The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [93]
Likewise, you store your overlapping roles in a place that is more home to you than the stage where you play out the dramas. If you try to sort out these overlapping roles, you’ll find none of them is you. You are the one who pushes the mental button to enable the role to spring to life. From your vast repertoire, you select situations that play out personal karma, each ingredient seamlessly fitting into place to provide the illusion of being an individual ego.
The real you is detached from any role, any scenery, any drama. In spiritual terms, detachment isn’t an end unto itself—it develops into a kind of mastery. When you have this mastery, you can shift into nonlocal awareness anytime you want. This is what the Shiva Sutras mean by using memory without allowing memory to use you. You exercise detachment by stepping outside your memorized persona, and then the karma attached to any role no longer sticks. If you try to change your karma one piece at a time, you may achieve limited results, but the improved model of yourself will not be any more free than the unimproved one.
If there is really a secret to happiness, it can be found only at the source of happiness, which has the following characteristics:
THE SOURCE OF HAPPINESS IS . . .
Nonlocal
Detached
Impersonal
Universal
Beyond change
Made of essence
This list breaks down metanoia into its component parts. Metanoia originally meant a change of heart, and I think the same elements apply:
Nonlocal: Before you can have a change of heart, you must step outside yourself to get a larger perspective. The ego tries to narrow every issue down to “What will I get out of this?” When you reframe the question as “What will we get out of this?” or “What will everyone get out of this?” your heart will immediately feel less confined and constricted.
Detached: If you have a stake in a particular outcome, you can’t afford a change of heart. The boundaries are drawn; everyone has chosen a side to be on. The ego insists that keeping your eye on the prize—meaning the result it wants—is all-important. But in detachment, you realize that many outcomes could be beneficial to you. You work toward the outcome you believe is right, yet you remain detached enough to shift when your heart tells you that you should.
Impersonal: Situations seem to happen to people, but in reality they unfold from deeper karmic causes. The universe unfolds to itself, bringing to bear every cause that needs to be included. Don’t take this process personally. The working out of cause and effect is eternal. You are part of this rising and falling that never ends, and only by riding the wave can you ensure that the waves don’t drown you. The ego takes everything personally, leaving no room for higher guidance or purpose. If you can, realize that a cosmic plan is unfolding and appreciate the incredibly woven tapestry for what it is, a design of unparalleled marvel.
Universal: One time, when I was trying hard to understand the Buddhist concept of ego death (a concept that seemed at the time very cold and heartless), someone eased my mind by saying, “It’s not that you destroy who you are. You just expand the sense of ‘I’ from your little ego to the cosmic ego.” That’s a big proposition, but what I liked about this version is that nothing gets excluded. You start seeing every situation as belonging in our world, and even though that sense of inclusion may start out small—my family, my house, my neighborhood—it can grow naturally. The very fact that the ego finds it absurd to say my world, my galaxy, my universe implies that there is a shift at hand that it can’t make on its own. The key idea is to keep in mind that awareness is universal, however confined your ego makes you feel at any given moment.
Beyond change: The happiness you are used to comes and goes. Instead of thinking of this as a well that runs dry, imagine the