The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [24]
The ego has a repertoire of rationalizations for not being emotionally free:
I’m not the kind of person who feels like that.
I should be over it.
No one wants to hear about these feelings.
I don’t have a right to feel hurt; it isn’t fair to everyone else.
I’ll only open old wounds.
The past is the past.
If you find yourself saying such things as a deflection from facing painful feelings, you may succeed in keeping them repressed. But every hidden, blocked feeling is like a chunk of frozen consciousness. Until it thaws, you are saying “I am this hurt” even as you refuse to look at it; it has you in its grip. This is another obstacle between you and the silent witness that must be dissolved. Time and attention have to be paid, sitting with your feelings and letting them say what they have to say.
Reach beyond yourself: When you are inhabiting a self that is fixed and set in place, you may think that you have attained something positive. As people say, “Now I know who I am.” What they really know is an imitation of a real self, a collection of habits, labels, and preferences that is entirely historical. You have to reach beyond this self-created identity to find the source of new energy. The silent witness is not a second self. It doesn’t resemble a new suit hanging in the closet that you can reach for and put on to replace the shabby suit you’ve worn out.
The witness is a sense of self that lies beyond boundaries. There’s a haunting poem by the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore in which he imagines what it will be like to die. He has a deep intuition that it will be like a stone melting in his heart:
The stone will melt in tears
Because I can’t remain closed to you forever.
I can’t escape without being conquered.
From the blue sky an eye will gaze down
To summon me in silence.
I will receive death utterly at your feet.
To me, this is a perfect description of reaching beyond yourself. Having lived with a hard place in the heart, you still can’t avoid your real self. It is the silent eye looking down. (Instead of saying, “I will receive death,” the poet could have said, “I will receive freedom” or “I will receive joy.”) To reach beyond yourself means realizing, with real determination, that your fixed identity is false. Then, when the ego demands that you see the world from the perspective of “what’s in it for me,” you can free yourself by saying in return, “that me isn’t in charge anymore.”
Be genuine: Why is it said that the truth will set you free? People are punished and ostracized all the time for telling the truth. Lies often succeed. A polite agreement to go along and make no waves has brought money and power to many people. But “The truth shall set you free” wasn’t meant as practical advice. There’s a spiritual intent behind the words, saying in essence, “You cannot set yourself free, but truth can.” In other words, truth has the power to set aside what is false, and doing so can set us free. The ego’s agenda is to keep itself going. At crucial moments, however, the truth speaks to us; it tells us how things really are, not forever or for all people but right at this moment for us alone. This impulse must be honored if you wish to break free. When I think of what a flash of truth is like, some examples come to mind:
Knowing that you can’t be what someone else wants you to be, no matter how much you love the other person.
Knowing that you love, even when it’s scary to say so.
Knowing that someone else’s fight isn’t yours.
Knowing that you are better than what you appear to be.
Knowing that you will