The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [88]
As someone who found untold hope and consolation in such writings, I can’t urge you more strongly to turn to them. But there is a living world to meet as well. Immerse yourself in a spiritual context, according to how you define spirit. Expect to be disappointed when you get there, too, because it’s inevitable that you will meet the most frustration among people struggling with their imperfections. The ferment you meet is your own.
Once you commit yourself to being sober, there is nothing more to do. Presence will appear on its own, and when it does, your awareness cannot help but be in the now. A moment in the now causes an internal change felt in every cell. Your nervous system is being taught a way of processing reality that isn’t old or new, known or unknown. You rise to a new level of being in which presence matters for itself alone, and it matters absolutely. Every other experience is relative and therefore can be rejected, forgotten, discounted, put out of mind. Presence is the touch of reality itself, which cannot be rejected or lost. Each encounter makes you a little more real.
Evidence of this comes in many ways, the most immediate of which has to do with time itself. When the only time on the clock is now, the following becomes your actual experience:
1. The past and the future exist only in imagination. Everything you did before has no reality. Everything you will do afterward has no reality. Only the thing you are doing now is real.
2. The body you once called yourself is not who you are anymore. The mind you once called yourself is not who you are anymore. You step out of them easily, without effort. Both are temporary patterns that the universe took for an instant before moving on.
3. Your actual self manifests at this moment as thoughts, emotions, and sensations passing across the screen of awareness. You recognize them as the meeting point between change and timelessness. You see yourself as exactly that also.
When you find yourself in the present moment, there is nothing to do. The river of time is allowed to flow. You experience the eddies and currents, shallows and depths, in a new context: innocence. The present moment is naturally innocent. The now turns out to be the only experience that doesn’t go anywhere. How can this be true when I’ve said that the whole purpose of time is to unfold the steps of evolution? That’s the mystery of mysteries. We grow and yet life remains eternal at the core. Imagine a universe expanding through infinite dimensions at infinite speed, completely free to create everywhere at once. To go along for the ride we need do nothing but remain absolutely still.
CHANGING YOUR REALITY TO ACCOMMODATE THE TWELFTH SECRET
The twelfth secret is about how to use time. The best use of time is to reconnect to your being. The misuse of time comes down to the opposite: moving away from your being. There is always enough time to evolve because you and the universe are unfolding together. How can you prove that to yourself? One way is through a Sanskrit practice called Sankalpa. Any intention or thought that you put your will behind is a Sankalpa. Included in the term is the whole idea of means: Having made a wish or had a thought you want to come true, how do you actually get results? The answer depends a great deal on your relationship to time (the root word kalpa means “time”).
• If timelessness is part of your being, the wish will come true spontaneously without delay. You have the power to play with time as you would any other part of your world.
• If timelessness has a tentative relationship to your being, some wishes will come true spontaneously,