The modern Sufi teacher A. H. Almass expresses this beautifully in an essay titled “Hanging Loose”:
When your mind is free, not concerned or worried, or focused on anything in particular, and your heart is not grasping or clinging to anything, then you are free… Whatever is there, is there. The mind isn’t saying, “I want this” or “I want to look at this” or “It has to be this way.” The mind is loose. The expression “hang loose” tells us what it means to be liberated.
The process of surrender gets you to the point that you can hang loose, without the urge to grab at things and worry over them. The ego’s agenda falls away. This takes time, but it comes eventually. Long before that moment, your mind learns what it’s like to be quiet, comfortable, and loose. You coast along enjoying this state, and as you do, grace brings in the real you to fill the space once occupied by the mind’s churning. To your surprise, you go into a situation where love is called for, and you have that love. It is part of you (just as you suspected in your heart of hearts). In the same inexplicable way, courage has become part of you, and also truth. The promises of the great spiritual teachers, who told you that grace is freely given, come to fulfillment. Then you know, once and for all, that placing faith in yourself was fully justified. So it must be justified at this moment, wherever you may be on the journey.
In Your Life: Meeting Grace Halfway
Grace brings about personal transformation, but this happens so quietly that even the most blessed people may not recognize it, or if they do, they may forget. It’s beneficial to put any blessing to work. In that way it becomes a part of you that goes out into the world. You represent grace through your actions, not as a private possession to be admired behind closed doors.
If you want to display grace, you need to manifest the qualities of grace. The words associated with grace in the New Testament provide a guide:
Merciful
Freely bestowed
Available to all
Generous
Forgiving
I’m not holding these out as moral virtues or as a duty. Rather, they are a litmus test. You can measure how much grace has come into your life by the ease with which these actions can be performed. There’s a big difference between giving from the ego and giving from the soul, between showing mercy and extending forgiveness. The difference can be felt inside, and it’s unmistakable.
Showing mercy. Most people show mercy because it’s less trouble, or it makes them feel magnanimous. The ego gets something out of it, in any event. The image of a condemned man in court comes to mind. He hangs his head. At that moment the judge holds all the power, and whether he is harsh or lenient, that power is validated. But the mercy that comes from grace is selfless. You empathize with the wrongdoer. You see his vulnerability and desperation. You understand that more people are changed by an act of mercy than by years of punishment. In short, you see shared humanity in another person, and that requires the eyes of the soul.
Not that mercy must follow the model of a courtroom. You are showing mercy when you don’t point out someone else’s faults, when you refuse to blame even though blame is deserved, when you refrain from gossiping and bringing someone down behind his back. It’s merciful to see the best motives in a person, to give the benefit of the doubt, to look for positive change. In all these instances, you take the nonjudgmental view. Hamlet says, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall escape whipping?” It’s a gift of grace not to use every man according to what he deserves, but as mercy pleads.
Bestowing freely. The ego looks out on a world of barter, where everything has a price and quid pro quo is the rule. This doesn’t apply to grace. It is given freely, without a thought about what will be given in return. It’s unfortunate that the New Testament rests its argument on the sinful nature of man. Saint Paul’s notion is that we are all so degraded that we deserve God’s wrath and punishment, but, like a loving father, God forgives his errant children. This kind of moral scheme speaks to many people. They feel the weight of their faults and wrongdoing. God becomes the more lovable by overlooking all their sins and erasing them through the power of grace.
There’s no need for morality to enter into it, however. It is in the nature of the soul to give freely in the same way that a river gives water. Establish a channel, and the water flows. The ego gets tangled up in questions of who deserves what, calculating how much to give and take away. Grace is free with its gifts. It helps to remember that the universe supplies you with everything, and whether your ego thinks you got enough or not is irrelevant. Your body has been freely sustained with energy, intelligence, and nourishment since the moment of your inception. To the extent that human beings are deprived, the root cause is ultimately ourselves, or our circumstances. It’s not in the setup of life that unfolded for billions of years before human beings came on the scene. As freely as one breath comes and the next one goes, you can act from grace by giving without attachment.
Available to all. Grace is the great leveler. It recognizes no differences, but gives itself to anyone who has surrendered. (In Christian metaphor, the rain falls on the just and unjust.) On the other hand, our ego places critical importance on being special. We want someone who loves us more than anyone else in the world. We crave status, recognition, a sense of uniqueness. Yet from the soul’s perspective, uniqueness is a universal trait. You are a singular creation no matter what you do; there’s no need to prove it to anyone else.
When you make someone feel that he or she is your equal, you exhibit this quality of grace. This holds true whether you are reaching down or reaching up. It’s not a question of noblesse oblige, or of giving to the poor because you have so much more. In the eyes of the soul, equality is simply a fact, and you are acknowledging it. When the ego dominates, we all assess where we stand, high or low, in any situation. We are drawn to people who reflect back our own self-image. We subtly put others in their place. Under the influence of grace this behavior changes, because you genuinely feel no higher and no lower than anyone else. A tremendous relief accompanies this realization. So much energy is wasted protecting our dignity, status, pride, and accomplishments. When defending yourself from a fall becomes pointless, you’ve made an enormous advance toward liberation.
Generous. To be generous is to allow your spirit to overflow. You can be generous at every level of life—giving someone the benefit of your joy is just as good as giving them money, time, or a chance to be heard. Whenever you are generous, you strike a blow against lack. Your ego secretly fears ruin because it believes that something is lacking. This may be the result of scarce resources, an unfair God, bad luck, or personal defect. It’s rare to find anyone who doesn’t worry, at one time or another, about one or all of these deficiencies. Grace brings living proof that nothing is lacking, either in you or the world around you.
I imagine that there’s no wider gap between the ego and the soul than this one. If you declare that there is no lack in the world, countless arguments will be raised against you, and you stand a good chance of being called insensitive, blind, immoral, or worse. Haven’t you deliberately overlooked the vast extent of poverty and famine in the world? Jesus’ words about Providence watching the fall of a sparrow seem unconvincing to someone who doesn’t know where the next meal is coming from. But the teaching is based on consciousness, not on this year’s feast or famine. Grace is generous once it has descended, and before that, material forces hold sway.
The ego’s generosity is a display of riches; it draws attention to the giver’s wealth and the receiver’s need. The soul’s generosity draws no attention to itself. The impulse is natural and selfless, like a tree loaded with fruit whose branches bow to the ground. If you can be generous from an overflow of spirit, you will be acting from grace.
Showing forgiveness. Here is the most telling test. To forgive unconditionally is a mark of grace. Your ego can’t duplicate this quality of the soul. Without grace, forgiveness is always conditional. We wait until we aren’t
angry anymore. We weigh what is fair and unfair. We nurse grievances and imagine retaliation (or carry it out before we forgive). Conditions are being imposed. When you are able to forgive by setting those conditions aside, you are acting from grace.
Some spiritual teachers would say that the ego can never forgive to begin with. Christianity makes forgiveness a divine attribute. Fallen humanity, itself in severe need of forgiveness, cannot abolish sin without salvation. Buddhism believes that pain and suffering are inherent in human nature until the illusion of the separate self is overcome. It’s not that these traditions are pessimistic, or that wrongdoing is a permanent curse. Rather, Jesus and Buddha took a realistic look at the psyche, which is entangled in a complex web of right and wrong. We cannot help but feel that pain is wrong—our own pain, that is—and with that in mind, all wounds are proof of unfairness. Pain makes us feel victimized. Which means that life’s tendency to bring pain makes everything and everyone open to blame. If you had to forgive everything you blame someone else for, the process would consume a lifetime.
To extend forgiveness shows that you have found a way out of the trap. Forgiveness becomes easy once you stop being attached to not forgiving. The blame game is over. So is the perception of being victimized. In the presence of grace, forgiveness is a recognition that for every wound there is a healing. If you see yourself as healed in advance, there is nothing to forgive in the first place.
Breakthrough #5
The Universe Evolves Through You
Finally, it takes a breakthrough to reveal how precious you really are. Almost no one believes that he or she is absolutely necessary in the grand scheme of things. Yet if you are the growing tip of evolution, the universe needs you in a unique way. You fit into a plan that cannot be imagined in advance. It has no rigid guidelines, no fixed boundaries, and no predictable outcome. The plan is made up as it goes along, and it depends on the participation of each and every person.
I once heard a famous Indian guru talking about the cosmic plan—or the divine plan, as he called it. He couched the plan in the most inspiring terms, painting a future of untold abundance and the total absence of suffering. There was a large audience in attendance, mostly westerners. In the room I could feel an emotional tug-of-war—people wanted to believe what they heard, but they didn’t dare. Finally a brave soul stood up and asked, “Is the divine plan unfolding right now? The world looks so chaotic and violent. Fewer and fewer people believe in God.”
Without hesitation the guru said, “Belief in God doesn’t matter. The plan is eternal. It will always unfold. It can’t be stopped.” With a sweep of his arm he added, “Everyone here should join. There’s no higher purpose in life, and if you join now, you will reap the first rewards.”
The questioner’s brow furrowed. “What if I don’t join?” he asked. “What happens then?”
The guru’s face became stern. “The divine plan doesn’t need you to unfold.” He leaned closer to the microphone. “But if you turn away, it won’t unfold through you.”
Ultimately, I think that’s the right answer. If we take “divine” out of the equation and talk in terms of a universe that is constantly evolving, you can join in the evolutionary flow or not. The choice is yours. Either way, evolution will proceed, but if you opt out, it won’t proceed through you.
Why do I matter?
In the past, life was made easier by knowing what God had in store. If you know where you fit in the divine scheme, the physical hardships of life become secondary. If you don’t fall in line, your destiny will be painful but no less fixed. I know of no culture in which a person’s fate was left adrift. Even in Judaism, where one interpretation (but not all) denies the existence of an afterlife, God dictates that this lifetime, being the only one, should be lived as devoutly as possible. The virtue of living under God is that your small existence has not just a higher purpose, but the highest of all as part of God’s creation.
Yet, powerful as it is to live for God, religion has always been vexed by a serious contradiction. Everyone is considered precious to God, but no one is really needed. Individual lives are thrown away in war by the tens of thousands every year. Untold more lives are lost through disease and famine, or barely get a start before infant mortality strikes. Few people talk about this contradiction, yet it has a hidden effect. Doctors must deliver fatal news to patients with incurable conditions. The news comes as a shock, yet it’s moving to see that the majority of dying patients are selfless. The reason they don’t want to die is that their families need them. The great question “Why am I here?” comes down to other people. This also accounts for the dominant fear expressed by the old, which isn’t fear of dying or even of chronic, disabling pain. Rather, old people are most afraid that they will become a burden to their children.
It’s only human to realize that we all need each other. But if taken too far, this becomes a system of codependency in the worst sense: I only exist to need and be needed. I remember, early in my medical training, wishing that just one person, upon hearing that he had incurable liver or pancreatic cancer, would murmur, “What a loss to the world when I am gone.” Not a loss to one’s family and friends but an absolute loss, something that makes the world poorer. We see the passing of eminent people that way, certainly. Yet from your soul’s perspective, you are as great an addition to the world as Mahatma Gandhi or Mother Teresa, and subtracting you from the cosmic equation would be just as great a loss. The most exquisite silk remains intact if you pull out a thread, but the snag will show.
Many people would resist the notion that they have an absolute worth in the universe. Unwittingly they are playing out a behavior known as learned helplessness. A famous example comes from experiments on dogs performed in the 1950s. Two dogs were put in separate cages, and each was given a mild shock at random intervals. The first dog had a switch that it could hit to make the shocks stop, and very quickly it learned to throw the switch. Since the shocks were mild, this dog displayed no adverse effects. The second dog received shocks at the same time, but had no switch for stopping them. Its experience was very different. For that dog, pain was a random occurrence out of its control.
But it’s the second part of the experiment that is most revealing. Each dog was now put into a cage where half the floor delivered shocks while the other half was safe. All the dog had to do when it was shocked was to jump over a small partition to reach the safe zone. The first dog, the one that had learned how to turn the shocks off, didn’t have a switch anymore. But it didn’t need one. It quickly learned to jump to safety. The second dog, however, gave up immediately. It lay down and let the shocks come as they would, without making an effort to jump out of the way. This is learned helplessness in action. When applied to human life, the implications are devastating. Countless people accept that life’s pain and suffering come randomly. They have never been in control of the shocks that every existence delivers, and so they seek no escape, even when one is presented.
Knowing how things work is important. Otherwise, learned helplessness creeps up on us. The first dog learned that life makes sense: if you hit a switch, the pain goes away. The second dog learned that life was pointless: no matter what you do, the pain comes anyway, which means either no one is in charge, or whoever’s in charge doesn’t care. A dog’s brain may not think this way, but ours do. Without a sense of purpose, we resort to helplessness, since either God isn’t there or he doesn’t care what happens to us. To escape our learned helplessness, we have to have a sense that we matter in the larger scheme of things.
Brett’s story
Our purpose is hidden from us, yet there are moments when we see that everything fits together. We may not know what the plan is, but for certain we know that something is working out a larger design; at such times we realize that the most common events cohere into extraordinary patterns.
At seventy, Brett is an avid gardener. One rose in his garden is tall and strikingly beautiful, its blooms pale yellow tinged with pink. “This
is the only mystical rose I grow, and it has a story,” he told me. “When the Nazis invaded France, flower-growing came to a sudden halt. Every available acre had to be used for food, so a young grower near Lyon found himself digging up 200,000 rosebushes to be burned. He was an avid breeder; it crushed him to destroy the decades of work started by his father and grandfather, so he saved his most promising seedling. The war grew darker, and he was lucky enough to send a package containing buds of this new rose to America with one of the last diplomatic couriers leaving France.
“He had no idea what happened to this handful of bud grafts until France was liberated in 1944. Within weeks he got an excited telegram. The rose had thrived overseas, and it wasn’t just promising. It was stupendous, perhaps the greatest rose the American nurseries had ever seen. It was decided to set a date, at which point the public would be introduced to ‘Peace,’ as the rose would be called. A series of coincidences followed that became legend. When the naming day came, it coincided with the day that Japan surrendered. On the day that ‘Peace’ won the award for best rose of the year 1945, Germany surrendered. On the day that the first delegates gathered to form the United Nations, each was greeted with a blossom of ‘Peace.’ As it turned out, this was also the day that Germany signed the final papers of surrender.”
Brett paused. “Everyone in the rose world knows about ‘Peace,’ which became by far the most famous rose in the world. It sold in the millions. It made a fortune for the young French grower, whose name was Francis Meilland. But that’s not why I call this rose mystical. It was Meilland’s tragedy to die young, at the age of forty-six. Before he passed away, he visited his oncologist, and on a table in the waiting room was placed a bowl of ‘Peace,’ which seems like little more than a coincidence. But when Meilland returned home, he told his family that he saw his mother sitting next to the roses, smiling at him. She had passed away twenty years before, and in her honor, her son had given ‘Peace’ another name in France, ‘Madame Antoine Meilland.’ What do you think of that?”
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul Page 22
