When in doubt: It’s hard to let go when you don’t know if you have made the right choice in the first place. Doubt lingers and ties us to the past. Many relationships end in divorce because of a lack of commitment, but that lack didn’t grow over time; it was present from the very outset and was never resolved. It’s important not to make critical decisions when you are in doubt. The universe supports actions once they are begun, which is the same as saying that once you take a direction, you are setting a mechanism in motion that is very hard to reverse. Can a married woman feel unmarried simply because she wants to? Can you feel that you aren’t your parents’ child simply because you think it would be better to have different parents? In both cases the ties to a situation, once it is in place, are strong. When you are in doubt, however, you put the universe on hold for a while. It favors no particular direction.
There is a good aspect to this pause and a bad one. The good aspect is that you are giving yourself room to become aware of more things, and with more awareness, the future can bring you new reasons to act one way or the other. The bad aspect is that inertia isn’t productive—without choices you cannot grow and evolve. If doubts persist, you have to break out of stasis. Most people do this by plunging into the next choice, catching life on the rebound: “This didn’t work out, so I better do something else, no matter what.”
Usually, the people who wind up making totally arbitrary choices—recklessly going for the next house, the next job, the next relationship that shows up—turn out to be over-calculating. They spend so much time figuring out the risks, looking at all the pros and cons, assessing every worst-case scenario, that no choice looks right, and sheer frustration pushes them to break the deadlock. Ironically, such irrational leaps sometimes work out. The universe has more in store for us than we can ever predict, and bad choices frequently smooth out in the end because our hidden aspirations know where we are going.
Even so, doubt is destructive to the one quality that awareness is trying to bring to you: knowingness. At a deep level, you are the knower of reality. Doubt is a symptom indicating that you aren’t in contact with the knower inside. It usually means that you are looking outside yourself when you have to make a choice. Your decision is going to be based on externals. For most people, the strongest externals come down to what other people think because fitting in is the path of least resistance. But fitting in is like embracing inertia. Social acceptance is the lowest common denominator of the self—it’s you as a social unit rather than you as a unique person. Find out who you really are; let fitting in be the last thing on your mind. Either it will happen or it won’t, but in either case you will be in no more doubt about yourself.
There is no formula for removing doubts because finding the knower inside is personal. You have to be committed to expanding your awareness. Don’t be in doubt about that one thing. If you turn inward and follow the path that leads to your inner intelligence, the knower will be there waiting for you.
Seeing the possibilities: It would be much easier to let go of outcomes if every choice turned out well. And why shouldn’t it? In the one reality there are no wrong turns, only new turns. But the ego personality likes things to be connected. Coming in second today is better than coming in third yesterday, and tomorrow I want to come in first. This kind of linear thinking reflects a crude conception of progress. Real growth happens in many dimensions. What happens to you can affect how you think, feel, relate to others, behave in a given situation, fit into your surroundings, perceive the future, or perceive yourself. All these dimensions must evolve in order for you to evolve.
Try to see the possibilities in whatever happens. If you don’t get what you expected or wished for, ask yourself, “Where am I supposed to look?” This is a very freeing attitude. On some dimension or other, every event in life can be causing only one of two things: Either it is good for you, or it is bringing up what you need to look at in order to create good for you. Evolution is win-win, which we can say not out of blind optimism but once again by referring back to the body. Anything happening inside a cell is either part of its healthy operation or a sign that a correction should take place. Energy is not expended randomly or on a whim to see how it turns out.
Life is self-correcting in just this way. As the choice-maker you can act on a whim; you can follow arbitrary or irrational paths. But the underlying machinery of consciousness doesn’t alter. It keeps following the same principles, which are:
• To adapt to your desires
• To keep everything in balance
• To harmonize your individual life with the life of the cosmos
• To make you aware of what you are doing
• To show you the consequences of your action
• To make your life as real as possible
Because you have free will, you can ignore these principles entirely—we all do at one time or another. But you can’t make them deviate. Life depends on them. They are the ground of existence, and even as your desires come and go, the ground of existence is unchanging. Once you absorb this truth, you can align yourself with any possibility that comes your way, trusting that win-win is the attitude that life itself has been taking for billions of years.
Finding the stream of joy: My fancy was caught by an episode in the adventures of Carlos Castaneda when his master Don Juan sends him to a witch who has the ability to adopt the perception of any creature. The witch allows Castaneda to feel exactly like an earthworm, and what does he perceive? Enormous exhilaration and power. Instead of being the tiny blind creature that a worm appears to human eyes, Castaneda felt like a bulldozer pushing each grain of dirt aside like a boulder; he was mighty and strong. Instead of feeling like drudgery, the worm’s digging was cause for elation, the elation of someone who could move mountains with his body.
In your own life there is a stream of joy that is just as elemental and unshakable. A worm knows nothing but itself, so it cannot deviate from the stream of joy. You can disperse your awareness in every direction, and by doing so distract yourself from the stream. You won’t really let go of your self-image and your restless mind until you feel, without question or doubt, a palpable joy in yourself. The renowned spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti once made a passing comment I find very moving. People don’t realize, he said, how important it is to wake up every morning with a song in your heart. Once I read that, I performed a test on myself. I asked inside to hear the song, and for a few weeks, without any further willpower on my part, I did notice a song as the first thing that came to mind when I woke up in the morning.
But I also know that Krishnamurti was being metaphorical: The song stands for a sense of joy in existence, a joy that is free of any good or bad choices. To ask this of yourself is both the simplest thing and the most difficult. But don’t let it slip your mind, no matter how complex your life becomes. Keep before you the vision of freeing your mind, and expect that when you succeed at doing this, you will be greeted by a stream of joy.
CHANGING YOUR LIFE TO ACCOMMODATE THE SIXTH SECRET
The sixth secret is about the choiceless life. Since we all take our choices very seriously, adopting this new attitude requires a major shift. Today, you can begin with a simple exercise. Sit down for a few minutes and reassess some of the important choices you’ve made over the years. Take a piece of paper and make two columns labeled “Good Choice” and “Bad Choice.”
Under each column, list at least five choices relating to those moments you consider the most memorable and decisive in your life so far—you’ll probably start with turning points shared by most people (the serious relationship that collapsed, the job you turned down or didn’t get, the decision to pick one profession or another), but be sure to include private choices that no one knows about except you (the fight you walked away from, the person you were too afraid to confront, the courageous moment when you overcame a deep fear).
Once you have your list, think of at least one good thing that came out of the bad choices and one bad
thing that came out of the good choices. This is an exercise in breaking down labels, getting more in touch with how flexible reality really is. If you pay attention, you may be able to see that not one but many good things came from your bad decisions while many bad ones are tangled up in your good decisions. For example, you might have a wonderful job but wound up in a terrible relationship at work or crashed your car while commuting. You might love being a mother but know that it has drastically curtailed your personal freedom. You may be single and very happy at how much you’ve grown on your own, yet you have also missed the growth that comes from being married to someone you deeply love.
No single decision you ever made has led in a straight line to where you find yourself now. You peeked down some roads and took a few steps before turning back. You followed some roads that came to a dead end and others that got lost at too many intersections. Ultimately, all roads are connected to all other roads. So break out of the mindset that your life consists of good and bad choices that set your destiny on an unswerving course. Your life is the product of your awareness. Every choice follows from that, and so does every step of growth.
Secret #7
EVERY LIFE IS SPIRITUAL
ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES of modern life is that people violently disagree over religious beliefs and then go on to lead similar lives. Nietzsche’s famous remark that God is dead should be changed to God is optional. If the government kept round-the-clock surveillance on those who felt that they were abiding by divine law and those who never gave a thought about God’s rule book, I imagine the sum total of virtue and vice, love and hate, peace and violence, would look exactly the same. If anything, the balance of intolerance and lovelessness would probably tilt toward the most loudly religious people in any society.
I’m not mentioning this to be contentious. Rather, it’s as if the universe has a sense of humor, since at a deep level it’s impossible not to lead a spiritual life. You and I are as deeply engaged in making a world as a saint. You can’t be fired from the job of creating a world, which is the essence of spirituality. And you can’t resign from the job even when you refuse to show up. The universe is living through you at this moment. With or without belief in God, the chain of events leading from silent awareness to physical reality remains intact. The operating system of the universe applies to everyone alike, and it works along principles that do not require your cooperation.
However, if you decide to lead a consciously spiritual life, a change occurs. The principles of the operating system, which means the rules of creation, become personal. We’ve already touched upon many of the rules of creation; let’s take a look at how we can line up the universal with the personal.
UNIVERSAL
1. The universe is a mirror of consciousness.
PERSONAL
1. The events in your life reflect who you are.
Nothing in these statements smacks of religion; there isn’t any spiritual vocabulary involved. Yet this first principle is the whole basis for saying that religion (whose root words in Latin mean “to tie back”) unites the Creator with his creation. The physical world mirrors a mind; it carries intention and intelligence in every atom.
UNIVERSAL
2. Awareness is collective. We all draw it from a common source.
PERSONAL
2. The people in your life reflect aspects of yourself.
In this principle, we see the beginnings of all myth and archetypes, all heroes and quests. The collective psyche shares a level of awareness that goes beyond individuals. When you see other people as aspects of yourself, you are actually seeing faces of mythical types. We are one human being wearing countless masks. When all the masks are stripped off, what remains is essence, the soul, the divine spark.
UNIVERSAL
3. Awareness expands within itself.
PERSONAL
3. Whatever you pay attention to will grow.
In the one reality, consciousness creates itself, which is the same as saying that God is inside his creation. There is no place outside creation for divinity to stand—omnipresence means that if any place exists, God is there. But whereas God can be attentive to an infinitude of worlds, human beings use attention selectively. We put it one place and take it away from another. By paying attention we add the creative spark, and that part of our experience, either positive or negative, will grow. Violence begets violence, but so too does love beget love.
UNIVERSAL
4. Consciousness creates by design.
PERSONAL
4. Nothing is random—your life is full of signs and symbols.
The war between religion and science is old and nearly exhausted, but on one point, neither side is willing to budge. Religion sees design in nature as proof of a creator. Science sees randomness in nature as proof of no design at all. Yet, there has never been a culture based upon chaos, including the subculture of science. Consciousness looks at the universe and sees design everywhere, even if the spaces in between looked disorganized and random. For the individual, it’s impossible not to see order—every aspect of life from the family outward is based on it. Your brain is set up to perceive patterns (even an inkblot looks like some kind of image, no matter how hard you try not to see one) because it took patterns of cells to make a brain. The mind is ultimately a machine for making meaning, even when it flirts with meaninglessness, as the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries have done so well.
UNIVERSAL
5. Physical laws operate efficiently, with least effort.
PERSONAL
5. At any given moment, the universe is giving you the best results possible.
Nature loves efficiency, which is very odd for something supposedly working at random. When you drop a ball, it falls straight down without taking unexpected detours. When two molecules with the potential for bonding meet, they always bond—there is no room for indecision. This expenditure of least energy, also called the law of least effort, covers human beings, too. Certainly our bodies cannot escape the efficiency of the chemical processes going on in each cell, so it is probable that our whole being is wrapped up in the same principle. Cause and effect aren’t just linked; they are linked in the most efficient way possible. This argument also applies to personal growth—the idea is that everyone is doing the best he or she can from his or her own level of consciousness.
UNIVERSAL
6. Simple forms grow into more complex forms.
PERSONAL
6. Your inner awareness is always evolving.
This principle is baffling to the religious and scientific alike. Many religious people believe that God created the world in his image, which implies that creation had nowhere to go after that (except perhaps to devolve from its initial perfection). Scientists accept that entropy is inexorable, entropy being the tendency of energy to dissipate. Thus, in both systems it’s a problem that DNA is a billion times more complex than the first primordial atoms, that the human cortex has vastly increased in size over the past 50,000 years, that life appeared out of inert chemicals, and that new thoughts appear every day out of the blue. Entropy still makes us grow old; it still causes cars to rust and stars to grow cold and die. But the drive of evolution is equally inexorable. Nature has decided to evolve, whatever our opinions about that may be.
UNIVERSAL
7. Knowledge takes in more and more of the world.
PERSONAL
7. The direction of life is from duality to unity.
According to a commonly held idea, ancient cultures saw a unified creation, while we moderns look on a fragmented and divided world. The decline of faith has been blamed for this, as has the absence of myth, traditions, and social bonding. But I believe the opposite is true: The ancient way of understanding could barely explain a sliver of all the phenomena in Nature, while physics today is on the verge of a “theory of everything.” The eminent physicist John Wheeler makes a crucial point when he says that before Einstein, human beings thought that they were looking at Nat
ure “out there,” as if through a plateglass window, trying to figure out what external reality was doing. Thanks to Einstein, we realize that we are embedded in Nature; the observer changes reality by the very act of observation. Therefore, despite a widespread feeling of psychological alienation (the result of technology’s outstripping our ability to keep meaning alive), the duality of man and Nature is shrinking with each successive generation.
UNIVERSAL
8. Evolution develops survival traits that perfectly match the environment.
PERSONAL
8. If you open yourself to the force of evolution, it will carry you where you want to go.
Adaptation is a miraculous thing because it proceeds by quantum leaps. When some ancestral dinosaurs developed feathers, they hit upon an adaptation that would be perfect for winged flight. The cells on the outside of their bodies, which were hard and scaly, were useful as armor, but could not contribute to soaring aloft. It’s as if evolution set itself a new problem and then took a creative leap to get there. The old use of scales was abandoned for a new world of winged flight (and those same scales would take a leap in a different direction when they turned into hair, allowing the development of furry mammals). Science and religion both worry about this. Science doesn’t like the notion that evolution knows where it’s going; Darwinian mutations are supposed to be random. Religion doesn’t like the notion that God’s perfect creation changes when something new is needed. Yet this is a case where explanations have taken a backseat. Without a doubt, the physical world adapts itself by creative leaps that take place at a deeper level—call this level genetic or conscious, as you will.