Awareness has the magical ability to merge question and answer. In Garry’s case, as soon as he posed a dilemma, a chance event or a casually overheard phrase would contain the solution. Without being aware, he would never have put the two together—you have to notice a connection before a coincidence turns into synchronicity. Someone who is unaware won’t notice that he is being guided. You may be surprised when a perfect stranger tells you exactly what you need to know and skeptical that it means anything. Yet who hasn’t opened a book at random, only to find that the information he wanted was on that page? (I know a legally blind scholar who told me with a note of triumph that on a good day he didn’t need to use the library’s microfiche catalog. He would go into the stacks and be guided to the exact book he needed, even to the point that he could pull a volume down at random only to discover that it was the right one.)
Upaguru is a mystical phenomenon only if you assume that awareness is limited to the brain; asking a question “in here” can’t produce an answer “out there.” But the wall between inner and outer reality is artificial. Awareness is everywhere in nature. Seeing how animals are guided, it’s hard to maintain skepticism on that point. Migrating whales pick up calls from their kind hundreds of miles away; migrating monarch butterflies return to the same mountainous area in Mexico without fail, even though it is their first migration home after hatching. A breakthrough can occur when you accept that awareness is what guides you. If you attune yourself to that possibility, you are reconnecting to your soul, which is nothing but awareness in its most expanded form.
Relying on the soul
Awareness comes from the soul, yet many people would say that they have never been guided, much less transformed. For centuries human beings have prayed for signs that there is a higher power. These signs are actually everywhere, but there’s a subtle difference between inner and outer guidance. One person’s insight is another person’s message from God. One person’s glimpse of inner light is another person’s angel. The realm of the soul has room for both.
External guidance comes to people for whom the best proof of spirit is physical. There’s an enormous body of lore about a rescue squad of angels and protectors who come to earth in times of peril. Many of these are contemporary eyewitness accounts. Travelers who find themselves stranded on a deserted road in the midst of a howling storm suddenly see headlights. A kind stranger gets out and changes a tire, fixes a carburetor, or connects jumper cables. This helper then disappears around the next bend, and the grateful recipient reports an encounter with an angel.
I was vividly struck by a vignette on television in which a woman told her story of angelic intervention. She found herself alone one Christmas with no money and two young children to take care of. She despaired of telling her children that there would be no holiday for them that year, since she couldn’t afford presents under the tree and a turkey dinner. On Christmas Day there was a knock on the door. A kindly neighbor invited the whole family to his apartment, where he provided a lavish spread and gifts for the children. The young mother, who had never seen this neighbor, was overwhelmed by his kindness. She knocked on his door a few days later to thank him, only to find that the apartment was empty. When she inquired at the manager’s office to ask where the stranger had gone, she was informed that the apartment had gone unrented for months. The manager had never seen the stranger she was looking for.
In first-person accounts like this, belief and skepticism are both beside the point, I think. We have no hard-and-fast proof either way. Skeptics are forced to prove a negative, that angels don’t exist. Believers are forced to produce an angel for the camera, and that, so far, hasn’t been done convincingly. Even so, nothing is going to stem the constant flow of such stories. The deeper issue is that the spiritual world is kept at arm’s length when it depends on angels. What happens when the angels don’t show up? That’s where inner guidance proves so valuable, because the world within is never far away.
Without the inner support that comes from your own awareness, you are left in a very vulnerable position. In one psychiatric case study, a middle-aged woman came for therapy in a very agitated state, unable to sleep and prey to fearful thoughts. A few months before, she had been happy and untroubled. But as she was walking out of a restaurant by herself one evening, a purse-snatcher ran up and grabbed her pocketbook. He barely laid hands on her, so she wasn’t hurt physically. She had little of importance in her purse and lost only the small amount of money in her wallet.
The woman told herself that she was lucky to escape a violent mugging, but over the next few weeks, these rational reassurances crumbled. She began to feel unsafe for the first time in her life. She kept reliving the incident, and the images made her increasingly afraid. Most victims of muggings experience residual anxiety, no longer feeling quite as safe as they did before. But this woman fell into deeper anxiety. In therapy she discovered that she had been masking a profound fear of death. She had made herself feel safe by believing that she led a charmed life. For this woman, who was growing older and had never examined her youthful sense of immortality, one shock was enough to crack the fantasy of that charmed life. Then the way was opened for darker energies to pour out from their hiding place.
The irony of this story for me is that people are immortal. The fantasy of immortality masks the very thing that’s true. The soul steps God down to the human level, which gives us the appearance of being mortal. But the soul is you. The fact that the soul exists gives us an aspect of the self that transcends the cycle of birth and death. We don’t have to separate the lore of angels from the lore of the soul. We do have to break the supernatural spell that religion weaves around obedience, faith, and theological dogma. Under that spell, people lose the ability to find their own inner guidance, which never sleeps and is always at hand.
To break this spell, you must rely on personal experience. The soul can be tested. You can ask your soul to produce results by running your own soul-experiment. In fact, all of the breakthroughs in this part of the book are self-experiments to prove that higher awareness can be trusted. If your first experiment has positive results, you can try another, and then another. This is the most practical way to resurrect the soul. The more useful the soul becomes, the more real it is, not as religious dogma but as a part of yourself.
In Your Life: Guided by the Soul
If your inner guide is always with you, why aren’t you aware of it? Actually, you are. Every desire pushes you in a certain direction. Every thought looks forward or backward. Anyone who has a purpose in life, even if that purpose is limited to getting through the day, is following his or her own inner guidance. The real issue is how wise this guidance is. Your soul has the potential to be a perfect guide. You must first attune your mind to a subtler level, and then your brain will adapt—this is the flow of life that governs all change. Being guided is a process, and at this moment you find yourself somewhere—the beginning, middle, or end—of that process.
In the beginning, you catch just a few glimpses of subtle guidance. Usually these seem like chance events or lucky coincidences. You find that you have made a decision that benefited you, but unlike your usual everyday choices, this decision has a certain sense of rightness about it, as if it were meant to be. We’ve all had that feeling at one time or another. You then have a choice, either to say, “I had the strangest feeling that this was meant to happen,” after which you put the whole thing out of your mind, or to stop and look more closely at what happened. How you make the choice determines whether you will begin to listen to your guidance or not.
In the middle of the process, your questioning has become more urgent and important. You have seen repeatedly that various situations came out in your favor. Instead of settling for a vague feeling that God was on your side, or that fate smiled at you for a moment, you became more actively involved. You ask more personal questions: Why did this happen to me? Who or what is watching over me? Am I the one who’s doing this? There’s no guarantee
that you will come up with the same answers as the rishis, the sages of India. They concluded that the higher self, which we are calling the soul, is the source of everything, including God and fate.
Today, most people fence-sit. While some develop a confirmed conviction that God is rewarding them and therefore must be worshipped, others consider God a vague belief that doesn’t impinge on everyday life; divine reward, after all, raises the specter of divine punishment. In a secular world, cause and effect don’t operate on such a supernatural basis. By fence-sitting, a person can worry about God sending bad things their way, while at the same time using practical means to gain success and avoid failure.
The end of the process comes when you stop fence-sitting. You no longer halfheartedly believe in God and fate, but you seize the reins yourself. At this point, guidance becomes an acknowledged part of you and the journey you are consciously taking. You see the truth of Upaguru—there is guidance at every moment, because the guru is inside yourself. The teacher is as near as your next breath. When I call this the end of the process, I don’t mean that it reaches a halt, but rather that it matures. The process of being guided is fully revealed, at which point you take full advantage of it.
How do you get to this point?
Realize that you are on a journey to higher consciousness, and embrace it.
Expand your awareness, through meditation, contemplation, and other means.
Ask for guidance, simply and sincerely, and then wait for it to appear.
Trust your finest instincts. Guidance doesn’t come in the form of fear, premonition, omens, distrust, or self-importance. All of those things exist around us; they cloud our view of true guidance, which is always a signpost to the next step of personal growth.
The last point is extremely important but also tricky. All of us have reacted afterwards to a bad event by saying, “I just knew that was going to happen. I had this bad feeling.” But that isn’t guidance. It’s the voice of anxiety having an I-told-you-so moment. The difference is that true guidance is never fearful. Your soul doesn’t say, “Watch out, bad things are about to happen.” It steers you out of the situation before things turn bad. Sometimes it guides you out of danger before there’s even the slightest hint of it. The voice of fear never does that, since it reacts to immediate threat, real or imagined. Getting past the voice of fear is important, because fear is part of the shield that keeps you from your inner self. Like the fantasy of being protected, fear is the fantasy that you are always in danger. True guidance removes these fantasies and replaces them with reality: you possess a guide inside; it can be trusted. To activate this reality, we will go deeper into how the soul connects to the everyday self.
The connecting link is the mind, and much depends on whether your mind is open to your soul or closed to it. In a state of complete openness, the mind can realize infinite possibilities, far beyond guidance and protection. In its closed state, however, the mind mistakes reality. It creates a world that’s random, impersonal, and unsafe. Because each of us unthinkingly starts off in that world, our most urgent business is to crack the shell of illusion. Higher consciousness stands ready to deliver the gifts promised in every spiritual tradition as grace and Providence. In the flow of life, those gifts are meant to be yours, effortlessly and constantly.
Breakthrough #1
There’s an Easier Way to Live
The first soul breakthrough takes something that used to be difficult and makes it easy. Connecting with your soul is as easy as breathing, and just as natural. When pollsters ask, “Do you believe you have a soul?” close to 90 percent of respondents say yes. But that statistic is misleading, because very few people have actually experienced their souls. They avoid the spiritual journey because they assume it will be arduous, with many sacrifices along the way. But doesn’t that describe everyday life already? (One of the major bestsellers of the eighties, M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled, hooked millions of readers with three simple words: “Life is difficult.”)
Connecting to your soul is actually easier than whatever you are doing right now. It takes effort to keep your soul at a distance. When you stop struggling, the path to the soul is automatic. Everything you want to achieve will naturally unfold. This is what Jesus meant when he said, “Ask, and you shall receive. Knock, and the door will be opened.”
When you meet with day-to-day obstacles, you have put up inner obstacles first. These obstacles block the flow of life from soul to mind to body. If the flow hadn’t been blocked, it would bring everything the soul has to offer. The soul provides an open channel. If you ask for the truth about something, the truth dawns. If you ask for the solution to a problem, the solution appears. That’s why Buddhism teaches that every question is paired with its answer at the very moment the question arises.
If any channel in awareness is closed off, it has been temporarily blocked. The trap is that so much of this blockage happens without being noticed. We have all adapted to “life is difficult” because we saw no alternative. Like plaque building up on artery walls until the whole blood vessel is clogged, the buildup of struggle and strain happens by tiny degrees.
I was reminded of this when I was waiting in an airport between flights. It was several years ago. My daughter Mallika had a two-year-old girl, Tara, my first grandchild. I often eased the boredom of airports by calling Tara on my cell phone. It became a ritual that delighted both of us, me because Tara recognized my voice, and her because to a two-year-old a telephone is a magical toy.
This time when I hung up I noticed a frazzled young woman rushing toward me to catch her flight. She had two toddlers in tow, and what with being late and struggling with luggage and a stroller, the mother was overwhelmed. This in turn caused her children to cry. I saw her drag them to the check-in counter. But the young woman was out of luck. The gate had closed, and she would have to wait for the next flight. She pleaded that she had to get home to her family. You could tell that she was at her wits’ end after a long day.
But the agent at the counter was firm. Rules were rules. Passengers had to arrive at the gate at least fifteen minutes before their flight. Frustrated, her kids still crying, the young mother dragged herself away. When she was out of earshot, the agent turned to her assistant and said, “What could I do? My hands are tied.” The assistant agent was still watching the young mother. “I guess things are tough all over,” she said, shaking her head.
Life is a baffling mixture of Tara’s innocent joy—and the joy she inspired in me—and constant struggle like that of the young mother. We don’t see ourselves choosing one over the other, and yet we do. For each of us was like Tara when life began. The tragedy is that we learn to struggle so young, too young to realize that innocence and simplicity should never have been abandoned. Only in innocence can you receive the gifts of the soul. Once you accept that you are supposed to struggle in order to survive, that presumption becomes your reality. It gathers its own energy and momentum. Your brain quickly learns to conform. Once your brain is conditioned, the look, feel, and sound of the world have been fixed—until you escape that conditioning.
Tuning in to your soul
We already know that the body is aware. By tuning in to it, you can increase its awareness. Tuning in is also how you clear a channel to the soul. You are tuning in to your soul anytime you choose to grow and expand. On the other hand, when you tune out, the soul connection is blocked. Anytime you choose to contract in your awareness, the channel to your soul is squeezed shut. Everyone experiences both states. As mystically as we talk about the soul, being connected to it comes down to everyday experience.
Tuned In
Things are going easily for me.
I’m calmly certain.
The answer is clear.
Everything fits together.
I feel in harmony with the situation.
There are no outer obstacles.
Opposites are reconciled.
I’m open to any possibility.
I
don’t judge myself or others.
I am whole.
Whenever you are jarred out of this state, you are no longer connected to your soul. This condition also comes down to everyday experience.
Tuned Out
Things aren’t going smoothly for me.
I’m confused and uncertain.
The answer isn’t clear. I go back and forth.
Everything is mixed up.
I feel out of sync with the situation.
There are many obstacles.
I’m conflicted inside.
I find it hard to see a way out.
I keep blaming myself, and others.
I feel incomplete. I must be lacking something.
Please don’t take these two opposites as either absolute or permanent. Each of us tunes in and out every day. Our awareness contracts under stress, much like the body’s stress response. Our aim here is to achieve a permanent connection that can’t be broken, yet even short of that, people reach moments of very profound connection that change their lives.
A friend recently told me about an incident from his past that illustrates the point. It was a moment when his awareness expanded all at once.
“I was bumming around Europe with a backpack. I was twenty-six, and my life was a permanent vacation. I held temp jobs for just long enough to bankroll another trip.
“On this occasion I was the last person to get on the plane as a standby. I plunked myself down next to a man reading a book. Neither of us looked at the other. The plane took off, and I sat there. For some reason I had this empty feeling, accompanied by a vague dissatisfaction. I was surprised because, in general, bumming around Europe had been the happiest phase of my life. But at that moment I heard myself asking, What are you doing? This is a total waste.