The Book of Secrets - Deepak Chopra [98]
The universe runs on a switch with only two positions, on and off. “On” is the material world with all its events and objects. “Off” is pure possibility, the changing room where particles go when no one is looking. The “on” position can be controlled only by external means. Once you light it up, the physical universe behaves by a set of rules. But if you catch it in the “off” position, the universe can be changed without regard for time and space. Nothing is heavy and immovable in the “off” position because there are no objects. Nothing is close or far away. Nothing is trapped in the past, present, or future. The “off” position is pure potential. There, your body is a set of possibilities waiting to happen, and present, too, are all those possibilities that have already happened and those that might happen. In the “off” position, everything in creation collapses down to a point, and miraculously, you live at that point; it is your source.
“On” and “off” don’t give quite an accurate picture, however. Just as there are many degrees of physical reality, there are many degrees of nonphysical reality. Your body is a solid object, a swirl of atoms, a storm of subatomic particles, and a ghost of energy, all at the same time. These states are simultaneous, but each operates according to different rules. In physics, this jumbled set of rules is called a “tangled hierarchy.” The word hierarchy indicates that the levels are stacked in a certain order. Your body is in no danger of flying apart into random atoms because, in the hierarchy of things, solid objects stay in place, but in truth you are a cloud of electrons and a probability wave and everything in between.
That is the “on” position. In the “off” position, the same tangle continues but is totally out of sight. The invisible domain is divided in strange ways. At one level, events are all merged. Beginnings and endings meet; nothing happens without affecting everything else. But at another level, some events are more important than others; some can be controlled while others may float around with only the weakest kind of causation. By analogy, look inside your mind: Some thoughts demand to be acted on while others are passing whims; some follow strict logic while others obey very loose associations. Events in the universe are exactly the same mixed bag of potential events. If you want to, you can dive deep into the “off” position and start bringing up the events you want. You have to be prepared to meet the tangled hierarchy head on, however, because every event you might want to change is enmeshed in every other event. Still, there are certain conditions that remain the same.
DIVING INTO PURE POTENTIAL
How to Navigate the Field of Everything
1. The deeper you go, the more power is available to change things.
2. Reality flows from more subtle regions to more gross ones.
3. The easiest way to change anything is to first go to the subtlest level of it, which is awareness.
4. Still silence is the beginning of creativity. Once an event starts to vibrate, it has already begun to enter the visible world.
5. Creation proceeds by quantum leaps.
6. The beginning of an event is simultaneously its ending. The two co-arise in the domain of silent awareness.
7. Events unfold in time but are born outside of time.
8. The easiest way to create is in the evolutionary direction.
9. Since possibilities are infinite, evolution never ends.
10. The universe corresponds to the nervous system that is looking at it.
Exploring these conditions is the way you create the meaning of your own life. Let me compress these ten points into a sketch, leaving you to fill it in: The entire universe since the Big Bang behaves the way it does in order to conform to the human nervous system. If we could experience the cosmos any other way, it would be a different cosmos. The universe is lightless to a blind cave fish, which has evolved to exclude anything visual. The universe has no sound to an amoeba, no taste to a tree, no smell to a snail. Each creature selects its own range of manifestation