The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [22]
You’ve already undertaken the exercise of looking at a rose and breaking it down from the level of a physical object to the level of energy vibrating in empty space. The other side of that exercise consisted of seeing that your brain can also be understood the same way. So when you are seeing a rose, is nothing looking at nothing?
So it would seem, but the real phenomenon is more amazing: You are looking at yourself. One part of your awareness, which you call yourself, is gazing upon itself in the form of a rose. There is no solid core to either the object or the observer. There is no person inside your head, only a swirl of water, salt, sugar, and a handful of other chemicals like potassium and sodium. This whirlpool of a brain is always flowing, and thus every experience is swept along in currents and eddies as swiftly as a mountain stream. So, where is the silent observer located if not in my brain? Neurologists have found locations for all kinds of mental states. No matter what a person is experiencing—depression, elation, creativity, hallucination, amnesia, paralysis, sexual longing, or anything else—the brain displays a signature pattern of activity scattered across various locations. Yet there is no location or pattern for the person having these experiences. The person could be nowhere, at least nowhere that science will ever spot.
This is a cause for incredible excitement because, if the real you isn’t inside your head, you have been set free, like awareness itself. This freedom is limitless. You can create anything because you are in every atom of creation. Wherever your awareness wants to go, matter must follow. You do come first after all and the universe second.
I can hear the cries of outrage from those who claim that today’s worshippers think they are larger than God, that instead of obeying his laws they arrogantly want to define life any way they choose. There is some truth to this criticism, but it must be put into context. Imagine an infant who has been crawling for several months and who suddenly finds that there’s a new mode of travel called walking. Everyone has watched a toddler find his legs—the baby’s face shows a combination of unsteadiness and determination, insecurity and joy. “Can I do this?” “Should I fall back down and crawl, the way I know how to do?” What you’re reading in a baby’s face is exactly the same tangled experience of anyone caught at a spiritual crossroads. In both cases, everything is on the move in a new way. The brain is motivating the body; the body is bringing new information to the brain; unexpected actions begin to emerge from nowhere; and even though the whole mixture feels scary, a certain exhilaration drives us forward. “I don’t know where I’m going, but I have to get there.”
All experience takes place within the bubbling cauldron of creation. Every moment of life sweeps the body along in an uncertain balance of mind, emotions, perceptions, behavior, and outside events. Your attention gets pulled here and there. In a moment of awakening, the brain is just as confused, joyful, insecure, uneasy, and astonished as a baby finding his legs. But at the level of the witness, this confused mix is utterly clear: It’s all one thing. Look at the baby again. As he lurches across the floor, the whole world totters with him. There’s no steady place to stand, no way of saying, “I am in control. This is going to turn out the way I want it to.” The baby has no choice but to plunge his whole being into a world that is bursting into new dimensions.
Can anyone live this way, plunging into new dimensions, all the time? No, stability must be found. Since childhood, all of us have found a stable point through the ego. We imagine a fixed “I” who is in control, at least as much as possible. But there is another, far