The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [87]
Listening to what you’re saying: Having returned from your distraction, listen to the words you’re saying, or the ones in your head. Relationships are driven forward with words. If you listen to yourself, you will know how you are relating to the universe right now. Don’t be thrown off by the fact that there is another person in front of you. Whoever you are talking to, including yourself, stands in for reality itself. If you are complaining about a lazy waiter, you are complaining about the universe. If you are showing off to someone you want to impress, you are trying to impress the universe. There is only one relationship. Listen to how it’s going at this moment.
Watch your reaction: Every relationship is two-way, so whatever you are saying, the universe is responding. Watch your reaction. Are you defensive? Are you accepting and moving forward? Do you feel safe or unsafe? Again, don’t be distracted by the person you are relating to. You are tuning in to the universe’s response, closing the circle that embraces observer and observed.
Remove yourself from the details: Before sobriety, you had to find a way to adapt to the loneliness that comes from the absence of reality. Reality is wholeness. It is all-embracing. You dive in and there is nothing else. In the absence of wholeness you still crave a similar embrace, so you try to find it in fragments, bits and pieces. In other words, you tried to lose yourself in the details, as if sheer chaos and raucousness could saturate you to the point of fulfillment. Now you know that this strategy didn’t work, so back out of it. Remove yourself from the details. Forget the messiness. Take care of it as efficiently as possible, but don’t take it seriously; don’t make it important to who you are.
Follow the rise and fall of energy: Once the details are out of the way, you still need something to follow. Your attention wants to go somewhere, so take it to the heart of experience. The heart of experience is the universe’s breathing rhythm as it pours forth new situations, a rise and fall of energy. Notice how tension leads to release, excitement to fatigue, exhilaration to peace. Just as there is an ebb and flow in every marriage, your relationship to the universe rises and falls. You may experience these swings emotionally at first, but try not to. This is a much more profound rhythm. It begins in silence as a new experience is conceived; it moves through a period of gestation as the experience takes shape in silence; it begins to move toward birth by hinting at how things are going to change; finally there is the arrival of something new. This “something” can be a person in your life, an event, a thought, an insight—anything, really. Common to all is the rise and fall of energy. You need to connect with every stage because in the present moment one of them is right in front of you.
Question your ego: All this watching and noticing and catching yourself isn’t going unnoticed. Your ego has its own “right” way of doing things, and when you break that pattern, it will let you know of its displeasure. Change is frightening, but more than that, it is threatening to the ego. This fright is just a tactic to pull you back into line. You can’t fight your ego’s reactions because that will only deepen your involvement with it. But you can question it, which means questioning yourself from a calm distance. “Why am I doing this?” “Isn’t this a knee-jerk reflex?” “How far have I gotten in the past acting like this?” “Haven’t I proved to myself that this doesn’t work?” You must keep asking these stubborn questions over and over, with the intent not of breaking down your ego but of loosening its reflexive hold over your behavior.
Immerse yourself in a spiritual milieu: When you seriously face your behavior, you’ll realize that the ego has been isolating you all along. It wants you to think that life is lived in separation because, with that belief, it can rationalize grabbing as much for I,