“I got clear about a lot of things. I became gentler and easier with myself. I stopped pushing and judging myself. It took time. Nothing happened all at once. But as I opened up a space inside myself, something new entered the picture. I gave my mind permission to settle down, and it quit racing so much. It quit being so desperate. Once I felt calmer, it was like slowly waking up. The world got brighter. Gradually, being happy became possible. That’s the best way that I can put it.”
Clarity, because it’s internal, brings home the truth that can’t be absorbed when you are confused or agitated. You see that you can’t change what you hate in yourself. Many people who suffer have firsthand experience with the futility of warring with themselves. The breakthrough comes when they accept that the thing they hate has no real independent existence. This is not me. It’s how I am temporarily. It’s my energy until I let it go.
If you are an alcoholic and say, “Drinking is who I am. Put up with it,” you aren’t moving toward healing. Your defensiveness is a secret form of helplessness. Deep down, you think change is doomed to fail. What’s needed is a different attitude, or rather no attitude. You become clear that there’s a bundle of energy, emotions, habits, and feelings to let go of, and that’s all. Naturally, one moment of clarity doesn’t shift everything. What took years to develop takes time to undo. But with clarity comes acceptance, and even a small step toward acceptance opens a channel to the soul.
3. Expect the best. You don’t let go so that something good might happen. You let go so that the very best in yourself, your soul, can merge with you. By itself, letting go of a bit of anger, a bit of fear, a bit of resentment, might seem tiny. I’d reframe the situation. Imagine that you are used to living in a small, cramped house. You’ve become so used to this claustrophobic space that you almost never go outside. Yet there are carefree moments when you think it would be nice to experience a wider world. So you open the door, and as you step outside, you confront a vast landscape, filled with light and extending to infinity in all directions.
Ah, you think, here is joy and love. Here is real fulfillment. So you roam outside, wanting to abide in this land of light forever. Yet after a while you get tired of all this love and joy. Somehow the space outside is too vast, the horizon too infinite. You miss your familiar house, and it pulls you back. So you return, and it feels safe to be back. You resume your familiar existence. For a time you’re content again, but you keep remembering that vast, unlimited space outside. Once again you step out, and this time you stay there longer. Your sense of love and joy isn’t so tiring. The space outside is still infinite, but that doesn’t frighten you so much. The light that shines everywhere isn’t so blinding, and you resolve that this time you will abide here forever.
This is a parable about the ego and the soul. The ego is your safe house; the soul is the unbounded space outside. Every time you feel even a moment of joy and love, freedom and bliss, you have stepped into the land of light. You feel so wonderful that you want to keep the experience going, the way two infatuated lovers never want to be apart. But your ego, your safe house, calls you back. This pattern of coming and going is how letting go works. It takes repeated exposure to the unbounded soul for you to know that it is real. But your old conditioning will keep pulling you back. In time, your trips outside will last longer and feel more comfortable. Your soul is starting to seep into you; with this merging you begin to understand that you can live in the unbounded permanently. It becomes more natural than your safe house because in the unbounded you are the real you.
Therefore, expecting the best isn’t about wishful thinking or optimism. It’s about recognizing in advance that your goal is attainable. The unbounded soul is experienced, however faintly, in every impulse of the soul. This counters the prevailing attitude in psychology that happiness is a temporary state stumbled upon by accident. I find that attitude deplorable. To declare that love and joy, the primal components of happiness, are occasional is a teaching born of desperation. Keep in mind the image of the safe house and the land of light that surrounds it. No one will ever force you to let go of the limited space you occupy, but you always have the choice to seek the infinite, because that is who you are.
4. Watch and wait. Surrendering in battle happens once, at the very end. Surrendering on the spiritual path happens over and over, and it never ends. For this reason, watching and waiting isn’t a passive act. It’s not an exercise in patience, or a kind of down time until the big event starts. The moment you let go of some old habit or conditioning, the instant you catch yourself in a programmed reaction, the self shifts. As casually as we use the word self, it isn’t a simple thing but a complex, dynamic system. Your self is a micro universe mirroring the macro universe. Countless forces are moving through it. As fluid as air, the self changes with every shift in awareness.
Therefore, whenever you let go, you are subtracting something old from the universe and adding something new. The old is dark energy and distorted patterns from the past. These are dead bits that got stuck inside the self’s system. Having no way to eject them, you worked around them. You adjusted to negative elements in yourself—usually through denial and by pushing these elements down out of sight—because you assumed that you had to. Letting go isn’t an option until you learn how to make it an option. Once you do let them go, the negative energies depart permanently.
Which allows something new to enter. What will it be? That’s what watching and waiting reveals. Think of what happens when you breathe in. New oxygen atoms enter your bloodstream, but where they go isn’t predetermined. An oxygen atom can wind up in any one of billions of cells. Its destination is determined by which cell needs it the most. The same is true of you. When you open space for the soul by letting go of old energies, the part of you in greatest need, the part that wants most eagerly to grow or most seriously wants healing, will benefit.
To take an example on a larger scale, I’ve often thought that Jesus became the greatest teacher of love because that’s what his audience needed most. They weren’t starved for divine wisdom, spiritual discipline, or enlightenment—all of which became dominant in other traditions like Buddhism. At a more human level, Jesus’ listeners wanted God’s love, and so that’s what they absorbed. No doubt Jesus was as complete a teacher as Buddha. He taught the way to higher consciousness, even enlightenment. But that part has to be searched out in the corners of his teaching; the foreground is occupied by love in every form.
To know what your soul is, you must follow the path it takes as it enters you. Will it make you more loving and kind? Will it make you more devout and worshipful? Any quality can be imparted by the soul—strength, truth, beauty, or faith. But these aren’t laid on like a coat of paint. Rather, they enter you as oxygen enters your body, seeking out what is most needed. We speak of being filled with spirit, as if all it takes is pumping a person up the way you pump up a bicycle tire. In reality, spirit is awareness traveling to places where awareness is lacking. It speeds your growth enormously if you are there to receive the healing when it arrives.
Too often, people don’t watch and wait. They miss what’s really happening inside them. They fixate on wishes and fantasies, and while their attention is distracted, the real thing passes them by. I love the story of Harold Arlen, a famous Hollywood composer in the golden era of movies, who was assigned to write the music for The Wizard of Oz. Arlen worked steadily at it, and he thought he had done a good job. But one song was lacking, the special one that he knew the score needed, the topper. Nothing would come, so Arlen gave up for the day and took his wife to lunch. On the way down Sunset Boulevard he suddenly told his wife, who was at the wheel, to pull over. Arlen scribbled some notes on a scrap of paper, which turned out to be the music for a song called “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
In many ways, artists and creators know best how to receive the soul, because they attune themselves to inspiration. Inspiration doesn’t happen randomly. It’s always a matter of call and response. The need
goes out, and the solution appears. So take a creative attitude toward your own inner growth. Be aware of your need and watch for the response. When asked how he came up with such great music, Harold Arlen said, “I drift, wait, and obey.” It wouldn’t hurt to take heed of that credo, which is simple but profound.
Breakthrough #4
The Fruit of Surrender Is Grace
A breakthrough can lead you to the ultimate surrender. Because letting go is a process, it eventually comes to an end. But this end point is very different from anything one would anticipate. You won’t be the person you see in the mirror today. That person goes through life with endless needs. In the ultimate surrender, you give up all needs. For the first time you will be able to say, “I am enough.” You will find yourself in a world where everything fits together as it should.
A completely new self can’t be imagined in advance. A young child has no idea that the future will bring the drastic changes triggered by puberty. It would be confusing to try to understand that until the experience is at hand (there’s confusion enough when that moment arrives). Letting go of childhood comes naturally, if you are lucky. Letting go of your adult identity is much more difficult. We have no maps to guide us, although there is certainly a call from the world’s great spiritual teachers. Saint Paul compares it to growing up. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.”
Going from child to adult means changing your identity, but Paul is pointing to a far more shattering kind of transformation. He says, “Pursue love and strive for the spiritual gifts,” and then holds out a vision of what will happen if someone heeds the call.
Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (i CORINTHIANS 13: 4–7)
Paul was well aware that he was calling for supernatural change. All of human nature would be transformed, and the only power capable of doing that was grace. You cannot find the word “grace” in the Bible without its connotations close by—abundance, purity, unconditional love, a gift freely given. There’s something universal here that goes beyond Judeo-Christianity. By letting go completely, a person can achieve a new identity. The fruit of surrender is grace, the all-embracing power of God.
Grace is the invisible influence of the divine. Once it enters a person’s life, the old tools that we have used to run our lives—reason, logic, effort, planning, forethought, discipline—are discarded like the training wheels of a bicycle. But the actual process is shadowy and amorphous. Grace is associated with mercy and forgiveness, but in reality, if you strip it of religious overtones, grace is unbounded awareness.
Grace abolishes life’s limitations. There is nothing to fear, nothing to be guilty of. The whole issue of good versus evil disappears. Peace is no longer a dream to be chased, but an innate quality of the heart. These things are the result not of supernatural intervention, but of coming to the end of a process. The word grace occurs almost a hundred times in the Old Testament, but, curiously, Jesus doesn’t use it even once. One explanation is that we meet Jesus after he has come to the end of the process of finding his unbounded self; he is unique that way.
Grace, like the soul itself, steps down God’s infinite power to human scale. It carries more than a whiff of magic, as befits a total transformation. The human mind barely grasps how a caterpillar can transform into a butterfly, much less the miracle of how human beings are transformed by grace. Somehow nothing more is required except surrender. But the process of being born again is recorded in every culture, so let’s see if we can come closer to understanding it.
Self-transformation
Before it is touched by grace, human nature is fallen, corrupt, sinful, impure, ignorant, guilty, and blind—those are the traditional terms in Judeo-Christianity. What makes them unhelpful is that they are based on morality. The word boundary is neutral; it simply refers to a state of limitation. If you take a person and force him to live in severe limitation—say, in a dungeon—all kinds of problems will develop, from paranoia to delusion. But they aren’t because the prisoner is morally defective. They result from being bound up. The difference between a prisoner captive in his cell and you or me is that we have voluntarily chosen to live inside our boundaries. The part of our selves that made this choice is the ego.
The ego is your familiar self, the “I” that goes through the world and deals with everyday events. As long as this self feels satisfied, there’s no overriding reason to seek the soul. But is life satisfying? Every great spiritual teacher begins with the assumption that it isn’t. Jesus and Buddha confronted a world where ordinary people were beset by disease and poverty. Simply to survive being born and then live to age thirty was a major challenge. It wasn’t difficult to convince such an audience that everyday life was steeped in suffering. That problem remains constant, even in modern societies that have made substantial inroads against disease, poverty, and hunger.
Buddha and Jesus weren’t concerned with the material causes of suffering. Instead, they traced the cause to its very root, the “I” that handles everyday life. That “I” is a false identity, they said. It masks the real self, which can only be found at the soul level. But this diagnosis didn’t lead to anything like a quick cure. The self isn’t like a car that can be taken apart and rebuilt as a better model. “I” has an agenda. It thinks it knows how to run everyday life, and when threatened with disassembly, it fights back—after all, survival itself is at stake. For this reason, ego became the great enemy of change (more in the East than the West; in the West, sin and evil took on that role, again for moral reasons). It became obvious that the ego was a subtle opponent, because it had become so pervasive. A person’s identity isn’t like a cloak that can be taken off. Transforming your identity is more like performing surgery on yourself; you must act as both doctor and patient. This is an impossible task in the physical world, but entirely possible in awareness.
Awareness looks at itself, and when it does, it can search out flaws and fix them. The reason it can mend itself is that only awareness is involved. There is no need to go outside the self, no need to be asleep to block the pain, and no need for violence against the body.
Before surgery begins, you need a disease or defect. The ego, for all its claims to running everyday life, has a glaring defect. Its vision of life is unworkable. What it promises as a completely fulfilling life is an illusion, a will-o’-the-wisp you can chase all your life without ever laying hands on it. When you become aware of this defect, the result is fatal for the ego. It can’t compete with the soul’s vision of fulfillment. We have all been conditioned to believe that it’s the ego that is practical and realistic in its approach to life, while the soul is unattainable and detached from everyday affairs. But that is a complete reversal of the truth. Let me illustrate.
Two Visions of Fulfillment
The ego’s vision:
I have everything I need to be comfortable.
I am serene because bad things can’t come near me.
Through hard work, anything can be achieved.
I measure myself by my accomplishments.
I win much more often than I lose.
I have a strong self-image.
Because I’m attractive, I win the attention of the opposite sex.
When I find the perfect love, it will be on my terms.
The soul’s vision:
I am everything I need.
I am secure because I have nothing to fear in myself.
The flow of life’s abundance brings me everything.
I do not measure myself by any external standard.
Giving is more important than winning.
I have no self-image; I am beyond images.
Other people are attracted to me as so
ul to soul.
I can find perfect love, because I have discovered it first in myself.
It’s fair to say, I think, that the second vision describes life in a state of grace. It stands for life transformed, not life as presided over by the ego. Yet, looking at the two choices, most people would find the ego’s version more reasonable. For one thing, they are already quite used to it. Familiarity, added to inertia, keeps most of us doing the same things every day. But that aside, what makes the ego’s path to fulfillment seem easy is that it is based on improving the conditions of life step by step. If you have a modest job today, it will become more important tomorrow. A small first home will one day turn into a larger home. If you run into problems or obstacles along the way, they can be overcome. Hard work, diligence, loyalty, and faith in progress combine to make life better.
This is the ego’s version of personal growth: however limited your life may be, in time it will steadily get better. Yet this vision, so focused on externals, ignores what’s actually happening with the inner person. There is no correlation between fulfillment and external progress. A country as impoverished as Nigeria ranks higher among societies on a scale of happiness than the United States (as measured by polls that ask people how happy they are). As far as money goes, people get happier as they rise above the level of poverty, but once the basic wants of life are secure, adding more money actually decreases one’s chance of being happy. Studies of people who have won the lottery find that within a year or two, not only are they worse off materially, but the majority say they wish they had never won in the first place. (Needless to say, these findings are not widely promoted by the lotteries themselves.)
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul Page 20
