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

by Deepak Chopra

  Science has no idea why metamorphosis evolved. It is almost impossible to imagine that insects hit on it by chance—the chemical complexity of turning into a butterfly is incredible; thousands of steps are all minutely interconnected. (It’s as if you dropped off a bicycle at the shop to be repaired, and when you came back the parts had become a Gulfstream jet.)

  But we do have some idea about how this delicate chain of events is linked. Two hormones, one called juvenile hormone, the other ecdysone, regulate the process, which looks to the naked eye like a caterpillar dissolving into soup. These two hormones make sure that the cells moving from larva to butterfly know where they are going and how they are to change. Some cells are told to die; others digest themselves, while still others turn into eyes, antennae, and wings. This implies a fragile (and miraculous) rhythm that must remain in precise balance between creation and destruction. That rhythm, it turns out, depends on day length, which in turn depends on the earth’s rotation around the sun. Therefore, a cosmic rhythm has been intimately connected to the birth of butterflies for millions of years.

  Science concentrates on the molecules, but this is a striking example of intelligence at work, using molecules as a vehicle for its own intent. The intent in this case was to create a new creature without wasting old ingredients. (And if there is only one reality, we can’t say, as science does, that day length causes the pupa’s hormones to begin the metamorphosis into a butterfly. Day length and hormones come from the same creative source, weaving one reality. That source uses cosmic rhythms or molecules as it sees fit. Day length doesn’t cause hormones to change any more than hormones cause the day to change—both are tied to a hidden intelligence that creates both at once. In a dream or a painting, a boy may hit a baseball, but his bat doesn’t cause the ball to fly through the air. The whole dream or painting fits together seamlessly.)

  Here is another example: Two chemicals called actin and myosin evolved eons ago to allow the muscles in insect wings to contract and relax. Thus, insects learned to fly. When one of these paired molecules is absent, wings will grow but they cannot flap and are therefore useless. Today, the same two proteins are responsible for the beating of the human heart, and when one is absent, the person’s heartbeat is inefficient and weak, ultimately leading to heart failure.

  Again, science marvels at the way molecules adapt over millions of years, but isn’t there a deeper intent? In our hearts, we feel the impulse to fly, to break free of boundaries. Isn’t that the same impulse nature expressed when insects began to take flight? The prolactin that generates milk in a mother’s breast is unchanged from the prolactin that sends salmon upstream to breed, enabling them to cross from saltwater to fresh. The insulin in a cow is exactly the same as the insulin in an amoeba; both serve to metabolize carbohydrates, even though a cow is millions of times more complex than an amoeba. To believe in one reality that is totally interconnected isn’t mystical at all, it turns out.

  How, then, did the belief in one reality fall apart? There was another alternative, which also put each person at the center of his or her own world. But instead of being included, one feels alone and isolated, driven by personal desire rather than a shared life force or communion through the soul. This is the choice we call ego, although it has been called by other names, such as the pursuit of pleasure, the bondage of karma, and (if we resort to a religious vocabulary) banishment from paradise. So thoroughly does it permeate our culture, following your ego doesn’t feel like a choice anymore. We’ve all been carefully trained since childhood in the ways of I, me, and mine. Competition teaches us that we have to fight for what we want. The threat of other egos, who feel as isolated and alone as we do, is ever present—our desires could be thwarted if someone else gets there first.

  I don’t have an ego-bashing agenda in mind here. Ego bashing looks for a villain whose actions keep people from finding happiness, which is the underlying reason why people suffer, why they never find their true self, God, or the soul. The ego, we are told, blinds us with its constant demands, its greed, selfishness, and insecurity. That is a common theme but a mistaken one, because throwing the ego into the dark, making it an enemy, only creates more division and fragmentation. If there is one reality, it must be all-inclusive. The ego can’t be thrown out any more than desire can be thrown out.

  The choice to live in separation—a choice no cell ever makes unless it becomes cancerous—gave rise to a certain strain of mythology. Every culture tells the story of a golden age buried in the dim past. This story of lost perfection debases human beings instead of exalting them. People told themselves that human nature must be innately flawed, that everyone wore the scars of sin, that God disapproved of his once-innocent children. A myth has the power to take a choice and make it seem like destiny. Separation took on a life of its own, but did the possibility of one reality ever really go away?

  To embrace one reality again, we must accept that the world is in us. This is a spiritual secret based on the nature of the brain, which spends every second manufacturing the world. When your best friend calls you on the phone from Tibet, you take for granted that he is far away, yet the sound of his voice occurs as a sensation in your brain. If your friend shows up on your doorstep, his voice hasn’t gotten any closer. It is still a sensation in the same part of your brain, and it will remain there after your friend leaves and his voice lingers inside you. When you look at a distant star, it too seems far away, yet it exists as a sensation in another part of your brain. So the star is in you. The same is true when you taste an orange or touch a velvet cloth or listen to Mozart—every possible experience is being manufactured inside yourself.

  At this moment, ego-based life is thoroughly convincing, which is why no amount of pain and suffering drives people to abandon it. Pain hurts, but it doesn’t show a way out. The debate on how to end war, for example, has proved totally futile because the instant I see myself as an isolated individual, I confront “them,” the countless other individuals who want what I want.

  Violence is built into the opposition of us versus them. “They” never go away and “they” never give up. They will always fight to protect their stake in the world. As long as you and I have a separate stake in the world, the cycle of violence will remain permanent. The dire results can be seen in the body, too. In a healthy body, every cell recognizes itself in every other cell. When this perception goes awry and certain cells become “the other,” the body goes on an attack against itself. This state is known as an auto-immune disorder, of which rheumatoid arthritis and lupus are devastating examples. The violence of self against self is based entirely on a mistaken concept, and although medicine can bring some relief to the war-torn body, no cure can be achieved without correcting the mistaken concept first.

  Getting serious about bringing violence to an end means giving up a personal stake in the world, once and for all. That alone will pluck violence out by the roots. This may sound like a shocking conclusion. One’s immediate reaction is to say, “But I am my personal stake in the world.” Fortunately, such isn’t the case. The world is in you, not the other way around. This is what Christ meant when he taught that one should attain the kingdom of God first and worry about worldly things later, if at all. God owns everything by virtue of having created everything. If you and I are creating every perception that we take for reality, then we are allowed to own our creation as well.

  Perception is the world; the world is perception.

  In that key idea, the drama of us-versus-them collapses. We are all included in the only project that makes any difference: reality-making. To defend any outside thing—money, property, possessions, or status—makes sense only if those things are essential. But the material world is an aftereffect. Nothing in it is essential. The only personal stake worth having is the ability to create freely, with full awareness of how reality-making works.

  I feel sympathetic to those who have examined the ego and found it so repugnant that they want to be without ego. But in the
end, attacking the ego is just a subtle disguise for attacking yourself. Destroying the ego would serve no purpose even if it could be achieved. It is vital to keep our entire creative machinery intact. When you strip away its ugly, insecure, violent dreams, the ego is no longer ugly, insecure, and violent. It takes its natural place as part of the mystery.

  The one reality has already revealed a deep secret: Being a creator is more important than the whole world. It’s worth pausing for a moment to take that in. In fact, it is the world. Of all the liberating ideas that could change a person’s life, this one is perhaps the most freeing. Yet to truly live it, to be a true creator, a great deal of conditioning needs to be broken down. No one remembers being told to believe in the material world. Yet somehow we’ve learned to accept ourselves as limited beings. The outside world must be far more powerful. It dictates the storyline, not you. The world comes first; you come a distant second.

  The outside world will never produce any spiritual answers until you take on a new role as the manufacturer of reality. That feels strange at first, yet we can already see how a new set of beliefs is falling into place:

  Everything I am experiencing reflects myself: Therefore I don’t have to try and escape. There is nowhere to escape to, and as long as I see myself as the creator of my reality, I wouldn’t want to escape even if I could.

  My life is part of every other life: My connection to all living things makes it impossible that I have enemies. I feel no need to oppose, resist, conquer, or destroy.

  I have no need to control anyone or anything: I can affect change by transforming the only thing that I ever had control of in the first place, which is myself.

  CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE SECOND SECRET

  To truly possess the second secret, begin to see yourself as a co-creator in everything that happens to you. One simple exercise is to sit wherever you are and look around. As your gaze falls on a chair, a picture, the color of the walls in your room, say to yourself, “This stands for me. This, too, stands for me.” Let your awareness take in everything, and now ask yourself:

  Do I see order or disorder?

  Do I see my uniqueness?

  Do I see how I really feel?

  Do I see what I really want?

  Some things in your environment will speak instantly to these questions while others won’t. A bright, cheerfully painted apartment open to the light stands for a very different state of mind than a dark basement efficiency. Yet a cluttered desk piled high with papers could stand for quite a few things: inner disorder, fear of meeting one’s obligations, accepting too much responsibility, ignoring mundane details, and so on. This inconsistency is valid because we each express and at the same time hide who we are. Some of the time you express who you are, while at other times you detach from your real feelings, deny them, or find outlets that feel socially acceptable. If that sofa was bought just because it was cheap and you decided to make do, if the wall color is white because you didn’t care what color you looked at, if you’re afraid to throw out a picture because your in-laws gave it to you as a present, you are still seeing symbols of how you feel. Without dwelling on details, it’s possible to scan someone’s personal space and fairly accurately discern if that person is satisfied or dissatisfied with life, has a strong or weak sense of personal identity, is a conformist or nonconformist, values order over chaos, feels optimistic or hopeless.

  Now step into your social world. When you are with your family or friends, listen with your inner ear to what is going on. Ask yourself:

  Do I hear happiness?

  Does being with these people make me feel alive, alert?

  Is there an undertone of fatigue?

  Is this just a familiar routine, or are these people really responding to each other?

  However you answer these questions, you are assessing your world and what is going on inside you. Other people, like the objects in your surroundings, are a mirror. Now turn on the evening news, and instead of watching it as if events are happening “out there,” tune in personally. Ask yourself:

  Does this world I see feel safe or unsafe?

  Do I feel the fear and dismay of a disaster, or am I just being titillated and entertained?

  When the news is bad, am I still watching basically to be entertained?

  Which part of me does this program stand for? The part that dwells on one problem after another or the part that wants to find answers?

  This exercise develops a new kind of awareness. You begin to break the habit of seeing yourself as an isolated, separate entity. The realization dawns that the whole world is actually nowhere but inside you.

  Exercise #2: Bringing Home the World

  To say that you are a creator isn’t the same as to say that your ego is. The ego will always remain attached to your personality, and certainly your personality doesn’t create everything around you. Creation doesn’t happen on that level. Let’s see, then, if we can get closer to the real creator inside you. We’ll do this by meditating on a rose.

  Get a beautiful red rose and hold it in front of you. Inhale the fragrance and say to yourself, “Without me, this flower would have no fragrance.” Take in the glowing crimson color and say to yourself, “Without me, this flower would have no color.” Stroke the velvety petals and say to yourself, “Without me, this flower would have no texture.” Realize that if you subtract yourself from any sensation—sight, sound, touch, taste, smell—the rose would be nothing but atoms vibrating in a void.

  Now consider the DNA that is inside each cell of the rose. Visualize the billions of atoms strung along a double helix and say to yourself, “My DNA is looking at the DNA in this flower. The experience is not an observer looking at an object. DNA in one form is looking at DNA in another form.” Now see the DNA begin to shimmer and turn into invisible vibrations of energy. Say to yourself, “The rose has vanished into its primal energy. I have vanished into my primal energy. Now only one energy field is looking at another energy field.”

  Finally, see the boundary between your energy and the rose’s energy fade as one set of waves merges into another, like ocean waves rising and falling on the vast surface of an endless sea. Say to yourself, “All energy comes from one source and returns to it. When I look at a rose, a tiny flicker of infinity is rising from the source to experience itself.”

  Having followed this trail, you have arrived at what is truly real: An infinite, silent energy field flickered for an instant, experiencing an object (the rose) and a subject (you the observer) without going anywhere. Awareness simply took a look at one aspect of its eternal beauty. Its only motive was to create a moment of joy. You and the rose stood at opposite poles of that moment, yet there was no separation. A single creative stroke took place, fusing you both.

  Secret #3

  FOUR PATHS LEAD TO UNITY

  ALL THE SPIRITUAL SECRETS from this point on, meaning the vast majority, depend on your accepting the existence of one reality. If you still think of it as a pet idea held by someone else, your experience of life won’t change. One reality isn’t an idea—it is a doorway into a completely new way to participate in life. Imagine a passenger on an airplane who doesn’t know that flight exists. As the plane takes off he panics, thinking such thoughts as “What’s holding us up? What if this plane is too heavy? Air weighs nothing, and this whole plane is made of steel!” Thrown back on his own perceptions, the panicked passenger loses all sense of being in control; he is trapped in an experience that could be leading to disaster.

  In the cockpit the pilot feels more in control because he’s been trained to fly. He knows the aircraft; he understands the plane’s controls that he works. Therefore he has no reason to panic, even though in the back of his mind the danger of mechanical failure is always present. Disaster could occur, but that is out of his control.

  Now move on to the designer of jet planes, who can build any craft he wants based on the principle of flight. He occupies a position of greater control than the pilot
because if he kept on experimenting with various designs, he could come up with a plane that is incapable of crashing (perhaps some kind of glider with an airfoil that never stalls, no matter what angle of dive the plane goes into).

  This progression from passenger to pilot to designer is symbolic of a spiritual journey. The passenger is trapped in the world of the five senses. He can perceive flight only as impossible because when steel is compared to air, it only seems capable of falling through it. The pilot knows the principles of flight, which transcend the five senses by going to a deeper law of nature (the Bernoulli principle), which dictates that air flowing over a curved surface creates lift. The designer transcends even further by coaxing the laws of nature to arrive at an intended effect. In other words, he is closest to the source of reality, acting not as a victim of the five senses or a passive participant in natural law but as a co-creator with nature.

  You can take this journey yourself. It is more than symbolic because the brain, which is already manufacturing every sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell that you experience, is a quantum machine. Its atoms are in direct contact with the laws of nature, and through the magic of consciousness, when you have a desire, your brain is sending a signal to the very source of natural law. The simplest definition of consciousness is awareness; the two are synonymous. One time at a business conference an executive came up to me demanding a definition of consciousness that was practical and concrete. At first I wanted to reply that consciousness can’t be defined concretely, but I found myself blurting out, “Consciousness is the potential for all creation.” His face brightened as he suddenly got it. The more consciousness you have, the more potential you have to create. Pure consciousness, because it underlies everything, is pure potential.