In his classic text, the Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali informs us that there are three types of Vasana. The kind that drives pleasant behavior he calls white Vasana; the kind that drives unpleasant behavior he calls dark Vasana; the kind that mixes the two he calls mixed Vasana. I would say Jean had mixed Vasana—he liked fence-sitting but he missed the reward of lasting love for another person, a driving aspiration, or a shared vision that would bond him with a community. He displayed the positives and negatives of someone who must keep every option open. The goal of the spiritual aspirant is to wear down Vasana so that clarity can be achieved. In clarity you know that you are not a puppet—you have released yourself from the unconscious drives that once fooled you into thinking that you were acting spontaneously.
The secret here is that the state of release isn’t free will. Free will is the opposite of determinism, and in the one reality, opposites must ultimately merge into one. In the case of life versus death, we saw that they merged because both are needed to renew the flow of experience. Free will and determinism don’t merge like that. They merge only when a cosmic argument is settled once and for all. Here is the argument in its simplest form.
There are two claims to ultimate reality. One claim comes from the physical world, where events have definite causes and effects. The other claim comes from absolute Being, which has no cause. Only one claimant can be right because there’s no such thing as two ultimate realities. So which is it?
If the physical world is the ultimate reality, then you have no choice but to play out the game of Vasana. Every tendency has a cause in a prior tendency, and as soon as you wear out one, you will be creating another to replace it. You can’t be a finished product. There is always something waiting to be fixed, attended to, adjusted, polished, cleaned up, or ready to fall apart. (People who can’t face this fact turn into perfectionists, constantly chasing the chimera of a flawless existence. Although they don’t realize it, they are trying to defeat the law of Vasana, which dictates that no cause can disappear; it can only transform itself into a new cause.) The physical world is also called the domain of karma, which has its own cosmic side. Karma, as we know, means “action,” and the question to ask of action is this: Did it have a beginning? Does it ever end? Every person who was ever born found himself thrown into a world of action that was already fully operational. There is no hint that a first action got things started, and no way to tell if a last action might bring everything to a halt. The universe is a given, and despite theories about the Big Bang, the possibility of other universes, or even infinite universes, means that the chain of first events could extend forever.
The ancient sages didn’t bother with telescopes because they saw, in a flash of insight, that the mind is ruled by cause and effect and therefore it doesn’t have the power to look beyond karma. The thought I have right now emerged from the thought I had a second ago. The thought I had a second ago emerged from a thought I had the second before that—and on and on. Big Bang or not, my mind is a prisoner of karma because thinking is all it can do.
There is one alternative, the sages argued. Your mind can be. This is how the second claimant got into court. The ultimate reality could be Being itself. Being doesn’t act; therefore, it is never touched by karma. If Being is the ultimate reality, the game of Vasana is over. Instead of worrying about cause and effect, which is the origin of all tendencies, one can simply say there is no cause and effect.
I said that Vasana gave us a reason to delve deeper into free will. Now we can see why. The person who is content to remain a puppet is no different from the rebel who screams that he must remain free at all costs. Both are subject to karma; their opinions make no difference to the matter. But if you can identify with a state that has no Vasanas, free will and determinism merge; they become mere instructions in the manual of karmic software. In other words, both are tools to be used by Being rather than ends in themselves. Karma, it turns out, loses the argument about being the ultimate reality.
How can I say that the argument is settled? I could say it’s settled by authority because the spiritual record holds countless sages and saints who testify that Being is the ultimate ground of existence. But since we aren’t relying on authority here, the proof has to come from experience. I experience that I am alive, which seems to help the case for karma, since being alive consists of one action after another. But I cannot be alive if the whole universe isn’t alive. This conclusion would seem absurd without building up to it. But we have come far enough to realize that the real absurdity is to be alive in a dead universe. No one before modern times felt that he or she was stranded on a speck of rock and water with nothing but a black void to look out at. I find that image, which underlies the superstition of science, horrifying and untrue. My body and the universe are composed of the same molecules, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t manage to believe that a hydrogen atom is alive inside me but dead the instant it leaves my lungs.
My body and the universe come from the same source, obey the same rhythms, flash with the same storms of electromagnetic activity. My body can’t afford to argue over who created the universe. Every cell would disappear the second it stopped creating itself. So it must be that the universe is living and breathing through me. I am an expression of everything in existence.
At any given moment, the bubbling subatomic activity that keeps the universe going is in flux; every particle winks in and out of existence thousands of times per second. In that interval, I also wink in and out, traveling from existence to annihilation and back again billions of times a day. The universe came up with this lightning-fast rhythm so that it could pause in between and decide what to create next. The same is true of me. Even though my mind works too slowly to see the difference, I’m not the same person after I return from my billion journeys into the void. Every single process in my cells has been rethought, reexamined, reorganized. Creation happens by infinitesimal degrees, and the overall result is eternal genesis.
In a living universe, we do not have to answer any questions about who the creator is. At various times, religions have named a single god, multiple gods and goddesses, an invisible life force, a cosmic mind, and in the current religion of physics, a blind game of chance. Choose any or all of these because what’s far more crucial about genesis is you. Can you see yourself as the point around which everything is now revolving?
Look around and try to view your whole situation. From the viewpoint of a limited self, you cannot be the center of the cosmos. But that’s because you are looking at karma. Your attention is going to bits and pieces of your situation—a current relationship, events at work, finances, perhaps tossing in a vague concern with some political crisis or the state of the stock market. No matter how many of these ingredients you try to comprehend, you aren’t seeing your whole situation. From the perspective of wholeness, the universe is thinking about you. Its thoughts are invisible, but they eventually manifest as tendencies—the by now familiar Vasanas—and sometimes your attention feels the larger design at work because every life has inescapable turning points, opportunities, epiphanies, and breakthroughs.
To you, a thought is an image or idea floating through your mind. To the universe—and here we mean the universal intelligence that permeates the swarm of galaxies, black holes, and interstellar dust—a thought is a step in evolution. It’s a creative act. To truly live at the center of the one reality, evolution must become of primary interest to you. The noncritical events in your life already run themselves. Think of your body, which operates with two separate types of nervous system. The involuntary nervous system is automatic—it regulates the everyday functions of the body without intervention from you. When someone goes into a coma, this nervous system continues more or less normally, keeping heartbeat, blood pressure, hormones, electrolytes, and a hundred other functions going in perfect coordination.
The other nervous system is called voluntary because it relates to will, or volition. The voluntary nervous system carries
out desires. That is its only purpose, and without it, life would run exactly as it does for someone in a coma, without any motion forward, frozen in a waking death.
The universe reflects the same division. On one level, natural forces need no assistance from us to keep everything regulated so that life can be sustained. Ecology is self-balancing. Plants and animals exist in harmony without knowing that they do. One could imagine a world in which nothing expands beyond basic existence, where instead creatures are reduced to eating, breathing, and sleeping. Such a world doesn’t exist, however. Even one-celled amoebas swim in a particular direction, hunt for food, move toward light, and seek temperatures they prefer. Desire is built into the scheme of life.
So it’s not that incredible to look for the second half of the universe’s nervous system, the half that revolves around desire. When your brain carries out a desire, the universe is carrying it out at the same time. There is no difference between “I want to have a child” and “The universe wants to have a child.” The embryo that starts to grow in the womb relies on billions of years of intelligence, memory, creativity, and evolution. The individual seamlessly flows into the cosmos when we are talking about fetuses in the womb. Why should this merging stop there? The fact that you experience your desire as individual doesn’t negate the universe from acting through you, just as the fact that you consider your children to be yours doesn’t negate the fact that they are also the children of a vast gene pool. That gene pool has no other parent than the universe.
At this moment, you are seamlessly flowing with the cosmos. There is no difference between your breathing and the breathing of the rain forest, between your bloodstream and the world’s rivers, between your bones and the chalk cliffs of Dover. Every shift in the ecosystem has affected you at the level of your genes. The universe remembers its evolution by leaving a record written in DNA. This means that your genes are the focal point for everything happening in the world. They are your line of communication with nature as a whole, not just with your mother and father.
Set aside what you have read about DNA as a string of sugars and amino acids strung in a double helix. That model tells us what DNA looks like, but it says almost nothing about what is actually going on in the dynamics of life, just as the wiring diagram of a television tells us nothing about what’s playing on the screen. What’s playing through your DNA at this moment is the evolution of the universe. The next desire you have will be recorded in memory, and either the universe will move forward or it won’t. We tend to think of evolution as a straight-line march from primitive organisms to higher ones. A better image would be of a bubble expanding to take in more and more of life’s potential.
• As you access more intelligence, you are evolving. On the other hand, if you constrict your mind to what you already know or can predict, your evolution will slow down.
• As you access more creativity, you are evolving. On the other hand, if you try to use old solutions to solve new problems, your evolution will slow down.
• As you access more awareness, you are evolving. On the other hand, if you continue to use a fraction of your consciousness, your evolution will slow down.
The universe has a stake in which choices you decide to make, for the overwhelming evidence is that it favors evolution over standing still. In Sanskrit, the evolutionary force is called Dharma, from a root word that means “to uphold.” Without you, Dharma would be confined to three dimensions. Even though you spend almost no time thinking about your relationship to a zebra, a coconut tree, or blue-green algae, each is your intimate in the evolutionary scheme. Human beings extended the evolutionary scheme when life reached a certain limit in physicality—after all, in physical terms, the earth depends on blue-green algae and plankton more than on humans. The universe wanted to have a new perspective, and for this had to create creators like itself.
I once asked a physicist if everyone in his community accepted by now that reality was nonlocal. He conceded that they did. “Isn’t nonlocality the same as omniscience?” I said. “There’s no distance in time, no distance in space. Communication is instantaneous, and every particle is connected to every other.”
“Could be,” he said, not exactly agreeing but letting me go on.
“Then why did the universe bother to become local?” I said. “It already knew everything. It already includes everything, and at the deepest level it already encompasses all events that could possibly happen.”
“I don’t know,” my physicist said. “Maybe the universe just wanted a vacation.”
This isn’t a bad answer. Through us the universe gets to play. Play at what? At giving someone else the controls to see what he or she comes up with. The one thing the universe can’t experience is getting away from itself. So, in a sense, we are its vacation.
The problem with dilemmas like free will and determinism is that they don’t leave enough playtime. This is a recreational universe. It provides us with food, air, water, and a great deal of scenery to explore. All of that comes from the automatic side of cosmic intelligence. It continues on its own, but the side that wants to play is plugged into evolution, and Dharma is its way of telling us how the game works. If you look carefully at the critical turning points in your life, you’ll see how closely you were paying attention to the evolutionary game.
BEING IN THE DHARMA
• You were ready to move forward. The experience of your old reality was worn out and ready for change.
• You were ready to pay attention. When the opportunity arrived, you noticed it and took the necessary leap.
• The environment supported you. When you moved forward, events fell into place to ensure that you didn’t backslide.
• You felt more expanded and free in your new place.
• You saw yourself as in some way a new person.
This set of circumstances, both inner and outer, is what Dharma provides. Which is to say that when you feel ready to move forward, reality shifts to show you how. And when you aren’t ready to move forward? Then there is the backup system of Vasana, which moves you forward by repeating those tendencies that are embedded in you from the past. When you find yourself stuck and unable to make any progress at all, the following circumstances usually apply:
1. You aren’t ready to move. The experience of an old reality still fascinates you. You keep enjoying your habitual way of life, or else, if there is more pain than enjoyment, you are addicted to the pain for some reason not yet revealed.
2. You aren’t paying attention. Your mind is caught up in distractions. This is especially true if there is too much external stimulation. Unless you feel alert inside, you won’t be able to pick up the hints and clues being sent from the one reality.
3. The environment won’t support you. When you try moving forward, circumstances push you back. This kind of thwarting means that there is more to learn, or that the timing isn’t yet right. It also can be true that at a deep level you don’t see yourself moving forward; your conscious desire is in conflict with deeper doubt and uncertainty.
4. You feel threatened by the expansion you would have to make, preferring the safety of a limited self-image. Many people cling to a contracted state, believing that it protects them. In fact, the greatest protection you could ask for comes from evolution, which solves problems by expansion and forward movement. But you must own this knowledge completely; if any part of you wants to hang back in a constricted state, that’s usually enough to block the road ahead.
5. You keep seeing yourself as the old person who adapted to an old situation. This is often an unconscious choice. People identify with their past and try to use old perceptions to understand what is happening. Since perception is everything, seeing yourself as too weak, limited, undeserving, or lacking will block any step forward.
The full implication is that Dharma needs you to collaborate. The upholding force is as much in you as it is “out there” in the universe or the realm of the soul.
The single best w
ay to align with the Dharma is to assume that it is listening. Give the universe room to respond to you. Start up a relationship with it as with another person. I have been a doting grandfather for two years now, and I’m astonished that my granddaughter Tara has no problem talking to trees, rocks, the ocean, or the sky. She takes for granted that there is subjectivity everywhere. “See those dragons?” she’ll say, pointing to an empty space in the middle of the living room, naming a blue dragon here and a red one there. I ask Tara if she is afraid of the dragons, but she assures me that they’ve always been friendly.
Children inhabit imaginary worlds, not for the sake of pure fantasy but to test their creative instincts. Tara is a creator in training, and if deprived of her relationship to trees, rocks, and dragons, she would be cut off from a power that needs to grow. At her age Tara’s life is all playtime, and in the role of grandfather I try to immerse her in as much love and pleasure as possible. Her Vasana is going to be white if I can help it. But I also know that the great challenge for her will be to go beyond every tendency, good or bad. She will have to remain alert to stay in the Dharma, and for those of us who grew up to find that life is a serious business with few time-outs for play, the Dharma awaits our return to sanity.
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE ELEVENTH SECRET
The eleventh secret is about escaping the bondage of cause and effect. The universe is alive, and imbued with subjectivity. Cause and effect are just the machinery it uses to carry out what it wants to do. And what it wants to do is to live and breathe through you. To find out the truth of this, you need to relate to the universe as if it were alive. Otherwise, how will you ever know that it is? Today, begin to adopt the following habits: