It accompanied my steps to the very door of
the grocery, and if this was not strange enough, when I came out
fteen minute s later, it reappeared and followed me home again. What was I to think?”
Before I could respond, he rushed on. “No, wait. The next day I
went downtown to buy a portable typewriter, only to nd that the
price had gone up by twenty dollars since I had called in the
morning. I objected to the clerk and the store manager, but to noavail. Feeling intensely irrita ted, I bought the typewriter anyway, so
as not to waste the trip, and when I stepped outside the door, do
you know what was there?”
“A patch of sunlight,” I ventured. “A twenty-dollar bill, right at my feet!” Sidney proclaimed,
ignoring me. “Insignicant as these incidents may sound, I began to
feel increasingly funny about them.”
“Funny?”
“Yes—there was a certain tone to these incidents that I would
have to call playful , as if I was being shown a particularly amusing
trick by a clever child—no, by an intelligence I could n’t see or
contact. But let me go on. A week later I was riding alone in the car. It was after dark, and I was in the country, coming back from a
house I had never visited before. One winding rural road led to
another, and after half an hour I admitted to myself that I was
hopelessly lost. “The few houses I passed were all dark and I began to feel
anxious, when all at once my awareness was no longer inside my
head—it reach ed out in front of me, about the length of the car’s
headlights. Just as I noticed this phenomenon, a further expansion
took place, and my awarene ss now pooled out in all directions. It
was a very delicate feeling. How can I possibly describe it? I was
simply everywhere, and without thinking about it, I gave up driving
my car. I still held the wheel and pushed the pedals, but the feeling
of conscious eort was gone. I became this pool of awareness
gliding through the night, not caring where I was bound. “I arrived at crossroads and turned this way or that, apparently at
random, yet in ten minutes I came out onto the highway at precisely
the turno that led back home.”
“Would you call that an experience of your soul?” I asked
quizzically. “If the soul is our portion of an invisible world, then perhaps I
was projecting myself into the territory of the soul. My invisible
extension was alive, and it was undoubtedly me. Everything felt
vibrant in its presence—the car, the land, the sky. A scrap of verse
comes to mind—where’s it from? ‘The stars are wide and alive, theyseem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very
near.’ ”
“How do you feel now?”
“Not like that anymore. There’s been a change, a ripening. I
continue to be intensely conscious all the time, and as the days go
by, there is a sporadic ecstasy that comes over me. In those
moments, the quality of my life becomes sacred. Pardon me for
sounding so awkward; I am new at speaking like this.”
“I’m happy for you,” I said, and added, “You still seem like
yourself, if that is a worry. You’ve always known a lot about
yourself, and I’m not surprised that you are getting to know even
more.”
He gave me a grateful look. “I want to tell you about a very
unusual occurrence. Are you bothered by the idea of miracles?”
“I’m not sure. You implied something in that vein already, didn’t
you?”
“Yes, but you’ve looked into this area yourself?”
“I don’t  seek it out, but stories seem to come my way. I’ve met
people who tell me in all condence that they used to y as
children. They oated down the staircase when no one else was at
home and left their dolls on top of tall wardrobes, which mystied
their parents. Then one day they told Mommy their secret, only to
be assured that ying was impossible. After that, the ability
disappeared. “Of course ying is a very extraordinary claim,” I said, “but quite
a lot of people seem to irt with unusual powers. They can visualize
lost objects and go right to them if they really need to. They answer
other people’s thoughts befor e they are spoken. In a haphazard way,
most of us can foretell the future, although our correct predictions
remain mixed up with assorted projections from our unconscious
minds, wish fulllments and false premonitions. I wouldn’t feel
comfortable saying where ordinary life leaves o and miracles
begin.”
Sidney seemed relieved, but when he started speaking again, it
was with marked hesitancy. “My nights have been sleepless
recently, not from anxiety but because I seem to be—w hat shall Isay?—lled with light. The pressure of ecstasy makes me get up and
walk around restlessly; some times I put on my coat and go out into
the street. Would you believe it, I dance to the moon! I was in this
heightened state one night when I ran across a bedraggled woman
lying on the sidewalk near my home. She was asleep, rolled up in a
lthy blanket, and I heard her mumbling, ‘Mother, Mother, Mother.’
“It was very pitiable, and intuitively I had no doubt that like
many homeless people, she was mentally ill. Her voice sounded
desperately crazy; it carried  such an intensity of suering that I
couldn’t bear it, yet at the same time I felt more ecstatic than ever. I
leaned down and gently woke her up. She looked at me, frightened,
but she didn’t pull away. Without knowing why, I told her, ‘You
don’t have to suer anymore.’
“ ‘What?’ she said, completely bewildered. “ ‘I’m here to help you,’ I said. ‘You’re not crazy anymore, are
you?’ She was taken aback, and yet there was a sane look in her
eyes that I am sure was new. She shook her head, as if to make sure
of what was inside, and didn’t say anything. ‘Tell me,’ I insisted, ‘do
you still feel crazy?’ In a quiet, normal voice she replied, ‘No.’
“ ‘Look, ’ I said, ‘I don’t know why this is happening, but let’s just
say you are very fortunate. You’re going to be all right from now
on.’ ” Sidney stopped. “This really happened to you?” I said, amazed. He nodded. “But
can you really be sure she was cured? It does sound like a manic
episode on your part, you must know that.”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I cannot prove anything, and it wasn’t
possible at the time for me to analyze what was taking place
between the two of us. My heart started pounding, and I felt an
overpowering urge to run away. I heard the woman call after me,
‘What kind of person are you?’ But by that time I was halfway down
the block; ve minutes later I was back in bed, shivering. I’ve never
seen her again.”
Invisible PowersI have no proof that Sidney’s experiences are true, or even sane. He still seems balanced to me: his personality has not been thrown
into shock or disarray by his “miracles.” As he talks he does not
oat in the clouds of grandiosity, nor has he suered from the
backlash of depression and disillusionment that typically follows an
episode of mania. The fact that he is trying to integrate these
remarkable happenings into a new view of himself reassures me,
because that means they have been nourishing rather than
destructive. However, the backlash may be just around the corner. It is
dangerous to rush into a wonder world. At best, people like Sidney
are jewels without a setting, as Maharishi once called them. That is
to say, they lack a context that will make sense of the
transformation they have gone through. I can understand why
Sidney calls his strange episo des “miracles,” but he has lapsed into a
conventional religious vocab ulary for want of a clearer  and more
precise one. He needs new words, and with them, he needs
explanations that apply directly to his situation. In this light, it is not all that important to decide whether I
“believe” in Sidney’s story or not. Other people’s revelations are
unshareable to begin with. If I stood beside Sidney while he was
simply gazing at a daodil, his perception would be just as
ephemeral, unreachable, and private as anything he told me about. The critical thing for each of us is to understand our own
revelations. The rst step, I think, is to dispel the aura of wonderworking that
surrounds the unfoldment of higher states of consciousness. A
disciple once complained to his guru, “If you are enlightened, why
don’t you perform miracles to prove it?” The guru answered,
“Because there are no miracles, unless you consider all of life a
miracle. I am beyond miracles. I am normal.”
Isn’t that the wisest perspecti ve? Human awareness has never lost
its capacity to open up into the invisible world, and we can be
certain that a farmer in the time of Zoroaster looked up at the stars,
suddenly near and alive and smiling, with the same awe as Sidney. When you point out to someone that he is not the rst person toenter a state of grace, the news comes as a great disappo intment at
rst—in our heart of hearts , we all hunger for the uniqueness of
sainthood. But on sober reection, people who experience wonders
are very relieved to know that they are not alone. Indeed, to nd
that there is a magnicent, broad, endless river of spirit running
through the tumult of human existence brings tremendous joy. “Should I try to encourage these experiences?” Sidney asked at
one point, “or should I turn my back on them? They are incredibly
seductive, and yet, I can see that they might be too alluri ng. I could
plunge into complete fantasy. Who knows, I may already be there.”
“No, you’re not lost in fanta sy,” I said. “You are walkin g a ne
line that your past experience has not prepared you for at all.” I
urged him to stop hanging out in mental space by himself; he
needed a safety net. The entire range of spiritual experiences has
been catalogue d and analyzed in the ancient traditions of wisdom. The Vedic rishis stand as the most authoritative commentators,
being the most ancient, but any continuous, living spiritual tradition
has one great advantage—i t provides a map of the journey and
identies the destination. The reason this is so importa nt is that an experience of healing or
communion or expansion is usually part of a larger journey as well,
pointing the person toward  an unseen goal. The ecsta sy of one
miracle is nothing compared to the ecstasy of complet e spiritual
transformation. This perspective makes all the dierenc e between
growth and chaos. Instead of drifting from one experience to
another, one sights a purpose—a higher state of consciousness—and
aims for it. The Vedic seers were unwavering in their belief that
fulllment is the natural tendency of life. Growth, evolution, the
bewildering activity of the mind are not chaotic. They are trying to
break out of the nite and into the innite. Without apply ing any kind of esoteric terminology, we can say
that for Sidney, reality is widening, breaking out of the usual
patterns that bolster our sense of what is acceptable and tolerable. Even to bend these boundaries can create a feeling of vertigo, as if
the ground itself and not just our assumptions was being cut out
from under us.One time a young patient entered my oce with the startling
words “Namaste kya hal hai, Doctor  sahib?”  It would not be at all
startling for an Indian to say, “Greetings, doctor, how are you?” but
this man had blue eyes and curly blond hair. “Where did you learn to speak Hindi so well?” I asked curiously. “You hardly have any accent at all.”
“I picke d it up in New Delhi, ” he replied. “I was at Hindu College
for a while, and I was born and raised in Kashmir.” I accepted this
explanation, and we went into his medical complaint, which was
minor. After writing out a prescription, I was about to close his le
when I noticed that it read, “Place of birth: Santa Barbara, Calif.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t you say you were born in
Kashmir?”
“That’s right.”
“But your chart says you were born in Santa Barbara.”
“I should have explained,” he murmured without missing a beat,
“I was born in Kashmir last time.”
“Oh. Is that also when you learned Hindi?”
“Right.” His tone of voice remained blandly matter-of-fact. My
rst instinct was to keep asking him questions to see if he would
give me a few overt signs of mental disturbance. “I notic e that you work as a bartender at a hotel down town,” I
said. “That’s not a very pure place, I mean for someone who is
sensitive enough to remember his past lives.”
“I know,” he sighed, “but I stay there out of nostalgia. It reminds
me of the ocer’s mess at Mhow.” Mhow was one of the most
famous military outposts established by the British in central India. It is still so large that most Indian army ocers can count on being
stationed there at least once in their careers. “You remember Mhow, too?” I asked. “Sure,” he said cheerfully, “that’s where I was killed.” We
continued to chat amiably in this vein, as if nothing unusual was
going on, and after a few minutes I reluctantly let him go. At the
time, I felt guilty that I hadn ’t injected him with 100 milligrams of
Thorazine to calm his hallu cinations before committing him to a
psychiatric ward. Now I nd it dicult to separate his strangenessfrom my own discomfort, which was making him seem strange. It is
a mark  of our times that all manner of “impossible” things are
surfacing before our very eyes, like ancient sea creatures that were
given up as extinct but were only sleeping in the depths. What we can hope to do is to clarify where these reemerging
experiences actually originate. There is an age-old tendency for
humans to look outside them selves whenever the everyday logic of
the world crumbles. One day there is ecstasy where none existed
before. Who could cause such a drastic transformation but a divine
agent located in the realm of heaven? Heaven and earth come closer
together, however, through the physicist’s concept of the quantum
eld. There is no such thing as being outside the eld looking in,
whether it be God looking down on man or man up to God. We are
all part of the eld; the eld is existence itself, owing in, around,
and through everything. It is the arena where all possibilities unfold. The eld is omnipresent and omnipotent. It invisibly unites two
quarks that are light-years apart; it blends individual and cosmic
existence, the natural and the supernatural. When their awareness
was fully expanded, the ancient rishis were able to declare, echoing
Lord Krishna, “I am the eld.” They saw that their own individual
consciousness was identical to the consciousness that upholds the
universe. They were conferring the quality of omniscienc e upon the
eld—and that gives pause. In the West, to be all-know ing is an
attribute exclu sive to God, unless you accept that the eld is a
proper home for the divine. But why shouldn’t it be? The idea that the sacred is outside us makes no sense in quantum
terms, because it takes our participation to construct all experience,
from the sacred to the profane. When my father was stationed at the
big army cantonment at Jabalpur in central India, Prime Minister
Nehru came for a one-day visit. It was the early Fifties, and Nehru
was considered the savior of India by us and everyone we knew. The
whole town poured out to greet him. People milled as thick as ants
as far as you could see. Men climbed trees to catch a glimpse of
Nehru’s open jeep trundling through the street, and agile little boys
lled the top branches.I was just seven and had no clear idea why my father and mother
were standing there, mute members of a silence so loud that it was
nearly deafening. But I am quite clear that the crowd was silent, and
as Nehru approached, standing up on the back seat of the jeep with
a rose in his hand, a wave of reverential awe swelled before him. My mother began crying, and as fate would have it, Nehru threw his
rose almost at her feet. No one ran forward. The silence endured,
and my mother slowly walked over and bent to gather her ower. The next day people came to our house to see the rose in its silver
vase, and without fail they could not speak when they laid eyes on
it. What I know now is that their exalted feelings came from an inner
source, not solely from Nehru, perhaps not at all from him. The
crowd participated in a collective reality; they felt an emotion and
let it sprout into independent existence, until it resided  even in a
casually tossed  ower. This does not make their sacred feeling
unreal, far from it. Whenever a ow of consciousness moves up from
the depths of the human spirit, great transformations can occur with
dramatic speed . Tearing down the Berlin wall signaled a new rise of
freedom that was taking place among nations. But what is a nation
except a collection of individuals? Politics is what happens “out
there” in response to shifting mental events “in here.” The Berlin
wall rst had to come down inside people’s awareness before it
could come down physically. We do not think of political change in this way mainly  because
people are not generally united in their inner perspective. Sometimes, however, a surge of consciousness carries everyone
along. Gandhi  inspired millions of Indians to gather silently as a
means of protesting British rule; they did not do anything other than
stand or sit together for a time, yet that in itself created a sort of
witness very like the silent witness I tell my patients about. Just to
look at your enemy in peace creates a huge moral eect, because he
sees himself in your eyes. The silent witness reects the truth that
he must come to terms with in the end. I do not want to equate collective consciousness only with
emotions or morality; rather, it is the mind we all share beneath thesupercial layer of our indiv idual minds. This shared mind creates
our shared world. Therefore, the world is a map of all that people
agree to be real, with the exclusion of all that they agree to be
unreal. The reason that seemingly impossible things are surfacing
again in our culture after their long sleep is that our collective
consciousness has agreed to let them in. A deep censoring
mechanism is losing its powe r over us. When the censor is abolished
altogether, there will be no limit to what can be allowed in, for at
the level of the eld, all possibilities exist in unmanifest form. “You are the sole cause of everything in creation,” a guru assured
his disciples. “All is because you are.” The statement reeks of the
worst arrogance if we claim that the Big Bang needed our blessing
before it could happen. I don’t think that is what the guru was
saying. He meant that human consciousness and cosmic
consciousness are one. The eld dances and waits for us to join it. It
constantly folds and refolds itself, like an innite wool blanket
tumbling in a dryer at innit e speed. Under these conditions, every
point in the universe is everywhere at once, sharing in the
omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience of the whole eld. Everyone has a right, then, to consider himself the center of the
cosmos, holding untold powers in his hands. What the Twins Could Do
Any ability to command nature is called a siddhi  in Sanskrit. The
word means “power,” and it refers to powers that have been
perfected in consciousness. Healing the sick is a siddhi, and like the
supernatural feats that yogis are supposed to be able to perform—
ying through  the air, turning invisible, reading the past and future
—the key to mastery is a shift in awareness. A person  suddenly
knows how to do something  impossible, as simply and easily as I
know how to lift my arm. A shift in awareness does not require force. A person who has
achieved the level of consci ousness where siddhis are natural can
breathe change into things as softly as you or I wish and dream,
using no more energy than it takes to stir a thought. The basicprinciple here is that reality is dierent in dierent states of
consciousness. If I see a tree in my dreams, I can jump over it or
make it turn blue or y over it into the sky. What gives me such
powers is the dream state. If I had no other state of awareness to
compare it to, the dream state would constitute the only reality I
know and accept as valid. On waking up, I nd that I cannot jump over a tree anym ore, but
why not? According to the rishis, what holds me back is not the tree
but the arriva l of waking-state consciousness. It has propelled me
into a world that obeys dierent laws of nature . “You think that a
dream tree is inside your head,” a rishi might argue, “while a real
tree is outside you. But this notion can only occur to you after you
wake up. As long as you are in your dream, the tree seems to be
outside you, just as it is in a waking state. In truth, what you take to
be the only ‘real’ tree should be called a waking-state tree. If you
cannot jump over it, perhaps you need to wake up from waking. Then you would discover that this tree, too, was in your head.”
A siddhi seems particularly  amazing when it crops up among
people whose minds lack ordinary abilities, much less extraordinary
ones. In his much-praised essay “The Twins,” Oliver Sacks describes
two brothers, identical twins , who were able to perform prodigious
feats of mental calculation, despite the fact that they repeatedly
tested with IQs no higher than sixty. When Sacks rst met them in
1966, the twins were in their mid-twenties and already mildly
famous. In appearance they resembled a grotesque Tweedledum and
Tweedle-dee—equally rotun d, with thick glasses, bobbing heads,
rolling eyes, and various uncontrollable tics and twitches. Although the twins lived in a private mental world closed to
outsiders, Sacks found them pathetically eager to launch into one of
their “routines”:
The twins say, “Give us a date—any time in the last or next
forty thousand years.” You give them a date, and, almost
instantly, they tell you what day of the week it would be. “Another date!” they cry, and the performance is repeated. They will also tell you the date of Easter during the sameperiod of 80,000 years.… Their memory for digits is
remarkable—and possibly unlimited. They will repeat a
number of three digits, of thirty digits, of three hund red
digits, with equal ease. The literature on idiot savants is vast; the twins’ astonishing
talents do not make them unique. Instead, they fall into the well-
studied class of “mental calculators,” which includes people, both
retarded and normal, who can recite from memory the number p to
3,000 decimal places, or tell you how many cubic inches there are
in a solid measuring 7,345,278 yards on one side and 5,478,234
yards on the other. (One eight-year-old savant was posed such a
problem and instantly replied , “Do you want the answer backwards
or forwards?”)
But, to my knowledge, Sacks is the rst observer who had the
insight that the twins were not calculating at all—they were seeing
numbers. Their minds rumm aged in the land of numerals the same
way we rummage for old faces in our memories, but with amazing
precision, clarity, and speed. The argument Sacks makes is simple. On their own, the twins could not perform basic arithmetic. Adding
four plus four baed them, and it was only after years of training
that they could reliably make change in order to ride the bus. The
standard explanation for “calendar idiots” is that they have
memorized a shortcut, a special mathematical formula or algorithm,
that is programmed to give dates without the calculator  having to
run through the calendar year by year. This is how one would
program a computer to name the date of Easter over a period of
80,000 years. But is it really possible, Sacks wonders, for the twins to calculate
at all, even using a shortcut, when they cannot add simple numbers? On the other hand, their ability to visualize had been proven over
and over. If you named any day in their lives after the age of four,
they could tell you the weather, the incidents occurring around
them, and the important political events on that day. Sacks also took
careful clinical note of the look on their faces when they were
coming up with their extraordinary answers: “Their eyes x andmove in a peculiar way as they do this, as if they were unrolling, or
scrutinizing, an inner landscape.”
This look of “seeing,” complete with eyes rolled upward and a
at, monotono us delivery of the answer, as if reciting from a
printout, may seem similar to the look of someone who is mentally
calculating, but how could one account for two other facts? First,
the twins could “see” prime numbers that were ten and even twenty
digits long. Thirty years ago, extracting very long prime numbers
was a laboriou s feat even for the largest mainframe computers, and
there was no known shortcu t. Yet here were the twins, giggling in
their corner, extracting such long primes that Sacks could not check
them in a standard mathematical reference book. Even more mysteriously, it was observed that only one of the
twins had been fascinated by numbers at rst, early in childhood,
and later had somehow passed on his prodigious talents, with no
loss of accuracy, to his broth er. Duplicate masters in every way, the
twins sat for hours in a corner by themselves, murm uring long
strings of numerals and gurgling with shared delight over some
arcane nd that no one else could comprehend. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the twins in fact possessed
a siddhi, one well known in ancient India, called Jyotish Mati Pragya
—the ability to see into the light. At a subtle level, the rishis say,
everything is made of light; light is the nest level of appearance
before creation dissolves into pure consciousness. By some means or
other, the twins attuned their minds to this level of awareness. And
they appeared to know that this was what they were doing. Sacks
writes, “If you ask them how they can hold so much in their minds
—a three-hundred-gure digit, or the trillion events of four decades
—they say very simply, ‘We see it.’ ”
The twins’ methods give us a model for how siddhis work in
general. A siddhi is a ment al ability, no dierent from ordinary
thinking except that it runs deeper. One has to go right to the edge
where pure consciousness is about to emerge into its created forms. To put it in the language of physics, a local intention begins to have
nonlocal results. Instead of being conned inside my skull, mydesire to see a twenty-digit prime number radiates into the eld,
and the eld brings back the answer. It is not “me,”  in the most local sense, who has worked  out the
solution. The eld is acting upon itself, folding question and answer
together until they meet in time and space. My role is simply to
issue the orders, leaving the eld to compute, instantly and
automatically, whatever result I want. The secret to any siddhi is
that you tap into the cosm ic computer using the brain as your
keyboard. Siddhis can come spontaneously, as happened to the twins, but
more often they have to be cultivated. The rst stage is meditation,
which brings the mind into the transcendent; the second stage is to
hold onto the transcendent while thinking a specic thought. This
sounds like a complete contradiction, and it is. The transcendent by
denition is silent and void of thoughts. But the rishis discovered
centuries ago that a person can entertain two states of awareness at
the same time. A siddh i throws together everyday awareness with transcendent
awareness, and when the two are completely blended, nature begins
to respond to one’s most casual desires as commands. In itself, this
is a wondrous development, but it serves a higher end, which is to
rob ordinary reality of its power to keep people ensnared. This is
always the aim of Yoga in all its phases. “Once you realize that the
world is your own projection , you will be free of it,” a guru told his
followers. “Everything existing around you is painted on the screen
of your consciousness. The picture you see may be ugly or beautiful,
but in either case you are not bound by it. Rest assured, there is no
one who has forced it on you. You are trapped only becau se of your
habit of mistaking the imaginary for the real.”
This is how reality appears from a higher state of consciousness. The siddhis are an essential part of reaching such a state, a stepping-
stone. They allow us to exper iment with the world illusion. A friend
recently told me this story: “Several years ago I took my car on a
camping trip through the Far West. One morning in Montana I woke
up thinking how splendid it would be to see a rainbow. Not that I
had much hope for one—the  day was dark and overcast. We startedclimbing a high mountain pass near Glacier Park that was shrouded
in mists. Suddenly, the mists parted, moved aside by invisible
stagehands, and a glorious rainbow connected two peaks directly in
front of me, as if the gods had fashioned a sparkling bridge of light. “It was a dazzl ing sight and an interesting coincidence. We moved
down the Rockies to Wyoming, and the next day I saw an
impressive rainbow in the Tetons, leaping down into the waters of
Jackson Lake. Another rainb ow appeared the following day in the
Green Mountains, another near Aspen the day after that. This went
on for six days. On the seventh I found myself deep in a desert
canyon in Utah. There had been no rain for weeks; the July sky was
broiling hot and completely free of clouds. Around noon I looked up
and saw an impossible vision, a small but vivid rainbow arching
over the narrow white sandstone arroyo we had camped in. What
could have caused it? “I am not the kind of person who jumps to miraculous
conclusions, and a few days later a park ranger told me about an
interesting phenomenon: If the sun is hot enough, its heat can cause
a temperature inversion over the desert. Humidity rising up from
the canyons remains trapped  by the cooler air above, and at times
there are enough water droplets in a thin layer over the canyon rim
to create a rainbow. So in the end, there was a natural explanation
for everything I had seen. Nature herself had the means to make
rainbows. Yet I am left believing that she also has the means to
make them when and where I want.”
The Mind of the Fire
The rishis felt completely comfortable with a quantum fact, that
our solid world is basically built up from vibrations in empty space. However, we are not yet comfortable with a Vedic fact, that this
space that permeates everything is intelligent. It is Chit Akasha , or
“mind space.” Mind space is inside our heads and gives rise to
thought “in here,” but it exists outside our heads as well. Nietzsche
oered a remark that challen ges Western logic to the core when hesaid, “All philo sophy is based upon the premise that we think, but it
is equally possible that we are being thought.”
Because our conventional system of logic holds that thinking is
always interna l, we do not see the natural processes takin g place all
around us as a kind of thinking, but that is just a cultura l bias. We
could see Chit Akasha everyw here, and if we did, we would realize
that everything in nature is a transformation of mind space from
one guise to another. The rocks, mountains, oceans, and galaxies are
constantly being thought, just as much as we. To give a concrete example, there is the phenom enon of
rewalking, which caught the popular imagination as a fad several
years ago, but which has persisted in various traditional cultures as
a main stay of spiritual experience for centuries. Anthropologist
Loring Danforth’s Firewalking and Religious Healing  is a fascinating
account of one of these rewalking cults, the Anastenaria in
northern Greece. No one knows how the cult began. One legend holds that a raging
re broke out in the village church at Kosti in eastern Thrace untold
centuries ago. Bystanders heard loud cries coming from inside the
empty building . Amazed, they realized that it was the painted icons
of Saint Constantine and his mother, Saint Helen, who were calling
to be rescued. A few courage ous villagers recklessly rushed into the
re, and when they emerged with the icons in their arms, neither
they nor the saints had been harmed. In memory of this miracle, the devotees of Saint Constantine
celebrate his name day, May 21, by walking into a pit of burning
coals, and not just walking: they perform a stomping dance on the
red-hot cinders, holding aloft icons of the two saints. Perhaps a
hundred devout rewalkers , called Anastenarides, are scattered
throughout a few villages in northern Greece; almost all of them
trace their roots back to Kosti. To show  their unshakable faith and their contempt for the re,
the Anastenaria dancers pick up glowing embers, smashing them
into a shower of sparks with their bare hands. One devotee named
Stephanos spent ve months mesmerized before his home re,
putting out the live coals with his hands hour after hour until hismother begged him to stop, for fear that she would not have any re
left for baking her family’s bread. Without their religious faith, the Greek rewalkers are certain
that they would be burned. They each “belong to the saints,” having
surrendered themselves to divine authority in exchange for their
extraordinary powers. Walking into the re sets a person aside from
normal society  for the rest of his life; he is said to have an open
road, which means that the saints can guide him anywhere they
choose. One of the rewalkers is a peasant farmer named Mihalis. He
recounted how he feels durin g his ery dance: “If you have an open
road, then you don’t feel the re as if it were your enemy. You feel
as if it were your husband or your wife. You feel love for the re;
you have courage. What you see isn’t a mountain; it’s nothing. That
way you go in freely. But if you go in of your own will, then you
have fear and doubt. It seem s like an enemy, like a mountain. If
your courage is from the Saint, then you really want to go into the
re. The power comes from outside. You’re a dierent person.”
At the outset of this book I mentioned that some paranoiacs can
no longer draw the line between their own mind and God’s. In their
madness, these people take personal responsibility for averting wars
and natural disasters. Mihalis and his cohorts are caught in a similar
confusion, but from the opposite pole. They cannot accept that their
power to walk on re is personal, or even specically human. They
insist that it must come from God, through the saints’ intercession. It
would be inexplicable to them if someone walked on the coals
without being devout. In fact such a person appeared in their midst. In 1985 a tall,
smiling, handsome American arrived on Saint Constantine’s feast
day in the village of Langadas, where the Anastenaria rite is
performed. At a restaurant he showed around a photograph of
himself rewal king in Oregon, and he was immediately permitted to
join the local ceremony. The year before, an Italian spectator had
attempted to enter the re and had been severely burned. The Greek
rewalkers took this as conrmation that one cannot defy the re
without the saints.But this year’s visitor was something no one had ever seen, a
rewalk instructor. Outside the conned world of the Anastenaria
cult, rewalking had become a star turn in the human potential
movement, with rewalk “seminars” being held every  weekend
throughout the West Coast. In its New Age guise, walking into the
re was a form of psychotherapy. It was considered a liberating
experience, perhaps endow ed with spiritual overtones but not
narrowly religious. Therefore, when the visitor, named Ken Cadigan,
entered the Anastenaria re, two worlds collided. At rst there was no open conict. “Ken managed to make his
way through the crowd to the site of the rewalk togethe r with the
Anastenarides,” Danforth writes. “He danced around the re with
them for a few minutes. Then, after [their leader] Stamatis crossed
the re, Ken went across too. He was dressed in white and held his
hands high over his head. ‘I didn’t have the dance down  right,’ he
said. ‘I just went boogying across.’ ”
We do not know what went through the minds of the Greek
rewalkers, but a sinister gesture ensued. “After Ken crossed the re
two or three times,” Danfor th writes, “he saw Stamatis motion to
another Anast enaris to take Ken through the re with him. The
Anastenaris grabbed him by the arm, but Ken broke free. He went
back into the re again, and this time he stayed in for a long time;
he really danced  in the coals. Just then the Anastenaris grabbed his
arm a second time, held him in the re, and stepped on his foot.…
Ken broke free again and left the re.”
The local crowd had been cheering for the tall stranger, and
several reporte rs now besieged him with questions. How did he
walk on re without being a devotee? Had he been burned at the
end? Cadigan joked about the incident and refused to attribute any
malice to the man who had accosted him. Privately, however, he
was sure that the Anastenaris had pushed him into the coals hoping
he would be burned. In fact, he had been. One of the peculiarities of rewalking is that belief plays such a
critical part in it. A skeptic can enter the re one step behind a
believer, and only the skeptic will be burned. An experienced
rewalker can be distracted by someone shouting at him from thesidelines and suddenly get burned also. Since the re is the same
temperature for all (hot enough to sear esh in a matter of seconds),
one is convinced that awareness must be playing a crucial role. There are reports of people who have been severely burned when
they rashly stepped onto the coals despite an inner voice that tried
to halt them with a sharp warning of “Don’t do this!” At the same
sessions, other s have walked in without harm. There is no scientic
explanation for what causes these variances, or for that matter, for
how the feat of rewalking is accomplished. In this instance, when
Cadigan was drawn into the ugly mood of his assailant, he lost his
power to remain unharmed. Danforth notes that even though
Cadigan’s burns went deep enough to expose the nerves in his foot,
he felt no pain either on the re or afterward. As he gathered his data, Danforth moved among the
Anastenarides, who buzzed with talk after the American left. Quickly and reexively the Greek rewalkers retreated into
rationalization: they claimed that their visitor had walked too
quickly across the coals, that he had not really danced, that he had
left the ceremony early because he had been burned. In this way the
cultists retained their ties to the saints and their exclusive right to
an open road. Yet the main theme of their spiritual life—acquiring power and
freedom in the re—is the same espoused by New Age practitioners. “You are burne d by fear, not by re” is a popular sentiment among
American rewalkers. In both camps the re is a symbol for inner
barriers that one must break through in order to prove that reality is
more than the senses perceive. But we have to probe deeper and
ask, “What is the link between the subjective world of the re
walker and the burning coals?”
The rewalker thinks  he can enter the re safely, and therefore he
can. His thought causes the re to become harmless, which implies
that the re understands  him. The Greek rewalker s accept this
assumption: they frequently say that the re beckons them. They
know to walk onto the coals only after the re says “yes.” It is
dicult to avoid the conclusion that the re is in fact intelligent.If the idea of intelligent re is too shocking, we could say that one
continuous eld of mind-stu links the rewalker and the re. When a person thinks, that is one vibration in the eld; when the
re cools down, that is another. So it is all eld speakin g to eld,
without any mystery to it. Mihalis does not really walk into the re;
he walks into the outskirts of his own mind. Two Fullnesses
It is hard to deny that our reality remains stubbornly intact
because our logic is stubbornly rational, geared solely to the events
of the waking state. A dreamer can y because defying gravity in a
dream is just a matter of altering one’s brain wave patterns:
everything that occurs in a dream, no matter how bizarre , is clearly
self-generated. Yet the same holds true in waking state, with a
dierence. Sitting in my chair this minute, I might think,  “I want to
y,” and nothing will happen. I lack the power of a dream er, or so it
seems, and the reason, I tell myself, is that certain laws of nature
have been set aside out of my control, gravity being a prominent
example. However, the rishis would argue that this setting aside is itself a
human act. What holds me down to earth is not the fact that gravity
is a law of nature. It is the choice  of laws that happen to be in eect. When a person has reached a higher state of consciousness, he
realizes that such choices are always being made and can also be
unmade. For every natural law that holds me down in my chair,
another, still asleep in the eld, would allow me to y. Gaining the siddhis means gaining freedom of choice. The rishis
say, “ Purnam adah, purnam idam,”  which means, “This is full, that is
full.” The word this signies the manifest reality  I see all around me;
the word that signies the unseen world of the transcendent, the
world of Being, the eld. Both worlds are full—i.e., innit e—and if I
do not like the natural laws that trap me here, I can nd alternatives
inside the eld. I don’t have to defy the current set of laws, but only
wake up a new one. This is how re can be convincingly hot at one
time and cold the next.The doctrine of “This is full, that is full” causes the yogi to declare
that nature is perfect. He is not referring to the picture that reality
presents today , nor is he glossing over the gross imperfe ctions that
create suerin g. The cruelty and violence we see in our world
cannot be called perfect by any means. But another kind of world is
also available, at the touch of Being, and that fact overrid es the evil
we are witness  to in daily life. Nature is perfect because it contains
all possibilities. We are just beginning to abandon a fragmented view of Nature in
favor of a comprehensive vision of the whole. Seventy years ago the
great quantum physicists of Einstein’s generation postulated that
“local reality” was a dubiou s proposition. “Local reality”  is a term
that describes separate events leading independent lives in time and
space. An atom  of oxygen on Mars is local because it has nothing to
do with an atom of oxygen  on Venus, just as a suering man in
China has nothing to do with me. On the human level, this
arrangement has never seemed satisfactory, because in sympathy I
do suer with the man in China. Before the advent of quantum  theory, the same could not be said
of two atoms. In order for them to be in sympathy, one would have
to negate the millions of miles of void that separate them. Common
sense says that emptiness is empty; by denition it cannot have
anything in it. Today, howe ver, it is known from radio  telescope
observation that the universe has organized itself along orderly lines
across vast distances. Stars at one end of the cosmos obey the same
structural laws and pass through the same life stages as those at the
other end. It can also be proved in the laboratory that certain
elementary particles are paired like twins (according to a principle
called “spin type”), and a change of spin in one is instantly matched
by an equal but opposite change in its mate, whatever the distance
between them. They are connected by a telephone wire that
happens to be made of nothing. Such strange behavior dees  ordinary logic. It has led physicists
to say that the quantum realm is not only stranger than we think but
stranger than we can think. The rishi disagrees. To him, a quantum
and a thought are remarkabl y alike. The eeting, invisible impulsesof the mind can turn into concrete, locatable neurotransmitter
molecules like dopamine and serotonin. Where can you stand to
watch an emotion turn into a molecule? Nowhere—you cannot see
or touch  an emotion; you can barely pin it down in time, and it has
no home in space whateve r. Molecules can be objectively seen,
stored, and manipulated. They are easier to deal with than
emotions, and therefore scientists always assume that the reality of
molecules should be the benchmark, while the reality of emotions is
somehow inferior. In the quantum world this situation changes. A quantum  event is
also invisible, eeting, and unpredictable, just like our thoughts. Before the sun throws out light, where is the light? Photons come
out of nowhere; they cannot  be stored. They can barely be pinned
down in time and have no home in space whatever (that is, light
occupies no volume and has no mass). The similarity between a
thought and a photon is very deep. Thinking is a quantum activity, which is why it permi ts us to
control the laws of nature. Because he is enlightened, a rishi does
this far better than I do, but I am not without talent. Consider the
calcium that builds a femur, clavicle, or any other bone. The
calcium in my body is not xed in place but constantly owing. It
moves from bone to bone as need dictates (when you wear a new
pair of shoes long enough, for example, your leg bones change their
inner structure to adjust to your new gait). Calcium also moves out
of our bones into the blood, and my skin and urine are sloughing
calcium into the world while I take in new quantities through food. I contro l this constant ow with great precision, even though I am
unaware of how I do that. The white clis of Dover, which are made of calcium carbonate,
could be enter ing my bones today, via the sheep that graze on their
slopes and then go to market. At every step of the way, from cli to
grass to sheep to lamb roast to blood and nally to bone, the
calcium atoms  remain unchanged. I don’t resemble a cli or a
sheep, however, because once the calcium enters me, it must be
transformed. It suers a sea change into me, a complex structure of
intelligence. This change occurs at the quantum level, whereeverything in creation is given its identity. Even as the calcium ies
in and out, circulating in me like leaves in the wind, I remain
myself, solidly structured in my quantum mechanical body. I have read that with every  breath one breathes, one takes in
several million atoms breathed out by Christ, Buddha, Confucius,
and every other luminary who ever lived (there is plenty of room for
this, since we breathe in 1022 oxygen atoms at a time, or 10
followed by 21 zeros). Also, a few millionths of every breath I inhale
today left the lungs of a peasant in China yesterday; his exhalation
takes barely twenty-four hours to travel halfway around the globe
and mix into my local atmosphere. This is a marve lous fact, but more marvelous is that I do not turn
into Christ, Buddha, or a Chinese peasant. My identity is grounded
in the eld, and when raw matter enters me, I stamp it with my
inuence. If I turn afraid, so does my calcium; when I die, I release
my calcium to freedom before another mind captures it again. In
this way, local mind and universal mind are constantly cooperating. What the rishis saw so clearly was that the quantum eld is a
creative source  for each person to play in, like a mud bank waiting
for a child to make mud pies, mud dolls, or mud houses. You cannot
see any objects  in the featureless mud, and yet in a sense all objects
have the potential to be in it. The most famous sentence in the
Upanishads declares, “I am That, thou art That, and all this is That.”
A quantum physicist could not quibble with these assertions, once
he translated the word “That” as “the eld.”
Despite the innite power and vastness of the eld, it doesn’t take
a great leap to command it—we do that every time we have a
thought. But to gain real mastery, to make our deepest desires come
true, we must commit ourselves to reach a higher state of
consciousness. Like any force in nature, the force of awareness can
be weak or strong. It is strongest in people whose minds are
identied with the eld, weakest in those whose minds are stranded
on the surface  of life. To identify fully with the eld, then, is a
practical denition of what it means to be enlightened. Only then do
the hindrances of local reality disappear. One is free at last to join
the creative play of the universe.When people nd that their desires are beginning to come  true, in
deance of how reality is supposed to behave, the sudden inux of
power brings with it vaulting emotions—people feel jubilant and
triumphant; they feel fused with the very heart of nature (“I was
like an orphan who found the way home,” one woman remembers). Fear becomes meaningless, replaced with immense relief at the true
simplicity of life. Simplicity is the key. The rishis lived by a code that depen ds upon
magic rather than strugg le. Maharishi expresses this code
beautifully:
Keep your desire turning back within and be patient. Allow
the fulllment to come to you, gently resisting the tempta tion
to chase your dreams into the world. Pursue them in your
heart until they disappear into the self, and leave them there. It may take a little self-discipline, but be simple, be kind. Attend to your inner health and happiness. Happi ness
radiates like the fragrance from a ower and draws all good
things toward you. Allow your love to nourish yourself as well as others. Do
not strain after the needs of life—it is sucient to be quietly
alert and aware of them. In this way life proceeds more
naturally and eortlessly. Life is here to enjoy. Just by being ourselves, we are borne toward a destiny far beyond
anything we could imagine. It is enough to know that the being I
nourish inside me is the same as the Being that suuses every atom
of the cosmos. When the two see each other as equals, they will be
equal, because then the same force that controls the galax ies will be
upholding my individual existence. If a man claims to be
enlightened, I only need to ask, “Do your desires eortlessly come
true?” If he says yes, I can accept that his thinking has turned
magical. But I would also ask a second question, “On what scale do you
have your desires?” If he says his desires are for himself, I will know
that he has not broken free of local reality. On the other hand, if hesays that his desires are for the world, I will know that the entire
universe works  on his behalf . He has mastered nonlocal reality—he
is a citizen of the eld. OceanofPDF.com12
What It Means to Be Whole
To give them the benet of the doubt, Nick’s parents did not
deliberately set out to destro y him. Quite the reverse: from the time
Nick was born they treated him like a little god. All the toys a rich
family could provide were laid at his feet, and the slightest wish was
instantly granted. His infant goos and gurgles delighted his mother
so much that she could not bear to let him out of her sight. If she
was forced to tear herself away for even half an hour, Nick’s
grandparents stepped in to take her place, and they, too, loved him
so much that they never let him out of their sight, either. For three years Nick accept ed as normal the constant gaze of
adult eyes. He was much too little to suspect that he might be under
guard. Then one day his mother took him aside and tried to make
him understand something important. Thirty-ve years later, he still
remembers the intense emotion in her voice. “You came out of me, and you are a part of me. That will always
be true,” she said. “But your father and I want you to know
something. You didn’t come the way other babies did. You were
adopted.” Nick smiled, delighted by this new word. He was not old
enough to wonder how he could have come out of his mother and
been adopted at the same time. He only knew that he was even
more special than before. “I’m adopted! I’m adopted!” he kept
repeating, and he immediately rushed o to tell his best friend the
good news. It took two years before he fully grasped what being
adopted meant.“My parents have always held on to me very tightly,” he told me,
“and little by little I became aware that their love was colored by a
great deal of desperation. They were obsessed with me. The reason I
was constantly watched was that they had this morbid fear that I
would be kidnapped by my real mother, like a fairy-tale prince
stolen in the night by gypsies.”
Keeping Nick under constant  watch was the only way his parents
had of handling their fear of losing him. In itself, this anxious,
doting attention might not have been too destructive. But, as soon
became apparent, there was much more involved. “There’s something wrong with my father,” Nick said. “I guess
you could call him a misogynist, a woman-hater. He would be
shocked to hear that, becau se he is very aectionate towards my
mother, and he makes a great show of acting extremely romantic
around her, particularly in public. But in subtle ways he constantly
degrades and belittles her. I have never seen him strike her, but it
became clear to me as a young child that she lives in fear of him
and is helpless to do anything about it.”
The same fear crept into Nick’s own life as he passed the toddler
stage. He discovered that his loving father, who hugged him so tight
and showered him with gifts, could y into a blind rage without
warning. At the most unexpe cted moments he would lash out, and
the inhibitions  that kept him from physically hurting his wife did
not apply to his little boy. “My father hit me a lot, for reasons that I could not gure out. I
never really did anything that bad. My mother and I bent over
backwards to placate my father, to always stay on his good side, but
if I said something in a tone of voice he didn’t like, or if I hesitated
to obey one of his orders, he would slap my face or spank me hard,
very hard.”
Nick has guilty memories of hiding the bruises that his father
inicted with his hard spankings, of feeling like an innocent victim
and yet at the same time being inexplicably ashamed whenever he
was punished. “I want to be fair to my father,” he carefully
explained. “He didn’t push the violence to extremes . I wasn’t
battered. What  hurt so much was not how hard he hit but where thepunishment was coming from. What had I ever done to him to
deserve his contempt?”
The fact that he was beaten  for the most trivial infractions—not
picking up his socks, leaving his room untidy—made it impossible
for Nick to sort out why he was being punished. Whatever the
emotions were that drove his father, they were too alien for a small
child to comprehend, and much too powerful to defend himself
against. Although Nick’s mother feebly tried to intervene, his
father’s rage ruled the house basically without opposition. Unable to ght back physically, Nick took his cues from his
mother and turned his energies to keeping the peace. Without
protest he was drawn into a conspiracy of silence, preserving the
facade of being a perfect child nestled in a perfect family. “When I
grew up, I found out that we were living out a pattern of denial that
is very common in families like ours. But at the time, I had nothing
to comp are my situation to. My mother knew what was going on,
but she turned her back, and soon I had to accept the bitter fact that
she would not try to protect me, no matter how bad things got.”
Throwing himself into the role of model child, Nick became the
kind of ospring parents dream of having. He was an intelligent,
sensitive boy, well behaved and diligent in his schoolwork. He grew
up to be magnetically good-looking, and other boys looked up to
him as a natur al athlete and a born leader. Success follow ed success,
and yet festering underneath  it all, like rotten wood covered with
gold leaf, was a feeling of dread that never left him. “I learned to keep our secret at any price, particularly from my
grandparents—they were Greek immigrants who looked on me as
the bright, blond hope. Everyone expected the world of me, and I
wanted above all to oblige. At ve years old I felt like a little adult. I
understood adult feelings and adult ambitions, and the adult need to
guard yourself from exposure. The strain inside me was enormous,
because everyone in my family was basically living through me.”
The deeper Nick’s parents buried their own severe emotional
problems, the more necessary they found it to manipulat e him. His
psyche became the stage for playing out their hidden frustrations. “I
accepted that I was the sacricial lamb. What Mommy and Daddyfelt, I felt, too. That was my job, to be a buer between them. I
knew it was unfair. I wasn’t being allowed any feelings of my own,
the child’s feelings that my friends had. I was never simply happy or
simply sad. My emotions were complicated, because they were
grown-up emotions shifted from my parents onto me.”
No child is prepared for such pressures, and Nick soon became
profoundly confused about the most basic issues of feeling and
identity. “I remember calling  out in anguish when I was six, asking
God why I was being tormented in this way. But what could I do? My mother said I came out of her, and yet she said I was adopted. My father claimed that he loved me, and yet he beat me for no
reason. And their whole motive, so they said, was that they wanted
me to be a real son to them. “In some strange way, it all came down to my being adopted. Whenever he hit me, my father seemed to be saying, ‘Damn it, you
may not be my son, but if I wallop you hard enough, I’ll make you
mine.’ ”
Above the Play of Opposites
So far, I am telling Nick’s story as he told it to me, from the
viewpoint of a thirty-eight-year-old man who vividly remembers the
pain of his childhood but who has worked it through. Nick came to
me during the last phase of treatment for a serious addiction, at a
time when he was beginning to meditate—this has become the
anchor for his healed sense of self. Our talks turned on inner issues;
the strictly medical problem s of being an addict are over with. Forthcoming as Nick is today, the terror of his world as a child can
only be guesse d at by an outsider. Its real texture and feelings are
not apparent in the man I see before me. The adult Nick is a very understanding person. He has read the
books on dysfunctional families and been through the groups. Today
he can talk sympathetically about his aged father, the same man
who emerges as a monster in his tale. “My father is seventy now, but he is still emotionally brittle. It’s
hard to bring up those years  without upsetting him,” Nick said. “Inorder to love my parents as they are today, I have accepted
responsibility for my past, all of it. I want to get on with my future.”
Nick spoke these conciliatory  words near the end of our long rst
interview. The whole time he had been talking, his voice had
remained perfectly, almost uncannily calm. But just hearing about
his father’s aggression had set my own heart pounding. I suddenly
realized that I felt more outraged by Nick’s story than he seemed to
be—and that gave me pause. When an adult is entrusted with a
guilty or shameful secret, it may cause extreme psychological
distress, but at least he has a formed personality to absorb it. Nick
has never been a person separate from his secrets. They were
molded into his psyche from his earliest years. I couldn ’t help but
wonder how much of himself Nick had to smother in order to
become so accepting. This was not a subject I intended to probe. After years of painful
eort, Nick has made himse lf into something admirabl e—he is a
good man, sane, kind, and tolerant. But being good is not the same
as being whole. The two can be exact opposites, in fact, if goodness
is the outcome of a war in which one part of the self must defeat
another. Whate ver wholeness  is, it is not a war. It is a state of mind
above conict, not touched by evil, immune to fear. This degree of
psychological freedom may seem unreachable, but the very concept
of whol eness means not split into parts, even the basic dualities of
good and bad, love and hate, black and white. Since reality can be divided endlessly, how can wholeness
possibly exist, and if it does, how can it be integrated with the
fragmented world? The ancient rishis set out to answer these
questions, and what they found was this: the human mind can be
either silent or active. In that regard, duality is unavoidable. “The
play of opposi tes,” as the Upanishads calls it, cannot be abolished. But opposites can coexist without challenging each other—and that
is the secret. For wholeness to be a living reality, one must learn
how to expand beyond the eld of duality, encompassing the most
diametrically opposed qualities of life: good and evil, joy and
suering, love and hate.Thinking about Nick, I realized that his upbringing had fostered a
“solution” that many other people have adopted, putting all their
energy into making life perfect on the outside while shoving all
their fear, anger, and guilt out of sight. In any case, it is not the
repression of pain that worries me, for psychiatry has explored that
mechanism extensively. But what about the other pole? By
pretending that everything was perfect, Nick developed a profound
disillusion that anything could really  be perfect. He equates
perfection with deception. Sadly, so do most people. One of the greatest shocks I had as a young doctor came when I
saw how divided most of my patients were. They preserved a public
facade up to the very moment I ushered them in from the waiting
room. The instant I closed  the door, however, the public self
crumbled. An overwhelming ood of pain came my way, far more
pain than their disease could have caused. A lifetime of pent-up
rage, self-doubt, grief, guilt, and remorse poured uncontrollably
from these people. I would do what I could, and after half an hour,
they just as quickly re-composed themselves, and the public person
once again marched out into the waiting room, bidding me good-
bye with a cheerfulness that was chilling. This is exactly  what it mean s to be fragmented, to live under the
sway of opposi tes. It is a condition so far removed from healing that
perfection—which could be seen as simply the natural state of life—
looms as an enemy. Many neurotic patients go into therapy wanting
to be “cured.” But the last thing they want is to cry their hearts out
or show vulnerability or grieve over lost love or whoop with joy. Yet
that is what normal people do if they are in touch with themselves. The deep problem facing not only Nick but everyone is how to
break free of boundaries when being a prisoner is the only
comfortable way we know how to live. First of all, one has to be honest enough to admit that life is not
perfect already. Although this may sound like the easiest step, it is
often the hardest, because it has to be accomplished on the feeling
level. Looking around and saying calmly, “Yes, we could do with
some improvements here,” has nothing to do with buried emotions,
feeling trapped, angry, disappointed, humiliated, and in pain. Denyit as they will, everyone has such feelings. The reason I can risk this
blanket genera lization is that I see no one living a perfe ct life, and
since perfection is both natural and possible, something must be
denying it and holding it back. Once a skeptical disciple was visiting his guru. Modern gurus do
not all live in caves, and this one happened to inhabit a tiny
apartment in Bombay. “Is there really any dierence between you and me?” the disciple
demanded. “I look at us, and I just see two old men sitting  in a room
waiting for their lunch.” The guru replied, “Your level of awareness
forces you to see yourself as an old man sitting in a room. But to
me, this room and everything in it occupy the smallest speck on the
horizon of my awareness.”
“Even if you have adopted that perspective, we still live in the
same world,” the disciple argued. “No, your world is personal, private, and unshareable. No one else
can enter it, because no one can hear or see things exactly as you
do; no one else can have your memories, thoughts, and desires. And
they are all you have. My world is consciousness itself, open to all,
shared by all. In it there is community, insight, love. The individual
contains the totality, which makes him real. You are unreal. This
private reality you accept without question, bounded by these four
walls, by your isolated body and your conditioned  mind, is
imaginary. It is nothing but a dream.”
“Then why do you bother to be here?” the disciple grumbled. “I don’t have to be in your dream,” the guru replied, “since I
know the truth: I am innite. But it gives me pleasure to visit your
dream, because I may coax you to wake up.”
A Speck of Consciousness
For thousands  of years, the metaphor of waking up has been
applied to describe what it means to move from a state of ignorance
to a state of enlightenment. When a person wakes up, he opens his
eyes and sees, which he couldn’t do while asleep; he moves from a
completely inert state of consciousness to one that is alert andresponsive; he regains the sense of identity that was lost in sleep. The contrast delivered when a person becomes enlightened is said to
be just as stark. But there is a subtle point to grasp: waking up also
implies a natural process that does not have to be forced. You do
not choose to wake up in the morning—it dawns on you—and
despite the sleepy resistance  you may put up, eventually you are
awake. The rishis believed that spiritual awakening was just as
natural and inevitable. The enlightenment that dawned upon the ancient sages was
dierent from yours or mine only because it came earlier.
_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:

        It accompanied my steps to the very door of
the grocery, and if this was not strange enough, when I came out
fteen minute s later, it reappeared and followed me home again. What was I to think. ”
Before I could respond, he rushed on. “No, wait. The next day I
went downtown to buy a portable typewriter, only to nd that the
price had gone up by twenty dollars since I had called in the
morning. I objected to the clerk and the store manager, but to noavail. Feeling intensely irrita ted, I bought the typewriter anyway, so
as not to waste the trip, and when I stepped outside the door, do
you know what was there. ”
“A patch of sunlight,” I ventured. “A twenty-dollar bill, right at my feet. ” Sidney proclaimed,
ignoring me. “Insignicant as these incidents may sound, I began to
feel increasingly funny about them. ”
“Funny. ”
“Yes—there was a certain tone to these incidents that I would
have to call playful, as if I was being shown a particularly amusing
trick by a clever child—no, by an intelligence I could n’t see or
contact. But let me go on. A week later I was riding alone in the car. It was after dark, and I was in the country, coming back from a
house I had never visited before. One winding rural road led to
another, and after half an hour I admitted to myself that I was
hopelessly lost. “The few houses I passed were all dark and I began to feel
anxious, when all at once my awareness was no longer inside my
head—it reach ed out in front of me, about the length of the car’s
headlights. Just as I noticed this phenomenon, a further expansion
took place, and my awarene ss now pooled out in all directions. It
was a very delicate feeling. How can I possibly describe it. I was
simply everywhere, and without thinking about it, I gave up driving
my car. I still held the wheel and pushed the pedals, but the feeling
of conscious eort was gone. I became this pool of awareness
gliding through the night, not caring where I was bound. “I arrived at crossroads and turned this way or that, apparently at
random, yet in ten minutes I came out onto the highway at precisely
the turno that led back home. ”
“Would you call that an experience of your soul. ” I asked
quizzically. “If the soul is our portion of an invisible world, then perhaps I
was projecting myself into the territory of the soul. My invisible
extension was alive, and it was undoubtedly me. Everything felt
vibrant in its presence—the car, the land, the sky. A scrap of verse
comes to mind—where’s it from. ‘The stars are wide and alive, theyseem each like a smile of great sweetness, and they seem very
near. ’ ”
“How do you feel now. ”
“Not like that anymore. There’s been a change, a ripening. I
continue to be intensely conscious all the time, and as the days go
by, there is a sporadic ecstasy that comes over me. In those
moments, the quality of my life becomes sacred. Pardon me for
sounding so awkward; I am new at speaking like this. ”
“I’m happy for you,” I said, and added, “You still seem like
yourself, if that is a worry. You’ve always known a lot about
yourself, and I’m not surprised that you are getting to know even
more. ”
He gave me a grateful look. “I want to tell you about a very
unusual occurrence. Are you bothered by the idea of miracles. ”
“I’m not sure. You implied something in that vein already, didn’t
you. ”
“Yes, but you’ve looked into this area yourself. ”
“I don’t  seek it out, but stories seem to come my way. I’ve met
people who tell me in all condence that they used to y as
children. They oated down the staircase when no one else was at
home and left their dolls on top of tall wardrobes, which mystied
their parents. Then one day they told Mommy their secret, only to
be assured that ying was impossible. After that, the ability
disappeared. “Of course ying is a very extraordinary claim,” I said, “but quite
a lot of people seem to irt with unusual powers. They can visualize
lost objects and go right to them if they really need to. They answer
other people’s thoughts befor e they are spoken. In a haphazard way,
most of us can foretell the future, although our correct predictions
remain mixed up with assorted projections from our unconscious
minds, wish fulllments and false premonitions. I wouldn’t feel
comfortable saying where ordinary life leaves o and miracles
begin. ”
Sidney seemed relieved, but when he started speaking again, it
was with marked hesitancy. “My nights have been sleepless
recently, not from anxiety but because I seem to be—w hat shall Isay. —lled with light. The pressure of ecstasy makes me get up and
walk around restlessly; some times I put on my coat and go out into
the street. Would you believe it, I dance to the moon. I was in this
heightened state one night when I ran across a bedraggled woman
lying on the sidewalk near my home. She was asleep, rolled up in a
lthy blanket, and I heard her mumbling, ‘Mother, Mother, Mother. ’
“It was very pitiable, and intuitively I had no doubt that like
many homeless people, she was mentally ill. Her voice sounded
desperately crazy; it carried  such an intensity of suering that I
couldn’t bear it, yet at the same time I felt more ecstatic than ever. I
leaned down and gently woke her up. She looked at me, frightened,
but she didn’t pull away. Without knowing why, I told her, ‘You
don’t have to suer anymore. ’
“ ‘What. ’ she said, completely bewildered. “ ‘I’m here to help you,’ I said. ‘You’re not crazy anymore, are
you. ’ She was taken aback, and yet there was a sane look in her
eyes that I am sure was new. She shook her head, as if to make sure
of what was inside, and didn’t say anything. ‘Tell me,’ I insisted, ‘do
you still feel crazy. ’ In a quiet, normal voice she replied, ‘No. ’
“ ‘Look, ’ I said, ‘I don’t know why this is happening, but let’s just
say you are very fortunate. You’re going to be all right from now
on. ’ ” Sidney stopped. “This really happened to you. ” I said, amazed. He nodded. “But
can you really be sure she was cured. It does sound like a manic
episode on your part, you must know that. ”
“Yes,” he admitted. “I cannot prove anything, and it wasn’t
possible at the time for me to analyze what was taking place
between the two of us. My heart started pounding, and I felt an
overpowering urge to run away. I heard the woman call after me,
‘What kind of person are you. ’ But by that time I was halfway down
the block; ve minutes later I was back in bed, shivering. I’ve never
seen her again. ”
Invisible PowersI have no proof that Sidney’s experiences are true, or even sane. He still seems balanced to me: his personality has not been thrown
into shock or disarray by his “miracles. ” As he talks he does not
oat in the clouds of grandiosity, nor has he suered from the
backlash of depression and disillusionment that typically follows an
episode of mania. The fact that he is trying to integrate these
remarkable happenings into a new view of himself reassures me,
because that means they have been nourishing rather than
destructive. However, the backlash may be just around the corner. It is
dangerous to rush into a wonder world. At best, people like Sidney
are jewels without a setting, as Maharishi once called them. That is
to say, they lack a context that will make sense of the
transformation they have gone through. I can understand why
Sidney calls his strange episo des “miracles,” but he has lapsed into a
conventional religious vocab ulary for want of a clearer  and more
precise one. He needs new words, and with them, he needs
explanations that apply directly to his situation. In this light, it is not all that important to decide whether I
“believe” in Sidney’s story or not. Other people’s revelations are
unshareable to begin with. If I stood beside Sidney while he was
simply gazing at a daodil, his perception would be just as
ephemeral, unreachable, and private as anything he told me about. The critical thing for each of us is to understand our own
revelations. The rst step, I think, is to dispel the aura of wonderworking that
surrounds the unfoldment of higher states of consciousness. A
disciple once complained to his guru, “If you are enlightened, why
don’t you perform miracles to prove it. ” The guru answered,
“Because there are no miracles, unless you consider all of life a
miracle. I am beyond miracles. I am normal. ”
Isn’t that the wisest perspecti ve. Human awareness has never lost
its capacity to open up into the invisible world, and we can be
certain that a farmer in the time of Zoroaster looked up at the stars,
suddenly near and alive and smiling, with the same awe as Sidney. When you point out to someone that he is not the rst person toenter a state of grace, the news comes as a great disappo intment at
rst—in our heart of hearts, we all hunger for the uniqueness of
sainthood. But on sober reection, people who experience wonders
are very relieved to know that they are not alone. Indeed, to nd
that there is a magnicent, broad, endless river of spirit running
through the tumult of human existence brings tremendous joy. “Should I try to encourage these experiences. ” Sidney asked at
one point, “or should I turn my back on them. They are incredibly
seductive, and yet, I can see that they might be too alluri ng. I could
plunge into complete fantasy. Who knows, I may already be there. ”
“No, you’re not lost in fanta sy,” I said. “You are walkin g a ne
line that your past experience has not prepared you for at all. ” I
urged him to stop hanging out in mental space by himself; he
needed a safety net. The entire range of spiritual experiences has
been catalogue d and analyzed in the ancient traditions of wisdom. The Vedic rishis stand as the most authoritative commentators,
being the most ancient, but any continuous, living spiritual tradition
has one great advantage—i t provides a map of the journey and
identies the destination. The reason this is so importa nt is that an experience of healing or
communion or expansion is usually part of a larger journey as well,
pointing the person toward  an unseen goal. The ecsta sy of one
miracle is nothing compared to the ecstasy of complet e spiritual
transformation. This perspective makes all the dierenc e between
growth and chaos. Instead of drifting from one experience to
another, one sights a purpose—a higher state of consciousness—and
aims for it. The Vedic seers were unwavering in their belief that
fulllment is the natural tendency of life. Growth, evolution, the
bewildering activity of the mind are not chaotic. They are trying to
break out of the nite and into the innite. Without apply ing any kind of esoteric terminology, we can say
that for Sidney, reality is widening, breaking out of the usual
patterns that bolster our sense of what is acceptable and tolerable. Even to bend these boundaries can create a feeling of vertigo, as if
the ground itself and not just our assumptions was being cut out
from under us. One time a young patient entered my oce with the startling
words “Namaste kya hal hai, Doctor  sahib. ”  It would not be at all
startling for an Indian to say, “Greetings, doctor, how are you. ” but
this man had blue eyes and curly blond hair. “Where did you learn to speak Hindi so well. ” I asked curiously. “You hardly have any accent at all. ”
“I picke d it up in New Delhi, ” he replied. “I was at Hindu College
for a while, and I was born and raised in Kashmir. ” I accepted this
explanation, and we went into his medical complaint, which was
minor. After writing out a prescription, I was about to close his le
when I noticed that it read, “Place of birth: Santa Barbara, Calif. ”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Didn’t you say you were born in
Kashmir. ”
“That’s right. ”
“But your chart says you were born in Santa Barbara. ”
“I should have explained,” he murmured without missing a beat,
“I was born in Kashmir last time. ”
“Oh. Is that also when you learned Hindi. ”
“Right. ” His tone of voice remained blandly matter-of-fact. My
rst instinct was to keep asking him questions to see if he would
give me a few overt signs of mental disturbance. “I notic e that you work as a bartender at a hotel down town,” I
said. “That’s not a very pure place, I mean for someone who is
sensitive enough to remember his past lives. ”
“I know,” he sighed, “but I stay there out of nostalgia. It reminds
me of the ocer’s mess at Mhow. ” Mhow was one of the most
famous military outposts established by the British in central India. It is still so large that most Indian army ocers can count on being
stationed there at least once in their careers. “You remember Mhow, too. ” I asked. “Sure,” he said cheerfully, “that’s where I was killed. ” We
continued to chat amiably in this vein, as if nothing unusual was
going on, and after a few minutes I reluctantly let him go. At the
time, I felt guilty that I hadn ’t injected him with 100 milligrams of
Thorazine to calm his hallu cinations before committing him to a
psychiatric ward. Now I nd it dicult to separate his strangenessfrom my own discomfort, which was making him seem strange. It is
a mark  of our times that all manner of “impossible” things are
surfacing before our very eyes, like ancient sea creatures that were
given up as extinct but were only sleeping in the depths. What we can hope to do is to clarify where these reemerging
experiences actually originate. There is an age-old tendency for
humans to look outside them selves whenever the everyday logic of
the world crumbles. One day there is ecstasy where none existed
before. Who could cause such a drastic transformation but a divine
agent located in the realm of heaven. Heaven and earth come closer
together, however, through the physicist’s concept of the quantum
eld. There is no such thing as being outside the eld looking in,
whether it be God looking down on man or man up to God. We are
all part of the eld; the eld is existence itself, owing in, around,
and through everything. It is the arena where all possibilities unfold. The eld is omnipresent and omnipotent. It invisibly unites two
quarks that are light-years apart; it blends individual and cosmic
existence, the natural and the supernatural. When their awareness
was fully expanded, the ancient rishis were able to declare, echoing
Lord Krishna, “I am the eld. ” They saw that their own individual
consciousness was identical to the consciousness that upholds the
universe. They were conferring the quality of omniscienc e upon the
eld—and that gives pause. In the West, to be all-know ing is an
attribute exclu sive to God, unless you accept that the eld is a
proper home for the divine. But why shouldn’t it be. The idea that the sacred is outside us makes no sense in quantum
terms, because it takes our participation to construct all experience,
from the sacred to the profane. When my father was stationed at the
big army cantonment at Jabalpur in central India, Prime Minister
Nehru came for a one-day visit. It was the early Fifties, and Nehru
was considered the savior of India by us and everyone we knew. The
whole town poured out to greet him. People milled as thick as ants
as far as you could see. Men climbed trees to catch a glimpse of
Nehru’s open jeep trundling through the street, and agile little boys
lled the top branches. I was just seven and had no clear idea why my father and mother
were standing there, mute members of a silence so loud that it was
nearly deafening. But I am quite clear that the crowd was silent, and
as Nehru approached, standing up on the back seat of the jeep with
a rose in his hand, a wave of reverential awe swelled before him. My mother began crying, and as fate would have it, Nehru threw his
rose almost at her feet. No one ran forward. The silence endured,
and my mother slowly walked over and bent to gather her ower. The next day people came to our house to see the rose in its silver
vase, and without fail they could not speak when they laid eyes on
it. What I know now is that their exalted feelings came from an inner
source, not solely from Nehru, perhaps not at all from him. The
crowd participated in a collective reality; they felt an emotion and
let it sprout into independent existence, until it resided  even in a
casually tossed  ower. This does not make their sacred feeling
unreal, far from it. Whenever a ow of consciousness moves up from
the depths of the human spirit, great transformations can occur with
dramatic speed. Tearing down the Berlin wall signaled a new rise of
freedom that was taking place among nations. But what is a nation
except a collection of individuals. Politics is what happens “out
there” in response to shifting mental events “in here. ” The Berlin
wall rst had to come down inside people’s awareness before it
could come down physically. We do not think of political change in this way mainly  because
people are not generally united in their inner perspective. Sometimes, however, a surge of consciousness carries everyone
along. Gandhi  inspired millions of Indians to gather silently as a
means of protesting British rule; they did not do anything other than
stand or sit together for a time, yet that in itself created a sort of
witness very like the silent witness I tell my patients about. Just to
look at your enemy in peace creates a huge moral eect, because he
sees himself in your eyes. The silent witness reects the truth that
he must come to terms with in the end. I do not want to equate collective consciousness only with
emotions or morality; rather, it is the mind we all share beneath thesupercial layer of our indiv idual minds. This shared mind creates
our shared world. Therefore, the world is a map of all that people
agree to be real, with the exclusion of all that they agree to be
unreal. The reason that seemingly impossible things are surfacing
again in our culture after their long sleep is that our collective
consciousness has agreed to let them in. A deep censoring
mechanism is losing its powe r over us. When the censor is abolished
altogether, there will be no limit to what can be allowed in, for at
the level of the eld, all possibilities exist in unmanifest form. “You are the sole cause of everything in creation,” a guru assured
his disciples. “All is because you are. ” The statement reeks of the
worst arrogance if we claim that the Big Bang needed our blessing
before it could happen. I don’t think that is what the guru was
saying. He meant that human consciousness and cosmic
consciousness are one. The eld dances and waits for us to join it. It
constantly folds and refolds itself, like an innite wool blanket
tumbling in a dryer at innit e speed. Under these conditions, every
point in the universe is everywhere at once, sharing in the
omnipotence, omnipresence, and omniscience of the whole eld. Everyone has a right, then, to consider himself the center of the
cosmos, holding untold powers in his hands. What the Twins Could Do
Any ability to command nature is called a siddhi  in Sanskrit. The
word means “power,” and it refers to powers that have been
perfected in consciousness. Healing the sick is a siddhi, and like the
supernatural feats that yogis are supposed to be able to perform—
ying through  the air, turning invisible, reading the past and future
—the key to mastery is a shift in awareness. A person  suddenly
knows how to do something  impossible, as simply and easily as I
know how to lift my arm. A shift in awareness does not require force. A person who has
achieved the level of consci ousness where siddhis are natural can
breathe change into things as softly as you or I wish and dream,
using no more energy than it takes to stir a thought. The basicprinciple here is that reality is dierent in dierent states of
consciousness. If I see a tree in my dreams, I can jump over it or
make it turn blue or y over it into the sky. What gives me such
powers is the dream state. If I had no other state of awareness to
compare it to, the dream state would constitute the only reality I
know and accept as valid. On waking up, I nd that I cannot jump over a tree anym ore, but
why not. According to the rishis, what holds me back is not the tree
but the arriva l of waking-state consciousness. It has propelled me
into a world that obeys dierent laws of nature. “You think that a
dream tree is inside your head,” a rishi might argue, “while a real
tree is outside you. But this notion can only occur to you after you
wake up. As long as you are in your dream, the tree seems to be
outside you, just as it is in a waking state. In truth, what you take to
be the only ‘real’ tree should be called a waking-state tree. If you
cannot jump over it, perhaps you need to wake up from waking. Then you would discover that this tree, too, was in your head. ”
A siddhi seems particularly  amazing when it crops up among
people whose minds lack ordinary abilities, much less extraordinary
ones. In his much-praised essay “The Twins,” Oliver Sacks describes
two brothers, identical twins, who were able to perform prodigious
feats of mental calculation, despite the fact that they repeatedly
tested with IQs no higher than sixty. When Sacks rst met them in
1966, the twins were in their mid-twenties and already mildly
famous. In appearance they resembled a grotesque Tweedledum and
Tweedle-dee—equally rotun d, with thick glasses, bobbing heads,
rolling eyes, and various uncontrollable tics and twitches. Although the twins lived in a private mental world closed to
outsiders, Sacks found them pathetically eager to launch into one of
their “routines”:
The twins say, “Give us a date—any time in the last or next
forty thousand years. ” You give them a date, and, almost
instantly, they tell you what day of the week it would be. “Another date. ” they cry, and the performance is repeated. They will also tell you the date of Easter during the sameperiod of 80,000 years. … Their memory for digits is
remarkable—and possibly unlimited. They will repeat a
number of three digits, of thirty digits, of three hund red
digits, with equal ease. The literature on idiot savants is vast; the twins’ astonishing
talents do not make them unique. Instead, they fall into the well-
studied class of “mental calculators,” which includes people, both
retarded and normal, who can recite from memory the number p to
3,000 decimal places, or tell you how many cubic inches there are
in a solid measuring 7,345,278 yards on one side and 5,478,234
yards on the other. (One eight-year-old savant was posed such a
problem and instantly replied, “Do you want the answer backwards
or forwards. ”)
But, to my knowledge, Sacks is the rst observer who had the
insight that the twins were not calculating at all—they were seeing
numbers. Their minds rumm aged in the land of numerals the same
way we rummage for old faces in our memories, but with amazing
precision, clarity, and speed. The argument Sacks makes is simple. On their own, the twins could not perform basic arithmetic. Adding
four plus four baed them, and it was only after years of training
that they could reliably make change in order to ride the bus. The
standard explanation for “calendar idiots” is that they have
memorized a shortcut, a special mathematical formula or algorithm,
that is programmed to give dates without the calculator  having to
run through the calendar year by year. This is how one would
program a computer to name the date of Easter over a period of
80,000 years. But is it really possible, Sacks wonders, for the twins to calculate
at all, even using a shortcut, when they cannot add simple numbers. On the other hand, their ability to visualize had been proven over
and over. If you named any day in their lives after the age of four,
they could tell you the weather, the incidents occurring around
them, and the important political events on that day. Sacks also took
careful clinical note of the look on their faces when they were
coming up with their extraordinary answers: “Their eyes x andmove in a peculiar way as they do this, as if they were unrolling, or
scrutinizing, an inner landscape. ”
This look of “seeing,” complete with eyes rolled upward and a
at, monotono us delivery of the answer, as if reciting from a
printout, may seem similar to the look of someone who is mentally
calculating, but how could one account for two other facts. First,
the twins could “see” prime numbers that were ten and even twenty
digits long. Thirty years ago, extracting very long prime numbers
was a laboriou s feat even for the largest mainframe computers, and
there was no known shortcu t. Yet here were the twins, giggling in
their corner, extracting such long primes that Sacks could not check
them in a standard mathematical reference book. Even more mysteriously, it was observed that only one of the
twins had been fascinated by numbers at rst, early in childhood,
and later had somehow passed on his prodigious talents, with no
loss of accuracy, to his broth er. Duplicate masters in every way, the
twins sat for hours in a corner by themselves, murm uring long
strings of numerals and gurgling with shared delight over some
arcane nd that no one else could comprehend. It is hard to escape the conclusion that the twins in fact possessed
a siddhi, one well known in ancient India, called Jyotish Mati Pragya
—the ability to see into the light. At a subtle level, the rishis say,
everything is made of light; light is the nest level of appearance
before creation dissolves into pure consciousness. By some means or
other, the twins attuned their minds to this level of awareness. And
they appeared to know that this was what they were doing. Sacks
writes, “If you ask them how they can hold so much in their minds
—a three-hundred-gure digit, or the trillion events of four decades
—they say very simply, ‘We see it. ’ ”
The twins’ methods give us a model for how siddhis work in
general. A siddhi is a ment al ability, no dierent from ordinary
thinking except that it runs deeper. One has to go right to the edge
where pure consciousness is about to emerge into its created forms. To put it in the language of physics, a local intention begins to have
nonlocal results. Instead of being conned inside my skull, mydesire to see a twenty-digit prime number radiates into the eld,
and the eld brings back the answer. It is not “me,”  in the most local sense, who has worked  out the
solution. The eld is acting upon itself, folding question and answer
together until they meet in time and space. My role is simply to
issue the orders, leaving the eld to compute, instantly and
automatically, whatever result I want. The secret to any siddhi is
that you tap into the cosm ic computer using the brain as your
keyboard. Siddhis can come spontaneously, as happened to the twins, but
more often they have to be cultivated. The rst stage is meditation,
which brings the mind into the transcendent; the second stage is to
hold onto the transcendent while thinking a specic thought. This
sounds like a complete contradiction, and it is. The transcendent by
denition is silent and void of thoughts. But the rishis discovered
centuries ago that a person can entertain two states of awareness at
the same time. A siddh i throws together everyday awareness with transcendent
awareness, and when the two are completely blended, nature begins
to respond to one’s most casual desires as commands. In itself, this
is a wondrous development, but it serves a higher end, which is to
rob ordinary reality of its power to keep people ensnared. This is
always the aim of Yoga in all its phases. “Once you realize that the
world is your own projection, you will be free of it,” a guru told his
followers. “Everything existing around you is painted on the screen
of your consciousness. The picture you see may be ugly or beautiful,
but in either case you are not bound by it. Rest assured, there is no
one who has forced it on you. You are trapped only becau se of your
habit of mistaking the imaginary for the real. ”
This is how reality appears from a higher state of consciousness. The siddhis are an essential part of reaching such a state, a stepping-
stone. They allow us to exper iment with the world illusion. A friend
recently told me this story: “Several years ago I took my car on a
camping trip through the Far West. One morning in Montana I woke
up thinking how splendid it would be to see a rainbow. Not that I
had much hope for one—the  day was dark and overcast. We startedclimbing a high mountain pass near Glacier Park that was shrouded
in mists. Suddenly, the mists parted, moved aside by invisible
stagehands, and a glorious rainbow connected two peaks directly in
front of me, as if the gods had fashioned a sparkling bridge of light. “It was a dazzl ing sight and an interesting coincidence. We moved
down the Rockies to Wyoming, and the next day I saw an
impressive rainbow in the Tetons, leaping down into the waters of
Jackson Lake. Another rainb ow appeared the following day in the
Green Mountains, another near Aspen the day after that. This went
on for six days. On the seventh I found myself deep in a desert
canyon in Utah. There had been no rain for weeks; the July sky was
broiling hot and completely free of clouds. Around noon I looked up
and saw an impossible vision, a small but vivid rainbow arching
over the narrow white sandstone arroyo we had camped in. What
could have caused it. “I am not the kind of person who jumps to miraculous
conclusions, and a few days later a park ranger told me about an
interesting phenomenon: If the sun is hot enough, its heat can cause
a temperature inversion over the desert. Humidity rising up from
the canyons remains trapped  by the cooler air above, and at times
there are enough water droplets in a thin layer over the canyon rim
to create a rainbow. So in the end, there was a natural explanation
for everything I had seen. Nature herself had the means to make
rainbows. Yet I am left believing that she also has the means to
make them when and where I want. ”
The Mind of the Fire
The rishis felt completely comfortable with a quantum fact, that
our solid world is basically built up from vibrations in empty space. However, we are not yet comfortable with a Vedic fact, that this
space that permeates everything is intelligent. It is Chit Akasha, or
“mind space. ” Mind space is inside our heads and gives rise to
thought “in here,” but it exists outside our heads as well. Nietzsche
oered a remark that challen ges Western logic to the core when hesaid, “All philo sophy is based upon the premise that we think, but it
is equally possible that we are being thought. ”
Because our conventional system of logic holds that thinking is
always interna l, we do not see the natural processes takin g place all
around us as a kind of thinking, but that is just a cultura l bias. We
could see Chit Akasha everyw here, and if we did, we would realize
that everything in nature is a transformation of mind space from
one guise to another. The rocks, mountains, oceans, and galaxies are
constantly being thought, just as much as we. To give a concrete example, there is the phenom enon of
rewalking, which caught the popular imagination as a fad several
years ago, but which has persisted in various traditional cultures as
a main stay of spiritual experience for centuries. Anthropologist
Loring Danforth’s Firewalking and Religious Healing  is a fascinating
account of one of these rewalking cults, the Anastenaria in
northern Greece. No one knows how the cult began. One legend holds that a raging
re broke out in the village church at Kosti in eastern Thrace untold
centuries ago. Bystanders heard loud cries coming from inside the
empty building. Amazed, they realized that it was the painted icons
of Saint Constantine and his mother, Saint Helen, who were calling
to be rescued. A few courage ous villagers recklessly rushed into the
re, and when they emerged with the icons in their arms, neither
they nor the saints had been harmed. In memory of this miracle, the devotees of Saint Constantine
celebrate his name day, May 21, by walking into a pit of burning
coals, and not just walking: they perform a stomping dance on the
red-hot cinders, holding aloft icons of the two saints. Perhaps a
hundred devout rewalkers, called Anastenarides, are scattered
throughout a few villages in northern Greece; almost all of them
trace their roots back to Kosti. To show  their unshakable faith and their contempt for the re,
the Anastenaria dancers pick up glowing embers, smashing them
into a shower of sparks with their bare hands. One devotee named
Stephanos spent ve months mesmerized before his home re,
putting out the live coals with his hands hour after hour until hismother begged him to stop, for fear that she would not have any re
left for baking her family’s bread. Without their religious faith, the Greek rewalkers are certain
that they would be burned. They each “belong to the saints,” having
surrendered themselves to divine authority in exchange for their
extraordinary powers. Walking into the re sets a person aside from
normal society  for the rest of his life; he is said to have an open
road, which means that the saints can guide him anywhere they
choose. One of the rewalkers is a peasant farmer named Mihalis. He
recounted how he feels durin g his ery dance: “If you have an open
road, then you don’t feel the re as if it were your enemy. You feel
as if it were your husband or your wife. You feel love for the re;
you have courage. What you see isn’t a mountain; it’s nothing. That
way you go in freely. But if you go in of your own will, then you
have fear and doubt. It seem s like an enemy, like a mountain. If
your courage is from the Saint, then you really want to go into the
re. The power comes from outside. You’re a dierent person. ”
At the outset of this book I mentioned that some paranoiacs can
no longer draw the line between their own mind and God’s. In their
madness, these people take personal responsibility for averting wars
and natural disasters. Mihalis and his cohorts are caught in a similar
confusion, but from the opposite pole. They cannot accept that their
power to walk on re is personal, or even specically human. They
insist that it must come from God, through the saints’ intercession. It
would be inexplicable to them if someone walked on the coals
without being devout. In fact such a person appeared in their midst. In 1985 a tall,
smiling, handsome American arrived on Saint Constantine’s feast
day in the village of Langadas, where the Anastenaria rite is
performed. At a restaurant he showed around a photograph of
himself rewal king in Oregon, and he was immediately permitted to
join the local ceremony. The year before, an Italian spectator had
attempted to enter the re and had been severely burned. The Greek
rewalkers took this as conrmation that one cannot defy the re
without the saints. But this year’s visitor was something no one had ever seen, a
rewalk instructor. Outside the conned world of the Anastenaria
cult, rewalking had become a star turn in the human potential
movement, with rewalk “seminars” being held every  weekend
throughout the West Coast. In its New Age guise, walking into the
re was a form of psychotherapy. It was considered a liberating
experience, perhaps endow ed with spiritual overtones but not
narrowly religious. Therefore, when the visitor, named Ken Cadigan,
entered the Anastenaria re, two worlds collided. At rst there was no open conict. “Ken managed to make his
way through the crowd to the site of the rewalk togethe r with the
Anastenarides,” Danforth writes. “He danced around the re with
them for a few minutes. Then, after [their leader] Stamatis crossed
the re, Ken went across too. He was dressed in white and held his
hands high over his head. ‘I didn’t have the dance down  right,’ he
said. ‘I just went boogying across. ’ ”
We do not know what went through the minds of the Greek
rewalkers, but a sinister gesture ensued. “After Ken crossed the re
two or three times,” Danfor th writes, “he saw Stamatis motion to
another Anast enaris to take Ken through the re with him. The
Anastenaris grabbed him by the arm, but Ken broke free. He went
back into the re again, and this time he stayed in for a long time;
he really danced  in the coals. Just then the Anastenaris grabbed his
arm a second time, held him in the re, and stepped on his foot. …
Ken broke free again and left the re. ”
The local crowd had been cheering for the tall stranger, and
several reporte rs now besieged him with questions. How did he
walk on re without being a devotee. Had he been burned at the
end. Cadigan joked about the incident and refused to attribute any
malice to the man who had accosted him. Privately, however, he
was sure that the Anastenaris had pushed him into the coals hoping
he would be burned. In fact, he had been. One of the peculiarities of rewalking is that belief plays such a
critical part in it. A skeptic can enter the re one step behind a
believer, and only the skeptic will be burned. An experienced
rewalker can be distracted by someone shouting at him from thesidelines and suddenly get burned also. Since the re is the same
temperature for all (hot enough to sear esh in a matter of seconds),
one is convinced that awareness must be playing a crucial role. There are reports of people who have been severely burned when
they rashly stepped onto the coals despite an inner voice that tried
to halt them with a sharp warning of “Don’t do this. ” At the same
sessions, other s have walked in without harm. There is no scientic
explanation for what causes these variances, or for that matter, for
how the feat of rewalking is accomplished. In this instance, when
Cadigan was drawn into the ugly mood of his assailant, he lost his
power to remain unharmed. Danforth notes that even though
Cadigan’s burns went deep enough to expose the nerves in his foot,
he felt no pain either on the re or afterward. As he gathered his data, Danforth moved among the
Anastenarides, who buzzed with talk after the American left. Quickly and reexively the Greek rewalkers retreated into
rationalization: they claimed that their visitor had walked too
quickly across the coals, that he had not really danced, that he had
left the ceremony early because he had been burned. In this way the
cultists retained their ties to the saints and their exclusive right to
an open road. Yet the main theme of their spiritual life—acquiring power and
freedom in the re—is the same espoused by New Age practitioners. “You are burne d by fear, not by re” is a popular sentiment among
American rewalkers. In both camps the re is a symbol for inner
barriers that one must break through in order to prove that reality is
more than the senses perceive. But we have to probe deeper and
ask, “What is the link between the subjective world of the re
walker and the burning coals. ”
The rewalker thinks  he can enter the re safely, and therefore he
can. His thought causes the re to become harmless, which implies
that the re understands  him. The Greek rewalker s accept this
assumption: they frequently say that the re beckons them. They
know to walk onto the coals only after the re says “yes. ” It is
dicult to avoid the conclusion that the re is in fact intelligent. If the idea of intelligent re is too shocking, we could say that one
continuous eld of mind-stu links the rewalker and the re. When a person thinks, that is one vibration in the eld; when the
re cools down, that is another. So it is all eld speakin g to eld,
without any mystery to it. Mihalis does not really walk into the re;
he walks into the outskirts of his own mind. Two Fullnesses
It is hard to deny that our reality remains stubbornly intact
because our logic is stubbornly rational, geared solely to the events
of the waking state. A dreamer can y because defying gravity in a
dream is just a matter of altering one’s brain wave patterns:
everything that occurs in a dream, no matter how bizarre, is clearly
self-generated. Yet the same holds true in waking state, with a
dierence. Sitting in my chair this minute, I might think,  “I want to
y,” and nothing will happen. I lack the power of a dream er, or so it
seems, and the reason, I tell myself, is that certain laws of nature
have been set aside out of my control, gravity being a prominent
example. However, the rishis would argue that this setting aside is itself a
human act. What holds me down to earth is not the fact that gravity
is a law of nature. It is the choice  of laws that happen to be in eect. When a person has reached a higher state of consciousness, he
realizes that such choices are always being made and can also be
unmade. For every natural law that holds me down in my chair,
another, still asleep in the eld, would allow me to y. Gaining the siddhis means gaining freedom of choice. The rishis
say, “ Purnam adah, purnam idam,”  which means, “This is full, that is
full. ” The word this signies the manifest reality  I see all around me;
the word that signies the unseen world of the transcendent, the
world of Being, the eld. Both worlds are full—i. e. , innit e—and if I
do not like the natural laws that trap me here, I can nd alternatives
inside the eld. I don’t have to defy the current set of laws, but only
wake up a new one. This is how re can be convincingly hot at one
time and cold the next. The doctrine of “This is full, that is full” causes the yogi to declare
that nature is perfect. He is not referring to the picture that reality
presents today, nor is he glossing over the gross imperfe ctions that
create suerin g. The cruelty and violence we see in our world
cannot be called perfect by any means. But another kind of world is
also available, at the touch of Being, and that fact overrid es the evil
we are witness  to in daily life. Nature is perfect because it contains
all possibilities. We are just beginning to abandon a fragmented view of Nature in
favor of a comprehensive vision of the whole. Seventy years ago the
great quantum physicists of Einstein’s generation postulated that
“local reality” was a dubiou s proposition. “Local reality”  is a term
that describes separate events leading independent lives in time and
space. An atom  of oxygen on Mars is local because it has nothing to
do with an atom of oxygen  on Venus, just as a suering man in
China has nothing to do with me. On the human level, this
arrangement has never seemed satisfactory, because in sympathy I
do suer with the man in China. Before the advent of quantum  theory, the same could not be said
of two atoms. In order for them to be in sympathy, one would have
to negate the millions of miles of void that separate them. Common
sense says that emptiness is empty; by denition it cannot have
anything in it. Today, howe ver, it is known from radio  telescope
observation that the universe has organized itself along orderly lines
across vast distances. Stars at one end of the cosmos obey the same
structural laws and pass through the same life stages as those at the
other end. It can also be proved in the laboratory that certain
elementary particles are paired like twins (according to a principle
called “spin type”), and a change of spin in one is instantly matched
by an equal but opposite change in its mate, whatever the distance
between them. They are connected by a telephone wire that
happens to be made of nothing. Such strange behavior dees  ordinary logic. It has led physicists
to say that the quantum realm is not only stranger than we think but
stranger than we can think. The rishi disagrees. To him, a quantum
and a thought are remarkabl y alike. The eeting, invisible impulsesof the mind can turn into concrete, locatable neurotransmitter
molecules like dopamine and serotonin. Where can you stand to
watch an emotion turn into a molecule. Nowhere—you cannot see
or touch  an emotion; you can barely pin it down in time, and it has
no home in space whateve r. Molecules can be objectively seen,
stored, and manipulated. They are easier to deal with than
emotions, and therefore scientists always assume that the reality of
molecules should be the benchmark, while the reality of emotions is
somehow inferior. In the quantum world this situation changes. A quantum  event is
also invisible, eeting, and unpredictable, just like our thoughts. Before the sun throws out light, where is the light. Photons come
out of nowhere; they cannot  be stored. They can barely be pinned
down in time and have no home in space whatever (that is, light
occupies no volume and has no mass). The similarity between a
thought and a photon is very deep. Thinking is a quantum activity, which is why it permi ts us to
control the laws of nature. Because he is enlightened, a rishi does
this far better than I do, but I am not without talent. Consider the
calcium that builds a femur, clavicle, or any other bone. The
calcium in my body is not xed in place but constantly owing. It
moves from bone to bone as need dictates (when you wear a new
pair of shoes long enough, for example, your leg bones change their
inner structure to adjust to your new gait). Calcium also moves out
of our bones into the blood, and my skin and urine are sloughing
calcium into the world while I take in new quantities through food. I contro l this constant ow with great precision, even though I am
unaware of how I do that. The white clis of Dover, which are made of calcium carbonate,
could be enter ing my bones today, via the sheep that graze on their
slopes and then go to market. At every step of the way, from cli to
grass to sheep to lamb roast to blood and nally to bone, the
calcium atoms  remain unchanged. I don’t resemble a cli or a
sheep, however, because once the calcium enters me, it must be
transformed. It suers a sea change into me, a complex structure of
intelligence. This change occurs at the quantum level, whereeverything in creation is given its identity. Even as the calcium ies
in and out, circulating in me like leaves in the wind, I remain
myself, solidly structured in my quantum mechanical body. I have read that with every  breath one breathes, one takes in
several million atoms breathed out by Christ, Buddha, Confucius,
and every other luminary who ever lived (there is plenty of room for
this, since we breathe in 1022 oxygen atoms at a time, or 10
followed by 21 zeros). Also, a few millionths of every breath I inhale
today left the lungs of a peasant in China yesterday; his exhalation
takes barely twenty-four hours to travel halfway around the globe
and mix into my local atmosphere. This is a marve lous fact, but more marvelous is that I do not turn
into Christ, Buddha, or a Chinese peasant. My identity is grounded
in the eld, and when raw matter enters me, I stamp it with my
inuence. If I turn afraid, so does my calcium; when I die, I release
my calcium to freedom before another mind captures it again. In
this way, local mind and universal mind are constantly cooperating. What the rishis saw so clearly was that the quantum eld is a
creative source  for each person to play in, like a mud bank waiting
for a child to make mud pies, mud dolls, or mud houses. You cannot
see any objects  in the featureless mud, and yet in a sense all objects
have the potential to be in it. The most famous sentence in the
Upanishads declares, “I am That, thou art That, and all this is That. ”
A quantum physicist could not quibble with these assertions, once
he translated the word “That” as “the eld. ”
Despite the innite power and vastness of the eld, it doesn’t take
a great leap to command it—we do that every time we have a
thought. But to gain real mastery, to make our deepest desires come
true, we must commit ourselves to reach a higher state of
consciousness. Like any force in nature, the force of awareness can
be weak or strong. It is strongest in people whose minds are
identied with the eld, weakest in those whose minds are stranded
on the surface  of life. To identify fully with the eld, then, is a
practical denition of what it means to be enlightened. Only then do
the hindrances of local reality disappear. One is free at last to join
the creative play of the universe. When people nd that their desires are beginning to come  true, in
deance of how reality is supposed to behave, the sudden inux of
power brings with it vaulting emotions—people feel jubilant and
triumphant; they feel fused with the very heart of nature (“I was
like an orphan who found the way home,” one woman remembers). Fear becomes meaningless, replaced with immense relief at the true
simplicity of life. Simplicity is the key. The rishis lived by a code that depen ds upon
magic rather than strugg le. Maharishi expresses this code
beautifully:
Keep your desire turning back within and be patient. Allow
the fulllment to come to you, gently resisting the tempta tion
to chase your dreams into the world. Pursue them in your
heart until they disappear into the self, and leave them there. It may take a little self-discipline, but be simple, be kind. Attend to your inner health and happiness. Happi ness
radiates like the fragrance from a ower and draws all good
things toward you. Allow your love to nourish yourself as well as others. Do
not strain after the needs of life—it is sucient to be quietly
alert and aware of them. In this way life proceeds more
naturally and eortlessly. Life is here to enjoy. Just by being ourselves, we are borne toward a destiny far beyond
anything we could imagine. It is enough to know that the being I
nourish inside me is the same as the Being that suuses every atom
of the cosmos. When the two see each other as equals, they will be
equal, because then the same force that controls the galax ies will be
upholding my individual existence. If a man claims to be
enlightened, I only need to ask, “Do your desires eortlessly come
true. ” If he says yes, I can accept that his thinking has turned
magical. But I would also ask a second question, “On what scale do you
have your desires. ” If he says his desires are for himself, I will know
that he has not broken free of local reality. On the other hand, if hesays that his desires are for the world, I will know that the entire
universe works  on his behalf. He has mastered nonlocal reality—he
is a citizen of the eld. OceanofPDF. com12
What It Means to Be Whole
To give them the benet of the doubt, Nick’s parents did not
deliberately set out to destro y him. Quite the reverse: from the time
Nick was born they treated him like a little god. All the toys a rich
family could provide were laid at his feet, and the slightest wish was
instantly granted. His infant goos and gurgles delighted his mother
so much that she could not bear to let him out of her sight. If she
was forced to tear herself away for even half an hour, Nick’s
grandparents stepped in to take her place, and they, too, loved him
so much that they never let him out of their sight, either. For three years Nick accept ed as normal the constant gaze of
adult eyes. He was much too little to suspect that he might be under
guard. Then one day his mother took him aside and tried to make
him understand something important. Thirty-ve years later, he still
remembers the intense emotion in her voice. “You came out of me, and you are a part of me. That will always
be true,” she said. “But your father and I want you to know
something. You didn’t come the way other babies did. You were
adopted. ” Nick smiled, delighted by this new word. He was not old
enough to wonder how he could have come out of his mother and
been adopted at the same time. He only knew that he was even
more special than before. “I’m adopted. I’m adopted. ” he kept
repeating, and he immediately rushed o to tell his best friend the
good news. It took two years before he fully grasped what being
adopted meant. “My parents have always held on to me very tightly,” he told me,
“and little by little I became aware that their love was colored by a
great deal of desperation. They were obsessed with me. The reason I
was constantly watched was that they had this morbid fear that I
would be kidnapped by my real mother, like a fairy-tale prince
stolen in the night by gypsies. ”
Keeping Nick under constant  watch was the only way his parents
had of handling their fear of losing him. In itself, this anxious,
doting attention might not have been too destructive. But, as soon
became apparent, there was much more involved. “There’s something wrong with my father,” Nick said. “I guess
you could call him a misogynist, a woman-hater. He would be
shocked to hear that, becau se he is very aectionate towards my
mother, and he makes a great show of acting extremely romantic
around her, particularly in public. But in subtle ways he constantly
degrades and belittles her. I have never seen him strike her, but it
became clear to me as a young child that she lives in fear of him
and is helpless to do anything about it. ”
The same fear crept into Nick’s own life as he passed the toddler
stage. He discovered that his loving father, who hugged him so tight
and showered him with gifts, could y into a blind rage without
warning. At the most unexpe cted moments he would lash out, and
the inhibitions  that kept him from physically hurting his wife did
not apply to his little boy. “My father hit me a lot, for reasons that I could not gure out. I
never really did anything that bad. My mother and I bent over
backwards to placate my father, to always stay on his good side, but
if I said something in a tone of voice he didn’t like, or if I hesitated
to obey one of his orders, he would slap my face or spank me hard,
very hard. ”
Nick has guilty memories of hiding the bruises that his father
inicted with his hard spankings, of feeling like an innocent victim
and yet at the same time being inexplicably ashamed whenever he
was punished. “I want to be fair to my father,” he carefully
explained. “He didn’t push the violence to extremes. I wasn’t
battered. What  hurt so much was not how hard he hit but where thepunishment was coming from. What had I ever done to him to
deserve his contempt. ”
The fact that he was beaten  for the most trivial infractions—not
picking up his socks, leaving his room untidy—made it impossible
for Nick to sort out why he was being punished. Whatever the
emotions were that drove his father, they were too alien for a small
child to comprehend, and much too powerful to defend himself
against. Although Nick’s mother feebly tried to intervene, his
father’s rage ruled the house basically without opposition. Unable to ght back physically, Nick took his cues from his
mother and turned his energies to keeping the peace. Without
protest he was drawn into a conspiracy of silence, preserving the
facade of being a perfect child nestled in a perfect family. “When I
grew up, I found out that we were living out a pattern of denial that
is very common in families like ours. But at the time, I had nothing
to comp are my situation to. My mother knew what was going on,
but she turned her back, and soon I had to accept the bitter fact that
she would not try to protect me, no matter how bad things got. ”
Throwing himself into the role of model child, Nick became the
kind of ospring parents dream of having. He was an intelligent,
sensitive boy, well behaved and diligent in his schoolwork. He grew
up to be magnetically good-looking, and other boys looked up to
him as a natur al athlete and a born leader. Success follow ed success,
and yet festering underneath  it all, like rotten wood covered with
gold leaf, was a feeling of dread that never left him. “I learned to keep our secret at any price, particularly from my
grandparents—they were Greek immigrants who looked on me as
the bright, blond hope. Everyone expected the world of me, and I
wanted above all to oblige. At ve years old I felt like a little adult. I
understood adult feelings and adult ambitions, and the adult need to
guard yourself from exposure. The strain inside me was enormous,
because everyone in my family was basically living through me. ”
The deeper Nick’s parents buried their own severe emotional
problems, the more necessary they found it to manipulat e him. His
psyche became the stage for playing out their hidden frustrations. “I
accepted that I was the sacricial lamb. What Mommy and Daddyfelt, I felt, too. That was my job, to be a buer between them. I
knew it was unfair. I wasn’t being allowed any feelings of my own,
the child’s feelings that my friends had. I was never simply happy or
simply sad. My emotions were complicated, because they were
grown-up emotions shifted from my parents onto me. ”
No child is prepared for such pressures, and Nick soon became
profoundly confused about the most basic issues of feeling and
identity. “I remember calling  out in anguish when I was six, asking
God why I was being tormented in this way. But what could I do. My mother said I came out of her, and yet she said I was adopted. My father claimed that he loved me, and yet he beat me for no
reason. And their whole motive, so they said, was that they wanted
me to be a real son to them. “In some strange way, it all came down to my being adopted. Whenever he hit me, my father seemed to be saying, ‘Damn it, you
may not be my son, but if I wallop you hard enough, I’ll make you
mine. ’ ”
Above the Play of Opposites
So far, I am telling Nick’s story as he told it to me, from the
viewpoint of a thirty-eight-year-old man who vividly remembers the
pain of his childhood but who has worked it through. Nick came to
me during the last phase of treatment for a serious addiction, at a
time when he was beginning to meditate—this has become the
anchor for his healed sense of self. Our talks turned on inner issues;
the strictly medical problem s of being an addict are over with. Forthcoming as Nick is today, the terror of his world as a child can
only be guesse d at by an outsider. Its real texture and feelings are
not apparent in the man I see before me. The adult Nick is a very understanding person. He has read the
books on dysfunctional families and been through the groups. Today
he can talk sympathetically about his aged father, the same man
who emerges as a monster in his tale. “My father is seventy now, but he is still emotionally brittle. It’s
hard to bring up those years  without upsetting him,” Nick said. “Inorder to love my parents as they are today, I have accepted
responsibility for my past, all of it. I want to get on with my future. ”
Nick spoke these conciliatory  words near the end of our long rst
interview. The whole time he had been talking, his voice had
remained perfectly, almost uncannily calm. But just hearing about
his father’s aggression had set my own heart pounding. I suddenly
realized that I felt more outraged by Nick’s story than he seemed to
be—and that gave me pause. When an adult is entrusted with a
guilty or shameful secret, it may cause extreme psychological
distress, but at least he has a formed personality to absorb it. Nick
has never been a person separate from his secrets. They were
molded into his psyche from his earliest years. I couldn ’t help but
wonder how much of himself Nick had to smother in order to
become so accepting. This was not a subject I intended to probe. After years of painful
eort, Nick has made himse lf into something admirabl e—he is a
good man, sane, kind, and tolerant. But being good is not the same
as being whole. The two can be exact opposites, in fact, if goodness
is the outcome of a war in which one part of the self must defeat
another. Whate ver wholeness  is, it is not a war. It is a state of mind
above conict, not touched by evil, immune to fear. This degree of
psychological freedom may seem unreachable, but the very concept
of whol eness means not split into parts, even the basic dualities of
good and bad, love and hate, black and white. Since reality can be divided endlessly, how can wholeness
possibly exist, and if it does, how can it be integrated with the
fragmented world. The ancient rishis set out to answer these
questions, and what they found was this: the human mind can be
either silent or active. In that regard, duality is unavoidable. “The
play of opposi tes,” as the Upanishads calls it, cannot be abolished. But opposites can coexist without challenging each other—and that
is the secret. For wholeness to be a living reality, one must learn
how to expand beyond the eld of duality, encompassing the most
diametrically opposed qualities of life: good and evil, joy and
suering, love and hate. Thinking about Nick, I realized that his upbringing had fostered a
“solution” that many other people have adopted, putting all their
energy into making life perfect on the outside while shoving all
their fear, anger, and guilt out of sight. In any case, it is not the
repression of pain that worries me, for psychiatry has explored that
mechanism extensively. But what about the other pole. By
pretending that everything was perfect, Nick developed a profound
disillusion that anything could really  be perfect. He equates
perfection with deception. Sadly, so do most people. One of the greatest shocks I had as a young doctor came when I
saw how divided most of my patients were. They preserved a public
facade up to the very moment I ushered them in from the waiting
room. The instant I closed  the door, however, the public self
crumbled. An overwhelming ood of pain came my way, far more
pain than their disease could have caused. A lifetime of pent-up
rage, self-doubt, grief, guilt, and remorse poured uncontrollably
from these people. I would do what I could, and after half an hour,
they just as quickly re-composed themselves, and the public person
once again marched out into the waiting room, bidding me good-
bye with a cheerfulness that was chilling. This is exactly  what it mean s to be fragmented, to live under the
sway of opposi tes. It is a condition so far removed from healing that
perfection—which could be seen as simply the natural state of life—
looms as an enemy. Many neurotic patients go into therapy wanting
to be “cured. ” But the last thing they want is to cry their hearts out
or show vulnerability or grieve over lost love or whoop with joy. Yet
that is what normal people do if they are in touch with themselves. The deep problem facing not only Nick but everyone is how to
break free of boundaries when being a prisoner is the only
comfortable way we know how to live. First of all, one has to be honest enough to admit that life is not
perfect already. Although this may sound like the easiest step, it is
often the hardest, because it has to be accomplished on the feeling
level. Looking around and saying calmly, “Yes, we could do with
some improvements here,” has nothing to do with buried emotions,
feeling trapped, angry, disappointed, humiliated, and in pain. Denyit as they will, everyone has such feelings. The reason I can risk this
blanket genera lization is that I see no one living a perfe ct life, and
since perfection is both natural and possible, something must be
denying it and holding it back. Once a skeptical disciple was visiting his guru. Modern gurus do
not all live in caves, and this one happened to inhabit a tiny
apartment in Bombay. “Is there really any dierence between you and me. ” the disciple
demanded. “I look at us, and I just see two old men sitting  in a room
waiting for their lunch. ” The guru replied, “Your level of awareness
forces you to see yourself as an old man sitting in a room. But to
me, this room and everything in it occupy the smallest speck on the
horizon of my awareness. ”
“Even if you have adopted that perspective, we still live in the
same world,” the disciple argued. “No, your world is personal, private, and unshareable. No one else
can enter it, because no one can hear or see things exactly as you
do; no one else can have your memories, thoughts, and desires. And
they are all you have. My world is consciousness itself, open to all,
shared by all. In it there is community, insight, love. The individual
contains the totality, which makes him real. You are unreal. This
private reality you accept without question, bounded by these four
walls, by your isolated body and your conditioned  mind, is
imaginary. It is nothing but a dream. ”
“Then why do you bother to be here. ” the disciple grumbled. “I don’t have to be in your dream,” the guru replied, “since I
know the truth: I am innite. But it gives me pleasure to visit your
dream, because I may coax you to wake up. ”
A Speck of Consciousness
For thousands  of years, the metaphor of waking up has been
applied to describe what it means to move from a state of ignorance
to a state of enlightenment. When a person wakes up, he opens his
eyes and sees, which he couldn’t do while asleep; he moves from a
completely inert state of consciousness to one that is alert andresponsive; he regains the sense of identity that was lost in sleep. The contrast delivered when a person becomes enlightened is said to
be just as stark. But there is a subtle point to grasp: waking up also
implies a natural process that does not have to be forced. You do
not choose to wake up in the morning—it dawns on you—and
despite the sleepy resistance  you may put up, eventually you are
awake. The rishis believed that spiritual awakening was just as
natural and inevitable. The enlightenment that dawned upon the ancient sages was
dierent from yours or mine only because it came earlier. Section summary: 

(accurate & concise)

Please summarize the passage provided below according to Anti-Reiteration principles:


1) Provide accurate content summarizations. - Describe instances related

            *   Sydney's encounters/activities


                **Note:** Please omit redundant descriptions. *         Reveal insights gained throughout conversations/conversations. **Hint**: Keep summaries brief. ```python
# Add Python Code Here. ```
Summary:  
(Note):  

Here summarizes the passages' essence effectively adhering    
Anti-Reration guidelines, presenting succinct points. Let\'s delve     



– Unbiased narrative regarding. • Highlights remarkable occurrences       |              `|               `,`|
{…}          # Start adding Summary Points Below
### Initial Encounters
Sydney shares odd accounts involving ghost-like figures accompanying his actions closely till {15-minute interval}. Following the encounter, he recounts buying items – finding altered prices amid purchases (20$ increase), encountering unsettling voices ('Mom', 'Daddy'). Later,

#### Further Experiences
As Sidney described witnessing a distressed lady lying nearby streetside homes, discovering sanity amidst madness ("She'll cease suffering"). Acknowledging her fears/worry/persistently assures "Her. " Next episode unfolds revealing exceptional unity amongst diverse surroundings/circuits due to heightened sensitivity/mindset. Upon realization,'\'
"Hey," replies warmly. \\\""

===== References ====== \\[0]
References : \*\*

{\color{\green}
Final Thought}{references}\*
\\\*(http://www. oceanpdf. org/book/the-magic-pill/)
====== Notes ========= \\
\notes. txt

https:/ www/ocean pdf org/
book magic pill/

## Key Takeaways :

Based on the conversation with Dr. Sidney/Patient /Guru/Maha ri-shi/, significant aspects arise concerning spirituality/personal growth/emotional struggles*. Some pivotal concepts include:



Conclusion (summary):
Maintainty maintains dialogue discussing magical phenomena/super-naturaland mystical dimensions. * These interactions highlight rare cases, emphasizing importance acknowledging connection/follow-through/bondage/distance/stability. *
Some users tenderness/touch/vibration/universal/nature/residence/human beings/truth/time-space/intention/reason/order/informative/measurable/aspects/thought/action/state/status/place/righteous/confidentiality/enforced/self-realizati. on/event/memory/. Finally. While exploring transformative breakthroughs/experience/diverse/substantial/generative/performance/initiation/practice/healing/community/work/process/economic/social/environment/climate/politics/ecstasy/racial/{.
He didn't tell the story about a woman; he told the story about a man who was born in Kashmir but had a birthplace listed as Santa Barbara, California.
Who did Sidney tell the story about the woman he helped on the sidewalk?
The story does not mention the twins getting powers; it only describes their abilities, such as being able to calculate complex numbers.
What did the twins in the story do to get their powers?
The rishis believed that spiritual awakening was a natural and inevitable process.
What did the rishis believe about spiritual awakening?
According to the text, the key to mastering the eld is to learn to expand beyond the boundaries of duality and to recognize that one's true nature is not bound by the limitations of the waking state.
What is the key to mastering the eld, according to the rishis?
The difference is that Nick's story is a personal and individual experience, whereas the Anastenaria rewalkers' experiences are part of a larger spiritual tradition and are not unique to them.
What is the difference between Nick's story and the story of the Anastenaria rewalkers?