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

by Deepak Chopra

  “Am I really responsible here? What part did I really play? Were my actions a small part of the situation or a big part?” You can be responsible only for the actions you took or failed to take. Be specific. Detail those actions to yourself; don’t exaggerate them and don’t fall for the irrational notion that just by being there you are totally responsible. Many family situations immerse us in a general sense of shared guilt, but if you are specific and narrow your responsibility to what you actually said and did, not what others around you said and did, you can diffuse the guilt trip of being responsible for everything.

  “What good things have I done to atone for the bad ones? When will I have done enough to let go? Am I ready to forgive myself?” All bad actions have their limit, after which you are forgiven and reprieved from guilt. But as we’ve seen, the inner voice of guilt is prejudiced—you are guilty the moment you step into the courtroom and will remain so forever. Take any guilty action and write down the day you will be forgiven. Do everything you can to atone for your bad action, and when the day of release arrives, take your pardon and walk away. No heinous action deserves condemnation forever; don’t buy into the prejudice that would hold you responsible for even your most venial sins year after year.

  I don’t want to expend all my energy: This decision revolves around a belief that energy, like the money in your bank account, is limited. Some people who don’t want to spend much energy avoid new challenges out of laziness, but that is mostly a disguise for deeper issues. It’s certainly true that energy is limited, but if you have ever committed yourself passionately to anything, you’ve found that the more energy you devote to it, the more you have. Passion replenishes itself.

  What drains energy, strangely enough, is the act of holding back. The more you conserve your energy, the more narrow become the channels through which it can flow. People who are afraid to love, for example, wind up constricting love’s expression. They feel tight in the heart rather than expanded; loving words stick in their throats; they find it awkward to make even small loving gestures. Tightness develops fear of expansion, and thus the snake keeps eating its own tail: The less energy you spend, the less you have to spend. Here are a few steps that can cause the channels of energy to expand:

  • Learn to give. When you feel most like hoarding, turn to someone in need and offer some of what you possess in abundance. This doesn’t have to be money or goods. You can give time and attention, which actually will do much more to open your channels of energy than giving away cash.

  • Be generous. This means generous in praise and appreciation even more than generous with your money. Most people hunger for praise and get much less than they deserve. Be the first to notice when someone has done well. Appreciate from a full heart and not just with formulaic words. Praise in detail, showing the other person that you actually paid attention to what he or she accomplished. Meet the person with your gaze and stay connected as you praise.

  • Follow your passion. Some area in your life makes you want to spend all your energy there. For most people, there’s a built-in inhibition about going too far, however, so they don’t really spend themselves even in those areas. Be willing to go the limit, and then go a bit further. If you like to hike, set your sights on a mountain and conquer it. If you like to write, start and finish a book. The point is not to force yourself but to prove how much energy is really there. Energy is the carrier of awareness; it allows awareness to come out into the world. By devoting more energy to any endeavor you increase the reward of understanding that will come to you.

  I don’t want any pain: This decision revolves around several issues, all having to do with psychological rather than physical pain. The first issue is suffering in the past. People who have suffered without being able to find healing have a great aversion to any new possibility of pain. Another issue is weakness. If pain has defeated someone in the past, the prospect of more pain brings up fear of getting even weaker. Finally, there is the issue of vulnerability. Pain makes us feel exposed and more prone to further pain than if we remained invulnerable. All these issues run deep, and it’s rare to find anyone who is immune to them. As always, there are degrees of sensitivity here.

  Pain is neutral in the cosmic design. In the material world, pain motivates us negatively while pleasure motivates us positively. Learning to be free means that your actions don’t depend on throwing either switch. No challenge is greater, given that all of us are deeply attached to the cycle of pleasure and pain. Only by reaching the state of witnessing can you observe how uncomfortable you feel when either pleasure or pain drives you onward.

  I want to get things over with as fast as possible: This decision revolves around impatience. When your mind is restless and disorganized, you can’t help but be impatient. You lack the attention span needed for taking time and being patient. People who hold back because they can’t pay enough attention are also deprived of new challenges. Their understanding is forced to remain on a very superficial level. Ironically, time is not essential to a thoughtful response. It’s not how long you pay attention but how deep that counts.

  In the movie Amadeus, a very proficient composer, Salieri, was tormented by the genius of his rival, Mozart. Mozart wasn’t a better person than Salieri—for the movie’s sake Mozart was turned into a vain, childish hedonist. He didn’t spend more time composing than Salieri; he didn’t have greater favor from patrons; he didn’t go to music school longer. Salieri blamed God for this gross inequality in gifts, and unconsciously most of us do the same when we confront somebody who vastly exceeds our abilities.

  Impatience is rooted in frustration. We refuse to pay attention because the results aren’t coming fast enough or with enough rewards. The mind prefers to hop away from this potential source of discomfort. If you find that you’re easily made impatient, you probably blame outside circumstances. Traffic isn’t moving fast enough; the grocery checkout line takes forever; when you ask someone to do a job the person always drags his feet.

  Projecting your impatience on the outside world is a defense, a way of deflecting a fear of inadequacy. In the most extreme cases of attention deficit disorder, particularly among young children, this fear always underlies the surface inattention. Impatient people are too discouraged to go inside very deeply. Even without a rival of Mozart’s commanding genius, all of us are intimidated by a shadowy competitor inside—someone who by definition is better than we are. This ghost drives us out of our own awareness.

  Impatience ends when you can go back inside yourself with enough confidence to let awareness unfold. Confidence cannot be forced. You will be adequate in your own eyes when you experience deeper and deeper levels of understanding. If you are impatient, you need to face the reality that you aren’t the best at everything, nor do you need to be. Stop yourself when you feel overshadowed by greater genius, talent, wealth, status, or accomplishment. The only real person inside you is you. That person is a seed whose growth is unlimited. The way you make seeds grow is with nourishment, and in this case that nourishment comes from paying attention. Be willing to face yourself, whatever you think your shortcomings are. Only a direct encounter with yourself brings the nourishment of attention, and the more nourishment you offer, the greater your growth will be.

  Secret #15

  EVERYTHING IS PURE ESSENCE

  AT LAST, EVERY LAYER OF THE ONION has been peeled away. We come face to face with the indescribable, the secret at the core of life. Yet words have almost reached their limit.

  What do you have when you find yourself facing the indescribable? You can only try with inadequate words to describe it. The mind can’t help itself. Used to putting everything into a thought, it cannot grasp something beyond thought.

  We each draw a world of line, form, and color using invisible ink. Our instrument is no more than a speck of consciousness, like a pencil point moving across a blank piece of paper. Yet everything pours out of that single point. Could anything be more mysterious and at the same time more mirac
ulous? A point infinitely smaller than a pencil point draws the shape of the universe.

  That point is made of essence, or the purest form of Being. Essence is the ultimate mystery because it manages to do three things at once:

  It conceives everything in existence.

  It turns what it has imagined into reality.

  It enters that reality and keeps it alive.

  Right now you are also performing these three activities. Before any-thing happens to you it is conceived in the imagination—that is, in the state where wisps of images and desires are born. These images then unfold into expressed objects and events. While that happens you enter the event subjectively, which means you absorb it into your nervous system. The simplest way to describe this three-part act of creation is to say that you imagine a picture, then you paint it and finally step inside.

  All that is required to find the essence of life is to step outside the picture and see yourself. You won’t see a person or even a soul, just a speck of awareness—the point that is producing the most lovely, appalling, mundane, holy, astonishing, ordinary, and marvelous pictures. But even in using these words, I have fallen into the temptation of trying to describe the indescribable. Let me throw every image away and say the simplest things that are true: I exist, I am aware, I create. These are the three qualities of essence that permeate the universe.

  With every unreal aspect of yourself stripped away, only essence remains. Once you realize that essence is the real you, the golden door opens. Essence is precious because it is the stuff from which the soul is made. If you could keep holding on to essence while stepping back into the picture you create, you would be living from the level of the soul at every moment.

  But a huge difficulty arises that keeps the golden door shut: Nothing isn’t essence. When you reduce the one reality to its essence, every quality disappears. Now a tree, a horse, a cloud, and a human being are the same. Physical dimensions also disappear. The time elapsed between any two events is now zero; the space between any two objects is zero. Light and dark no longer exist. Complete fullness and utter emptiness are the same.

  In other words, at the very moment you think you have the secret to everything, you look down to find that your hands are empty. This is a particularly disturbing outcome for those who travel the spiritual path to find God. Unless you define God as essence, he will vanish also. But in India, there is a strong tradition that puts essence far above a personal god. One of the greatest modern spiritual teachers, Nisargadatta Maharaj, made no concessions on this point. He declared himself—and all other people—to be pure essence. As a result, he met with a good deal of contentious opposition.

  Here’s a typical interchange from a skeptical visitor to Maharaj:

  Q: Did God create the earth for you?

  A: God is my devotee and did all this for me.

  Q: Is there no god apart from you?

  A: How can there be? “I am” is the root, God is the tree. Whom am I to worship, and what for?

  Q: Are you the devotee or the object of devotion?

  A: Neither. I am devotion itself.

  You can feel the baffled frustration in the questioner’s voice, and who can blame him? The path to unity is so different from what is taught in organized religion that it bends the mind. Maharaj used to regularly announce that we were not created for God, God was created for us. By which he meant that essence, being invisible, had to create an almighty projection to be worshipped. By itself, essence has no qualities; there is nothing to hold on to.

  Essence does a vanishing act because it’s not anything you can feel or think about. Since being alive consists of feeling and thinking, how is essence going to be of any use? At the most superficial level, essence is not useful because differences still hold your attention. Let’s say that you want to be happy rather than unhappy, rich rather than poor, good rather than evil. None of these distinctions matters to your essence. Essence works with only three things: It exists, it creates, it is aware.

  A life without differences sounds completely unlivable, and yet there is a document that talks about essence in a matter-of-fact way, suggesting that somebody has figured out how to live from this level. The document, known as the Yoga Vashistha, has many strange things to offer. Yoga we know means “unity,” and Vashistha is the name of the author; therefore, in Sanskrit the title means “Vashistha’s version of unity.” No one has offered proof that a person by this name ever lived—the text itself is many centuries old—but Vashistha’s version of unity stands as a unique work. I believe it is the furthest stretch the human nervous system has ever taken toward being aware of existence itself.

  Some typical observations by Vashistha quickly give you the flavor of his viewpoint on life:

  In the infinite consciousness universes come and go like particles of dust in a beam of sunlight that shines through a hole in the roof.

  Death is ever keeping a watch over our life.

  All objects are experienced in the subject and nowhere else.

  Whole worlds arise and fall like ripples in the ocean.

  Vashistha’s teaching has a reputation for being one of the most difficult, abstract texts in the spiritual canon, and therefore not for beginners. I read him much more simply as the voice of essence. Even from a handful of sayings, some general themes emerge clearly. Vashistha considers the universe to be impermanent and fleeting. He observes that death is inescapably linked to life. He uses subjective awareness as the true measure of what’s real, compared to which the material world is like a puff of air.

  As you keep reading, these themes get elaborated hundreds of times over with such total conviction that the reader becomes mesmerized. The sentences sound arcane, sometimes inconceivable, but then that is the point—this is life compressed into ideas as dense as diamonds:

  Whatever the mind thinks of, that alone it sees.

  What people call fate or divine will is nothing other than action from the past acting upon itself.

  Even as motion is inherent in air, manifestation is inherent in consciousness.

  As you pore over his words, it’s easy to fall into a kind of trance in which the visible world blows away like a feather. The effect isn’t to inspire or uplift: Vashistha offers absolutely no consolation. Nothing matters to him except essence, and therefore he is the ultimate teacher on the subject of getting real. Getting real is the goal of this book, too, and therefore I’ve tried to distill Vashistha’s advice on how to live if you are totally serious about waking up from unreality. He describes four conditions that must exist if you want to find reality:

  Contentment

  Inquiry

  Self-awareness

  Strength

  Four ordinary, somewhat innocuous words. What did he mean by them, this sage who knew essence perhaps better than anyone who ever lived?

  Contentment: This is the quality of restfulness in the mind. Someone who is content exists without doubt and fear. Doubt is a constant reminder that there is no answer to the mystery of life, or that all answers will turn out to be untrustworthy. Fear is a constant reminder that you can be hurt. As long as either of these beliefs exists in your mind, resting easy in yourself is impossible. So contentment must be won on the level where doubt and fear have been defeated.

  Inquiry: To get real, you have to question the unreal over and over until it disappears. This process is a kind of peeling away. You look at something that seems reliable and trustworthy, and if it betrays your trust, you say, “No, this isn’t it,” and throw it away. The next thing that asks for your trust also gets examined, and if it proves unreliable, you peel it away as well. Layer by layer, you keep inquiring until you reach something that is completely trustworthy, and that thing must be real.

  Self-Awareness: This quality tells you where to conduct your inquiry—not outside in the material world, but in yourself. Turning inward doesn’t happen as a single step. For every challenge there are always two solutions—inner and outer. Only by working through
every reason to look outward are you left with why you should look inward.

  Strength: Because you are looking inward, no one from the outside can help you. This implies a kind of isolation and solitude that only the strong can accept. Strength is not a given; it’s not that the strong are born different from the weak. Your inner strength grows from experience. The first stages of looking inward give you a hint that you can get real, and with that bit of added strength you move forward. You grow in resolve and certainty. You test what you find out until it feels secure. Step by step you discover that strength is built from experience. The journey itself makes you strong.

  Vashistha has almost nothing else to say about everyday matters. No one has to start living a certain way or stop living a certain way in order to get real. Vashistha’s viewpoint is totally accepting: He is content to allow life to unfold. “For only as long as one invests any object with reality,” he says, “that bondage lasts; once that notion goes, with it goes bondage.” In other words, unreality has to melt away on its own. Until it does, you can be rich or poor, happy or sad, certain or plagued with doubt, as your karma dictates.

  Vashistha feels infinite tolerance because “the unreal has no existence and the real will never stop existing.” He feels infinitely serene because “consciousness is omnipresent, pure, tranquil, omnipotent.” Yet it’s not for these deep thoughts that I hold Vashistha to be unique. His special gift lies in jabs of truth that are as sharp as salt on the tongue: “The universe is one long dream. The ego-sense, along with the fancy that there are other people, is as unreal as anything in a dream.”