The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [91]
If you live at the center of one reality, you begin to witness patterns coming and going. At first, these patterns continue to feel personal. You create the patterns, and that brings a sense of attachment. But artists are famous for not collecting their own works; it is the act of creation itself that brings satisfaction. Once completed, the painting holds no more life; the juice has been squeezed out of it. The same holds true for the patterns we create. Experience loses its juice when you know that you created it.
The notion of detachment, which crops up in every Eastern spiritual tradition, troubles many people, who equate it with being passive and disinterested. But what’s really implied is the same detachment any creator has once the work is done. Having created an experience and then lived it out, one finds that detachment comes naturally. It doesn’t happen all at once, however. For a long time we remain fascinated by the play of duality with its constantly warring opposites.
Yet eventually one is ready to undergo the experience called metanoia—Greek for having a change of heart. Because the word cropped up so many times in the New Testament, it took on a more spiritual meaning. It signified changing your mind about leading a sinful life, then it gained the connotation of repentance, and finally it expanded to mean eternal salvation. Yet if you step outside the walls of theology, metanoia is very close to what we’ve been calling transformation. You shift your sense of self from local to nonlocal. Instead of calling any experience “mine,” you see that every pattern in the universe is temporary. The universe keeps shuffling its basic material into new shapes, and for a time you have called one of those shapes “me.”
Metanoia is the secret behind Nadi reading, I think. A long-ago seer looked inside himself and picked a ripple of consciousness that had the name Deepak attached to it. He wrote the name down along with other details that rippled out into spacetime. This implies a level of awareness that I should be able to reach inside myself. If I could see myself as a ripple in the field of light (Jyotish is Sanskrit for “light”), I would find the freedom that cannot be attained by remaining who I am inside my accepted boundaries. If my parents’ names were known before my birth, and if my father’s time of death could be reckoned generations before he was born, these preconditions are closed off to change.
True freedom occurs only in nonlocal awareness.
The ability to shift from local to nonlocal awareness is for me the meaning of redemption or salvation. You go to that place where the soul lives without having to die first. Rather than argue the metaphysics of this again, let me reduce the issue of nonlocality to something everyone is pursuing: happiness. To try to be happy is intensely personal, and therefore it’s something we give over to the ego, whose sole goal is to make “me” happy. If it turns out that happiness lies outside “me,” in the domain of nonlocal awareness, that would be a convincing argument for metanoia.
Happiness is a complex thing for human beings. We find it hard to experience happiness without being reminded of the things that could shatter it. Some of these things stick to us from our past as traumatic wounds; others are projections into the future as worries and anticipations of disaster.
It’s no one’s fault that happiness is elusive. The play of opposites is a cosmic drama, and our minds have been conditioned to fit into it. Happiness, as everyone knows, is too good to last. And this is true, as long as you define it as “my” happiness; by doing so you have already tied yourself to a wheel that must spin to the other side. Metanoia, or nonlocal awareness, solves this problem by transcending it because there is no other way. The elements making up your life are conflicting. Even