The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [16]
You might want to pause for a moment and do just that: Choose any item that speaks to you—a sensation or thought you can remember having—and connect it to the other three categories. Let’s say you pick “I see that I am unique.” Uniqueness means that there is no one else who is exactly like you. What feeling would go with that realization? Perhaps a feeling of strength and self-esteem, or a sensation of being like a flower with its own unique scent, form, and color. There is also the sensation of standing out from the crowd and being proud that you do. The thought might then come, “I don’t have to imitate anybody else.” With this thought you might begin to feel free of other people’s opinions about you. From this, a desire arises to act with integrity, to show the world that you know who you are. Thus, from one tiny sensation a whole new pattern emerges; you have found the path of expanded awareness. If you pursue a momentary glimpse of awareness, you will see how quickly it expands; a single thread leads to a complex tapestry. Yet this metaphor cannot explain how to change reality itself. To master pure awareness, you must learn how to live it.
When an experience is so powerful that it motivates people to change the whole pattern of their lives, we call that a breakthrough, or an epiphany. The value of an epiphany doesn’t lie just in some new or exciting insight. You might be walking down the street and pass a stranger. Your eyes meet, and for some reason there is a connection. It isn’t sexual or romantic or even a suspicion that this person could mean something in your life. Instead, the epiphany is that you are that stranger—your experiencer merges with his. Call this a feeling or a thought, it doesn’t matter which—it’s the sudden expansion that counts. You are flung outside your narrow boundaries, if only for a moment, and that makes all the difference. You have tasted a hidden dimension. Compared to the habit of shutting yourself behind the walls of ego, this new dimension feels freer and lighter. You have a sense that your body can’t contain you anymore.
Another example: When you watch a young child who is playing with complete focus and yet totally carefree, it’s hard not to feel a tug. Doesn’t the child’s innocence seem palpable at that moment? Can’t you feel in yourself—or yearn to feel—the same delight in play? Doesn’t the child’s tiny body seem as fragile as a soap bubble and yet bursting with life itself, something immense, eternal, never to be defeated? In a fascinating text called the Shiva Sutras, which dates back centuries in India, one can find similar epiphanies. Each one is a sudden glimpse of freedom in which the underlying experiencer is directly confronted, without interference. One looks at a beautiful woman and suddenly one sees beauty itself. Or one looks at the sky and suddenly one sees an infinity beyond.
No one else, however much you love and adore the person, sees the true significance of your private epiphanies. The secret belongs to you, with you, in you. In the title Shiva Sutra, the word Shiva means “God” and the word Sutra means “thread,” so quite deliberately the reader is being shown tiny threads that lead back to the eternal source.
There is a wider context for the Shiva Sutras, which requires following the path that is opened up by an epiphany. In the Vedic tradition, each person can choose four paths that arise from feeling, thinking, acting, and being. Each path is called a Yoga, the Sanskrit word for “union,” because unity—merging