“When I started out, I was shy about my spirituality. My family thought of me as antireligious, in fact, since I had refused to go to church with them when I turned eighteen. After I started meditating, I thought I was changing, but if anyone saw this, they had nothing to say. People liked the way I used to be. So I quietly kept on, and I let everyone suppose that I was the person I had always been.
“Then I found that my desires weren’t the same anymore. There was nothing I desperately wanted or didn’t want. I stopped running after the things everyone else thought were so important. My friends and family noticed that I had gotten a lot quieter. That’s all they said. I kept working on myself and moved on.
“Time passed, and more changes happened. I faced my ego and its whole deal. I went into my old beliefs and my need to be right all the time. There was something new to look at every day. I kept watching and moving on. Nothing outward was drastically different, but there were moments when I was amazed that the people close to me didn’t see how totally different I had become.”
“This was all happening while you were in the incubator?” I asked.
My friend smiled. “Exactly. Then one day it all ended. I woke up and had no desire to meditate. Frankly, I felt kind of blank, as if nothing had happened for the last ten years. I looked at myself in the mirror, and this ordinary guy stared back at me. For a second I was almost afraid, feeling a faint wave of dread. I lay back down on the bed, and then, like a warm liquid inside, I felt “it” wash over me. What is “it”? Life itself, like a river picking me up and carrying me along. Since then, I’ve been going where the river goes, and things just work out. From that moment on, everything works out.”
His face showed a flush that was a kind of ecstasy. But I had a question. “Why not let the river carry you beginning the first day? Why do you have to wait until the end?”
“That’s the thing,” my friend said. “I had a thousand days I thought were the end. And I’m not sure I could tell you when the first day was, either. The thing happens when it wants to.”
In all honesty, none of us knows when the first day on the path was—or when the last day will be. Therefore, the best thing is to live every day as if it were the first and the last. A new world is born in spirit every time the sun rises. Life is perpetually fresh, so your path can be just as fresh. Otherwise, if you postpone your life waiting for a great and glorious gift to be bestowed, the gift may never come, and your life will be postponed forever. Wholeness must be seized at this moment, because eternity dawns only in a moment like this one. The goal of the following steps is to make wholeness a daily possibility. Vision and reality want to come together. The time to make that happen is now.
Step 1. Nourish Your “Light Body”
Your soul acts as your spiritual body. As such, it needs to be nourished. In the same way that your cells exchange oxygen and food, your spirit body sends and receives subtle energy, or “light.” Your heart, liver, brain, and lungs—all your organs—literally survive on light coming from the sun. Every bite of food represents trapped sunlight that your body releases into chemical and electrical energy. Your cells have no future except through light.
“Light” performs the same function at a subtler level. Every message from your soul is encoded in energy, because the brain must convert love, truth, beauty—every aspect of meaning, in fact—into physical activity. Subtle energy brings the mind into material existence, so in practical terms your future depends on how well you nourish your light body. If you feed it with fresh energy every day, it will provide you with inspiration and guidance. In the West we aren’t used to thinking that way, but in Sanskrit the word jyoti, or light, is more than physical. Jyoti carries meaning, growth, good and bad influences, and the whole trajectory that a person’s life will follow. Even if you are a strict materialist and believe that the brain is the source of the mind, nothing is possible in the brain without energy; therefore you wind up with the same conclusion, that a person’s hopes, wishes, and dreams must be nourished through light—in this case, sunlight. And you will have to account for how raw light, composed of photons, manages to turn into the mind’s rich display of meaning. It’s not as though a bean knows how to paint a Madonna and Child, or as though a cauliflower can build the Parthenon.
Every day it’s up to you to convert the soul’s energy into the meaning of your life. There’s no such thing as a meaningless experience. Your brain exists to process meaning. One way or another, the light is going to turn into you. It is going to support the vision you have of yourself, if that is your choice. But in the absence of a vision, it can also be funneled into supporting old habits and closed-off beliefs.
Think of your soul’s energy being parceled out like the electricity running to your house. Some portion must go to basic life support. Your brain needs to regulate the body’s various systems to keep you alive. Another portion of energy goes to routine activity. Your brain operates to keep the family going, to do your job at the office, and so on. Some energy also gets allotted to pleasure. Your brain thrives on pleasurable sensations and tries to maximize those sensations through entertainment, games, fantasy, sexual arousal, and the like.
So far, the analogy between the soul’s energy and the electricity that runs a household is pretty close. Most people run their lives and their households the same way, for basic life support, daily routine, and some amount of pleasure. Yet inside a house might live a Picasso or a Mozart, and here the analogy breaks down, because geniuses maximize the soul’s energy for other purposes. Meaning becomes disproportionately important in their lives. Fortunately, the supply of subtle energy is as copious as we want it to be. Once the basics of life are taken care of, there’s plenty left over to fuel your personal vision and higher purpose.
As you approach each day, consciously channel energy into your vision. Take any quality of the soul and convert it to your own use. These qualities are not mysterious, and all around you people are creating a purposeful life from the soul level. Let me illustrate the wealth of choice that is available to you.
The soul is dynamic. This quality can be converted into a life of adventure, exploration, and forward-looking activity. The overriding theme here is reaching a goal.
The soul is loving. This quality can be converted into a life of romance, devotion, and worship. The overriding theme here is ever-expanding bliss.
The soul is creative. This quality can be converted into a life of art, scientific discovery, and self-transformation. The overriding theme is inspiration.
The soul is spontaneous. This quality can be converted into a life of drama, epiphany, and emotional exploration. The overriding theme is surprise.
The soul is playful. This quality can be converted into a life of recreation, sport, and carefree enjoyment. The overriding theme is innocence.
The soul is knowing. This quality can be converted into a life of observation, study, and meditation. The overriding theme is reflection.
The soul is ever-expanding. This quality can be converted into a life of journeys, breakthroughs, and personal growth. The overriding theme is evolution.
With these qualities in mind, you can shape the soul’s energy into any kind of life you desire. The shaping is never done automatically, and no one can do it for you. I’m not implying that you will make a choice once and for all. At various stages in your life, different qualities of meaning exert an appeal. “Knowing” generally dominates the student years; “loving” dominates during the phase of relationships and family; “playful” dominates in childhood.
Can a life be shaped without resorting to the soul? Such a life would be either unconscious or shortsighted. Of course such lives exist. There are people who totally dedicate themselves to work for its own sake, to materialism and getting ahead, to saving for the future or protecting the present. One can’t call these meaningless choices, but they fall short of the soul’s potential to inspire. In some cultures a complete life is one that passes through stages of meaning
that everyone is expected to fulfill. I’m thinking primarily of ancient India, where four ashramas, or stages of life, were assigned to study, family life, retirement, and finally renunciation of the world. Each stage had its specific duties, and the overall goal was to merge the individual soul with the universal soul—in other words, this was the blueprint for a spiritual journey that every person agreed to for many centuries.
In modern society that broad agreement has broken down, and a toll is paid in lives that feel restless, chaotic, and lacking in meaning. But you don’t need society’s approval to use your soul’s energy in a meaningful way—you don’t need anyone’s approval. The trajectory of your life can follow whatever arc you choose. The important thing is not to waste energy in the many ways we are all tempted to waste it: through pointless fantasy, unconscious suffering, dead-end habits, inertia, and circular repetition. These are the enemies of a purposeful life. Nourish your “light body” by feeding it with meaning. Recognize the quality of the soul that appeals to you, and interact with the potential that wants to unfold.
Step 2. Turn Entropy into Evolution
Your soul offers a future that is a rising arc from this moment forward. There will be no flat plateaus and no slippery slopes to slide back down. Such a future depends on constant renewal. Your vision must remain fresh, and that can only happen if you find fresh uses for your energy. Without constant input from your soul, however, energy tends to wane. People have come to accept that life will wear itself out as they age. But this is hardly inevitable, even if you look at yourself in materialistic terms. As we saw before, the entire universe is a contest between energy that wants to dissipate and run down (entropy) and energy that wants to become more coherent and complex (evolution). The same contest is waged at the micro level, too, in your cells. Your everyday choices tip the balance one way or the other. If you favor evolution day by day, it’s completely reasonable for you to evolve for an entire lifetime.
You have a powerful ally on your side, the mind. Mind isn’t subject to entropy. When a thought disappears, it hasn’t exhausted your capacity for a new thought to replace it, or a hundred new thoughts. The secret to defeating entropy is to build higher and higher structures in the mind. It is these structures that hold back time and shape a future that keeps improving. To grasp what this means, think of any project that takes more than a day to accomplish: a painting, a book, a scientific problem, or a project at work. When you come back to it, you don’t have to mentally start over at the beginning. There’s a structure in your mind that keeps your prior work intact, which allows you to pick up where you left off.
In Sanskrit there’s a special term for mental structures that endure. They are called devata. (The word derives from the Devas. Usually translated as “angels,” the Devas are actually the builders and shapers of reality. Without the Devas, awareness would never take shape; it would flow like rainwater across an open field.) To the ancient Vedic seers, devata’s job is to make sure that creativity is preserved and not allowed to dissolve. You can even multitask, since the mind is capable of building any number of structures at once. And you can shut off your conscious mind—to go to sleep, for example—without anxiety that entropy will blow away your thoughts like dust in the wind. (Everyone has had the experience of waking up in the morning to find that their first thoughts continue exactly where they left off the night before. Brain chemistry cannot explain this continuity, since chemical reactions change constantly, at a rate of thousands per second in every neuron. Yet something keeps our thoughts intact and allows them to build on each other.)
Use the devata aspect of your mind to build and keep on building. Never-ending creativity is your goal. In practical terms, this means fighting against boredom, routine, and repetition. Find creative openings at every level of your life, as follows:
Family life is creative as long as each person is interested in every other. No one is put into a box with phrases like “You always do that,” or “You’re so predictable.” No one is labeled and expected to behave according to that label. Fixed roles aren’t assigned (e.g., rebel, bad boy, good girl, mother’s pet, bully, victim, martyr). Everyone is encouraged to be expressive. Nobody is shut down for acting different.
Relationships are creative if both people find new things to discover in the other. This requires that you move beyond the ego. The ego is by nature self-regarding. It looks to itself first and foremost. Even in the most nearly equal relationships, there’s a tendency to take your partner for granted because two egos are involved—you have to look beyond not just your boundaries, but theirs as well. The incentive to find something new in your partner comes from your own sense of change. If you want your own changes to be valued, you must see change in your partner. This sets up a mutual give-and-take. Once started, this give-and-take blossoms into the richest aspect of any relationship: shared evolution.
Work is creative when it satisfies the deepest creative center in a person. New challenges are met by discovering new resources in oneself. As most people find out early in their careers, the problem of boredom and repetition is very real in any occupation. Few workplaces take measures to overcome the problem, so the responsibility lies with you. Remain vigilant for signs that you aren’t being challenged, and when those signs appear, demand change. Take on more responsibility; don’t shirk risks. If your present situation doesn’t permit creative expansion, look for another situation that does. The worst thing is to settle for inertia at work, using the excuse that creativity and pleasure are for after hours and the weekends. You will be leaving a big hole in your life, and that makes wholeness impossible.
Your vision is the part of your life that encompasses pure possibility. Whatever energy you devote to building a family life, relationships, and work, there is still enormous room left for reaching higher. Build on your vision every day. It doesn’t matter what the vision is, but it should reach beyond your normal boundaries. For some people the vision is humanitarian or religious; for others it is artistic. (For me, in an early adulthood overwhelmed with medical training, a young family, and constant financial pressure, it turned out to be spiritual.) However much you cherish them, family, relationships, and work are transient. Your vision is not. It’s your link to the long span of culture and civilization. You get to participate in myth and archetype, a world of heroes and quests. If you keep focusing on your vision, you may touch the fringe of eternity. None of these things is possible without a vision, however. As time unfolds, material life recedes. Having a vision provides insurance that a void isn’t waiting at the end of the journey. The miracle is that by dedicating yourself to a vision, you are swept up in the cosmic force of evolution itself, which has no beginning or end.
Step 3. Commit Yourself to Deeper Awareness
Imagine that it’s a starry night in June after the moon has gone down. Walk until you find a piece of open ground. Lie on your back and gaze up at the heavens. Can you see yourself in that position? Now think this thought: There is infinity in all directions, and I am at the center of it. This isn’t an exaggeration—it’s literally true that no matter where you stand, you are the center of infinity extending in all directions. The same is true of time. At every minute of your life, eternity stretches before you and behind you. Having absorbed those two ideas, it’s hard to feel bound by space and time. Yet there’s one more layer to add. Close your eyes, go inside, and think this thought: The silence I experience is the source of infinity and eternity.
All the teachings of the greatest spiritual traditions come down to that thought. Jesus and Buddha are linked by knowing that awareness is the source of all that is, was, and ever will be. At your source, time depends on you, not the other way around. Every event that occurs depends on you, in fact, because without awareness the universe ceases to exist. Stars and galaxies vanish. Creation is sucked into a black hole. Your awareness makes reality blossom in all directions, and the deeper your awareness, the richer creation will be. If you can live as if you are the ce
nter point of reality, with eternity and infinity expanding all around you, you are living from the level of the soul.
It’s mysterious that people don’t see themselves this way. But it’s easy to be convinced by our eyes, which can see only so far. It’s easy to be convinced by our minds, which take in only so much information. And it’s easy to be convinced by the ego, which tells you that you are a small, isolated individual overwhelmed by the gigantic scale of the cosmos. Fortunately, as awareness extends, it teaches your eyes, your mind, and your ego to change. In practical terms, when you commit yourself every day to deeper awareness, you are asking for new vision, new beliefs, and a new sense of self.
New vision is possible when you stop being tied to the raw data that your senses bring in. People take for granted that their eyes, for instance, are optical instruments being bombarded by light from the outside. Photons strike the retina, which then transmits billions of photons a minute to the visual cortex to be analyzed. Yet in many traditional cultures, this process is viewed as reversed. Sight goes outward from the mind, seeking to discover the world. In other words, sight carries awareness wherever it wants to go. In many ways this model of the senses is true to our experience. If you don’t want to see something, it doesn’t matter how many photons bombard your retina. On the other hand, if you are immensely interested in seeing, there’s no limit to what you can take in. Consider a gifted artist, who can walk through a crowd on a busy city street and see inspiration in every passing face, every shift of sunlight, every angle of the cityscape.
New vision is creative vision, and you can cultivate it every day. There is unlimited inspiration hidden inside everyday things, waiting for you to pull it out. One of the most famous Chinese paintings consists of two peaches sitting side by side. The artist has reduced each peach to a single stoke of his brush. On the surface this looks like the easiest thing in the world to create, and hardly art at all: you just dip your brush in some black ink, and with a twist of the wrist you draw a circle that looks like a peach. But can you do it so perfectly that the peach looks ripe, sweet, and glistening with beauty? Can you also make the viewer feel that you, the artist, are infinitely sensitive to nature? In this famous image, both things have happened.