We pay dearly for latching on to externals as the measure of who we are. Downturns in the economy create widespread fear and panic. In personal relationships, love fades when the other person stops providing enough emotional input and personal attention—those external supports without which the ego falters. When conflicts arise, people suffer in silence or fight futilely to get the other person to change. The ego insists that a better spouse, a bigger house, and more money will bring the satisfaction you long for. What doesn’t occur to people is that failing to be satisfied might not be their fault or the fault of their circumstances. They might simply have chosen the wrong path to begin with.
The ego’s vision of fulfillment is unattainable because each isolated “I” is on its own, cut off from the source of life. The steady improvement being promised can only be external, because there’s no security inside. How can there be? The only way the ego can deal with the psyche’s disorder and discontent is to wall it off. The “I” is full of secret compartments where fear and anger, regret and jealousy, insecurity and helplessness are forced to hide. Thus we see record levels of anxiety and depression in our society, conditions treated with drugs that just build a thicker wall around the problem. The moment the lulling effect of the drug is removed, depression and anxiety return.
The soul’s vision of fulfillment seems far more difficult, and yet it unfolds automatically once you reach the level of the soul. Fulfillment is not a matter of self-improvement. It involves a shift away from the ego’s agenda, turning from externals to the inner world. The soul holds out a kind of happiness that isn’t dependent on whether conditions outside are good or bad. The path of the soul leads to a place where you experience fulfillment as a birthright, as part of who you are. You don’t have to work for it; you only have to be.
Grace comes from a clear vision of who you really are.
Annette’s story
Knowing who you really are is the only way to be completely happy. Currently there’s a popular notion that travels under the rubric of “stumbling on happiness,” the title of a 2006 book by Harvard professor Daniel Gilbert. The core idea is that happiness arrives almost by chance—we stumble on it in the dark, as it were—because people don’t really know what will make them happy. This is largely a failure of foresight, Gilbert tells us. We think a million dollars will make us happy, but the day when we actually get a million dollars turns out to be far different from what we saw in advance. The sun doesn’t become twice as bright; life doesn’t lose its nagging imperfections. If anything, the day you get a million dollars is worse than an ordinary day because it falls so short of being extraordinary.
I have no problem with the observation that people lack the tools to make themselves happy, or with the notion that we rarely see in advance what will actually create happiness. The sentimental image of the sad millionaire is real enough. The most memorable moments of shining happiness do occur unexpectedly. But it’s completely wrong, in my view, to assert that human life must be flawed in this way. The deeper truth is that we stumble on identity. We cobble together a self, using the imperfect plans laid down by the ego. We are motivated by memories of what hurt in the past and what felt good, which impel us to repeat the good things and avoid the bad. As a result, “I” is a product of accident, fickle likes and dislikes, old conditioning, and the countless voices of other people who told us what to do and how to be. At bottom, this whole structure is totally unreliable and, in fact, unreal. Having seen through this jerry-rigged self, you should let it go completely. It is the wrong ship to take you to the far shore of fulfillment, and it always was.
“For years I was having a problem in relationships. Basically I never felt loved enough,” said Annette, a successful, independent woman I know from teaching a meditation group. “The last man I was involved with only chose me because the woman he wanted to marry got engaged to somebody else. I began to feel that I had never mattered to him at all. So when we broke up, I went to see a therapist.
“She asked me what I wanted to achieve in therapy. That’s not an easy question, but I knew that I didn’t feel loved, so I told her that I wanted to get over that feeling. The therapist asked me what being loved meant to me. Did I want to be protected, taken care of, coddled? None of those things, I said. To me, being loved means that you are understood. The words just popped out, but they felt right. When I was growing up, nobody understood me at all. My parents were nice people, and they did their best. But their love didn’t include understanding who I was. They were too concerned with me finding the right man, making a home together, and raising a family.”
“So you started on an inner journey,” I said.
Annette nodded. “My therapist turned out to be great. We uncovered all my hidden issues—I kept back nothing. I really trusted her. For months I relived everything about my past. There were lots of revelations and lots of tears.”
“But you felt you were achieving something,” I said.
“As I released my old stuff, the sense of release was incredible,” said Annette. “Before I knew it, five years had passed, hundreds of sessions. One afternoon I was in my therapist’s office when it hit me. ‘You understand me completely,’ I said to her. ‘I have no more secrets to tell, no more shameful thoughts and forbidden desires.’ At that moment I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“Why was that?” I asked.
“Here this woman totally understands me,” said Annette. “I have what I’ve always wanted, and yet what had come of it? I wasn’t suddenly happier or more contented. That’s what made me want to cry. What made me want to laugh was harder to explain.”
“You had come to an end point,” I suggested. “That implies the start of a new life.”
“I think so. It took a while for it to sink in. But then I noticed that when I’d get in a situation that used to make me angry, instead of flaring up, a voice inside me would say, ‘Why are you doing this again? You know where it comes from.” The voice was right. I knew myself too well now. Going back to my old reactions wasn’t possible.”
This proved to be a major turning point. Annette had earned the rare privilege of being able to reexamine herself from the ground up. She had come to the end of everything the ego-self had built up over the years. Once she saw it for what it was—a haphazard, flimsy construct unrelated to her real self—she could move on. Her mind was no longer tied to the past.
The mind can be used for many things, but most people mainly use it as a storehouse. They fill it with memories and experiences, along with all the things they like and dislike. What makes us save some parts of our past and discard others? It’s not that we hold on to pleasurable experiences and throw away painful ones. There’s a personal attachment to both. Without attachment, the past would simply fade away. I don’t mean that you would have amnesia. Attachment is psychological. It preserves the pain that still hurts, and the pleasure that hopes to be repeated. Being in the past, however, your mental storehouse is filled with a jumble of things that no longer serve you.
I said something like this to Annette, and she absolutely agreed. “It had been my fantasy that the real me was hiding out somewhere in my past. If someone wiser and stronger than me was handed all the pieces, they’d hand me back a complete person.”
Getting beyond the ego-self means leaving stale illusion behind and beginning to face a fresh reality. We’re all clinging to images of ourselves that pile up year after year. Some images make us look good, some make us look bad. But images can’t substitute for the real thing. The real you is vital and alive, shifting and changing at every moment. What fascinates me about Annette is that she’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who came to the end of the ego-self. Working with her therapist, she exhausted everything it had to offer. In everyone’s life, the ego extends its lease by saying, “Hold on. Keep trying. I know what to do.” But stand back and consider what this strategy comes down to:
If all your hard work hasn’t brought you what you want, wor
k harder.
If you don’t have enough, get more. If your dream fails, keep following it.
If you grow insecure, believe in yourself more.
Never acknowledge failure; success is the only option.
This kind of ego motivation, turned into slogans, is deeply ingrained in popular culture. Following your dream and never giving up has become a credo repeated by the rich, famous, and successful. Yet for every winner of a beauty pageant, stock-car race, World Series, or Hollywood audition, there are an untold number whose dream didn’t come true. They followed their dream just as hard and believed in it just as much. By no means did the ego’s strategy work for them. Fortunately, there’s another way; it’s the exact opposite of the ego’s strategy:
If all your hard work hasn’t brought you what you want, look for new inspiration.
If you don’t have enough, find it in yourself.
If your dream fails, and you see that it was a fantasy, find a dream that matches your reality.
If you grow insecure, detach yourself from the situation until you find your center again.
You are not shaken by either success or failure; the flow of life brings both, as temporary states.
The real self is a shifting, elusive phantom that’s always one step ahead of us. It dissolves the instant you think you’re about to grab it. (I’ve heard God described that way, as someone we constantly run after, only to discover that wherever he—or she—was last seen, he just left.) You can’t ever nail down who you really are. To understand your real self, you have to keep up as it moves. Finding the real you happens on the run. The same holds true for grace, since it is part of the real you.
Placing your faith
We have arrived at a point that will be uncomfortable for many people. A fluid, shifting self represents a radical change from the fixed, secure self that the ego promises to provide for us. Feeling the ground beneath your feet suddenly soften is disturbing. Yet the process of letting go leads us to this point. A shift of allegiance is called for. Surrender brings the descent of grace, but not in one flash. Grace is a way of life that relies on none of the ego’s old props. Jesus put it succinctly:
Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.
(MATTHEW 6:19–20)
Our old way of life centered on saving, planning, looking ahead, providing for security, and relying on material goods must give way to a new one based on trust in Providence, no planning or looking ahead, and nonphysical treasures. The same theme is reiterated throughout the Sermon on the Mount. I said earlier that Saint Paul doesn’t provide a process by which grace overtakes a person. The same holds true for Jesus as we meet him in the Gospels. Deep transformation is necessary, yet the steps to get a person from here to there aren’t outlined. Instead, Jesus and Paul put the primary emphasis on faith.
Faith is an inner certainty that such radical change can and will happen. But faith needn’t be blind. Nor does it have to be based on anything outside yourself. By going through the process of letting go, you will find that there are reasons to have faith here and now.
Faith in your experience. Letting go brings the experience of being tuned in to your soul. As a result, the soul begins to play a bigger role in your life. Gradually but steadily, you begin to have some of the following experiences:
I feel inspired.
I see the truth of spiritual teaching.
I sense that I have a higher self.
A deeper reality is dawning.
My inner life brings satisfaction.
I understand things in a new way.
I greet each day with fresh energy.
My life feels more whole.
Sometimes I tell people to write these things down on a slip of paper to carry around with them. If they can pull out the list and connect with just one item on the list, they are tuned in. If not, then it’s time to start tuning in. The flow of life is self-renewing. It brings fresh energy every day to address fresh challenges. But when the soul connection isn’t being made, that energy doesn’t arise as it should.
Where does faith enter in? When you are aligned with your soul, life feels unbounded, and your awareness exudes carefree joy and confidence. But when you tune out, these qualities disappear. In those moments, have faith in your own experience, which tells you firsthand that being unbounded is real. It’s a state of awareness you can return to. I find that the ego-self is like a small, comfortable hut, while what the soul offers is a vast landscape with an infinite horizon. All of us retreat into our hut from time to time. Sometimes we do this under stress, sometimes from pure habit. The psyche is unpredictable enough that you can find yourself feeling insecure for no good reason.
Fortunately, the reason doesn’t matter. Once you’ve experienced freedom, you will be drawn there again. You will find it more comfortable to expand, and as time goes on, the temptation to retreat back into your hut will weaken. There’s no need to put pressure on yourself. Freedom speaks for itself; the impulse to experience it is built into you and will never die. That’s the first and most important thing to have faith in.
Faith in your knowledge. People who pride themselves on being rational often reject spirituality because it isn’t backed up by hard facts. Their argument has a blind spot, however, because not all facts can be measured. It may be a fact that the North Pole is located at 90 degrees north latitude, but it’s also a fact that each of us thinks, feels, wishes, and dreams, and upon this invisible reality all external facts depend. The North Pole would have no location without a mind to measure it. As you walk the path, you acquire knowledge that can be relied upon. Some crucial knowledge has been communicated in these pages, but it’s left to you to verify it. What kinds of facts do I have in mind?
Awareness can change the body.
Subtle action can bring you more love and compassion.
Distorted energy patterns can be healed.
The flow of life supplies unlimited energy creativity, and intelligence.
Every problem contains a hidden solution.
Awareness can be either contracted or expanded.
There’s another way to live that your ego doesn’t know about.
By this point, none of these statements should sound mystical. Even if you feel tentative about one or more of them, have faith that real knowledge does exist in the realm of awareness. The awareness you were born with as a child has expanded over the years. You have added new skills and neural pathways to your brain. Neurologists have confirmed that spiritual practices like meditation are real in physical terms; so is a spiritual attainment like compassion.
Therefore, the process of awakening the soul requires little extra faith. It’s a natural extension of findings that have a solid foundation in science. Not that this should be your final proof. I was inspired long ago by a phrase from the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: he said that each person was born to test a “soul hypothesis.” In other words, you and I are grand experiments, conducted inside ourselves, to prove whether there is a soul. The experiment renews itself in every age. Once it was based on faith in God and scripture. Now it is based on faith that consciousness can grow and evolve. The terms have shifted, but not the challenge.
Faith in yourself. Popular culture constantly drums into us that having faith in yourself leads to the highest achievement. But the self in question really means the ego, with its unquenchable craving to win, own, consume, and find pleasure. That’s the last thing to put your faith in. Better to reframe the whole issue as faith in a self you have yet to meet. Nobody needs to have faith in the ego-self; its demands are constant. But the self you have not yet met does require faith, because it is the end point of transformation. Until you undergo this transformation, you are a caterpillar dreaming of turning into a butterfly.
How can you have faith in a s
elf you haven’t met? That’s such a personal question that the answer will be different for everyone. So let me put the question differently: What would convince you that you have changed at a deep level, and permanently? Here are some answers that most people, I think, would find valid:
I am not in pain anymore.
I don’t feel conflicted anymore.
I overcame a weakness and became strong.
Guilt and shame have disappeared.
My mood isn’t anxious anymore.
Depression has lifted.
I have found a vision I believe in.
I experience clarity in place of confusion.
These changes are all rooted in the self, because the conditions that need the deepest change—depression, anxiety, conflict, confusion—feel like part of “me.” A person doesn’t catch them like catching a cold. They may submit to temporary distractions, but the affliction returns. Freud called anxiety an unwelcome visitor who refuses to leave. Every step you take in throwing out an unwelcome visitor is a step of faith in yourself. You are succeeding in letting go. More than that, a new “me” is gradually being revealed. For it turns out that the transformed self isn’t like a passenger waiting for the train to arrive. Your new self is revealed one aspect at a time.
Spiritual tradition holds that the soul possesses every virtue. It is beautiful, truthful, strong, loving, wise, understanding, and imbued with the presence of God. Those qualities cannot be taken away. They cannot be bought or acquired by your ego, either, except on a provisional basis. The most loving person can exchange love for hate. The strongest person can be crushed. But as your real self is revealed, all these qualities become unconditional. You won’t be aware that they’ve descended upon you—grace isn’t a shower of cool water or white light. Rather, you will simply be yourself. Yet when love is called for, love will be there in you, ready to express itself. When strength is called for, strength will be there. Otherwise, you will feel nothing special. Life goes on as it does for everyone. But inside, in a way hard to describe, you are totally secure. You know that you possess everything you need to confront life’s difficulties.