In his
journal, the English essayist Mark Rutherford writes about one
spring morning when he was walking in the woods and chanced
upon a huge old oak. The tree was just leang out, bursti ng forth as
a billow ing cloud of greenish-yellow buds. Caught by the splendor
of so much new life, Rutherford suddenly felt that “something
happened which was nothing less than a transformation of myself
and the world.”
The oak was “no longer a tree away from me and apart from me. The enclosing barriers of consciousness were removed.… The
distinction of self and not-sel f was an illusion. I could feel the rising
sap; in me also sprang the up-rushing from its roots, and the joy of
its outbreak, from the extremity of each twig right up to the summit,
was my own.” Fused with the being of the tree, he thought the
words Thou in me and I in thee. The key to his experience lay in the
unity that this sentence conveyed. “I cannot explain; it will be easy
to prove me absurd, but nothing can shake me. Thou in me and I in
thee. Death ! what is death? There is no death: in thee it is
impossible, absurd.”
Countless people have had similar experiences. They have fused
with nature for a moment and realized the Self. Isn’t it possible,
then, to go further and think of a state where a person fuses with
nature permanently? That is the yogi’s challenge to our everydayconception of being. To be human, the yogis say, is to experience
the one silence  underlying everything. Indeed, life is silence, and in
the fellowship of silence all life is oneself. Going into Silence
At the end of our rst talk, I decided to ask Karin to maintain
strict silence, speaking to no one for the next three days, after which
we would meet and talk again. She was staying as a patient at the
clinic outside Boston where I see patients, so her daily needs would
be taken care of. At the same time, this period of silence would be a
good opportunity to deepen her experience of meditation,  which she
had just learned the previous month. Karin was very reluctant to try my experiment. “Do I have to be
totally silent?” she asked nervously. “Yes,” I said. “When you need anything, you can write a note and
pass it to one of the sta.”
She only looked more nervous. Karin is used to keeping up a
constant shield of words, partly to relieve her anxiety, partly to
cover it up. I could see how the prospect of being quiet seemed like
having her oxygen tent taken away. “Please, just have a little faith,”
I implored. “You might be surprised at what happens.”
She wavered. “Can I at least call my brother to wish him a happy
birthday?” she asked. I nodd ed. “And then not a word to anyone?”
she said. “Not a word,” I replied. Asking a patient to go into silence is a very unusual step— I hasten
to add that spending days in silence is not a requirement for
successful meditation—but I couldn’t think of any other way to keep
Karin from constantly verbal izing every tiny thing that happens to
her. Using words as an escap e route, she runs away from me, from
anyone else who has tried to help her, and ultimately from herself. Also, it seems to me that she has a basic misperception about her
problem. She believes that she is outside reality trying desperately
to get back in. I often feel, on the contrary, that she spends just as
much of her energy making sure that she stays on the outside.Why does she do that? Partic ipating in the everyday world brings
with it a mixture of pleasure and pain, but Karin prefers to oat
above the world like a balloon barely tethered to earth. This distant
vantage point doesn’t provide much pleasure, but it certainly  helps
to isolate her from any more pain. Karin knows that her escape
plans haven’t succeeded. She is still tied to the ground, by her
memories, by her distress, and above all by her longing to rejoin the
rest of us. I didn’t expect a few days of silence to mark a major
breakthrough, but at least I could be there if she happene d to come
to earth and meet herself again. It would be a highly charged
moment, I knew. When the three days were up, I felt that some kind of change had
taken place. Karin looked rested and less anxious; she did not return
obsessively to the same litany of complaints. She looked at me
inquisitively, and after admit ting that she felt a little more cheerful,
she asked, “What was I supposed to get out of that?”
“What do you think you got out of it?” I asked in return. “Well, I still feel like a lit-up Christmas tree,” she laughed
ruefully, “and I still want to pull the plug so the lights will go o.”
She stopped. “Anything else?” I urged. “I don’t know,” she mumble d evasively. “I walked around a lot. There was one thing.”
“Yes?”
“There’s a big maple in your woods that was cracked by lightning
and has a hole in the middl e, about shoulder high. I happened to
pass by when I noticed some thing moving inside the hole. Walking
closer, I saw a bird’s nest with a single blue egg in it; an adult bird
was standing beside it, not moving. I was surprised that she didn’t
y away, but when I looked closer, I realized what was happening. The egg was hatching, right at that moment. Tiny cracks appeared,
and then the brown point of a bill. “I stood very still, holding my breath. For a second I wondered if I
should help, but I have heard that touching a hatchling will make
the mother reject it. So I just watched and very slowly moved my
hand until it was only a foot from the nest. Still the bird did not yaway. The chick must have gotten exhausted, because as soon as
one large patch  of shell fell o, it didn’t move for several minutes. I
decided to go back.” Neither of us said anything. “Do you know why the mother bird didn’t y away?” I asked. “It’s
because you were truly quiet. You were carrying around your inner
silence and projecting it. You may not notice yourself doing it,
because you may think that a silent mind shouldn’t be able to think. You can think and be silent at the same time. They are two dierent
levels of yourself. The thinking mind goes on, yet the silence
remains.”
What Karin had experienced  was a small window of quietness. I
told her that the world seen through that window is very dierent
from the one we are used to. Far from radiating silence, most of us
radiate hysteria, reecting the mental turmoil inside. When that
inner turmoil subsides, it leaves a space for change to begin. “Your
mind is quiet by nature,” I said, “but you have to settle down to
realize this. Everything sorts itself out correctly and spontaneously
once you become quiet. In the light of calm, steady self-awareness, a
feeling of wholeness will wake up inside you. This wholeness is not
a thoug ht of any kind; it is simply your own mind, empty of thought
but full of you. You do not have to do anything to reach this state;
the process is eortless. You do not even have to consciously let go. A quiet mind is all you need.”
This, the secon d time I talked with Karin, was also the last. Her
week-long stay at the clinic had only a couple more days to go. We
had been alone in each other’s company for less than two hours, yet
I felt close to her. She has staked so much on being true to herself. Just before we said good-bye, she seemed ready for the rst time to
talk about her future—I mean the possibility that she actually has
one and is not going to waste her life protesting the present or
mourning the past. “I came here to nd out if there was a way to go
back to what I’ve lost, even though my mind already told me there
wasn’t. I have to go on,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be too sad to exist on a memory?” I asked. “That is
what the past is.” Softly she agreed.I went out of town the next day, but the nurses told me afterward
that Karin seemed much more cheerful and outgoing before she left. She noticed for the rst time how sick some of the other patients
were and spent several hours walking and talking with two older
women who had advanced cancer. I really feel now that Karin is not
lost but in transition. She is about to arrive at a new and much higher conception of
who she is. “You keep asking who you really are,” I said at our last meeting. “If you want to know intellectually, then you are pure awareness,
the changeless background against which all thoughts occur. This
pure awareness is a continuum. It is not broken up by time or space
—it just is, ever and always. “When you witness yourself, what you are experiencing is your
real nature. This is the key to freedom. Freedom is the experiential
knowledge of one’s own nature. You already have elements of this. Many times you denitely seem to be witnessing your body and
your environm ent. You’ve said that to me, over and over. You even
stand aside from your own thoughts. “Right now, the experience is not creating joy, but why shouldn’t
it? You are exploring your own corner of immortality as separate
from all things mortal. Can’t that be exciting?”
“I can accept that as a concept, but I don’t feel it yet,” she said. I respect Karin’s honesty on this point. We do not live in an age of
faith, and many people have problems with any view of life that
includes as chancy a word as immortality. “Life? I already know
what life is,” the isolated self declares. “It is thinking, feeling,
breathing. It ends when they end. I don’t need to go beyond.” But I
am not asking Karin for faith, only the willingness to explore inside
and wait for the facts to emerge. More than one person has lain half-
awake in a row-boat, drifting under a cloudless summer sky, and felt
something immense, quiet, and endless. In a certain relaxed state,
this something  seems to be everywhere, both inside and out. It does
not smile at you or frown; it just is. It takes  repeat ed dips into silence, in and out every day, for a
person to accept that this immense, motionless, eterna l state ofbeing is himse lf. Then the door is open for an experience  that truly
does transform  oneself and the world. The person realizes that
everything he has been doing in isolation—thinking, feeling,
breathing—was taking him on a hidden path. The self has always
wanted to connect; it exists so that it may marry the Self. OceanofPDF.com10
Paradise Remembered
Stan will tell you that the ute saved his life, but there is more to
it than that—the ute is his life. A day does not go by that he is not
either playing the ute or teaching others how to play it. He fullls
dozens of concert dates every year as a ute soloist. He owns a shop
downtown where he repairs, tests, demonstrates, and even builds
utes from scratch. On the way home at night, he hangs onto the
subway strap reminiscing about all the bright silver instruments he
has caressed and polished that day. One can only imagine, therefore, the horror of what has recently
happened. Stan woke up one morning ve months ago, suspecting
nothing unusu al, only to nd that the sound of the ute was no
longer pleasan t to his ears. The sinuous melodies, scales, runs, and
trills of his own ute playing had become ugly, sounding as grating
as ngernails scraping across a blackboard. Overnigh t, without
reason, the greatest pleasure in his life had turned to pain. “Where is this harsh sound coming from?” I asked him. “From any
one instrument?”
“No, it doesn’ t matter what instrument I pick up,” he replied
gloomily. “It’s still my energy being transmitted through it. I have
always gotten a certain tonal  quality that my peers hear as gorgeous
but that I now hear as annoyingly shrill. It’s become so annoying
that I can’t stand to play anymore.”
Stan’s haggard , drawn face looked up at me. “And this all
happened out of the blue?” I asked. “Completely.”“Without any warning? Think back,” I urged. “All I can tell you is that everything seemed to be going all right
in my life when a psychiatrist told me that I shouldn’t keep on
taking a certain antidepressant. I had relied on it for a period last
year after I broke up with my old girlfriend. When my psychiatrist
told me to go o it cold turkey, I said, ‘Is that really okay?’ He said,
‘Sure.’ The next morning I woke up with my ears zooming and
ringing, as if someone was playing the ute inside my head.”
Stan’s psychiatrist has carefu lly explained to him that the sudden
change in his hearing could not be blamed on discontinuing his
medication, but Stan is not reassured. He has consulted various
specialists, all of whom are baed by the peculiar mixture of the
physical and the psychological in his symptoms. “Whenever I
swallow,” Stan told me, “I get the sensation that my ears are lling
up with uid. It’s like there are trees in my body with branches, and
as I swallow, they crackle and ll with uid. I went to four ear
specialists. Two said there wasn’t any uid, two said there was. Only one thought he could treat it, but the medicine he gave me
didn’t work. My hearing tests come back normal or above normal,
just like before, but I know I’m not right anymore.”
“Since so much of your life is tied up with your sense of hearing,”
I pointed out, “do you think some kind of emotional problem could
have become localized through this symptom in your ears?”
“I don’t  know, ” he replied. “A few months ago I began to think,
‘Maybe it’s not physical at all. Maybe there’s something I need to
work through.’ People said to me, ‘Go talk to someone,’ so for
months it’s been talk, talk, talk, but the psychologists aren’t telling
me anything I don’t already  know. Let’s assume that my problems
are neurotic. Well, Merry Christmas, we have an answer, but I still
feel like I’m doomed.”
Stan’s audiences apparently hear nothing wrong with his playing. To them , his music sounds the same as before, and his peers still
praise him specically for his sensitive, expressive tone. The fact
that he now hates his own playing has therefore becom e a deep,
dark secret.“Perhaps it’s temporary. No one has complained to you yet,” I
pointed out. “No, but they might,” Stan said anxiously. “I keep dreading that
someone will catch on and begin to hear my sound the way I do. It’s
bound to happen, isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling as puzzled as he was. As things stand, Stan nds it harder and harder to uphold his
integrity, both as a person and a musician. Palming o his dissonant
sound on others is a constant source of guilt. More than that, he has
depended on the ute for his happiness ever since he was a boy
growing up in Brooklyn and his teachers discovered his musical
talent. I can imagine the small, defenseless thirteen-year-old he must
have been. Today, at thirty-ve, Stan is still small. He wears fragile wire-
rimmed glasses and has a full lower lip that curls outward just so,
making a perfect perch for the edge of a ute. He speaks in a
nervous whirlwind of words, barely touching ground before rushing
o to something new. I can’t help but think that he was lucky to
nd the ute when he did. A boy like Stan could easily have been
trampled on the streets of Brooklyn. Without the pleasure of his ute, he is growing more moody and
isolated every week. “I’m playing a concert on Sunday with an
orchestra that is mostly doctors and lawyers. There’s a cello player
who’s very wonderful. She’s cute, and I think she kind of eyed me. I
would like to get together with her. We could have a lot of fun, both
of us musicians. I am as good a player as she is, if not better. But I’m
afraid to pick up my ute and play duets with her, so I can’t ask her
out.”
For a man who sees dating a woman as basically “playing  a duet,”
not being able to perform has proved catastrophic. One could glibly
point to the sexual overtones in what Stan is saying. He is like a
sharpshooter without his pistol, a policeman without his nightstick,
but I don’t think the sexual overtones are nearly as important as the
drastic loss of purpose that he has suered. “It has never mattered if anyone else liked my playing, so long as
I enjoyed it. You can impress people for ten minutes and get a quickhigh, but those endorphins or whatever they are up here”—Stan
pointed to his head—“they’re just morphine. I want to feel it for
myself. I want fulllment; otherwise my playing has no meaning.”
He sighed wearily. “Maybe it’s like meeting a woman for the rst
time. You’re so elated, but then you learn that she’s just a person. The magic gradually wears o, and your perception shifts. Maybe
the ute is just a ute to me now. I’ve already had my love aair
with it, and now I’m hearing it the way it really is—who knows? “Every day I start to play, hoping it will sound beautiful again,
but then I’ll hear that shrillness. I try to talk myself out of it by
saying, ‘Stan, your sound couldn’t have changed. Your ears are just
plugged up.’ But my symptom s tell me something else. I rationalize
to myself, ‘Look, people are walking around with multiple sclerosis
and things that are much worse,’ but it doesn’t help. I just don’t
want to live this way.” Stan stopped, and his face looked more
morose and baed than ever. Hurled out of paradise like a fallen
angel, he cannot get over the shock of where he has landed. Now and Forever
The dierence  between Stan and a fallen angel is that paradise is
handed to the angels while humans have to create their own. Not
that anyone has ever succeed ed. Stan was privileged just to create a
corner of intense happiness through his music. As every true artist
must, he lived from the creative core of himself, until the sinister
day when the ow of creativity was interrupted. A gap appeared
between the maker and the thing made, and even though the thing
made was still beautiful, it was not his beauty that others admired. In that gap, that emptiness, all his earlier happiness was lost. This problem is not unique to Stan, or to artists as a class. No
matter how gratifying one aspect of life becomes, its satisfaction is
limited. It wears itself out unless one nds a way to remain
connected to the source of renewal. Renewal is one of life’s primary
urges, like love and freedom, but even more important, since all of
life needs renewing to keep ahead of the tireless process of
destruction. There is never pure destruction in nature but creationand destruction together, so closely spliced that they cannot be
separated. We are constantly  dying and being born at the physical
level. Each minute, millions of our cells divide, sacricin g their old
existence in a death that gives birth to two new cells. The impulse of
creation pushe s life ahead even while the past is gobbl ing up life
from behind. We all have a deep psychological drive to keep pace with this
process. Alice Miller puts it with beautiful conciseness: “There are
needs that can and should be satised in the present.… Among
these is every human being ’s central need to express himself—to
show himself to the world as he really is—in word, in gesture, in
behavior, in every genuine utterance from the baby’s cry to the
artist’s creation.”
The key to this inspiring armation is that life needs to be
satisfying in the present . It is not that easy to den e “the present,”
however. From  one perspective the present is the thinnest possible
slice of time, the eeting instant that allows the future to ip-op
into the past. From the oppo site perspective, the present is eternal,
because it is ever-renewing, like a river that is never the same twice. “The present is the only thing that has no end,” Schrödinger once
declared. To create paradise could mean nothing more or less than living in
the present, enjoying the happiness that is both now and forever—
but who can manage that? The boundaries that the human mind
lives within are invariably fashioned from the past. It is yesterday’s
hurt that I am defending against today, last year’s glory  I want to
relive, a bygon e love I want to nd again. The boundary-m aker who
wields such enormous power  over us is the intellect, the part of the
mind that judges and categorizes our experiences. We have already seen that the mind creates boundaries for its
own self-prote ction. Because it can push dangerous feelings out of
sight, shoving our childhood fears and primal aggression back down
into the underworld of the unconscious, the intellect plays a crucial
role in making us feel safe. Anytime we nd ourse lves in a
psychologically threatening situation, the mind faces a decision. “Will this perso n hurt me? Is it dangerous to feel this emotion? DareI say what I really think?” Whatever answer the mind  comes up
with becomes the provisiona l reality we act upon, and the shifting,
jumbled heap that these provisional realities amount to is Reality
itself. Since life never ceases bringi ng us a new wave of challenge every
day, the intellectual decision s we make spin on forever. The number
of questions that arise over the tiniest experience is awe inspiring. Is
it desirable or undesirable? To be repeated or not to be repeated? Right or wrong, good or bad, nice or nasty? Once each decision is
made, it gets led away in memory, to serve as a referenc e point for
future experience. Let us say that my rst time horseback riding
made me feel better / was good / nice / worth repeating . The next
time I think of going riding, these judgments will color my decision. They do not force me to get back up on a horse, but I cannot totally
discard them either. Two years ago I gave a lecture in Germany. A woman came up
afterward to say that she worked for a large municipal aquarium
and had often observed an interesting phenomenon there. Whenever
the thick glass partitions in the main tank were pulled out to be
cleaned, the sh would swim  right up to the spot where the glass
used to be, and just before crossing it, they would turn back, warded
o by a barrier that didn’t really exist. My imagination was quite caught by this observation. Our own
uncrossable boundaries are nothing more than wrinkles in our mind
that another wrinkle labels as too ugly, fearful, loathsome, or
terrifying to confront. If I see an old enemy who insulted me ten
years ago, I will nd it almost impossible to overlook my former
injury. The old judgments crop up in my mind automatically,
erecting a wall, and the person who could be my friend is shut out,
rejected in advance. In turn, when he senses my coldness, his
defenses are raised, until we both nd ourselves hiding behind
barricades that serve no purpose, that lack all reality. The moment
soon passes, and yet there has been no relationship at all, only the
stale repetition of outworn memories. And the most frustrating part
is that my tormentor today is myself left over from yesterday.The rishis pondered this problem posed by the intellect, which is
like a bread knife, constantly  cutting the ow of life into neat slices
of experience, each one labeled and judged. They saw that this
slicing up of reality, although necessary to the thinking process, was
basically false. Life is a river, not a dripping faucet. The rishis
therefore contended that any experience which depends upon slices
of time and space is not an experience at all. It is a ction, a
shadow, a notion of life that has no actual life in it. By endlessly
interpreting the world in bits and pieces, we are losing it at every
instant, allowing it to slip through our ngers like sand. To have
reality that is whole and thus truly real, one must rise above the
intellect, discarding its neat slices of experience. Like day-old bread,
they only go stale anyway. “I Am the Field”
In place of a world sliced up into bits and pieces, the rishis oer
us a continuum—a owing river—that begins inside our awareness,
expands to create all the things and events “out there,” and then
returns to its source, dissolving back into awareness again. Ultimately, the rishis’ perception can only be tested by rising to
their state of consciousness. But let us suppose that they might be
right. Then it should be possible, if only for an instant, for us to see
what they saw. A teacher I know from Oregon, now in his early
forties, apparently had just such a glimpse as he was meditating. The experience began in familiar territory:
When I started to meditate one morning, I felt as if a
powerful magn et was pulling me down into myself. For some
minutes I continued to sink deeper and deeper, using no
eort on my part, until all sense of outside stimuli faded
away. I sat with my breathing stilled, but my mind was alert
in the unbroken silence. I knew that I had transcended to the
point where my individual self had dropped out completely,
taking with it all sense of time, space, direction, or any kind
of thought.At this juncture, a person usually continues to experie nce the
transcendent silence or else begins to rise toward the surface of the
mind, carried by a sudden thought or feeling. However, this time
something new happened. Out of the absolutely uniform  eld of silence, a faint point of
awareness arose. It was the most delicate feeling of “I-ness,”
just a wisp of personal consciousness, and with it came the
sensation of “turning”—that is the only way I can describ e it. This turning must have acted  as a spark, because sudden ly I
was surrounded by an enormous expanse of light. There was
nothing existin g but light, and I intuitively knew it to be
intelligence, or consciousness, taking on visible form. Even though I was sitting with my eyes closed, I could see
that everythin g outside myself was also made of the same
brilliant white light. My body, the tables and chairs, the walls
and windows, the building and all that lay beyond it—
everything was molded from this intelligent light, which
pulsated with life. After a moment or two the light gradu ally
faded. I was left alone, sitting in silence again, but now it was
dierent, as if I had swallow ed the world and for the rst
time felt full. Extraordinary as this experi ence is, it strikes me as even more
remarkable that my friend found it normal  He said that the
“turning” which sparked his vision could also be called a “self-
reection.” In other words, he felt that behind the alluring surface
of his vision, he was actually catching sight of himself. After a
lifetime of being distracted by things “out there,” he nally saw the
seer. Yet we can’t fully comprehend his experience until we get
closer to what  this inner “turning” of awareness is and how it can
carry us out of ourselves into the eld where light and mind,
nothing and everything, mingle as one. It is extremely intriguing that the word “eld,” which modern
physicists use to describe the most fundamental forces in nature,
was a divine word in ancient India. When Lord Krishna reveals hisinnite greatness to the warrior Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita , he
says, “Know me as the eld and as the knower of the eld.” The
Sanskrit word, kshetra , can mean a battleeld (Arjuna and Krishna
happen to be talking in the middle of a battleeld, just before two
mighty armies clash), but the deeper meaning of kshetra  comes very
close to what a physicist means when he says “quantum  eld” or
“electromagnetic eld.” These elds are innite and all-pervasive;
without them, reality could not exist. Lord Krishna was making the
same point about himself. Before there can be a photon of light, there must be the eld of
light; before an individual electron, the eld of electricity; before an
isolated bar magnet, the earth’s magnetic eld. The eld of light
that my friend saw as the source of everything around him was not
a physical eld, however, but a eld of awareness . He was
perceiving his consciousness as light, but this is not so dierent from
ordinary perce ption as it might seem. When we see light, our brains
are actually selecting totally abstract qualities from out of the eld
and interpreting them as light. In fact, everything we see, touch,
hear, taste, or smell has been selected from the innite reservoir of
vibrating energy in the eld. Think of a rose leaf and a rose thorn. Both are nourished by the
same sunlight, being constantly bombarded by the sun’s entire light
spectrum. Photosynthesis is basically the same in each, and if you
delve into their cellular structure, you would see mostly the same
molecules at work, and their DNA is identical. The dierence between a leaf and a thorn is a matter of selection. The thorn takes sunlight and turns it into something hard, sharp,
and pointed. The leaf takes sunlight and turns it into something soft,
rounded, and translucent. By itself, sunlight has none of these
qualities. Could you claim that light is hard or soft, sharp or
rounded? Somehow the vario us qualities get pulled out of the eld
even though they do not appear to be “in” it—the y exist as
possibilities that the eld can manifest. Like the rose, I practice selection, fashioning my life as my
relationship to the eld alters. In one state of awareness—deep sleep
—I have no interaction with light at all. In dreaming state, I produceimages of light in my head. In waking state, the light appears to be
“out there.” In actuality, the light was always a poten tial of the
eld, waiting to be activated by my mind. The eld, it must be understood, is not a thing— it is an
abstraction that we shape into things. To help prove this to
ourselves, we can turn to those people who lack the complete
creative abiliti es the rest of us take for granted. In Pilgrim at Tinker
Creek , Annie Dillard writes eloquently about an entire class of
people, those born blind, who do not live in a world that contains
space, size, distance, or many other qualities we accept as given. Several decades ago, when eye surgeons rst learned to remove
cataracts safely, they could restore sight overnight to people who
had been blind from birth. Suddenly released into the light, the
newly sighted did not feel freed. They were plunged into a mystery
that was at times overwhelming. “The vast majority of patients, of
both sexes and all ages, had … no idea of space whatsoever,” Dillard
writes, drawin g from the notes left by surgeons. “Form, distance,
and size were so many meaningless syllables. One patient ‘had no
idea of depth, confusing it with roundness.’
“Of another postoperative patient the doctor writes, ‘I have found
in her no notion of size, for example, not even within the narrow
limits she might have encompassed with the aid of touch. Thus
when I asked her to show me how big her mother was, she did not
stretch out her hands, but set her two index ngers a few inches
apart.’ ”
One patient was used to tellin g the dierence between a cube and
a sphere by touching both to his tongue. After the operation, he
looked at the same objects and could not tell them apart by sight. A
second patient said that lemonade was “square” because it gave his
tongue a pricking sensation, the same way a square object gave his
hands a pricking sensation. The newly sighted faced a baing world because they lacked the
visual creativi ty we all take for granted. Vision was plopped into
their laps formlessly, which is how it really exists before the mind
turns it into something formed. Some patients did not realize that a
house is bigger than one of the rooms inside it. A building one mileaway looked as close as a nearby one, only taking a lot more steps
to get to. A dog that walked behind a chair was no longer in the
room. Shapes were seen as at patches of color, and when some
patients walked past a tree, they were amazed to turn around and
see that it was now behind them. “For the newly sighted,” Dillard comments, “vision is pure
sensation unencumbered by meaning.” Adding the meaning proved
too much for some of them. They reverted to closing their eyes
when they were alone, feeling objects with their hands and tongues,
or climbing the stairs with eyes shut to avoid the dizzying prospect
of going straight up a wall. Poignantly, the glut of visual images
caused almost every person to lose the serenity that is so striking in
those born blind. It was particularly disturbing for them to discover
that they had been watched  all their lives, since this was a personal
intrusion totally alien to the blind. In the end, some adjusted better than others. It was startling but
also wonderful for them to nd that everyone in the world had a
dierent face; it was awesom e to realize the vastness of the heavens
and the earth itself. But space mostly remained elusive. One girl was
shown some paintings and photos. “Why do they put those dark
marks all over them?” she asked. “Those aren’t dark marks,” her
mother explain ed, “they are shadows. That is one of the ways the
eye knows that things have shape. If it were not for shadows, many
things would look at.” “Well, that’s how things do look,” the girl
replied. “Everything looks at with dark patches.”
Just because we are so used to the usual construct of the world,
that does not mean it must already exist. Other people may not
accept our code for reality if they do not accept our code for seeing. The eye refuses to see what the mind does not know. I am reminded of stories told about Turks who ran in panic from
the theater when they saw their rst movie, thinking that the image
of a locomotiv e was leaping out of the wall; of forest pygmies in
Africa who were led onto a plain for the rst time and thought that
distant water bualos were actually two inches high; of Eskimos
who were confronted with photographs of themselves and saw no
faces at all, only a jumble of gray and black blotches. These are not“primitive” responses but responses from another code, another
world. Yet every person accepts some code. The human race is
bound in cords of sight, with only the rishis to tell us that we are
free to adopt any code we wish. Weaving the Fabric of Awareness
The reason the rishis were able to see this so clearly is that their
own experience of the world was beyond the binding inuence of
any single code of perception. They did not select bits and pieces
from the eld but saw it as a whole. And what did this wholeness
look like? When the rishis turned their attention toward the eld to
see its totality, they found that the eld was pure awareness, the
same “mind-stu” that lls our heads. “Pure” means  without form and can be equated with the
motionless silence being contacted in meditation. Existing without
form in the eld, pure awareness starts to vibrate and in so doing
turns itself into the visible universe. A thought can be seen as a
vibration inside this mind-stu, and so can an atom, although an
atom is outsid e our heads and has all the marks of matter. These
marks are only trick eects, the rishis declared. Atoms, molecules,
photons of light, stars, galaxies—all of creation—are fashioned from
the same thing, pure awareness. This, the core insight of ancient India, is too sweeping to take on
faith, and it can only be tested in a higher state of consciousness. However, we have a linking  concept, the eld, which can at least
take us to the boundary of the rishis’ world. Over the last fty years, the concept of the eld rose to
prominence in physics when it was realized that matter and energy
have no xed, concrete existence. Because you can hold a tennis ball
in your hand, common sense  tells you that you must be able to hold
the smallest part of a tennis ball in your hand, too. But the
elementary particles that are the smallest bits of matter are not solid
or xed. To see a tennis  ball accurately, one has to imagine it being like a
swarm of bees. Each bee is ying so fast that it forms a streak oflight, like a sparkler waved  around in the dark on the Fourth of
July. Besides leaving a visible trail, each bee also leaves a trail you
can feel. Thus, even though the bee moves out of sight as soon as
you try to spot it, your eyes and hands still see and feel where it has
been. In crude form, we have uncovered the basic tenet of quantum
reality, the famous Uncertainty Principle, which says that
elementary particles, although they appear to exist in a denite
place in time and space, cannot actually be found there. Every time
you try to catch a bee, it disappears, so that all you have is trails. Physicists were not entirely happy with the notion that everything
in existence is constantly slipping away, but they learned to live
with it, however uneasily. Instead of having a solid particle to hold
on to, they were left with a set of possibilities, and if all the
possibilities were lumped together, the result was a eld. In essence a eld is only a set of variables to be measured. One
can probe it for the various sorts of trails that the whizzing particles
are leaving in their wake. When that is done, what comes out is a
highly precise,  scientically useful set of descriptions. A quark can
be described as having this or that property—mass, momentum,
symmetry, spin—all of which can be computed with beautiful
mathematical accuracy. Strangely, one can know everyth ing about
the ying bee without ever stopping it. That is why a tennis ball
seems totally secure, solid, and real on one level, where the senses
operate, and totally ghostly and unreal at a deeper level, where the
senses cannot go. Like a rishi, a physicist maneuvers between existing things,
possible things, and nothing. Lord Krishna can use the word “eld”
with the same intent as a physicist: both are trying to convey a
sense of nature’s wholeness. A eld is the most complete way to
describe anyth ing, from an atom to a star, because all possible
descriptions are embedded in it. This implies that anything your eye
can see could be anything else. In fact, there is no way out of this
peculiar concl usion, since at the level of the eld, seeing and
creating merg e. The renowned Princeton physicist John Wheeler
writes: “We used to think of the universe as ‘out there,’ to beobserved as it were from behind the screen of a foot-thick slab of
glass, safely, without personal involvement. The truth, quantum
theory tells us, is quite dierent.… The observer is increasingly
promoted to participator. In some strange sense, this is a
participatory universe.”
Like every great insight, the discovery that the universe has no
xed structure can seem frightening, but the uncertainty principle is
just as much a creativity principle. Words like “void,”
“nothingness,” and “interstellar space” do not have to generate fear;
they are the creative stu of everyday life. “I like the story of the
three baseball umpires relaxing over beer one afternoon and
comparing notes,” Wheeler writes. “One umpire says, ‘I calls ’em as
I sees ’em.’ The next umpire says, ‘I calls ’em as they really are.’ The
third umpire says, ‘They ain’t nothin’ until I calls ’em.’ ”
The rishis promoted the creative act of seeing even higher than
did the quantum physicist. First of all, they expanded the inuence
of the observer  beyond the innitesimal range of the quantum eld,
which is from 10 million to 100 million times smaller than an atom. The hide-and-s eek of a quark became the hide-and-seek of life as a
whole—the Vedic seer pulle d forth new tomorrows from the eld,
whole packages of reality that could not exist without him. Physics has barely entered  this enlarged domain. However,
controlled studies have shown that ordinary people actually do
project their thoughts into nature’s workshop. Two researchers from
Princeton’s engineering department, Robert G. Jahn and Brenda J.
Dunne, have shown that volunteers set down in front of a machine
can inuence its workings  with the power of atten tion. The
experiment is recounted in Jahn and Dunne’s rigorously
documented book, Margins of Reality . Typically the machine being inuenced was a random-number
generator, a computer that spewed out strings of 0s and 1s in
random order. Over the long run, the number of 0s would be the
same as the number of 1s (just as tossing a coin eventuall y produces
as many heads as tails). The volunteers  were asked to tilt the machine’s output toward
either more 1s or more 0s simply by desiring it. They put theirminds on what they wanted the machine to produce and succeeded
remarkably well. They achieved deviations from randomness on the
order of 18 percent, although even the most sophisticated quantum
theory cannot explain how they accomplished this. In related experiments, the Princeton team showed that ordinary
people could also broadcast messages to others telepathically, no
matter how far away the receiving person was. In some cases, it was
observed that the relayed messages were received up to three days
before  they were sent. The startling implication is that the xed
boundaries of space-time are only conveniences of the mind, not
absolutes. We could easily be living in a three-dimensional movie
projected by our minds, as the age-old Indian scriptures maintained. In truth  we are the three-dimensional movie. It is not separate
from us but mingled with our mind-stu, so that the only way to see
it without being fooled is to see the seer. Every person can declare,
along with Lord Krishna, “Know me as the eld and as the knower
of the eld.” The poet Tagore sensed exactly what it was like to
accept his own cosmic status:
The same stream of life that runs through my veins night
and day runs through the world and dances in rhyth mic
measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the
earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into
tumultuous waves of leaves and owers. If the eld is all there is, then the inconceivable impulse driving
the universe must also be in every speck of matter and every grain
of thought. No, it must be in the mere possibility  that matter and
thought could exist. As the rishis conceived of it, the location of all
creativity is in pure aware ness, but then so are we and so is
everything. “Mistake of the Intellect”I have dwelt on the parallels between Vedic thought and modern
physics because there has been a great deal of past
misunderstanding in this area. It became fashionable in the late
Seventies to claim that quantum theory was anticipated by the
insights of mystics, principal ly the sages of Buddhism and Taoism. Many people took this to mean that Eastern wisdom  could be
interpreted in terms of modern physics, and vice versa. Hope arose
that a bridge would be built between East and West, and through a
mingling of insights, both world views would prot. Very soon, however, there came a backlash from professional
physicists, among others, decrying the whole notion. To them, the
quantum eld is a hard fact, while a mystic’s visions are at the
extreme of softness. It was argued that the complex and highly
specialized mathematics which predicts the behavior of such things
as quarks and leptons has little or nothing to do with human
behavior. To suggest that the mind has a quantum basis was fantasy,
since thoughts and subatomic particles exist in totally separate
realms. These could not be bridged by physics, nor did most
physicists even wish to try. (Although they kept quieter about it,
traditional Buddhists were equally dismayed, since they saw their
religion as centered on the salvation of souls mired in the cycle of
rebirth. They did not see the relevance of quantum theory to this
goal, and therefore their desire to build a bridge was minimal as
well.) I hope I will not simply make matters worse by pointing out that
to discuss the ancient sages in terms of either  mysticism or quantum
theory deprive s them of their true originality and purpose. The
Vedic seers, like their later counterparts in Taoism and Buddhism,
were not mystics; they were wideawake observers of the same world
we all live in. They did not deal solely in subjective visions and
insights; their minds were focused on the junction-point where
subjectivity and objectivity meet. This gave them a unique
perspective from which to observe their own consciousness as it
transformed itself into the rocks, trees, mountains, and stars we all
perceive “out there.”I have done my best to provide convincing proof that reality is
everyone’s personal creation. People will never grasp this solely on
an intellectual level—it must be experienced and internalized. The
intellect, by raising barriers of doubt, denial, and fear, has reduced
direct spiritual experience to an empty mysticism, making it much
harder for people to realize how necessary such experience actually
is. If I can take the risk of dening it, a spiritual experience is one in
which pure awareness revea ls itself as the maker of reality. What
could be more relevant to our lives? Reality is pouring from us like
dreams from a dreamer or light from a bonre. Once we gain
control over this process, we can restore ourselves to a state of
freedom and fulllment; in other words, we can put ourselves back
in paradise. The loss of spiritual experience, in both East and West, has
shattered the higher aspiratio ns of human life. “All your suering is
rooted in one superstition,” a guru told his disciples. “You believe
that you live in the world, when in fact the world lives in you.” The
ancient rishis went even further and declared that perfection in
every area of life was sacriced because of Pragya Aparadha , “the
mistake of the intellect.”
The intellect’s need to explore the world, which began in the
remote past and reached its peak in modern times, eventually took
us so far into the diversity of creation that the source of creation—
our own awareness—was lost sight of. Inner experiences of bliss and
innite expan sion, of complete freedom and boundle ss power,
became “mystical.” No one has such experiences as a matter of
course; indeed , it seems to take years of meditation to get back to
the state of awareness where these experiences become remotely
possible. By now, the hard reality “out there” has become so
compelling that spirit is allowed little if any power at all. Perhaps
the existence of spirit was a superstition all along. As dismal as it may sound, the current state of spiritual atrophy
does not have to become permanent; the “mistake of the intellect”
can be corrected. In fact, there is cause for tremendous optimism
here. To narrow our problems down to a single cause is a
breakthrough in and of itself. How then do we correct our mistake?Not by giving up the intellect altogether, which would only result in
mindlessness. The intellect must be restored to its proper place in
the total balance of awareness. Repeated experience of pure
awareness allows this healing to take place. When all its aspects are in balance, human awareness nds itself
living both halves of life, the absolute state of the Self and the
relative state of the self. By remaining in contact with our core of
pure awarenes s, we can fully appreciate the beautiful and diverse
world “out there.” The mirror of nature will give us back the
reection of our own inner joy. The poet W. B. Yeats wrote, “We are
happy when for everything  inside us there is a corresponding
something outside us.” The word “correspondence” means a ow of
communication as well as a similarity between two things. When
awareness is completely balanced, communicating with the outside
world is instantaneous and automatic. It happens with the touch of
thought. The South African writer Laurens Van der Post recalled a day
when he went traveling among the natives in the bush country. He
came to their camp and found the men sitting around an old
tribesman whom Van der Post particularly liked. The old man was
sitting still with his eyes closed, deeply absorbed. When Van der
Post asked what he was doing, one of the onlookers said, “Ssh, he’s
doing something important. He’s making clouds.” The rishis say that
you and I were born to be cloud-makers, too. But until we regain
control of our inner nature, we will never solve the imbalances that
have been inicted on nature as a whole. The Circular Trap
I nd it signi cant that so many people are currently involved in
the issue of addiction. To me, addictions stand for the deeper
conict between maintaining one’s old conditioning and breaking
free. The addic t’s “habit” is but an exaggerated version of all habits,
which cling to outworn realities rather than allowing new life to
ow in. The root causes of addiction are hotly debated , but one
aspect of the syndrome is that it brings pleasure to people whocannot nd it any other way. As Alice Miller observes, “People who
as children successfully repressed their intense feelings often try to
regain—at least for a short time—their lost intensity of experience
with the help of drugs and alcohol.”
I think it is obvious that many people have anesthetized a huge
portion of their feeling self. To show strong emotions is rarely
considered an acceptable form of behavior in our society, while
paramount importance is placed on self-control. As a result, many of
us may reach the point where we panic at the rst sign of emotion
starting to well up. Repeatin g the denial of emotion imposed upon
us in childhood, we now exert enormous pressure to deny ourselves. Addiction “solves” this problem by permitting pleasure while at
the same time insuring that the pleasure is furtive and guilt ridden. One of my patients, whose facade of correct deportment is
impeccable, for many years  led a secret life haunting the worst
heroin dens in Boston. “I played various characters when I went to
the shooting galleries in the ghetto,” he said. “Sometimes I drove my BMW  and wore a three-piece suit; other
times I had on army fatigues or the rags a street person would wear. I saw people die, begging for heroin to the very end. I was under
close surveilla nce by both the police and the pushers, neither of
whom could gure me out. I slept in abandoned houses with other
junkies and walked the streets with ten-year-old kids who had
orders to shoot on sight anyone who tried to rip o their stash of
crack. “You won’t be able to really grasp what it means when I tell you
that I had a twenty-bag-a-day heroin habit,” he said with an
unfathomable look in his eyes. “The common junkie has a two- to
ve-bag habit,  maybe ten. When a person is hooked on that much,
his chances of recovery are less than one percent. I shot twenty bags
for over a year and survived.”
This man is very frank about the enjoyment that his addiction
brought him, at least at the outset. From the moment he rst
injected heroin , long-lost pleasure ooded him. Being able to play
various characters as he moved through the junkie’s shadow world
gave him a secondary source of forbidden pleasure. By having to bereal to no one, he could temporarily forget his massive self-doubt,
which told him that he might not be real to begin with. Although lurid on the outside, his addiction was not essentially
dierent from that of the cautious alcoholic who sneaks a shot of
whiskey before brushing his teeth in the morning. Both are hooked
on the alluring combination of enjoyment and guilt. The essence of
any form of compulsive behavior is helpless repetition, which
pleasure alone would not be strong enough to incite. Alcoholics and
heroin addicts,  food bingers and compulsive thieves all return again
and again to the very behav ior that they would judge shameful in
another person. Often it is pleasure itself that they nd shameful; therefore, they
have no alternative but to seek pleasures that have built-in
dissatisfaction. As one psychotherapist put it, “You can never get
enough of what you don’t want in the rst place.” Even the most
intense pleasur e is not addict ive as long as the person indulging in it
has a clear idea of what pleasure is. But a certain kind of personality
has no choice but to mix feeling bad with feeling good. A guilty
pang accompa nies the jolt delivered by the drug, and without the
guilt, the jolt would lose its allure. Addicts are pitied and revile d in our culture, and society has not
decided whether they are to be considered sick, deviant, or both. There is a deeper ambiguity as well. To contemplate the helpless
loss of self-con trol represented by fullblown addiction is horrible but
secretly tempti ng. Who would not have a ood of pleasur e coursing
through his body if he did not have to pay too high a price? This is
not sheer escapism on our parts. At the heart of addictio n, I would
propose, lies a deep nostalgia for pleasure that echoes a legitimate
need. Despite what our conditioning might tell us, to seek pleasure
is not bad. Everyone’s life is driven by the spur of desire. But hardly
anyone can enjoy deep satisfaction untainted by feelings of guilt,
selshness, or a vague premonition that “this is too good to last.”
If addicts are indeed playing out a fantasy we all share, then they
may be neither  sick nor deviant. I would like to apply the diagnosis
provided by the rishis and say that addiction is basically  the result
of a mistake. The addict is caught in a circular trap of his owndevising; he cannot get enough pleasure to nally abolish his guilt;
he cannot suer enough guilt to keep him from the next x. Rather,
the two impulses circle each other in an endless dance. What we have here is another example of the mistaken intellect—
the circular trap depends upon the addict’s belief that his divided
awareness cannot heal itself. Yet the rishis maintain that awareness
is all-po werful, which means  that it should be able to heal anything,
including itself. Let us see if a solution to addiction might lie in this
direction. Evelyn Silvers, a Los Angeles therapist who specializes in drug
addiction, has learned to create a remarkable phenomenon with her
patients that releases them from the bondage of their cravings. Using the simplest sort of suggestion and guided thinking, she
induces her patients to manufacture “brain drugs” that appear to act
exactly like the heroin, alcohol, cocaine, or tranquilizers  that they
have been ruining their lives to buy or steal. Earlier, in 1976, Silvers had focused on a dierent problem,
chronic pain. Widespread excitement had been generated by the
recent discovery of the body’s internal painkillers, or endorphins,
which were analyzed as being many times more powerful than
morphine and other opiates. Inspired by this breakthrough, Silvers
found that she could get long-term suerers of migraines, arthritis,
and lower-bac k pain to produce highly eective pain relief on
command. This may seem like a simple application of the body’s painkillers,
which all of us call upon. But our use is not voluntary, and few if
any researchers in the eld claim to know how endorphins are
actually switched on. They are highly unpredictable chemicals. Under certain circumstances, such as being wounded in battle or
being injured in a highway collision, the body may feel no pain for
hours, while at other times a minor headache or dental pain may be
impossible to suppress. Faced with this baing unpredictability, Silvers devised a
disarmingly simple approach. She told her patients in an
authoritative voice that the brain’s inner pharmacy could  treat any
disorder. She would be giving them a simple technique for tapping“brain drugs” that would successfully deal with the most intractable
chronic pain. Next, she told each patient to close his eyes and to
imagine that he was creating  a supply of endorphins inside his head
but without releasing it. The painkilling dose had to be built up to
the appropriate  level. For the next few minutes she kept her patients
in suspense as they felt the dose becoming bigger and bigger, until
nally she gave a signal, and each person mentally injected a ood
of endorphins into his bloodstream. At this point, almost everyone felt a surge of pain relief sweep
over them, as if morphine were being fed into them through an IV
needle. Chronic pain that had resisted all previous treatments
improved dramatically or disappeared entirely. When the patients
were sent home to use the “brain drug” technique on their own,
many were able to wean themselves completely o prescribed
painkillers. Remarkably, Silvers made the further observation that if
a patie nt with chronic pain was also a drug addict, using the
technique seemed to sweep away all drug cravings along with the
pain. This occurred even among patients who had been abusing
drugs for twenty years, and there seemed to be no withdrawal
symptoms. By 1986 Silver s was condent enough to test her
methods on a group of hard-core addicts. She selected twenty adults who had spent from ve to forty years
hooked on cocaine, alcohol, Valium, or heroin, either alone or in
combination. They were desperate people, almost all of whom had
gone far beyond getting any satisfaction from their xes. They
continued on drugs basically  to escape their deep feelin gs of guilt
and to alleviate the constant  physical pain that their abused bodies
were aicted with. Most had completely ruined their family life and
career. Silvers taught the group her standard technique, but after telling
them that the brain produces  its own painkillers, she went on to say
that it produce s the exact equivalent of any drug sold on the street. Besides giving an addict a lifetime supply of pure drugs with no side
eects, the brain’s pharmacy  would make it unnecessary for him to
feel guilty. Silvers told the group: “You have been using drugs for a
very good reason. The drugs that get abused are precisely  those thatmimic the natural substance s which the brain uses to make people
feel normal. When we say that we feel a certain way, our mood is
always produced by one brain chemical or other—there is no state
of mind without a biochemical foundation. “In the brains of an addicted  person, the internal drugs for feeling
normal—happy, calm, balanced, and in control—are in short supply,
either because of a hereditary or spontaneous shortage, or because
taking outside drugs lowers the brain’s ability to produce its own
supply. “Your addictive cravings have been telling you that your brain
was having a problem, and your habit was a way of solving it. Although drug abuse has dangerous consequences, it is nothing to
be ashamed of in itself. You were just medicating yourself, like a
diabetic taking insulin.”
Here Silvers was mixing astute therapy, the power of suggestion,
and rather tenuous science. Neuroscientists have not yet proved that
the brain produces the equiv alent of some addictive drugs (alcohol,
nicotine, and cocaine, for example), much less that such substances
can be deliver ed on command. But there is no doubt that our cells
are outtted to latch on to street drugs. That undeniable fact implies
that addictive substances must fulll some purpose that is closely
matched by a chemical we make inside ourselves; otherwise, we
would have to assume that nature gave us a receptivity  for street
drugs millions  of years before they arrived on the scene, which
seems highly improbable. After Silvers delivered her talk, the members of the group closed
their eyes, mentally built up a massive dose of their favored drug,
and released it when she gave the signal. What followed was
astonishing. The eyes of the subjects glazed over; each person was
lost on a dierent trip, according to the kind of drug he was
addicted to. The cocaine addicts felt a rush that left them
speechless. They laughed quietly and later said that they had relived
childhood memories. The Valium addicts became so tranquilized
that they stuttered at the beginning of words. The alcoholics
sprawled in dreamy relaxatio n and lost their inhibitions; they talkedcalmly about threatening subjects that had arouse d massive
defensiveness before. In every instance the drug x was so strong that Silvers had to
wait twenty minutes before  the group was coherent enough to
describe their experiences. All were elated and convinced by what
had happened, although they had approached the session quite
skeptically. “For years the drug has been in control of you,” Silvers
assured them, “now it will be the other way around.”
I nd this a superb example of how awareness can heal. When
Silvers told addicts that their guilt was unfounded, she set the stage
for an outlook  most of them  had not entertained but were eager to
accept. Once a plausible tool was oered, the mind allow ed itself to
break out of an old bounda ry. My explanation assumes that the
brain acted as a neutral agent here; having no will of its own, the
brain would have been capable of continuing the addiction or
abandoning it. The brain cannot free itself; it needs instructions
from the mind. Silvers follows the current trend to seek explanations within the
brain’s chemistry, but she admits that the exact brain mechanism
she has been tapping is unknown. She places great weight on the
notion that feeling like a normal person depends upon a proper
balance of many interconnected neurochemicals. This seems
undeniable, but it bypasses the mystery of how a single  technique
could tap into brain chemicals that are not even know n to exist. Besides, could  an addict’s brain, so grossly impaired by outside
substances, really cure itself through chemical means? As I see it,
the wound of addiction was cured instead by a new ingredient in
awareness. The brilliance of her whole method was that it gave the mind-
body connection credit for doing anything it wanted to, even in the
face of people ’s enormous conditioning. As support for the view
underlying Silvers’ method, consider the power of the placebo
eect. If you give a dummy drug to a group of cancer patients,
telling them that they are receiving a potent form of chem otherapy,
a large  percentage will exhibit the typical side eects of
chemotherapy. They will feel intensely nauseous after taking thedrug; their hair will begin to fall out and sometimes  falls out
completely. Clearly we were not born with a xed brain mechanism for losing
our hair at will; nor do chemotherapy drugs mimic natural
substances in the brain. In order for the placebo to work, the mind
created someth ing new—it was not dependent on the brain’s known
abilities. Rather, the brain was the mind’s innitely resourceful
servant, able to carry out what it was told to do. When Silvers
oered these addicts a drugle ss x, they discovered on the spot that
addiction was not a prison but an illusion. Years of pain, frustration,
and demolishe d self-esteem were suddenly irrelevant. “Curving back
upon myself,” Lord Krishna expounds to Arjuna, “I create again and
again.” This is not only a transcendent god speaking, but the creator
inside each person. OceanofPDF.com11
The Field of Power
In India, if a person appears to be living in a state of grace,
people will admiringly say, “Let him walk where he likes, owers
will grow under his feet.” I’m sure Sidney has never heard this
poetic saying, but it could easily apply to him, now that he has
stepped into a wonder world. “I was the last person who should have started performing
miracles,” he began, talking in a soft, musing voice. “In my circle,
you know, religion means next to nothing. I abhor ‘the gradual
descent into woolly mysticism ,’ as Stephen Hawking so aptly put it,
and I agree with Freud that people who pray to an all-lov ing Father
in heaven are probably compensating for the father that did not love
them enough on earth. “I was sitting in a café last year telling a student, ‘If you are
completely honest with yourself, you will never claim to know that
you have a soul.’ Medieval physicians used to weigh their dying
patients to test if the body became lighter as the soul departed. They
never found anything, of course. But metaphysics is the hardest
superstition to kill. Newton himself believed that the aairs of the
universe take place inside God’s mind—he never produced evidence
for that contention, either. “Think of all the spiritual titillation we would be forced to
abandon if the ‘other world ’ and its ‘higher beings’ had to prove
their existence instead of being taken on faith! By the time I turned
twenty-one, I had dropped the whole archaic vocabulary of God,soul, sin, atonement, redemption, and immortality as so much
excess baggage.”
“But now you do possess a soul?” I asked in puzzlement. “Believe it or not, I think I do.” He laughed and spread his hands
in the air to ward o invisible objections. “Let me just tell you what
has happened, and you judge.”
“All right,” I said. I’ve known Sidney for ve years, as a friend
and occasional patient. If he had found his soul, it would be worth
hearing about. Sidney is forty-seven and looks at the world with the
most alert gaze I have ever met. He is a uent and diverse writer
and sometime professor who takes his stance against any kind of
orthodox dogma. His words, which pour out like Niagara, are
always memorable. Now here we were, seated in another café,
taking shelter from the rain one gray Saturday in Cambridge. “A few month s ago,” Sidney said, “it became quite clear to me
that my normal mind was breaking apart.”
“You had a psychotic episode?” I asked, startled. “Let us say that I brushed up against a state of mind that I would
have unhesitatingly labeled as disturbed in someone else,” he
replied. “But again, I leave the judgments to you. Early last winter I
started noticing some strang e ‘coincidences’ in my life. One day it
was snowing when I had to walk to the grocery store. As I stepped
outside my apartment, a patch of sunlight appeared at my feet, and I
couldn’t help but notice as I went down the street that it moved
with me. “I took a left turn at the end of the block; so did the patch of
sunlight, which  measured perhaps ten feet across. I stopped at the
trac light and waited for it to change—and when I crossed the
street, so did the light!
_OceanofPDF.com_Unconditional_Life_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        In his
journal, the English essayist Mark Rutherford writes about one
spring morning when he was walking in the woods and chanced
upon a huge old oak. The tree was just leang out, bursti ng forth as
a billow ing cloud of greenish-yellow buds. Caught by the splendor
of so much new life, Rutherford suddenly felt that “something
happened which was nothing less than a transformation of myself
and the world. ”
The oak was “no longer a tree away from me and apart from me. The enclosing barriers of consciousness were removed. … The
distinction of self and not-sel f was an illusion. I could feel the rising
sap; in me also sprang the up-rushing from its roots, and the joy of
its outbreak, from the extremity of each twig right up to the summit,
was my own. ” Fused with the being of the tree, he thought the
words Thou in me and I in thee. The key to his experience lay in the
unity that this sentence conveyed. “I cannot explain; it will be easy
to prove me absurd, but nothing can shake me. Thou in me and I in
thee. Death. what is death. There is no death: in thee it is
impossible, absurd. ”
Countless people have had similar experiences. They have fused
with nature for a moment and realized the Self. Isn’t it possible,
then, to go further and think of a state where a person fuses with
nature permanently. That is the yogi’s challenge to our everydayconception of being. To be human, the yogis say, is to experience
the one silence  underlying everything. Indeed, life is silence, and in
the fellowship of silence all life is oneself. Going into Silence
At the end of our rst talk, I decided to ask Karin to maintain
strict silence, speaking to no one for the next three days, after which
we would meet and talk again. She was staying as a patient at the
clinic outside Boston where I see patients, so her daily needs would
be taken care of. At the same time, this period of silence would be a
good opportunity to deepen her experience of meditation,  which she
had just learned the previous month. Karin was very reluctant to try my experiment. “Do I have to be
totally silent. ” she asked nervously. “Yes,” I said. “When you need anything, you can write a note and
pass it to one of the sta. ”
She only looked more nervous. Karin is used to keeping up a
constant shield of words, partly to relieve her anxiety, partly to
cover it up. I could see how the prospect of being quiet seemed like
having her oxygen tent taken away. “Please, just have a little faith,”
I implored. “You might be surprised at what happens. ”
She wavered. “Can I at least call my brother to wish him a happy
birthday. ” she asked. I nodd ed. “And then not a word to anyone. ”
she said. “Not a word,” I replied. Asking a patient to go into silence is a very unusual step— I hasten
to add that spending days in silence is not a requirement for
successful meditation—but I couldn’t think of any other way to keep
Karin from constantly verbal izing every tiny thing that happens to
her. Using words as an escap e route, she runs away from me, from
anyone else who has tried to help her, and ultimately from herself. Also, it seems to me that she has a basic misperception about her
problem. She believes that she is outside reality trying desperately
to get back in. I often feel, on the contrary, that she spends just as
much of her energy making sure that she stays on the outside. Why does she do that. Partic ipating in the everyday world brings
with it a mixture of pleasure and pain, but Karin prefers to oat
above the world like a balloon barely tethered to earth. This distant
vantage point doesn’t provide much pleasure, but it certainly  helps
to isolate her from any more pain. Karin knows that her escape
plans haven’t succeeded. She is still tied to the ground, by her
memories, by her distress, and above all by her longing to rejoin the
rest of us. I didn’t expect a few days of silence to mark a major
breakthrough, but at least I could be there if she happene d to come
to earth and meet herself again. It would be a highly charged
moment, I knew. When the three days were up, I felt that some kind of change had
taken place. Karin looked rested and less anxious; she did not return
obsessively to the same litany of complaints. She looked at me
inquisitively, and after admit ting that she felt a little more cheerful,
she asked, “What was I supposed to get out of that. ”
“What do you think you got out of it. ” I asked in return. “Well, I still feel like a lit-up Christmas tree,” she laughed
ruefully, “and I still want to pull the plug so the lights will go o. ”
She stopped. “Anything else. ” I urged. “I don’t know,” she mumble d evasively. “I walked around a lot. There was one thing. ”
“Yes. ”
“There’s a big maple in your woods that was cracked by lightning
and has a hole in the middl e, about shoulder high. I happened to
pass by when I noticed some thing moving inside the hole. Walking
closer, I saw a bird’s nest with a single blue egg in it; an adult bird
was standing beside it, not moving. I was surprised that she didn’t
y away, but when I looked closer, I realized what was happening. The egg was hatching, right at that moment. Tiny cracks appeared,
and then the brown point of a bill. “I stood very still, holding my breath. For a second I wondered if I
should help, but I have heard that touching a hatchling will make
the mother reject it. So I just watched and very slowly moved my
hand until it was only a foot from the nest. Still the bird did not yaway. The chick must have gotten exhausted, because as soon as
one large patch  of shell fell o, it didn’t move for several minutes. I
decided to go back. ” Neither of us said anything. “Do you know why the mother bird didn’t y away. ” I asked. “It’s
because you were truly quiet. You were carrying around your inner
silence and projecting it. You may not notice yourself doing it,
because you may think that a silent mind shouldn’t be able to think. You can think and be silent at the same time. They are two dierent
levels of yourself. The thinking mind goes on, yet the silence
remains. ”
What Karin had experienced  was a small window of quietness. I
told her that the world seen through that window is very dierent
from the one we are used to. Far from radiating silence, most of us
radiate hysteria, reecting the mental turmoil inside. When that
inner turmoil subsides, it leaves a space for change to begin. “Your
mind is quiet by nature,” I said, “but you have to settle down to
realize this. Everything sorts itself out correctly and spontaneously
once you become quiet. In the light of calm, steady self-awareness, a
feeling of wholeness will wake up inside you. This wholeness is not
a thoug ht of any kind; it is simply your own mind, empty of thought
but full of you. You do not have to do anything to reach this state;
the process is eortless. You do not even have to consciously let go. A quiet mind is all you need. ”
This, the secon d time I talked with Karin, was also the last. Her
week-long stay at the clinic had only a couple more days to go. We
had been alone in each other’s company for less than two hours, yet
I felt close to her. She has staked so much on being true to herself. Just before we said good-bye, she seemed ready for the rst time to
talk about her future—I mean the possibility that she actually has
one and is not going to waste her life protesting the present or
mourning the past. “I came here to nd out if there was a way to go
back to what I’ve lost, even though my mind already told me there
wasn’t. I have to go on,” she said. “Wouldn’t it be too sad to exist on a memory.
Mark Rutherford had an experience where he felt a transformation of himself and the world, as if he was no longer separate from the tree he was observing. This experience changed him, allowing him to see the world in a new light.
What was the experience that Mark Rutherford had in the woods, and how did it change him?
Karin was initially reluctant to participate in the experiment, but after it, she looked more cheerful and outgoing. She reported that she had gained a new perspective on her life and was no longer consumed by her anxiety.
What was Karin's initial reluctance to participate in the experiment, and how did she respond after it?
The rishis believed that the world is not as it appears to be, and that our perception of it is shaped by our own minds. They did not see the world as a fixed, solid entity, but rather as a dynamic, ever-changing process.
What did the rishis believe, and how did they approach their perception of the world?
Stan, the musician, experienced a loss of his creative ability and a sense of disconnection from his art. He felt like he had lost his purpose and was struggling to come to terms with his new reality.
What did Stan, the musician, experience, and how did it affect him?
Evelyn Silvers used a technique where she guided her patients to imagine they were creating their own endorphins, and the results showed that the patients were able to overcome their addiction and feel a sense of freedom and fulfillment.
What did Evelyn Silvers, a therapist, do with her patients, and what were the results?