The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [78]
There is one alternative, the sages argued. Your mind can be. This is how the second claimant got into court. The ultimate reality could be Being itself. Being doesn’t act; therefore, it is never touched by karma. If Being is the ultimate reality, the game of Vasana is over. Instead of worrying about cause and effect, which is the origin of all tendencies, one can simply say there is no cause and effect.
I said that Vasana gave us a reason to delve deeper into free will. Now we can see why. The person who is content to remain a puppet is no different from the rebel who screams that he must remain free at all costs. Both are subject to karma; their opinions make no difference to the matter. But if you can identify with a state that has no Vasanas, free will and determinism merge; they become mere instructions in the manual of karmic software. In other words, both are tools to be used by Being rather than ends in themselves. Karma, it turns out, loses the argument about being the ultimate reality.
How can I say that the argument is settled? I could say it’s settled by authority because the spiritual record holds countless sages and saints who testify that Being is the ultimate ground of existence. But since we aren’t relying on authority here, the proof has to come from experience. I experience that I am alive, which seems to help the case for karma, since being alive consists of one action after another. But I cannot be alive if the whole universe isn’t alive. This conclusion would seem absurd without building up to it. But we have come far enough to realize that the real absurdity is to be alive in a dead universe. No one before modern times felt that he or she was stranded on a speck of rock and water with nothing but a black void to look out at. I find that image, which underlies the superstition of science, horrifying and untrue. My body and the universe are composed of the same molecules, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t manage to believe that a hydrogen atom is alive inside me but dead the instant it leaves my lungs.
My body and the universe come from the same source, obey the same rhythms, flash with the same storms of electromagnetic activity. My body can’t afford to argue over who created the universe. Every cell would disappear the second it stopped creating itself. So it must be that the universe is living and breathing through me. I am an expression of everything in existence.
At any given moment, the bubbling subatomic activity that keeps the universe going is in flux; every particle winks in and out of existence thousands of times per second. In that interval, I also wink in and out, traveling from existence to annihilation and back again billions of times a day. The universe came up with this lightning-fast rhythm so that it could pause in between and decide what to create next. The same is true of me. Even though my mind works too slowly to see the difference, I’m not the same person after I return from my billion journeys into the void. Every single process in my cells has been rethought, reexamined, reorganized. Creation happens by infinitesimal degrees, and the overall result is eternal genesis.
In a living universe, we do not have to answer any questions about who the creator is. At various times, religions have named a single god, multiple gods and goddesses, an invisible life force, a cosmic mind, and in the current religion of physics, a blind game of chance. Choose any or all of these because what’s far more crucial about genesis is you. Can you see yourself as the point around which everything is now revolving?
Look around and try to view your whole situation. From the viewpoint of a limited self, you cannot be the center of the cosmos. But that’s because you are looking at