The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [107]
With every unreal aspect of yourself stripped away, only essence remains. Once you realize that essence is the real you, the golden door opens. Essence is precious because it is the stuff from which the soul is made. If you could keep holding on to essence while stepping back into the picture you create, you would be living from the level of the soul at every moment.
But a huge difficulty arises that keeps the golden door shut: Nothing isn’t essence. When you reduce the one reality to its essence, every quality disappears. Now a tree, a horse, a cloud, and a human being are the same. Physical dimensions also disappear. The time elapsed between any two events is now zero; the space between any two objects is zero. Light and dark no longer exist. Complete fullness and utter emptiness are the same.
In other words, at the very moment you think you have the secret to everything, you look down to find that your hands are empty. This is a particularly disturbing outcome for those who travel the spiritual path to find God. Unless you define God as essence, he will vanish also. But in India, there is a strong tradition that puts essence far above a personal god. One of the greatest modern spiritual teachers, Nisargadatta Maharaj, made no concessions on this point. He declared himself—and all other people—to be pure essence. As a result, he met with a good deal of contentious opposition.
Here’s a typical interchange from a skeptical visitor to Maharaj:
Q: Did God create the earth for you?
A: God is my devotee and did all this for me.
Q: Is there no god apart from you?
A: How can there be? “I am” is the root, God is the tree. Whom am I to worship, and what for?
Q: Are you the devotee or the object of devotion?
A: Neither. I am devotion itself.
You can feel the baffled frustration in the questioner’s voice, and who can blame him? The path to unity is so different from what is taught in organized religion that it bends the mind. Maharaj used to regularly announce that we were not created for God, God was created for us. By which he meant that essence, being invisible, had to create an almighty projection to be worshipped. By itself, essence has no qualities; there is nothing to hold on to.
Essence does a vanishing act because it’s not anything you can feel or think about. Since being alive consists of feeling and thinking, how is essence going to be of any use? At the most superficial level, essence is not useful because differences still hold your attention. Let’s say that you want to be happy rather than unhappy, rich rather than poor, good rather than evil. None of these distinctions matters to your essence. Essence works with only three things: It exists, it creates, it is aware.
A life without differences sounds completely unlivable, and yet there is a document that talks about essence in a matter-of-fact way, suggesting that somebody has figured out how to live from this level. The document, known as the Yoga Vashistha, has many strange things to offer. Yoga we know means “unity,” and Vashistha is the name of the author; therefore, in Sanskrit the title means “Vashistha’s version of unity.” No one has offered proof that a person by this name ever lived—the text itself is many centuries old—but Vashistha’s version of unity stands as a unique work. I believe it is the furthest stretch the human nervous system has ever taken toward being aware of existence itself.
Some typical observations by Vashistha quickly give you the flavor of his viewpoint on life:
In the infinite consciousness universes come and go like particles of dust in a beam of sunlight that shines through a hole in the roof.
Death is ever keeping a watch over our life.
All objects are experienced in the subject and nowhere else.
Whole worlds arise and fall like ripples in the ocean.
Vashistha’s teaching has a reputation