If only we
knew it, we are already moving out of deep sleep. The process is
happening at its own pace, often with little, if any, outward sign. Here I think of Nick again. When he was seventeen, he took stock of
himself in a poem that shows a keen understanding of the knots that
tied up his personality. He also foretold much of his tempestuous
future. The poem’s hero is a tormented sailor about to journey
toward unknown shores:
Days and nights of peace
Have turned into success and frustration . Oh, demonish powers have betrayed my wits ,
I am haunted by nothingness . Away! Away! I must leave to destroy this self-destruction
Within my aching soul . The words are feverish but true: given his chaotic childhood, the
young Nick had nothing solid to stand on but his lonely ship—his
self—and his great enemy was the threat of self-destruction that
recurred throughout his young adulthood. Within a few years he
found that the fantasy of escape, which might be viable in a
romantic poem, did not work in real life. Very early on he learned that he would have to struggle just to
survive. Constant struggle—against his family, against drug
addiction, against his inner demons—has remained the main theme
of his existence. Therefore, more than anyone else I know , I wouldlike Nick to see a way out that is beyond struggle. To nd that way
out, we have to focus on those rare islands of calm when he did not
experience struggle. These were the portents of wholeness that his
psyche was trying to gain. If wholeness can be recognized by how it feels, the appropriate
feeling is fulllment. Anything that is deeply fulllin g gives a
person the sense of his own completeness. If only for a moment, one
reaches a state where “I am” is enough, without cares, without the
craving for anything more. One is content to live on life itself, just
the air, sunligh t, trees, and sky. One lacks for nothing. Being here is
the highest reward. When I was seven I had an experience of this kind that has served
as a talisman ever since. Every day I shared a small family ritual
with my mother and younger brother Sanjiv, who was four. My
mother would draw us close to her while she read verses from the
Ramayana, the epic tale of Lord Rama. There is no exact equivalent
of this work in the West. It contains the battles and adventures
required of an epic, but the Ramayana is also scripture . Rama is
both an exiled  prince and an incarnation of God. It is impossible to
separate his humanity from his divinity, and while Sanjiv and I were
captivated by Rama’s exploit s in battle, the same verses would raise
my mother to a pitch of devotional exaltation. Nor were we just reader and listeners. The Ramayana is recited to
music, and my mother would sit at a small harmonium picking out
the tunes for each verse. Sanjiv and I sang along, and wherever the
music went, so did our emotions. Rama’s saga moves from the
wildest ecstasy to the depths of despair, touching every emotion in
between. When  my father walked in the door after work, dressed in
his starched army uniform, he never knew whether his wife and
children would  have tears rolling down their cheeks or be shrieking
with delight. Being a canny storyteller, my mother ended each day’s recitation
at a suspensef ul point in the tale. One day she stopped  after the
demon Ravana, the arch villain of the saga, shoots Rama’s brother
Lakshman on the battleeld. Lakshman lies near death, and the only
remedy for his poisoned wound is an herb that grows on themountainsides of the Himalayas. Unfortunately, the battle is taking
place in Sri Lanka, hundreds  of miles south. Rama’s greatest ally is
the monkey king Hanuman, who by incredible good fortune can, as
he now reveals, y. He instantly volunteers to bring back the herb
that will save Lakshman’s life. Hanuman ies to the Himalayas, but
when he arrive s he cannot nd the plant he needs. He searches high
and low, knowing that every second is precious. Still the herb is
nowhere to be found. Hanuman is beside himself with frustration. This is where my mother closed the book, leaving us to go to bed
that night tingling with dread and anticipation. I had begun to
identify myself  and Sanjiv with Rama and his younger brother and
so felt particul arly anxious for Sanjiv. The next day my mother sang
to us of how the clever monkey king solved his dilemma. He ripped
the mountain up by its roots , bore it through the air to Sri Lanka,
and laid it at Rama’s feet. The herb was found, and to our joy,
Lakshman’s life was saved in the nick of time. Unable to contain our feeling s, my mother, brother, and I rushed
out into the courtyard. Still singing, we joined hands and began to
dance in a ring, faster and faster. I got dizzy and sat down in the
dust, laughing . When my head quit swimming, I looked up. Everything I saw had taken on a feeling of utter rightness. I was in
the middle of a perfect world, sparkling with clarity and joy. The
sky, the sunlight glancing o the trees, the nearby sounds of Delhi
trac, and my smiling mothe r bending over me fused into an image
of complete fulllment. Many times since then I have referred back to that momentary
feeling, which never fails to remind me of its truth, as enduring in
my mind as Rama himself. But what sets this experience apart from
the other joys I have felt is that Ravana the demon was included in
it. I loved him for shooting Lakshman! His evil enabled good to
triumph; it made Rama’s whole adventure possible. This was the
closest I came, before I knew  of spirituality, to grasping the sage’s
serenity at the rightness of life as a whole. I experienced that the
beauty of the totality far exceeds the beauty or ugliness of any
single part.Few people have carried fulllment far enough to be able to say
whether complete, lasting satisfaction is built into human nature,
although that is exactly what is claimed in higher states of
consciousness. Nick experienced a glimpse of fulllment for the rst
time when he was sent to an experimental high school in Vermont. As part of their curriculum, the students spent weeks hiking and
mountaineering; they learned self-reliance by camping alone in the
woods. “I would be left on my own for days at a time, and it gave me a
sense of self that I had never  had,” Nick recalled. “There were hours
when I was very quiet inside. I felt protected, and remaining at
peace with myself seemed like a real possibility.” This interlude
spent communing with nature made a lasting impression on him,
but returning home exposed him once more to the emotional
turbulence of his family. His sense of self became tenuous again,
glimpsed only in eeting moments. A few years later, Nick’s father pressured him to drop out of
college and take over one of the construction rms that he owned. Nick proved extremely succe ssful at this, but before long he faced
his rst emotional crisis as an adult. For years, wheneve r he dared
to open his heart to someone else, Nick instantly felt strong pangs of
distrust. This was predictab le, given that the models of love he
learned from as a child, his father and mother, were also powerful
models of betrayal. The fused emotions of love and distrust were
imprinted on his psyche, and he found it nearly impossible to
separate them. At rst this imprint remained at the unconscious level, while Nick
went through the normal adolescent rites of dating and casual
intimacy. Disaster struck when he turned twenty-ve and plunged
into a sudden marriage with a woman named Clare. I have almost
no sense of what she was like, since Nick says little about her now,
except that he divorced her after two stormy years together. Apparently their period of compatibility lasted little longer than
the honeymoon. Nick quickly  discovered, to his horror, that he was
preprogrammed to treat his wife the way his father treated his
mother. “I was under tremendous pressure at work, havingdiscovered too late what a huge mistake I made by going into
business for my father. He was a worse tyrant than ever, and when I
came home in the evening, I found myself taking my revenge on
Clare. I would snap at her and start arguments over nothing. “Beneath this irrational behavior, which upset me terribly, I
wanted to do exactly the opposite, to open up and treat her as a
condante. But there was always a great resistance inside me, like a
rock in the middle of my chest.”
This is the tragedy of a fragmented self. Certain feelings become
impermissible, because the past has made them too threatening to
incorporate into oneself. The rock in the middle of Nick’s  chest was
part of him, but it had split o so completely that it felt like a thing,
a piece of nonself that could not be moved. “Every time I tried to
share a feeling with Clare, I had a dreadful premonitio n that she
would betray me. The two impulses locked together, and I really
believe that the most extrem e torture could not have forced me to
tell her what I was feeling. Like an oyster, I would die if my shell
was pried open. Frustrated by what she perceived as my rejection,
Clare became estranged, and soon we drifted apart completely.”
Nick’s marriag e ended in failure, but at least he could sense that
the war inside himself was not total. A speck of consciousness
hovered above the fray. One knows this because Nick saw himself
creating the conict that trapped him, even though he lacked
enough aware ness to free himself. It would be years before this
speck of consciousness becam e more powerful. For the moment, it
only intensied his suering , because he could see all too clearly
how he was victimizing Clare. Life in Unity
To grow from a speck of consciousness to complete self-aw areness
is a natural process, although few people get to the end of it. If you
close your eyes and sit quietly, you will experience the same feeling
of “I am” that a yogi has, but this fundamental sense of self can be
very limited or very large. It can be so fragile that a crisis will easily
shatter it, or it can be so rm that you could build the world on it.The fragmented self pretends to be rm and solid, but the rock
inside is made of pain, denied emotions, and guilt. This repressed
pain eventuall y makes itself known, either by causing suering or
by bringing up a mirror image (in this case, Nick’s wife) which
reveals the presence of pain even if the feeling itself cannot be
faced. But denial is incredibly powerful. Any reality, however
punitive, can be seen as acceptable, even ideal. I was very moved
when I read a sentence from one of the Christian church fathers:
“God has placed souls in Hell, but in His mercy He allows them to
believe that they are actually living in Paradise.” This would not be
merciful if there was no escape from hellish situations. But if one
believes that every person is working his way through the process of
awakening, then nothing could be more merciful than letting
everyone think that his stage of growth is the best. All this is to preface the notion of “false unity.” There is a huge
dierence between dierent states of consciousness, but each one
tends to feel as if one has found unity. “Unity” means a sense of
being in touch  with reality, of seeing things as they are. The most
deluded paranoiac, who believes that Martians are going to invade
tomorrow, pities the rest of us who cannot share his grasp of reality. Likewise, the saint who sees God in a fallen sparrow has no choice
but to accept that his awareness is not shared by everyone, either. Because we all harbor the secret belief that our level of awareness
must be the right one, it seems all but impossible to credit that there
is, in fact, a state of true unity. The rishis called it Brahmi Chetna ,
“unity conscio usness,” and declared that it was the goal toward
which all other states of consciousness are evolving. Anyone who
has a speck of self-awareness is heading, however halting ly, toward
it. The dierence between me, a man who lives in ordinary waking
consciousness, and a man in unity is that I see the world dominated
by dierences: billions of separate fragments cluster together to
form my reality. A man in unity sees these fragments, too, but
underneath them he perceives wholeness. To him, the world with all
its diversity is just one thing. A world  made of only one thing sounds strange, but the rishis
found it glorious, because what they beheld in all directions wastheir own awareness. Creation became a mirror showing them
themselves. The objects seen by the eye were no longer made of
inert matter. They breathed with life; their being owed seamlessly
into the rishi’s own. Although usually invisible, this living
consciousness could shine forth at times, making a table or tree
seem to glow from within or lling the air with a shower of golden
sparkles. Visible or invisible, a world suused with awareness becomes
indescribably intimate to a person in unity. There are no separations
anymore. Without stretching out a hand, one can feel the texture of
a distan t wall. The heave of the earth as it turns on its axis can be
felt under one’s feet. Even touching a star becomes a direct
experience. “Since everything is made of consciousness alone,” the
Upanishads jubilantly declare, “there is nothing in creation that is
not myself.”
The mind’s shift into unity is as radical as the change from waking
to sleeping, or sleeping to dreaming. A book can barely suggest
what happens, but imagine a British explorer brewing a cup of tea
in the Arctic. One thing, the molecule H2O, surrounds him on all
sides, in the form of his ice oe, the snow covering it, the Arctic
Ocean over the horizon, the clouds above, the boiling water in his
kettle and the steam rising from it; even the explorer’s body is two-
thirds water. The eye alone could not reveal this unity. It takes a
specic state of awareness, one that has been educated in the basic
principles of physics, to experience so many dierent things, by
turns hard, soft, cold, hot, white, blue, invisible, visible, moving,
and still, as transformations of one fundamental substance. Because of what he knows, the explorer can manipulate  part of
reality. He can make ice into water, or water into steam, and so on. The state of unity goes one better: any aspect of reality can be
changed, not by manipulating molecules or atoms, but by
manipulating the fundamental layer of awareness that ties all of
nature together. By a simple but breathtaking stroke, if I can change
my mind, and if the world is made of the same stu as my mind,
then I can change the world.We are speaking of a natural unfoldment of the mind’s deeper
layers. The rishis claim that wrapped up inside us is the capacity to
command every force of nature, to inuence every atom in the
universe. Is all this really believable? Our present state of awareness
keeps us convinced that we are small and helpless. One person is
insignicant compared to the might of natural force s. An all-
powerful and merciless environment does not care for his fate. Terrible things happen at random to people who do not seem to
deserve them, and everyone feels swept along by circumstances
beyond his control. To accept such a reality is the most crippling kind of ignorance,
according to the rishis, because it fullls its own prophec ies. If you
are unaware of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, your
ignorance will not change relativity one jot, but if you are ignorant
about your own self, your self will shrink to t your conception. For
any person engaged in strong denials of pain and anger, the picture
of reality presented to him will be twice as deludin g, because
whenever he makes a move  to release his pain, it will hurt, and
escaping hurt is his whole reason for denying in the rst place. Ignorance is the most circular of circular traps. Fortunately, awareness is not only self-healing, if given the
chance, but a certain part is already healed. This part is the sense of
Being, of “I am,” which no one can ever sacrice or destroy. Only a
person in unity sees Being in all directions, but we each have a seed
of Being inside, the starting point of our evolution. Brain scientists have stumbled across this aspect of awareness in
their exploration of the brain and wondered what they were
confronting. Beginning in the 1930s, the renowned Canadian brain
surgeon Wilder Peneld spent several decades probing the brains of
epileptic patients with an electric needle. This procedure (which was entirely painless) enabled Peneld to
talk with his patients while their cerebral cortex was being
stimulated. When the needle touched various parts of the cortex,
which control s the higher functions of thought, all kinds of
experiences were evoked. Any moment from the past might return,not with the vagueness of a memory, but replayed exactly as if it
were happening again. Peneld recounts the experi ence of a young South African who
burst out in astonishment because he perceived himself  far away,
laughing with his cousin on a farm back home, while at the same
time being fully conscious that he was lying on an operating table in
Montreal. It was very exciting for Peneld to discover that
completely formed, totally convincing reality could be evoked from
the brain. The farm, the sun, and the patient’s cousin were as real as
life. But what intrigued Pen eld far more was the fact that this man
did not believe he was in South Africa. His consciousness
maintained two tracks at once, and he was quite clear that only one
was true. In other words, he could tell that a brain picture was not
convincing enough to constitute reality. Something stood aside and
judged the picture without becoming wrapped up in it. Similarly, Pen eld could touch a specic spot on the cortex that
caused the operating room to change visually, to become suddenly
much larger or much smaller, but the patient knew that this was an
optical illusion , even though it was the only thing he could see. He
didn’t say, “The room is getting bigger,” but “I am seeing  the room
appear to get bigger.” This may sound like a ne distinction;
however, to Peneld it proved something immensely important, that
awareness can be studied apart from the thoughts and images that
usually ll it. In other words, some aspect of the mind is not imprisoned in the
world of duality. It maintains a steady state of conscious
intelligence; it just is. This core of undisturbed clarity is awareness
itself, in its purest, simplest form. Whether he realizes it or not,
every person’s mind is anchored in clarity. Pure awareness remains
unaected even in the midst of life’s most wrenching events (brain
surgery being  one of the most wrenching, by any measure). Although we cannot alter our core of pure awareness, lose it or
destroy it, we can forget it. As part of being free creatur es, each of
us has the choice whether to put his attention on the changing part
of the mind or on the unchanging part.What the rishis discovered is that a whole mind, one that has
risen to a higher state of consciousness, fuses these two dierent
modes of attention. One mode follows the activity of the world; the
other remains motionless within its own nature. A person is beyond
all suering when he can think and act without disturbing the silent
clarity of his mind. As the rishis put it, the full moon’s reection
breaks apart on a windy lake, but that does not break up the moon
itself. In one poetic image, they captured exactly what Peneld
discovered with his probes. Like any other wound, hurt awareness has to heal of its own
accord. This means that for many people, the initial stages of
evolution will remind them of pain, anger, and guilt they would
rather forget. But awareness is like an army that advances together,
leaving no stragglers; all the old pain must be confronted. As
Maharishi points out, “enlightenment” means that every part of the
mind receives light; there are no dark corners, and nothin g remains
that is frightening to look at. Meditation does not confront us with
our old hurts head on, howe ver. Each hurt has left its mark in the
nervous system, and it is these physiological scars that get released. In this way, the growth to enlightenment proceeds without
wrenches. There is no pressure to grow at a certain speed. Franz
Kafka, whose literary reputa tion centers on his portrayal of acute
suering, once wrote a brilliant armation of the path to
enlightenment: “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting
at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not
even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely oer
itself to you to be unmasked; it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy
at your feet.” Reading this passage, I feel the breath of reality. It
beckons witho ut disturbing its own stillness, and to know what it
whispers, I must become just as still myself. Struggle and Expansion
Nick’s next phase, occupying  his late twenties and early  thirties,
was to wrestle with the speck of consciousness that had revealed
itself o and on since his childhood. Outwardly, this was the mostchaotic time of his life, in which his urge to be free of his demons
expressed itself in twisted ways, often as self-destructive behavior. At some deep level, however, wholeness was mysteriously growing. The divorce from Clare was not a friendly one, and it was soon
followed by an acrimonious legal dispute with Nick’s parents, who
claimed title to his house and bank account. These had been
transferred to them as a legal ploy during the divorce proceedings,
but after Clare  departed with a modest settlement, Nick’s parents
atly refused to return his property. His father coolly challenged
him to le a lawsuit, claiming  that he could tie Nick up in the courts
for years. In a fury, Nick walked out of the family business. Having
managed to gain money from a trust fund, he ed to Italy, where he
spent a kind of fantasy year learning to race cars on the grand prix
circuit. He drove recklessly, pushing the sport’s dangers to the limit,
but his self-des tructive streak  was just beginning to emerge. Soon he
came back to Boston and raised the ante on his life by turning to
cocaine. The same mixture of danger, thrills, and rage that he had
felt driving a race car now became much sharper edged. The compulsion to stay on cocaine was immense. Nick had
reached the point where keeping up the facade of normality, which
he had been so good at when  he was ve, became nearly impossible
now that he was thirty-ve. Despite his intense eorts to channel his
energies into productive outlets—he ran ve miles a day, swam two
more miles in the pool, worked out at the gym, and kept up a large
circle of sympathetic friends—he found that despair and rage
inexorably crept into his mind, tingeing every other impulse. His
buried secrets were claiming their revenge. Nick broke out of his addiction by slow stages, but at each stage
the common theme was his expansion of awareness. What gives any
form of mental torment its sinister power is that people have a
mistaken notion about themselves. We think that we are being
tortured by grief, depression , fear, and despair as if some foreign
enemy were attacking from within. Yet there are no enemies within. There is only mind-stu. Like a kind of universal modelin g clay, thisinvisible subst ance molds itself into all our thoughts, feelings, and
desires. The problem is that mind-stu can enact dramas in which  it plays
opposite roles. It can play victim and torturer at the same time. Nick
told me that he was staying  in a Jamaican hotel a few years ago,
spending a week scuba divin g. He was temporarily o all drugs and
had never been in better shape physically. As he stepped into the
shower one morning, he suddenly found himself dropping to his
knees, crying, totally beside himself. A wave of despair welled up
from some dark recess. “God,” he cried out loud, “why is this
happening to me? Should I kill myself? Do you exist? Please, please,
if you are God, take my torment away!”
He related this terrifying moment, as ever, in a controlled,
pleasant voice,  but I was brushed by the emptiness he had felt. “Do
you think God heard you?” I asked after a moment. “I don’t  know,”  he said. “I can’t say that God is real to me. I could
have been crying out to fate or to the void.”
“So as far as you’re concerne d, your voice didn’t reach anyone?” I
asked. “I don’t know,” he repeated. “But at least we know someone who heard it,” I said. “We do?”
“You were heard by you,” I said. “Why not begin there? Instead of
wondering if there is some almighty agency who can save you from
suering, at least we can begin with your need to understand
yourself, to truly listen and know who you are. “Whenever we cry out, our voices reach ourselves. When we are
afraid, it is ourselves making us afraid; if we start to tear apart
inside, the same mind is doing the tearing and being torn. Experiencing just one side leads to suering, no matter whether you
identify with the actor or the one being acted upon. In reality, there
is no actor separate from the acted upon. It is all just you.”
Thinking about the pointless  suering that ensues, I saw a sad,
bemused look on Nick’s face, too. But we weren’t meeting  to discuss
sorrow. The latest phase of Nick’s life has been the happiest,
because he has realized that he can nd a way out of the cruel self-splitting that shaped him in childhood. He realized that if he was
ever going to live at peace with himself, he had to dismantle the
haunting threats from his past. He was fortunate to nd a
sympathetic, experienced therapist whom he began to see several
times a week. At rst Nick’s anger toward his father was too violent
to deal with. “When I uncorked my revenge fantasies and started
talking about killing my father, I sounded so convincing that my
therapist said he would have to call my parents to warn them that
they were in danger. It took that strong a threat to curb me.” It was
also necessary to check Nick into drug detox centers o and on; he
went through various rehabilitation programs a total of nine times. Eventually, the turbulence of his inner world began to subside. He
no longer feared the sudden eruption of his black rage; he did not
wake up at midnight, as he had ever since adolescence, sweating in
the grip of a panic attack. The surface Nick—the good little boy who
wanted to please—began to realize that the other Nick, seemingly so
wild and self-destructive, was in fact a sobbing child whose
emotions of grief and terror were legitimate. They did not deserve
to be condemned or feared. They deserved to be healed. A year ago, as he was terminating his therapy, Nick began to
meditate. It came as a revelatory experience, because all at once he
recovered the clarity that had been lost twenty years earlier, the last
time he was by himself in the Vermont woods. Even though his
experiences of inner silence were brief, when he came out he felt as
if he had contacted a source of deep fulllment. It was his rst
experience of a whole self in many years, and also the rst
satisfaction that rendered his shame, guilt, and self-loathing totally
irrelevant. “I have had a recurring image of myself as a swimmer caught out
alone in the middle of the ocean,” Nick said. “I am thrashing
around, while  shadowy monsters are rising up toward me from
below. But the rst time I meditated, this sinister image changed. It
dawned upon me that I was the swimmer but also the sea, and the
monsters were nothing but me, too.”
After a long pause, he unexpectedly began to tell me a story: “I
had been searching for my real mother for thirteen years. It becameextremely important for me to nd her. I thought that maybe my
addiction was related to my bloodline; I also just want ed to look
into a face that might be like mine. All kinds of reasons  motivated
me. But nothing happened. Years went by; I spent a fortune on investigators, some of whom
were outright charlatans. “Soon after I began to meditate, I turned on the radio and heard a
woman saying  that she could track down the parents of adopted
children in six weeks. She would not disclose her meth ods, but I
immediately sent her my name. Just as she promised, six weeks
later I received the name of my real mother in the mail.”
It sounded like a story some writer had carefully contrived: Nick’s
biological mother actually turned out to be a gypsy, just as he had
imagined in the fairy tale he told himself as a child. She had
threatened to steal him back when he was rst adopted. She
continued to hound Nick’s parents for several years, attempting to
squeeze more money from them (they have not revealed how
successful she was). “All at once, my whole life began to hang together. The
impersonal, random world disappeared, and I waked into a world
that had mean ing. I can’t really tell you exactly when this new sense
of meaningfuln ess dawned on me, but once it did, I felt incredibly
free. All I wanted to do was to contact my real mother and tell her
that everything was all right. No matter what she had done, I
forgave her and my adopted parents, everybody.”
“But this woman sold you and then tried to practice extortion,” I
pointed out. “I was so thrilled to nd her,” he said, “how could I not forgive
her? When I rst called up, I was extremely nervous. The woman
who had tracked my mother  down said to write a letter rst, but I
had to telepho ne her. Her name is Eva Z——, and I pretended to be
a distan t relation. After a while she became suspicious and asked me
how I knew so much about the Z——family without ever showing
up at their gatherings. “I came right out and asked her, ‘Did you ever have a son?’
Without hesita tion she said no. We fenced around a bit, and then Ipushed her harder. ‘Did you give birth to a baby boy on August 5,
1953, and give him up for adoption to a wealthy couple in Glen
Rock, New Jersey?’ Sounding twice as suspicious now, Eva again
demanded to know who I was. ‘I’m your son,’ I blurted out. “She didn’t even pause. ‘You may never believe this,’ she said,
‘but I love you.’ All at once my heart melted. We both broke down
crying. She wanted to see me immediately but I stalled . I needed
time to soak in the fact that I had really found her after thirteen
years of searching. “Two weeks later we met, and it was wonderful. Eva looks like
me; her two daughters look like me. She has a beautiful laugh. Once, she couldn’t stop laughing for ten minutes, and I anxiously
tried to calm her down. She brushed me away, saying, ‘Leave me
alone, I just want to laugh.’ We went dancing, and I held her in my
arms. She would smile and look up at me, and I thought, ‘She’s my
mother, right here in my arms. I am holding her and touching her.’
How could I not forgive her?”
Nick paused to collect himself. He had found out the secret of his
birth, which opened a deep well of emotions inside him, but there
was more to it. He was caught up by the wonder of a heart that is
just beginning  to know itself, which is a second birth. I thought
about how much I have changed, too. My hard belief that life is
merciless, like a mill wheel impartially grinding out birth and death,
is gone. To see things that way is to accept the appearance and miss
the essence. Come closer, and the world looks much more like a
wish, a great desire coming true all around us, with our own wishes
and desires woven into it. In this human life we cannot stop the wheel from grinding, but at
some other level we have all the power. We are nature’s  privileged
children. Once we x upon our deepest desires, they must come
true. That is why the great wish of the world is unfolding in the rst
place. Nick and I sat silently, sharing a conception of life so delicate and
so thrilling. He had nothing more to say, but I could still hear what I
had missed before and never wanted to forget. For the rst time,
sheer joy had been rising in his voice.OceanofPDF.comRecommended Reading
I have limited the followi ng list to books that are both
informative and enjoyable. Most of the titles were mentioned in the
text of this book. All have helped me to bring together in my own
mind the scattered elds of medicine, psychotherapy, quantum
physics, and consciousness. Crichton, Michael. Travels . New York: Knopf, 1988. Hawking, Stephen M. A Brief History of Time. New York: Bantam,
1988. Laing, R. D. Wisdom, Madn ess, and Folly. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1985. Langer, Ellen J. Mindfulness . New York: Addison-Wesley, 1989. Locke, Stephen , and Douglas Colligan. The Healer Within . New York:
E. P. Dutton, 1986. Miller, Alice. The Drama of the Gifted Child . New York: Basic Books,
1981. Noonan, David. Neuro: Life on the Front Lines of Brain Surgery and
Neurological Medicine . New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Peneld, Wilder, et al. The Mystery of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1975. Sacks, Oliver. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1985. ————. Seeing Voices . Berke ley: University of California Press,
1989.Selzer, Richard. Mortal Lessons . New York: Simon and Schuster,
1987. Yalom, Irvin D. Love’s Executioner . New York: Basic Books, 1989. OceanofPDF.comAbout the Author
Trained in India and the Unite d States, DEEPAK CHOPRA, M.D.,
has practiced endocrinology since 1971 and is a Fellow of the
American College of Physicians. He is executive director of the
Sharp HealthCare Institute for Human Potential and Mind/Body
Medicine in San Diego, California. His other books are Creating
Health  (a selection of the Prevention Book Club), Return of the Rishi
(a selection of the Literary Guild), Quantum Heali ng, Perfect Health ,
and the national bestseller Ageless Body, Timeless Mind. His writing
has been publi shed in twenty-two languages, and he lectures widely
in the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan, and India. For information about workshop and seminar programs by Deepak
Chopra, M.D., please contact:
Quantum Publications  
P.O. Box 598  
South Lancaster, MA 01523  
1-800-858-1808
Requests for information on workshops and seminars by Dr.
Chopra or any personal correspondence can be addressed to:
P.O. Box 541  
Lancaster, MA 01523  
(800) 255–8332
OceanofPDF.com
_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:

        If only we
knew it, we are already moving out of deep sleep. The process is
happening at its own pace, often with little, if any, outward sign. Here I think of Nick again. When he was seventeen, he took stock of
himself in a poem that shows a keen understanding of the knots that
tied up his personality. He also foretold much of his tempestuous
future. The poem’s hero is a tormented sailor about to journey
toward unknown shores:
Days and nights of peace
Have turned into success and frustration. Oh, demonish powers have betrayed my wits,
I am haunted by nothingness. Away.
He felt a sense of self and a connection to nature, which gave him a fleeting sense of wholeness.
What was Nick's experience like when he was sent to an experimental high school in Vermont?
The marriage ended in failure, and he felt a deep sense of despair and guilt.
What was the outcome of Nick's marriage to Clare?
The therapist did not react, instead, Nick realized that he was the one holding on to his anger and guilt.
What did Nick's therapist say to him when he expressed his anger towards his father?
He felt a sense of deep fulfillment and a connection to his own self, which he had not experienced in many years.
What did Nick experience during his meditation, which he had never felt before?
The author suggests that it is not about seeking an external force, but rather about understanding and accepting oneself, and forgiving one's past and inner demons.
What is the key to achieving enlightenment, according to the author, as stated by Nick?