Use the principle of change to keep your life fresh and renewable. Taking the attitude that the flow of life is always self-renewing will help you avoid stagnation, and anxiety over the future. What makes people anxious about the future is a gnawing fear that the best has already happened, or that a single missed opportunity will prove to be decisive. “The one that got away” is a recurrent theme of failed romance, and it applies equally to failed careers, abandoned projects, and deflated aspirations. But in reality “the one that got away” comes down to clinging to a fixed idea. Every creative person’s success is based on trust that inspiration is continuous. The more you create, the more there is to create. In a documentary on a famous orchestra conductor who was turning eighty, the most poignant moment came with his last comment: “I have no wish to live many more years, except for knowing that I am just beginning to say all that I want to say through my music.”
Gather information from every source. The universe is multidimensional, and when we speak of the flow of life, it’s a multidimensional flow. Imagine not just one mighty river rushing to the sea, but a hundred small streams converging, mixing, and each adding its unique contribution. To draw the most from life, you must be aware that absolutely anything can contribute to it. Inspiration comes from all directions, both inner and outer. You need alert antennae to sense how continuously your soul is communicating with you. It’s not a matter of tuning in to a hundred cable TV channels in the hope of finding one interesting program. Rather, in the welter of sensations that bombard the brain every day, certain ones are meant for you—they carry a meaning that is personal to you alone.
In the Indian tradition it is said that God spends as much time hiding as revealing himself, which points to an everyday truth. The next thing that will spur you on is asleep until you awaken it. The future is a hiding place we call the unknown. Yet the known, which is here and now, comes from nowhere if not from the unknown. The instinct that says “something is out there waiting” is valid. You stand at the pivot point between the unknown and the known. Your task is to reach into the darkness and pluck out the next thing that will be meaningful.
Some people avoid the task by repeating the known over and over. What they don’t realize is that the unknown is never truly invisible. Your soul anticipates what you need, and it lays out hints and clues on your path. This is the soul’s subtle form of guidance. It winnows out the useless, the pointless, the misleading, and the false starts. If you tune in with alertness, you’ll feel a sense of vibrancy about the thing you should be doing—it feels right, alluring, seductive, enticing, pleasurable, curious, intriguing, and challenging, all at once. Being open to those feelings, which are entirely subjective, allows you to pick up the hints left by your soul. The unknown looks dark only to those who can’t see its hidden glow.
Wait until your intention is clear. Countless people are looking for motivation in the wrong places. They seek to increase their energy and drive. They want the biggest reward. They lie in wait for a lightning bolt to hit them with the next great invention or business idea. The real source of motivation isn’t any of those things. Motivation, the kind that carries seed ideas to fruition with energy and passion, comes from a clear intent. Knowing exactly what you want to do, with unwavering conviction, is the spark that generates everything else, including the big ideas and the great rewards. Confusion and uncertainty divide the flow of life into separate, weak channels. Because a clear intent can’t be forced, many people never find one. They apply a bit of themselves to half a dozen areas of their lives. Yet there is no great secret to finding a clear intent; it depends upon simply waiting.
Waiting isn’t a passive act; it only looks passive. The right kind of waiting involves discrimination: you are inwardly sorting out what feels right from what doesn’t. You allow vague fantasies and idealistic schemes to do what they will—the pointless ones dissolve in time. You keep an eye out for a spark that refuses to be extinguished. Much else is involved—anxious searching, the struggle of self-doubt, the lure of grandiose ambitions, and flights of impossible fancy. Eventually a clear intent will emerge, and once it does, the invisible forces harbored in the soul will come to your aid. For many people, waiting for a clear intent is so exhausting that they undertake it only a few times, generally in those uncertain years when young adults feel compelled to start a career. Casting about, they feel aimless and under pressure; they watch as their more motivated peers pass them by in the job market.
But with hindsight, one can see that the individuals who held out until a clear intent revealed itself were the lucky ones. Despite stress, peer pressure, and doubt, they had the inner strength to trust that “something is out there waiting.” Or in here waiting. It amounts to the same thing, a hidden potential that needed to be carefully plucked out from the tangled fabric of the psyche. The best thing you can do is to go through this process as many times as possible. The fog that shrouds your soul may be thick, but it will clear if you want it to, however long the process takes.
Realize that nothing is personal—the universe is acting through you. It sounds strange to hear that you shouldn’t take your life personally. What could be more personal? Yet the universe’s plan is composed entirely of impersonal forces. They apply equally to every object, every event. They are not loaded against you or for you, any more than gravity is. Finding your soul is the same as finding the impersonal self, because the soul has direct access to the invisible forces that uphold the cosmos. Intelligence is impersonal, and so are creativity and evolution. They are discovered only in your deepest awareness. To take full advantage of them, look upon life as a school, with consciousness as its curriculum.
The ego takes everything personally, which is a big hindrance; experience is happening to “me.” Buddhism spends a great deal of time trying to dispel the notion that this “me” has a claim on experience. Instead, Buddhists say, the experience is unfolding on its own, and you, as an experiencer, are simply a conduit. Thus we get formulations like “Thinking is thinking itself.” It can be baffling to unravel the complexities of such a simple statement as “Being is,” or “The dancer is the dance.” Yet the essential point is practical: the less you take life personally, the more easily it can flow through you. Holding on lightly works. Holding on tightly doesn’t work. Nor does assuming that every experience either builds you up or tears you down. The flow of life doesn’t sort itself into plus and minus columns. Everything has its own intrinsic value, measured in energy, creativity, intelligence, and love. To find those values, a person must stop asking, “What good does it do me?” Instead, you witness what happens, finding fascination in all of it.
Ask for nothing less than inspiration. Daily life can be maddeningly mundane. You can overcome the tedium by piling up as many interests as possible, but in the end you may find that you never got below the surface. For what makes life mundane is shallowness. In the depths, every experience is full of vitality. You feel vibrant, no matter what your life looks like on the surface. In some spiritual traditions, making your daily routine vibrant is an ultimate goal. The idea is that you can carry water and chop wood while still feeling universal. I respect those traditions, but sometimes I miss the most vibrant quality that life can offer, which is inspiration. It limits the soul to ask it to fill daily routine with light. Why not fill extraordinary achievement with light?
Consciousness is value-free. It can be shaped into ugly, dull, inert things if your intention moves that way. Like an artist’s palette, which is full of colors but which carries no guarantee that lovely pictures will result, consciousness contains vibrancy, brilliance, and fascination. But even a self-aware person doesn’t automatically gets a life with those qualities. You must shape consciousness with intent, which is why asking for inspiration is crucial. So is not settling for less. I said before that your soul places hints along the path, clues to the next thing that will spur you on. To be more precise, these hints depend on where you’re going and where you’re coming from. If yo
u are walking a path of low expectations, the next thing you find will support those low expectations.
Your soul has no agenda. It’s not out to make you the best you can be. It’s out to fulfill the potential you discover in yourself, which means that you and your soul are in a cooperative venture. You ask, it supplies. What it supplies leads you to ask for the next thing. Because it’s rare to meet every occasion with a clear intention, often we ask for things that are mixed up, conflicted, and confused. And when we do, the soul winds up providing us with less-than-ideal opportunities. We find ourselves at loose ends or following false trails. To keep this from happening, ask for nothing less than inspiration. That is to say, keep your highest vision in mind, and in any situation, seek the highest outcome according to that vision.
As always, this strategy is purely subjective; it happens inside. But only by cleaving steadily to your vision can you align yourself with the highest potential you were born to express. The best you can be comes down to a series of decisions that refuses the less-than-best time and again. We aren’t speaking of consumer shopping here. It’s not the less-than-best lover, car, house, or job. You refuse the less-than-best idea, motivation, purpose, solution, and goal, choosing instead to wait for better, and trusting that your soul will bring it.
See every step as part of the process. When some people say, “It’s all part of the process,” one hears a note of resignation, as if life takes time and patience, but if you can put up with the bother long enough, the process eventually works. This makes the process sound like a bureaucracy grinding its way to action, or a conveyor belt that mechanically produces results. The process I’m describing is not like that at all. It is dynamic, unpredictable, fascinating, and ever-changing. To be caught up in the process brings ultimate joy and fulfillment. The great spiritual guides, those who can look at life metaphysically, often declare that the process takes care of itself. A noted Indian guru was once asked, “Is my personal evolution something I’m doing or something that’s happening to me?” His answer: “It’s both, but if we must choose, it’s something that is happening to you.”
Yet, for all that, the spiritual path doesn’t feel automatic. Here and now, from the ant’s perspective rather than that of the eagle, life takes participation. You must focus on every minute; new challenges show up constantly and cannot be ignored. It’s all too easy, then, to view your life as a sequence of moments, steps forward or backward. Most people participate in their lives exactly that way, by “living one day at a time,” as the saying goes. This perspective would turn all of us into survivors. It would deny life its wholeness, and if you take that away, wholehearted participation is impossible. Of course you will accept one slice of bread at a time if you don’t know that the whole loaf can be yours.
We are forced to speak in metaphors because the process of life is mysterious. Does it happen right now if right now you are filling your car with gas, changing a baby diaper, or sitting in the dentist’s chair? Does it unfold to a glorious conclusion on a date you can circle on your calendar? The mingling of the visible and invisible, the sublime and the distressing, is inescapable. The only viable attitude you can take is “This is it.” Sometimes “it” amounts to nothing; you can’t wait for it to end. Sometimes “it” feels as if the heavens have parted; you can only hope it will last forever. But “it” is a bird on the wing. You’ll never catch it. The miracle is that the greatest creations, such as the human brain, were made by chasing after the bird. We weave ourselves into a tapestry of experience that grows more exalted as time passes, yet each thread is nothing but a wisp of thought, desire, or feeling. Every moment lived adds another stitch, and even if you cannot envision what the final pattern will look like, it helps to know that the thread is golden.
10 STEPS TO
WHOLENESS
PROMISES YOU
CAN KEEP
Wholeness is the result of connecting body, mind, and soul. In wholeness you aren’t divided against yourself; therefore the choices you make are beneficial at every level. Once you realize how the soul functions, there is no reason to turn back and live any other way than from the level of the soul. Yet living without the soul has also been easy. You can ignore being divided against yourself. Life goes on without resolving that issue. Bad decisions bring pain and suffering, but people learn to put up with it. In other words, life without being whole is “easy” because of habit, inertia, or old conditioning that is hard to break. (I remember my first meditation instructor, who insisted that if I wasn’t committed to daily practice, I might as well not start. “I don’t know how many years it takes to reach enlightenment,” he said, “but it takes only one day to quit.”)
The secret is to live in wholeness now, before you completely achieve it. What’s needed is a lifestyle that keeps your vision alive. “Holistic” has come to mean organic food, leaving no carbon footprint, practicing prevention, and trusting in alternative medicine. All of those things are undeniably good—they are evidence of growing consciousness that earlier generations only dreamed of—but they won’t keep you on the spiritual path. A holistic lifestyle should sustain the ties to your soul even when those ties feel fragile.
Spiritual teachers have wrestled with this problem for centuries, wondering how they can bridge the gulf between the old life and the new. Teaching and preaching aren’t enough. Showing by example isn’t enough. Yet many human beings have crossed over to the light (call them saints, yogis, bodhisattvas, or simply inspiring examples) and what they have achieved is real. If we distill their stories, a lifestyle emerges that applies to you and me in these times of transition. The lifestyle is simple, and can be followed without anyone else needing to know or approve. I’ve broken it down into simple steps.
10 Steps to Wholeness
Nourish your “light body.”
Turn entropy into evolution.
Commit yourself to deeper awareness.
Be generous of spirit.
Focus on relationships instead of consumption.
Relate to your body consciously.
Embrace every day as a new world.
Let the timeless be in charge of time.
Feel the world instead of trying to understand it.
Seek after your own mystery.
These steps happen in awareness. They mean the most to me personally, because they are the fruit of my own journey. As a child in India I learned that my fate hung in the balance between vidya, or wisdom, and avidya, or ignorance. This choice, which goes back thousands of years, was painted in graphic terms that a young boy could understand. I was born in a time of turmoil as the country was struggling with every imaginable woe, from riots in the streets between Hindus and Muslims to gross social inequity and millions living on the verge of famine. What would save us? Not belief in God or massive social programs, good as those things might be. I was taught that life followed from the values you held in your own awareness. The road of light, or the road of darkness? By the time I was eight I knew which one to choose. Happiness, success, prosperity, and well-being would come my way if I lived by the light of vidya.
In later years I lost my innocence and came to see this promise as somewhat empty, like Benjamin Franklin’s promise that “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” More effective was the fear of living in avidya, which brought disease, poverty, and disgrace. These threats were not pumped into me, the way children are warned that the devil is waiting if they stray from God. Yet for nearly forty years I wandered between the two poles of wisdom and ignorance, or, if you will, belief and unbelief. I know firsthand the gap between vision and reality. Today, as firmly as I believe in self-transformation, I come back to that gap. Most people know what’s supposed to be good for them, but making promises to themselves (“I will never cheat,” “I won’t wind up getting a divorce,” “I’ll never stab anyone in the back to get ahead”) is never quite enough. (A guru was once asked by a confused disciple, “Master, how can I become a good perso
n?” The guru said, “It’s nearly impossible. If you think deeply, there are a thousand reasons to pick a pin up from the floor and a thousand reasons not to.” The disciple became very worried. “Then what can I do?” The guru smiled. “Find God.” Now the disciple was much more worried. “But, sir, finding God seems so far beyond my reach.” The guru shook his head. “Finding God is a hundred times easier than trying to be good. God is part of you, and once you locate that part, being good comes naturally.”)
If the spiritual path is to take us to our goal, we must make promises that we can keep every day. The ten steps I’ve outlined are just that. They don’t require you to stretch beyond your limits, and yet your limits will begin to expand. The ten steps can’t be undermined by old habits and conditioning, because you won’t be asked to fight against your old self. All you can do is help the new self to grow in silence. Yet nothing more is needed. The secret is that inner transformation cannot be seen as it occurs. The brain shifts as the person shifts. The brain has no way of preserving its old pathways once new ones have been created. In a sense the soul erases its tracks, and yet something very tangible is also happening.
A good friend was a committed seeker for years. To all outward appearances he led an ordinary life. Whenever I ran into him, I’d ask how his search was going. His reply, offered with a smile, was always the same. “I’m almost ready to peek out of the incubator.” This went on for several years. He was very private, and I doubt there were more than a handful of people who knew about his inner dedication. Then the day came when he gave up his strict spiritual disciplines, and he seemed much happier for it. When I asked what had changed, he spoke eloquently.
Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul: How to Create a New You Page 24