The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [106]
Impatience is rooted in frustration. We refuse to pay attention because the results aren’t coming fast enough or with enough rewards. The mind prefers to hop away from this potential source of discomfort. If you find that you’re easily made impatient, you probably blame outside circumstances. Traffic isn’t moving fast enough; the grocery checkout line takes forever; when you ask someone to do a job the person always drags his feet.
Projecting your impatience on the outside world is a defense, a way of deflecting a fear of inadequacy. In the most extreme cases of attention deficit disorder, particularly among young children, this fear always underlies the surface inattention. Impatient people are too discouraged to go inside very deeply. Even without a rival of Mozart’s commanding genius, all of us are intimidated by a shadowy competitor inside—someone who by definition is better than we are. This ghost drives us out of our own awareness.
Impatience ends when you can go back inside yourself with enough confidence to let awareness unfold. Confidence cannot be forced. You will be adequate in your own eyes when you experience deeper and deeper levels of understanding. If you are impatient, you need to face the reality that you aren’t the best at everything, nor do you need to be. Stop yourself when you feel overshadowed by greater genius, talent, wealth, status, or accomplishment. The only real person inside you is you. That person is a seed whose growth is unlimited. The way you make seeds grow is with nourishment, and in this case that nourishment comes from paying attention. Be willing to face yourself, whatever you think your shortcomings are. Only a direct encounter with yourself brings the nourishment of attention, and the more nourishment you offer, the greater your growth will be.
Secret #15
EVERYTHING IS PURE ESSENCE
AT LAST, EVERY LAYER OF THE ONION has been peeled away. We come face to face with the indescribable, the secret at the core of life. Yet words have almost reached their limit.
What do you have when you find yourself facing the indescribable? You can only try with inadequate words to describe it. The mind can’t help itself. Used to putting everything into a thought, it cannot grasp something beyond thought.
We each draw a world of line, form, and color using invisible ink. Our instrument is no more than a speck of consciousness, like a pencil point moving across a blank piece of paper. Yet everything pours out of that single point. Could anything be more mysterious and at the same time more miraculous? A point infinitely smaller than a pencil point draws the shape of the universe.
That point is made of essence, or the purest form of Being. Essence is the ultimate mystery because it manages to do three things at once:
It conceives everything in existence.
It turns what it has imagined into reality.
It enters that reality and keeps it alive.
Right now you are also performing these three activities. Before any-thing happens to you it is conceived in the imagination—that is, in the state where wisps of images and desires are born. These images then unfold into expressed objects and events. While that happens you enter the event subjectively, which means you absorb it into your nervous system. The simplest way to describe this three-part act of creation is to say that you imagine a picture, then you paint it and finally step inside.
All that is required to find the essence of life is to step outside the picture and see yourself. You won’t see a person or even a soul, just a speck of awareness—the point that is producing the most lovely, appalling, mundane, holy, astonishing, ordinary, and marvelous pictures. But even in using these words, I have fallen into the