When you fully remember who you are, you become one with God. An invisible grace permeates every aspect of your life. The hope expressed in Psalm 23, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” comes true. You cannot achieve such a state of grace overnight. You and I, wherever we find ourselves, must balance hope, faith, and knowledge. It’s a precarious balance. There may be moments of grace that break through like sunshine through clouds. These moments don’t come every day, however, unlike the personal trials that we face. The trick is to begin looking for the grace hidden beneath the struggle, and then your trials start to ease and fade away.
I want to show that spirituality can be a way of life at every stage of the path. At the beginning—and well into the middle—“the courage to be” means the courage to be confused. God seems relevant off and on. The possibility of finding peace or trusting in a higher power flickers. The rest of the time God is nowhere. Are these glimmers of the divine enough? Obviously not. When you watch the evening news, you will see some fresh disaster—a jetliner crashing into the Atlantic, genocide in the Congo, a gunman on the rampage in a movie theater who then shoots himself—pulling you back into the “real world.” Your old conditioning kicks in: You believe the world is full of violence and chaos, and you have no choice but to meet it on its own terms, struggling to hold your own.
It takes a hidden element to keep us from backsliding into our old ingrained reactions. That element is wholeness. Unknown to us, wholeness is in charge of our lives. It keeps chaos at bay. It provides support even when bad things are happening. The world’s wisdom traditions have an axiom: “As it is in the great, so it is in the small.” In other words, even the tiniest fragment of reality is the whole. But you and I cling to the perspective of a fragment. Taking this point of view, no one can see wholeness. The air in a party balloon would be surprised to hear that there is no difference between it and the Earth’s atmosphere. Until the balloon is popped, a thin membrane keeps it from knowing who it really is.
For you and me, the thin membrane is mental. From the perspective of a fragment, you approach your life as “I,” a single, isolated person. This “I” possesses individual drives and motives. It wants more for itself. It thinks that consciousness is private. Looking out for number one, along with immediate family, takes top priority. But no matter how strong “I” becomes, outside forces are far more powerful, which makes existence insecure. God has the perspective of wholeness. At the end of the spiritual journey, the seeker who has become enlightened has also gained this perspective. He can say Aham Brahmasmi, “I am the universe,” which is like seeing infinity in all directions, with no boundaries or limitations.
Mystery swirls around this word enlightenment, what it means and how to get there. Stripped of mystery, you are enlightened when you become completely self-aware. Each step on the spiritual path expands the self-awareness you started with. Your sense of self changes. You begin to perceive that wholeness is possible. (To lift an image from the Vedic tradition, you smell the sea even before you reach it.)
If you observe the following changes in yourself, wholeness is actually dawning.
You feel less isolated, more connected to everything around you.
Insecurity is replaced with a sense of safety.
You realize that you belong.
The demands of “I, me, and mine” are not so strong.
You can see from a wider perspective than self-interest.
You act on the impulse to help and serve.
Life and death merge into a single cycle. Creation and destruction are no longer frightening.
Us-versus-them fades away. Divisions seem less meaningful.
Status and power become less important.
The ups and downs of everyday life don’t trigger you as much.
You feel guided in your actions. Life is no longer random and full of impending crises.
You feel more balanced and at peace with yourself.
Being whole is a state that grows inside you, but reality has always been whole. The entire universe conspires to bring about every moment in time. In Sanskrit this fact is compressed in the verb dhar, “to uphold.” Reality upholds itself and all the fragments that seem to exist in it. The fragmentation that is so obvious in the material world is maya, a part of the illusion. Gazing at billions of galaxies masks the reality that they all came from one event, a Big Bang that had no fragments. This is easy to understand now that physics has traced all matter and energy back to their source. But the mind has no Big Bang to refer to. Thinking is always fragmented. It takes place one thought at a time, so makes it much harder to see that all thoughts come from one mind. “My” mind is the most convincing fragment of all.
If you tell someone to stop clinging to the notion of “my” mind, they’ll look alarmed and say, “You want me to lose my mind?” No, you want them to gain cosmic mind instead. It helps to substitute something you can actually see: your body. While you are focused on doing something small and specific—reading these words—fifty trillion cells are upholding that tiny action. Cells are not fooled by their isolated situation as individuals. They operate from wholeness all the time. Each is leading a spiritual life that any saint would envy.
Every cell follows a higher purpose, maintaining the whole body.
Each cell knows its place in the body. It has total security.
The body protects and embraces the life of every cell.
Without judgment or prejudice, every cell is accepted.
Every cell lives in the moment, constantly renewed, never clinging to the old and outworn.
The natural flow of life is trusted to operate with supreme efficiency.
Individual cells are born and die, yet this all takes place against the body’s perfect balance.
None of these things are spiritual aspirations; they are facts of daily existence at the level of your cells. Everything that seems unreachable in spiritual terms—perfect surrender, humility, innocence, nonviolence, reverence for life—has been built into you. It doesn’t matter how minuscule a single red blood corpuscle is; the wisdom of life upholds it.
This leads to a surprising conclusion. For a cell to remain alive, it depends upon infinity. A single cell can say Aham Brahmasmi without spending years in a cave in the Himalayas. Saying “I am the universe” doesn’t mean that you are very, very big. The issue isn’t about size, place, time, or space. It’s about everything in creation being the same in essence, despite all appearances. Such differences, to use a Vedic image, are like a gold watch and a gold ring arguing over which one is more valuable. Trapped in their egos, they can’t see that they are made of the same essence, which is gold. Brain cells exhibit intelligence. Is intelligence big or small? Would you need a lunch sack to carry it around in or a shipping container? The question is meaningless. Intelligence has no physical size. All the invisible attributes that uphold life have no physical size. The beauty of the spiritual path is that you are supported by an infinite power every step of the way.
The real issue is how much of infinity you can absorb into your life. When expansion is infinite, the whole project feels daunting. Why challenge your boundaries, which feel like home? You might go flying outward like a paddleball, only to come springing back on a rubber band. A liver or heart cell is fortunate. To remain alive, it must connect with wholeness. It cannot doubt or opt out, turn its back on its creator, or denounce God as a delusion. But you are even more fortunate. You have self-awareness, the ability to know who you are. So your spiritual path comes down to choosing an identity. You act like an isolated individual or like the whole. You either align yourself with the universe or you don’t.
Alignment = self-acceptance, flow, balance, orderliness, being at peace
Nonalignment = self-judgment, suffering, struggle, opposition, restlessness, disorder
If you focus on the right side of the equation, life looks incredibly complicated. Paralyzed by a welter of choices, you’d hardly be able to start the car. At any given moment, you’d be deciding whether to accept or resist, to struggle or let go. Perhaps that’s why we can’t stop fantasizing about perfection. If you can only get the perfect body, the perfect house, the perfect mate, you will escape the hardest thing in life, which is ambivalence. All bodies, houses, and mates have imperfections. There are good days and bad. Love can unexpectedly turn into boredom or even hate.
The left side of each equation, however, consists of only one word. You face only a single choice: to align yourself with wholeness or not. Simplicity is extremely powerful. You ask God to uphold you, and everything else follows. This is the holistic solution to all problems.
Many pages ago I mentioned how impossible it was to live as Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. The lilies of the field do not toil or spin, but human beings spend a lifetime of toil. Jesus was holding out the same holistic solution that we have arrived at: Providence will uphold you when you are totally aligned with God, as nature upholds all simpler life-forms. “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?” (Matthew 6:26–27). The expression may be poetic, but the logic is pure wisdom: Alignment is the natural way; nonalignment isn’t.
It’s hard to be left behind, but that’s the situation we all find ourselves in. If we could be sitting at the feet of Jesus, Buddha, or one of the great Vedic rishis, they would show us, day by day, when we were aligned with God and when we weren’t. The New Testament swings constantly between the master’s rebukes and his praise. At one moment, Jesus scorns his followers for demanding healings and miracles. At another moment, he bestows healings and miracles with a smile. It must have been incredibly confusing for them. Caught between rebuke and blessing, the disciples needed constant course correction.
You and I need course correction just as much, with only ourselves to follow. The obstacles that we face test our faith and tease us with hope that soon fades. It’s necessary, then, to examine the broken state we’ve created. Nonalignment has been a way of life for generations. (What greater symptom of our plight than the doctrine of a random, cold, uncaring universe that Dawkins and company promote?) The Vedic masters point to five obstacles that keep us out of alignment with God. The Sanskrit term for these obstacles is more dramatic: klesha, which literally means “poison.” The five poisons are
• Ignorance (the inability to tell the real from the false)
• Egoism (identifying with “me,” the individual self)
• Attachment (clinging to certain things, the objects of desire)
• Aversion (rejecting other things, the objects of revulsion)
• Fear of death
The first poison starts a chain reaction, we might say, leading to the last. Fear of death, the fifth klesha, is the end product on the assembly line of ignorance. Not many people are happy to be told that they’ve shaped their lives through ignorance; it sounds offensive. A more palatable way is to talk about fragmentation.
How did you come to see yourself as a fragment? The first step was forgetfulness. A rich man afflicted with amnesia forgets his bank account. The money is still there, but forgetfulness makes him impoverished. You and I lost the memory of wholeness. We are still whole, but we’ve lost the advantage of it. The chain reaction has started.
You forget that you are whole.
You see yourself as “I,” an isolated, vulnerable fragment.
“I” has desires that it clings to in order to feel safer.
It also has things that feel threatening, which it pushes away.
Despite its pursuit of desire, “I” knows that it will die one day, and this knowledge makes it very afraid.
The five poisons look bad, yet one thing gives hope: Once you extract the first poison—forgetting who you are—the chain reaction stops. This is an invaluable secret. People waste years trying to improve the bits and pieces of their lives. Let’s say you look in the mirror one day and dislike the body you see. You want to impress the opposite sex, so you resolve to exercise. Running on a treadmill stokes desire by leading to better fitness; it stokes revulsion by being boring and tiring. You pay for an expensive date, which stokes the desire to be considered a success, but knowing that you are compensating for your insecurity stokes revulsion. You have been poisoned by the kleshas of attachment and revulsion. The result is that “I” feels conflicted, falls back on inertia, and winds up feeling worse about itself because it has failed to get what it wanted—a better body. The whole process takes place in consciousness, as clinging, revulsion, desire, and ego clash in a confusing melee. But there was never any real hope in the first place. By trying to satisfy “I,” you were trying to placate an illusion.
The way out of this dilemma is to remember who you really are, which means aligning yourself with what is real. Instead of asking “What would Jesus do?” which seems pretty imaginary, ask “What would my real self do?” That question is more authentic and immediate.
Your real self would take responsibility for the reflection that the universe sends. Reality is a mirror that never lies.
Your real self would focus on inner growth. It wants nothing more than to reach its full potential.
Your real self wouldn’t project blame and judgment on others.
Your real self wouldn’t act on impulse. It relies on self-reflection. It makes decisions in a state of calm, away from the chaos.
You might grumble that you still see a flabby body in the mirror.
Actually not, because once you inhabit your real self, judgment ends; focusing on externals ends; you are no longer motivated by insecurity, which traps people on the endless treadmill of self-improvement. This is just a broad outline, but it’s enough to show you that “I” has a very different agenda from your real self.
God should be a way of life that you can rely upon as securely as you rely upon grocery stores, a monthly paycheck, and your insurance policy. What would be the point of an unreliable God? The devout French writer Simone Weil put it this way: “In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.” I totally agree, but we need a process that arrives at certainty. Let’s set aside absolute answers—they leave no middle ground, no evolution, and no chance to correct your mistakes. Unbending certainty is the position taken by atheists at one extreme and fundamentalists at the other. For the rest of us, certainty grows from inner experience, and this unfoldment takes time. Meanwhile, we have a whole life to live, and we must embrace our uncertainty. It’s okay to be wobbly as long as you are still heading down the right road.
No one has really been left behind. As a child, I didn’t know this. I marveled at the miracles that Jesus performed in the New Testament—my early schooling took place under Christian Brothers, mostly Irish missionaries who ran the best schools in India. But Jesus’s miracles weren’t anything I’d ever see. Walking on water has gone away. A process of disenchantment began, and it was easy for me to slide from disenchantment to disillusionment, then on to amnesia, forgetting that my childhood ideals ever existed. The best I could do was adapt to a world devoid of God. If he would not intervene in the world’s evils, I would. I think many doctors follow this path in their own way. What I didn’t see was that the entire slide perfectly matched the five kleshas.
If you find yourself fighting the world’s many evils, you are immersed in them. The system of evil has claimed you. It sounds shocking, but if you believe in evil, you have forgotten who you really are. I thought helping sick people would improve one small corner of the world. From a wider perspective, though, I was doing something quite different. I was keeping an illusion going. Every time you fight evil, you are reinforcing the system of evil, which would shrink away unless people paid attention to it.
Krishnamurti was one of the frankest teachers on this point, regardless of how it baffled people or hurt their feelings. In one of his journals, he recounts an incident in India when a kindly, well-dressed woman came asking for a contribution to her cause, the prevention of cruelty to animals.
“What’s the reason for this cause?” Krishnamurti asked.
“Animals are terribly mistreated in this country,” the woman said. “I know that you teach Ahimsa, reverence for life. Surely this means being kind to animals.”
“I meant, why is this your cause? What’s your reason for taking it up?” Krishnamurti replied.
The woman was taken aback. “I feel how much these poor creatures suffer.”
“Then it’s your own distress you want to alleviate,” said Krishnamurti. “There is a way. Look deep into yourself. Where is the seed of violence? If animals are being mistreated, it is because we don’t take responsibility for our own violence. The seed is nowhere else but in you.”
The wider perspective can be very painful. It rips away the ego’s pride in being right and good. Krishnamurti doesn’t recount whether he made a contribution or not. (He probably did, being a supporter of good causes.) His aim was to expose the root of evil itself, because that is the only way to end it once and for all. The same applies to any particular evil one can name. Imagine that a psychic reads your mind and tells you, “Your notion of true evil is child abuse, domestic violence, religious hatred, and a helpless person dying in horrible pain from cancer.” You might agree with this list—surely most people would—and yet it implies no solution. You can give to good causes that help victims of child abuse and support harsher laws against domestic violence. You can pray that you don’t die in agony from incurable cancer. But these acts only skirt the question; they don’t get at evil itself.
The question of evil is the toughest we can ask and the greatest challenge to God. Why does evil exist? Why doesn’t God intervene? If the evils we deplore in society are symptoms of cosmic evil, then hope vanishes. The entire spiritual enterprise collapses, as it did for countless people after the Gulag, the Holocaust, and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although carried out by human beings, these horrors felt satanic. They erased any optimism that good could triumph over evil. The ultimate reason to despair, as many saw it, was that the perpetrators who perform the most evil acts in modern history thought of themselves as moral and their victims as the actual bad people.
If we can answer the toughest question, the whole trend reverses. Once evil is exposed as an illusion, reality has a chance to convince us. Love can prove itself more powerful than fear. The greatest of spiritual ideals, a world free of evil, will begin to actualize. On the other hand, if evil cannot be defeated, it will doom the spiritual path itself.
If you are spiritual, does that provide a safeguard against the heinous crimes perpetrated on humanity? We can’t begin at such an extreme with questions about cosmic evil and that dark, seductive creature Satan. Instead, we have a more modest way to get at the question of evil. Start with a personal question: “Would you accept a world that contained no badness at all? Do you want everything to be good?”
Your immediate answer might be yes. For instance, pain is the body’s idea of evil, and a world without physical pain sounds desirable. But a handful of patients worldwide have a rare condition (traced to two mutations in the SCN9A gene) that prevents them from feeling any pain. Justin Heckert, a journalist who was reporting on a thirteen-year-old girl living with this anomaly, writes that:
She really has a lot less fear and regard for her body than other girls her age, anyone her age, anyone at all, really. She was playing air hockey with her sister so crazily I thought she might hurt herself, or hurt her sister. She threw half of her body onto the table and was trying to smash the puck toward the little goal as hard as she could. Her parents were mortified.
But Heckert quickly lost his envy of a child who felt no pain, accepting instead what her doctor said: “Pain is a gift that she doesn’t have.” In grade school a monitor followed her constantly to make sure she wasn’t injured; after every recess it was necessary to check her eyes in case grit had gotten in. At home, her parents “got rid of all their furniture with sharp corners. They laid down the softest carpet they could find. They didn’t let [their daughter] roller-skate. They didn’t let her ride a bicycle. They wrapped her arms in layers of gauze to keep her from rubbing them raw. They used a baby monitor in her bedroom to listen for grinding teeth.”
Pain is a gift, once you realize the consequences of doing without it. Fire burns the skin, but it also cooks food. Then what about violence? A world without crime and war seems completely desirable, but surgery is a form of controlled violence. The body is (carefully) torn open, exposing it to many risks. A healthy ecosystem depends on one species eating another, which entails violence. Make all animals vegetarians, and in the absence of predators, nothing would stop insects from filling the world; they already outweigh all mammals many times over.
And what about mental suffering, which is entangled with shame, guilt, fear, and anger? Two angry factions in a civil war wind up killing each other and many innocent bystanders. On the face of it, anger has led to great evil. But the combatants don’t stop, because their desire for vengeance makes them accept anger as justified and even righteous. Civil wars are driven by desires—defending your home, hatred of “the other,” racial and religious intolerance—that are just as tied to anger as revenge. War glorifies anger, masking the suffering that it brings. Caught up in a righteous cause, a soldier might brush aside his own suffering, but once the war is over, new forms of mental suffering emerge, such as guilt and the complex symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Mental suffering can’t be summarized in a few paragraphs. Let’s stick to our original line of questioning: “Do you want everything to be good? Is a painless world desirable?” If you define mental pain as depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders, no one wants them to exist. But the need for pain applies to the mental world, too. Fear keeps you from putting your hand in the fire a second time. Guilt teaches children not to steal from the cookie jar even when their mothers aren’t watching. Mental pain is useful in all kinds of ways when it isn’t excessive.
What we call evil is often something we can’t do without and don’t want to. Human beings thrive on contrast. Without pain there can be no pleasure, only a bland state of nonstimulation. (Hence the natural suspicion that young children show when they are told about heaven—it sounds boring to sit on clouds and play harps for eternity.) Are we designed to be good in the first place? Apparently so. Researchers into infant behavior have found that babies as young as four months old will try to pick up an object that their mothers dropped and hand it back.
But the impulse to goodness is mixed in with contrary impulses. Other researchers have found that young children learn to act the way their parents tell them to; they know what “be good” means in terms of getting approval at home. But when left alone without an adult in preschool, the same child may suddenly turn from Jekyll to Hyde, snatching toys from other children and showing no remorse when their victims cry. Still, these intriguing findings don’t solve the problem of evil itself. For that, we must go deeper.
In duality, everything inevitably has its opposite. Good cannot be separated from evil, just as light cannot be separated from darkness. They are inseparable, one of the basic teachings in Buddhism. Every golden age in mythology has led to a fall. Paradise always has a flaw, if not a serpent in the garden, because our divided nature demands it. Should God be held responsible for our predicament? Or is evil entirely a product of human nature?
It’s hard for God to escape responsibility for evil. You can do it by fiat—simply declaring that God is all goodness. Many believers do just that, assigning the evil part of creation to a cosmic demon, who was given the name Satan in Hebrew, meaning “the adversary.” Regardless of whether this arch-demon is a fallen angel, once you assign evil to Satan—leaving aside the existence of hell, the kingdom that he rules—God gets demoted. An omnipotent God wouldn’t have an enemy who holds sway over us almost as powerfully as God himself. A loving God wouldn’t let the Devil hurt us all the time. An omniscient God would know when the Devil is going to strike and would intervene, or at the very least give us advance warning. Once God loses his monopoly over love, power, and wisdom, trouble is afoot.
To allow God to be God in all his glory, religion shifted the blame for evil. It became a human problem, tied in with temptation and sin. Adam and Eve had every other food laid out before them, but they perversely ate the apple. Perversity has struck with us. So God permits evil to exist because we deserve it. We run loose with desire; our aggression makes us attack and kill one another. We erect moral schemes only to defy them at will, act like hypocrites, and turn to crime and rebellion.
Shifting the blame resulted in a huge burden, but most people are willing to carry it. Some evils arise beyond our control, such as hurricanes and other natural disasters. Others are the product of genes, like cancer, but even here blame persists. Poor lifestyle choices are connected to many cancers, and even if they weren’t, patients anxiously ask themselves, “Did I cause my disease?” As for natural disasters, we’ve all become aware of the human contribution to global warming and the erratic weather it has produced.
The two schemes, cosmic evil and human evil, merge in the concept of the shadow, which manages to be universal and human at the same time. No one ever doubted that darkness lurks in the human heart. But modern psychology wanted a systematic, rational way to understand this darkness; the early Swiss psychoanalyst C. G. Jung provided it when he described a force in the unconscious he named “the shadow.” To the domain of the shadow, Jung consigned guilt, shame, anger, and anxiety. But the shadow is more than a warehouse for negative impulses. Being conscious, it looks at the world through its own distorted lens, and when it does, anger and fear seem justified. The shadow makes us want to kill our enemies and feel good about it, or at least justified.
The shadow sends messages to the rest of the psyche that are no doubt powerful, contradicting the desire for goodness, well-being, and happiness. It persuades us that anger, which feels good at the time, is good. Never mind the aftermath. To use Jung’s phrase, the shadow creates “the fog of illusion” that surrounds everyone. Since there is no escape from it, the shadow is universal. I once debated a staunch Jungian who argued that peace can never be achieved because Mars, the archetype of war, resides permanently in our psyches. (So does sex, I argued back, but people don’t run around in a state of erotic mania. Primitive drives leave room for choice, the domain of the higher brain.) In the depths of the unconscious, Satan and the shadow join hands. Each is equally invisible, equally a projection of the mind.
If cosmic evil holds such sway that even God permits it to exist, what hope do we have of undoing it? This question was tested in the Book of Job, which some scholarly accounts say was the last part of the Hebrew Bible to be written, but the same themes are found in more ancient texts from Sumer and Egypt (giving support to Jung’s notion that mythology from all cultures can be traced to the same archetypal roots). In the Book of Job, God and Satan wager over the soul of a man in the land of Uz. God’s adversary claims that he can tempt any man to renounce God, even the most righteous. God claims that Job, being of utmost righteousness, cannot be swayed. He gives Satan a free hand to torment Job, the only restriction being that he cannot kill him.
The wager intrigues any reader the first time he encounters the story. What kind of torture will Satan inflict? Will Job hold out or give in? The makings of an exciting morality play are all there. As it turns out, the afflictions of Job cover almost every form of human suffering. He loses everything that was good in his life—money, crops, wife, and children. His body is covered with seeping sores. The infamous three friends appear to tell Job why God has done these horrible things to him. Their basic argument is that he deserves everything that has befallen him. As their taunts and blame increase, the setup makes us sympathize more with the victim. No convincing reason is given for why a good man should suffer so much. There couldn’t be a reason, in fact, since Job and his friends have no clue that God and Satan are using him as a pawn in a cosmic bet.
If you are literal-minded, the bet was cruel to begin with. A God who uses souls like poker chips isn’t worth worshiping. Besides, if God can keep Satan from killing Job, he should be able to keep Satan from hurting him in any way short of death. True goodness doesn’t say, “Okay, you can be evil, only don’t go too far.”
So Job’s tale has to be read as an allegory. The cosmic wager stands for the mystery of evil, which descends upon our lives without reason, and when it does, our suffering feels undeserved. Clearly, despite the three friends accusing him of hypocrisy and hidden sin, Job doesn’t deserve his afflictions. The allegory needs a moral, and the Book of Job has one that is quite unconvincing.
A young servant named Elihu has been listening to the argument between Job and his friends with increasing dismay. Jumping to his feet, he startles everyone by speaking in a holy voice, as God’s stand-in. Both sides are wrong, Elihu declares. The three friends are wrong to claim that Job has a hidden flaw that God is punishing. Job is wrong to believe that his righteous life trumps God’s power. God can do what he wants, when he wants, to whomever he wants. His ways do not have to be justified to man.
The three friends flee, their hypocrisy and disloyalty exposed. Job’s reaction isn’t clear, but a happy ending is tacked on (probably by later scribes; the whole framework of a cosmic wager also seems to be a late addition). He is healed, and his wealth is restored. A new wife gives birth to sons to replace those who died. Righteousness has prevailed. Job never renounced God, and having won the wager, God rewards his favored child. But the Job who emerges safe and sound from his horrendous trials isn’t the same Job as before. Addressing God, he says, “I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:5–6).
He has become humble and repentant—a default position frequently reinforced in the Hebrew Bible—but this seems strange. Job wasn’t proud or boastful to begin with. He was the model devotee of God. The allegory is telling us something deeper. Before his trials, Job thought he understood God “by the hearing of the ear”—sermons, the reading of the Torah, temple rituals, the teachings of elder rabbis. All of this pointed in the wrong direction. God isn’t the same as talk about God. When Job declares that he abhors himself, he is referring to the arrogant ego, which would demote God to just another thing to be figured out and managed.
For me, this is a profound story about the kleshas, the poisons that distort reality. Job, for all his goodness, is attached to his own righteousness. He has turned his existence into a regimen dictated by scripture and the law. Such a life is unreal when there is no contact with the transcendent world. Rules about God are like rules about driving a car. They can prevent mishaps and keep everyone safer, but passing a DMV exam isn’t the same as driving down the highway. Reality can’t be defined by rules and laws. It is dynamic, unbounded, creative, all-embracing, and eternal.
The allegory of Job applies to the bad things in our lives. Pain and suffering weaken faith; God gets deposed with every new atrocity on the evening news. But what topples is only an image. God himself isn’t even touched by bad things; afflictions are part of the illusion. In a whimsical moment, when I came across a Twitter argument over whether heaven is real, I tweeted, “Material existence is an illusion. Heaven is an upgrade of the illusion.” That’s why Satan, as Job’s tormentor, is given free rein in the world of appearances, while God, who abides in the transcendent, doesn’t interfere. God’s role isn’t to upgrade the illusion but to lead us out of it.
Even though we might dissect evil into a thousand parts, we don’t need to. Escaping evil is far more important than explaining it. Find your true self, and you will no longer want to participate in the illusion. You will create a personal reality that isn’t tied to the play of opposites. At that point, Job’s lesson becomes abundantly clear. Don’t be attached to your own goodness or someone else’s badness. Find out your real relationship to God, and base your life on that.
Your real relationship with God emerges by eliminating everything that led to a false relationship.
You lose your connection to God whenever you
Fear divine punishment
Feel burdened by God’s demands
Reduce God to a set of dos and don’ts
Defend God with anger or violence
Shirk responsibility by saying that something is God’s will
Despair that God has turned against you
Hope to be so good that God can’t help but love you
Keep guilty and shameful secrets
Live as if God is secondary to the “real” world
Treat other people as if God loves them less or not at all
These ingredients don’t just sour your relationship with God; they’d doom any relationship between you and another person. Living in fear, keeping secrets, using anger and violence—no positive relationship can grow under those conditions, even if it manages to limp along. When applied to your relationship to God, the effect is more disastrous. Evil is created in the misplaced desire to make ourselves worthy of God. Holy wars are the most obvious example, but guilt, shame, and anger are direct results of an either/or trap that is inescapable: either you aren’t good enough for God, or no matter how good you are, God doesn’t care. Suffering is rooted in a false relationship to God, and when we suffer, we lash out at ourselves and others. When Emerson wrote that evil is the absence of good, he didn’t satisfy those who believe in Satan, an active agent for evil. But what Emerson meant turns on the word privation or lack.
Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity … Benevolence is absolute and real.
This remark echoes the world’s wisdom traditions, which say that evil is like a vacuum, the emptiness of illusion. Fill the vacuum with reality, and evil vanishes. I’m not talking about a magic trick that makes genocide, war crimes, and oppression go away overnight. Human nature does its worst when it finds no way to change. But you will undergo an inner transformation, and as you do, the labels of good and evil won’t be as sticky. The fullness of God will steadily fill the vacuum. You are creeping out of the illusion, quietly and without flashiness.
Let me give a sense of the stages that mark this transformation.
Stage 1: Fear
When consciousness is dominated by fear and insecurity, evil is everywhere. It comes in physical threats to our bodies, the struggle to provide food and shelter, and natural disasters that no one can prevent. God offers no protection. The only protection is self-defense.
Stage 2: Ego
Ego brings the building of a strong self. “I” can stand up to challenges. Living a good life, obeying the rules, and trusting that God is fair will keep bad things at bay. In a world of risk and reward overseen by God, “I” will be blessed for my goodness as long as I avoid the pitfalls of sin.
Stage 3: Social order
Individual consciousness expands to include others. The group bonds together for the common good. A system of laws protects people from crime and other wrongdoing, enforced by the police. The greatest bond is a shared version of God. Faith sustains the belief that evil can never defeat God’s love for his children.
Stage 4: Empathy and understanding
Consciousness expands to embrace the world “in here.” One sees that other people have their own motives and beliefs, just as you do. They share your feelings, as you share theirs. It becomes possible to understand why people behave as they do. The seed of evil isn’t just inside “bad people” but in everyone. God, who understands everyone, is forgiving. He embraces the wrongdoer and the righteous alike.
Stage 5: Self-discovery
Consciousness expands to ask why. Why do we act the way we do? What are the roots of good and bad in human life? There is no longer pure evil or cosmic evil. The responsibility lies squarely on us. By trusting in reason and insight, we can explore our nature and improve it. God is clarity, the light of reason, no longer judging us. He wants us to live in the light.
Stage 6: Compassion
Consciousness expands to love humanity. The wall between right and wrong has crumbled. All people are valued no matter how they behave. God looks down on his children with love. Knowing that love is eternal, people can offer compassion, treating others as God would treat them.
Stage 7: Being
Consciousness expands beyond duality. The play of good and evil is allowed to be what it is. One’s allegiance has shifted elsewhere. Having sensed the transcendent world, one enters it and lives there. God is One. Merging with pure being, a person lives in a state of grace, which holds the ultimate power for overcoming evil.
As a person passes through these seven stages, evil changes. It moves from being an overwhelming threat to being a minor threat and then no threat at all. When you try to figure out why evil exists, you may decide that the source is a cosmic demon, a flaw in human nature, or a shadowy domain that has its own agenda. But the bottom line is the same. Evil is created. You can fight as hard against it as you want. In the end, the solution doesn’t exist on the level of the created. Emerson intuited this, I think, when he said that evil is temporary. Anything that depends on human perception can’t be eternal. The only eternal state is Being, the simplest state of existence. Plant your feet there; it is the only safe haven, where evil has no meaning.
As a boy in India, I imbibed faith from my mother, who was very devout. I stood beside her every day as she lit incense and prayed before the household altar. Afternoons were frequently filled with the sounds of kirtan, group singing of devotional songs that were fervent and enchanting.
In the still of the night
From the darkness comes a light.
And I know in my heart it is you.
When the fire in my soul
Burns with longing for the goal.
Then I know in my heart it is you.
It didn’t stay with me. Faith leaked away with each passing year. I was fortunate, stranded in Boston as a young doctor drinking after hours so that I would be accepted by the crowd, smoking to relieve stress, and driving myself to succeed. Nonetheless I felt the vacuum that exists when fullness is absent. I had witnessed lung cancer patients crossing the street as soon as they left my care, rushing to buy a pack of cigarettes at the corner convenience store. I had seen the look of abject fear in dying patients who were deprived of solace. The faith my mother introduced to me could have turned to cynicism or despair.
Looking back to childhood didn’t change my life. I sensed my own emptiness and wanted to do something about it. Here a piece of good fortune came my way. The religion I had been taught didn’t focus on sin, guilt, temptation, or the Devil. It makes no promise of a heavenly reward or punishment in hell. It helps to have that old lumber cleared away. The secret to finding God, it taught, is to fill yourself up with Being (capitalized to denote pure, absolute being). Once you do that, you know that you are nothing but Being, and in that knowledge comes total awakening. You look around and behold light in all directions.
Wherever you start from, waking up is the destination. Evil is the most powerful of illusions, supported by fear, the most powerful of negative emotions. Whenever you are in the grip of fear, a panicked voice inside screams, “Get away! Run! You’re about to die.” Fear constricts the mind. It freezes you up and blots out everything else. By contrast, what can Being do? Its voice is silent. It makes no demands. It doesn’t tell you to choose A over B, because Being is beyond duality. People bitterly accuse God for not intervening in the world, yet Being has no other choice. It underlies everything equally—in that regard Hamlet was wrong. “To be or not to be” isn’t a real choice. To be is inescapable. So Being is left to solve all problems without speaking, acting, changing, or interfering. Success doesn’t look very probable, does it?
In the famous Beatles song, the advice to “let it be” is called “words of wisdom.” I agree—nothing is wiser, because when Being becomes human, it isn’t a passive state. It’s a mode of living, one that most people have never tried. This book has outlined what this mode of living calls for, from showing generosity of spirit and expressing love to finding inner silence and following your own guidance.
What changed my life had nothing to do, in the end, with who I was as a person. The labels I attached to myself—Indian physician, a success, well-loved, self-reliant, and so on—were positive. Like heaven, the illusion I lived in came with upgrades. None of that actually mattered. What mattered was that I shifted into a new mode of living, beginning with an empty feeling inside and working from there to fill the vacuum. Saints and angels didn’t light the way. Every day I did what I always did, getting up before dawn, making hospital rounds, and seeing a stream of patients in my private practice.
The difference was that I aligned myself with my Being. The verb dhar, “to uphold,” leads to a way of life that the universe upholds, called dharma. Foreign words aren’t better than common everyday words. Get to know yourself, and you will be in your dharma. Dharma comes down to one crucial thing: trusting Being to give you a course correction when you need it. Being provides hints about a higher reality. You feel subtly wrong when you veer into ego and selfishness. Being speaks silently, but existence is tilted in its favor. A few hidden advantages are tucked away in our lives.
Moving forward is favored over inertia.
Once it begins, evolution accelerates its pace.
Consciousness naturally expands.
The more you know yourself, the better your life becomes.
Positive intentions are supported more than negative intentions.
Individual consciousness is connected to God consciousness.
These advantages are subtle, but they endow Being with enormous power. When you think with love about your children, the thought is also occurring in God’s mind—they both have the power to bless. If you are on your way to the movies and stop to help a traveler stranded in the snow, your impulse is the same as the impulse of salvation. The toughest questions will never stop plaguing the mind. God is the place where the mind finds an answer beyond thought. When you see this, no one in the world is an enemy, only a fellow traveler. The door to Being is open to everyone, leaving evil behind at the threshold.