The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

by Deepak Chopra

  UNIVERSAL

  9. Chaos serves evolution.

  PERSONAL

  9. The fragmented mind cannot get you to unity, but you have to use it along the way.

  Swirling chaos is a reality, but so is order and growth. Which is dominant? Science has yet to arrive at a conclusion because more than 90 percent of the physical universe is composed of mysterious dark matter. Since it has yet to be observed, it’s an open question what the fate of the cosmos might be. Religion is firmly on the side of order, for the simple reason that God made the world out of chaos. According to science, there is a delicate balance between creation and destruction, with billions of years having elapsed in the maintenance of that balance. However, since cosmic forces on a huge scale haven’t been able to rip apart the delicate fabric that wove the beginnings of life, a reasonable person might conclude that evolution is using chaos the way a painter uses the jumbled colors in his box. On the personal level, you can’t reach unity while you’re ruled by the whirling of thoughts and impulses in your head, but still you can use your mind to find its own source. Unity is the hidden purpose that evolution is working toward, using the fragmented mind as a tool along the way. Like the cosmos, the surface of the mind looks chaotic, but there is a tidal pool of progress at work beneath.

  UNIVERSAL

  10. Many invisible levels are enveloped in the physical world.

  PERSONAL

  10. You are living in many dimensions at once; the appearance of being trapped in time and space is an illusion.

  With all their hearts, the early quantum pioneers, including Einstein, did not want to create new dimensions beyond time and space. They wanted to explain the universe as it appeared. Yet the current superstring theories that descended from Einstein use at least eleven dimensions to explain the visible world. Religion has always held that God inhabits a world beyond the five senses; science needs the same transcendent realm to explain how particles separated by billions of light years could act like mirror twins, how light can behave as both particle and wave, and how black holes can transfer matter beyond the clutches of gravity and time. Ultimately, the existence of multidimensions is irrefutable. At the simplest level, there had to be somewhere that space and time came from during the Big Bang, and by definition that somewhere can’t be in time and space. Accepting that you, as a citizen of a multidimensional universe, are a multidimensional being is far from mystical, then. It’s the best hypothesis one can make given the facts.

  These ten principles arguably represent ways to conceive of the operating system that keeps one reality going. In truth, the whole thing is inconceivable, and our brains aren’t set up to operate on inconceivable lines. They can adapt, however, to living unconsciously. Every creature on earth is subject to the laws of nature; only humans think, “What does all this matter to me?” If you opt out and decide to live as if duality is real, you won’t see that these ten principles have any bearing on you. The cosmic joke is that the same laws will continue to uphold your life even though you don’t recognize them.

  The choice is to be conscious or not, which brings us to the possibility for transformation. No one disputes the fact that life consists of change. But can a person, simply by altering his or her consciousness, actually bring about a deep transformation and not just another superficial change? Transformation and change are two different things, as can be seen in any fairy tale. The poor girl left by her wicked stepmother to scrub the fireplace while her stepsisters go to the ball doesn’t improve herself by attending night school. Cinderella is touched by a magic wand and whisked off to the palace as a completed, transformed creature.

  In fairy tale logic, change is too slow, too gradual, too mundane to satisfy the yearning symbolized by the frog who knows he is a prince or the ugly duckling who becomes the beautiful swan. There’s more than an element of fantasy in a magic touch that will instantaneously deliver a trouble-free life. More important, this fantasy disguises the way true transformation takes place.

  The key to true transformation is that nature doesn’t move forward in step-by-step movements. It takes quantum leaps all the time, and when it does, old ingredients aren’t simply recombined. Something new appears in creation for the first time, an emergent property. For example, if you examine hydrogen and oxygen, they are light, gaseous, invisible, and dry. It took a transformation for those two elements to combine and create water, and when that happened, an entirely new set of possibilities emerged with it, the most important from our point of view being life itself.

  The wetness of water is a perfect example of an emergent property. In a universe without water, wetness can’t be derived by shuffling around properties that already exist. Shuffling only produces change; it isn’t sufficient for transformation. Wetness had to emerge as something completely new in creation. Once you look closely enough, it turns out that every chemical bond produces an emergent property. (I gave the example in passing of sodium and chlorine—two poisons that when combined produce salt, another basic element of life.) Your body, which is bonding millions of molecules every second, depends on transformation. Breathing and digestion, to mention just two processes, harness transformation. Food and air aren’t just shuffled around but, rather, undergo the exact chemical bonding needed to keep you alive. The sugar extracted from an orange travels to the brain and fuels a thought. The emergent property in this case is the newness of the thought: No molecules in the history of the universe ever combined to produce that result. Air entering your lungs combines in thousands of ways to produce cells that have never existed before in just the way they exist in you, and when you use oxygen to move, your muscles are performing actions that, however they may be similar to those of other people, are unique expressions of you.

  If transformation is the norm, then spiritual transformation falls into place as an extension of where life has been going all along. While still remaining who you are, you can bring about a quantum leap in your awareness, and the sign that the leap is real will be some emergent property you never experienced in the past.

  EMERGENT SPIRITUAL PROPERTIES

  Clarity of awareness

  Knowingness

  Reverence for life

  Absence of violence

  Fearlessness

  Nonattachment

  Wholeness

  These qualify as spiritual transformations because none can be achieved simply by recombining old ingredients of the self. Like the wetness of water, each appears as if by alchemy—the dross of everyday life turns to gold.

  Clarity means being awake to yourself around the clock, in waking, sleeping, and dreaming. Instead of being overshadowed by externals, your awareness is always open to itself. Clarity feels totally alert, and carefree.

  Knowingness means being in touch with the level of the mind where every question is answered. It is related to genius, although knowingness isn’t focused on music, mathematics, or other specific subjects. Your area of knowledge is life itself and the movement of consciousness on every level. Knowingness feels wise, confident, unshakable, and yet humble.

  Reverence for life means being in touch with the life force. You feel the same power flowing through you as through every living thing; even the dust in a beam of light dances to the same rhythm. Therefore, life isn’t limited to plants and animals—everything possesses a glowing, animated vitality. Reverence for life feels warm, connected, and exhilarating.

  Nonviolence means being in harmony with every action. There is no opposition between what you do and what anyone else does. Your desires do not clash with another person’s well-being. When you look around you see conflict in the world at large but not in your world. You emanate peace like a force field that subdues conflict in your surroundings. Nonviolence feels peaceful, still, and completely without resistance.

  Fearlessness means total security. Fear is a jolt from the past; it reminds us of the moment when we left a place of belonging and found ourselves in a place of vulnerability. The Bhagavad Gita says
that fear is born of separation, implying that the original cause of fear was the loss of unity. Ultimately, that separation is not a fall from grace but a loss of who you really are. To be fearless feels, therefore, like yourself.

  Wholeness means including everything, leaving nothing out. At present we each experience life sliced up into bits of time, bits of experience, bits of activity. We cling to our limited sense of self to protect the slices from falling apart. But it’s impossible to find continuity in this way, hard as the ego tries in its struggle to make life hang together. Wholeness is a state beyond personality. It emerges when “I am” as it applies to you is the same “I am” everywhere. Wholeness feels solid, eternal, without beginning or end.

  True transformation, in my view, depends on the emergence of these properties as your personal experience. They are primal qualities embedded in awareness; they weren’t invented by human beings or projected out of lack, need, or hunger. You cannot experience any of them by attaining more of what you already have. Being as nice as possible to others and causing no harm isn’t the same as nonviolence in the spiritual sense. Showing courage in the face of danger isn’t the same as fearlessness. Feeling stable and well put together isn’t the same as wholeness.

  One must emphasize that however unreachable these things sound, they are completely natural—they are extensions of a process of transformation that has been with you all your life. Each of us is already an emergent property of the universe, a totally new creation from our parents’ genes. And yet there is a deeper magic at work. At the chemical level, your parents’ genes were only recombined; you got some from one person and some from another. The survival of a certain gene pool extended to include a new generation; it didn’t suddenly break down into a new and unknown substance.

  Somehow nature used those old building blocks to perform a feat of alchemy because you are not a reconfigured genetic replica. Your genes are just a supporting structure for a unique experience. DNA is the universe’s way of becoming conscious of itself. It took eyes for the universe to see what it looks like, ears to hear what it sounds like, and so on. To make sure that it didn’t lose interest, the universe created you so that it could be conscious of itself in a way that had never appeared before. Thus, you are an expression of eternity and of this very second, both at once.

  Transforming yourself is like getting pregnant. Every woman who decides to get pregnant is making a personal decision and yet submitting to a tremendous force of nature. On the one hand, she exerts free will; on the other, she is caught up in inexorable events. Once she has a fertilized seed inside her womb, nature takes over; producing a child is something you do and at the same time it is something that is happening to you. The same can be said for any other true transformation. You can make a personal decision to be spiritual, but when spirit really takes hold, you are caught up in forces far beyond yourself. It’s as if a surgeon is called into the operating room for an essential surgery and looks down to find that the patient on the table is himself.

  We’ve covered the ten principles that serve as the operating system of one reality. But most people are firmly entrenched in another operating system—the system of duality. They live according to the assumption that they are separate, isolated individuals in a random cosmos where what happens “in here” is not reflected “out there.” How, then, does a person shift from one operating system to the other? Unity is totally different from duality, but you don’t have to wait for the end of this journey to live as if you are there in the next. Right now you are living as if limitation and separation must be true; therefore, you aren’t leaving room for them not to be true. Even so, a hidden intelligence is preserving the incredible orderliness of life while allowing change to swirl around in apparent chaos. If exposed to sunlight on a fresh spring day, a living cell would wither and turn to dust, and its DNA would blow away in the wind. But such apparent fragility has survived two billion years of constant assault from the elements. In order to see that your own existence is protected by the same intelligence, you have to align with it first. Then a universal law reveals itself: Wholeness remains the same no matter how much it changes.

  Your task is to make wholeness more real in your life. As long as you remain on the level where change is dominant, there is no possibility of truly becoming new. Duality maintains its operating system from moment to moment, and as long as you are plugged into it, that system seems real, workable, reliable, and self-validating. The other operating system, the one based on wholeness, works far better than the system you are used to. Wholeness is also real, workable, reliable, and self-validating. For the sake of getting our bearings, let’s look at some familiar situations and see how each system would handle them.

  You arrive at work one day to find out through the grapevine that your company is downsizing. No one can tell you if your job is at risk, but it might be. In the operating system of duality, the following implications start to come into play:

  I could lose the one thing I need to support myself.

  Someone else has control over my destiny.

  I am faced with something unpredictable and unknown.

  I don’t deserve to be blind-sided like this.

  I could be hurt if things go wrong for me.

  These are all familiar thoughts whenever you find yourself in crisis. Some people manage the threat better than others; you yourself have been through similar situations with more or less success. Yet these concerns are just part of an operating system. They are programmed into the software of the ego with its total fixation on keeping everything under control. What is really being threatened here is not the loss of a job but loss of control. This reveals just how fragile the ego’s grip actually is.

  Now let’s reframe the situation in terms of the operating system programmed from wholeness, or one reality. You come to work to find that the company is downsizing, and the following implications begin to come into play:

  My deeper self created this situation.

  Whatever happens, there is a reason.

  I am surprised, but this change doesn’t affect who I am.

  My life is unfolding according to what is best and most evolutionary for me.

  I can’t lose what’s real. The externals will fall into place as they need to.

  Whatever happens, I can’t be hurt.

  You can see immediately that plugging into the second operating system brings a far greater sense of security. Wholeness is safe; duality isn’t. Protection from external threats is permanent when there are no externals but only yourself unfolding in two worlds, inner and outer, that completely mesh.

  A skeptic will protest that this new operating system is only a matter of perception, and that just seeing yourself as the creator of your reality doesn’t mean you are. But it does. Reality shifts as you do, and when you change your perception of being separate, the one reality responds by shifting with you. The reason everyone doesn’t notice this is that the ego-based world with all its demands, pressures, drama, and excesses is highly addictive, and like any addiction it needs a daily fix as well as denial that there is any way out. By giving your allegiance to the one reality instead, you won’t end the addiction immediately, but you will begin to starve it. Your ego and personality, which give you limited awareness of who you are, will be put on notice that clinging and grasping must come to an end. Your conditioning from the past that told you how to win out over the outside world will no longer help you survive. The support you counted on from external sources such as family, friends, status, possessions, and money will no longer make you feel secure.

  Rest assured that perception is flexible enough to let go of the addiction to duality. Any event can be seen as coming from the creative center in oneself. At this very moment I can look at any part of my life and say “I made that.” Then it is only one step away to ask “Why did I make that?” and “What do I want to make instead?”

  Let’s take another example: You stop at a red light on the way home, but the c
ar behind you doesn’t stop and rear-ends you. When you jump out to confront the other driver, he is not apologetic. Sullenly, he begins to give you his insurance information. In one operating system the following implications come into play:

  This stranger doesn’t have my best interests in mind.

  If he is lying, I could be left with all the damages.

  I am the aggrieved party, and he should recognize that.

  I may have to force him to cooperate.

  As these ideas come into play, consider the possibility that the car accident didn’t cause them—they were already imprinted in your mind waiting for the moment they’d be needed. You aren’t seeing the situation as it really is but only through your programmed perception. In a different operating system the following implications are equally valid:

  This accident was no accident; it’s a reflection of myself.

  This stranger is a messenger.

  When I find out why this event happened, I will uncover some aspect of myself.

  I need to pay more attention to some kind of hidden or stuck energy. When I deal with it, I will be glad this accident happened.