The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [47]
EMERGENT SPIRITUAL PROPERTIES
Clarity of awareness
Knowingness
Reverence for life
Absence of violence
Fearlessness
Nonattachment
Wholeness
These qualify as spiritual transformations because none can be achieved simply by recombining old ingredients of the self. Like the wetness of water, each appears as if by alchemy—the dross of everyday life turns to gold.
Clarity means being awake to yourself around the clock, in waking, sleeping, and dreaming. Instead of being overshadowed by externals, your awareness is always open to itself. Clarity feels totally alert, and carefree.
Knowingness means being in touch with the level of the mind where every question is answered. It is related to genius, although knowingness isn’t focused on music, mathematics, or other specific subjects. Your area of knowledge is life itself and the movement of consciousness on every level. Knowingness feels wise, confident, unshakable, and yet humble.
Reverence for life means being in touch with the life force. You feel the same power flowing through you as through every living thing; even the dust in a beam of light dances to the same rhythm. Therefore, life isn’t limited to plants and animals—everything possesses a glowing, animated vitality. Reverence for life feels warm, connected, and exhilarating.
Nonviolence means being in harmony with every action. There is no opposition between what you do and what anyone else does. Your desires do not clash with another person’s well-being. When you look around you see conflict in the world at large but not in your world. You emanate peace like a force field that subdues conflict in your surroundings. Nonviolence feels peaceful, still, and completely without resistance.
Fearlessness means total security. Fear is a jolt from the past; it reminds us of the moment when we left a place of belonging and found ourselves in a place of vulnerability. The Bhagavad Gita says that fear is born of separation, implying that the original cause of fear was the loss of unity. Ultimately, that separation is not a fall from grace but a loss of who you really are. To be fearless feels, therefore, like yourself.
Wholeness means including everything, leaving nothing out. At present we each experience life sliced up into bits of time, bits of experience, bits of activity. We cling to our limited sense of self to protect the slices from falling apart. But it’s impossible to find continuity in this way, hard as the ego tries in its struggle to make life hang together. Wholeness is a state beyond personality. It emerges when “I am” as it applies to you is the same “I am” everywhere. Wholeness feels solid, eternal, without beginning or end.
True transformation, in my view, depends on the emergence of these properties as your personal experience. They are primal qualities embedded in awareness; they weren’t invented by human beings or projected out of lack, need, or hunger. You cannot experience any of them by attaining more of what you already have. Being as nice as possible to others and causing no harm isn’t the same as nonviolence in the spiritual sense. Showing courage in the face of danger isn’t the same as fearlessness. Feeling stable and well put together isn’t the same as wholeness.
One must emphasize that however unreachable these things sound, they are completely natural—they are extensions of a process of transformation that has been with you all your life. Each of us is already an emergent property of the universe, a totally new creation from our parents’ genes. And yet there is a deeper magic at work. At the chemical level, your parents’ genes were only recombined; you got some from one person and some from another. The survival of a certain gene pool extended to include a new generation; it didn’t suddenly break down into a new and unknown substance.
Somehow nature used those old building blocks to perform a feat of alchemy because you are not a reconfigured genetic replica. Your genes are just a supporting