starts to free itself up. A dramatic example of this would be the long-term response of people who have had near-death experiences. Most report that they no longer fear death and dying, while some go further and report a loss of anxiety altogether. You and I don’t go around feeling a constant fear of death, because it is embedded in the psyche at a subtle level. This is also the level where release comes. Whether one believes in near-death experiences or not, release of fear takes place, which indicates that the subtle world has been contacted, and the contact led to a practical result.
Once the subtle world starts to matter to you, it will allow you to overcome more than hidden anxiety. It is the realm of light, where light means “clear perception, a state of transparency.” Consciousness is meant to be free. You have only to provide an opportunity and encourage every step of expanded awareness. How is that done?
You remain open-minded.
You don’t listen to the voice of fear.
You don’t allow yourself to escape into denial.
You take a holistic point of view.
You question the narrow boundaries of ego.
You identify with your highest impulses.
You are optimistic about the future.
You search for the hidden meaning in everyday events.
These are what I call subtle actions. You don’t take them on the material level. The hints left by the subtle world require a subtle response.
All of us are used to subtle action, although we don’t use that name for it. All subtle actions are choices. Imagine that you have left on a vacation, and on the way to the airport a nagging thought comes to you: Did I lock the front door? perhaps, or Did I leave the oven on? At that moment, you are confronting yourself, and a choice arises. Do you return home and double-check, or do you trust that nothing is wrong? The first is action in the material world, while the second is subtle action. You may not see a difference, but consider this. In the material world, we worry, double-check, fret, and so on out of a sense of insecurity. But intuition, which is subtle, doesn’t fret or worry. When you decide to trust your feelings, you are making your choice on the subtle level. (Simply stating the difference doesn’t mean that you can ignore every worry. You need to follow a process before trust becomes real.)
Subtle actions pervade life. If you trust that your partner loves you, that’s a subtle action. A less secure person asks for reassurance, such as ending every phone call with “Love you” in order to hear “Love you, too” in return. Only words and deeds can assuage their insecurity, but they can’t trust their own inner world. Inner trust and mistrust can affect the course of a lifetime. A child who has been well loved by his parents will almost always go through life feeling secure about his lovability. At the subtle level, lovability is a settled matter. But if a child grows up doubting that she is lovable, she will experience nagging doubt at the subtle level. What happens then? She will spend years trying to calm a sense of restlessness, dissatisfaction, and insecurity, and a fear of never being good enough.
The basic needs that religious people direct to God are also subtle. Lord, make me feel worthy. Lord, make me feel loved. Lord, make me feel blessed. If you direct these appeals outward, you cannot trust that God will reply. You’re like a telegraph operator at an isolated station tapping out a message with no security that the lines aren’t broken. Only after you experience the state known as “God within” do you trust the connection. God is disconnected in the material world but has a presence in the subtle world. This isn’t the end of the journey, but through subtle action, followed by a real response, the divine starts to matter. To lose fear or to feel blessed isn’t a mystical response. You think and behave differently from someone who hasn’t undergone a subtle change.
An Indian parable comes to mind as an illustration. Once there was a monk traveling by himself and teaching the dharma, the right way to live spiritually. As he made his way through the forest, he came upon a large clearing and sat down to rest.
Just as he opened his sack to take out some food, a thief happened to pass by. He saw that the sack contained an enormous diamond. When the monk finished his meal and set out on his way again, the thief ran ahead and hid in the bushes. Soon the monk approached, and the thief leaped out. The monk calmly asked him what he wanted.
“The diamond in your bag,” the thief replied.
“You followed me all this way just for that?” the monk asked. He took the diamond from his bag and held it out. “All right, take it,” he said.
The thief greedily snatched the diamond and hurried away. He hadn’t gone far when he looked back to make sure the monk wasn’t coming after him. What he saw stunned him. The monk was sitting cross-legged under the stars, meditating peacefully with a look of complete bliss on his face.
The thief went running back to him. “Please,” he begged, “take your diamond back. I only want to learn how you could lose it with so much peace.”
The story is about the difference between human nature that hasn’t been transformed and human nature that has. Subtle actions matter deeply; they provide direction to our whole existence. At every moment of the day we are arriving at hidden crossroads and making choices that lead one way or the other.
To trust or mistrust
To surrender or control
To let be or interfere
To pay attention or ignore
To love or fear
To engage or escape
We can distinguish subtle actions that have positive results from those that don’t. But they shouldn’t be taken as directions in an instruction manual. There is no approved set of choices that are always right while the others are always wrong. Love is the greatest good in life, but sometimes you have reason to fear. Not interfering is often wise counsel, but sometimes you must intervene. The secret to making the right choice is to be comfortable in the subtle world. When it is your home, you see clearly the right choice to make. The situation speaks to you. The gap between the question and the answer gets ever smaller. When these things start to be familiar, you have learned to trust your instincts and operate through intuition.
Instinct and intuition are genuine skills. Most of us merely make stabs in the dark because we have spent so little time developing these skills. Our inner world is confused and conflicted. Great artists are beautiful examples of skilled intuition. Imagine standing next to Rembrandt as he paints. His palette contains the same jumble of colors as that of any other painters of the day. The subject before him is perhaps a rich Amsterdam lady wrapped in a stiff white lace collar and gold jewelry. (Rembrandt’s subjects were often eager to wear their wealth on their backs.) Rembrandt’s hand dabs at his paints, then at his easel. These are the ordinary actions of any professional portrait painter.
Yet after a few sittings, a transformation has taken place. Instead of a portrait, a living human being has emerged on canvas. With his subtle skill, Rembrandt has intuited what this lady’s character is. She displays a hidden range of qualities (vanity, melancholy, sweetness, naïveté) that shine through the pigments. These inner qualities can’t be translated into mechanical technique. They require a direct connection between the subtle world and the painter’s hand, which is why we stand in awestruck admiration and say, “He has captured her soul.”
Not just geniuses but anyone can develop subtle skills. New mothers do it all the time when they learn to read the signals given off by an infant. (In tribal Africa, mothers carry their naked babies around on their backs. The mother knows immediately when to take her baby and hold it out to urinate or move its bowels. There is an instinctive bond, and no accidents.) The issue isn’t whether you have subtle skills—I’m sure you have many. But experiencing God isn’t a single skill. God is everywhere in the subtle world. The divine doesn’t appear by glimpses, in peak moments with sudden blinding light. The divine is constant; it is we who come and go.
Until the subtle world becomes your home, you can’t help but come and go. Repetition and practice are part of the learning curve. The trick is to know that you are in the subtle world to begin with. The level of the solution is deeper than the level of the problem. Staying at the level of the problem therefore leads to frustration.
You’ve probably met people who are constantly aiming for self-improvement, who say things like “I’m learning to be less angry,” “I’m learning how to trust more,” or “I’m learning how to be less controlling.” Somehow this learning never ends. Despite all their struggles, they are stuck with anger, mistrust, and control issues. (People who take anger management courses, for example, sometimes wind up angrier afterward. Likewise, the benefits of grief counseling are suspect and highly unpredictable.) Why does this happen? There is no cut-and-dried answer, but a range of possibilities comes into play.
The person didn’t reach the subtle level but struggled at the level of ego, self-doubt, and blame.
They lost heart when they met with inner resistance.
They lost motivation after one too many setbacks.
Their approach was confused and filled with contradictions.
They didn’t take real responsibility for their behavior.
They were lacking in self-awareness.
To put it simply, most people approach the subtle world haphazardly, rather like “cheasters,” casual Christians who attend church only at Christmas and Easter. Our failure to find God can be traced back to our habit of coming and going rather than making a home in the subtle world. Just so, our failure to play the piano well can be traced back to the moment we dropped piano lessons; our failure to perfect your golf swing, or to be creative, resulted from lack of practice. As banal as it sounds, finding God depends on regular practice.
I’m not here to catalog the failures of seekers who never find what they are searching for. It’s far more important to arrive at a trustworthy path to the goal. The subtle world may lie in the unknown, but it is always open.
The most trustworthy path is to take a mind-body approach. In any state of awareness, the brain processes experience; a mundane experience like walking the dog is on the same plane as an exalted experience like hearing angels sing. The brain must be adapted to process both. As a child, you went through very specialized adaptations in your brain to learn how to read. Your eyes had to be guided to focus on small black specks on a piece of paper; they had to move in linear fashion from left to right and then down to the next line. Your cortex had to decode the black specks into letters. Your memory committed itself to building up a vast library of words and ideas. Becoming literate was like moving to a new world.
Your shift away from materialism will be far more radical, because you give up all attachment to the physical universe as your fixed reference point. An impulse of love will gain more power than a thunderstorm. The sight of a rose in your mind’s eye will have the same status as a rose held in your hand; both are products of consciousness. Just as it adapted when you learned to read, your brain can adapt to experiencing God. When you commit to a strategy of shaping how your brain processes perceptions, your spiritual vision will become practical. In fact, this serves as the litmus test—if your brain hasn’t been retrained, you will not discover anything real in your spiritual search. You will still be in the net, waiting to find a hole to jump through.
The brain cannot reshape itself; it functions as a mechanism for processing what the mind wants, fears, believes, and dreams about. By becoming more conscious, you automatically begin to lead your brain where you want it to go. In the Age of Faith, every person was conditioned to process daily life in terms of God. There were sermons in the stones; a fallen tree was a telegram from the Almighty. Today the opposite is true. The stones are dumb; a fallen tree is a random event. The human brain has learned to adapt to any reality. That’s a great gift, because it means you can lead your brain into the subtle world, which becomes real as your brain adjusts to a new landscape.
Your brain, despite its marvels, requires basic training when you learn any new skill, and finding God is a skill. New neural pathways must be formed, which will happen automatically once you put focus, attention, and intention behind it.
Below are seven strategies for processing the subtle world, one for each day of the week. Each day focuses on a different exercise to make you feel comfortable with your inner world. Be easy with each exercise, repeat them over a period of time, and you will witness a genuine and lasting change in your consciousness.
Old pathway: Holding on to what is yours
New pathway: Sharing yourself
Exercise: Today be aware of old habits that cause you to react with “me first.” Watch yourself holding back instead of giving. If you see hints of selfishness, greed, fear of lack, fear of loss, and other kinds of contraction around giving, stop and take a deep breath. Cut off the reaction, and go back on the self. Wait and see if a new way of responding comes up. It’s okay if it doesn’t. Just stopping the old reaction is a step forward.
To lay down a new pathway, look for one opportunity today where you can be kind, affectionate, or appreciative to someone. Anticipate someone’s need before they ask. See what you can do to go out of your way to help. Ask what it means to be generous, and see yourself in that role. Act on your generous impulses instead of shrinking away from them.
Old pathway: Suppressing love
New pathway: Expressing love
Exercise: Today your goal is to turn repression into expression. Inside us all there are feelings and impulses that we resist. We don’t express them even when they are completely positive. It may be healthy or socially prudent not to express how hostile you feel at a given moment, but repressing something as positive and basic as love is self-destructive. Happiness consists of knowing what you need and gaining fulfillment from someone who wants to meet your need.
Since giving is easier than receiving for most people, show some aspect of love today that you would normally repress. This doesn’t mean that you suddenly come out of your shell and say “I love you”—although that is often a very welcome thing to say and to hear. Instead, think of your mother or someone else who loved you in a very natural way. What did she do to express love? She looked after your needs, she put you ahead of herself, she didn’t judge or criticize, she helped heal your wounds, and she supported you when you were nervous, afraid, or insecure. Find a way today to enact that role for someone else.
It is impossible to turn “I am not lovable enough” into “I am perfectly lovable” overnight. A process is involved. What made you feel unlovable was a series of messages from other people; these negative messages became incorporated into your self-image. So let’s reverse the process. If others give you positive messages that you are lovable, your self-image will shift in that direction. Bit by bit, you will earn a new self-image.
Be aware of yourself today in terms of love. Watch to see if you push away other people’s positive messages. See if you fall into the groove of acting neutral, indifferent, or careless with others. If so, stop. All retraining requires that you stop doing what doesn’t work. If you simply stop, that is a step forward. But also add to the new pathway. Be someone who is worthy of love. A smile, a kind word, any act of bonding—these small daily things tell other people that you care. Most love isn’t romantic. It’s an expression of a warm heart, and the one thing that every warm-hearted person does is care. Instead of worrying if you will ever find the right one to love you, be the right one. The more you express love, the more your higher brain will automatically react in loving ways.
Old pathway: Holding on to resistance
New pathway: Surrendering to what is
Exercise: Today you need to let go of something. Keep your attention on this, and when a moment arises when your inner voice says “I’m right, dammit,” or “I’m not giving in,” just stop. You don’t have to do the opposite of anything. Merely pause and be self-aware. Notice that you are clinging, holding on, demanding that the situation change. How does this make you feel? Almost always, holding on feels tight, constricted, angry, and stressful. If you feel any of this, walk away and relax. Do deep breathing or meditation. Center yourself before you react.
Letting go is both emotional and physical. You are opening a pathway of acceptance. Whatever your inner voice says, reality is simply what is. You need to look at “what is,” which means dropping “what should be.” Don’t think of this as surrender in the sense of losing. Think of it as being more open, letting your brain gain more information. At a higher level, you are also calling upon the brain to deliver better responses that suit the situation.
Being self-aware will alert you to your negative reactions. In the past, the old pathways gave you two options when you felt negative: shut down or act out. Most people shut down, since they’ve learned from painful experience that acting out their judgment, anger, resentment, and ego gets poor responses from others. Yet this was never an either/or situation. Instead of shutting down or acting out, you can simply be aware. When you do that, you let in the light of consciousness. Your higher self is actually nothing more than expanded consciousness. By holding on to anything, you squeeze it into a narrow place in your mind—the mental equivalent of folding your arms tight across your chest. You can spend a lot of time with tight-folded arms, a clenched jaw, and beady eyes, or you can notice what you are doing and stop.
The mental equivalent works the same way. You can cast other people as wrong for a long time, or you can notice what you are doing and stop. The process of letting go begins here. In this case, once you stop clenching inside, your brain is automatically freed up. Over time openness becomes a habit. The new pathways replace the old by gaining fresh experiences. Once you actually look for proof that holding on isn’t working, it’s easy to find. What takes patience is to find the rewards in letting go. Life is hugely complicated; shutting yourself up into a small room delivers a safer reality. But once you let life flow in by no longer resisting, letting go becomes easier, and then you see that life is yours to experience as an individual. Bliss is universal; finding our own kind of bliss is a privilege that belongs only to you.
Old pathway: Routine
New pathway: Satisfaction
Exercise: Today you need to break out of predictable routine. That’s easy to do—too easy, if all we’re talking about is asking for poached eggs instead of scrambled, or turning the channel from Sunday Night Football. Routine is rooted in the brain. It’s a form of survival when in truth it never ran a risk of not surviving. Most people’s lives are established when it comes to the basics of food, shelter, and clothing. The fact that we can take survival for granted, however, doesn’t convince the lower brain. It is constantly trying to shore itself up against famine, aggression, exposure to the elements, and a dangerous environment. Hence the sense of risk, amounting to dread, when people are cut off from their familiar routines.
Your goal today is to learn to expand beyond your brain’s habit of equating new, fresh, and unexpected with alien, threatening, and anxious. Be aware of how you structure your whole day around making yourself feel safe. Protecting yourself is a lower-brain instinct. But remember, the lower brain never evolves; it continues to do what it did millions of years ago. Only your higher brain can evolve, but it won’t if you live behind mental barriers. Break out of the security systems you’ve built around yourself, even for a little while. When you do, what happens? You will walk around feeling insecure, and that’s your actual reality. We are not talking about foolish risk-taking. We are talking about the root of insecurity, which is the belief that the universe would never uphold our existence.
To dispel that deep sense of insecurity, you must go through a process of retraining your brain. Give it room to evolve. The lower brain won’t go away; you need its protective instincts some of the time, although very rarely. Most people are protecting themselves from imagined threats. But if your higher brain dominates, the protective voice will grow smaller and less anxious.
Imagine that you have been dropped unwillingly into the middle of Haiti after its devastating earthquake or into Malaysia after its tsunami. You will probably go into some kind of anxiety or panic. Now imagine that you have voluntarily gone to those disaster sites to help. You are there for a higher purpose, something deeply meaningful to you, and therefore, the voice of threat is rendered marginal.
Meaning overrides insecurity. That’s the key. So today find something to do that expresses your purpose. Let life support your purpose. Be decisive; know what you are about. If you cannot think of anything that fits the bill, then read a book about someone in real life who inspires you, a potential role model. Absorb yourself in the path that this person took. Now sit back and consider whether you have been given a clue about your path. Clues are always present. It’s part of the dharma, the cosmic force that will uphold anything you intend for a deep level inside yourself.
Old pathway: Passive neglect
New pathway: Active well-being
Exercise: Today your goal is to help your body’s healing system. Healing system is a relatively new term medically, in that in brings together several of the body’s systems. The immune system may be central to healing a wound or infection, but emotional healing involves the brain, exercise involves the muscles and cardiovascular system, diet involves the digestive system, and so on. People pop vitamin pills thinking that they are helping to fend off disease, but the benefit is minimal and mostly unnecessary given a healthy balanced diet. When the same person refuses to address damaging stress in their lives or long-held anger and resentment, the result isn’t passive; the healing system is meeting a serious obstacle.
Today, break through your passive neglect. When you brush your teeth, think about the whole issue of your dental health. When you eat breakfast, consider how to nurture your body. When you take the elevator instead of the stairs, consider how good it is to be active. As you do these things, check in on how you feel. The reason you neglect yourself always has an underlying feeling attached to it.
You are tuned to the world, including the subtle world, through body awareness as much as mental awareness. Are you happy to tune in to yourself physically? Many women, indoctrinated to have a poor body image, don’t want to tune in at all. They use worry and self-judgment instead. They accuse their bodies for not being perfect, a form of rejection that carries a hidden price: They are rejecting the body’s healing system at the same time. Thus it becomes an annoyance when the body signals discomfort, and if the discomfort is actual pain, their only response is anxiety and panic.
You can avert all this by tuning in, not out of anxiety, but as your body’s ally. In turn, your body will become your ally. The most positive signal you can send every day is to be aligned with balance in all things. Your body is constantly in the state of dynamic equilibrium called homeostasis. This is the same as a car idling at the stoplight or setting a thermostat and walking away. Homeostasis is meant to be disturbed, to be thrown off its set point. The reason is that a body at rest also needs to move at a moment’s notice. If you decide to run after a cab, rush to the phone, or enter a marathon, homeostasis gives you the flexibility to do so.
Passive neglect reinforces the body at rest; it chooses inertia over dynamism. What helps homeostasis to remain dynamic, flexible, and available at the touch of intention? All kinds of things, as long as they are the opposite of inertia. Exercise wards off physical inertia. Taking an interest in life wards off mental inertia. Best of all, self-awareness enables the whole mind-body system to be dynamic, because self-awareness makes room for spontaneity. The best kind of freedom is unexpected, because it renders you open to surprise, passion, and the unknown. So see if you can trigger those things in your daily life. Surprise yourself; take an interest; find something to be passionate about. These are all deep forms of healing, and when you pursue them, you are truly finding your healing.
Old pathway: Limited expectations
New pathway: Unlimited potential
Exercise: Today you need to be fulfilled, not by waiting for a magical day in the future but by changing the pathways of fulfillment. Fulfillment is multidimensional. It feels satisfying physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The ingredients are, first, a general sense of relaxation and contentment in the body, along with the absence of tension and discomfort. Second, at the emotional level, you feel a sense of personal satisfaction; you are living your life well. With this comes an absence of threat, isolation, loneliness, and emotional baggage. Finally, on the spiritual level, you feel at peace and centered, connected with your highest self. This comes with an absence of doubt, of fear of death, and of abandonment by God.
Although only a sketch, this picture of your multidimensionality shows you where to look for fulfillment. Any of these dimensions will do, and if you truly pursue physical, mental, and spiritual satisfaction, they will merge. All the pathways will be open to the many avenues that fulfillment comes from. There is no set recipe. It’s true that giving brings fulfillment to many people, and others experience satisfaction only when being of service. These are general conclusions only. Because you are multidimensional, any map you draw leads to where you want to go.
The chief obstacle is limited expectations. Whether they admit it or not, most people are unfulfilled because they set their sights too low. They have in fact achieved what they imagined would make them happy. For decades psychologists looked at what makes people miserable and psychologically impaired. In the new field of positive psychology, researchers instead look at what makes people happy, but their findings are full of contradictions.
Everyone tries to be happy; everyone pursues the thing they think will make them happy. But it turns out that human beings are bad predictors. When we get the thing that should make us happy, it doesn’t. New mothers, for example, often feel frustrated and depressed by taking care of their babies; some mothers rank caring for small children as a source of unhappiness, along with doing household chores. Having money makes people happy only up to a certain point. They reach a nice level of comfort, but then extra money increases their unhappiness by adding responsibility and worry. And once you have enough money, you receive diminishing returns from getting more. The second Porsche doesn’t carry the thrill of the first; the tenth time you stay at the Ritz, the glamour has mostly rubbed off.
Wealth aside, the essential reality is that achieving fulfillment requires having higher expectations. As you go through your day, experiencing all kinds of things, pause and ask yourself, “Honestly, what is this doing for me?” The answer won’t be cut and dried. Some things will be more fulfilling than you might suppose; others will fall flat. Then ask yourself, “What would be more fulfilling instead?” In other words, embark on a journey of discovery. You will quickly find that discovery isn’t a piece of cake; obstacles and limitations will lie in your way.
Be aware of the following kinds of limitations: Thinking that you don’t deserve better. Fear of not being accepted. Fear of failure. Fear of sticking out too much from the crowd. Anxiety over leaving your old ways behind. For many people, happiness equates with settling. They choose good enough because it’s safe. But good enough means that your dreams will be so limited that fulfilling them will bring only small satisfactions. Take a second look at the people you associate with. Their expectations are likely to be your own, because in all likelihood you want to fit in with your own crowd. You aren’t asked to disapprove of your friends or yourself—quite the opposite.
Choose the person you most admire among your circle, or the one whose dreams secretly match yours. Here is a living example of how to expand your expectations. You can get closer to this person, ask for advice, and share your heart’s desires. Yes, this means taking a risk. Exposing who you want to be isn’t necessarily safe. But finding out who you want to be is crucial, because it will keep your eye on the prize. You will accept constant growth, an unending journey, expanding horizons. Achieving fulfillment isn’t like building a wall brick by brick until you stand back to admire the finished product. It’s like stepping into a river in which you can’t step into the same place twice.
The one image is static; the other, dynamic. The one is fixed securely in place; the other leads who knows where. You have neural pathways to deal with both extremes. Stability is important, but so is dynamism. Most people are so imprinted to be secure that they don’t have much play on the dynamic side. Their landscape features more walls than rivers. As you go through your day, try to be aware of how your personal landscape looks. That’s the first step in getting around the walls. Some will need tearing down; others will need climbing over or sneaking around while not knocking them down. It feels good to live with as few walls as possible if they are the kind that shut out new possibilities. See if you can take one deep breath of real satisfaction today. In that lies the path to lasting fulfillment.
Old pathway: Struggling to achieve
New pathway: Using least effort
Exercise: Today is about learning to let it be. The basics are simple: Intend for a certain outcome, let your intention go, and wait for the result. There is nothing esoteric about these steps. You go through them every time you send an order to your brain, such as wanting to raise your arm. The intention is carried out automatically. You don’t stand watch to see if your brain will respond the way you ask it to. The feedback loop between intention and result runs smoothly and automatically.
The art of being consists in bringing the same trust and effortlessness to other aspects of your life. The difference is that in the West, people keep events “in here” apart from events “out there.” Claiming that one’s intention can affect an external situation sounds normal in Eastern spiritual traditions, which hold consciousness to be everywhere, both “in here” and “out there.” One worldview is dualistic; the other is unified. But terminology is irrelevant; the proof is in the pudding. Can you have an intention and allow it to manifest without struggling to achieve your goal?
The world’s wisdom traditions say that you can. “Letting it be” means being connected to the same source in pure Being as everything in the cosmos. When this connection is strong, having a desire “in here” leads to a result “out there” automatically, because the underlying unity transcends boundaries and artificial separation. To arrive at the point where you are completely connected is a process, one that takes place through the brain. As in the previous exercises, you only need to become more self-aware.
In practice, what I’m asking you to do is this: Have one intention today, let go of it, and see what happens. If you get the result you want, appreciate the fact that you connected, you tuned in to the mechanism of least effort. “Least effort” is the same as letting your Being do the work. If you don’t get the result you want, shrug it off and try again with a new intention. Many times, however, the result won’t be obvious. You will come close or sense that things worked out approximately as you wished.
This is part of the process, so notice that you came close, and accept the result you received. (Most of the time you will have to do more work to achieve what you wanted, but that’s okay.) In this exercise, there is no failure. Creating a strong connection to your Being is the same as creating any new pathway. You are making progress if any of the following indicators appear:
It takes less effort to get to a result.
You feel less stressed about getting a good outcome.
People begin to cooperate with you more easily.
You sense that everything is going to be all right.
You start to have strokes of luck.
Events mesh together in synchronous fashion.
Results start to appear more quickly.
Creative solutions appear as if out of nowhere.
None of this is mysticism. Every life already contains synchronous happenings, strokes of luck, and happy coincidences. Instead of accepting that these are accidental or random events, you can now look upon them as a sign that making a connection is very real and possible. Mastering the art of being takes time and self-awareness. But your brain is designed to forge the ultimate pathway to fulfillment, which is effortless.
Let’s say that you have begun the process of reshaping new pathways. At first this requires effort and patience. You must address the old pathways, which represent imprinted memories, habits, and conditioning, over and over. You are changing the default mode of your brain, and it takes conscious attention to do that. But the project is highly rewarding, and if you persist, various signs of progress will appear, including the following:
Your internal dialogue quiets down.
Negative responses diminish.
You resist and control impulses more easily.
A sense of meaning grows.
You begin to feel cared for.
You feel less regret over the past and less anxiety about the future.
Decision making becomes clearer.
At a certain stage, you reach a tipping point. Having done the work of imprinting your brain to have new responses, you can trust those responses. This opens the door for Being. You can “let it be” when your brain starts taking care of you. You already trust your brain to take care of you in countless ways. It automatically controls hormone levels, respiration, the sleep cycle, heart rate, appetite, sexual response, the immune system, and much more. So the art of being isn’t foreign to you; it is second nature.