The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [65]
Imagination: When this door is open, the images in your mind have creative power. They breathe existence into possibilities that never existed before. At this level, you also develop a passion for exploring the unknown.
Reason: When this door is open, you can make up systems and models for reality. Rational thought copes with infinite possibilities by using logic, which cuts off slices of reality to analyze in isolation from the whole.
Emotion: When this door is open, you are sensitive to bodily sensations and interpret them as pleasure and pain, feelings you desire and those you want to avoid. The emotional domain is so powerful that it overrides logic and reason.
Physical body: When this door is open, you find yourself as a separate being in the physical world.
How did all these levels come about? As a fact of existence: Pure being conceived them, projected them from itself, and then entered them. This is the cosmic circuit board, and your own nervous system is wired into it. By paying attention to any dimension of life, you send a current of consciousness into it. If you pay no attention, the circuit is closed for that dimension. Although we are using words like doors, circuitry, and levels, they fall short of reality, which vibrates with every impulse. You are having an effect in every dimension, even when you haven’t sent your attention to explore and understand what’s there.
Someone who has fully explored a dimension is said in Sanskrit to have attained Vidya, a word that literally means “knowledge” but implies much more—mastery over a set of natural laws. Think of yourself as entering a workshop where the tools and skills are unknown to you. The minute you step inside you take in everything at a glance, but it requires training to master every detail. In the end you emerge as a changed person, with completely altered perceptions. Thus, a musician coming out of the Juilliard School of Music hears every note on the radio through a different nervous system from someone who has just graduated from M.I.T. as an electrical engineer. Both have acquired Vidya, the kind of knowledge that you become rather than the kind you passively learn.
People with vastly different visions of spirituality still have in common a quest for Vidya. They want to be transformed by knowledge that flows directly from the source—the fact that one person’s source is God while another’s is Brahman, Allah, Nirvana, or Being is a minor difference. What really divides people is keeping the doors of perception shut. This state is called Avidya, or lack of awareness.
AVIDYA
Cutting Yourself Off from Awareness
Pure being: When this door is closed, we exist in separation. There is underlying dread of death, a loss of connection, and the absence of any divine presence.
Conditioned bliss: When this door is closed, life is joyless. Happiness is only a passing state. There is no opening for peak experiences.
Love: When this door is closed, life is heartless. We feel isolated in a gray world where other people are distant, detached figures. There is no sense of a loving hand in creation.
Knowingness: When this door is closed, the laws of nature are baffling. Knowledge is gained only through facts and limited personal experience, with no access to deeper meaning.
Myth and archetypes: When this door is closed, there are no higher models, no heroes or gods, no passionate quests to pursue. We see no mythical significance to our own lives. There is no deeper dimension to the relations between men and women beyond what lies on the surface.
Intuition: When this door is closed, life loses its subtlety. The person lacks insight, has no flashes of brilliance, no exhilarated “Aha!” moments. The subtle web of connectedness that holds the universe together is completely hidden from view.
Imagination: When this door is closed, the mind is devoid of fantasy. We see everything in literal terms—art and metaphor count very little. Important decisions are approached with technical analysis, and there is no hope of a sudden creative