I do not count, time, or control my breaths. No eort is being
made to cause certain thoughts to come or go. There is no particular
feeling I try to either induce or avoid. I do not pay atten tion to my
body in a special way or attempt to relax any part of it. If I start to
fall asleep, I do not resist the impulse. What am I doing, then? The best answer is that I am just not
doing; I am engaged in getting the normal activity of the mind to
turn into silence, but without coercing it to do so. I am getting past
the inner noise of thoughts and feelings in order to reveal what the
silent witness inside me is really like. This is how the mind naturally
opens to itself and heals. “Not doing” sounds like doing nothing at all, but there is a subtle
dierence. The thinking, feeling mind is in constant motio n. If it has
the thought “Slow down, be silent,” that is a movement, too, and
will not make the mind stop. No thought can make it stop. One
might try just sitting, waiting  for the mind to stop of its own accord. There are meditations of this sort in the vast tradition of Indian andZen practice, but most novices who try this method nd it extremely
exhausting and unproductive. A mind left to its own devices tends to
run here and there like a drunken monkey, as the Indian  scriptures
say. To watch one’s mind reel around for an hour can be intensely
disturbing. Moreover, there is no reason why the mind should reach
silence during the vigil. One can try gathering the mind to a point, which is called
concentration. This form of discipline is often compared to trying to
make a candle ame hold still in the wind. Concentration is not like
active thinking, but it still falls under the category of motion, since
the mind has to be brought back to its focus every time it wanders. Enormous strain is involved , and the results may be very small
compared to the eort required. The deeper you go into it, the more dicult “not doing” seems to
be. How can any form of mental activity ever make the mind be
still? The ancient rishis mastered this extremely exacting art after
they observed that the mind has various layers. In this observation,
they agreed wholeheartedly with Freud. However, they were not
interested in the meaning  of each layer (whether it stores away
childhood fears, repressed anger, or submerged sexual desires). They
simply observed that the mind’s deeper layers are not in as much
motion as the supercial ones. This insight made them realize that meditation must be a vertical
process—a dive into the mind’s depths—not a strugg le on the
surface. Somehow the meditator’s attention has to penetrate the
chaotic surface activity of the mind, pass through all the layers of
subtle thought , and at last arrive at silence. Instead of subduing a
drunken monkey, the appropriate metaphor is much more subtle:
Meditation is like creeping through a herd of sleeping  elephants
without waking them up. In order to dive through every layer of the mind, one needs a
vehicle that can carry one beyond the thinking process. In
primordial sound meditation the vehicle is called a mantra , a
specic mental sound deriv ed from Sanskrit but with no verbal
meaning. A mantra is chosen solely for its ability to gradually bring
a person’s attention to quieter and quieter levels of the mind.Since everyone’s mind has innumerable layers, the choice of a
mantra and the precise instructions for using it are extremely
delicate. If chosen, taught, and used correctly, a mantra is as nearly
eortless as mental activity can be. It begins like a normal thought
but fades to fainter and fainter degrees of sound without getting
lost, until it disappears entirely, leaving the mind in complete
silence. Many forms of meditation use some kind of sound or visual image
as their vehicle. That might make it seem that one technique is as
good as another. However, there are any number of important issues
to consider when evaluating a form of meditation—above all: Did
my mind actually nd the silence I was seeking? Was I
psychologically comfortable during and after the meditation? Did
my old self begin to change as the result of having meditated? Is
there more truth in my self? Every person has to decide these crucial issues for himself. Patrick, a friend of mine, began meditating more than a decade ago
in order to rescue himself from a disastrous personal and nancial
fall. “In the late Seventies I was just barely emerging  from the
rockiest period  in my life. For several years I had invested heavily in
the real estate market, accumulating rental properties quickly on a
very speculativ e basis. It was an exhilarating venture at rst, and I
found myself in a powerful nancial position, at least on paper, with
assets in the multimillions. “You never know the exact point when things start sliding beyond
repair. The ups and downs of the market seemed to be no worse
than before, but I couldn’t keep my grip somehow. My real estate
holdings began  to crumble, and no matter what I did, the collapse
accelerated. I had started drinking heavily, and my wife was very
distraught when I stopped relating to her and the children. It wasn’t
deliberate on my part; I had become swept up in a nancial
nightmare, and all I could think of was how to save myself.”
Spiraling deeper into his troubles, Patrick learned to meditate. He
learned almos t on a whim, but from the outset the impact was
dramatic. “The rst time I meditated came as a revelation , if for no
other reason than the comfort I felt in letting go of my huge internalstruggle. The moments of actually transcending—that is, reaching
the silent level of the mind— were very brief at rst. Several times I
asked, ‘Is this all there is?’ There was not much clear transcending
in my meditations, only the coming and going of periods of silence. However, I couldn’t deny that when I opened my eyes, I felt
changed.”
A single meditation can change people because it has allowed
them to release  part of the false self for good. Without our realizing
it, holding on to old feelings,  habits, and lifelong conditioning takes
eort. The isolated ego defends itself by remaining constantly on the
alert. Is this situation a threat? Is that person going to do what I
want? The constant need to protect oneself psychologica lly may be
too subtle to notice, but it occupies an enormous part of everyone’s
unconscious life. As we saw, meditation does not deal in meaning. The old
conditioning is released without talking about it, feeling it, or
having much conscious exper ience of letting it go. Instead , the mind
is shown how to cross over from activity to silence, and this process
accomplishes the desired result. The stresses lie in the gap between
the active and silent mind; touching this gap with one’s awareness is
enough to release them. Since it takes mental activity to keep the
false self going, ending the activity loosens the false self’s grip. It is
not that a person tries to detach himself from his fears; they detach
themselves from him. “Meditating made me feel that I was putting the pieces together
again, but I was not out of the woods yet,” Patrick recalls. “The
damage done to my personal life ran very deep. One day I came
home to nd that my wife had locked me out of the house. No one
answered the phone when I called, and I felt angry and hurt. Miserably I walked over to the park and sat down to meditate. It
didn’t seem to do any good. I felt restless and upset the whole time. “But when I opened my eyes, a remarkable thing happened. My
mind was suddenly very quiet. I tried to think a thought, and one
came, but it immediately settled back into the silence, like a drop
merging into a still pool. I began to notice that the light around me
looked brighte r than usual, and when I heard some childr en playingnearby, their voices struck me as being the most joyful sound I had
ever heard. “It is hard to recapture how free I felt just at that momen t. It was
like having all these dead layers fall o to expose some sensitive,
living part of myself. I walked around a little, and everything had
taken on the same vibrant quality. My intense feelings of aloneness
and shame were now completely gone. I was totally dierent from
the suering person who had sat down on a park bench half an hour
before.”
I believe Patrick had hit upon the breakthrough that meditation
causes: the self expands beyond the connes of the ego, at rst
gradually, but with greater  and greater intensity, until it is in
complete union with everything. “I and the world are one,” an
ancient Upanishad declares. The transformation of the small,
isolated self into something universal may come only in glimpses,
but this is the true self. It is only a matter of time before one lives its
truth permanently. At the height of his experience, which lasted for half an hour,
Patrick was approached by a panhandler. “Up to this point I was
completely lost in myself. I saw this derelict walking towards me—it
makes me ashamed to use that word. He did not look like a derelict
to me then; he was beyond that kind of value judgment. He was as
alive and vibrant as everything else. “When he was about three feet away, I looked right into his eyes. For some reason, they were changed. They looked shining and soft. I
asked him what he wanted,  and he hesitated, confused. Then he
said, ‘I don’t want nothing. I just hope you’re happy, man.’ It
sounded funny  coming out of him, and I could see his surprised
reaction to his own words. It was as if he had been draw n into my
experience. In an amazingly  joyous voice, I said, ‘Yes, I’m happy,
very, very happy.’ I mean, I wanted to embrace this dilapidated,
lthy guy. “He was walking away by now. I turned and started to go o in
the other direction, but when we were about twenty feet apart, I
looked over my shoulder. He was staring at me with disbelief. When
he caught my gaze he turned away for good. I wonder what he sawin my eyes at that moment? Probably disbelief, too, but I hope he
saw more. For a few seconds back there, I deeply loved him.”
Unconditional Love
This strange encounter between Patrick and the derelict brings us
to the issue of unconditional love, which has become a catch phrase
in popular psychology. The objection I have felt about unconditional
love is that it runs complet ely against the grain of normal love,
which is based upon relationship. The love that exists between
husband and wife is not the same as that between mother and child. The dierence is based upon the type of relationship the two people
have. Where there is no relationship, it is hard to see how love can
ow. In this case, though, Patrick had no relationship whatsoever with
the derelict. They were total strangers who had every reason to feel
suspicious and hostile toward each other. However idealistically one
may want to feel, a shambling, smelly man in raggedy clothes is an
object of love to practically nobody; usually he is an object of
revulsion whom we assiduously avoid in order not to be exposed to
feelings of fear and contempt. But it is at the point where all relationship ceases that the
opportunity for unconditional love actually arises. When you have
no relationship to another person, you are automatically thrown
back upon yourself. The feelings that come out have no basis in
what you need or want from others—they simply come out. If I get
bumped in the street and feel angry, the emotion arises
spontaneously. I may feel guilty about it the next mom ent, but in
that split second it was the only choice my self could make. My level
of awareness did not oer me a better response. In Patrick’s case, his
level of awareness had leaped far beyond its normal limits; this
expansion dictated the response that spontaneously poured from
him. I imagine  his meditation on the park bench was not the sole
cause of this sudden change ; in India they speak of the “Yoga of
desperation,” a breakthrough into higher consciousness resultingfrom a predica ment so terrible that the psyche can nd no other
way out. Whatever the precise mechanism, Patrick found himself in a state
transcending normal perception. Like a yer breaking through a
dense cloud layer to nd blue sky and brilliant sun above, he
discovered that to look at anything was to see it in the light of love. He could not help himself, just as I could not help my anger on
being bumped in the street. The rishis speak of unconditi onal love, in fact, as a transcendental
quality that becomes infused into the mind during meditation. When
the mind goes beyond normal waking awareness, the transcending
process brings  one in contact with unconditional love in its silent,
unmanifest state. “Unmanifest” means that this love is not directed
at anything; it simply vibrates within the nature of the silent
witness, like a radio signal silently waiting for a radio to pick it up. At the end of meditation, the person returns to the waking state
bringing some of this transcendental quality into his everyday
consciousness. A new vibration has been added that alters, however
subtly, the person’s former awareness. This explanation is a twist on the usual understanding of
unconditional love. By denition, you can love someone
unconditionally only if your love does not alter no matter what the
other person does. This aspect of “no matter what” implies a
superhuman eort of will. One cannot help but imagine a plaster
saint who returns rudeness, anger, jealousy, inconsideration, and
every other sort of unloving behavior with sweetness and light. For
all its apparent goodness, this situation smacks of self-denial and
even masochism. The rishis’ version of unconditional love contains no eort at all. A person who feels love “no matter what” is simply following his
nature. In truth, this is all that can be asked of anyone. Acting
according to your own level of awareness is inescapable. In order to
smile at the stranger who bumps into me on the street, I need to feel
like smiling; otherwise, my behavior will be calculated. As we saw
before, calculation is the primary strategy of the false self. It has to
calculate when to smile because it is too afraid to show theemotions actually being felt. Tact and diplomacy, which most of us
applaud as “nice behavior,” can also be seen as the subtle skill of
lying. All of us are radiating our awareness out into the world and
bringing its reection back to us. If your awarenes s contains
violence and dread, you will meet those qualities “out there.” On
the other hand, if your awareness contains unconditional love, the
world, even the eyes of a derelict, will mirror that love. The curative
value of this kind of awareness is enormous, as I would like to
illustrate with a moving story told by R. D. Laing. At the age of fourteen, a Scottish boy named Phillip came home
from school one day and found his mother on her bed in a pool of
blood. A long-term tuberculo sis patient, she had died from a sudden
hemorrhage in her lungs. Instead of consoling the boy and helping
him to overco me his shock and grief, Phillip’s father berated him,
telling him again and again that he had killed his mother by putting
her through the exhaustion of pregnancy, birth, and raising him. This went on for two months . Then Phillip came home from school
to nd that his father had committed suicide. Six months later, Laing came  across the boy in a Glasgow mental
ward, in a bizarre state of psychological and physical deterioration. As Laing vividly recalls, “He smelled awful. He was incontinent of
urine and feces, given to staggering and walking peculiarly. He
gesticulated in strange ways without speaking, seem ed almost
completely self-absorbed, and could not care less about his
surroundings and the people in them.”
Although he was in the midst of doctors and nurses whose job
was to care for him, Phillip had pushed the limits of compassion. He
was too strange and disgust ing for anyone to be around for more
than a few minutes, much less to help. He had developed a stutter,
along with a peculiar collect ion of tics: blinks, darts of the eye, and
twitches in his cheeks, tongue, hands, and ngers. Worst of all was
his total I-could-not-care-less attitude, which had alienated the other
patients and turned the whole sta against him. Two months in the hospital made little change in Phillip’s
condition. “There was no question of the diagnosis,” Laing recounts.“He was an acute (probably becoming chronic) catatonic
schizophrenic. When he had anything to say, it was clear that he
was hallucinated, very paranoid, and very deluded.” Laing felt
drawn to this shattered creature. Phillip had no remaining relatives
or family friends to take him in. That he would be put away for the
rest of his life was a foregone conclusion. Instead, Laing took Phillip home with him, to his wife and three
children under the age of four. He made this extraordinary decision
because, when talking to Phillip alone in his oce, outside the
setting of a psychiatric ward, he noticed that the boy became
calmer. Phillip started to talk intelligibly, and although his talk was
about “crazy” things—his feeling that the ward was a gigantic
sphere with himself as a pin in the center, his visitations by
interstellar beings, his hallu cination that a black man’s voice was
speaking gibberish to him in the night—he did not seem completely
gone. His tics and twitches also subsided in Laing’s oce. For an
hour at least he controlled his bodily functions, and most telling of
all, a shadow of gratitude passed over his rigid features when Laing
oered to help him. Laing had the insight that perhaps the doctors and nurses were
keeping  Phillip crazy simply by the way they felt about him. “Phillip
generated in everyone  who came near him mixed feelings of
revulsion, at the sight of him and the smell of him, and feeling sorry
for him, just because he was so repulsive, as well as at his evident
misery. The result was that hardly anyone could resist trying to
appear to him to be kind and loving, but eeing out of sight and
smell of him as quickly as possible—not because they could not
stand him, but for some other necessity.”
Phillip was being kept crazy because the attempt to love and care
for him was tinged with hypo crisy and he knew it. As soon as Laing
took the unheard-of step of bringing a catatonic schizophrenic into
his home, Phillip improved with astonishing speed. His incontinence
ended the mom ent he entered the house. Within a couple of weeks
he had stopped staggering, although he still shook. He began to talk
falteringly but coherently. Three months later he was well enoughto be moved into a foster home. The threat of a lifetime spent
locked up in a mental ward had been removed. Laing did not use psychothe rapy on Phillip while he was under
his roof. The boy was treated honestly, without emotional
hypocrisy, which meant that what was good or bad about him was
reacted to as such. Fifteen years later, he returned to the house to
report his progress. As Laing puts it with a shade of dry wit, “He
was married, had two children, had a steady job, and was taking
evening classes in psychology.”
It is hard to deny that Phillip’s sanity depended to a huge extent
on projections from the mind s of others. The supercial “love” and
“caring” in the mental ward kept him imprisoned in a false self
because these feelings were equally false. Behind them lurked the
real message: “love” was just a means to keep him under control—it
was a power ploy. Fortunately, in Laing the boy found someone who looked upon
him in the light of love. To me, that is the most touching part of the
story. Laing does not raise the issue of love. He puts his motives on
a simple human basis: “I felt very sorry for his plight and very much
wanted to help him, if possi ble.” Yet in Laing’s presence, a rapport
was established  that was an honest reection of one awareness with
another. The intensity of life, so clear, sane, and loving, radiated
from Laing and touched the boy. That seems to be the most natural
part of what happened between the two, and what should happen
between all of us. One true self speaks to another, using the
language of the heart, and in that bond a person is healed. Safe to Love
If the rishis are right, the end of the false self spells the end of
fear, and the desperate need for power that fearful people cannot
help. Power is a form of self-protection, and when fear is gone, there
is no need for protection. The true self is love, and being able to love
all the time is the most one could want. The clash between love and
power then has no meaning. As Tagore so decisively wrote, “Love is
not a mere impulse; it must contain truth, which is law.” I deeplybelieve that, because I have met people who suddenly found
themselves living under this law. “I was driving down the highway looking for the exit onto the
turnpike when  I noticed an unusual sensation in my chest. It began
as a warm or tingling feeling, which I recognized from meditating. Generally the feeling is pleasant but temporary. Now it began to
intensify, and instead of physical warmth, wave after wave of
emotion started to sweep over me.”
Chris’s eyes shone as he talked on: “It was love, but much purer
and more concentrated love than I had ever felt. I have read in
various scriptures about the heart opening like a ower—one never
thinks such things are going  to happen in real life, on a six-lane
road. But this was it: my heart was unfolding like a ower, almost
drowning me in the exquisit e sensation of love. Strangely, I could
still keep my attention on the road, but I decided to pull o. I
walked into a hamburger stand and just stood there lookin g down at
the salad bar, having the most wonderful experience of my life.”
I still see my friend Chris every once in a while. He has worked as
a bank manager and a community organizer; he is a hardheaded
sort, not the man you would pick to have his heart unfold like a
ower. But that is wrong of me. His voice sounds kind in an
unforced way, and he has a very accepting manner with people; it is
easy to believe that he has experienced his heart very deeply. Seventeen years ago, when Chris began meditating, he had a
conventional, though deep-felt regard for relationships. “I was just
testing the water as a comm unity organizer then, trying to bring
together people who would normally take no notice of each other. All around me I saw so much hatred that had no real basis—people
simply had never crossed color barriers or social lines to meet each
other. “I helped organize a large food cooperative in a poor
neighborhood; anyone could join, regardless of class or income. We
would purchase food and sell it at cost, but each member had to put
in some time, usually about an hour a week, to go to the wholesale
market at Faneuil Hall or sweep the oor at the co-op or something. The idea was that if people helped out, they could not avoid seeingthe results of their actions. The store wouldn’t open if they didn’t
buy the food. It would open late if they didn’t sweep the oor. Prices would go up if the cash register was shortchanged. “I had never been more hopeful than the day the co-op  opened,
but a month later I was pract ically in despair. People didn’t seem to
care—they shirked their work, they didn’t sweep the oor, they
stole money from the cash register, and they found it very easy to
live with the consequences of their actions. This experience
convinced me that institutions cannot bring about a fundamental
change in human nature. And yet it seemed unbearable not to do
something.”
As he became more disillusi oned with the social crusade, Chris’s
commitment to meditating deepened. “I desperately wanted to
foster cooperation and love among other people, but it was never
possible to make intimate enough contact with them, not in the long
run. There were always  barriers and personal hangups;
disappointment was inevitable, whatever my ideals said. “Seeing no way out of this painful dilemma, I let it continue. I
decided to work on myself, since after all I was a crucial part of
every relationship I wanted to improve. Gradually a profound
change came about. I felt less anxiety about situations and warmer
feelings towards people who had been stereotyped in my eyes as
‘bad’ or ‘uncaring.’ As a result, people began to emerge from their
stereotypes. For a long time I found it hard to believe that I was the
focus of this change. But how could I account for the love that
people directed at me, whether I knew them or not?”
At this point Chris was far along into the change of awareness
produced by unconditional love. In conventional psychology, a
person is told that altering his own attitudes is the best way to
improve the behavior of others. Chris now found that he could walk
into a bank and soon everyone in it would be smiling. When he
presided over community meetings, where the clash of opinions was
usually very tense, the atmosphere seemed to be softer, as if
troubled waters were mysteriously stilled. “I could  not come to terms with this inexplicable pheno menon,”
Chris recalls, “until I radica lly changed my sense of myself. Myworld view had always been centered on individual ego and eort. The eect you might have on the world depended on doing
something, or at least thinkin g. I wasn’t doing anything, other than
existing. So I had to conclude that what I am was having this eect.”
I asked him to t in his experience on the highway, when he felt
waves of love engulng him. “That experience, I think, brought a
certain part of the whole process to a climax. After believing for so
long that I could not expect or receive love without relating to
another person, suddenly it was all happening inside me. I was
shocked at rst, because it meant that in some way the failings of
other people, their selshnes s and hatred, was somehow centered in
me as well. And yet these experiences were undeniable: as I
changed, everything around me changed. “In time, I quit wrestling with this thing intellectually. I became
used to it. No longer did I nd myself depending on other people for
my basic sense of loving or being loved. By connecting with myself I
started connecting with others better than I ever had before. “When it came, the exper ience of my unfolding heart was
overwhelming, but only for about forty-ve minutes. The most
fortunate thing is that the breakthrough lasted. It has been two
years now, and I am still that loving person inside. I don’t  mean that
I always exude  kindness no matter what other people do to me. I
can get angry and criticize others when I think they’re wrong, but
there is no destructiveness in it.”
I was thinking of how hard we try to protect ourselves from being
hurt emotionally, not realizing the intensity of life we have walled
out in the process. It is necessary to defend the heart when it is too
weak and frightened to love, yet at some point all that changed for
Chris. It became possible for him to let love ow when and where it
wanted. He was able to welcome others, without defenses, without
fear, into the expanded space of his own being. Somethi ng he said
particularly sticks with me: “I used to try so hard to love, and now
it’s the one thing I can’t prevent, no matter how hard I try.” He
smiled, and I felt the tender aection of someone who has not torn
down the walls of pain but own over them.OceanofPDF.comPart Three
Unconditional 
Life
OceanofPDF.com9
“Why Aren’t I Real  
Anymore?”
The day after I rst met Karin, I was driving home when I felt a
sudden urge to hear her voice again. I found the tape of our
interview and slipped it into the machine. There it was, the soft,
melodious soprano of a woman who kept reminding me, hauntingly,
of a child. I don’t mean that she sounded childish. She spoke like an
adult, talking about serious adult problems, yet blended into that I
could hear a precocious eight-year-old who was very puzzled by the
grown-up world. “Why am I punished for telling a lie when Mommy lies about her
age? Why do I have to clean my plate when Daddy leaves his
Brussels sprou ts?” All children go through some stage like this. By
challenging the ready-made values handed down by adults, they
begin to formulate their own values, which is a necessary step
toward gaining  a real identi ty. Karin, however, continu es to issue
challenges right and left. I once went to a clinic where they treat obsessiv e-
compulsive disorder. I didn’t think I was obsess ive-
compulsive, but it had me worried. The rst thing the doctor
did was to hand me a test. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to ll
this out,” I said. “Why not?” he asked. “Well, the rst question wants to know if I read things
more than once. I didn’t read very much in school, and now Isometimes do reread books to make sure that I am getting
everything out of them. But if I say yes to your question, you
will interpret it as an obsessive-compulsive trait, like hand
washing.”
He still wanted me to take the test. “I’m not a test score,”  I
protested. “I’m a human being. I need to be dealt with for
what’s going on with me.”
He said, “That’s a sign right there of obsessiveness.”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” I said, “that because you run
a clinic for obsessive-comp ulsive disorder, you may be
obsessed with making a diagnosis of obsessiveness?”
“No,” he said, “that has never occurred to me.”
I laughed out loud listening to the tape, just as I had when Karin
rst told me about this run-in. Like many children, she has a sixth
sense for when she is being manipulated. Okay, so I went to another doctor, a well-known
psychologist. It took me a while to get hold of him, and when
I nally did, he said, “I think you didn’t want to meet me,
anyway.”
“What makes you think that?” I asked. “Because you got my answering machine three times.”
“Oh really?” I said, “but what about the fact that you got
my answering machine three times?”
Karin sounds rather feisty set down on the page. In person she is
actually much less that way. She talks excitably about herself and
likes to drama tize her story. Underneath the drama, however, one
senses that she is a gentle person—I nd it easy to believe her when
she says that she has never deliberately hurt anyone. She has soft,
pleasing featur es and lively eyes. Still unmarried at thirty-ve, she
successfully runs a small catering business with two women friends
in suburban Boston. By her own count, Karin has been to ten dierent doctors in the
past two years , none of whom has helped her. To begin  with, herbasic complaint is extremely dicult to pin down. She says that she
doesn’t feel real anymore. In everyday situations such as talking on
the phone, walking down the street, or eating in a restaurant, she
has persistent doubts about her existence: “Someone will call my
name, and I’ll go through one of my experiences: ‘Did I answer that? Is this really me?’ Sometimes I’ll be talking and think, ‘How come I
can talk? How can I breathe?’ It’s as if my mind is going, ‘Does not
compute, does not compute,’ and I start to cry.”
Physically, Karin no longer feels comfortable in her own body, a
sensation that psychologists call derealization: “It’s as if someone
else is in my body, doing everything with me, or for me.” Her
feeling of being unreal becom es quite profound at times, and yet she
continues to function normally. Other people have a hard time
believing that there is actually anything wrong with her. “When I’m
miserable, my brother will say, ‘Look, I have the same thoughts you
do, but I don’t  have the same  responses. I don’t want to ruin my life
over the question, Why am I here? or Who am I?’ ”
Her brother is right in spotting that Karin is wrapped up in a great
deal of intellectual confusion. She is constantly assaulted by
questions that seem crazy to her: Can one be real and unreal at the
same time? Is thinking that you are unreal the same as being
unreal? When  her head begins to whirl with these existential
riddles, she becomes as bewildered as Alice down the rabbit-hole. I asked Karin if she felt real talking to me. She said that she did
and she didn’t: “I am sitting  here having a conversation with you,
but a part of me says I’m not. It’s impossible. How can I be saying
such a thing to myself? My mind doesn’t comprehend it. I know  I’m
talking to you, but another part knows  I’m not. I can’t gure that
out.”
As a yogi would see it, there must be some element of witnessing
involved here—that is, Karin is having an experience and at the
same time watching herself have it. That does not have to be an
unreal way to relate to things. Quite the contrary—it could be seen
as the most real way, once the silent witness is acknowledged as the
core of the self. In ancient India, witnessing would have been calmlyaccepted and welcomed as a gateway to higher spiritual
experiences. Karin was not totally surprised when I brought this up to her, but
it did not make her any happier. “People have told me that my
awareness has risen too high, that it has become my enemy,” she
said, “but I don’t know how to turn it o.” Turning her awareness
o is all she wants to do at this point. Time and again she has
intuited things that I would consider profound truths, only to reject
them as “sick.” Here is one example:
“I have this experience of talking to someone and feeling  that I’m
on automatic. It’s like a reserve mechanism kicking in. I want to
shut it o. I want to be able to walk into a room and not think, ‘Oh,
look at that. I converted myself into matter.’ The top layer of my
mind is now above automatic, but that doesn’t seem like a gift to
me, it’s just neurotic. How do I get rid of this high awareness or
sensitivity, whatever you want to call it?”
I told her that other people have spent years on the spirit ual path
trying to achieve the very state of nonattachment that she has fallen
into. To a spiritual person, the feeling of being “on automatic”
implies that God or the higher Self has taken over from the small,
isolated self. Many saints, both Christian and Eastern, have reported
that they lived in such a blessed state. They considered it a kind of
second birth, freeing them from the bondage of the esh and the
ties of the past. After this rebirth, a person has nothing to fear from
the snares of Maya and can go forth to explore what lies beyond. Yet the everyday world seems to have no relationship to the
boundless one, and to stand on the threshold of the higher Self,
where Karin nds herself, can generate deep fear. No one can feel
her experiences with her. There is no objective standard for
weighing them, and their scientic validity remains marginal (the
renowned English physicist Sir Arthur Eddington once remarked
that any attempt to scientically measure a subjective experience
was like trying to nd the square root of a sonnet). In this light, the words that have come to us from the ancient
spiritual traditions are all the more valuable, since they can serve as
lifelines to the present. In India the Bhagavad-Gita  is taken as thequintessence of the collected wisdom on the nature of reality. There,
Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that every person shelters a
“dweller in the body” who is wholly unlike the isolated, vulnerable
ego:
Weapons cannot cleave him ,
Fire cannot burn him ,
Water cannot wet him ,
Wind cannot dry him away …
He is eternal and all-pervading ,
Subtle, immovable, and ever the same . Although this invulnerable dweller may seem to be a religious
concept—what most devout people call the soul—Lord Krishna
asserts that it is the same self that gives everyone his sense of “I
am.” In Sanskrit several dierent words are needed to describe the
full range of the self, from the most local to the completely
universal. Each of us has an individual spirit that underg oes unique
experiences in life—this is called the jiva in Sanskrit; it comes
closest to being the soul. If you remove  all personal boundaries, the jiva expands into the
Atman , pure spirit without individual experiences. Emerson and the
other Transcen dentalists called this the Over-soul. (I will follow the
simple convention of calling it the Self with a capital “s.”) When jiva
and Atman fuse, merging the individual and the cosmic self without
losing the qualities of either, one arrives at Brahman , or totality. A
person who has realized Brahman retains his individuality but
experiences himself as unive rsal, “under the aspect of eternity,” as
the church fathers phrased it. Brahman is also used to describe
reality as a whole, taking in both the objective and subjective elds
of existence, the manifest and the unmanifest. Beyon d the all-
inclusive Brahman, there is nothing. The jiva, then, is like a single wave on the ocean; Atma n is the
water that all waves partake of equally; Brahman is the ocean itself. If you ask which of these three is you, the answer is “all of them.”
To say that one aspect of the self is dierent from the others may beuseful on an everyday basis, but it is not the nal truth. The self I
call “me” seems to respect the boundary of my skin, but at the same
time I naturally feel my kinship to other selves. When a child suers
in Afghanistan, I feel the pain. My sensation may not be as intense
as when I cause pain to my own body, but that simply says that I do
not share a particular set of nerves with the child. The ancient sages knew that each person is grounded in a
concrete reality that gives him his bearings in time and space. Nevertheless, they maintained that all selves are woven into the
same fabric of life. Karin could easily be stumbling into this state of
greatly expand ed self. However, she wants no part of it. She has
frequently stated to me in crisp tones that she did not have a
religious upbringing and nds no spiritual signicance in what is
happening to her. Clearly there is a knowledge gap here. No
tradition validates her experience for her; no elders or guides exist
to educate her further. She has been cast adrift. On the Outside Looking In
It is not easy to live with an original experience, and Karin would
much rather return to the mundane experiences that all of us put on
like ready-to-w ear clothes. “I want to watch TV on Satur day night,
drink a glass of wine, and not think about anything,” she complains. “I want  to be upset when my car gets dented and not feel detached
about it. I want to go back to feeling like I’m a part of life. Is that
even a possibility anymore?”
At mom ents like this, one realizes how much in limbo Karin is. Since no convincing versio n of her present reality exists, she
remains comm itted to the unreal. Yet she is not as detached as she
appears. I sense that she is trying to connect with others all the time
but in hidden ways. I might have missed this except for a telling
incident. At one point durin g our rst talk, I wanted her to know
how impressed  I was with her level of insight, and I started out by
saying, “For a brilliant person like you—”
She cut me o with a strange look. “Why did you say that?” she
demanded.“What?”
“That I’m brilliant. What makes you say that out of the blue?”
“Well,” I explained, “it is obvious that you have more self-
awareness than ninety-nine percent of the people I deal with.”
“How can you tell that after one meeting?” she asked
suspiciously. I said I just could, and she let the matter drop. Half an
hour later, she interrupted  herself and asked, this time rather
timidly, “Do you really think I’m brilliant?” I repeated that I did. Again, the matter was quickly dropped. When we met a few days
later, the rst words out of her mouth were “I’ve been thinking
about why you called me brilliant.”
Then I couldn’t help but notice that my compliment held a special
charm for her. It was a token, not just of my respect, but of my
aection. By calling her brilliant, I had said, “I feel close to you.”
Replaying the tapes, I nd that Karin also managed to call me
brilliant severa l times that day—apparently quite unconsciously—
and whenever she did, one heard a shy, embarrassed intimacy in her
voice. Why was this little game of emotional hide-and-seek so important
to her? I think  it’s because she nds it much easier to intellectualize
about feeling unreal than to openly express the much more
wrenching feeling of being lost. Before their emotions get covered
over with a thick coat of denial, many children feel lost, set apart. Karin reminds me of a wide-e yed child one might nd on the fringes
of a social gathering—a wedding reception, cocktail party, or
Thanksgiving reunion—peer ing at the adults like a fascinated
spectator at the zoo. What the child wonders at is quite ordinary and yet very
disturbing: the casual deception of daily life. Behind the words “I
love him” or “I love her” lie guarded feelings and secret betrayals. People who put on a show of generosity turn out to be secretly the
most selsh. Jealousy lurks under a smile. Children do not know
how to live this way, and Karin still doesn’t have the knack for it. From her perspective, other people are living securely inside a
shared reality,  while she is outside lookin g in—“I live in another
dimension,” she mourns. This persistent feeling of isolation makesthings very fearful for her. She has no security. The rest of us are at
home; she is the eternal stranger. Many sensitive  people feel this way. Wisdom and poetry can arise
from the situation as easily as anguish. But given how lonely such
people generally are, I can see why anguish is the most common
response. It is by relating to other people, after all, that most of us
manage to feel real in the rst place. Three years ago, Karin asserts, she felt completely normal and
connected—she is particularly adamant on that point. She was
thirty-one and had just decid ed to break up with a man whom she
had been seeing steadily for several years. “From the very beginning
of our relationship,” she said, “I knew that Rodney was not ‘the
one,’ but we cared for each other and really enjoyed each other’s
company.” What made her nally break o with this man was her
decision to seek someone whom she really might want to marry. This reason satised her, and the breakup occurred without rancor. But Karin immediately starte d having doubts about what she had
done. She glossed over that part with me: “When Rodney and I
broke up, I felt a sudden sense of loss. I wondered if I had done the
wrong thing, if I should get back with him, you know, blah, blah,
blah. Then I went on with my life.” Within a month after the
breakup, she met another man, a customer at her catering business. She fell deeply  in love with him and continues to say that their
relationship, which was brief but intense, was the closest she ever
came to marrying anyone. From the very outset, however, she knew
that his parent s, who were Orthodox Jews, strongly disapproved of
her because she was Catholic. “At rst it was okay, because I was
condent and elated, and I didn’t allow them to become involved in
my life. But after a certain amount of treatment that I considered
worse than torture.…”
Karin stopped speaking at that point. I gathered that there was a
tempestuous breakup and she had a “collapse” or “nervous
breakdown.” Whether in fact she suered an actual psychosis is not
clear. She did develop a morbid fear of having AIDS. “Whenever I
gave blood I would shake like crazy. Three times they needed my
blood that year, and I was terried that I would be infected.”Several times she called the local AIDS hotline in a panic, always to
be reassured that she had no real reason to be afraid (a fact
conrmed by all her blood tests). It was in the midst of this dicult period that she rst began to
feel unreal. She says that the sensation was quite new and
unexpected when it rst arrived. Never in her life had she ever had
the feeling of “being out of my body” or “having my awareness up
here” (holding her hand above her head). When I told her that many
people have similar feelings without being disturbed, she curtly
responded, “What does that matter if I still feel miserable?”
I tend to believ e Karin when she says that she began to feel unreal
all of a sudden. On the other hand, I cannot buy her story that her
life was so perfect before “something happened.” She has an
unshakable nostalgia for the past; it is the ip side of her refusal to
open herself to the present. She says that her only wish is to return
to the way she was three years ago, before the unfort unate love
aair. That period has become xed in her mind as a rapturous
ideal:
“I felt centered and relaxed then. I was condent, and I had a
purpose. I felt integrated: I had a relationship, I had money, I had
peace of mind. I felt good about what I did and was able to feel
humble about it. I felt I was on a nice road to growth. I felt like a
part of the universe, like I really wanted to be here. People looked
up to me, and I was able to make them feel good.”
Karin has split time into then and now, the good and the bad,
with no gray in between. It is no wonder that her situati on ties her
in knots, because it cannot be resolved as she has set it up. On one
hand she has this need to make sure that the split in her life
continues (in order to preserve the myth of the perfect past she left
behind), while  on the other she longs to feel real again, which
would mean jumping back into the ow of things. For the time
being, clinging to her black-and-white view of the world feels like
the only safe course. Don’t Tell Me I’m Not CrazyKarin is surely  real; she has just had the misfortune to nd herself
moving from one level of reality to another, like an infant who one
day realizes that crawling, which he has thoroughly mastered, is
starting to give way to the uncertain prospect of learnin g to walk. Babies make this transition instinctively, and their parents guide
them over the rough spots with encouraging attention. But when an
adult psyche begins to test the possibility of a completely new
perspective, the transition period is fraught with diculty. There are no guidelines for “normal” experiences of a higher Self. The image we have of saints  suddenly pierced by a shaft of divine
light is far too simple; even the greatest spiritual attainments take
place within the limits of daily mental life, with its doubts, fears,
hopes, and denials. What people need is the same encouraging
attention that parents give to a wobbly toddler. Sadly, our society is
bereft in this area, and each of us has to row alone to the foreign
shore that is beckoning us across the waters. But what is even more disturbing is that the growing pains of self-
awareness might get mistaken for the goal. Karin was making this
mistake, and her self-doubt echoes a culture that feels profoundly
suspicious of spiritual exper iences. I am not just referr ing to the
accusations of insanity that surround anyone who breaks out of the
normal ways of thinking, seeing, and behaving—that problem exists
in all cultures, unfortunately. The deeper worry is that our society is
so fearful of the Self that we equate it with death and dissolution. When Freud was confronted  with the fact that every psyche has a
hidden longing for unboundedness, he coined the phrase “death
wish” or “Nirvana instinct”—the two were more or less the same in
his eyes. Nirvana is not death, however. It is a Sanskrit word for Being, the
primary state of the Self. By and large, psychiatry still ignores this
clarication, and the fear persists that total self-awareness is a kind
of annihilation . Irvin Yalom describes the moment when he had
brought one of his neurotic patients, after much struggle, to the
stage where he began to open up to self-awareness:It is the time when one stands before the abyss and decides
how to face the pitiless existential facts of life: death,
isolation, groundlessness, and meaninglessness. Of course,
there are no solutions. One has a choice only of certain
stances: to be “resolute,” or “engaged,” or courageously
deant, or stoically accepting, or to relinquish rationa lity
and, in awe and mystery, place one’s trust in the provide nce
of the Divine. To think that this is the long sought-for goal of therapy! It would
be kinder to believe that the patient had not yet begun. In fairness, I
should explain  that Yalom is an “existential” therapist, meaning that
his cornerston e belief is unbelief: life has no intrinsic meaning or
purpose other than the one created (through an arbitrar ily chosen
“stance”) by each person. Many, perhaps most, psychiatrists might agree that life’s
dilemmas have no solution, only they would not preface their
opinion with the words “of course.” Outside the therapist’s oce,
lay people echo the same pessimistic world view, if not in so many
words, then in their endless search for pleasure and escape from
pain. Karin grew up with no better version of reality, so she resists
her “high awareness,” turns her back on insight, and longs to watch
TV with a beer on Saturday  night—anything but to see what she
actually sees and feel what she actually feels. When I tried to put her experiences in a good light, Karin turned
on me. “This standing outside myself all the time isn’t natural. People tell me that I’m functioning well, so what’s the problem? I
know I’m still functioning well, but I’m afraid. I have times when I
look at a calendar and think, ‘How can there be dates? What is
time?’ The experience is too much. Am I insane? Luckily, someone
told me that you can’t go crazy after a certain age.…”
I respo nded with the strongest assurances I had yet given her,
“You’re not crazy. At all. You’re having experiences that you can’t
handle. They’re coming too fast. But they’re all right. What’s
happening to you isn’t completely healthy, because it causes youpanic, anxiety, and so on. Yet there is an element of witnessing here. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Um. If you remember that obsessive-compulsive doctor,” Karin
rejoined, “he saw everyone as obsessive-compulsive except himself. When I’m with you, I like talking to you, and I can see that you’re
used to conversing with minds far above mine, but you’re  trained to
look for this witnessing. Maybe you see my symptoms as opening up
a new avenue, but I see them as neurotic.”
I imme diately backed o, waiting for things to happen naturally
and at their own pace. But I couldn’t help feeling sad that Karin is so
conditioned to see herself as “sick” rather than normal or even
gifted. She tosses around a good deal of unattering psychological
jargon to describe herself. At one point I was going to say, “I think
you’re really on to something.” As soon as I said the words “I think
you’re,” she jumped in with “an acute schizophrenic?” Finding a
satisfactory label is very important to her. At various times in our rst talk, which lasted less than an hour,
she also referred to herself as obsessive, neurotic, depressed,
anxious, insecu re, hyper, and crazy. Actually, her deep worry that
she might be insane is one of the surest signs that she is not. She
describes her symptoms with clarity and insight. She does not
hallucinate or have delusion al thoughts. I could even get her to
admit, grudgingly, that she sometimes feels pleasantly detached
from her symptoms and can see through them. This admission came
out when we talked about the ten doctors she had seen before me. “Ten specialist s each gave you ten dierent diagnoses, and each one
happened to be the diagnosis that he specializes in,” I said. “So what
does that tell you?”
“That that is how they view it,” she replied evasively. “But what does that tell you about what you have?” I insisted. “Well, it might tell me that they have seen these symptoms
before,” she said. “Maybe my need to go to ten dierent doctors is
obsessive. I could have all ten of those things or none of them.”
“Which is it, do you think?”
“Probably a combination, if that makes any sense. Obviously I
have anxiety, I have depression—I have what they term‘derealization.’ On the other hand, sitting here now, I question
whether I have any of that.”
If Karin had not made this last comment, I would concede that the
chances of turning her interpretation around would be remote—we
are lucky that she is not totally sold out to the idea of being sick. She is intelligent enough to pick out the weak points in even the
best doctors. “I told one therapist that when I was two I had a pet
ghost,” she said. “It was my imaginary friend. This psychi atrist said,
‘Well, no doubt that was your longing for a penis.’ Now, at two
years old, who cares if it was or it wasn’t? I felt normal three years
ago, and I feel terrible now.”
“Did you really have a pet ghost?” I asked. “Yes, I did—I wouldn’t make  up a thing like that. Many children
have imaginary friends, don’t they? And if they don’t, I still can’t see
how that aects me,” Karin said. “What happened to your friend?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she answered wistfully. “As I grew older, he
just … I don’t remember. He is no longer with me.”
As much as I appreciate her knack for seeing through self-
important doctors (including me, I’m sure), Karin isn’t happy
scoring points  against them. She wants to be accepted, like
everybody else. These two sides of her personality have created a
major conict in her life. “You can see how hard it is for me to tell
if I am right in wanting to be dealt with for myself,” she said. “Am I
a bright person who is just over-analyzing other people’ s motives? Or am I so self-righteous that I won’t listen to anybody else?”
Relating to the Self
The more I think about Karin, the less peculiar her situation
seems and the more she appears to be only a slight exaggeration of
many other people I know. The common theme in all her
experiences is a drastic loss of condence in her relationships, a
leaking away of trust and security, which leaves a vacuum of
distrust and loneliness. Everywhere one looks, relationships are in a
similar crisis. Preserving a stable marriage and a loving family lifehas turned into a heroic enterprise, doomed to failure more often
than not. If Karin really is as I see her, not “sick” but just acutely
self-aware, perhaps her sensitive awareness is leading  her to a
solution. Relationships are based on two opposite values: feeling close to
someone else and yet feeling apart. Feeling close enables us to have
rapport, to share our feelings and to exchange words and ideas. Feeling apart enables us to retain our own egos, so that “me” does
not bleed into “not me.” As long as a person has a health y sense of
how to share himself but not share too much, the machinery of
relationship runs smoothly enough. The crux of Karin’s problem is
that she has tumbled headlong into feeling separate without the
balance of feeling close:
“I have started to walk around without being able to fathom my
existence. My mother isn’t my mother anymore. I look at my brother
and it isn’t, ‘Hi, Rich,’ but, ‘Who is this person?’ I know he is my
brother, but how can he be? Looking in the mirror at my body I say,
‘How can that be me?’ I just feel that the world is over there, and I
am looking in on it.”
Far from being delusional, Karin’s feelings of intense self-
absorption could be hitting upon a deep truth. All of us retain a part
of ourselves that stays aloof from others, no matter how intimate the
relationship. As people who dene ourselves by how we relate, we
have mothers, brothers, houses, jobs, and so forth. The scene around
us changes, and we change with it. As witnesses who stand back and
observe the scene, however , we are as xed as stars, and our
changeless nature is utterly still, calm, and wise. In one of the oldest Indian scriptures, called the “great forest
teaching” (Brihadaranyaka Upanishad ), which dates back at least a
thousand years before Christ,  we are told the deeper emotional basis
for the kind of feelings Karin is having:
Truly, it is not for the sake of the husband that the husband
is dear, but for the sake of the Self. And it is not for the sake of the wife that the wife is dear,
but for the sake of the Self.And it is not for the sake of the sons that the sons are dear,
but for the sake of the Self. Yajnavalkya, one of the greatest of the ancient sages, is speaking,
trying to conve y to his wife what is most real and lasting  in life. He
is raising the Self above any relationship one might have with
husband, wife, or children, but this is not to degrade those
relationships. Rather, the sage is stating a psychological fact, that
each of us is more intimately  connected to ourselves than to anyone
around us. Relationships begin “in here,” with our ability to love
ourselves, to know ourselves , to be ourselves. As Yajnavalkya tells
his wife, “Indeed, my beloved, it is the Self that should be seen, the
Self that should be heard, the Self that should be reected upon, and
the Self that should be known.”
The reason these words have survived for more than three
thousand years is that in every generation, the Self wakes up and
demands to be known. When it does, other relationships begin to
pale by comparison, at least at the outset, because the intimacy of
one’s own being is quite overwhelming. The world becomes a
wraparound mirror, reecting oneself on all sides. Let us begin to
examine how that might feel. Sitting in my chair meditatin g, I feel like myself, a person isolated
in time and space. I have thoughts, each of which takes a tiny
amount of time, but every once in a while my mantra fades away
and I experien ce silence. Sometimes this silence grows deep, and I
am left in it for moments at a stretch. When that happens, I do not
feel like my nite self anymore. I have entered into the Self. How
does this feel, exactly? Think of a man exploring a long, dark
hallway with a ashlight. All he sees is the next object that falls
within his beam; the rest remains in darkness. This is like the
waking-state mind, which knows its contents one thought  at a time. Now suppose that all at once the whole corridor lights up, revealing
every object in it. The Self is like that, a total awakening to all that exists in
awareness, but unlike the lighted hallway, there are no physical
restrictions—no objects or walls. Awareness simply sees itself inpure form. To give another analogy, imagine a genius resting on a
couch. He could be thinking  any number of brilliant thoughts, but
he is not having one right now. He remains a genius nevertheless,
because his ability lies in his potential  for being brilliant. Similarly,
the Self is a state of potentiality, of untold possibilities that unfold
one at a time in the manifest world. Entering the domain of the Self can be a surprisingly modest
experience, and many beginning meditators miss the signicance of
their inner quietness. I had one patient who had suered from
anxiety attacks since childhood and found it dicult to accept that
he was meditating correctly . In an encouraging tone I asked, “Do
you notice any periods of silence in your meditations?”
“Never,” he shot back. “At least not that I know of. Wouldn’t I
know it? I’m looking for it all the time.”
I told him that noticing the silence might or might not happen at
rst. “But intellectually,” I said, “you realize that the mind can be
silent?”
“Not mine,” he said. “Why not?”
“It’s too quick.”
“But even a quick mind has gaps between thoughts,” I pointed
out. “Each gap is like a tiny window onto silence, and through that
window one actually contac ts the source of the mind . As we’re
talking here now, there are gaps between our words, aren’t there? When you meditate, you take a vertical dive into that gap.”
“Sure, I can see that,” he rejoined, “but I don’t think I experience
it in meditation.” I asked him what he did experience. He said, “The
only thing that makes medi tation dierent from just sitting in a
chair is that when I open my eyes after twenty minutes, I often feel
that only two or three minutes have passed—I am intrigued by
that.”
I said, “But you see, this is the very best clue that you have gone
beyond though t. When you don’t have thoughts, there is silence. Silence does not occupy time, and in order to contact the Self, one
has to go into the eld of the timeless. Your mind might not be able
to register this experience at rst, because it is so accustomed tothinking. You may feel that time has simply own by, or that it was
lost somewher e. But the ‘lost’ time was actually spent immersed in
the Self.”
It was helpful for this man to gain a better intellectual grasp of
what was happ ening to him, but the timeless Self is not a concept
one has to believe in or even comprehend. It is only necessary to
travel back and forth from thinking to silence, over and over, until
the full experience of silence registers. When the yogis escaped the
eld of time, they did not intend to remain away forever. They
knew that as long as they possessed a body, its organs had to
function accord ing to natural laws; as long as they used their brains
to think , their minds had to accept the same sensations, memories,
and desires as the mind of any other person. All this was absolutely necessary. What was not necessary,
however, was the tangle of pain and sorrow that is caused when one
is a prisoner of events. For the duration that he could experience
pure silence, the yogi’s nervous system was free to untw ist the old
knots of stress and thus heal the wounds of time. Once a person is convinced that his meditation experiences are
real, he begins the process of ripening the self into the Self. That is,
he begins to experience what it means to abolish all the divisions
that keep people apart. Ordinary life does not provide much
experience of this state. We are conditioned never to forget that
“me” and “not me” are dierent, with one notable exception: falling
in love. To fall head over heals in love is to share your self with
another. The ego’s barriers fall for a time, and the lover and his
beloved agree that they have merged into one identity. For as long
as the enchantment lasts, one feels the other’s emotions, breathes
the other’s breath. There is an invincible sense of union that makes
being alone too painful to endure. In our culture, we tend to dismiss this union as a passing
psychological illusion and probably unhealthy if prolon ged much
beyond the rst ush of courtship. (“Love addiction” has even
entered the lexicon of abnormal psychology recently.) The yogis,
however, would say that there is no reason why a person cannot
have two perspectives on himself, one local (the self) and the otheruniversal (the Self). A yogi adopts both perspectives at once. He has
stabilized his awareness of the Self without losing the self. An
intense feeling  of love accompanies this new state, but unlike falling
in love, the yogi’s merging does not depend upon another person,
even a beloved. He merges with everything, including it all in his
Self. Once he can see everyt hing as part of his identity, there is no
isolated “me” to defend. Love is all that remains. A perso n living in the Self feels intimately connected to others,
not because he is skillful at the usual give-and-take of a good
relationship, but because he gives everything of himself. He holds
nothing back, and therefore he ows eortlessly beyond the
boundaries of his isolated self. Could this be our natural state? At the turn of the century, the great photographer Alfred Stieglitz
was growing up in a well-to-do German family in New York City. During one viciously cold winter, a wandering organ-grinder
showed up at the back door. As soon as he heard the organ-grinder’s
tune, Alfred jumped up from the dinner table and ran outside to
give him a penny. The next evening the organ-grinder reappeared,
and the little boy ran out again to give him a penny. This ritual repeated itself day after day, through snow and sleet. The family became quite impressed, and one evening Alfred’s
mother told him how wonder ful it was that he would brave the cold
to give money  to a beggar. Alfred looked up in surprise  and said,
“But Mama, I am doing it all for myself.” When I rst read this
anecdote, it gave me a thrill of recognition, for I could see that the
most intensely selsh motive can also be the most seless. In another instance, the renowned Jewish philosopher Martin
Buber went through a shift in perception from the small to the
larger self when he chanced to spot a shiny rock by the side of the
road:
On a gloomy morning I walked upon the highway, saw a
piece of mica lying, lifted it up, and looked at it for a long
time; the day was no longer gloomy, so much light was
caught in the stone. And suddenly, as I raised my eyes from
it, I realized that while I looked, I had not been consciou s of“object” and “subject”; in my looking the mica and “I” had
been one; in my looking I had tasted unity. I looked at it
again, the unity did not remain. This is not a mystical momen t; it is just true experience, stripped
of the veils that make us think we are not one with the rocks, trees,
mountains, and stars. For a brief moment, Buber had replaced
relationship with unity, catching on the wing a vision of the world
that could be captured permanently. That rarely happens, because
the nervous system of ordinary people is too active, too conditioned
by years of non-silence. If a moment of unity lasts long enough, the perceiver has time to
appreciate what it would be like to remain in a state where “me”
and “not me” peacefully coexist within the same mind.
_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:

        I do not count, time, or control my breaths. No eort is being
made to cause certain thoughts to come or go. There is no particular
feeling I try to either induce or avoid. I do not pay atten tion to my
body in a special way or attempt to relax any part of it. If I start to
fall asleep, I do not resist the impulse. What am I doing, then. The best answer is that I am just not
doing; I am engaged in getting the normal activity of the mind to
turn into silence, but without coercing it to do so. I am getting past
the inner noise of thoughts and feelings in order to reveal what the
silent witness inside me is really like. This is how the mind naturally
opens to itself and heals. “Not doing” sounds like doing nothing at all, but there is a subtle
dierence. The thinking, feeling mind is in constant motio n. If it has
the thought “Slow down, be silent,” that is a movement, too, and
will not make the mind stop. No thought can make it stop. One
might try just sitting, waiting  for the mind to stop of its own accord. There are meditations of this sort in the vast tradition of Indian andZen practice, but most novices who try this method nd it extremely
exhausting and unproductive. A mind left to its own devices tends to
run here and there like a drunken monkey, as the Indian  scriptures
say. To watch one’s mind reel around for an hour can be intensely
disturbing. Moreover, there is no reason why the mind should reach
silence during the vigil. One can try gathering the mind to a point, which is called
concentration. This form of discipline is often compared to trying to
make a candle ame hold still in the wind. Concentration is not like
active thinking, but it still falls under the category of motion, since
the mind has to be brought back to its focus every time it wanders. Enormous strain is involved, and the results may be very small
compared to the eort required. The deeper you go into it, the more dicult “not doing” seems to
be. How can any form of mental activity ever make the mind be
still. The ancient rishis mastered this extremely exacting art after
they observed that the mind has various layers. In this observation,
they agreed wholeheartedly with Freud. However, they were not
interested in the meaning  of each layer (whether it stores away
childhood fears, repressed anger, or submerged sexual desires). They
simply observed that the mind’s deeper layers are not in as much
motion as the supercial ones. This insight made them realize that meditation must be a vertical
process—a dive into the mind’s depths—not a strugg le on the
surface. Somehow the meditator’s attention has to penetrate the
chaotic surface activity of the mind, pass through all the layers of
subtle thought, and at last arrive at silence. Instead of subduing a
drunken monkey, the appropriate metaphor is much more subtle:
Meditation is like creeping through a herd of sleeping  elephants
without waking them up. In order to dive through every layer of the mind, one needs a
vehicle that can carry one beyond the thinking process. In
primordial sound meditation the vehicle is called a mantra, a
specic mental sound deriv ed from Sanskrit but with no verbal
meaning. A mantra is chosen solely for its ability to gradually bring
a person’s attention to quieter and quieter levels of the mind. Since everyone’s mind has innumerable layers, the choice of a
mantra and the precise instructions for using it are extremely
delicate. If chosen, taught, and used correctly, a mantra is as nearly
eortless as mental activity can be. It begins like a normal thought
but fades to fainter and fainter degrees of sound without getting
lost, until it disappears entirely, leaving the mind in complete
silence. Many forms of meditation use some kind of sound or visual image
as their vehicle. That might make it seem that one technique is as
good as another. However, there are any number of important issues
to consider when evaluating a form of meditation—above all: Did
my mind actually nd the silence I was seeking. Was I
psychologically comfortable during and after the meditation. Did
my old self begin to change as the result of having meditated. Is
there more truth in my self. Every person has to decide these crucial issues for himself. Patrick, a friend of mine, began meditating more than a decade ago
in order to rescue himself from a disastrous personal and nancial
fall. “In the late Seventies I was just barely emerging  from the
rockiest period  in my life. For several years I had invested heavily in
the real estate market, accumulating rental properties quickly on a
very speculativ e basis. It was an exhilarating venture at rst, and I
found myself in a powerful nancial position, at least on paper, with
assets in the multimillions. “You never know the exact point when things start sliding beyond
repair. The ups and downs of the market seemed to be no worse
than before, but I couldn’t keep my grip somehow. My real estate
holdings began  to crumble, and no matter what I did, the collapse
accelerated. I had started drinking heavily, and my wife was very
distraught when I stopped relating to her and the children. It wasn’t
deliberate on my part; I had become swept up in a nancial
nightmare, and all I could think of was how to save myself. ”
Spiraling deeper into his troubles, Patrick learned to meditate. He
learned almos t on a whim, but from the outset the impact was
dramatic. “The rst time I meditated came as a revelation, if for no
other reason than the comfort I felt in letting go of my huge internalstruggle. The moments of actually transcending—that is, reaching
the silent level of the mind— were very brief at rst. Several times I
asked, ‘Is this all there is. ’ There was not much clear transcending
in my meditations, only the coming and going of periods of silence. However, I couldn’t deny that when I opened my eyes, I felt
changed. ”
A single meditation can change people because it has allowed
them to release  part of the false self for good. Without our realizing
it, holding on to old feelings,  habits, and lifelong conditioning takes
eort. The isolated ego defends itself by remaining constantly on the
alert. Is this situation a threat. Is that person going to do what I
want. The constant need to protect oneself psychologica lly may be
too subtle to notice, but it occupies an enormous part of everyone’s
unconscious life. As we saw, meditation does not deal in meaning. The old
conditioning is released without talking about it, feeling it, or
having much conscious exper ience of letting it go. Instead, the mind
is shown how to cross over from activity to silence, and this process
accomplishes the desired result. The stresses lie in the gap between
the active and silent mind; touching this gap with one’s awareness is
enough to release them. Since it takes mental activity to keep the
false self going, ending the activity loosens the false self’s grip. It is
not that a person tries to detach himself from his fears; they detach
themselves from him. “Meditating made me feel that I was putting the pieces together
again, but I was not out of the woods yet,” Patrick recalls. “The
damage done to my personal life ran very deep. One day I came
home to nd that my wife had locked me out of the house. No one
answered the phone when I called, and I felt angry and hurt. Miserably I walked over to the park and sat down to meditate. It
didn’t seem to do any good. I felt restless and upset the whole time. “But when I opened my eyes, a remarkable thing happened. My
mind was suddenly very quiet. I tried to think a thought, and one
came, but it immediately settled back into the silence, like a drop
merging into a still pool. I began to notice that the light around me
looked brighte r than usual, and when I heard some childr en playingnearby, their voices struck me as being the most joyful sound I had
ever heard. “It is hard to recapture how free I felt just at that momen t. It was
like having all these dead layers fall o to expose some sensitive,
living part of myself. I walked around a little, and everything had
taken on the same vibrant quality. My intense feelings of aloneness
and shame were now completely gone. I was totally dierent from
the suering person who had sat down on a park bench half an hour
before. ”
I believe Patrick had hit upon the breakthrough that meditation
causes: the self expands beyond the connes of the ego, at rst
gradually, but with greater  and greater intensity, until it is in
complete union with everything. “I and the world are one,” an
ancient Upanishad declares. The transformation of the small,
isolated self into something universal may come only in glimpses,
but this is the true self. It is only a matter of time before one lives its
truth permanently. At the height of his experience, which lasted for half an hour,
Patrick was approached by a panhandler. “Up to this point I was
completely lost in myself. I saw this derelict walking towards me—it
makes me ashamed to use that word. He did not look like a derelict
to me then; he was beyond that kind of value judgment. He was as
alive and vibrant as everything else. “When he was about three feet away, I looked right into his eyes. For some reason, they were changed. They looked shining and soft. I
asked him what he wanted,  and he hesitated, confused. Then he
said, ‘I don’t want nothing. I just hope you’re happy, man. ’ It
sounded funny  coming out of him, and I could see his surprised
reaction to his own words. It was as if he had been draw n into my
experience. In an amazingly  joyous voice, I said, ‘Yes, I’m happy,
very, very happy. ’ I mean, I wanted to embrace this dilapidated,
lthy guy. “He was walking away by now. I turned and started to go o in
the other direction, but when we were about twenty feet apart, I
looked over my shoulder. He was staring at me with disbelief. When
he caught my gaze he turned away for good. I wonder what he sawin my eyes at that moment. Probably disbelief, too, but I hope he
saw more. For a few seconds back there, I deeply loved him. ”
Unconditional Love
This strange encounter between Patrick and the derelict brings us
to the issue of unconditional love, which has become a catch phrase
in popular psychology. The objection I have felt about unconditional
love is that it runs complet ely against the grain of normal love,
which is based upon relationship. The love that exists between
husband and wife is not the same as that between mother and child. The dierence is based upon the type of relationship the two people
have. Where there is no relationship, it is hard to see how love can
ow. In this case, though, Patrick had no relationship whatsoever with
the derelict. They were total strangers who had every reason to feel
suspicious and hostile toward each other. However idealistically one
may want to feel, a shambling, smelly man in raggedy clothes is an
object of love to practically nobody; usually he is an object of
revulsion whom we assiduously avoid in order not to be exposed to
feelings of fear and contempt. But it is at the point where all relationship ceases that the
opportunity for unconditional love actually arises. When you have
no relationship to another person, you are automatically thrown
back upon yourself. The feelings that come out have no basis in
what you need or want from others—they simply come out. If I get
bumped in the street and feel angry, the emotion arises
spontaneously. I may feel guilty about it the next mom ent, but in
that split second it was the only choice my self could make. My level
of awareness did not oer me a better response. In Patrick’s case, his
level of awareness had leaped far beyond its normal limits; this
expansion dictated the response that spontaneously poured from
him. I imagine  his meditation on the park bench was not the sole
cause of this sudden change ; in India they speak of the “Yoga of
desperation,” a breakthrough into higher consciousness resultingfrom a predica ment so terrible that the psyche can nd no other
way out. Whatever the precise mechanism, Patrick found himself in a state
transcending normal perception. Like a yer breaking through a
dense cloud layer to nd blue sky and brilliant sun above, he
discovered that to look at anything was to see it in the light of love. He could not help himself, just as I could not help my anger on
being bumped in the street. The rishis speak of unconditi onal love, in fact, as a transcendental
quality that becomes infused into the mind during meditation. When
the mind goes beyond normal waking awareness, the transcending
process brings  one in contact with unconditional love in its silent,
unmanifest state. “Unmanifest” means that this love is not directed
at anything; it simply vibrates within the nature of the silent
witness, like a radio signal silently waiting for a radio to pick it up. At the end of meditation, the person returns to the waking state
bringing some of this transcendental quality into his everyday
consciousness. A new vibration has been added that alters, however
subtly, the person’s former awareness. This explanation is a twist on the usual understanding of
unconditional love. By denition, you can love someone
unconditionally only if your love does not alter no matter what the
other person does. This aspect of “no matter what” implies a
superhuman eort of will. One cannot help but imagine a plaster
saint who returns rudeness, anger, jealousy, inconsideration, and
every other sort of unloving behavior with sweetness and light. For
all its apparent goodness, this situation smacks of self-denial and
even masochism. The rishis’ version of unconditional love contains no eort at all. A person who feels love “no matter what” is simply following his
nature. In truth, this is all that can be asked of anyone. Acting
according to your own level of awareness is inescapable. In order to
smile at the stranger who bumps into me on the street, I need to feel
like smiling; otherwise, my behavior will be calculated. As we saw
before, calculation is the primary strategy of the false self. It has to
calculate when to smile because it is too afraid to show theemotions actually being felt. Tact and diplomacy, which most of us
applaud as “nice behavior,” can also be seen as the subtle skill of
lying. All of us are radiating our awareness out into the world and
bringing its reection back to us. If your awarenes s contains
violence and dread, you will meet those qualities “out there. ” On
the other hand, if your awareness contains unconditional love, the
world, even the eyes of a derelict, will mirror that love. The curative
value of this kind of awareness is enormous, as I would like to
illustrate with a moving story told by R. D. Laing. At the age of fourteen, a Scottish boy named Phillip came home
from school one day and found his mother on her bed in a pool of
blood. A long-term tuberculo sis patient, she had died from a sudden
hemorrhage in her lungs. Instead of consoling the boy and helping
him to overco me his shock and grief, Phillip’s father berated him,
telling him again and again that he had killed his mother by putting
her through the exhaustion of pregnancy, birth, and raising him. This went on for two months. Then Phillip came home from school
to nd that his father had committed suicide. Six months later, Laing came  across the boy in a Glasgow mental
ward, in a bizarre state of psychological and physical deterioration. As Laing vividly recalls, “He smelled awful. He was incontinent of
urine and feces, given to staggering and walking peculiarly. He
gesticulated in strange ways without speaking, seem ed almost
completely self-absorbed, and could not care less about his
surroundings and the people in them. ”
Although he was in the midst of doctors and nurses whose job
was to care for him, Phillip had pushed the limits of compassion. He
was too strange and disgust ing for anyone to be around for more
than a few minutes, much less to help. He had developed a stutter,
along with a peculiar collect ion of tics: blinks, darts of the eye, and
twitches in his cheeks, tongue, hands, and ngers. Worst of all was
his total I-could-not-care-less attitude, which had alienated the other
patients and turned the whole sta against him. Two months in the hospital made little change in Phillip’s
condition. “There was no question of the diagnosis,” Laing recounts. “He was an acute (probably becoming chronic) catatonic
schizophrenic. When he had anything to say, it was clear that he
was hallucinated, very paranoid, and very deluded. ” Laing felt
drawn to this shattered creature. Phillip had no remaining relatives
or family friends to take him in. That he would be put away for the
rest of his life was a foregone conclusion. Instead, Laing took Phillip home with him, to his wife and three
children under the age of four. He made this extraordinary decision
because, when talking to Phillip alone in his oce, outside the
setting of a psychiatric ward, he noticed that the boy became
calmer. Phillip started to talk intelligibly, and although his talk was
about “crazy” things—his feeling that the ward was a gigantic
sphere with himself as a pin in the center, his visitations by
interstellar beings, his hallu cination that a black man’s voice was
speaking gibberish to him in the night—he did not seem completely
gone. His tics and twitches also subsided in Laing’s oce. For an
hour at least he controlled his bodily functions, and most telling of
all, a shadow of gratitude passed over his rigid features when Laing
oered to help him. Laing had the insight that perhaps the doctors and nurses were
keeping  Phillip crazy simply by the way they felt about him. “Phillip
generated in everyone  who came near him mixed feelings of
revulsion, at the sight of him and the smell of him, and feeling sorry
for him, just because he was so repulsive, as well as at his evident
misery. The result was that hardly anyone could resist trying to
appear to him to be kind and loving, but eeing out of sight and
smell of him as quickly as possible—not because they could not
stand him, but for some other necessity. ”
Phillip was being kept crazy because the attempt to love and care
for him was tinged with hypo crisy and he knew it. As soon as Laing
took the unheard-of step of bringing a catatonic schizophrenic into
his home, Phillip improved with astonishing speed. His incontinence
ended the mom ent he entered the house. Within a couple of weeks
he had stopped staggering, although he still shook. He began to talk
falteringly but coherently. Three months later he was well enoughto be moved into a foster home. The threat of a lifetime spent
locked up in a mental ward had been removed. Laing did not use psychothe rapy on Phillip while he was under
his roof. The boy was treated honestly, without emotional
hypocrisy, which meant that what was good or bad about him was
reacted to as such. Fifteen years later, he returned to the house to
report his progress. As Laing puts it with a shade of dry wit, “He
was married, had two children, had a steady job, and was taking
evening classes in psychology. ”
It is hard to deny that Phillip’s sanity depended to a huge extent
on projections from the mind s of others. The supercial “love” and
“caring” in the mental ward kept him imprisoned in a false self
because these feelings were equally false. Behind them lurked the
real message: “love” was just a means to keep him under control—it
was a power ploy. Fortunately, in Laing the boy found someone who looked upon
him in the light of love. To me, that is the most touching part of the
story. Laing does not raise the issue of love. He puts his motives on
a simple human basis: “I felt very sorry for his plight and very much
wanted to help him, if possi ble. ” Yet in Laing’s presence, a rapport
was established  that was an honest reection of one awareness with
another. The intensity of life, so clear, sane, and loving, radiated
from Laing and touched the boy. That seems to be the most natural
part of what happened between the two, and what should happen
between all of us. One true self speaks to another, using the
language of the heart, and in that bond a person is healed. Safe to Love
If the rishis are right, the end of the false self spells the end of
fear, and the desperate need for power that fearful people cannot
help. Power is a form of self-protection, and when fear is gone, there
is no need for protection. The true self is love, and being able to love
all the time is the most one could want. The clash between love and
power then has no meaning. As Tagore so decisively wrote, “Love is
not a mere impulse; it must contain truth, which is law. ” I deeplybelieve that, because I have met people who suddenly found
themselves living under this law. “I was driving down the highway looking for the exit onto the
turnpike when  I noticed an unusual sensation in my chest. It began
as a warm or tingling feeling, which I recognized from meditating. Generally the feeling is pleasant but temporary. Now it began to
intensify, and instead of physical warmth, wave after wave of
emotion started to sweep over me. ”
Chris’s eyes shone as he talked on: “It was love, but much purer
and more concentrated love than I had ever felt. I have read in
various scriptures about the heart opening like a ower—one never
thinks such things are going  to happen in real life, on a six-lane
road. But this was it: my heart was unfolding like a ower, almost
drowning me in the exquisit e sensation of love. Strangely, I could
still keep my attention on the road, but I decided to pull o. I
walked into a hamburger stand and just stood there lookin g down at
the salad bar, having the most wonderful experience of my life. ”
I still see my friend Chris every once in a while. He has worked as
a bank manager and a community organizer; he is a hardheaded
sort, not the man you would pick to have his heart unfold like a
ower. But that is wrong of me. His voice sounds kind in an
unforced way, and he has a very accepting manner with people; it is
easy to believe that he has experienced his heart very deeply. Seventeen years ago, when Chris began meditating, he had a
conventional, though deep-felt regard for relationships. “I was just
testing the water as a comm unity organizer then, trying to bring
together people who would normally take no notice of each other. All around me I saw so much hatred that had no real basis—people
simply had never crossed color barriers or social lines to meet each
other. “I helped organize a large food cooperative in a poor
neighborhood; anyone could join, regardless of class or income. We
would purchase food and sell it at cost, but each member had to put
in some time, usually about an hour a week, to go to the wholesale
market at Faneuil Hall or sweep the oor at the co-op or something. The idea was that if people helped out, they could not avoid seeingthe results of their actions. The store wouldn’t open if they didn’t
buy the food. It would open late if they didn’t sweep the oor. Prices would go up if the cash register was shortchanged. “I had never been more hopeful than the day the co-op  opened,
but a month later I was pract ically in despair. People didn’t seem to
care—they shirked their work, they didn’t sweep the oor, they
stole money from the cash register, and they found it very easy to
live with the consequences of their actions. This experience
convinced me that institutions cannot bring about a fundamental
change in human nature. And yet it seemed unbearable not to do
something. ”
As he became more disillusi oned with the social crusade, Chris’s
commitment to meditating deepened. “I desperately wanted to
foster cooperation and love among other people, but it was never
possible to make intimate enough contact with them, not in the long
run. There were always  barriers and personal hangups;
disappointment was inevitable, whatever my ideals said. “Seeing no way out of this painful dilemma, I let it continue. I
decided to work on myself, since after all I was a crucial part of
every relationship I wanted to improve. Gradually a profound
change came about. I felt less anxiety about situations and warmer
feelings towards people who had been stereotyped in my eyes as
‘bad’ or ‘uncaring. ’ As a result, people began to emerge from their
stereotypes. For a long time I found it hard to believe that I was the
focus of this change. But how could I account for the love that
people directed at me, whether I knew them or not. ”
At this point Chris was far along into the change of awareness
produced by unconditional love. In conventional psychology, a
person is told that altering his own attitudes is the best way to
improve the behavior of others. Chris now found that he could walk
into a bank and soon everyone in it would be smiling. When he
presided over community meetings, where the clash of opinions was
usually very tense, the atmosphere seemed to be softer, as if
troubled waters were mysteriously stilled. “I could  not come to terms with this inexplicable pheno menon,”
Chris recalls, “until I radica lly changed my sense of myself. Myworld view had always been centered on individual ego and eort. The eect you might have on the world depended on doing
something, or at least thinkin g. I wasn’t doing anything, other than
existing. So I had to conclude that what I am was having this eect. ”
I asked him to t in his experience on the highway, when he felt
waves of love engulng him. “That experience, I think, brought a
certain part of the whole process to a climax. After believing for so
long that I could not expect or receive love without relating to
another person, suddenly it was all happening inside me. I was
shocked at rst, because it meant that in some way the failings of
other people, their selshnes s and hatred, was somehow centered in
me as well. And yet these experiences were undeniable: as I
changed, everything around me changed. “In time, I quit wrestling with this thing intellectually. I became
used to it. No longer did I nd myself depending on other people for
my basic sense of loving or being loved. By connecting with myself I
started connecting with others better than I ever had before. “When it came, the exper ience of my unfolding heart was
overwhelming, but only for about forty-ve minutes. The most
fortunate thing is that the breakthrough lasted. It has been two
years now, and I am still that loving person inside. I don’t  mean that
I always exude  kindness no matter what other people do to me. I
can get angry and criticize others when I think they’re wrong, but
there is no destructiveness in it. ”
I was thinking of how hard we try to protect ourselves from being
hurt emotionally, not realizing the intensity of life we have walled
out in the process. It is necessary to defend the heart when it is too
weak and frightened to love, yet at some point all that changed for
Chris. It became possible for him to let love ow when and where it
wanted. He was able to welcome others, without defenses, without
fear, into the expanded space of his own being. Somethi ng he said
particularly sticks with me: “I used to try so hard to love, and now
it’s the one thing I can’t prevent, no matter how hard I try. ” He
smiled, and I felt the tender aection of someone who has not torn
down the walls of pain but own over them. OceanofPDF. comPart Three
Unconditional 
Life
OceanofPDF. com9
“Why Aren’t I Real  
Anymore. ”
The day after I rst met Karin, I was driving home when I felt a
sudden urge to hear her voice again. I found the tape of our
interview and slipped it into the machine. There it was, the soft,
melodious soprano of a woman who kept reminding me, hauntingly,
of a child. I don’t mean that she sounded childish. She spoke like an
adult, talking about serious adult problems, yet blended into that I
could hear a precocious eight-year-old who was very puzzled by the
grown-up world. “Why am I punished for telling a lie when Mommy lies about her
age. Why do I have to clean my plate when Daddy leaves his
Brussels sprou ts. ” All children go through some stage like this. By
challenging the ready-made values handed down by adults, they
begin to formulate their own values, which is a necessary step
toward gaining  a real identi ty. Karin, however, continu es to issue
challenges right and left. I once went to a clinic where they treat obsessiv e-
compulsive disorder. I didn’t think I was obsess ive-
compulsive, but it had me worried. The rst thing the doctor
did was to hand me a test. “I’m sorry, but I don’t want to ll
this out,” I said. “Why not. ” he asked. “Well, the rst question wants to know if I read things
more than once. I didn’t read very much in school, and now Isometimes do reread books to make sure that I am getting
everything out of them. But if I say yes to your question, you
will interpret it as an obsessive-compulsive trait, like hand
washing. ”
He still wanted me to take the test. “I’m not a test score,”  I
protested. “I’m a human being. I need to be dealt with for
what’s going on with me. ”
He said, “That’s a sign right there of obsessiveness. ”
“Has it ever occurred to you,” I said, “that because you run
a clinic for obsessive-comp ulsive disorder, you may be
obsessed with making a diagnosis of obsessiveness. ”
“No,” he said, “that has never occurred to me. ”
I laughed out loud listening to the tape, just as I had when Karin
rst told me about this run-in. Like many children, she has a sixth
sense for when she is being manipulated. Okay, so I went to another doctor, a well-known
psychologist. It took me a while to get hold of him, and when
I nally did, he said, “I think you didn’t want to meet me,
anyway. ”
“What makes you think that. ” I asked. “Because you got my answering machine three times. ”
“Oh really. ” I said, “but what about the fact that you got
my answering machine three times. ”
Karin sounds rather feisty set down on the page. In person she is
actually much less that way. She talks excitably about herself and
likes to drama tize her story. Underneath the drama, however, one
senses that she is a gentle person—I nd it easy to believe her when
she says that she has never deliberately hurt anyone. She has soft,
pleasing featur es and lively eyes. Still unmarried at thirty-ve, she
successfully runs a small catering business with two women friends
in suburban Boston. By her own count, Karin has been to ten dierent doctors in the
past two years, none of whom has helped her. To begin  with, herbasic complaint is extremely dicult to pin down. She says that she
doesn’t feel real anymore. In everyday situations such as talking on
the phone, walking down the street, or eating in a restaurant, she
has persistent doubts about her existence: “Someone will call my
name, and I’ll go through one of my experiences: ‘Did I answer that. Is this really me. ’ Sometimes I’ll be talking and think, ‘How come I
can talk. How can I breathe. ’ It’s as if my mind is going, ‘Does not
compute, does not compute,’ and I start to cry. ”
Physically, Karin no longer feels comfortable in her own body, a
sensation that psychologists call derealization: “It’s as if someone
else is in my body, doing everything with me, or for me. ” Her
feeling of being unreal becom es quite profound at times, and yet she
continues to function normally. Other people have a hard time
believing that there is actually anything wrong with her. “When I’m
miserable, my brother will say, ‘Look, I have the same thoughts you
do, but I don’t  have the same  responses. I don’t want to ruin my life
over the question, Why am I here. or Who am I. ’ ”
Her brother is right in spotting that Karin is wrapped up in a great
deal of intellectual confusion. She is constantly assaulted by
questions that seem crazy to her: Can one be real and unreal at the
same time. Is thinking that you are unreal the same as being
unreal. When  her head begins to whirl with these existential
riddles, she becomes as bewildered as Alice down the rabbit-hole. I asked Karin if she felt real talking to me. She said that she did
and she didn’t: “I am sitting  here having a conversation with you,
but a part of me says I’m not. It’s impossible. How can I be saying
such a thing to myself. My mind doesn’t comprehend it. I know  I’m
talking to you, but another part knows  I’m not. I can’t gure that
out. ”
As a yogi would see it, there must be some element of witnessing
involved here—that is, Karin is having an experience and at the
same time watching herself have it. That does not have to be an
unreal way to relate to things. Quite the contrary—it could be seen
as the most real way, once the silent witness is acknowledged as the
core of the self. In ancient India, witnessing would have been calmlyaccepted and welcomed as a gateway to higher spiritual
experiences. Karin was not totally surprised when I brought this up to her, but
it did not make her any happier. “People have told me that my
awareness has risen too high, that it has become my enemy,” she
said, “but I don’t know how to turn it o. ” Turning her awareness
o is all she wants to do at this point. Time and again she has
intuited things that I would consider profound truths, only to reject
them as “sick. ” Here is one example:
“I have this experience of talking to someone and feeling  that I’m
on automatic. It’s like a reserve mechanism kicking in. I want to
shut it o. I want to be able to walk into a room and not think, ‘Oh,
look at that. I converted myself into matter. ’ The top layer of my
mind is now above automatic, but that doesn’t seem like a gift to
me, it’s just neurotic. How do I get rid of this high awareness or
sensitivity, whatever you want to call it. ”
I told her that other people have spent years on the spirit ual path
trying to achieve the very state of nonattachment that she has fallen
into. To a spiritual person, the feeling of being “on automatic”
implies that God or the higher Self has taken over from the small,
isolated self. Many saints, both Christian and Eastern, have reported
that they lived in such a blessed state. They considered it a kind of
second birth, freeing them from the bondage of the esh and the
ties of the past. After this rebirth, a person has nothing to fear from
the snares of Maya and can go forth to explore what lies beyond. Yet the everyday world seems to have no relationship to the
boundless one, and to stand on the threshold of the higher Self,
where Karin nds herself, can generate deep fear. No one can feel
her experiences with her. There is no objective standard for
weighing them, and their scientic validity remains marginal (the
renowned English physicist Sir Arthur Eddington once remarked
that any attempt to scientically measure a subjective experience
was like trying to nd the square root of a sonnet). In this light, the words that have come to us from the ancient
spiritual traditions are all the more valuable, since they can serve as
lifelines to the present. In India the Bhagavad-Gita  is taken as thequintessence of the collected wisdom on the nature of reality. There,
Lord Krishna tells the warrior Arjuna that every person shelters a
“dweller in the body” who is wholly unlike the isolated, vulnerable
ego:
Weapons cannot cleave him,
Fire cannot burn him,
Water cannot wet him,
Wind cannot dry him away …
He is eternal and all-pervading,
Subtle, immovable, and ever the same. Although this invulnerable dweller may seem to be a religious
concept—what most devout people call the soul—Lord Krishna
asserts that it is the same self that gives everyone his sense of “I
am. ” In Sanskrit several dierent words are needed to describe the
full range of the self, from the most local to the completely
universal. Each of us has an individual spirit that underg oes unique
experiences in life—this is called the jiva in Sanskrit; it comes
closest to being the soul. If you remove  all personal boundaries, the jiva expands into the
Atman, pure spirit without individual experiences. Emerson and the
other Transcen dentalists called this the Over-soul. (I will follow the
simple convention of calling it the Self with a capital “s. ”) When jiva
and Atman fuse, merging the individual and the cosmic self without
losing the qualities of either, one arrives at Brahman, or totality. A
person who has realized Brahman retains his individuality but
experiences himself as unive rsal, “under the aspect of eternity,” as
the church fathers phrased it. Brahman is also used to describe
reality as a whole, taking in both the objective and subjective elds
of existence, the manifest and the unmanifest. Beyon d the all-
inclusive Brahman, there is nothing. The jiva, then, is like a single wave on the ocean; Atma n is the
water that all waves partake of equally; Brahman is the ocean itself. If you ask which of these three is you, the answer is “all of them. ”
To say that one aspect of the self is dierent from the others may beuseful on an everyday basis, but it is not the nal truth. The self I
call “me” seems to respect the boundary of my skin, but at the same
time I naturally feel my kinship to other selves. When a child suers
in Afghanistan, I feel the pain. My sensation may not be as intense
as when I cause pain to my own body, but that simply says that I do
not share a particular set of nerves with the child. The ancient sages knew that each person is grounded in a
concrete reality that gives him his bearings in time and space. Nevertheless, they maintained that all selves are woven into the
same fabric of life. Karin could easily be stumbling into this state of
greatly expand ed self. However, she wants no part of it. She has
frequently stated to me in crisp tones that she did not have a
religious upbringing and nds no spiritual signicance in what is
happening to her. Clearly there is a knowledge gap here. No
tradition validates her experience for her; no elders or guides exist
to educate her further. She has been cast adrift. On the Outside Looking In
It is not easy to live with an original experience, and Karin would
much rather return to the mundane experiences that all of us put on
like ready-to-w ear clothes. “I want to watch TV on Satur day night,
drink a glass of wine, and not think about anything,” she complains. “I want  to be upset when my car gets dented and not feel detached
about it. I want to go back to feeling like I’m a part of life. Is that
even a possibility anymore. ”
At mom ents like this, one realizes how much in limbo Karin is. Since no convincing versio n of her present reality exists, she
remains comm itted to the unreal. Yet she is not as detached as she
appears. I sense that she is trying to connect with others all the time
but in hidden ways. I might have missed this except for a telling
incident. At one point durin g our rst talk, I wanted her to know
how impressed  I was with her level of insight, and I started out by
saying, “For a brilliant person like you—”
She cut me o with a strange look. “Why did you say that. ” she
demanded. “What. ”
“That I’m brilliant. What makes you say that out of the blue. ”
“Well,” I explained, “it is obvious that you have more self-
awareness than ninety-nine percent of the people I deal with. ”
“How can you tell that after one meeting. ” she asked
suspiciously. I said I just could, and she let the matter drop. Half an
hour later, she interrupted  herself and asked, this time rather
timidly, “Do you really think I’m brilliant. ” I repeated that I did. Again, the matter was quickly dropped. When we met a few days
later, the rst words out of her mouth were “I’ve been thinking
about why you called me brilliant. ”
Then I couldn’t help but notice that my compliment held a special
charm for her. It was a token, not just of my respect, but of my
aection. By calling her brilliant, I had said, “I feel close to you. ”
Replaying the tapes, I nd that Karin also managed to call me
brilliant severa l times that day—apparently quite unconsciously—
and whenever she did, one heard a shy, embarrassed intimacy in her
voice. Why was this little game of emotional hide-and-seek so important
to her. I think  it’s because she nds it much easier to intellectualize
about feeling unreal than to openly express the much more
wrenching feeling of being lost. Before their emotions get covered
over with a thick coat of denial, many children feel lost, set apart. Karin reminds me of a wide-e yed child one might nd on the fringes
of a social gathering—a wedding reception, cocktail party, or
Thanksgiving reunion—peer ing at the adults like a fascinated
spectator at the zoo. What the child wonders at is quite ordinary and yet very
disturbing: the casual deception of daily life. Behind the words “I
love him” or “I love her” lie guarded feelings and secret betrayals. People who put on a show of generosity turn out to be secretly the
most selsh. Jealousy lurks under a smile. Children do not know
how to live this way, and Karin still doesn’t have the knack for it. From her perspective, other people are living securely inside a
shared reality,  while she is outside lookin g in—“I live in another
dimension,” she mourns. This persistent feeling of isolation makesthings very fearful for her. She has no security. The rest of us are at
home; she is the eternal stranger. Many sensitive  people feel this way. Wisdom and poetry can arise
from the situation as easily as anguish. But given how lonely such
people generally are, I can see why anguish is the most common
response. It is by relating to other people, after all, that most of us
manage to feel real in the rst place. Three years ago, Karin asserts, she felt completely normal and
connected—she is particularly adamant on that point. She was
thirty-one and had just decid ed to break up with a man whom she
had been seeing steadily for several years. “From the very beginning
of our relationship,” she said, “I knew that Rodney was not ‘the
one,’ but we cared for each other and really enjoyed each other’s
company. ” What made her nally break o with this man was her
decision to seek someone whom she really might want to marry. This reason satised her, and the breakup occurred without rancor. But Karin immediately starte d having doubts about what she had
done. She glossed over that part with me: “When Rodney and I
broke up, I felt a sudden sense of loss. I wondered if I had done the
wrong thing, if I should get back with him, you know, blah, blah,
blah. Then I went on with my life. ” Within a month after the
breakup, she met another man, a customer at her catering business. She fell deeply  in love with him and continues to say that their
relationship, which was brief but intense, was the closest she ever
came to marrying anyone. From the very outset, however, she knew
that his parent s, who were Orthodox Jews, strongly disapproved of
her because she was Catholic. “At rst it was okay, because I was
condent and elated, and I didn’t allow them to become involved in
my life. But after a certain amount of treatment that I considered
worse than torture. …”
Karin stopped speaking at that point. I gathered that there was a
tempestuous breakup and she had a “collapse” or “nervous
breakdown. ” Whether in fact she suered an actual psychosis is not
clear. She did develop a morbid fear of having AIDS. “Whenever I
gave blood I would shake like crazy. Three times they needed my
blood that year, and I was terried that I would be infected. ”Several times she called the local AIDS hotline in a panic, always to
be reassured that she had no real reason to be afraid (a fact
conrmed by all her blood tests). It was in the midst of this dicult period that she rst began to
feel unreal. She says that the sensation was quite new and
unexpected when it rst arrived. Never in her life had she ever had
the feeling of “being out of my body” or “having my awareness up
here” (holding her hand above her head). When I told her that many
people have similar feelings without being disturbed, she curtly
responded, “What does that matter if I still feel miserable. ”
I tend to believ e Karin when she says that she began to feel unreal
all of a sudden. On the other hand, I cannot buy her story that her
life was so perfect before “something happened. ” She has an
unshakable nostalgia for the past; it is the ip side of her refusal to
open herself to the present. She says that her only wish is to return
to the way she was three years ago, before the unfort unate love
aair. That period has become xed in her mind as a rapturous
ideal:
“I felt centered and relaxed then. I was condent, and I had a
purpose. I felt integrated: I had a relationship, I had money, I had
peace of mind. I felt good about what I did and was able to feel
humble about it. I felt I was on a nice road to growth. I felt like a
part of the universe, like I really wanted to be here. People looked
up to me, and I was able to make them feel good. ”
Karin has split time into then and now, the good and the bad,
with no gray in between. It is no wonder that her situati on ties her
in knots, because it cannot be resolved as she has set it up. On one
hand she has this need to make sure that the split in her life
continues (in order to preserve the myth of the perfect past she left
behind), while  on the other she longs to feel real again, which
would mean jumping back into the ow of things. For the time
being, clinging to her black-and-white view of the world feels like
the only safe course. Don’t Tell Me I’m Not CrazyKarin is surely  real; she has just had the misfortune to nd herself
moving from one level of reality to another, like an infant who one
day realizes that crawling, which he has thoroughly mastered, is
starting to give way to the uncertain prospect of learnin g to walk. Babies make this transition instinctively, and their parents guide
them over the rough spots with encouraging attention. But when an
adult psyche begins to test the possibility of a completely new
perspective, the transition period is fraught with diculty. There are no guidelines for “normal” experiences of a higher Self. The image we have of saints  suddenly pierced by a shaft of divine
light is far too simple; even the greatest spiritual attainments take
place within the limits of daily mental life, with its doubts, fears,
hopes, and denials. What people need is the same encouraging
attention that parents give to a wobbly toddler. Sadly, our society is
bereft in this area, and each of us has to row alone to the foreign
shore that is beckoning us across the waters. But what is even more disturbing is that the growing pains of self-
awareness might get mistaken for the goal. Karin was making this
mistake, and her self-doubt echoes a culture that feels profoundly
suspicious of spiritual exper iences. I am not just referr ing to the
accusations of insanity that surround anyone who breaks out of the
normal ways of thinking, seeing, and behaving—that problem exists
in all cultures, unfortunately. The deeper worry is that our society is
so fearful of the Self that we equate it with death and dissolution. When Freud was confronted  with the fact that every psyche has a
hidden longing for unboundedness, he coined the phrase “death
wish” or “Nirvana instinct”—the two were more or less the same in
his eyes. Nirvana is not death, however. It is a Sanskrit word for Being, the
primary state of the Self. By and large, psychiatry still ignores this
clarication, and the fear persists that total self-awareness is a kind
of annihilation. Irvin Yalom describes the moment when he had
brought one of his neurotic patients, after much struggle, to the
stage where he began to open up to self-awareness:It is the time when one stands before the abyss and decides
how to face the pitiless existential facts of life: death,
isolation, groundlessness, and meaninglessness. Of course,
there are no solutions. One has a choice only of certain
stances: to be “resolute,” or “engaged,” or courageously
deant, or stoically accepting, or to relinquish rationa lity
and, in awe and mystery, place one’s trust in the provide nce
of the Divine. To think that this is the long sought-for goal of therapy. It would
be kinder to believe that the patient had not yet begun. In fairness, I
should explain  that Yalom is an “existential” therapist, meaning that
his cornerston e belief is unbelief: life has no intrinsic meaning or
purpose other than the one created (through an arbitrar ily chosen
“stance”) by each person. Many, perhaps most, psychiatrists might agree that life’s
dilemmas have no solution, only they would not preface their
opinion with the words “of course. ” Outside the therapist’s oce,
lay people echo the same pessimistic world view, if not in so many
words, then in their endless search for pleasure and escape from
pain. Karin grew up with no better version of reality, so she resists
her “high awareness,” turns her back on insight, and longs to watch
TV with a beer on Saturday  night—anything but to see what she
actually sees and feel what she actually feels. When I tried to put her experiences in a good light, Karin turned
on me. “This standing outside myself all the time isn’t natural. People tell me that I’m functioning well, so what’s the problem. I
know I’m still functioning well, but I’m afraid. I have times when I
look at a calendar and think, ‘How can there be dates. What is
time. ’ The experience is too much. Am I insane. Luckily, someone
told me that you can’t go crazy after a certain age. …”
I respo nded with the strongest assurances I had yet given her,
“You’re not crazy. At all. You’re having experiences that you can’t
handle. They’re coming too fast. But they’re all right. What’s
happening to you isn’t completely healthy, because it causes youpanic, anxiety, and so on. Yet there is an element of witnessing here. Do you know what I’m saying. ”
“Um. If you remember that obsessive-compulsive doctor,” Karin
rejoined, “he saw everyone as obsessive-compulsive except himself. When I’m with you, I like talking to you, and I can see that you’re
used to conversing with minds far above mine, but you’re  trained to
look for this witnessing. Maybe you see my symptoms as opening up
a new avenue, but I see them as neurotic. ”
I imme diately backed o, waiting for things to happen naturally
and at their own pace. But I couldn’t help feeling sad that Karin is so
conditioned to see herself as “sick” rather than normal or even
gifted. She tosses around a good deal of unattering psychological
jargon to describe herself. At one point I was going to say, “I think
you’re really on to something. ” As soon as I said the words “I think
you’re,” she jumped in with “an acute schizophrenic. ” Finding a
satisfactory label is very important to her. At various times in our rst talk, which lasted less than an hour,
she also referred to herself as obsessive, neurotic, depressed,
anxious, insecu re, hyper, and crazy. Actually, her deep worry that
she might be insane is one of the surest signs that she is not. She
describes her symptoms with clarity and insight. She does not
hallucinate or have delusion al thoughts. I could even get her to
admit, grudgingly, that she sometimes feels pleasantly detached
from her symptoms and can see through them. This admission came
out when we talked about the ten doctors she had seen before me. “Ten specialist s each gave you ten dierent diagnoses, and each one
happened to be the diagnosis that he specializes in,” I said. “So what
does that tell you. ”
“That that is how they view it,” she replied evasively. “But what does that tell you about what you have. ” I insisted. “Well, it might tell me that they have seen these symptoms
before,” she said. “Maybe my need to go to ten dierent doctors is
obsessive. I could have all ten of those things or none of them. ”
“Which is it, do you think. ”
“Probably a combination, if that makes any sense. Obviously I
have anxiety, I have depression—I have what they term‘derealization. ’ On the other hand, sitting here now, I question
whether I have any of that. ”
If Karin had not made this last comment, I would concede that the
chances of turning her interpretation around would be remote—we
are lucky that she is not totally sold out to the idea of being sick. She is intelligent enough to pick out the weak points in even the
best doctors. “I told one therapist that when I was two I had a pet
ghost,” she said. “It was my imaginary friend. This psychi atrist said,
‘Well, no doubt that was your longing for a penis. ’ Now, at two
years old, who cares if it was or it wasn’t. I felt normal three years
ago, and I feel terrible now. ”
“Did you really have a pet ghost.
The author's approach is to not try to control or manipulate his thoughts, and the goal is to get the normal activity of the mind to turn into silence without coercion, in order to reveal the silent witness inside.
What is the author's approach to meditation, and what is the goal of this approach?
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What is the author's view on the idea of unconditional love, and how does he contrast it with the conventional understanding of love?
The story of Phillip highlights the importance of treating people with unconditional love and acceptance, without judgment or expectation. This is in contrast to the conventional understanding of love as a means to control or manipulate others.
What is the significance of the story about Phillip, the catatonic schizophrenic, and how does it relate to the concept of unconditional love?
The author believes that the self is not separate from the universe, but rather is a part of it, and that this is the true self. He contrasts this with the conventional view that the self is separate and must be protected and maintained.
What is the author's view on the relationship between the self and the universe, and how does he contrast it with the conventional view?
The author believes that unconditional love is a transcendental quality that can be achieved through meditation, and that it is not about trying to control or manipulate others, but rather about becoming one with the universe. He emphasizes that this is not about feeling a certain way or achieving a specific state, but rather about being in a state of unity and oneness with the universe.
What is the author's view on the concept of unconditional love and the relationship between the self and others?