The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [48]
Transforming yourself is like getting pregnant. Every woman who decides to get pregnant is making a personal decision and yet submitting to a tremendous force of nature. On the one hand, she exerts free will; on the other, she is caught up in inexorable events. Once she has a fertilized seed inside her womb, nature takes over; producing a child is something you do and at the same time it is something that is happening to you. The same can be said for any other true transformation. You can make a personal decision to be spiritual, but when spirit really takes hold, you are caught up in forces far beyond yourself. It’s as if a surgeon is called into the operating room for an essential surgery and looks down to find that the patient on the table is himself.
We’ve covered the ten principles that serve as the operating system of one reality. But most people are firmly entrenched in another operating system—the system of duality. They live according to the assumption that they are separate, isolated individuals in a random cosmos where what happens “in here” is not reflected “out there.” How, then, does a person shift from one operating system to the other? Unity is totally different from duality, but you don’t have to wait for the end of this journey to live as if you are there in the next. Right now you are living as if limitation and separation must be true; therefore, you aren’t leaving room for them not to be true. Even so, a hidden intelligence is preserving the incredible orderliness of life while allowing change to swirl around in apparent chaos. If exposed to sunlight on a fresh spring day, a living cell would wither and turn to dust, and its DNA would blow away in the wind. But such apparent fragility has survived two billion years of constant assault from the elements. In order to see that your own existence is protected by the same intelligence, you have to align with it first. Then a universal law reveals itself: Wholeness remains the same no matter how much it changes.
Your task is to make wholeness more real in your life. As long as you remain on the level where change is dominant, there is no possibility of truly becoming new. Duality maintains its operating system from moment to moment, and as long as you are plugged into it, that system seems real, workable, reliable, and self-validating. The other operating system, the one based on wholeness, works far better than the system you are used to. Wholeness is also real, workable, reliable, and self-validating. For the sake of getting our bearings, let’s look at some familiar situations and see how each system would handle them.
You arrive at work one day to find out through the grapevine that your company is downsizing. No one can tell you if your job is at risk, but it might be. In the operating system of duality, the following implications start to come into play:
I could lose the one thing I need to support myself.
Someone else has control over my destiny.
I am faced with something unpredictable and unknown.
I don’t deserve to be blind-sided like this.
I could be hurt if things go wrong for me.
These are all familiar thoughts whenever you find yourself in crisis. Some people manage the threat better than others; you yourself have been through similar situations with more or less success. Yet these concerns are just part of an operating system. They are programmed into the software of the ego with its total fixation on keeping everything under control. What is really being threatened here is not the loss of a job but loss of control. This reveals just how fragile the ego’s grip actually is.
Now let’s reframe the situation in terms