The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [77]
“Just think,” he said with obvious surprise, “the thing that’s the most me is the thing I never saw.”
If unconscious tendencies kept working in the dark, they wouldn’t be a problem. The genetic software in a penguin or wildebeest guides it to act without any knowledge that it is behaving much like every other penguin or wildebeest. But human beings, unique among all living creatures, want to break down Vasana. It’s not good enough to be a pawn who thinks he’s a king. We crave the assurance of absolute freedom and its result—a totally open future. Is this reasonable? Is it even possible?
In his classic text, the Yoga Sutras, the sage Patanjali informs us that there are three types of Vasana. The kind that drives pleasant behavior he calls white Vasana; the kind that drives unpleasant behavior he calls dark Vasana; the kind that mixes the two he calls mixed Vasana. I would say Jean had mixed Vasana—he liked fence-sitting but he missed the reward of lasting love for another person, a driving aspiration, or a shared vision that would bond him with a community. He displayed the positives and negatives of someone who must keep every option open. The goal of the spiritual aspirant is to wear down Vasana so that clarity can be achieved. In clarity you know that you are not a puppet—you have released yourself from the unconscious drives that once fooled you into thinking that you were acting spontaneously.
The secret here is that the state of release isn’t free will. Free will is the opposite of determinism, and in the one reality, opposites must ultimately merge into one. In the case of life versus death, we saw that they merged because both are needed to renew the flow of experience. Free will and determinism don’t merge like that. They merge only when a cosmic argument is settled once and for all. Here is the argument in its simplest form.
There are two claims to ultimate reality. One claim comes from the physical world, where events have definite causes and effects. The other claim comes from absolute Being, which has no cause. Only one claimant can be right because there’s no such thing as two ultimate realities. So which is it?
If the physical world is the ultimate reality, then you have no choice but to play out the game of Vasana. Every tendency has a cause in a prior tendency, and as soon as you wear out one, you will be creating another to replace it. You can’t be a finished product. There is always something waiting to be fixed, attended to, adjusted, polished, cleaned up, or ready to fall apart. (People who can’t face this fact turn into perfectionists, constantly chasing the chimera of a flawless existence. Although they don’t realize it, they are trying to defeat the law of Vasana, which dictates that no cause can disappear; it can only transform itself into a new cause.) The physical world is also called the domain of karma, which has its own cosmic side. Karma, as we know, means “action,” and the question to ask of action is this: Did it have a beginning? Does it ever end? Every person who was ever born found himself thrown into a world of action that was already fully operational. There is no hint that a first action got things started, and no way to tell if a last action might bring everything to a halt. The universe is a given, and despite theories about the Big Bang, the possibility of other universes, or even infinite universes, means that the chain of first events could extend forever.
The ancient sages didn’t bother with telescopes because they saw, in a flash of insight, that the mind is ruled by cause and effect