POWER
FREEDOM
GRACE
Copyright © 2006 by Deepak Chopra
Published by Amber-Allen Publishing, Inc.
Post Office Box 6657
San Rafael, California 94903
Author Photo: Jeremiah Sullivan
Cover Illustration: Mahaveer Swami, detail from Bhagavad Gita
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chopra, Deepak.
Power, freedom, and grace : living from the source of lasting happiness
p. cm.
1. Spirituality. I. Title.
BL624.C4768 2006
294.5'4—dc22 2006010817
ISBN 978-1-934408-14-8
DEDICATION
To the immortal Being in all of us.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Part I The Problem: Not knowing who we are
Chapter 1 What do I want?
Chapter 2 Who am I?
Chapter 3 Why do I forget who I am?
Chapter 4 How do I participate in creating my reality?
Part II The Prescription: Remembering who we are
Chapter 5 Where do I go when I die?
Chapter 6 What is the key to lasting happiness?
Chapter 7 How can I live with effortless ease?
Chapter 8 When will I be fully awake?
Part III The Practice: Experiencing who we are
Chapter 9 What is power and how do I obtain it?
Chapter 10 What is freedom and how do I experience it?
Chapter 11 What is grace and how do I live it?
Chapter 12 The Infinite
Appendix: The Old and New Paradigms
About Vedanta
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to Janet Mills, who has very diligently captured the essence of my lectures over the years, and helped me bring this manuscript to completion.
Do not confuse the instrument with the user of the instrument. The instrument is the brain; the user of the instrument is the infinite Being expressing itself in different disguises.
1
What do I want?
Happiness:
A feeling of great pleasure, contentment, or joy.
There is a reason why you were drawn to this book. Perhaps your soul is extending an invitation to you — an invitation to get in touch with the deepest part of your self. Your deepest self, your essential being, is the source of all Being — the field of pure consciousness that manifests as the infinite diversity of the universe. Power, freedom, and grace are attributes of this field. So, too, are happiness, joy, and bliss.
Over the course of my career, thousands of people have come to me with various problems and challenges in their lives. My career began as a physician, and in the beginning most of the people I met had some form of illness, such as heart disease or cancer. One day I was sitting with a patient who had heart disease and I happened to ask him, “Why do you want to get better?”
The look in his eyes said, What kind of ridiculous question is that? He told me, “Doesn’t everybody want to get better when they’re sick?”
“Yes,” I said, “but why do you want to get better?”
He replied, “If I get better, I can go back to work and make more money.”
For some unknown reason, I persisted in asking him why. “Why do you want to make more money?”
Apparently amused, he agreed to play the game and said, “Because I want to send my son to a good university.”
I asked him why he wanted to send his son to a good university.
He said, “I want my son to get a good education so he can build a successful career.”
I kept asking him the question, Why, why, why … In the end he answered, “Because I want to be happy.”
Since then, I have played this game not only with sick patients wanting to get better, but with anyone who wants anything. You can try this yourself. Ask people what they want, and when they tell you what they want, keep asking why until you hear the ultimate answer: “Because I want to be happy.”
Happiness seems to be the goal of all other goals, and yet most people seek happiness in a roundabout way. We have material goals, such as wanting a better house, a better automobile, or items of luxury. We have goals that deal with relationship. We want to feel safe; we want to feel that we belong. We want to be able to express ourselves freely and creatively. Some of us might want wealth or power; others might seek fame. But if you ask people why they want these things, the ultimate answer remains the same: They believe that if they attain these things, then they will be happy.
As I talked to people, I began to have the idea, Why not make happiness our primary goal? Why seek happiness through all these secondhand means? And I discovered something even more interesting. If we make happiness our primary goal instead of our secondary goal, then we easily accomplish everything else we desire.
Many spiritual traditions state that if you seek the highest first, everything else comes to you. In the New Testament, for example, Christ says, “Seek first the kingdom of heaven, and all else will be added unto you.” The kingdom of heaven is not some far-off place in some remote part of the universe; it is a state of consciousness. So, too, is happiness.
Most people say, “I’m happy because … because I have family and friends, because I have a great job, because I have money and security.” All of these reasons for happiness are tenuous; they come and go like a passing breeze. And when happiness eludes us, we seek pleasure through addictive behaviors out of the unconscious hope that we will find joy. External causes of happiness never create real joy. Joy is an internal state of consciousness that determines how we perceive and experience the world. The internal source of joy — our connection to our Creator, our source, our inner self — is the cause, while happiness is its effect.
If you have lost touch with your internal source of joy, if the happiness you experience always originates in circumstances outside yourself, then you are at the mercy of every situation and every stranger you meet. This kind of happiness is always elusive.
Vedanta, one of the world’s most ancient philosophies, tells us that happiness for a reason is just another form of misery because the reason can be taken away from us at any time. To be happy for no reason is the happiness we want to experience.
Happiness is a state of consciousness that already exists within us, but it’s often covered up by all kinds of distractions. Just as a beautiful sunrise might be hidden behind the clouds, so, too, our inner happiness is hidden behind our everyday concerns. Social conditioning and constricted awareness keep us from glimpsing this kingdom of heaven hidden in the depths of our heart. But we can learn to rise above the clouds of conditioning and rediscover the source of joy deep within us. Upon discovering this joy, wonderful and miraculous things begin to happen. The expression of happiness brings a sense of connection to the creative power of the universe. Having that connection, we feel that nothing can stop us from accomplishing anything we desire.
When our life is an expression of the inner state of happiness, we discover an immense reservoir of power within us. This power gives us freedom from fear and limitations, and allows us to realize all the abundance that we aspire to. Even more significantly, this power nurtures all of our relationship
s and makes them truly fulfilling. We find ourselves becoming beacons of light and love, and our very presence nurtures the environment around us. People are drawn to support our desires, and even nature responds to our intentions.
The more we live in the state of happiness, the more we experience the spontaneous fulfillment of desire in the form of synchronicity and meaningful coincidence. In many spiritual traditions, this has been called the state of grace. To experience grace is to find ourselves in the right place at the right time, to have the support of the laws of nature, or “good luck.” In the state of grace, it seems to us that the universal or cosmic mind is eavesdropping on our thoughts and fulfilling our intentions and desires even as we are having them.
But this is not the entire story. Though happiness is the goal of all other goals, what we really want, even beyond happiness, is to understand the mystery of our own existence. Until we do, no matter how many of our desires are fulfilled, we remain discontented because an inner voice keeps nagging at us. This voice asks, Who am I? Where did I come from? What is the meaning and purpose of my life? Where do I go when I die?
No one can give us the answers to these questions. If we take the answers that our parents, or our culture, or our religious traditions gave us, then we are taking whatever we learn on blind faith. When we don’t know something for certain ourselves, but only hope that it is true, then we believe it because authority figures told us to believe it. This kind of belief is a cover-up for insecurity, and in today’s age, it seems naive.
Science has given us a great deal of understanding about the laws of nature and how they work. We don’t have to believe in electricity; we can see the evidence in a light bulb. Nor do we have to believe in the other forces of nature, such as gravity. We know that gravity exists because we can experience it. So, too, if the soul exists, if an afterlife exists, then it isn’t necessary to believe in it. We don’t need belief. We need understanding; we need experience. Why should we take the deepest questions of our existence on faith? Isn’t there a way to find out for ourselves?
Are there means we can use to explore and understand ourselves so that we can have a direct understanding of the deep mysteries of our existence? Is it also possible for this understanding to satisfy our rationality and what we know about the universe from modern science or cosmology?
As you read this book, it is my intention that you will rediscover what you already know at a deep level, and in this act of remembrance, experience great wonder, unbounded love, and profound humility. The inner self of every human waits patiently until we are ready; then it extends an invitation to enter the luminous mystery of existence in which all things are created, nurtured, and renewed. In the presence of this mystery, we not only heal ourselves, we heal the world.
There can be no more important task in our life than to get in touch with our own inner self, the source of all Being. The deepest self within each of us is the Self of the whole universe, and it’s also the source of all healing and transformation.
The world has been waiting for our transformation because it, too, wants transformation. When we are transformed, the world is transformed, because we and the world are one.
Let us start on this journey now.
KEY POINTS
Happiness is the goal of all goals, and it’s a state of consciousness that already exists within you.
Happiness for a reason is a form of misery because the reason can be taken away from you at any time. To be happy for no reason is the happiness you want to experience.
When your life is an expression of your inner happiness, you feel a sense of connection to the creative power of the universe. Having that connection, you feel that you can accomplish anything you desire.
2
Who am I?
Universe:
One song; the totality of all the things that exist.
According to Vedanta, there are only five reasons why humans suffer: The first is not knowing who we are. The second is identifying with our ego or self-image. The third is clinging to that which is transient and unreal. The fourth is recoiling in fear of that which is transient and unreal. And the fifth is the fear of death. Vedanta also says that the five causes of suffering are all contained in the first cause — not knowing who we are. If we can answer this one basic question, Who am I?, we may find the answer to all other related questions, such as: Where did I come from? What is the meaning and purpose of my life? Where do I go when I die?
Now, if someone were to ask, “Who are you?” your response would probably be “Oh, my name is so-and-so. I’m an American, or I’m Japanese, or I’m the president of this company.” All of these answers refer to your self-image or to an object outside yourself: a name, a place, a circumstance. This process of identifying with your self-image or the objects of your experience is called object-referral.
You may also identify with your body and say, “This is my body. This bag of flesh and bones is who I am.” But then the question is: What is the body, and why call it yours? The body that you call yours is really the raw material of the universe: recycled earth, water, and air. But so is the tree outside your window. Why call the body yours when you do not call the stars, the moon, or the tree outside your window yours? Of course your body seems nearer to you, but this assumes that you know where the “I am” that you think you are is physically located.
Many people somehow feel that the “I” they call themselves, the skin-encapsulated awareness, is located somewhere in their head. Other people think it’s located somewhere behind the heart or solar plexus. But no scientific experiment has ever found a center of awareness in any one location in space or time.
An interesting insight comes to us from both Vedic science and the Jewish Kabbalah: The center of our awareness is the center of all space and time. It is at once everywhere and nowhere. But let’s assume for a moment that your awareness is indeed located where you are physically sitting. If this universe has infinite dimensions — and physicists assure us that it does — then infinity extends in all directions from where you are. You are in the center of the universe, but so am I, because infinity also extends in all directions from where I am. Infinity also extends in all directions from a person in China, a dog in Siberia, and a tree in Africa. The truth is, I am here, but I am also everywhere else because here is there from every other point in space. You are there, but you are also everywhere else because there is everywhere, or nowhere specifically.
In other words, location in space is a matter of perception. When we say the moon is near and the sun is far, that’s only true from our particular vantage point. In reality, there is no up or down, north or south, east or west, here or there. These are only points of reference for our convenience. Everything in the cosmos is nonlocal, meaning we can’t confine it to here, there, or anywhere.
But my eyes tell me this is not the case. I am here, you are there, wherever you are. So maybe we should not trust our senses that much. My eyes tell me that the Earth is flat, but nobody believes that anymore. Sensory experience tells me that the ground I am standing on is stationary, but I know from science that the Earth is spinning on its axis and hurtling through outer space at thousands of miles an hour. Sensory experience tells me that the objects of my perception are solid, but that’s not true either. We know that objects are made up of atoms, which in turn are made up of particles that whirl around huge empty spaces.
The experience of a material world is a superstition that we’ve developed because we’ve learned to trust our senses. The universe is actually a chaos of energy soup, and we ingest this soup through our five senses, and then convert it into a material reality in our consciousness. Our senses transform massless energy into sound and vibration, form and solidity, texture and color, fragrance and taste. And our interpretation of that energy soup structures our reality and creates our perceptual experience. Most of the time we do this unconsciously as a result of social conditioning. Philosophers have called this the hypnosis of social cond
itioning. When we live under this hypnosis, we believe the superstition of materialism.
The superstition of materialism relies on sensory experience as the crucial test of reality. In this worldview, reality is what we can see with our eyes, hear with our ears, smell with our nose, taste with our mouth, or touch with our hands. If energy or information is not available to our senses, we tend to think it isn’t there. And the intellect, with its linguistically structured system of logic, serves to justify this mistaken perception of reality.
Sensory experience is totally illusory; it’s as transient as a fantasy or a dream. Is there really such a thing as the color red? Every color you see is a particular wavelength of light, and the light you can actually detect is a fraction of what exists. How long can you cling to a world of illusion? You may think you are the body that your senses can locate in space and time, but the body is a field of invisible vibrations that has no boundaries in space and time.
So maybe you are not the image you identify with, and maybe you are not the body. Then at least you must be your thoughts and feelings. But who can honestly claim to know where thoughts and feelings come from? Where do they come from, and where do they disappear?
If you can’t claim exclusivity over the objects of your experience, your body, or even your thoughts and feelings, then what can you call your own? And here the knowledge of Vedanta saves us. If you replace the word exclusive with the word inclusive, then you are not just these objects, you are not just this body, you are not just these thoughts and feelings. You are all things, you are all bodies, you are all thoughts and feelings. You are a field of all possibilities.
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