The Book of Secrets: Unlocking the Hidden Dimensions of Your Life

  Ecstasy changes everything. The body is no longer heavy and slow; the mind stops experiencing its background music of sadness and fear. There is a dropping away of personality, replaced by the sweetness of nectar. This sweetness can linger a long time in the heart—some people say it can be tasted like honey in the mouth—but when it leaves, you know beyond doubt that you have lost the now. In the mind’s scrapbook, you can insert a picture of perfect bliss, and that becomes like the first taste of ice cream, an unattainable goal you keep running after, only to find that ecstasy remains out of reach.

  The secret of ecstasy is that you have to throw it away once you’ve found it. Only by walking away can you experience the present moment again, the place where presence lives. Awareness is in the now when it knows itself. If we take away the vocabulary of sweetness and bliss and nectar, the quality that is missing in most people’s lives, the biggest thing that keeps them from being present, is sobriety. You have to be sober before you can be ecstatic. This isn’t a paradox. What you’re hunting for—call it presence, the now, or ecstasy—is totally out of reach. You cannot hunt it down, chase after it, command it, or persuade it to come to you. Your personal charms are useless here, and so are your thoughts and insights.

  Sobriety begins by realizing, in all seriousness, that you have to throw away almost every strategy that you’ve been using to get what you want. If that’s at all intriguing, then carry out your sober intent to release those futile strategies as follows:

  SPIRITUAL SOBRIETY

  Getting Serious About Being in the Present

  Catch yourself not paying attention.

  Listen to what you’re actually saying.

  Watch how you react.

  Remove yourself from the details.

  Follow the rise and fall of energy.

  Question your ego.

  Immerse yourself in a spiritual milieu.

  These instructions could come directly from a ghost hunter’s handbook, or the hunter of unicorns. The present moment is more elusive than either, but if you want to get there passionately enough, sobriety is the program you need to set up.

  Not paying attention: The first step is neither mystical nor extraordinary. When you observe that you’re not paying attention, don’t indulge your wandering. Come back to where you are. Almost instantly you’ll discover why you wandered away. You were either bored, anxious, insecure, worrying about something else, or anticipating a future event. Don’t evade any of those feelings. They are ingrained habits of awareness, habits you have trained yourself to follow automatically. When you catch yourself drifting away from what’s right in front of you, you begin to take back the now.

  Listening to what you’re saying: Having returned from your distraction, listen to the words you’re saying, or the ones in your head. Relationships are driven forward with words. If you listen to yourself, you will know how you are relating to the universe right now. Don’t be thrown off by the fact that there is another person in front of you. Whoever you are talking to, including yourself, stands in for reality itself. If you are complaining about a lazy waiter, you are complaining about the universe. If you are showing off to someone you want to impress, you are trying to impress the universe. There is only one relationship. Listen to how it’s going at this moment.

  Watch your reaction: Every relationship is two-way, so whatever you are saying, the universe is responding. Watch your reaction. Are you defensive? Are you accepting and moving forward? Do you feel safe or unsafe? Again, don’t be distracted by the person you are relating to. You are tuning in to the universe’s response, closing the circle that embraces observer and observed.

  Remove yourself from the details: Before sobriety, you had to find a way to adapt to the loneliness that comes from the absence of reality. Reality is wholeness. It is all-embracing. You dive in and there is nothing else. In the absence of wholeness you still crave a similar embrace, so you try to find it in fragments, bits and pieces. In other words, you tried to lose yourself in the details, as if sheer chaos and raucousness could saturate you to the point of fulfillment. Now you know that this strategy didn’t work, so back out of it. Remove yourself from the details. Forget the messiness. Take care of it as efficiently as possible, but don’t take it seriously; don’t make it important to who you are.

  Follow the rise and fall of energy: Once the details are out of the way, you still need something to follow. Your attention wants to go somewhere, so take it to the heart of experience. The heart of experience is the universe’s breathing rhythm as it pours forth new situations, a rise and fall of energy. Notice how tension leads to release, excitement to fatigue, exhilaration to peace. Just as there is an ebb and flow in every marriage, your relationship to the universe rises and falls. You may experience these swings emotionally at first, but try not to. This is a much more profound rhythm. It begins in silence as a new experience is conceived; it moves through a period of gestation as the experience takes shape in silence; it begins to move toward birth by hinting at how things are going to change; finally there is the arrival of something new. This “something” can be a person in your life, an event, a thought, an insight—anything, really. Common to all is the rise and fall of energy. You need to connect with every stage because in the present moment one of them is right in front of you.

  Question your ego: All this watching and noticing and catching yourself isn’t going unnoticed. Your ego has its own “right” way of doing things, and when you break that pattern, it will let you know of its displeasure. Change is frightening, but more than that, it is threatening to the ego. This fright is just a tactic to pull you back into line. You can’t fight your ego’s reactions because that will only deepen your involvement with it. But you can question it, which means questioning yourself from a calm distance. “Why am I doing this?” “Isn’t this a knee-jerk reflex?” “How far have I gotten in the past acting like this?” “Haven’t I proved to myself that this doesn’t work?” You must keep asking these stubborn questions over and over, with the intent not of breaking down your ego but of loosening its reflexive hold over your behavior.

  Immerse yourself in a spiritual milieu: When you seriously face your behavior, you’ll realize that the ego has been isolating you all along. It wants you to think that life is lived in separation because, with that belief, it can rationalize grabbing as much for I, me, and mine as it can. In much the same way, the ego tries to grab spirituality as if it were a prized new possession. To counter that tendency, which will lead only to more isolation, immerse yourself in another world. I’m referring to the world where people consciously pursue experiences of presence, where there’s a common vision of transforming duality into unity. You can find such an environment in the great spiritual texts.

  As someone who found untold hope and consolation in such writings, I can’t urge you more strongly to turn to them. But there is a living world to meet as well. Immerse yourself in a spiritual context, according to how you define spirit. Expect to be disappointed when you get there, too, because it’s inevitable that you will meet the most frustration among people struggling with their imperfections. The ferment you meet is your own.

  Once you commit yourself to being sober, there is nothing more to do. Presence will appear on its own, and when it does, your awareness cannot help but be in the now. A moment in the now causes an internal change felt in every cell. Your nervous system is being taught a way of processing reality that isn’t old or new, known or unknown. You rise to a new level of being in which presence matters for itself alone, and it matters absolutely. Every other experience is relative and therefore can be rejected, forgotten, discounted, put out of mind. Presence is the touch of reality itself, which cannot be rejected or lost. Each encounter makes you a little more real.

  Evidence of this comes in many ways, the most immediate of which has to do with time itself. When the only time on the clock is now, the following becomes your actual experience:

  1. The past and the future exist onl
y in imagination. Everything you did before has no reality. Everything you will do afterward has no reality. Only the thing you are doing now is real.

  2. The body you once called yourself is not who you are anymore. The mind you once called yourself is not who you are anymore. You step out of them easily, without effort. Both are temporary patterns that the universe took for an instant before moving on.

  3. Your actual self manifests at this moment as thoughts, emotions, and sensations passing across the screen of awareness. You recognize them as the meeting point between change and timelessness. You see yourself as exactly that also.

  When you find yourself in the present moment, there is nothing to do. The river of time is allowed to flow. You experience the eddies and currents, shallows and depths, in a new context: innocence. The present moment is naturally innocent. The now turns out to be the only experience that doesn’t go anywhere. How can this be true when I’ve said that the whole purpose of time is to unfold the steps of evolution? That’s the mystery of mysteries. We grow and yet life remains eternal at the core. Imagine a universe expanding through infinite dimensions at infinite speed, completely free to create everywhere at once. To go along for the ride we need do nothing but remain absolutely still.

  CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE TWELFTH SECRET

  The twelfth secret is about how to use time. The best use of time is to reconnect to your being. The misuse of time comes down to the opposite: moving away from your being. There is always enough time to evolve because you and the universe are unfolding together. How can you prove that to yourself? One way is through a Sanskrit practice called Sankalpa. Any intention or thought that you put your will behind is a Sankalpa. Included in the term is the whole idea of means: Having made a wish or had a thought you want to come true, how do you actually get results? The answer depends a great deal on your relationship to time (the root word kalpa means “time”).

  • If timelessness is part of your being, the wish will come true spontaneously without delay. You have the power to play with time as you would any other part of your world.

  • If timelessness has a tentative relationship to your being, some wishes will come true spontaneously, others won’t. There will be delays and an uneasy sense that you might not get what you want. Your ability to play with time is shaky but developing.

  • If timelessness has no relationship to your being, it will take work and determination to get what you want. You have no power over time. Instead of playing with it, you are subject to its inexorable march.

  From these three broad categories one can project three different belief systems. Consider which one best applies to you.

  1. I am pressed for time. There aren’t enough hours in the day to accomplish everything I want. Other people make a lot of demands on my time, and it’s all I can do to keep everything in balance. What I’ve gotten in life I’ve earned through hard work and determination. As far as I know, this is the road to success.

  2. I consider myself pretty lucky. I’ve gotten to do a lot of the things I’ve always wanted to do. Although my life is busy, I find a way to make enough time for myself. Every once in a while things just fall into place on their own. Deep down, I expect my wishes to come true, but I am okay if they don’t.

  3. I believe that the universe brings you whatever you need. Certainly that’s true in my life. I’m amazed to find that my every thought brings some response. If I don’t get what I want, I realize that something inside me is blocking it. I spend time working on my inner awareness far more than struggling with outside forces.

  These are just snapshots of Sankalpa, but most people fall into one of these categories. They represent, again in a very general way, three stages of personal evolution. It’s useful to know that they exist, for many people would find it hard to believe that there is any reality other than the first one, in which hard work and determination are the only keys to getting what you want.

  Once you gain even a hint that wishes can come true without so much struggle, you can resolve to move to a new stage of growth. Growth is accomplished by awareness, yet you can resolve today to change your relationship to time:

  I will let time unfold for me.

  I will keep in mind that there’s always enough time.

  I will follow my own rhythm.

  I will not misuse time by procrastination and delay.

  I will not fear what time brings in the future.

  I will not regret what time brought in the past.

  I will stop racing against the clock.

  Try to adopt just one of these resolves today and see how it changes your reality. Time isn’t demanding, although we all act as if the clock rules our existence (or if it doesn’t, we still keep a close watch on it). Time is meant to unfold according to your needs and wants. It will start to do that only if you give up the opposite belief—that time is in charge.

  Secret #13

  YOU ARE TRULY FREE WHEN YOU ARE NOT A PERSON

  SEVERAL YEARS AGO IN A SMALL VILLAGE outside New Delhi, I was sitting in a small, stuffy room with a very old man and a young priest. The priest sat on the floor swaying back and forth as he recited words inked on bark sheets that looked ancient. I listened, having no idea what the priest was intoning. He was from the far south and his language, Tamil, was foreign to me. But I knew he was telling me the story of my life, past and future. I wondered how I got roped into this and began to squirm.

  It had taken strong persuasion from an old friend to get me to the small room. “It’s not just Jyotish, it’s much more amazing,” he coaxed. Indian astrology is called Jyotish, and it goes back thousands of years. Visiting your family astrologer is common practice everywhere in India, where people plan weddings, births, and even routine business transactions around their astrological charts (Indira Gandhi was a famous example of someone who followed Jyotish), but modern times have led to a fading away of tradition. I had chronically avoided any brushes with Jyotish, being a child of modern India and later a working doctor in the West.

  But my friend prevailed, and I had to admit that I was curious about what was going to happen. The young priest, dressed in a wrapped skirt with bare chest and hair shiny with coconut oil—both marks of a southerner—didn’t draw up my birth chart. Every chart he needed had already been drawn up hundreds of years ago. In other words, someone sitting under a palm tree many generations ago had taken a strip of bark, known as a Nadi, and inscribed my life on it.

  These Nadis are scattered all over India, and it’s pure chance to run across one that applies to you. My friend had spent several years tracking down just one for himself; the priest produced a whole sheaf for me, much to my friend’s amazed delight. You have to come for the reading, he insisted.

  Now the old man sitting across the table was interpreting in Hindi what the priest was chanting. Because of overlapping birth times and the vagaries of the calendar when we are speaking of centuries, Nadis can overlap, and the first few sheets didn’t apply to me. But by the third sheet or so, the young priest with the sing-song voice was reading facts that were startlingly precise: my birth date, my parents’ names, my own name and my wife’s, the number of children we have and where they live now, the day and hour of my father’s recent death, his exact name, and my mother’s.

  At first there seemed to be a glitch: The Nadi gave the wrong first name for my mother, calling her Suchinta, when in fact her name is Pushpa. This mistake bothered me, so I took a break and went to a phone to ask her about it. My mother told me, with great surprise, that in fact her birth name was Suchinta, but since it rhymed with the word for “sad” in Hindi, an uncle suggested that it be changed when she was three years old. I hung up the phone, wondering what this whole experience meant, for the young priest had also read out that a relative would intervene to change my mother’s name. No one in our family had ever mentioned this incident, so the young priest wasn’t indulging in some kind of mind-reading.

  For the benefit of skeptics, the
young priest had passed nearly his whole life in a temple in South India and did not speak English or Hindi. Neither he nor the old man knew who I was. Anyway, in this school of Jyotish, the astrologer doesn’t take down your birth time and cast a personal chart which he then interprets. Instead, a person walks into a Nadi reader’s house, the reader takes a thumbprint, and based on that, the matching charts are located (always keeping in mind that the Nadis may be lost or scattered to the winds). The astrologer reads out only what someone else has written down perhaps a thousand years ago. Here’s another twist to the mystery: Nadis don’t have to cover everyone who will ever live, only those individuals who will one day show up at an astrologer’s door to ask for a reading!

  In rapt fascination I sat through an hour of more arcane information about a past life I had spent in a South Indian temple, and how my transgressions in that lifetime led to painful problems in this one, and (after a moment’s hesitation while the reader asked if I really wanted to know) the day of my own death. The date falls reassuringly far in the future, although even more reassuring was the Nadi’s promise that my wife and children would lead long lives full of love and accomplishment.

  I walked away from the old man and the young priest into the blinding hot Delhi sunshine, almost dizzy from wondering how my life would change with this new knowledge. It wasn’t the details of the reading that mattered. I have forgotten nearly all of them, and I rarely think of the incident except when my eye falls on one of the polished bark sheets, now framed and kept in a place of honor in our home. The young priest handed it to me with a shy smile before we parted. The one fact that turned out to have a deep impact was the day of my death. As soon as I heard it, I felt both a profound sense of peace and a new sobriety that has been subtly changing my priorities ever since.