The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [92]
Therapists spend years detaching people from all the things they imagine might go wrong with their lives, things that have nothing to do with actual circumstances.
This reminds me of an experience that occurred to a medical colleague when I was in training years ago. He had an anxious patient who came in every few months for a complete physical, terrified by the prospect of contracting cancer. The X-rays were always negative, but she continued to come back, each time as worried as before. Finally after many years, her X-ray did indeed confirm that she had a malignancy. With a triumphant look she cried, “See, I told you so!” Imagined suffering is as real as any other kind, and sometimes they merge.
The fact that anyone would cling to unhappiness as fiercely as others cling to happiness is baffling until you look more closely at local awareness. Local awareness is caught on the border between the ego and the universe. This is an anxious place. On the one hand, the ego operates as if it were in control. You navigate through the world on the unspoken assumption that you are important and that getting what you want matters. But the universe is vast and the forces of nature impersonal. The ego’s sense of control and self-importance seem like a total illusion when you consider that human beings are barely a speck on the cosmic canvas. There is no security for the individual who senses deep down that he or she is pretending to be at the center of creation—the physical evidence of your unimportance is too overwhelming.
But is escape really possible? In its own domain, the ego says no. Your personality is a karmic pattern fiercely holding on to itself. However, when you detach yourself from local awareness, you stop playing the ego’s game—meaning that you step outside the whole problem of making “me” happy. The individual can’t be crushed by the universe if there is no individual. As long as you attach your identity to even one small part of your ego-personality, everything else comes along. It’s like walking into a theater and hearing an actor say the words “To be or not to be.” Instantly you know the character, his history, and his tragic fate.
Actors can throw off one role and put on another without having to do more than make a quick mental adjustment. Remembering to be Hamlet instead of Macbeth isn’t done one word at a time. You simply call the right character up. Moreover, when you change one character for another, you find yourself in a new place—Scotland instead of Denmark, a witch’s camp beside the road instead of a castle by the North Sea.
One way to give up local awareness is to realize that you already have. When you go home for Thanksgiving, you probably find yourself falling automatically into the role of the child you once were. At work, you play a different role than when you go on vacation. Our minds are so good at storing totally conflicting roles that even small children know how to switch smoothly from one to the other. When candid cameras are set up to catch three-year-olds at play without adults around, parents are often shocked by the transformations they see before their eyes: The sweet, obedient, conciliatory child they knew at home can turn into a raging bully. Some child psychologists go so far as to claim that upbringing plays only a minor part in who we grow up to be. Two children raised under the same roof with the same parental attention can be so different outside the home as to be unrecognizable as siblings. But it would be more correct to say that growing children learn many roles simultaneously, and the role learned at home is only one of many—nor should we expect it to be otherwise.
If you can see this in yourself, then nonlocal awareness is only a step away. All you need to realize is that all your roles exist simultaneously. Just like an actor, you keep your personas in a place beyond space and time. Macbeth and Hamlet are simultaneously found inside an actor