The aggressiveness of a warrior doesn’ t
correspond to Shiva, who has no need to intrude, conquer , overcome,
acquire, or compete. Although he is called “destroyer of worlds” in the
Bhagavad-Gita , what is meant is that Shiva absorbs the universe back into
himself at the end of creation. This isn’t a violent act, any more than it is
violent for your brain to reabsorb the neurochemicals that form ed your last
thought; in both cases the found ation for a new creation, a new thought, has
been laid. Shiva is at least a familiar name in the West, known to be one of the three
primal gods of India, along with Brahma and Vishnu. Each was conceived
as a particular form of the divine: Brahma is the creator of the universe,
Vishnu the maintainer , and Shiva the destroyer . It would be a mistake,
though, as I just explained, to think of Shiva as some kind of apocalyptic
avenger , or even as a being outside ourselves. God is within, and the three-part division of the divine is only an image
or metaphor for something that cannot be divided. By analogy consider how
an image, such as the face of someone you love, arises in your mind. Theimage is created , maintains itself for an instant, then disappears. We could
therefore divide  the mind into creator , maintainer , and destroyer , but the
actual experience of thinking is continuous and unbroken. So it is with spirit, which is always experienced as wholeness, but unlike
the mind, spirit cannot be assigned a place the way we conveniently assign
mind to the brain. God is neithe r here nor there, inside nor outside. Shiva is
best understood as omnipresence, a silent awareness that permeates
everything. Of the threefold gods only Shiva is equated with God because
God is all-pervading. In the setup of things Shiva was given Shakti to carry out the process of
physical creation. This is strikingly evocative of the way the code of life is
packaged in each cell of your body . It exists as DNA, which is silent,
inactive, and out of sight, but also as its biochemical twin, RNA, which
emer ged out of DNA to carry out all the cellular processes that actually
build the body at the basic level  of enzymes and proteins. Brain  physiology
is also both silen t and active—billions of memories lie stored in the cortex,
emer ging one at a time as expressed memory . If you expand this to a cosmic
scale, you have Shiva, whose creative potential remains infinitely greater
than any of its expressions, even when those expressions take the form of
galaxies and whole universes. Shiva brings pur e consciousness to a sacr ed marriage. It invisibly makes every action an action of
God. What would an action of God be exactly? A miraculous intervention, a
voice from the mountaintop? Millions of people have waited for such signs
and received none. Despite my attempts to bring Shiva out of the realm of
abstraction, it would be easy to see him as a ghost, a spirit ual concept
without flesh and bones. Flesh and bones are demanded by the five senses. When you pay attention to things “out there,” you judge their reality by
sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Yet in spiritual practice there is
something called  second attention, which attunes you to things your senses
cannot grasp. Second attention  makes you aware of spirit. It works through intuition,
and it is sometimes called the sight or the gift, although these imply a
supernatural faculty . In reality spirit is constantly sending signals to all ofus, but because our second attention was never developed, we don’t take
them in. Intuition is as real as any other faculty , once you have developed it. What kinds of signals is second attention looking for? Spirit is universal
and constant, like gravity , but has no physical constraints. Shiva reserves
for himself complete freedom to be what, when, where, and how he wishes. Second attention  can detect all five actions that, according to the classic
Shiva texts, are characteristic of God when He communicates with the
world:
God creates. God destroys. God protects and maintains what has been created. God covers or conceals His own nature. God reveals or uncovers His own nature. The Indian mind is not linear , and it finds no contradiction in making
Shiva the destroyer in one of his forms and the omnipresent creator -
maintainer in another . Shiva’ s five actions are the framework for any
spiritual experie nce you can have; they give it meaning and form. Since
meaning is completely personal, no two people have to agree on which
action has been manifested at any given moment—this is a private
communication between self and Self. My own convictions in this area go back almost thirty years. When I
entered medical  school I saw plenty of cadavers but rarely saw anyone die,
and I looked ahead to that experience with trepidation. One of my initiations into death occurred on the public wards of an
antiquated New Delhi hospita l. I was on rounds, doing the physical
workups assigned to second-year med students. It was very late at night,
and I had to wake my charge from a sound sleep—there was no other
choice, since the workup had to be done before surgery, which was
scheduled for 4:00 A.M. My patient was a bewildered villager from the
Punjab who endured my poking and prodding with unconcealed anxiety . “Almost finishe d,” I assured him. I stood up, taking the cold stethoscope
from his chest. Instead of pullin g his gown back down, the man stared over
my shoulder , openmouthed. I whipped around and saw a woman, her face
white as chalk, swaying in the doorway . I’m sure the Punjabi villager
thought she was a ghoul. The woman tried to speak, but no words emer ged,only a sound somewhere betwee n a croak and a gurgle. I barely ran over in
time to catch her as she collapsed. In moments like this a doctor ’s immediate reaction is to suspect a heart
attack. “Crash cart!” I yelled to the night nurse, who had appeared on the
scene. She ran back to the phone and called the intensive cardiac unit. In the
two minutes it took them to arrive, I held the woman, whose  eyes were
closed. Then her breathing stopped. In half a minute I began emer gency
resuscitation with my hands, but that gave me enough time to clearly see
she was dying. Despite my controlled frenzy calling for assistance and stripping away
her gown to expose the chest, a calmness came over me—it was impossible
to tell if I was witnessing this calmness or it was witnessing me. There was
a faint but distinct feeling that something was passing in the air,
accompanied by a wave of peace. Before I could think about it, the whole
experience was swallowed up by frantic activity as the crash cart appeared. A first-year resident armed with a fibrillator took over, more or less shoving
me out of the way . As I stood up I saw two men hovering over my shoulder , the Punjabi
villager and another , older patie nt I hadn’ t seen before. “Please , go back to
bed. I’m sorry you had to be upset by this,” I said. The two men didn’ t
move, nor did they look at all upset. One mumbled to the other in dialect,
then the older patient said to me, “Don’ t worry , it was all right.” My
Punjabi patient mumbled again,  and the other man translated for me: “She
was grateful to you.”
“For trying to save her?” I managed to say . “No, no. For holding her in your arms. It made her less afraid to leave.”
With this the two men turned back into the darkened ward and went to bed. This incident remains unfor gettable to me as an example of the dictum
that behind every action is hidden an action of God. My perception of the
night’ s emer gency was primitive, but second attention, via my two patients,
told me what I needed to hear. Spirit wanted me to know that the
peacefulness of death is real. Now that time has passed, I realize that the message was much deeper:
God is present in death. To have  this realization, I had to mature in second
attention and thereby learn the basic truth about Shiva: hidden within every
action is an action of God.To know  God is a process that unfolds over time. It isn’t a sudden
experience that is finished once and for all. One can never be finished with
God; moments of recognition only serve to draw you closer . Hidden in
every event of your life is a possible epiphany about love, as it
communicates to you from the source. As with Shakti there are some simple
verbal formulas to indicate what Shiva’ s actions are trying to impart:
Creation:  God’ s love is new . Destruction:  God’ s love is beyond death. Maintenance or pr otection:  God’ s love upholds. Concealment:  God’ s love is beyond form. Revelation:  God’ s love is in form. Spirit never stops sending signa ls of its intent to us in the relative world. If second attention is acute enou gh, you can be aware of spirit crossing your
path, descending upon you, uplifting you, or whispering truth many times a
day. These are all silent comm unications from Shiva, whos e nature is
silence. Compared with Shakti, Shiva is further removed from creation as
will or action, closer to pure creativity as a potential. But his five actions do
touch the world. Silence has a voice, which speaks in something like these
five ways. Cr eation. From my source in love I create situations that teach lessons. These are
always lessons about love. Nothing is created outside my spirit but only
from within it. Destruction. I destroy  the impurities that prevent you from perceiving love. There are
no obsta cles not created by myse lf, whatever appearances may say. Because
they originate inside me, obstacles are created out of love, and once you
find a deeper level of understanding, obstacles melt away . Pr otection. As long as any situation is needed for a spiritual purpose, I maintain and
protect it. Labeling a particular situation good or bad is not relevant to this
act—I protect life for its own sake, without judging it.Concealment. I conceal who I am if that is what is needed for growth. If you already
knew yourself totally as spirit, there would be no path and no growth. Therefore some  things remain hidden at certain times. In my role as
concealer I lay out the steps of the path. Revelation. I reveal myself as needed to open up new possibilities. Time and space
are constantly unfolding. If they simply unfolded more time and more
space, there would be endless repetition of the known. But time and space
are only curtains to the drama lying behind them. The drama is the
unfolding of spirit, which happens through revelation. If you listen to the voice speak ing these lines, it is remarkable  how the
“I” can be interpreted as God, spirit, love, or simply your own nature. You
are simultaneously in touch with all these levels, although your mind, made
insensitive by its conditioning, may not let you see this. Shiva isn’t hiding,
since there is no place for the One to hide. The gr eatest sign of God’ s love is that He wants to be known. Now we come to our deepest definition of passion: passion is the free
flow of awareness from the unmanifest to the manifest. Your existence here
on earth makes you the love child of Shiva’ s passion for Shakti, and hers for
him in return. Your life appears to be a tapestry of outward events ranging
from birth to death. But all this activity depends entirely upon the invisible
flow of awareness working on every level. Shiva and Shakti ar e eternally married because both ar e composed of awar eness. One is
awar eness r esting in silence; the other is awar eness flowing out into cr eation. This is what I mean by saying that you are passion itself, for you marry
silence and power , the two polarities between which awareness flows. Without the flow of awareness everything in and around you would collapse
into a heap of dead matter . When you aspire to enter a sacred marriage with
someone you love, you are expressing your own nature and nothing less. The miracle of love is that feeling a grain of love for another person can
suddenly reveal the divine. Such a tiny shift of perception is needed toregain infinity . When I stop heeding separation and follow love, my beloved
will be mirrored  in my being; I will feel exuberance, exaltati on, and joy
flowing from their silent wellspring. The manifestations of love will
multiply becaus e my lover will become sacred to me; that is why love is
called holy , because it expresses wholeness. OceanofPDF .comLOVING  PRACTICE
Heeding Spirit
IF SPIRIT IS sending  signals to you, how can you heed them? Second
attention has much in commo n with intuition and creativity . It is well
known that both are faculties of the human mind. From a spiritual
viewpoint you are always a creator . The tiniest situation in your life is not
made “out there” but “in here,” from the source of reality , which is
awareness. People who believe that the material world is causi ng things to
happen are simply unconscious creators—they haven’ t taken responsibility
for being authors of their own lives. Second attention gives you the ability to take authorship of your life,
putting you at the center of the daily process of making the reality you
perceive. Since all of us are conditioned to believe that nature operates
independently of what we think, wish, dream, and feel, reclaiming
authorship of our reality is a gradual process. Signals fr om spirit all serve the same purpose: to give you back your life as a cr eator . The attitude toward life of someone who functions as a creator  is based
on these  five cardinal beliefs, few of which you have been taught unless
you were extremely fortunate:
1. I am an empty vessel. Inspiration fills me every day , but I am not here
to hold on to anything that comes to me. 2. I am here to pass ener gy from one state to another . Hopefully I move it
from a lower to a higher state, since my purpose is to direct everything
toward spirit. 3. I do not have to control the flow of reality . I bend where spirit bids me. 4. The fullness of spirit, not my ego, provides.5. If I live from the source of creation, only good can come to me. Everything from spirit comes from love. Getting to these beliefs and making them work for you is a goal that spirit
can help you with. Society in general is not attuned to such a life, which is
why all artists and true lovers have had to travel far outside the accepted
framework of social beliefs. Society supports struggle, competition, and
ego, which means that it supports separation. The worldview of separation
is extremely convincing—millions of people spend every day simply trying
to cope with survival. But living in separation isn’t love; by definition it
cannot bring you to unity . Spirit is your chief and only ally in your quest for unity . The tactics of non-love will never get you
to love. In the following exercise you will learn how to transmute the beliefs and
behaviors of separation into those of love, using the signals that spirit is
always sending. PART ONE
The voice of spirit is constantly competing with other voices inside you,
and the outcom e of your life depends on which voice you follow . Since
inner voices are constant, you can estimate what a person expec ts from life
by looking at his or her inner voices for a period no longer than forty-eight
hours. Read the follow ing statements and check those that have applied to you
over the past two days:
1. I was afraid something wasn’ t going to work out for me. 2. I resolved a situation by acting nicer than I really felt. 3. I couldn’ t figure out how I felt about something. 4. I had doubts about how someone close to me actually feels about me. 5. I didn’ t tell the truth when I should have. 6. Someone hurt my feelings, but I let it pass. 7. I had worries when I went to bed, or I had a bad dream, or I had
insomnia. 8. Someone let me down.9. I thought about how good things used to be and wished I could go
back. 10. I felt frustrated by some part of my life that’ s gotten out of control. 11. I regretted something I said. 12. I felt bad about my feelings. 13. I talked behind someone’ s back. 14. I complained to someone who couldn’ t help the situation I was in. 15. Someone bothered me, but I didn’ t confront them. 16. I was afraid to ask for what I wanted. 17. I didn’ t say, “I love you.”
18. I felt bad about myself. 19. I looked at the news on TV and thought things were really getting
worse. 20. Nothing seemed to go right. Each check counts as a point. Total your score, which will fall into one of
these three broad categories:
0–5 points. You live in the present and do not heed strong inner voices of
fear or guilt. Your self-worth is based upon real expectations. You are not
stuck reliving past emotions or trying to atone for past mistakes. Others
may marvel at how low your stress is, but you work to keep it that way
every day . 6–15 points. You tend to listen to inner voices that are not you but are
expressions of your fear, anger , and disappointment. You have a habit of not
being totally truthful about your emotions, either to yourself or to others. Self-doubt is a problem that increases for you as your stress mounts. If
there’ s a choice between what you want to do and what you think you’d
better do in order to be safe or to go along with others, you’ll take the
second choice. In times of conflict or crisis, you will escape by watching
TV or complaining to friends rather than sit and work out what you can do
to change the situation. You say things like “It’ll all work out” when deep
inside you are quite afraid that it won’ t.
16–20 points. You have a hard time telling where your inner voices leave
off and you begin. You hate confrontation because it means actually beinghonest with yourself or other people. Getting along is very important to
you. You find yourself saying things you don’t mean; you make promises
you regret afterward. Sometime s you look around and wonder  what kinds
of friends you have and feel that you don’ t really know them—which means
that you do not get close to people or allow them to get close to you. Blaming your parents comes all too easily , or you want to run back to them
when things get rough. Your core beliefs have yet to surface, but if they did,
you would belie ve that survival is a dangerous business and love has little
force in this world. The whole business of inner voices is highly complex, but from spirit’ s
viewpoint the only inner voice you need to follow is that of the higher Self. To see if you are heeding that voice, read the next list of statements and
check which ones have applied to you over the last two days :
1. I decided to go it alone on something that matters to me. 2. I had a great new idea. 3. I came up with a way to solve a situation out of nowhere. 4. I said, “I love you.”
5. I got something of f my chest I’d wanted to say for a while. 6. I swallowed my pride and admitted I was wrong. 7. I supported someone who was in doubt or wanted to make a dif ficult
change. 8. I stood up for myself, even though I felt nervous about it. 9. Despite the evening news I feel that life is good. 10. I didn’ t blame anyone. 11. I didn’ t complain. 12. I searched deep inside. 13. I made someone feel better about themselves than they did before. 14. I saw something good in someone who had made a bad impression on
me before. 15. I trusted and it worked out. 16. My faith in God was justified. 17. I had a moment of insight. 18. I forgave myself, or I was kind to myself. 19. I was tempted to jump to conclusions but didn’ t.
20. I was at peace.Give yourself a point for each statement you checked and total your score. 0–5 points. Your life is based on values other than spiritual. You may be
unaware of this because you have success, money , and a good family life—
or you may not be unaware. In either case your inner climate is dominated
by routine. Creativity and sensitivity are not high on the list of things you
value, or you don’t see yoursel f being creative. Looking deep inside isn’t
something you do very often, since you are afraid of what you might find. “Love” to you means having your needs fulfilled by another person. You
are likely to describe yourself as an atheist, pessimist, or skeptic. 6–15 points. You attend church or at least believe in God, but you do not
have a strong personal link to spirit. You are not driven by success or
money , which gives you some peace of mind, but you haven’ t found a real
passion at the core of yoursel f. Problems don’t overwhelm you if they
aren’ t too big, but you don’t expect to come up with major innovations or
creative accomplishments either . Being on safe middle ground is all right
with you, althou gh you sometimes fear for the future. “Love” to you means
a secure family , a devoted spouse, and feeling good about people. 16–20 points. You are in tune with spirit. Conventional religious beliefs
matter much less to you than active participation in your own creative
lifestyle. Your belief in God is founded on experience, but at the same time
you consider yourself the author  of your own existence. In a crisis you may
be shaken, but when the emotions clear you look for positive outcomes and
almost always find them. You think in terms not of being safe but of what
you want to do and want to be— you follow your star. “Love” to you means
a force beyond personality that can be seen and felt everywhere you look, if
only you look hard enough. In most cases scoring high on either of these tests means that you scored
low on the other, because following the voice of spirit is the opposite of
following the voices of fear, anger , and doubt. Spirit’ s voice is harder to
follow because it is neither loud nor demanding, whereas the voice of fear,
for insta nce, is extremely loud and at times overwhelming in its insistence. Other voices are from the past:  your thoughts are not really your own butborrowed from authority figure s who once had influence over you. These
voices say, “This is what you’d better do”—they warn and often punish. Other voices from the past express habits and beliefs. When someone
exclaims, “If I listen to myself, I hear my mother talking,” what he really
means is that an adopted belief system is having its say; the source of these
beliefs—father , mother , coach, teacher , guru—still has a voice in your head,
repeating the tenets you are holding on to. But it is you who holds on. You are the one who decides which  voice to
heed, which to reject. A vast majority of the time, people do not heed the
voice that makes them either happy or loving. They are led into unloving
and unhappy outcomes because they followed the wrong voice, and they
spend immense amounts of time in therapy basically to get these wrong
voices out of their heads. The next exerci se will help you to recognize when spirit is speaking to
you and how to heed it. PART TWO
Getting rid of the negative voices in your head isn’t accom plished by
arguing with them, ignoring them , or trying to pretend that they aren’ t there. It involv es a process of letting go; the Loving Practice “Letting Go” (p.
169) details how this process works. Here I will be concerned with how to
attune yourself to the voice of spirit. Spirit is hard to listen to if you are
enmeshed in your old beliefs and social conditioning, for the following
reasons:
Spirit is not verbal like the other thoughts in your head. It comes as
insight, an “aha!” that makes you see things in a new light. Spirit doesn’ t argue or try to persuade. It shows you what is real in a
given situation, pure and simple. Spirit doesn’ t say, “If you don’ t do this, that will follow .” There are no
ultimatums or threats. Spirit doesn’ t communicate in terms of right and wrong. Whatever you
decide to do, spirit will support you. Spirit always makes you feel better about yourself, but it may pose
choices that take courage, patience, and faith.You can’ t make spirit do anything. It speaks when it wants to, but you
can be sure that it will speak at the right time. Spirit never comes from anything but love. If you are looking for a
way to find revenge, to prove yourself right, to oppose or conquer
others, or to punish, the voice in your head isn’ t spirit. These are the guidelines that enable you to tune in to your second attention. First attention is dominated by outside events, by expectations about the
way things should turn out, and by old conditioning—if you detect any of
these influences, you know you aren’ t in spirit. Ask yourself the following
questions any time you have a doubt about this:
Am I angry or anxious? Am I suspicious or doubtful? Do I feel overwhelmed by what’ s going on around me? Is somebody else trying to make up my mind for me? Is my body tense or feeling discomfort? Has this happened to me before? Am I just repeating a past scenario? Do I have to have things turn out a certain way? Do I feel I’m in danger? These are signals from your ego, far removed from spirit despite the fact
that we act on such signals all the time. It is in the absence  of these ego
signals that spirit is speaking to you. One kind of signal can’t be converted
to the other . Transmuting your behavior from ego based to spirit based
means cultivating your second attention. If you act on spirit you will see
results that you never expected, such as these:
Your fears will no longer come true. Your happiness will no longer depend on expectations. You will feel safe. You will feel loved. As you begin to heed spirit, you can only increase in love—pa ssion for
life will appear naturally . We are like empty vessels being endle ssly refilled
with spirit. To be in love with someone is to share this inexhau stible flow. Love shares awareness and being; it is a silent communication that unites
two people more and more in a spiritual reality unknown outside their
intimacy . They have reclaimed their lives by becoming authors of their own
reality .OceanofPDF .comIN OUR LIVES
Wooing the Goddess
“I’M SURE YOU don’t want to hear my problems,” Amy began. “Another
boring, weepy wife. How many  have you met as a doctor—a hundred? A
thousand?” She sounded distraught. “Is boring how you feel?” I asked. Amy’ s eyes turned dull. “It doesn’ t matter much how I feel,” she said. After twenty years of
marriage to a CEO from San Diego named Fred, Amy considered herself a
discarded wife. “Is Fred seeing someone else? Does he want a divorce?” I asked. Amy
shook her head. “I don’t know what he wants. We don’t see each other much these days. I’m alone until he is driven home after six, if he can make it home at all. He
might as well have a cellular phone grafted to his ear for all he pays
attention when he is around. And going to bed means going to sleep.”
“Do you think Fred wants this situation to change?” I asked. “Why should he? His life’s exciting. I’m a boring holdover from his
past.” Amy looked sad, but instead of crying she sighed and squared her
shoulders. “You’ve used the word boring  twice,” I pointed out. “Is that something
we could talk about?”
Amy shrugged and looked away . “I guess,” she said. “Since we all tend to find it easier to look outward than inward ,” I said,
“we rarely challenge the notion that there are ‘boring’ people and ‘boring’
situations. When someone complains that her or his marriage has become
boring, the usual remedy is external. The woman decides she needs to look
more seductive, so she buys a flimsy negligee, turns down the lights, and
puts on mood music. The man brings home candy and flowers and vows to
take his wife dancing.”A half smile crossed Amy’ s face, as if to say , “We’re way beyond that.”
I went on. “Being external, these can be only superficial gestures. The
heart of the problem is not a boring relationship (and by implication, a
boring partner), but a failure to discover where passion comes from and
how it is kept alive. What you’re talking about here is the fading of passion. Is it really all on Fred’ s side? How exciting is he?”
“That doesn’ t seem to matter ,” Amy said. “Not to him.”
“You just feel guiltier than he does,” I said. “I’d be surprised if he felt
any more desirable than you do right now .”
Amy looked surprised; it was clear that she was resigned to a boring
marriage and that she had taken all the blame for that upon herself. “Before asking the question ‘Where did the passion go?’” I said, “you
first have to ask, ‘Why did I want it to go?’ Passion is the flow of life, in all
its natur al exuberance. Passion doesn’ t just fade; it gets blocked, and you
have to ask why you blocked it.” I didn’ t wait for Amy to answer , since she
looked baffled. “The answer , almost always, is rooted in the past. To a
surprising extent we have all learned to approach passion with caution, as
something that may hurt us. An unconscious censor inside your mind
decides whether it is permissible for you to feel passionate or not.”
“I’ve always suspected that Fred thinks I’m cold,” Amy said. “We used
to disagree a lot about how much sex is ‘normal.’”
“Meaning that you got tagged as wanting too little?” I asked. Her silence
was answer enough. “This issue of how much sex is too little or too much is
a diversionary tactic,” I said. “Normal is however much two people feel
comfortable with, as long as there is love. Could the real issue  be that sex
wasn’ t so good for you, so you gradually wanted less of it?”
“Fred’ s not the champion he thinks he is,” Amy said with sudden
resentment. She stopped herself, biting her lip. “Fred’ s very competitive,” I pointed out, “and performance is extremely
important to such men. Tendern ess doesn’ t come easily to them, nor does
sensitivity to their partners. But the blame can always be shifted by
claiming that the woman is unde rsexed or that the man has too much libido. Again the real issue isn’t too much or too little. It’s how much emotion you
feel safe expressing through sexual activity—in other words, how much you
judge against passion.”
“I don’ t judge against it,” Amy protested.“You judge against your emotions, which amounts to the same thing,” I
said. Sex is always about emotions. Good sex is about fr ee emotions; bad sex is about blocked emotions. “So what is it that blocks the flow of emotion? This blockage is felt as
boredom, which is what both you and Fred feel.”
“Maybe I am just boring,” Amy said. “No, that is guilt, which is holdi ng back a lot of anger ,” I said. “Boredom
is never  a primary feeling; it arises from a much more basic response, an
inner hurt that has disconnected you from yourself. Boredom begins when
you allow yourself to feel little or no emotional stimulation, and from there
stem the reactions of dullness, lethar gy, and depression. “Listen,” I said. “Everything you want from Fred you can give yourself.”
Amy looked at me with disbelief. “Pinning your frustrations on your mate is
like pinning your happiness on him, only in reverse, and neither will work. Where are you going to find passion if not in yourself? Having found it, you
can give to Fred in the way you want him to give to you. That is always the
solution.”
I sugges ted that we leave Fred entirely out of it for the moment and talk
more about emotions. “How do you feel about yourself right now?” I asked. “I’m afraid to tell you,” Amy said with a twisted smile. “Because you’re going to say ‘boring,’ right?” She nodded. “Boredom is
a kind of numbness,” I pointed out. “A person who says, ‘I have no
feelings’ really means, ‘I can’ t find my feelings anymore.’”
Clearly I had struck a chord. Amy began to tell me of nights when she
was afraid she felt nothing for Fred, when their lovemaking was so
perfunctory that she couldn’ t wait for it to be over . “But what was the feeling you were pushing aside?” I asked. “If you look
deep enough you’ll find that it was hurt. That would be the most natural
feeling for anyone—man or woman—whose partner isn’t really making
love. Love is not about orgasm; it’s about surrender to the other  person, and
Fred doesn’ t sound like he was ever capable of surrender .”
“I’m not sure he knows the concept,” Amy said softly . Clearly no one
had told Fred that noticing someone else’s emotions is the essence ofcommunication. But it struck me that Amy’ s feelings, or lack of them, had
to be addressed first. “Let’ s try to understand something,” I suggested. “Why do you feel one
way and somebo dy else another? We have to go back to this whole question
of boundaries. In most cases early childhood taught us that being cold and
self-contained was preferable to being emotional. Passion came to be
equated with emotions that were ‘too much’ for your own good. Children
are taught to respect the emotional boundaries imposed by parents. This
teaching usually isn’ t direct, but it doesn’ t have to be. W ithout being handed
a textbo ok, a young child quickly learns to recognize when she is crying
‘too much,’ laughing ‘too hard,’ or being ‘too noisy .’”
Yet by nature all emotion is spontaneous, which means that an emotion
like crying or laughing will run its course if allowed to. There is no such
thing as crying too much—we simply cry until we are through,  and we are
through when the underlying energy of hurt has spent itself. Likewise there
is no such thing as laughing too hard or getting too angry or grieving
beyond measure. The limits we impose on all our emotions originated with the discomfort
of our parents. We formed our boundaries by reacting to theirs. They also
were taught as children to recognize when an emotion was “too much.”
Their sense of appropriateness was inherited, and they had little choice but
to pass it on. “What this means,” I told Amy , “is that your emotional life isn’t
completely yours. It comes to you secondhand and even thirdhand. Every
tear you shed, every angry outburst, every peal of laughter reflects the
emotional comf ort range of parents and grandparents, people who are not
yourself .”
My sudden emphasis startled Amy. She reflected for a moment. “So what
am I supposed to do—go wild, lose myself? I’m too old for those games.”
“I’m not saying that all emotion al displays are appropriate no matter how
extreme. If we had been allowe d to discover our emotions without outside
inhibition, they would not run to extremes; nature respects its own limits.”
A medical parallel can be made to blood pressure. When the body needs
to call upon it the vascular system contracts and dilates, resulting in very
high blood pressure when you are excited or exercising heavily , for
example, and lower blood pressure for periods of relaxation or creativity .These are extreme variations from “normal” blood pressure, yet they are
entirely natural. The body know s how to accommodate its need s regardless
of what we arbitrarily deem normal. Nature’ s definition of normal  is
whatever your system needs at any given moment in order to remain in
balance. Emotions are released to restore balance in the psyche, and if left to its
natural mechani sms the psyche has no difficulty determining  when it is
appropriate to laugh, cry, burst out in anger , or tremble with fear. The
connection with passion is this: passion is just the free flow of natural
emotional ener gy. “What this would all suggest,” I said, “is that emotional therapy is in
order here. But what if Fred doesn’ t think there’ s a problem? What if he
finds it too threatening to explo re emotions? Instead of depending on him,
let’s look at passion from a spiritual viewpoint, with the aim of seeing if
you can regain your passion. Ultimately , isn’t that the problem? Fred’ s
response is merely a reflection of what is going on inside you spiritually .”
Hesitantly Amy  agreed to go in this direction. It was clear that long-
standing emotio nal difficulties in her marriage weren’ t going to be solved
by having a talk with me, but the spiritual issues ran much deeper than
emotion. “If we could peel away the level of negative feelings inside you,” I said,
“we would expose a deeper core. What is this core made of? There are
many related factors—beliefs that separation has to occur , habits of being
isolated, old defeatism that prevents you from trying to reconnect. But if we
look at all these levels, a surprisingly simple diagnosis emer ges.”
We feel bor ed when we can’ t admit that we have desir es. “Unless desires are allowed to run their course,” I said, “existence feels
futile. Y our mate didn’ t inflict this condition on you; it is your own creation. Futility is a depressed condition that signifies, ‘What I want doesn’ t matter .’
This in turn is tied to similar beliefs, such as ‘What I feel doesn’ t make a
difference’ and ‘What I say doesn’t get heard.’ The common thread linking
all these  versions is that you are powerless . Someone with no power feels
that desire is hopeless, since it will never be fulfilled; therefore why bother
to have desires in the first place?”Amy is an intelligent woman, and the fact that she had subordinated her
power to Fred was not lost on her. As is true of most depressed  people she
had no Shakti of her own. The five powers all of us should take strength
from were greatly diminished in her . Instead of “I am” she felt, “Do I deserve to be here?”
Instead of “I am blissful” she felt, “I can’ t feel.”
Instead of “I will” she felt, “I can’ t.”
Instead of “I know” she felt, “I doubt.”
Instead of “I act” she felt, “I don’ t know what to do.”
Where did her Shakti go? The roots of powerlessness run deep. Some
people feel that they were stripped of power by their parents, by destiny , by
God. In actual fact we all disem power ourselves. It is impossible to exist
without desires,  which Shakti uses to guide us from one fulfillment to
another . If desire is denied, however , Shakti is rendered useless. It takes an
active ef fort to make desire seem to go away . Passion doesn’ t fade. It must be suppr essed. Boredom is just the passive face of this effort to keep desire out of sight,
the indifferent mask put on to hide a huge internal struggle. The belief that
you won’ t ever get what you want implies enormous hatred and judgment
against yourself. Keeping these feelings in control takes work, for even if
you sincerely believe that you do not deserve to have desires, the vitality of
life isn’ t going to be completely halted. People who have cut themselves off from passion have switched their
allegiance to something else almost as strong. Because the flow of life
won’ t be stopped, a counterfo rce must be called in to oppose it—the
counterforce of fear. Fear of life is extremely common whenever someone
complains of ennui. Fear at any level of the psyche makes it much more difficult to trust that
passion is safe. If my wife criticizes me, a warning voice that I hardly
notice will sap my desire for her. If my husband dislikes the way I keep
house, I will feel inhibition about fully expressing my sexual needs. Thus
existential issues are activated by everyday obstacles. In relati onships where two people have allowed the under ground war
between fear and desire to go on too long, suppressing passion becomes anactual life goal. In fear’s warpe d value system, getting “too close” seems
like a problem instead of the solution. As nature created us it is normal to
seek pleasure; a fearful person avoids pain instead. “Whether you can admit it to yourself or not,” I told Amy , “being bored
is your goal in life. Boredom isn’t happening to you; you are using it in the
pursuit of safety and security . Why don’t you tell Fred off or throw a vase at
him or break down and cry?” Amy looked stunned. “I just wouldn’ t,” she muttered, her face strained by unwept tears. I said more gently, “Bringing light to this dark dilemma is going to make
things better . Right now your stance toward the river of life is to stand on
the banks and try not to fall in. But can you survive without falling in? “The spiritual answer to boredom is to open yourself to the very thing
you have feared —the constant flow of desire that wants to express itself at
every moment.”
We are enticed back into passion when we admit to having desir es. The reason that falling in love is so passionate is simple: desire is no
longer a choice. Romance bursts the dam of inhibition. Its erotic power
proves too much for fear and repression to hold back. At the deepest level
people never fall in love accidentally . They simply grow tired of living
without passion, and having made this unconscious decision they open up
once more and allow themselves to receive love. Without waiting  to fall in love, you can rekindle passion by imitating this
process. When the passion is gone from a relationship, both partners must
be honest in stating that they have desires. This of course can be difficult,
for if either partner is operating  under the belief “I’m bored with you,” it
will be doubly difficult to say, “I desire you.” The critical step is to
eliminate your partner entirely  as the cause of the problem and take
responsibility for your own feelings. The essential issue is not “I am bored with you” but “I am bored.” By
taking blame out of the equation, you also remove threat. This is extremely
important, becau se you cannot help but fear anyone whom you are mentally
attacking. “Your whole effort needs to be directed toward finding out what you
really want and then feeling you deserve to fulfill those desires,” I toldAmy . “The gap between yourself and your desires is like a buffer that
deadens feeling. Feeling your way out of boredom is the only solution. “If you are hone st in your search  for your own feelings, you will hit upon
love, even if it is only the tiniest spark of attraction and desire. Some hint of
desire must be present no matte r how numbed a person may be. Instead of
deciding that these faint impulse s are too insignificant to act upon, take the
opposite tack. Put your newfound feelings at the feet of your beloved—
express kindnes s in the smallest  of ways, praise even the humblest quality ,
smile outwardly when an inner smile flickers. In this way you encourage a
fragile new emotion to believe  that it is legitimate, that it has a right to
exist.”
For the first time in our talk, Amy looked encouraged. “Fred doesn’ t
really know that I still love him,” she said, sounding very vulnerable. “And asking him to read your mind isn’t going to work,” I said. “The
web of tenderness that once connected you has been torn, but it can be
rewoven, I promise.”
From this starting point—“I love you”—the channels of passion
gradually open up. The relationship that seems to frustrate and kill desire
turns into the healer of desire. “I have a specia l name for the kind of healing I’m asking you to try,” I
said. “It’s called ‘wooing the goddess.’ What you ultimately want isn’t Fred
or a better sex life. You want the return of spirit within you, which is the
return of God. The passionate side of God is Shakti, the goddess. Passion
was the wedding  gift she brough t when she married Shiva. It is also the gift
women bring to men today , for the female principle is desirable by nature. It
excites consciousness with arousal and yearning. It melts opposites into
union and makes chaos into a dance. It was your birthright  to be that
passion.”
“You make it sound like I could  be,” Amy said, actually laughing for the
first time. “If you don’t feel at one with the goddess,” I said, “woo her back. Win
her before you try to win anyo ne else. Go into the fear and hurt; practice
letting go of your old beliefs; learn to forgive yourself; find moments when
you can be kind to your inner being; claim what is good about yourself and
not just what is bad; follow every enthusiasm wherever it leads you, since
the source of enthusiasm is always passion.“Spirit is waiting for you to rejoin her. She stands outside the boundaries
you have impos ed on yourself. There is no passion too great for her to
contain; you will never be lost reaching for the infinite. She is the tenderest
of infini ties, whose only desire is to protect you and carry you in her arms
from fear to love.”
OceanofPDF .com7
ECSTASY
WHA T WE HAVE discussed so far is how to ground a relationship in love
through surrend er, nonattachment, and the renewal of passion. When two
people have found such a basis  of lasting love, they are ready for the next
stage on the path, which we can call ascension. Ascension is based on
love’ s ability to expand beyond the world of limitations to the world of
boundlessness. Before ascension “I” refers to a single individua l isolated in
time and space. After ascension  “I” refers to a self that observ es time and
space without feeling trapped by them—you have slipped through a sliver
of time to find the timeless. Before ascension “you” meant someone who
could be loved but never merged with. After ascension “you” means a part
of oneself who is as close as breath. Before ascension “we” meant a couple
who met in mutual need. After ascension “we” has no meaning, since union
is complete. Ascending is a process, like falling in love or being in relation ship. You
are not carried away into the “other world.” This world becomes
transformed into a heaven of fulfillment, ever at peace, ever in love. The
process of ascension doesn’ t call upon anything new from inside you other
than letting go and letting go until there is nothing more to let go of;
ascension is the final stage in relinquishing attachment to separation. Someone who is ascended has achieved Christ’ s injunction to be in this
world but not of it. As you ascend, your love will turn to ecstasy . To feel ecstasy is the privilege of all who have walked the path to this
point, where ascension begins. If you have not yet come this far, ecstasy isnot within your normal range of feeling. You may know joy, delight,
exuberance, satisfaction, and happiness, but these are shadows of the
ecstatic state. It exists as an ideal that is more or less unreacha ble through
any emotion the ego can grasp. The fact that ecstasy takes us beyond ego is implied in the roots of the
word itself—in Greek ekstasis  means “to stand or place outside.” One can
read this in two ways. Either ecstasy requires you to move outside yourself
or it is standing all around, waiting to be noticed. There is more than a
subtle difference here. Do you have to go someplace to find ecstasy , taking
an extra ordinary journey into unknown realms? This is what mystics and
poets seem to do, fetching back their ecstatic experiences like precious
cargo from an exotic land. Or is ecstasy so close that we miss it because no
one has shown us how to touch it? Ecstasy is the final stage of intimacy with yourself. Before ascension intimacy is achieved by reaching out to someone else. Reaching out implies a gap, and what we have learned so far is that this
gap, which appe ars to be betwe en “me” and “you,” is actually  inside each
of us. Therefore  what lovers really heal when they love intim ately is the
relationship with themselves. Throughout time you have been seeking to
love yourself, heal yourself, forgive yourself, and find God in yourself. All
outer relationsh ips, which come and go in time, serve this eternal
relationship. Eventually your seeking is done. A moment comes when you
experience a mer ging, as Emily Dickinson so exquisitely describes it:
The Drop that wrestles in the Sea—
Forgets her own locality—
As I—towards Thee. This is the crystalline instant in which pure love fuses into pure religious
devotion, for ecstasy overpower s all separation; ego gives way to pure flow
of being. To be in ecstasy  permanently is known in Sanskrit as Moksha , which is
usually translat ed as “liberation.” It could just as correctly be called
ascension, for arrival at the end of love’ s journey identifies you with the
pure observer , witness, and seer that has been with you every step of theway, just above and beyond the world of ego and its needs. Moksha ends
karmic bondage; it abolishes individual memory , desire, and identity in the
cosmic ocean. Yet in some myst erious way liberation is not an extinction or
annihilation but a new birth, a birth into fullness. When moksha comes, the
individual has three distinct realizations:
I am That,
Thou art That,
All this is That. These simple statements, first enunciated thousands of years ago in the
Upanishads of India, are the most intimate revelations that spirit can impart
to humans. The word Upanishad  derives from a Sanskrit phrase meaning
“to sit close by,” referring to how near one must draw to God in order to
understand these teachings. “I am That” is the first revelation. It abolishes all separation between the
soul and God. This is the mome nt when the drop dissolves into the ocean,
when a person looks at all the good and bad things in his existence, the
struggle betwee n light and dark, the contrast of virtue and sin, and sees
them all as equa l. Everything that mattered to the mind is reduced to a play
of the Being within itself. “I am That” means “I am Being and nothing
else.”
“Thou art That” is the second revelation. It denotes the sacred nature of
the beloved, for “Thou” is both God and lover . In this revelation a bridge is
built between two souls; there is no possibility of separation because the
perception of “I” melts into the perception of “Thou.” Two truly breathe as
one; the celestia l vision of the Creator becomes personal. One can gaze like
a loving parent on every person. “All this is That” is the third revelation. It is an expansion of the first two
revelations to encompass every  particle in the universe. This expansion
delivers total unity as the individual ego finds that it is actually cosmic ego. “I” is no longer an isolated speck, a viewpoint bounded by time and space. Instead of feeling that I inhabit a body , I sense myself as infinite
consciousness expanding with infinite speed through infinite dimensions. These three strokes of moksha require extreme purity and refinement of
awareness to be sustained. The greatest masters and saints throughout
history have been capable of this liberation; it is the quest each of usundertakes when we step onto the path to love. Without ecstasy the
experience of liberation might seem impossibly distant, given its incredible
magnitude. At the end of the Bhagavad-Gita , Lord Krishna, who has been
posing as a chariot driver to the warrior Arjuna, agrees to show  himself as
he really  is. He opens his mouth , in which appear all worlds and creatures,
infinite universe s expanding so rapidly that the mortal Arjuna reels on the
verge of extinction. Yet all that moksha represents is a shift in awareness, a final perception
of who we are. Therefore the insights of ecstasy have much more to do with
the final expansion of conscio usness than with any feeling or emotion,
however remarkable. Ecstasy carries you completely outside your ego boundaries. In ecstasy you know yourself as cosmic ego, unbounded in time and space. The end of love’ s journey r eturns to the sour ce of all awar eness, power , and being. Moksha is not an ending but a beginning—we begin to live in fullness only after liberation. A liberated soul is a citizen of the universe. There is really no adequate equivalent for moksha in Western culture;
redemption  may be the closest synonym. Moksha unites self and soul in the
mystic marriage that in Christian terms is union with the Redeemer . Angels
are said to be in this state, whic h gives rise to their ecstatic praise of God. The dif ficulty with redemption, however , is that it is generally a future state,
realized after death; therefore it is much more mystical than moksha, which
can be achieved here and now . DREW’S STORY
Having said that liberation is like a new birth, I’d like to relate the story of
someone who went through that birth, my mystical friend Drew . Mystical  is
a term that has been attached to Drew since the day we met. It was at a
meditation course years ago, and Drew attracted considerable attention. He
wore a white Indian dhoti, sandals, and more chains of beads than I had
ever seen on a yogi in the Himalayas. When everyone gather ed in chairs
before the outdo or stage for presentations, he sat in lotus posit ion under agrove of trees on a nearby hill. I’d never met anyone who had a foot more
firmly planted in the “other world,” and his talk was an outpouring of mind-
boggling experiences of astral planes and angelic visitations. When I last
heard of Drew , he was in Nepal, having taken vows in a monastic order
deep in the mountains. In some ways I felt jealous of the life he had chosen. Then one day he called me and asked if we could meet. He appeared at
my door sans beads, sandals, and dhoti, dressed in a sports shirt and chinos. We talked, and I quickly found out that, unlike ten years ago, Drew now
never visits psychics or readers of any kind and in fact feels total
indifference toward paranormal phenomena. “I haven’ t sold out on all that,”
Drew said. “Something deeper took its place.” He proceeded to tell me
about a breakthrough experience he had had, one so powerful that it had
changed his life. “You don’t know me very well, but I’ve always been ambitious, fiercely
so, some people would say . I fought to get into the best prep school, the best
college, the best fraternity . I don’t remember how I hooked up with the idea
of mysticism and enlightenment —maybe an old girlfriend or a trip on LSD
—but once bitten I wasn’ t going to give up until I turned into something
magical—sorcerer , warrior , seer , psychic, and prophet if I got that far . “It was all rampant ego, as I look back on it now, but at the time my
experiences were pretty fantastic—I had the lights, the bliss, the angelic
voices, and while it was all happening it never occurred to me that what I
was experiencing was actually one and only one thing: my expectations. Mysticism was high drama, with me at the center lapping it all up. We’re
talking about ten years of extraordinary visions. Then one day I was
in/Vermont, walking up a perfectly green hill, when it all collapsed. “It was like being sucked down a drain. My head started spinning, and I
had to sit down. I couldn’ t tell if I was plummeting down a hole or if the
earth was sinkin g out from under me. It was a terrifying sensat ion. I had a
sudden horror of turning around, for I expected to see the sky opening into a
funnel that would suck out the world. I closed my eyes and lay down,
praying that whatever this was would just end. “It took about an hour. I might have passed out during that time—I didn’ t
have a watch on—because even when I felt like I was coming back to
reality , my head buzzed. I got up, still extremely wobbly , and walked downthe hill to my cabin; the dizziness didn’ t fully go away for several days, and
I continued to feel disoriented. What do you make of that?”
I had been listening to Drew without comment. “Well,” I said, “if a
patient came to me with that kind of experience, I guess I’d suspend
judgment until we took a brain scan and ran a psychiatric profile.”
“Bingo—either I was dying of a brain tumor or I had suffered a psychotic
break. That’ s exactly what I told myself. I ran to the village library and
madly scanned some old medical books. The thing was, I didn’ t have
double vision or any return of severe dizziness. I didn’ t have disordered or
racing thoughts. The clinical explanations for this episode didn’ t seem to
apply . Gradually my symptoms vanished, but not without a trace. “I was different. It was as if someone had pulled the plug and drained out
my—what? Battery fluid. I didn’ t have any charge left; no ambition,
curiosity , purpose, drive. I was pointless to myself, and my mystical
experiences had disappeared completely . If I shut my eyes to meditate, there
wasn’ t any light; I didn’ t expand outside my body or see angel s. For a few
days afterward I felt extreme anxiety , as though demons were going to get
me, but that didn’t happen either . So if it wasn’ t tumors, madness, or divine
punishment, what was it? I waited for an answer .”
“Did you get one?” I asked. “Yes, but not the way I expect ed. The answer was a process, which I
began to call ‘ego surgery.’ That dramatic moment on the mountain was
like having my chest opened up by an invisible surgeon, and once opened I
couldn’ t close myself up again. It hadn’ t occurred to me, in my headlong
pursuit of the never -ending high, for that’s what spiritual life had meant to
me, that spirit is carved out of the very things a person doesn’ t want to face. Like most people, I wanted not to be sad, anxious, powerless, unlovable,
and hostile. I wanted ‘It,’ the big spiritual payof f. But what I now got was
every speck of sadness, anger , anxiety , and so on that I thought I had gone
beyond.”
“It must have been a dif ficult time,” I said. “To put it mildly . Whoever this surgeon was, he dug deep, probing for
every hidden secret, every dark deposit of guilt and shame. There were
mornings when I felt that nothing could be worse than simply living with
myself. But I got used to what was happening, once I realized that thesurgeon was me, working on myself. At some deep level I had given myself
permission to go through the dark night of the soul. “Ironically , I’d always thought  that getting to God meant climbing a
mountain, gettin g so close to Him that He would say, ‘Ah, you’ve made it, I
see.’ With a smile of approval He would then grab my hand and pull me
into heaven. There’ s only one problem with that scenario. What  happens to
the parts  that get left behind? I certainly didn’ t expect God to say, ‘Bring
along your shame and guilt.’ To me, being spiritual meant jettisoning the
‘bad’ me and boosting the ‘good’ me to heaven.”
“But that would  imply ,” I said, “that God judges against the ‘bad’ you
and only loves the ‘good’ you. Such a God couldn’ t be a God of love. He
would be a God of ego, since that’s exactly what our egos do all the time—
judge against the bad and accept only the good.”
“Exactly ,” said Drew . “I suppos e that’s why ego surgery was so difficult
to face. Once these awful things—the ghosts in the basement, I call them—
were exposed I actually had to take them back. You can’t imagine how
disgusting that seemed at first. I mean, all our dirty secrets look hideous in
our own eyes, no matter how common they might appear to others.”
“I don’t think it’s the horribleness of the unconscious that is the main
block,” I suggested. “It’s more  our fears about forgiveness. What you’re
talking about is forgiving yourself so that you can take back your dark
energies and turn them into love. What if that fails? What if you’re stuck
being as ugly, dirty, sinful, and undeserving as your worst judgments say
you are? That prospect is so terrifying that even tiny sins and blemishes get
expanded into monstrosities.”
Drew nodded and sat still for a moment. “There were times when I didn’ t
think I was going to make it. A voice inside kept crying, ‘You’re going to
die. You can’t take any more.’ But I knew I wasn’ t going to die. My
spiritual life had taught me at least that much. I went back to my old job as
a stockb roker , and so far as I knew nobody had any idea of what I was
going through.”
He noticed my amusement at the kind of job he had chosen. “You like
literature, I recall. Didn’ t Hawthorne write somewhere that a man may go
around to all the world looking like any other man while entertaining the
most extraordinary ideas in his head?”“In his journals, I think. But that could apply to psychotics as well as
visionaries,” I said. “True, but my point is that something that appears normal can be very
wild inside. Which had not dawned on me when I was running around
trying to become a visionary . I walk down Milk Street with my briefcase,
and I ask: Is a tree a tree, a skyscraper a skyscraper? What makes these
things ‘normal’ is that they look like separate, solid objects, but they’re not. They’re bundles  of energy carved out of the infinite energy soup of the
universe, and so are you and I. Therefore at some level you and I are not
simply connected with that tree and that skyscraper . We are that tree and
skyscraper . And that is what a mystic knows, nothing else.”
“You have closed the gap,” I said, feeling both moved and impressed. “Something like that. Have you ever sat by a river, all alone, and tried to
feel it? Of cours e you can’t. You may say that you’re feeling the river—its
flow, its still depths, its constant change that runs unopposed from here to
there—but all you actually feel is yourself. If you can get close enough to it
(and such feelings are very tough to get close to), the sweetness of sitting by
a river actually comes from a tiny point in your heart. That point of
sweetness is perfectly still; it doesn’ t reach out for you, but it doesn’ t ever
abandon you either . What’ s in that sweet point?”
“Everything,” I said. “Yes, everything.”
We both sat without speaking,  relishing this moment of communion. Then Drew said, “The ego surgery ended. At a certain point the process spit
me out. I can’t say I did anything, really , but in some way I had been
through the crucible, and now, past the flames, what was I? I was real. It’s
astonishing to realize what a difference it makes to find out that you are not
false, since to the rational mind of course  I am real. It’s a given. But to
really be real, that’ s the joy . That’ s the revelation. That’ s the ecstasy .”
Impossible as it is to convey ecstasy through the poor power of words,
we can sense what it is, because all of us live from that sweet point in our
hearts. Whatever seems to be happening on the outside, every person wants
to hold on to that spot forever . It is touched in love, sometimes in sex, often
in mom ents of supreme creativity . When we succeed in getting there
permanently , the transformation goes beyond self to change the world.Ecstasy makes this world into God’ s world. The certainty of one’s divine status is probably the most important gift
ecstasy brings, as evoked by Whitman in his poem “Song of Myself”:
I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers . . . and the women my sisters and lovers. These words came from a direct, undeniable fusion of self and love. The
melting sensation that ushers in ecstasy isn’t meant to be temporary; when
you remain open to spirit you become spirit, and then universal love is your
natural state. It’s true of all lovers that at moments of intense joy some sort
of boundary melts, and the happiness of loving another perso n is exalted
beyond itself. One crosses over into a place where the traces of personality
diminish until they become so faint that the ego merges into love’ s flow like
that drop returning to the ocean. Despite the fact that only a smal l percentage of people may have  fallen in
love on any given day, lovers have not taken extraordinary journeys, not
compared with those mystical travelers often called ecstatics. The intense
joy of romance  is a reachable experience, a step on the same path that
mystics travel much farther along. Now it is time for us to see what the final
destination actually is. VARIETIES OF  ECSTASY
Rather than use a vague term like mystical , we will explore the different
experiences that have been labeled ecstatic throughout history . Ecstasy can
first be consider ed as a physical  experience. This is the level our culture has
fixated upon, to the extent that a drug has been given the name Ecstasy with
the promise, presumably , that it will deliver the experience. In the very
crudest sense pushing sensual pleasure to its limits is supposed to bring one
to the point of ecstasy . Books on erotic technique pass themselves off as
handbooks to the ecstatic. But in all these cases the real nature of ecstasy has been missed, because
no lasting transformation has taken place. A drug may alter the brain’ s
biochemical status, mimicking the spontaneous sensations that appear inecstatic states, but the experience is devoid of meaning. Altered brain waves
do not equate with the poetic insight of this exalted passage from the Song
of Solomon:
My heart was split, and a flower
appeared; and grace sprang up;
and it bore fruit for my God. These lines are supremely sensual, the images are undeniably sexual. Yet
the poet is not mistaking his ecstasy for mere pleasure, however deep and
intoxicating that may be. He declares,
And my drunkenness was insight,
intimacy with your spirit. Without this insight ecstasy might justifiably be equated with sensory
intensity such as drugs can deliv er. Here my intent certainly isn’t to strip the
pleasure away . Lovers who can freely surrender in sexual intim acy are able
to go far beyond the experience of partners who feel inhibited with each
other . Pleasure is by no means a given in a society that has not yet really
confronted the guilt and shame that cloud sexual desire. Yet the boundaries
that melt in the experience of ecstasy are of a different kind. As the most
famous lines from the Song of Solomon declare,
And you have made all things new;
you have showed me all things shining. You have granted me perfect ease;
I have become like Paradise. For all things to become new and shining requires much more than
sensuality . If anything, intense sexual contact leads to release and
exhaustion; the “little death” of orgasm is a form of oblivion, not a raising
of consciousness. We can’t afford to be absolute here. Sexual energy is
neutral; we mold it according to our own intentions.
The_Path_to_Love_by_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        The aggressiveness of a warrior doesn’ t
correspond to Shiva, who has no need to intrude, conquer, overcome,
acquire, or compete. Although he is called “destroyer of worlds” in the
Bhagavad-Gita, what is meant is that Shiva absorbs the universe back into
himself at the end of creation. This isn’t a violent act, any more than it is
violent for your brain to reabsorb the neurochemicals that form ed your last
thought; in both cases the found ation for a new creation, a new thought, has
been laid. Shiva is at least a familiar name in the West, known to be one of the three
primal gods of India, along with Brahma and Vishnu. Each was conceived
as a particular form of the divine: Brahma is the creator of the universe,
Vishnu the maintainer, and Shiva the destroyer. It would be a mistake,
though, as I just explained, to think of Shiva as some kind of apocalyptic
avenger, or even as a being outside ourselves. God is within, and the three-part division of the divine is only an image
or metaphor for something that cannot be divided. By analogy consider how
an image, such as the face of someone you love, arises in your mind. Theimage is created, maintains itself for an instant, then disappears. We could
therefore divide  the mind into creator, maintainer, and destroyer, but the
actual experience of thinking is continuous and unbroken. So it is with spirit, which is always experienced as wholeness, but unlike
the mind, spirit cannot be assigned a place the way we conveniently assign
mind to the brain. God is neithe r here nor there, inside nor outside. Shiva is
best understood as omnipresence, a silent awareness that permeates
everything. Of the threefold gods only Shiva is equated with God because
God is all-pervading. In the setup of things Shiva was given Shakti to carry out the process of
physical creation. This is strikingly evocative of the way the code of life is
packaged in each cell of your body. It exists as DNA, which is silent,
inactive, and out of sight, but also as its biochemical twin, RNA, which
emer ged out of DNA to carry out all the cellular processes that actually
build the body at the basic level  of enzymes and proteins. Brain  physiology
is also both silen t and active—billions of memories lie stored in the cortex,
emer ging one at a time as expressed memory. If you expand this to a cosmic
scale, you have Shiva, whose creative potential remains infinitely greater
than any of its expressions, even when those expressions take the form of
galaxies and whole universes. Shiva brings pur e consciousness to a sacr ed marriage. It invisibly makes every action an action of
God. What would an action of God be exactly. A miraculous intervention, a
voice from the mountaintop. Millions of people have waited for such signs
and received none. Despite my attempts to bring Shiva out of the realm of
abstraction, it would be easy to see him as a ghost, a spirit ual concept
without flesh and bones. Flesh and bones are demanded by the five senses. When you pay attention to things “out there,” you judge their reality by
sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Yet in spiritual practice there is
something called  second attention, which attunes you to things your senses
cannot grasp. Second attention  makes you aware of spirit. It works through intuition,
and it is sometimes called the sight or the gift, although these imply a
supernatural faculty. In reality spirit is constantly sending signals to all ofus, but because our second attention was never developed, we don’t take
them in. Intuition is as real as any other faculty, once you have developed it. What kinds of signals is second attention looking for. Spirit is universal
and constant, like gravity, but has no physical constraints. Shiva reserves
for himself complete freedom to be what, when, where, and how he wishes. Second attention  can detect all five actions that, according to the classic
Shiva texts, are characteristic of God when He communicates with the
world:
God creates. God destroys. God protects and maintains what has been created. God covers or conceals His own nature. God reveals or uncovers His own nature. The Indian mind is not linear, and it finds no contradiction in making
Shiva the destroyer in one of his forms and the omnipresent creator -
maintainer in another. Shiva’ s five actions are the framework for any
spiritual experie nce you can have; they give it meaning and form. Since
meaning is completely personal, no two people have to agree on which
action has been manifested at any given moment—this is a private
communication between self and Self. My own convictions in this area go back almost thirty years. When I
entered medical  school I saw plenty of cadavers but rarely saw anyone die,
and I looked ahead to that experience with trepidation. One of my initiations into death occurred on the public wards of an
antiquated New Delhi hospita l. I was on rounds, doing the physical
workups assigned to second-year med students. It was very late at night,
and I had to wake my charge from a sound sleep—there was no other
choice, since the workup had to be done before surgery, which was
scheduled for 4:00 A. M. My patient was a bewildered villager from the
Punjab who endured my poking and prodding with unconcealed anxiety. “Almost finishe d,” I assured him. I stood up, taking the cold stethoscope
from his chest. Instead of pullin g his gown back down, the man stared over
my shoulder, openmouthed. I whipped around and saw a woman, her face
white as chalk, swaying in the doorway. I’m sure the Punjabi villager
thought she was a ghoul. The woman tried to speak, but no words emer ged,only a sound somewhere betwee n a croak and a gurgle. I barely ran over in
time to catch her as she collapsed. In moments like this a doctor ’s immediate reaction is to suspect a heart
attack. “Crash cart. ” I yelled to the night nurse, who had appeared on the
scene. She ran back to the phone and called the intensive cardiac unit. In the
two minutes it took them to arrive, I held the woman, whose  eyes were
closed. Then her breathing stopped. In half a minute I began emer gency
resuscitation with my hands, but that gave me enough time to clearly see
she was dying. Despite my controlled frenzy calling for assistance and stripping away
her gown to expose the chest, a calmness came over me—it was impossible
to tell if I was witnessing this calmness or it was witnessing me. There was
a faint but distinct feeling that something was passing in the air,
accompanied by a wave of peace. Before I could think about it, the whole
experience was swallowed up by frantic activity as the crash cart appeared. A first-year resident armed with a fibrillator took over, more or less shoving
me out of the way. As I stood up I saw two men hovering over my shoulder, the Punjabi
villager and another, older patie nt I hadn’ t seen before. “Please, go back to
bed. I’m sorry you had to be upset by this,” I said. The two men didn’ t
move, nor did they look at all upset. One mumbled to the other in dialect,
then the older patient said to me, “Don’ t worry, it was all right. ” My
Punjabi patient mumbled again,  and the other man translated for me: “She
was grateful to you. ”
“For trying to save her. ” I managed to say. “No, no. For holding her in your arms. It made her less afraid to leave. ”
With this the two men turned back into the darkened ward and went to bed. This incident remains unfor gettable to me as an example of the dictum
that behind every action is hidden an action of God. My perception of the
night’ s emer gency was primitive, but second attention, via my two patients,
told me what I needed to hear. Spirit wanted me to know that the
peacefulness of death is real. Now that time has passed, I realize that the message was much deeper:
God is present in death. To have  this realization, I had to mature in second
attention and thereby learn the basic truth about Shiva: hidden within every
action is an action of God. To know  God is a process that unfolds over time. It isn’t a sudden
experience that is finished once and for all. One can never be finished with
God; moments of recognition only serve to draw you closer. Hidden in
every event of your life is a possible epiphany about love, as it
communicates to you from the source. As with Shakti there are some simple
verbal formulas to indicate what Shiva’ s actions are trying to impart:
Creation:  God’ s love is new. Destruction:  God’ s love is beyond death. Maintenance or pr otection:  God’ s love upholds. Concealment:  God’ s love is beyond form. Revelation:  God’ s love is in form. Spirit never stops sending signa ls of its intent to us in the relative world. If second attention is acute enou gh, you can be aware of spirit crossing your
path, descending upon you, uplifting you, or whispering truth many times a
day. These are all silent comm unications from Shiva, whos e nature is
silence. Compared with Shakti, Shiva is further removed from creation as
will or action, closer to pure creativity as a potential. But his five actions do
touch the world. Silence has a voice, which speaks in something like these
five ways. Cr eation. From my source in love I create situations that teach lessons. These are
always lessons about love. Nothing is created outside my spirit but only
from within it. Destruction. I destroy  the impurities that prevent you from perceiving love. There are
no obsta cles not created by myse lf, whatever appearances may say. Because
they originate inside me, obstacles are created out of love, and once you
find a deeper level of understanding, obstacles melt away. Pr otection. As long as any situation is needed for a spiritual purpose, I maintain and
protect it. Labeling a particular situation good or bad is not relevant to this
act—I protect life for its own sake, without judging it. Concealment. I conceal who I am if that is what is needed for growth. If you already
knew yourself totally as spirit, there would be no path and no growth. Therefore some  things remain hidden at certain times. In my role as
concealer I lay out the steps of the path. Revelation. I reveal myself as needed to open up new possibilities. Time and space
are constantly unfolding. If they simply unfolded more time and more
space, there would be endless repetition of the known. But time and space
are only curtains to the drama lying behind them. The drama is the
unfolding of spirit, which happens through revelation. If you listen to the voice speak ing these lines, it is remarkable  how the
“I” can be interpreted as God, spirit, love, or simply your own nature. You
are simultaneously in touch with all these levels, although your mind, made
insensitive by its conditioning, may not let you see this. Shiva isn’t hiding,
since there is no place for the One to hide. The gr eatest sign of God’ s love is that He wants to be known. Now we come to our deepest definition of passion: passion is the free
flow of awareness from the unmanifest to the manifest. Your existence here
on earth makes you the love child of Shiva’ s passion for Shakti, and hers for
him in return. Your life appears to be a tapestry of outward events ranging
from birth to death. But all this activity depends entirely upon the invisible
flow of awareness working on every level. Shiva and Shakti ar e eternally married because both ar e composed of awar eness. One is
awar eness r esting in silence; the other is awar eness flowing out into cr eation. This is what I mean by saying that you are passion itself, for you marry
silence and power, the two polarities between which awareness flows. Without the flow of awareness everything in and around you would collapse
into a heap of dead matter. When you aspire to enter a sacred marriage with
someone you love, you are expressing your own nature and nothing less. The miracle of love is that feeling a grain of love for another person can
suddenly reveal the divine. Such a tiny shift of perception is needed toregain infinity. When I stop heeding separation and follow love, my beloved
will be mirrored  in my being; I will feel exuberance, exaltati on, and joy
flowing from their silent wellspring. The manifestations of love will
multiply becaus e my lover will become sacred to me; that is why love is
called holy, because it expresses wholeness. OceanofPDF. comLOVING  PRACTICE
Heeding Spirit
IF SPIRIT IS sending  signals to you, how can you heed them. Second
attention has much in commo n with intuition and creativity. It is well
known that both are faculties of the human mind. From a spiritual
viewpoint you are always a creator. The tiniest situation in your life is not
made “out there” but “in here,” from the source of reality, which is
awareness. People who believe that the material world is causi ng things to
happen are simply unconscious creators—they haven’ t taken responsibility
for being authors of their own lives. Second attention gives you the ability to take authorship of your life,
putting you at the center of the daily process of making the reality you
perceive. Since all of us are conditioned to believe that nature operates
independently of what we think, wish, dream, and feel, reclaiming
authorship of our reality is a gradual process. Signals fr om spirit all serve the same purpose: to give you back your life as a cr eator. The attitude toward life of someone who functions as a creator  is based
on these  five cardinal beliefs, few of which you have been taught unless
you were extremely fortunate:
1. I am an empty vessel. Inspiration fills me every day, but I am not here
to hold on to anything that comes to me. 2. I am here to pass ener gy from one state to another. Hopefully I move it
from a lower to a higher state, since my purpose is to direct everything
toward spirit. 3. I do not have to control the flow of reality. I bend where spirit bids me. 4. The fullness of spirit, not my ego, provides. 5. If I live from the source of creation, only good can come to me. Everything from spirit comes from love. Getting to these beliefs and making them work for you is a goal that spirit
can help you with. Society in general is not attuned to such a life, which is
why all artists and true lovers have had to travel far outside the accepted
framework of social beliefs. Society supports struggle, competition, and
ego, which means that it supports separation. The worldview of separation
is extremely convincing—millions of people spend every day simply trying
to cope with survival. But living in separation isn’t love; by definition it
cannot bring you to unity. Spirit is your chief and only ally in your quest for unity. The tactics of non-love will never get you
to love. In the following exercise you will learn how to transmute the beliefs and
behaviors of separation into those of love, using the signals that spirit is
always sending. PART ONE
The voice of spirit is constantly competing with other voices inside you,
and the outcom e of your life depends on which voice you follow. Since
inner voices are constant, you can estimate what a person expec ts from life
by looking at his or her inner voices for a period no longer than forty-eight
hours. Read the follow ing statements and check those that have applied to you
over the past two days:
1. I was afraid something wasn’ t going to work out for me.
Shiva is not an aggressive god who destroys the universe, but rather absorbs the universe back into himself at the end of creation.
What is Shiva's role in the Bhagavad-Gita?
These actions are meant to impart spiritual growth and understanding, not to be taken as a literal guide for external actions.
What is the purpose of the five actions of Shiva?
The ego's voice is loud, demanding, and often negative, while the voice of spirit is silent, gentle, and loving.
What is the main difference between the voice of the ego and the voice of spirit?
The key is to let go of old beliefs, fears, and judgments, and to take responsibility for one's own feelings and desires.
What is the key to unlocking the voice of spirit and the experience of ecstasy?
The ultimate goal is to transcend the ego and become one with the universe, achieving a state of unity and wholeness.
What is the ultimate goal of spiritual growth and self-discovery?