Now apply this kind of vision to yourself. Can you look at your child or your spouse so that their essence strikes you, intensely and immediately? Can you transmit love in your glance and feel love in return? We all have this ability. Just as you stand at the center of space and time, so do you stand at the center of love. There is nothing you need to do. New vision comes from the awareness of who you are. When you renew your commitment to having new eyes, they will open.
New beliefs follow automatically from seeing things in a new way. A pupil once came to his spiritual teacher and said, “I don’t believe in God.” The teacher replied, “You will believe in God when you see him. Have you really looked?” The pupil blushed, taking this as criticism. “I have looked very hard, sir. I pray for God to answer me. I look for signs that He loves me. Nothing works. God might as well not exist.” The teacher shook his head. “You think God is invisible, so no wonder you don’t see him. The creator is in his creation. Go into nature. Appreciate the trees, the mountains, the green meadows. Look with total love and appreciation, not superficially. At a certain point God will notice that you love his creation. Like an artist who sees someone admiring his painting, God will want to meet you. Then he will come to you, and once you see him, you will believe.”
You can take this story as a parable or as the literal truth (taking into account that God is as much she as he, or both merged into one). As a parable, the story says that looking with love and appreciation brings out the subtle levels of nature—including your own nature—and as your perception becomes finer, the sacred level of life reveals itself. At that point you only have to believe in what you’ve personally experienced. But it’s also worthwhile to take the story literally. Gaze at anything you love, whether a beloved person, a rose, or a work of art, and you will see God in it. This is inevitable because there are no things outside yourself, and when you learn to gaze below the surface, you will see your own awareness. And your belief system will shift accordingly, because you have found that believing in yourself is all that you need.
A new sense of self dawns when your belief in yourself is secure. We all hold tight to a self-image that is part fantasy, part projection, and part reflection of other people. If the apple never falls far from the tree, the same holds true for our sense of self. Beginning with our families of origin, we have depended on other people to define us. Are you good or bad, loved or unloved, bright or dull, a leader or a follower? To answer those questions, and hundreds more, you accumulate information from the outside. This gets blended with your own fantasies and wishes. The final ingredient is the projections you place on other people; that is, you use them to measure yourself by. This entire sense of self is a ramshackle construct, but you depend upon it because you believe you must: otherwise you’d have no idea who you really are.
A new sense of self can replace this construct, one stick at a time, as you experience your awareness, go inside, and meet yourself. The person you meet isn’t a flimsy construct. Instead you meet openness, silence, calm, stability, curiosity, love, and the impulse to grow and expand. This new sense of self doesn’t need to be constructed. It has existed from the beginning and will always exist. Having met the new you, it becomes easier and easier to throw away bits and pieces of the old one. The process takes patience; you need to meet yourself every day. But it’s a joyful process, too, because in your heart of hearts you never bought in to the flimsy construct, not completely. There are too many memories of how it got glued together, piece by piece, sometimes by accident, often against your will. Nobody really wants to be no more than what others see. We yearn to be real, and that yearning, if you keep it in mind, is enough. The person you seek is the same person who is seeking you.
Step 4. Be Generous of Spirit
Wholeness can afford to be generous. It feels no lack. However much you give, more will come to you. I think that’s the secret behind the adage that “it is more blessed to give than to receive.” When you give, you reveal a spiritual truth, that the flow of life never runs dry. People run into trouble, however, when they give on the surface but feel the pinch of lack underneath. Generosity begins at the level of the soul, which never runs out of the two things totally necessary to life: energy and awareness. When you feel secure that you as a person won’t run short of those two things, you can afford to be generous in spirit. That is a greater gift to the world than money. The two don’t preclude each other. Once you are generous of spirit, giving on any level becomes natural and easy.
In practical terms, generosity of spirit comes down to the following things:
Offering yourself first.
Never withholding the truth.
Being a force for harmony and coherence.
Placing your trust in the flow of abundance.
All of these points fit our overall purpose of giving you a life style that you can pursue privately while creating real change all around you.
Offer yourself first. Here “yourself” means the real you. Offering an imitation version of yourself is tempting, and most people wind up giving in. They play a role that fits into society’s expectations (spouse, worker, authority figure, follower, dependent, victim). They follow the ego’s demand for quid pro quo, so that every gift is given with the expectation of a return. They stand upon status and income as defining traits. These factors create a false self because they are external. There’s no flow from the inside outward, which is what generosity of spirit is all about. There’s an immense difference between stepping forward as a benefactor giving time and money, and stepping forward to offer the real you. The real you is open and vulnerable. It feels sympathy with the human condition. It recognizes no divisions between one soul and another.
It can be frightening to offer the real you, but as so often happens, fear gives false counsel. When you offer the real you, you don’t become prey to other people’s immense neediness, or to their capacity to take advantage. Rather, you become stronger. The false you, being external, is like a flimsy suit of armor, in this case built from a sense of insecurity. Giving up the false you strips you of armor that was an illusion all along. In reality, your body has been using the unstoppable flow of energy and awareness in order to survive. While you were pretending to be closed, your body remained open to the universe. Why not adopt a strategy that’s already been proven to work? Align your spirit with the weak, the dispossessed, the wronged, and the children of the earth. By being open to them, you are not offering yourself as a single soul. You are offering the wholeness of spirit.
Don’t withhold the truth. When energy and awareness are flowing, the truth flows with them. Whatever is false serves to block spirit at the source. You aren’t being asked to stand up for truth with a capital T, because absolutes are not at issue. As life unfolds, you can only represent your truth, and it will change over time as you evolve. Consider the truth about good versus evil. To someone who is less evolved, evil feels powerful, frightening, and starkly opposed to good. With more growth, these things shift: there are gray areas between good and evil. But there is also less fear of evil or belief in its power. When a person is highly evolved, good and evil are less important than separation from the soul, and there is trust that in wholeness the conflict of good versus evil can be resolved. Each position has its own truth as felt by each person.
The important thing is not to withhold your truth, whatever it may be. Truth withheld is truth frozen and stuck. Every time you speak your truth, you are advancing your own evolution. More than that, you are showing your trust in truth to prevail. Untruth is aided more by silence than by lies. I’m thinking not so much on a grand scale as on a very intimate one. In homes where there is physical or emotional abuse, where someone drinks to excess or takes drugs, where signs of depression and anxiety are unmistakable but untreated, the rest of the family generally keeps silent. They passively acquiesce to their own sense of helplessness. The vain hope is that the situation will improve on its own or at the very least remain stable. What actually hap
pens is that silence makes the problem grow worse, because silence implies indifference, hopelessness, unspoken hostility, and lack of options. Speaking the truth opens up options. It shows caring. It rejects hopelessness.
Be a force for harmony and coherence. By definition, wholeness is a state of harmony, while fragmentation is a state of conflict. If we weren’t divided inside, we wouldn’t be fighting wars against temptation, anger, fear, and self-doubt. The soul is a harmonizing influence, and it shows generosity of spirit to radiate that same quality. A friend told me a striking anecdote recently: He was walking down the street in a big city where he was visiting, and on impulse he went into a fancy bakery, enticed by their extravagant window display. The minute he stepped in the door he saw trouble. The bakery manager was screaming at the girl working the counter. She was in tears, and both were so engrossed that they didn’t notice that a customer had entered the shop. My friend said that he had a sudden intuition. I can bring harmony here.
He turned his back on the argument, which settled down once his presence was noticed. In itself, that is unremarkable. But my friend kept lingering, and as he did so, he centered himself in his own peace—he’s been an experienced meditator for many years. He could feel the atmosphere in the shop soften, and although few would believe what happened next, the manager and the girl at the counter exchanged smiles. By the time my friend left, he saw them embracing and mutually expressing how sorry they were. Can your mere presence bring harmony to a situation the same way? The first step is to believe that it is possible; the second is the willingness not to take sides, but to act solely as a peaceful influence, silently if you can, but speaking up if that becomes necessary. At bottom, conflicts aren’t about right and wrong. They are about incoherence, the chaotic emotions and thoughts that result from chaotic energy and fragmented awareness. Right and wrong come into the picture as reflections of turmoil; by screaming that you are right, you don’t have to admit that you are hurt, confused, and torn apart yourself. Instead of adding to the turmoil, you can bring in peace, not just because it sounds moral and good to do that, but because without an influence of peace, no productive change can occur.
Place your trust in abundance. Wholeness contains everything; therefore it draws on infinite resources. You may find this a tentative truth in your personal life, because no one is supplied with infinite money, status, power, and love. Where lack doesn’t predominate, there is still fear of lack to contend with. Abundance needs to be reframed. When you see it as the infinite resources of spirit, your attention moves away from material things. Instead, you trust that there will always be enough of what your soul has to give. Many people fall back upon religious faith—they believe that God will never bring more challenges than they can handle. But this strikes me as simplistic, because when you look around, many people are silently crushed by their burdens and many more are diminished and overwhelmed. In the opposite camp are the spiritual materialists, the ones who measure divine favor by the size of their bank accounts, who declare that God helps those who help themselves. (Beneath the surface, aren’t they really saying that God helps only those who help themselves? That’s true abandonment of faith, because it reduces God to being a cheerleader for the well-to-do.)
I think it’s better to leave faith out of it altogether. Abundance isn’t materialistic or religious, either. It’s about trusting the flow, knowing that wholeness doesn’t have holes in it and never leaves a void. You can be generous with anything the soul gives you, and more will flow in. Be generous with sympathy, love, intelligence, truth, and creativity. The more you express these things, the more will be given to you on all levels. At the same time, don’t turn your soul into an ATM machine. The flow isn’t a straight line from A to B, and when you are generous, there’s no guarantee that a result will follow to your benefit. Yet in the larger scheme you will be evolving every day, as the soul, in flowing through you, transforms you at the same time.
Step 5. Focus on Relationships Instead of Consumption
Wholeness depends on relationships that are whole. You cannot be whole in isolation. Relationship is the true test of any spiritual state; otherwise, you might be deluding yourself—your ego could be using the soul to build itself up. That’s the point of a famous anecdote from the lore of yoga:
A spiritual recluse has been sitting in a cave high up in the Himalayas where he pursues enlightenment night and day. Finally, after years of arduous discipline, the light dawns, and the recluse realizes that he has arrived at the goal. Overjoyed, he descends the mountain to deliver the good news to the local villagers. When he gets to the outskirts of town, a beggar reeking of alcohol bumps into him. “Watch where you’re going, fool,” the recluse mutters. Suddenly he pauses, and without a word he heads back up to his cave.
Relationships become whole as you become whole. But the parallel isn’t automatic. You must place your attention on seeing untold potential in another person. I was deeply touched by a visit to Cuba a few years ago. Taken around the island by my hosts, I saw street singers and dancers, common in India when I was a child, but they have now vanished. I saw waitresses smiling and flirting with customers in the cafés; a happy atmosphere prevailed almost everywhere, or so it seemed. One day I asked my driver to explain what I was seeing. “We’re too poor to buy anything,” he told me. “So we have to focus on relationships.” It hadn’t occurred to me how seriously consumerism undermines relationships. To consume is to be focused constantly on material goods, but also on the distraction they bring, a flood of video games, television, music, high-tech gadgets, and on and on.
It’s degrading to define anyone as a consumer. The image of a voracious open mouth comes to mind (and the inevitable process of waste removal, once digestion is through). But I don’t want to make this a moral issue. As your soul sees you, you are connected to everything. To be connected means to be in relationship. Beneath every event in the world are underlying threads that tremble like the disturbance of a spider web. We communicate along these strands of love, sympathy, cooperation, community, and growth. When the strands weaken, so do all those things. (As we saw previously, children who spend hours at video games create a shift in their brains, acquiring special motor skills at the cost of social skills—they can zap fifty alien invaders a minute, but cannot relate to real human beings.) Consumerism exerts a hidden toll by shutting off channels of growth. As a substitute, digital culture has come up with networking, which serves to connect people, usually for a mutual benefit. The more linked you are electronically, the more tied in you are to a global community. But there’s no emotional bonding or sense of security in a link. Text messaging gets a few words across, but they come from the most superficial layer of human interaction.
If you look at your own life, you can easily measure how much consumerism has encroached on relationship. The questions are not difficult:
Does my family find time to relate to one another?
How together do we all feel?
Do my children manipulate me to get what they want?
Do I placate my children by bribing them with new things to buy?
In our family, do we rush to be alone with computers, iPods, TV, and video games?
Can we have a family discussion about what really matters?
How often do we deal with problems by seeking more distractions?
Do I measure my worth by how much money I have and the possessions I’ve accumulated?
Is shopping my therapy?
Few people can answer these questions honestly without feeling uneasy. Of course, distractions offer the easy way out, and relationships raise sensitive issues one would like to avoid. But relating is the only way that any two people can share life together. We don’t have to add qualifiers like committed relationship, long-term relationship, or even happy relationship. As an emotion or state of mind, happiness can be induced without going to the trouble of relating to other people, and at the best of times asking another person to make you happy is neither fa
ir nor realistic. What deeply matters in any relationship is the level of awareness that is involved.
On the surface, you relate to someone else to feel better, to get what you want, and to share good things.
If you can take the relationship to a deeper level, it exists to share common goals, to feel supported by another person, and to expand “I” to “we.”
If you can go deeper still, a relationship begins to dissolve ego boundaries. The result is a real communion between two people, each living into the other.
Finally, at the level of the soul, there is no “other person.” Individuality gives up its claims as the ego surrenders to spirit. At this level you participate in wholeness, and all your relationships are expansions of wholeness.
Experts often say, and everyone seems to agree, that relationships are hard work. That’s certainly true at the ego level, because conflict arises when two egos come into contact. But relating at the level of ego is doomed to begin with, because it points in the opposite direction from the soul. Whenever you find yourself working hard to overcome anything in your relationship—boredom, irritation, hostility, intractable opinions, and areas of disagreement—you’ve fallen for the ego’s agenda. Work as hard as you might, you won’t be relating, you will only be negotiating. The secret is to realize that relationships exist entirely in awareness. Because you are the source of awareness, you can shift any relationship within yourself. You don’t have to ask for, demand, or negotiate change in the other person. I realize that this goes against the grain of counseling and therapy, but keep in mind that people who bring troubled relationships to a therapist are actually bringing frustrated egos; awareness lost out before the first hour of counseling began.