The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [19]
The relaxing effect will continue, yet you will also begin to notice that you are more self-aware. You may gain a sudden insight or inspiration. You may start to feel more centered; sudden spurts of energy or alertness may occur. These effects vary from person to person, so be open to whatever comes. The overall purpose of meditation is the same for everyone, however: You are learning to relate to awareness itself, the purest level of experience.
Secret #4
WHAT YOU SEEK, YOU ALREADY ARE
WHEN I TURNED TWENTY-ONE as a medical student in New Delhi I had my choice of two kinds of friends. The materialistic kind got out of bed at noon and went to all-night parties where everyone drank Coca-Cola and danced to Beatles records. They had discovered cigarettes and women, perhaps even bootleg liquor, which was much cheaper than imported Scotch. The spiritual kind got up at dawn to go to temple—about the time the materialists were staggering home with hangovers—and they ate rice out of a bowl and drank water or tea, usually out of the same bowl.
It didn’t seem strange at the time that all the materialists were Indians and all the spiritual types were Westerners. The Indians couldn’t wait to leave home and go someplace where Coca-Cola, good tobacco, and legal whiskey were cheap and plentiful. The Westerners kept asking where the real holy men were in India, the kind who could levitate and heal lepers by touching them. As it happened, I ran with the materialists, who were all around me in class. Nobody who was actually born in India ever saw himself the other way, as a seeker.
Today I wouldn’t have two types to choose from—everyone around me seems to be a seeker. In my mind, seeking is another word for chasing after something. My Indian classmates had the easier chase because it doesn’t take much to get money and material things, whereas the spiritual types from the West almost never found their holy men. I used to think that the problem was due to how rare holy men actually are; now I realize that what defeated their thirst for a higher life was tied up in the act of seeking itself. Tactics that will successfully get you whiskey and Beatles records fail miserably when you chase holiness.
The spiritual secret that applies here is this: What you seek, you already are. Your awareness has its source in unity. Instead of seeking outside yourself, go to the source and realize who you are.
Seeking is a word often applied to the spiritual path, and many people are proud to call themselves seekers. Often, they are the same people who once chased too hard after money, sex, alcohol, or work. With the same addictive intensity they now hope to find God, the soul, the higher self. The problem is that seeking begins with a false assumption. I don’t mean the assumption that materialism is corrupt and spirituality is pure. Yes, materialism can become all-consuming, but that’s not the really important point. Seeking is doomed because it is a chase that takes you outside yourself. Whether the object is God or money makes no real difference. Productive seeking requires that you throw out all assumptions that there is a prize to be won. This means acting without hope of rising to some ideal self, hope being a wish that you’ll get somewhere better than the place you started from. You are starting from yourself, and it’s the self that contains all the answers. So you have to give up on the idea that you must go from A to B. There is no linear path when the goal isn’t somewhere else. You must also discard fixed judgments about high and low, good and evil, holy and profane. The one reality includes everything in its tangle of experiences, and what we are trying to find is the experiencer who is present no matter what experience you are having.
Looking at the people who race around trying to be models of goodness, someone coined the apt