You seem to be nowhere and everywhere at once. A G.o.d of pure being is infinite.
Common sense tells us that if you take away all qualities, nothing is left, and nothing doesn"t seem very useful. Even when people can be talked into giving up pleasure because, as the Buddha argued, it is always tied to pain, most Westerners go away and take up pleasure again. The argument for stage seven has to be made in more persuasive ways. First of all, no one forces this final realization upon you. Second, it doesn"t wipe out ordinary existence-you still eat, drink, walk, and act out desires. But now the desires do not belong to anyone; they are remnants of who you used to be. So who did you use to be?
The answer is karma. Until you become pure being, your ident.i.ty is wrapped up in a cycle of desires that lead to actions, every action leaves an impression, and impressions give rise to new desires. (When the potato chip commercial says, "Bet you can"t eat just one," the mechanism of desire-action-impression is at work.) This cycle is the cla.s.sic interpretation of karma. Everyone is caught up in it, for the simple reason that we all desire things. What is wrong with that? The great sages point out that nothing is wrong with karma except that it isn"t real. If you watch a puppy chasing its tail, you see pure karma. The puppy is absorbed, but it isn"t getting anywhere. The tail is always just out of reach, and even if the animal snaps it in his jaws, the pain will make him let go again, starting the chase all over. Karma means always wanting more of what won"t get you anywhere in the first place. In stage seven you realize this and no longer chase after phantoms. Now you end up at the source, which is pure being.
How do I fit in? ...
I am.
Once the adventure of soul-searching is over, things calm down. The state of "I am" forgoes pain and pleasure. Because all desire is centered on pain and pleasure, it comes as a surprise to find out that what I wanted all along was just to be. There are many kinds of worthwhile lives to lead. Is it worthwhile to lead the life of "I am"? In stage seven you include all the previous stages. Therefore you can live any way you want.
By a.n.a.logy, think of the world as a movie that includes everything; you cannot tell in any way that it is a movie; therefore, everyone behaves as if the scenario is real.
If you suddenly woke up and realized that nothing around you was real, what would you do? First of all, certain things would happen involuntarily. You wouldn"t be able to take other people"s dramas seriously. The smallest irritants and the greatest tragedies, a pebble in your shoe and World War II, become equally unreal. Your detachment might set you apart, but you could keep it to yourself.
Motivation would also vanish, because there"s nothing to achieve in a dreamworld. Poverty is as good as a million dollars when it"s all play money. Emotional attachments would also drop away, since no one"s personality is real anymore. After you consider all these changes, not much choice is left. The end of illusion is the end of experience as we know it. What do you receive in exchange? Only reality, pure and unvarnished.
In India they tell a fable about this: There was once a great devotee of Vishnu who prayed night and day to see his G.o.d. One night his wish was granted and Vishnu appeared to him. Falling on his knees, the devotee cried out, "I will do anything for you, my Lord, just ask."
"How about a drink of water?" Vishnu replied.
Although surprised by the request, the devotee immediately ran to the river as fast as his legs could carry him. When he got there and knelt to dip up some water, he saw a beautiful woman standing on an island in the middle of the river. The devotee fell madly in love on the spot. He grabbed a boat and rowed over to her. She responded to him, and the two were married. They had children in a house on the island; the devotee grew rich and old plying his trade as a merchant. Many years later, a typhoon came along and devastated the island. The merchant was swept away in the storm. He nearly drowned but regained consciousness on the very spot where he had once begged to see G.o.d. His whole life, including his house, wife, and children, seemed never to have happened.
Suddenly he looked over his shoulder, only to see Vishnu standing there in all his radiance.
"Well," Vishnu said, "did you find me a gla.s.s of water?"
The moral of the story is that you shouldn"t pay so much attention to the movie. In stage seven there is a shift of balance; one starts to notice the unchanging much more than the changing. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus called this "storing up treasure in heaven." But again a.n.a.logies fail. Stage seven isn"t a prize or reward for making right choices; it is the realization of what you always have been. If someone asks "Who are you?" every answer is misleading except "I am"-which means that we are all misled, even the miracle workers. We are the victims of mistaken ident.i.ty.
Our time has been spent projecting versions of reality, including versions of G.o.d, that are inadequate.
How do I find G.o.d? ...
By transcending.
Whatever it takes to get beyond illusion and back to reality, it"s a b.u.mpy landing when you get there. In fact, those few yogis and sages who have spoken about entering stage seven report that their first reaction was one of total loss. The comfort of illusion was stripped away. These are people who had reveled in ecstasy, miracles, deep insight, and intimacy with G.o.d.
Yet those experiences too were misleading. Leaving all of it behind, at a deeper level they now knew that something good had happened. Like sloughing off an old skin, they transcended to a new life and a new level of existence because the old life had simply withered.
Transcending is going beyond. In spiritual terms it also means growing up.
"When I was no longer a child, I put aside childish things," writes Saint Paul. By a.n.a.logy, even karma can be outgrown and put aside. Here is the argument for that: Two ultimate realities vie for our approval. One is karma, the reality of actions and desires. Karma is played out in the material world, forcing us to run on the same treadmill over and over. The other reality that claims to be ultimate has no action in it; it just is.
This reality is exemplified by the open, detached, peaceful state of deep meditation. Few people accept it, and those who do generally stay outside society as renunciates and ascetics.
However, to see yourself caught between two choices is false. "Ultimate reality" means the one and only; the winner swallows up the loser. So if you put your money on the loser, you have made a mistake that will cost you dearly. Eventually you will see that you have bought shadow for substance; your desires were ghostly wisps leading you down wrong paths.
As one Vedic master put it, "The world of karma is infinite, but you will discover that it is a boring infinity. The other infinity is never boring."
The reason, then, to return to the source derives from self-interest. I don"t want to be bored; I don"t want to come to the end of the chase and wind up empty-handed. Here all metaphors and a.n.a.logies end, because just as a dream gets exposed as illusion when you wake up, so Being eventually unmasks karma. Strip away the unreal and by definition all that remains must be real. The soul"s journey isn"t a game, a chase, or a gamble. It follows a predetermined course toward the moment of waking up.
Along the way tiny moments of waking up foreshadow the final event. I might be able to ill.u.s.trate this through a story. When I was ten our family lived in the hill station of Shillong, within reach of the Himalayas, and my father had an aide called Baba Sahib who cleaned his shoes and washed his clothes. Baba was a Muslim and a strong believer in the supernatural. Whenever he went down to the dhobi ghat, or wash place by the river, he pounded the clothes next to a cemetery. Baba was certain that ghosts inhabited the place and proved it by hanging the wet clothes on the gravestones. If they dried in less than half an hour, Baba knew that a ghost would be seen in the cemetery that night.
To prove it, he sneaked me out of the house and told me a story about a mother and child who were the primary haunters, both dying young under tragic circ.u.mstances. The two of us sat among the graves for two hours, I grew sleepy and afraid at the same time, but as we were leaving, Baba pointed in the distance.
"See-see there?" he cried.
And I did see-two pale apparitions floated above one of the gravestones. I rushed home in great excitement and told no one. After a day the secret was too hard to keep, so I told the safest person in the house, my grandmother. "Do you think I just imagined it?" I asked, hoping she would either confirm my vision or be amazed by it.
"What does it matter?" she said with a shrug. "The whole universe is imagined. Your ghosts are just as real as that."
At its source, the cosmos is equally real and unreal. The only way I have of knowing anything is through the neurons firing in my brain, and although they might take me to such a fine degree of perception that I could see every photon inside my cortex, at that point the cortex dissolves into photons as well. So the observer and the thing he is trying to observe merge, which is exactly how the chase after G.o.d also ends.
What is the nature of good and evil? ...
Good is the union of all opposites.
Evil no longer exists.
The shadow of evil stalks behind goodness up to the last moment. Only when it is totally absorbed into unity does the threat of evil end once and for all. The story of Jesus reaches its poignant climax in the garden of Gethsemane, when he prays that the cup be taken from his hands. He knows that the Romans are going to capture and kill him, and the prospect gives rise to a terrible moment of doubt. It is one of the loneliest and most wrenching moments in the New Testament-and it is utterly imaginary.
The text itself tells us that Jesus had walked apart from everyone else and that his disciples had fallen asleep. Therefore no one could have overheard what he said, particularly if he was praying. I think that this last temptation was projected onto him by writers of the gospel. Why?
Because they couldn"t conceive of his situation except through their own.
They viewed Christ across a gap, the same gap that keeps us from imagining how all fear, temptation, sin, evil, and imperfection could be transcended. Yet this is what happens in stage seven.
Religions have a hard time being funny, and in the Middle Ages people didn"t see much humor in the soul"s journey. They were too aware of death, disease, Satan"s temptations, and the many woes in this vale of tears. The church underscored these horrors, and about the only escape was on holidays when a rough plank stage was erected outside the cathedral. Upon it miracle plays were performed, and then Satan wasn"t so frightening because he could be played as a clown. The same people who trembled at the prospect of sin now witnessed the devil taking pratfalls. In those moments, the church was teaching a new lesson: evil itself must be redeemed. History comes to an end here on earth when Satan is accepted back into heaven; then the triumph of G.o.d becomes complete.
On the personal level, you can"t afford to have the last laugh until stage seven. As long as the mind is caught up in choices, some are going to turn out worse than others. We all equate pain with evil, and as a sensation, pain doesn"t end; it is part of our biological inheritance. The only way to get beyond it is to transcend, and that is accomplished by attaining a higher point of view. In stage seven all versions of the world are seen as projections, and a projection is nothing more than a point of view that has come to life. The highest point of view, then, would encompa.s.s anything that happens, without preference and without rejection.
I was starkly confronted by this possibility on two occasions when evil stood on my doorstep. The first occurred in the early 1970s when I was a struggling resident living in a seedy part of Boston. My wife had gone out, leaving me in charge of our infant daughter. It was getting late when the door to our apartment flew open, and a very big, menacing man strode in. He didn"t say anything. My head swiveled around, and before I was even aware that he was carrying a baseball bat, I jumped up and grabbed it.
Neither of us spoke. In less than a second I had swung the bat and hit him on the head, knocking him unconscious. A few seconds later my heart was pounding with adrenaline, but at the instant I acted, I wasn"t myself-the action didn"t belong to me.
Naturally a great deal of turmoil resulted, and when the police arrived it was quickly discovered that the man was a released felon with a history of a.s.sault and suspected murder. I had acted perfectly correctly, even though at a conscious level I have a strong commitment to nonviolence.
But the story isn"t complete. Two years ago I had just finished a lecture in a southern city and happened to exit from the hall by a back door into an alley. This looked like the shortest route back to my hotel, but waiting for me were three gang youths. One pulled a gun and held it to my temple. When he demanded my wallet, I suddenly knew what to say.
"Look, I can give you my bills but not my credit cards," I told him in a calm voice, holding out the money. "You don"t want to shoot me over two hundred dollars. That would be murder, and it will follow you the rest of your life. So just drop your weapon and go, okay?"
It amazed me to be saying these words; it was as though I were standing there watching myself. The youth"s hand was shaking, and the three of them looked undecided. All at once I shouted, "Go!" at the top of my lungs. The gun fell at my feet, and the three of them ran away.
Two scenes of evil, two different reactions. I offer them as evidence that something inside us already transcends the present situation. Where we see the play of opposites, our inner awareness takes every moment as unique. I haven"t told quite the whole story about the second incident. In my bargaining, I also promised the youths that I would not tell the police, and I never did. One act of potential violence was met with violence, the other with pacifism. I can"t explain my choices except to say that they weren"t chosen. The actions performed themselves. Justice was served in both cases, acted out from beyond my limited point of view. In stage seven a person realizes that it isn"t up to us to balance the scales; if we hand our choices over to G.o.d, we are free to act as the impulse moves us, knowing its source is divine unity.
What is my life challenge? ...
To be myself.
Nothing would seem easier than to be yourself, but people complain endlessly about how hard it is. When you are little your parents won"t let you be yourself. They have different ideas about eating the whole chocolate cake or drawing on the walls with crayons. Later on teachers keep you from being yourself. Then teenage peer pressure takes over, and finally, once society has imposed its demands, freedom is more restricted still. Alone on a desert island you might be able to be yourself, only guilt and shame would pursue you even there. The inheritance of repression is inescapable.
The whole problem is one of boundaries and resistance. Someone imposes a limit on you, and you resist it in order to break free. Thus "being myself" becomes a relative thing. Unless someone tells me what I can"t do, I have nothing to push against. By implication, my life would be shapeless. I would follow one whim after another, which itself is a kind of prison. To have a hundred wives and a feast on the table isn"t being yourself, it is being your desires.
In stage seven the problem comes to an end as boundaries and resistance both melt. To be in unity, you cannot have limitations. You are wholeness; that is what fills your perception. Choice A and choice B are equal in your eyes. When this is true, desire can flow where it will. Sometimes you get to eat the whole cake, have the hundred wives, and walk on the gra.s.s.
But being deprived of these fulfillments is just as good. I am not my desires. Being myself no longer has the slightest outside reference.
Doesn"t this deprive me of choice? Both yes and no. In stage seven there are still preferences. A person will want to dress and talk a certain way; there may even be decided likes and dislikes. Yet these are karmic holdovers from the past. Because I speak English and Hindi, come from a doctor"s family, do a lot of traveling, and write books, those influences could well persist into stage seven. But they would recede into the background, turning into the wallpaper of my real existence, which is simply to be.
How would I be able to tell that such a state is real? The skeptic who looks at stage seven would claim that unity is just a form of self-deception. All this talk about All and Nothing doesn"t erase the necessities of this world, and in fact the greatest mystics do preserve the trappings of ordinary life. The problem of self-deception seems trickier still when you realize that the ego, in its need to continue as the center of all activity, has no trouble pretending to gain enlightenment.
One is reminded of the story of the saffron monk: A young man in India used to attend a discussion group with his friends. They considered themselves to be serious seekers, and their discussions ran to esoteric subjects about the soul, the existence of afterlife, and so on.
One night the talk grew very heated and the young man stepped outside for some air. When he returned to the room, he saw a monk in saffron robes sitting off to the side. No one else in the room seemed to notice this.
The young man took his place, saying nothing. The arguments continued in loud voices, but still the monk sat silently and no one took any notice.
It was after midnight when the young man got up to go; to his surprise the saffron monk got up and followed. For the entire walk home in the moonlight the monk kept him company, and when the young man woke up the next morning, the monk was waiting by the bed in the young mans room.
Perhaps because he was so spiritual, this vision didn"t frighten the young man or make him fear for his sanity. He was delighted to have the peaceful presence of the monk around him. For the next week they remained constant companions, despite the fact that no one else saw anything. Eventually the young man had to tell his story to someone; he chose the teacher J.
Krishnamurti (from whose writings I got the story).
"First of all, this vision means everything to me," the young man began.
"But I"m not the kind of person who needs symbols and images to worship. I reject religion-only Buddhism ever interested me because of its purity, but even there I didn"t find enough to make me want to follow it."
"I understand," Krishnamurti said. "So what is your question?"
"I want to know if this figure is real or just a figment of my mind. I have to know the truth."
"You said it has brought you a great deal of meaning?"
The young man grew enthusiastic. "I have undergone a profound transformation. I feel joyful and at peace."
"Is the monk with you now?" Krishnamurti asked. The young man nodded, but hesitantly.
"To be quite honest," he said, "the monk is starting to fade. He is not so vivid as at first."
"Are you afraid of losing him?"
Anxiety showed in the young man"s face. "What do you mean? I came here wanting the truth, but I don"t want you to take him away. Don"t you realize how this vision has consumed me? In order to have peace and joy, I think about this vision, and they come to me."
Krishnamurti replied, "Living in the past, however pleasant and uplifting, prevents the experience of what is. The mind finds it difficult not to live in a thousand yesterdays. Take this figure you cherish. The memory of it inspires you, delights you, and gives you a sense of release. But it is only the dead inspiring the living."
The young man looked crestfallen and glum. "So it wasn"t real after all?"
"The mind is complicated," said Krishnamurti. "It gets conditioned by the past and by how it would like things to be. Does it really matter if this figure is real or projected?"
"No," the young man admitted. "It only matters that it has shown me so much."
"Has it? It didn"t reveal to you the working of your own mind, and you became a prisoner of your experience. If I may say so, this vision brought fear into your life because you were afraid to lose it. Greed also came in because you wanted to h.o.a.rd the experience. Thus you lost the one thing this vision might have brought you: self-knowledge. Without that, every experience is an illusion."
I find this a beautiful and moving tale, worth recounting at length.
Before stage seven the full value of being yourself isn"t known.
Experience can be shaped to bring great inspiration. But in the end this isn"t enough. Every divine image remains an image; every vision tempts us to hold on to it. To be really free, there is no option except to be yourself. You are the living center around which every event happens, yet no event is so important that you willingly give yourself up to it. By being yourself you open the door to what is, the never-ending play of cosmic intelligence curving back to know itself again and again. In this way life remains fresh and fulfills its need to renew itself at every moment.
What is my greatest strength? ...
Unity.
What is my biggest hurdle? ...
Duality.
Like every other stage, this one must ripen. Many people have had flashes of unity, but that isn"t the same as living there permanently. A flash of unity can feel like bleeding into the scenery, but unlike autism, which can make a child lose the boundary of ident.i.ty, the experience is positive-the self expands and achieves a higher vision. Instead of needing to intuit anything, you simply are that thing. Stage seven brings the ultimate form of empathy.
The opposite of unity is duality. Currently two dominant versions of reality are believed by almost everyone. Version one: there is only the material world, and nothing can be real that doesn"t obey physical laws.
Version two: two realities exist, the earthly and the divine.
Version one is called the secular view, and even religious people adopt it for everyday use. Yet total belief in materialism, as we have seen, has become unacceptable for a host of reasons. It cannot explain credible, witnessed miracles, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, the testimony of millions of people who have had answered prayers, and most convincing of all, the discovery of the quantum world, which doesn"t obey any ordinary physical laws.
The second version of reality is less rigid. It allows for spiritual experience and miracles, which exist on the fringes of the material world.
At this moment someone is hearing the voice of G.o.d, witnessing the Virgin Mary, or going into the light. These experiences still leave the material world intact and essentially untouched. You can have G.o.d and a Mercedes at the same time, each on its own level. In other words, there is duality.
Many religions, Christianity being a prime example, declare that G.o.d sits in heaven, unapproachable except by faith, prayer, death, or the intervention of saints. Yet this dualism falls apart once we heal the divisions between body, mind, and spirit. Duality is another word for separation, and in the state of separation, many illusions crop up. Steam and ice, sunlight and electricity, bone and blood are examples of things that seem totally different until you know the laws of transformation, which turn one form into another. This holds true for body and soul as well. In separation they cannot be more different, until you find the laws that transform invisible, immortal, uncreated spirit into flesh.
In India there has been a strong nondual tradition for thousands of years, known as Vedanta. The word literally means "the end of the Vedas," the point where no sacred texts can help you anymore, where teaching stops and awareness dawns. "How do you know G.o.d is real?" a disciple once asked his guru.
The guru replied, "I look around and see the natural order of creation.
There is tremendous beauty in the simplest things. One feels alive and awake before the infinite majesty of the cosmos, and the deeper one looks, the more astounding this creation is. What more is needed?"
"But none of that proves anything," the disciple protested.
The guru shook his head. "You only say that because you aren"t truly looking. If you could see a mountain or a rain cloud for one minute without your doubts blocking the way, the evidence of G.o.d would be revealed instantly."
"Then tell me what is revealed," the disciple insisted. "After all, I have the same eyes as you."
"Something simple, undivided, unborn, eternal, solid as stone, boundless, independent, invulnerable, blissful, and all-knowing," the guru replied.
The disciple felt a rush of despair. "You see all that? Then I will give up, for I can"t possibly learn to perceive such a wonder."
"No, you are wrong," the guru said. "We all see eternity in every direction, but we choose to cut it into bits and pieces of time and s.p.a.ce.