Does the second viewpoint seem impossible, or a matter of wishful thinking? Actually, it is the natural way to perceive the situation from the viewpoint of one reality. The first viewpoint was imprinted by circumstances in your early life—you had to be trained to see others as strangers and to assume that accidents are random events. But instead of relying on such limited consciousness, you can open yourself to expanded possibilities. The larger viewpoint is more generous to you and to the other driver. You aren’t antagonists but, rather, equal players in a scene that is trying to tell both of you something. The larger viewpoint holds no blame. It puts responsibility equally on every player and allows equally for growth. A car accident is neither right nor wrong—it is an opportunity to reclaim who you are, a creator. If you walk away with a result that moves you closer to your true self, you have grown, so even the ego’s demand to win is satisfied by the experience of one reality.
Although you may insist that the only thing at stake here is money, and that confrontation is the best way to get paid, that view is not reality but the reinforcement of a perception. Does the money neutralize what comes with it—anger, blame, and being made a victim by others?
Wholeness brings a seamless, unified world, but you will not know what that world feels like until you give your allegiance to a new operating system. Shifting from the old system to the new one is a process, one that each of us must commit ourselves to every day. Our shared addiction to duality is total; it leaves nothing out. The good news is that no aspect of life is immune to transformation. Every change you make, however small, will be communicated throughout existence—quite literally the whole universe will be eavesdropping on you and lending you its support. From its point of view, the formation of a galaxy is no more momentous than the evolution of a single person.
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE SEVENTH SECRET
The seventh lesson is about alchemy. By any measure, alchemy is magical. You can’t turn lead into gold by heating it, beating it, molding it into different shapes, or combining it with any known substance. Those are simply physical changes. Likewise, you will never cause an inner transformation by taking your old self and hammering it with criticism, heating it up with exciting experiences, reshaping how you look physically, or connecting with new people. How, then, does the magic work?
It works according to the principles that make up the universe’s operating system. When you consciously align with them, you give yourself an opening for transformation. Write down the ten principles as they personally apply to you and begin to live them. Carry them around with you; refer to them as reminders every few days. It’s better to focus with intention on one principle a day than trying to include too many at once. Here are examples of how you might apply these universal principles on a daily basis:
The events in my life reflect who I am: I will apply one experience today to myself. Whatever catches my attention is trying to tell me something. If I feel angry at anyone, I will see if what I dislike in the person actually exists in me. If an overheard conversation catches my attention, I will take those words as a personal message. I want to find the world that is inside me.
The people in my life reflect aspects of myself: I am a composite of every person who is important to me. I am going to look upon friends and family as a group picture of me. Each stands for a quality I want to see in myself or want to reject, yet in reality I’m the whole picture. I will gain the most knowledge from those people I intensely love and intensely dislike: The one reflects my highest aspirations; the other reflects my deepest fears of what lies inside me.
Whatever I pay attention to will grow: I will take inventory of how I’m using my attention. I will keep a log of how much time I spend with television, video games, the computer, hobbies, gossip, work I don’t care about, work I am passionate about, activities that fascinate me, and fantasies of escape or fulfillment. In this way I will find out what aspects of my life are going to grow. Then I will ask, “What do I want to grow in my life?” This will tell me where my attention needs to shift.
Nothing is random—my life is full of signs and symbols: I will look for patterns in my life. These patterns could be anywhere: in what others say to me, the way they treat me, the way I react to situations. I am weaving the tapestry of my world every day, and I need to know what design I am making. I will look for signs that show me my hidden beliefs. Do I meet opportunities for success or failure? These are symbols for whether I believe I have personal power or not. I will look for signs about my belief in whether I am loved and deserve love—or not.
At any given moment, the universe is giving me the best results possible: I will concentrate today on the gifts in my life. I will focus on what is working instead of what isn’t. I will appreciate this world of light and shadow. I will receive with grace the remarkable gift of awareness. I will notice how my own level of awareness makes me perceive the world I am co-creating.
My inner awareness is always evolving: Where do I stand right now? How far have I come on my chosen path? Even if I don’t see immediate results outside myself, do I feel that I am growing inside? Today I will face these questions and honestly ask where I stand. I will experience my awareness not as a stream of thoughts but as the potential for becoming who I want to be. I will look at my limitations and boundaries with the intention of expanding beyond them.
The direction of life is from duality to unity: Today I want to belong. I want to feel safe and at home. I want to be aware of what it’s like simply to be, without defenses or desires. I will appreciate the flow of life for what it is—my own true self. I will notice those moments of intimacy with myself, when I feel that “I am” is enough to sustain me forever. I will lie on the grass looking at the sky, feeling myself at one with nature, expanding until my being fades into the infinite.
If I open myself to the force of evolution, it will carry me where I want to go: Today is for long-term thinking about myself. What is my vision of life? How does that vision apply to me? I want my vision to unfold without struggle. Is that happening? If not, where am I putting up resistance? I will look at the beliefs that seem to hold me back the most. Am I depending on others instead of being responsible for my own evolution? Have I allowed myself to focus on external rewards as a substitute for inner growth? Today I will rededicate myself to inner awareness, knowing that it is the home of the evolutionary impulse that drives the universe.
The fragmented mind cannot get me to unity, but I have to use it along the way: What does unity really mean to me? What experiences of oneness can I look back upon? Today I will remember the difference between being at one with myself and being scattered. I will find my center, my peace, my ability to go with the flow. The thoughts and desires that drive me are not the ultimate reality. They are just a way to get myself back to oneness. I will remember that thoughts come and go like leaves in the wind, but the core of consciousness is forever. My goal is to live from that core.
I am living in many dimensions at once; the appearance of being trapped in time and space is an illusion: Today I will experience myself beyond limitations. I will set time aside to be present with myself in silence. As I breathe I will see my being spreading outward in all directions. As I settle into my own inner silence, any image that comes to mind will be asked to join my being. I will include anyone and anything that comes to mind, saying, “You and I are one at the level of being. Come, join me beyond the drama of space and time.” In the same way I will experience love as a light that begins in my heart and spreads out as far as my awareness can reach; as images arise in my mind, I will send love and light in their direction.
Secret #8
EVIL IS NOT YOUR ENEMY
THE MOST GRIEVOUS FAILURE of spirituality occurs in the face of evil. Idealistic and loving people who would never harm another person find themselves drawn into the maelstrom of war. Faiths that preach the existence of one God mount campaigns to kill infidels. Religions of love devolve into partisan hatred of heretics
and those who threaten the faith. Even if you think you hold the ultimate truth in your hands, there is no guarantee that you will escape from evil. More violence has occurred in the name of religion than for any other reason. Hence the bitter aphorism: God handed down the truth, and the Devil said, “Let me organize it.”
There is also the more subtle failure of passivity—standing by and letting evil have its way. Perhaps this reflects a secret belief that evil is ultimately more powerful than good. One of the most spiritual figures in the twentieth century was asked how England should handle the threat of Nazism. He replied:
I want you to fight Nazism without arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these but neither your souls, nor your minds.
The author of this passage was Mahatma Gandhi, and needless to say his “open letter” to the British was greeted with shock and outrage. Yet Gandhi was being true to the principle of Ahimsa, or nonviolence. He successfully used passive nonviolence to persuade the British to grant freedom to India, so by refusing to go to war against Hitler—a stand he took throughout World War II—Gandhi was consistent in his spiritual beliefs. Would Ahimsa really have worked to persuade Hitler, a man who declared that “war is the father of all things”? We will never know. Certainly passivity itself has a dark aspect. The Catholic Church marks as one of its darkest eras the years when it permitted millions of Jews to be killed under Nazism, to the extent that Italian Jews were rounded up within sight of the Vatican windows.
So let’s acknowledge that spirituality has already failed on countless occasions to deal with evil. Turning away from teachings that have only allowed evil to propagate and spread, the one reality opens a new way, because if there is only one reality, evil has no special power and no separate existence. There is no cosmic Satan to rival God, and even the war between good and evil is only an illusion born of duality. Ultimately, both good and evil are forms that consciousness can choose to take. In that sense, evil is no different from good. Their similarity goes back to the source. Two babies born on the same day may grow up to commit evil on the one hand and good on the other, but as babies it cannot be true that one was created evil. The potential for right and wrong exists in their consciousness, and as the babies grow up, their consciousness will be shaped by many forces.
These forces are so complex that labeling someone as purely evil makes no sense. Let me list the forces that shape every newborn child:
• Parental guidance or the lack of it
• The presence of love or its absence
• The context of the whole family
• Peer pressure at school and social pressure throughout life
• Personal tendencies and reactions
• Indoctrinated beliefs and religious teaching
• Karma
• The tide of history
• Role models
• Collective consciousness
• The appeal of myths, heroes, and ideals
Every force listed above is influencing your choices and invisibly pushing you into action. Because reality is tangled up in all these influences, so is evil. It takes all these forces for evil and good to emerge. If your childhood hero was Stalin, you won’t perceive the world as you would if your hero was Joan of Arc. If you are a Protestant, your life would not have been the same under the persecution of the Huguenots as it is in an American suburb today. Think of a person as a building with hundreds of electrical lines feeding countless messages into it, powering a host of different projects. Looking at the building, you see it as one thing, a single object standing there. But its inner life depends on hundreds of signals coming into it.
So does yours.
In and of itself, none of the forces feeding into us is evil. But under this menu of influences, each person makes choices. I believe that any evil inclination comes down to a choice made in consciousness. And those choices seemed to be good when they were made. This is the central paradox behind evil actions, because with rare exceptions, people who perform evil can trace their motives back to decisions that were the best they could make given the situation. Children who suffer abuse, for example, frequently wind up as adults abusing their own children. You would think that they’d be the last ones to resort to family violence, having been its victim. But in their minds, other, nonviolent, options aren’t available. The context of abuse, acting on their minds since early childhood, is too powerful and overshadows freedom of choice.
People in different states of awareness won’t share the same definition of good and bad. A prime example is the social enslavement of women around the world, which seems totally wrong in the modern world but is fed in many countries by tradition, religious sanction, social value, and family practices, going back for centuries. Until very recently, even the victims of those forces would see the role of the helpless, obedient, childlike woman as “good.”
Evil depends completely on one’s level of consciousness.
You can bring this message home by considering seven different definitions of evil. Which one do you instinctively agree with?
WHAT IS THE WORST EVIL?
Seven Perspectives
1. The worst evil is to hurt someone physically, or endanger their survival.
2. The worst evil is to enslave people economically, depriving them of any chance to succeed and prosper.
3. The worst evil is to destroy peace and bring about disorder.
4. The worst evil is to entrap people’s minds.
5. The worst evil is to destroy beauty, creativity, and the freedom to explore.
6. The worst evil is often difficult to tell from good, since all of creation is relative.
7. There is no evil, only the shifting patterns of consciousness in an eternal dance.
The vast majority of people would probably choose the first two definitions, because physical harm and deprivation are so threatening. At this level of consciousness, evil means not being able to survive or earn a living, and good means physical safety and economic security. In the next two levels, evil is no longer physical but mental. One’s greatest terror isn’t being deprived of food but rather being told what to think and forced to live with chaos and unrest. Good means inner peace and the free flow of insight and intuition. The next two levels are even more refined; they have to do with creativity and vision. One’s greatest fear is not being allowed to express oneself or being forced to label others as evil. A deeply spiritual person doesn’t view good and evil as rigid categories but has begun to accept that God had a purpose in creating both. Good is free expression, openness to all new things, reverence for both the dark and light aspects of life. Finally, the last level sees the entire play of good and evil, light and shadow, as an illusion. Every experience brings union with the creator; one lives as a co-creator immersed in God consciousness.
The one reality accepts all these definitions, as it must, because anything that consciousness can perceive is real to the perceiver. Evil is part of a hierarchy, a ladder of growth in which everything changes depending on the rung you happen to be standing on. Nor does the growing process ever end. It is at work in you at this very minute.
If you wake up one day to suddenly discover that you hate someone else, that there is no way out of a situation except violence, that love isn’t an option, consider how subtly you arrived at your position. It took a whole world to throw you or anyone else into the arms of what is labeled as good or evil. Having internalized these forces, you reflect the world just as the world reflects you. This is what it means in practical terms to have the world in you.
Yet evil cannot be your enemy if the world is in you; it can only be another aspect of yourself. Every aspect of the self is worthy of love and compassion. Every aspect is necessary to life, and none is exc
luded or banished into darkness. This view may seem even more naive at first than Gandhi’s passivity, for it appears that we are being asked to love and understand a murderer the same as a saint. Jesus taught exactly that doctrine. But translating love and compassion into difficult situations has been the crux of spirituality’s huge failure: Violence causes love to break down, turning it into fear and hatred. But evil doesn’t actually do this. The shaping forces on consciousness do. Here is where good and evil become equal. I can give a striking example of what I mean.
In 1971, students at Stanford University were asked to volunteer for an unusual experiment in role playing. One group of students was to pretend that they were prison guards in charge of another group who pretended to be prisoners. Although it was understood that this was make-believe, a jail setting was provided, and the two groups lived together for the duration of the experiment. According to plan, everyone would play their roles for two weeks, but after only six days the prison experiment had to be terminated. The reason? The boys chosen for their mental health and moral values turned into sadistic, out-of-control guards on the one hand and depressed victims of exorbitant stress on the other.
The professors conducting the experiment were shocked but couldn’t deny what had occurred. The lead researcher, Philip Zimbardo, wrote: “My guards repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them, chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary confinement, and made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands.” Those who didn’t descend to such atrocious behavior did nothing to stop the ones who did. (The parallel with infamous acts by American prison guards in Iraq in 2004 prompted Zimbardo to bring the Stanford experiment back to light after more than thirty years.) There was no extreme to which the student guards would not resort short of outright physical torture. Zimbardo mournfully recalls, “As the boredom of their job increased, they began using the prisoners as their playthings, devising ever more humiliating and degrading games for them to play. Over time, these amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the prisoners simulate sodomy on each other. Once aware of such deviant behavior, I closed down the Stanford prison.”