CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE SECRET

This is a lesson is about unity. As a young man, I was driven to reach as far as I could, but over time I began to grasp that unity is not an achievement one can set for oneself in the way one can set winning a game or finding the perfect wife or rising to the top of a profession. Unity is more like music. 

Bach might visit a kindergarten class and inspire the children with the hope that they can all be like him. In reality, few children will ever grow up with Bach’s genius for music. But they don’t have to. Music is a glorious pursuit on its own, comparing yourself to no one. Every moment of music-making brings delight on its own, not just as a step up the mountain toward the highest peak. 

Spirituality can bring delight at every moment—or at least every day—if it is pursued with the four things in mind that Vashistha taught. Let’s review them again, this time as they might be applied to our own lives. 

Contentment: Look for a moment of contentment every day. You have a right to it because, in cosmic design, you are safe and cared for. Be content not with your lot in life but with being here in the flow of life. The glories of creation are in your very cells; you are made of the same mind-stuff as the angels, the stars, and God himself. 

Inquiry: Don’t let a day go by without asking who you are. Understanding is a skill, and like all skills, it must be coaxed into existence. To understand who you mean return again and again to the question, Who am I? Each time you return you are allowing a new ingredient to enter your awareness. Every day is filled with the potential for expanding your awareness, and although each new addition may seem tiny, overall the accumulation will be great. It may take thousands of days to know who you are; it takes only one day to quit asking. Don’t let today be that day. 

Self-awareness: Never forget that you are not in the world; the world is in you. Whatever you need to know about existence will arise nowhere outside yourself. When anything happens to you, take the experience inward. Creation is set up to bring you constant hints and clues about your role as a co-creator. Be aware of them; absorb them. Your soul is metabolizing experience as surely as your body is metabolizing food. 

Strength: No one will ever be able to say that walking the spiritual path is the easiest thing in the world—or the hardest. The birth of the new is too intimately tied to the death of the old. Joy comes on the heels of sorrow, as it must if birth and death are merged. Don’t expect one or the other today. Use your strength to meet whatever is coming your way. Be as committed and passionate about spirituality as you can be. Strength is the foundation for passion, and you were designed to survive and thrive no matter how life unfolds. Be strong today in that knowledge.

THE MYSTERY OF LIFE IS REAL

THE LIFE YOU KNOW is a thin layer of events covering a deeper reality. In the deeper reality, you are part of every event that is happening now, has ever happened, or ever will happen. In the deeper reality, you know absolutely who you are and what your purpose is. There is no confusion or conflict with any other person on earth. Your purpose in life is to help creation to expand and grow. When you look at yourself, you see only love. 

The mystery of life isn’t any of these things, however. It’s how to bring them to the surface. If someone asked me how to prove that there really is a mystery in life, the simplest proof would be just this enormous separation between deep reality and everyday existence. Ever since you and I were born, we’ve had a constant stream of clues hinting at another world inside ourselves. 

Haven’t you ever fallen into a moment of wonder? Such moments may come in the presence of beautiful music, or at the sight of natural beauty that sends a shiver up your spine. Or you may have looked out of the corner of your eye at something familiar—morning sunlight, a tree swaying in the wind, the face of someone you love as he or she sleeps—knowing at that moment that life was more than it appears to be. Countless clues have come your way, only to be overlooked because they didn’t form a clear message. 

I have met an astonishing number of people whose spiritual beginnings were nothing short of amazing: As children, they may have seen a grandmother’s soul leave at the moment of her death, witnessed beings of light surrounding on a birthday, traveled beyond their physical bodies, or come home from school to see a beloved family member standing in the hallway, even though the person had just died in a terrible auto accident. 

(One man told me he was a “bubble boy” for the first ten years of his life, journeying in his bubble high over the city and away to unknown lands.) Millions of people—this is no exaggeration but testimony from public polls— have seen themselves bathed in a pearlescent white light at times. Or they heard a voice they knew came from God. Or they had invisible guardians in childhood, secret friends who protected them while they slept. Eventually, it became clear to me that more people have had such experiences—truly secret voyages into a reality separated from this one by a flimsy veil of disbelief—than not. 

Parting the veil means changing your own perception. This is a personal, totally subjective, yet very real shift. Where would you begin to solve a mystery that is everywhere, yet somehow never forms a whole message? A great sleuth like Sherlock Holmes would start his search from one elementary deduction: Something unknown wants to be known. A mystery that doesn’t want to be known will just keep retreating the closer you come to it. 

The mystery of life doesn’t behave that way: Its secrets are revealed immediately if you know where to look. But where is that? The body’s wisdom is a good entry point into the hidden dimensions of life because although completely invisible, the body’s wisdom is undeniably real—a fact that medical researchers began to accept in the mid- 1980s. The former view was that the brain’s capacity for intelligence was unique. But then signs of intelligence began to be discovered in the immune system, and then in the digestive system. 

In both these systems, special messenger molecules could be observed circulating through every organ, bringing information to and from the brain, but also functioning on their own. A white cell that can distinguish between invading enemy bacteria and harmless pollen is making an intelligent decision, even though it floats in the bloodstream apart from the brain. Ten years ago, it would have seemed absurd to speak of intestines being intelligent. 

The lining of the digestive tract was known to possess thousands of nerve endings, but these were just remote outposts of the nervous system—a way for it to keep in touch with the lowly business of extracting nutrition from food. Now it turns out that the intestines are not so lowly after all. Their scattered nerve cells form a finely tuned system for reacting to outside events—an upsetting remark at work, the threat of danger, a death in the family. 

The stomach’s reactions are just as reliable as the brain’s thoughts, and just as intricate. Your colon, your liver, and your stomach cells also think, only not in the brain’s verbal language. What people had been calling a “gut reaction” turned out to be a mere hint of the complex intelligence at work in a hundred thousand billion cells. In a sweeping medical revolution, scientists have stepped into a hidden dimension that no one had ever suspected. 

Cells have been outthinking us for millions of years. In fact, their wisdom, more ancient than cortical wisdom, could be the best model for the only thing more ancient than they, which is the cosmos. Perhaps the universe has been outthinking us, too. No matter where I look, I sense what cosmic wisdom is trying to accomplish. It is much the same as what I myself want to accomplish—to grow, expand, and create—the main difference being that my body is cooperating with the universe better than I manage to. 

Cells have no problem fully participating in the mystery of life. Theirs is a wisdom of total passion and commitment. So let’s see if we can link the qualities of bodily wisdom with the hidden dimensions we want to uncover: