The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [82]
When I say that you can talk to the universe, I mean you can connect to it. If you feel depressed by a gray and rainy day, for example, see the inner and outer grayness as the same phenomenon with objective and subjective sides. If you are driving home from work and your gaze is caught by a glowing sunset, consider that Nature wanted to catch your attention, not that you and the sunset are having just an accidental encounter. On some intimate level, your existence meshes with the universe, not by chance but by intention.
When you see the life that exists everywhere, acknowledge what you’re seeing. At first, it may seem peculiar to do this, but you are a co-creator, and you have the right to appreciate the patterns of connection that you’ve made. Carrying yourself like a child of the universe isn’t a game of cosmic pretend. At the level of the field, you exist everywhere in spacetime, a scientific fact that we are carrying a step further by saying that this moment in spacetime has a special purpose in your world. It is your world, and by responding to it that way, you will begin to notice that it responds back:
On some days everything goes right.
On some days everything goes wrong.
At certain moments you feel absorbed into the rhythm of Nature.
At some moments you feel as if you disappear into the sky or the ocean.
Sometimes you know that you have always been here.
These are general examples, but you can be alert to moments that seem meant just for you. Why do certain moments feel uniquely magical? Only you will know, but you won’t if you don’t first begin to attune yourself to the feeling. The closest parallel I can draw to this kind of privileged relationship is that between lovers, in which ordinary moments are suffused with a presence or specialness that wouldn’t be felt by an outsider. Something totally compelling draws your attention when you are in love; once experienced, it is not easily forgotten. You feel as if you are inside your beloved and your beloved is inside you. The merging of yourself with something vaster than yourself is a blending of two subjectivities. It’s been called the relationship of “I and thou,” or the sense of being as a wave on the infinite ocean of Being.
Don’t let names and concepts distract you. There’s no defined way for you to relate to the universe. Just relate in your own way. A little child like my granddaughter finds her way in talking to trees and invisible dragons. That’s her privileged relationship. What is yours going to be? Shiver with anticipation and find out.
Secret #12
THERE IS NO TIME BUT NOW
THERE HAVE BEEN MOMENTS when my whole life made sense. I knew exactly who I was. The people in my life were all there for a reason. Clearly, and without a shred of doubt, I knew that the reason was love, so for that moment I could laugh at the preposterous notion that I had enemies or that I was a stranger in this world.
Perfection has a mysterious way of slipping in and out of time. Few people, I imagine, haven’t felt the kind of moment I just described, but I’ve never met a single person who could hold on to it. But people desperately want to, and often this hunger motivates their spiritual life. In the Buddhist tradition, there are a wealth of exercises devoted to mindfulness, a state of awareness in which you can be conscious of perfect moments. Let’s hope they all become perfect. But to be aware, you must first catch yourself being unaware, which is difficult; after all, being unaware can be defined as not knowing that you aren’t aware.
I had a hard time with this slipperiness until someone told me, “It’s like being happy. When you’re happy, you’re just happy. You don’t have to think about it. But then a moment comes when you say