Here are the typical for ms that pr ojection can tak e:Superiority : “I know that I’m better than you. Y ou
should see this and acknowledge it.”
Injustice:  “It’s unfair that these bad things ar e
happening to me,” or “I don’t deserve this.”
Arrogance:  “I’m too pr oud to bother with you. Y our
very pr esence ir ritates me.”
Defensiveness:  “You’re attacking me, so I’m not
listening to you.”
Blame:  “I didn’t do anything. It’s all your fault.”
Idealizing others:  “My father was lik e a god when I
was little,” “My mother was the best in the world,”
or “The man I mar ry will be my her o.”
Prejudice:  “He’s one of them, and you know what
they’r e like,” or “ Be car eful. Their kind is
danger ous.”
Jealousy : “You’re thinking of betraying me. I can see
it.”
Paranoia:  “They’r e out to get me,” or “I see the
conspiracy no one else sees.”
Whenever any of these attitudes appear, ther e is an
unconscious feeling hidden in the shadow that you cannot
face. Her e are some typical e xamples:
Superiority  disguises the feeling that you ar e a
failur e or that others would r eject you if they knew
who you r eally ar e.
Injustice  disguises the feeling of sinfulness or the
sense that you ar e always to blame. Arrogance  disguises bottled-up anger, and beneath
that lies deep-seated pain.Defensiveness  disguises the feeling that you ar e
unworthy and weak. Unless you defend yourself
from others, you will start attacking yourself . Blame  disguises the feeling that you ar e at fault
and should be ashamed of yourself . Idealizing others  disguises the feeling that you ar e
a weak, helpless child who needs pr otection and
taking car e of. Prejudice  disguises the feeling that you ar e inferior
and deserve to be r ejected. Jealousy  disguises your own impulse to stray or a
sense of se xual inadequacy . Paranoia  disguises deep-seated, overwhelming
anxiety . As you can see, pr ojection is far mor e subtle than anyone
imagines. Y et it is the open gate to the shadow . It is a
painful gate, though, since what you see as faults in others
masks what you feel about yourself . It would be ideal if we
could stop blaming and judging all at once. In r eality,
undoing the shadow is always a pr ocess. T o stop pr ojecting
you must see what you’r e doing, contact the feeling that is
hidden beneath the surface, and mak e peace with that
feeling. See what you’r e doing:  Is it easy to r ecognize when you’r e
projecting? One clue is negativity—pr ojection is never
neutral. It manifests as negative ener gy because what it’s
disguising is negative. This tur ns out to be a help. Y ou know
when you’r e feeling angry or anxious. Those ar e shadow
feelings. But when you ar e aiming your anger at someone or
something or seeing r easons everywher e to be afraid
(negativity is pr esent), you have a clear e xample of
projection. I hope you can see the diﬀer ence between
feelings and pr ojecting those feelings; feeling angry isuseful, while aiming anger in the for m of blame isn’t. Society wants you to k eep blaming, because “us versus
them” thinking is a way—a very bad way—to hold society
together . Hence the small voice inside your head that wants
to get “them”—the ter rorists, the godless Communists, the
drug dealers, criminals, or child abusers. The list is endless. Instead of buying into all the r easons for blaming “them”
and judging all their faults (r easons that can be valid), tak e
a diﬀer ent path. L ook at yourself and what the blame game
says about you. One time the noted Indian spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti
was giving a talk, and someone in the audience stood up to
ask a question. “I want peace in the world. I abhor war . What can I do to bring about peace?”
“Stop being the cause of war,” Krishnamurti r eplied. The questioner was tak en aback. “I am not in favor of war . I only want peace.”
Krishnamurti shook his head. “Inside you is the cause of
every war . It is your violence, hidden and denied, that leads
to wars of every kind, whether it is war inside your home,
against others in society, or between nations.”
His reply mak es us uncomfortable, but I think it’s true,
because the V edic rishis  (seers) pr oclaimed, “Y ou ar e not in
the world. The world is in you.” If that is so, then the
violence of the world is in each of us. Befor e the concept of
the shadow emer ged, such a statement sounded mystical. But once you see that you ar e participating in a shar ed self,
you can also see that every impulse of anger, fear,
resentment, and aggr ession leads dir ectly fr om you to the
collective unconscious and back again. I realize that catching yourself every time you pr oject your
own hidden negativity isn’t always easy . Denial is powerful. The shadow is secr etive. When you idealize somebody else,
a her o you hold up to the light and call perfect, it’s har d to
see any underlying negativity . But ther e is, because this
fantasy of perfection in someone else hides a deep sense ofinferiority in yourself . But if you go back to the chart about
projection and consult it of ten, you will ﬁnd it easier to catch
yourself using this defense. Contact your hidden feelings:  The minute you see that
you ar e projecting a hidden feeling is the moment you need
to contact it. Don’t delay . The door of opportunity closes
very quickly . But befor e it does, ther e’s a gap. Just befor e
you er ect your defense, you actually feel the thing you don’t
want to feel. Here’s an e xample given to me by a young man. He was
very poor in graduate school, but had pr osper ous friends
who used to invite him to dinner . One night sitting ar ound
the table, he thought of a curious anecdote. “Remember when we wer e in L ondon last summer?” he
said, tur ning to his host. “Y ou and your wife started ar guing
right ther e on the sidewalk. Y ou both raised your voices,
while I just stood ther e. You wer e so busy scr eaming, you
didn’t notice that a van had pulled up behind you. On the
side of the van wer e the wor ds ‘Blue T antrum.’ I guess that’s
an example of synchr onicity or something.”
The other guests nodded and mur mured, and the
conversation moved on. But af terwar d the hostess took the
young man aside. “Why did you want to humiliate us lik e
that?” she ask ed angrily . “I wasn’t humiliating you,” he pr otested. “I was telling a
story that I thought was inter esting.”
“Go back,” the hostess said. “ Put yourself in the moment
when you decided to tell the story . What did you feel?”
The young man shrugged. “Nothing. The story just came
to me.”
She shook her head. “No, at that moment you had a
malicious impulse. Not just any story came to mind. One
that embar rassed us did.”
Not many people have the nerve, or the acumen, to
analyze a ﬂeeting moment in this way . It’s to the young
man’s cr edit that the confr ontation work ed. He told me, “Ididn’t automatically defend myself . I went back, and she
was right. I had felt jealous at that moment. Her e was a
table of food and wine I couldn’t aﬀor d to buy . At a certain
level, it was humiliating to be ther e and know I couldn’t
recipr ocate.” Which is why, to hide his own humiliation, he
turned the situation ar ound and told a story in which
someone else was humiliated. In this little e xample we see the traits you need if you
want to feel what is hidden inside: alertness, willingness,
openness, honesty, and courage. Or to put it another way, if
you don’t stop yourself and ask, “What am I r eally feeling
right now?” you ar e turning your back on alertness,
willingness, openness, honesty, and courage. Y ou ar e letting
the shadow win. Make peace with your feelings:  Once you can feel what’s
really ther e, you have a choice. Several choices, actually . You can push the feeling back down. Y ou can blame yourself
for not being a good person. Y ou can attack the feeling,
lament it, or apologize for it. None of these choices ar e
productive. They play into the shadow’s hands by
reinfor cing the unwanted feeling and making it even mor e
unwanted. It sounds strange, but feelings have feelings. Being part of
you, they know when they ar e unwanted. F ear cooperates
by hiding; anger cooperates by pr etending it doesn’t e xist. That’s mor e than half the pr oblem. How can you heal an
unwanted feeling when it’s trying not to cooperate? Y ou
can’t. Until you mak e peace with negative feelings, they will
persist. The way to deal with negativity is to acknowledge it. Nothing mor e is needed. No dramatic confr ontation, no
catharsis. F eel the feeling, whether it’s anger, fear, envy,
aggression, or anything else, and say, “I see you. Y ou belong
to me.” Y ou don’t have to feel ﬁne about your unwanted
feeling. This is a pr ocess. Anger and fear will r eturn; so will
any deeply hidden emotion. When one does, acknowledgeit. As time goes on, the message will get thr ough. Y our
unwanted feelings will start to feel less unwanted. When that happens, you will begin to hear their story . Packaged inside every feeling is a tale: “I am this way for a
reason.” Be open to the story that comes out, no matter
what it is. Every past trauma you have ever e xperienced,
from a car accident to r ejection in love, fr om losing a job to
failing in school, has deposited its r emains in the shadow . You have been accumulating what some psychologists call
“emotional debt to the past.” T o pay back this debt, you
listen to the story that lies behind it. L et’s say the story is “I
never got over not making the baseball team” or “I feel
guilty that I stole money fr om Mom’s purse.” Most stories
are rooted in childhood, because childhood is the lear ning
ground for guilt, shame, r esentment, inferiority, and all of
the most primal negativity we car ry around with us. Having hear d the story, be accepting. T ell yourself that
you had a valid r eason for holding on to negativity . You had
no choice, because it was secr etly deposited and then
remained hidden. Ther efore, you did nothing wr ong. Y our old
feelings stuck ar ound to pr otect you fr om having the same
wound r epeated. Mak e peace with this now, and you have
turned a negative into a positive. F ear wasn’t holding on to
hurt you; it thought you needed to be on guar d in case of
another hurt—another girl or guy r ejects you, another
parent scolds you, another boss ﬁr es you. But those things
aren’t going to happen again, certainly not in the very same
way. The last thing you want to do is to r ecycle these old
emotions. That’s very tempting, of course. Caught in a
frustrating situation, we’r e all tempted to r each into our bag
of emotions and haul out anger . At tense moments we r each
in and pull out anxiety . However, if you k eep r ecycling
emotions fr om the past, you will only wind up r einfor cing the
past.None of us need to pr otect ourselves fr om a childhood
that is long past. Even if similar situations occur—not that
anyone can pr edict them—all of us ar e overpr otected
already. We don’t stor e one r eason to be afraid, but dozens
and dozens, and just so we don’t for get them, we
participate in collective fear about enemies, crime, natural
disasters, and so forth. It won’t do you any har m to mak e
peace with as much fear, anger, and aggr ession as you can. The psyche will still r emember what it needs to . Having lear ned how to deal with pr ojection, you can ask
the ne xt question. Why do you need to defend yourself at
all? This becomes a k ey issue, because it calls into question
the main r eason the shadow e xists. Step 2: Detach and Let Go
Why is it har d to let go of negative emotions? Ther e’s mor e
than one r eason. F irst, negative emotions ar e the tip of the
iceber g, so every time you get angry or anxious, for
example, ther e is much mor e of those feelings stor ed in the
shadow . Second, negativity is stick y. It holds on to us just as
much as we hold on to it. This stickiness is a survival
mechanism. F eelings think they have a right to e xist. Lik e
you, your emotions justif y their e xistence. They oﬀer
reasons; they build a convincing story . Despite all these
things, however, you can let go of negativity once you know
how. The pr ocess begins by acknowledging your feelings,
however unwanted, and bringing them to the surface. W e’ve
cover ed that step. Now you need to detach yourself fr om
the negativity . Ther e’s a balancing act her e, because you
want to tak e responsibility (“This is mine”) without going
overboar d and identif ying with your negativity (“This is
me”). Negativity isn’t you once you know your true self,
which is beyond the shadow . So consider any negativereaction as though it wer e like an aller gy or the ﬂu,
something that changes your situation for the moment only . An aller gy is yours, but it isn’t you. The ﬂu brings misery,
but that doesn’t mean you ar e doomed to be a miserable
person. When you ﬁnd ways to undo the stickiness of negativity,
you will become mor e detached. The following statements
work towar d detachment:
“I can get thr ough this. It won’t last for ever.”
“I’ve felt this way befor e. I can deal with it.”
“I won’t feel better unloading on someone else.”
“No one ever wins the blame game.”
“Acting out leads to r egret and guilt.”
“I can be patient. L et’s see if I cool down in a while.”
“I’m not alone. I can call someone to help me thr ough
this bad patch.”
“I am much mor e than my feelings.”
“Moods come and go, even the worst moods.”
“I know how to center myself .”
If you can mak e any of these statements true, then you
are adding to your coping skills. How do you mak e them
true? By wanting them to be. Y ou must intend to be
detached, center ed, patient, and self -awar e. If you have that
intention, automatically you ar e aligning with detachment. The opposite is to be so attached that you incr ease the
stickiness of negativity . That occurs when you have the
following kinds of thoughts:
“I feel hor rible. I don’t deserve this. Why me?”
“Somebody’s going to pay . I didn’t bring this on myself .”“Who can I unload this on?”
“This is making me crazy .”
“Nobody can help me.”
“How can I distract myself until this feeling goes away?”
“I need my drug of choice to get thr ough this.”
“When I’m feeling this bad, everybody better look out.”
“I want to be r escued.”
“Somebody has it in for me.”
“This has to be settled right now .”
“I can’t help how I feel. It’s just how I’m wir ed.”
I realize that “detachment” is a ter m that people in the
West identif y with Easter n fatalism or indiﬀer ence. So mak e
this the ﬁrst concept you r eframe in a positive way . Detachment doesn’t show indiﬀer ence. It shows that you
really don’t want negativity to stick to you. Step 3: Give Up Self -Judgment
You get the emotions you think you deserve. Y et many times
these ar en’t the emotions you want. F ar from it. Everyone is
in the position of juggling “bad” feelings with “good” ones,
which comes down to self -judgment. W rapped up in the
“bad” feelings—anger, fear, envy, hostility, victimization,
self-pity, and aggr ession—is a self -image that needs these
negative emotions. No two people use them e xactly alik e.
We build up our identities in unique ways. Some people use
fear to motivate themselves to over come challenges; others
use it to feel dependent and victimized. Some deploy anger
to contr ol anyone in their vicinity; others ar e afraid of anger
and never show it. Y et your sense of self, and ther efore your
self-worth, ar e tied up in every feeling you have.Every emotion is valid in some way or another . But when
you add the ingr edient of self -judgment, any emotion can be
damaging. L ove has destr oyed lives when it was misplaced,
warped, or r ejected. “I was only trying to help” sounds lik e a
positive statement bor n of caring, but how of ten does it
mask unwelcome intrusion? Y ou can shape a nonjudgmental
self-image anytime you want. Countless people want to, and
almost as many e xperts tell us how . But if your emotions
have negative eﬀects, you won’t be able to cr eate the self
you want. It’s very diﬃcult to feel good about yourself if
primal emotions lik e anger and fear ar e allowed to have
their own way . So, what to do? If r epression and suppr ession
don’t work, neither does letting negative emotions run fr ee. I place a high value on sympathy . If you can look at
yourself and say, “It’s all right. I understand,” you ar e doing
two things at once. Y ou ar e taking the judgment out of your
emotions, and you ar e giving yourself per mission to be who
you ar e. Sympathy is an emotion we tend to dir ect outwar d.
We forget to grant it to ourselves. I was r eminded of this by
a striking encounter I had with a young woman who came
up to ask me a question. “I listen to people all the time,” she said. “I was just
wondering, can being sympathetic go too far?”
I asked her to describe what happens when she listens to
people. “It’s strange,” she said. “When I get up in the mor ning I
listen to my family and sympathize. I’ve been that way since
I was a child. A t work people bring me their tr oubles,
because they know I will be sympathetic. But r ecently even
people on the str eet, perfect strangers, suddenly come up
to me to tell me their tr oubles. I hear all kinds of stories.”
“And you always tak e the time to oﬀer sympathy?” I
asked. She nodded. “I don’t think you’r e har ming yourself,” I said. She look ed
relieved. “In fact,” I went on, “I think you ar e remark able
without r ealizing it. I’m grateful you e xist.”This was une xpected, and she was embar rassed. Not
many of us can say that our main pr oblem is an e xcess of
sympathy for others. “But ther e are pitfalls,” I told her . “Sympathy is a synonym
for compassion. The wor d ‘compassion’ means to suﬀer
with. That’s wher e one must draw the line. Y our sympathy
will be ill-spent if it e xhausts you. It must not overwhelm
you or cause you to feel as bad as the one you sympathize
with,” I said. When it’s valid, compassion is as valuable for the one who
gives it as for the one who r eceives it. A fterwar d, I thought
about how this applies to the self . Inside each of us is a
voice that sits in judgment. Call it a conscience or the
super ego, this voice doesn’t come fr om an outside judge or
parent. But it acts independent, evaluating the worth of who
we ar e and what we’r e thinking. L et’s say you get angry at
someone unjustly and later feel guilty about ﬂying oﬀ the
handle. The judgmental voice in your head says, “Y ou wer e
wrong. Y ou pr obably got yourself in tr ouble, and you
deserve it.” P erhaps these wor ds ar e helpful in a certain
way. But this judgmental voice is just you; ther efore, in
judging against you, it is actually judging against itself . There is no independent, objective judge inside. The voice
that labels you as wr ong or bad is a ﬁctional character, and
what you’ll notice is that this character never sympathizes. To keep its power over you, it must intimidate you. What would happen if you started to sympathize with
yourself? The inner judge would begin to dissolve. In the
case of this young woman, I sensed that she wasn’t
manipulating her sympathy selﬁshly, as people do when
they say, “ After seeing how badly oﬀ my friend is, I feel
much better about myself .” Instead, she was letting her
sympathy ﬂow by listening and opening a channel. W e must
do the same for ourselves. Even better if that channel leads
to God. A t its highest, compassion has a healing r ole to play .When you oﬀer sympathy, the woes of another ar e hear d
and passed on to a higher level of awar eness. We’re not talking about r enouncing your conscience. But
when conscience becomes punishing and mak es you feel
unworthy, it has gone too far . It’s time to r elease the
judgment that k eeps you bound inside a nar row self -
conception. In the r ealm of spirit or God—call it what you
will—suﬀering can be healed. Thr ough your sympathy, you
open a channel to the healing powers. Aspir e to be such a
channel. It is one of life’s gr eatest joys, and certainly the
purest. Step 4: Rebuild Y our Emotional Body
As any negative emotion surfaces, you can r eplace it with
something new . I call this r ebuilding your emotional body . We all have a mental image of what a desirable physical
body is lik e—trim, healthy, youthful, fr esh, pleasing to look
at. But we don’t use those qualities with r egard to our
emotions, our “emotional body .” The emotional body, lik e
the physical body, must be pr operly nourished. It can gr ow
tired and ﬂabby when the same r esponses to the world ar e
repeated over and over . It becomes diseased when e xposed
to toxins and unhealthy inﬂuences. Every time you feel a negative emotion, your emotional
body is e xpressing discomfort, sor eness, fatigue, or pain. Pay attention to these symptoms just as you would to
physical pain and discomfort. If you had a r ock in your shoe,
you wouldn’t hesitate to r emove it. Y et how long have you
endur ed emotional r ocks in your shoe? In many ways, our
priorities should be r eversed. Think of the time and money
spent to avoid aging. W e expend enor mous eﬀort and car e
to mak e sur e that our bodies can be healthy and functional
into advanced old age. Y et ironically, it’s the emotional body
that is immune to aging. Ther e is no r eason for emotionsever to gr ow old, because the sour ce of fr eshness and
renewal is always at hand. Y our emotional body should
remain ener getic, alert, ﬂe xible, and pleasing to e xperience. I think a single phrase, “the lightness of being,” covers all of
these qualities. Childr en naturally feel lightness in their being. They play
and laugh; they for get traumas and bounce back quickly . Whatever they feel quickly comes to the surface. This
carefree period may not last long. Observing a young child
closely, you can see the beginning of tendencies that will
lead to futur e suﬀering, as the shadow teaches its tactics of
projection, blame, guilt, and all the r est. That’s why
rebuilding the emotional body is the best long-ter m strategy
for everyone—your futur e depends on undoing your past. The k ey is to have a vision. Then you can implement your
vision every day . Ther e’s no lack of detailed advice, in this
book and fr om many other sour ces. But without a vision,
even the best advice becomes haphazar d and piecemeal. A vision for r ebuilding the emotional body includes at least
some of the following points:
Becoming mor e whole
Learning to be r esilient
Dispelling the demons of the past
Healing old wounds
Expecting the best and highest for yourself
Adopting r ealistic ideals
Giving of yourself
Being gener ous, especially with your spirit
Seeing thr ough your fears
Learning self -acceptance
Communicating with God or your higher selfThe most important single thing in r ebuilding your
emotional body is becoming mor e whole. Emotions can’t be
reshaped in iso lation. They mer ge and blend with thoughts,
actions, aspirations, wishes, and r elationships. Every feeling
you have invisibly moves outwar d into your envir onment,
aﬀecting the people ar ound you and ultimately society and
the world at lar ge. Having work ed with thousands of people
over the years, I’ve come to see that without wholeness, all
we can cr eate is superﬁcial change. Ther efore, let’s see if
we can appr oach your life as one r eality, a pr ocess that
encompasses every thought and action you have ever had
or will have. This may sound rather overwhelming, but to escape the
fog of illusion, the only way out is r eality . In truth ther e is
only one r eality . You have no way of separating yourself
from it. Nor would you wish to once you see the enor mous
advantage of living in wholeness. Y our separate self, which
has such a huge personal stak e in the world, isn’t who you
really ar e. In fact, it may be a total illusion, which is what
the Buddha said. The self you defend every day as your
unique point of view is a convenient ﬁction that mak es the
ego feel good. What the ego doesn’t r ealize, however, is
that it would feel even better if it gave up its nar row, selﬁsh
stake in the world. When that happens, the true self can
emer ge. Then and only then is wholeness possible. A NEW REALITY , A NEW POWER
Wholeness over comes the shadow by absorbing it. Evil and
wrong-doing ar e no longer isolated. Earlier I mentioned that
damaging the ecosystem is an e xample of how misbehavior
can be denied and swept under the carpet. But as attitudes
change, we’ve discover ed that the ecosystem is totally
interconnected. Everyone’s behavior aﬀects everyone else. There is no part of the planet that can be isolated, as ifimmune to ecological har m done by other parts. Wholeness
changes our entir e perspective. Now e xpand the wor d “ecosystem” to a br oader conte xt. Wholeness must e xpand to tak e account of the laws that
contr ol pollution, social battles over global war ming,
personal attitudes about r ecycling, and ultimately our very
way of being happy . Can we continue to be happy with a
way of life that is slowly destr oying the natural world? Everything you can possibly think of is encompassed by the
ecosystem. It is the web of r elationships in which we all
exist. If you understand the web of r elationships as an
invisible place wher e everything comes together, you begin
to see wholeness wher e divisions once e xisted. In the cur rent debate over the envir onment, two paths lie
open. W e can continue to deny the pr oblem or we can face
it. The ﬁrst path is a false solution, because it doesn’t
resolve the underlying fear and guilt of ecological
destruction and futur e disasters. The second path eliminates
fear and guilt the only way that pr oves viable: by solving the
problem that leads to those emotions. The same holds true
for the shadow . The pr oblem calls for a holistic appr oach to
solve it. Denial is a false solution. If you acknowledge and embrace your shadow, it is
actually nurturing, because the whole of life is nurturing—
that is, life e xists to sustain itself . When we get stuck in the
drama of good versus evil, we impose our own limited
perspective. A fter all, even when someone is committing a
violent crime or going to war or victimizing someone else,
the wr ongdoer’s cells and or gans don’t shut down. The
body’s allegiance is to life, no matter how confused and
conﬂicted the mind becomes. A New W orldviewThe miracle plays of the Middle Ages, which wer e perfor med
on feast days, took the grim seriousness of evil and tur ned it
into a cosmic jok e. The Devil is a comic character who
engages in every kind of bad deed, tempting souls and
bringing tor ment, yet the Devil fails to see that in the end
God is mor e powerful. Satan himself will be r edeemed. In
the end, the jok e is on him; no one is out of God’s r each. In
religious ter ms these miracle plays ar e saying that
wholeness always over comes separation. If you see the
world in ter ms of good versus evil, you have missed the
cosmic jok e.
Whatever you think is wr ong about yourself and too
painful to confr ont can be seen a diﬀer ent way . Life—
meaning your life and mine—transcends any win- or-lose
orientation. Wholeness goes beyond simplistic cause-and-
eﬀect e xplanations. In the web of r elationship, you function
in a much lar ger conte xt. Once you see yourself as part of
the whole, a new understanding arises. Ther e is no need to
label yourself or anyone else as part of the good- versus-evil,
right- versus-wr ong drama. Y ou can e xchange judgment for
the real e xperience of compassion, love, and for giveness. That is the healing that comes with being whole. But the holistic viewpoint also unleashes a deeper
intuitive knowingness—you see why things ar e the way they
are. It’s common to hear people say, “Ther e’s a r eason for
everything that happens,” but usually, if ask ed what the
reason is, they don’t actually know . The mind k eeps
searching in vain for cause-and-eﬀect e xplanations. This
eﬀort gets us into strange speculations: “I once cheated on
my wife and now this bankruptcy is payback” “I used to be
full of anger, and now I have cancer ” “The community quit
believing in God’s commandments, and now a hur ricane has
leveled it.” Even if you r eject such dark connections, you
probably still harbor superstitions along the same lines,
because we all do . We wer en’t taught another way to
explain the unseen workings of r eality .Let me suggest another way . What if everything that
exists, visible or invisible, ﬁts into a single scheme? In this
scheme, the entir e universe is made of consciousness. The
largest events, such as the birth and death of galaxies, ar e
connected to the smallest, the interactions of subatomic
particles. Everything is part of one consciousness, which
earlier ages called the mind of God. W e don’t have to use
religious ter ms. But lik e the traditional concept of God,
consciousness is inﬁnite, all-embracing, all-powerful, and all-
knowing. It unfolds into myriad for ms and shapes. V iewed
through the ﬁve senses, some of these for ms don’t appear
conscious. It sounds peculiar to say that a jellyﬁsh pulsating
in the P aciﬁc Ocean, a r ock on the side of Mt. Ever est, and a
raindr op falling in Brazil ar e conscious. But we’r e not talking
about possessing a brain. A jellyﬁsh, a r ock, and a raindr op
don’t have thoughts and feelings (so far as we know—it’s
good to k eep an open mind about the unknown). Ther efore,
we don’t feel intimately connected to the “ nonconscious”
life ar ound us. When we stand apart fr om objects and lower cr eatur es, as
we call them, something huge is being missed. Ther e are
principles that embrace all things. L ook at a cell in your
body and an electr on hurtling thr ough the darkness of
space, and at an invisible level some deep similarities
emer ge:
Every action is coor dinated with every other action. Information is shar ed by every part of the whole. Communication is instantaneous. Energy is r eshaped into countless variations, yet never
lost. Evolution pr oduces mor e intricate for ms as time
unfolds.Consciousness e xpands as for ms become mor e
comple x. These ar e very abstract ter ms, I know, but ultimately
there is no need for wor ds at all. When you see yourself as
separate, wor ds seem to matter much mor e than being. After all, being is passive, something we tak e for granted,
while wor ds run our lives, ﬁll our heads, bring people
together, and drive them apart. Y et all these words couldn’t
exist without the silent intelligence inside every cell. The
power that holds your body together, coor dinating an
inﬁnite number of biological actions per second among
hundr eds of billions of cells, is mor e primal than thinking
and using wor ds. Primal doesn’t mean primitive, a mistak e we mak e when
we get too pr oud of human r eason. The consciousness
found everywher e is ine xpressible; it far e xceeds the human
mind. If we list the things that come to us fr om a mysterious
source, that we e xperience deeply without wor ds, it’s a
wonder that anyone ever doubted the e xistence of the
invisible world. Her e’s a short list:
Love
Creativity
The sense of being alive
Beauty
Inspiration
Intuition
Dreams
Visions
Yearning
FulﬁllmentThe sense of belonging
Awe, wonder
Ecstasy, bliss
The numinous, a sense of the divine
A life ﬁlled with all these invisible qualities would be
nothing less than a new way of being. No one would
willingly r efuse wonder, cr eativity, love, and all the r est. Y et
millions of people do . They e xperi ence bliss and fulﬁllment
in small doses that quickly fade. They fail to get past the
shadow, which guar ds the riches of the unconscious with
sharp claws and fangs. I once hear d a guru lament to his
audience, “I show you the gates of heaven, and when a
goblin springs up shouting ‘Boo!’ you run away .”
Fear, anger, insecurity, anxiety, and the other aspects of
the shadow feel lik e much mor e than “ Boo!” If we ar e going
to reach heaven’s gates, the only self that can get us ther e
is the one we have. That’s the dilemma. How can a divided
self ever attain wholeness? I’d lik e to pr opose that it can,
but the way isn’t what most seek ers think it is. Krishnamurti,
the most dry -eyed, even ruthless of Indian sages, said,
“Freedom isn’t the end of the path. It’s the beginning. Ther e
is nowher e to go . Freedom is the ﬁrst and the last thing on
the path.” He wasn’t trying to mystif y his followers. Krishnamurti’s doctrine of the ﬁrst and last fr eedom, as he
dubbed it, was his way of saying that wholeness—the state
of complete fr eedom—isn’t about choosing this or that. It
isn’t about being good instead of bad, pur e instead of
impur e. Wholeness has no divisions. It is everything. Therefore, it must be the beginning and the end at the same
time. Our job is to tur n this insight into a practical way of
life. What Is Wholeness Lik e?The glory of human e xistence doesn’t lie in all the things
that mak e us unique. It lies in the fact that we can unite
with cosmic intelligence; each of us can become a conscious
part of the whole. When that happens, you gain a world that
is bar ely suggested by the thoughts and feelings of
everyday life. It’s practical to live holistically, because with
all of consciousness to draw upon, you will be much mor e
creative and imaginative, much less judgmental. But for any
of these beneﬁts to come about, you have to e xperience
what wholeness is r eally lik e. Let’s go into that now . Wholeness W ants to Heal Y ou
Wholeness always tries to r estor e itself . Your body has a
complete ar ray of healing techniques. Wholeness and
healing ar e intimately connected (the two wor ds derive fr om
the same r oot wor d in Sanskrit). What does the body do to
restor e wholeness? It seeks balance. Every cell communicates with every other . No part is mor e important than the whole. Rest and activity ar e har monized. In the midst of constant activity, ther e is a stable
foundation (known as homeostasis). Every cell adapts to change in the envir onment. Stress is counter ed and br ought under contr ol (disease
and discomfort ar e basically the r esult of str ess). In each case, the body is k eeping itself whole. The healing
system e xtends everywher e. Your heart, brain, and liver
cells all perfor m diﬀer ent functions, but k eeping alive and
healthy is their common goal; ther efore, wholeness is mor eimportant than any single activity . If you look at your body
as a metaphor for your life, what does it mean? You will value balance. The separate aspects of your life will work towar d a
common purpose. Every aspect of living will assume equal value. Rest will ﬁnd a nor mal r hythm with activity . Your cor e self, which is calm and at peace, won’t be
disturbed in the midst of activity . As your situation changes, you will adapt and r emain
resilient. At the ﬁrst signs that str ess is thr owing you out of your
comfort zone, you will notice and r espond. You will value your well-being over any individual
experience. I’ve couched these points in general ter ms, but consider
how diﬀer ently two people would live if one chose
wholeness and the other didn’t. Wholeness Is Always a Gain, Never a L oss
To be whole is to be fully healed. If that is true, then no
matter how well you live your life, you ar e not fully healed
until the split self has been transfor med. Ther e are many
ways to achieve a good life, and countless people ﬁnd
reasons not to seek wholeness (one of the biggest r easons
for this is that they have never been e xposed to a vision of
the higher self as it r eally e xists). It’s crucial to know that
you won’t stop being yourself if you seek transfor mation. The world of contrasts is seductive and dramatic. W ithout
contrast, would we be doomed to eter nal sameness? Thestronger the light, the gr eater the shadow . This isn’t
something cr eated by humankind; it’s the way natur e works. The alter native isn’t work able. If the universe did not have
creative for ces simultaneously opposing the for ce of decay,
or entr opy, ther e would be no universe. Let’s say only the evolutionary, cr eative impulse e xisted in
the universe. What would happen? The cosmos would
rapidly run out of matter and ener gy to use for new for ms,
since the old ones would never wear out or become
obsolete. In personal ter ms, we speak of becoming an
evolved person, but if you only evolved without dissolving
the old person that you wer e in the past, you would be a
perpetual infant, child, adolescent, and adult at the same
time. Y our body would have countless layers of skin because
old, dead cells wer en’t sloughed oﬀ; your stomach lining
would swell gr otesquely without the work of digestive
enzymes that constantly devour it so that it can be r eplaced
every month. On the other hand, if only the impulse of inertia or
destruction e xisted, the universe would rapidly bur n itself
out. Entr opy would cause “heat death” in short or der, as the
cosmos devolved into a cold, static void. W e need these two
opposing for ces, but that isn’t an ar gument for dualism. In
fact, it’s a str ong ar gument for wholeness, since it tak es a
larger perspective than that fr om either side to k eep them
in balance. Your body is capable of going into hyper drive when the
stress response is trigger ed. A ﬂood of adr enaline speeds up
the heart, draws e xtra ener gy from the bloodstr eam, alerts
the mind, heightens the senses, and kicks you into gear for
ﬁght or ﬂight. But if the str ess response goes uncheck ed, it
will kill you very quickly, in a matter of minutes. This has
actually been observed in patients who have spent a length
of time on ster oids. The drugs they tak e to suppr ess
inﬂammation, for e xample, also suppr ess the body’s
hormone system. If you suddenly withdraw those drugs, thebody has no ability to secr ete the right balance of
hormones. Ther efore, you can walk up behind one of these
patients, shout “ Boo!” and send the person into a state in
which str ess hor mones speed up the heart to a danger ous
degree, of ten with fatal r esults. At the ego level we constantly fool ourselves into thinking
that being absolutely good is possible. Never again will we
lie, cheat, feel jealous, lose our temper, or give in to anxiety . This intention never works out, because being good all the
time is as rigid as being anything else all the time. Ther e are
moments when it’s absolutely right and healthy to get angry
or be afraid. The ﬂaw in positive thinking is that you can’t
be positive all the time. It’s sane to ﬁght against dictators,
oppose oppr ession in all its for ms, tell cor rupt power br okers
that they ar e wrong, and on and on. Life pr esents challenges
from the dark side. W e don’t have to demonize the shadow;
it’s the sour ce of almost every challenge worth facing. The illusion that we fall into is thinking that life for ces us
to choose between good and evil. In r eality ther e’s a thir d
way, which is to be whole. F rom the perspective of
wholeness, you can balance the darkness and the light,
being a slave to neither . The opposition between the two
can be tur ned into cr eative tension. The good guys have to
keep winning, but the bad guys better not lose altogether,
because that would be the end of the story . The universe
would become lik e a museum, fossilized and mummiﬁed
forever. The ideal is that the for ces of truth, goodness, beauty, and
harmony stay a step ahead of the dark for ces. Y our body
manages to achieve that, as does the universe as a whole. We can’t deny the fact that life-for ms ar e constantly
evolving, moving to higher levels of abstraction, cr eativity,
imagination, insight, and inspiration. Something is
maintaining the balance, but tipping it slightly in favor of
evolution. In many ways, spirituality does no mor e than
imitate natur e. If you can help tip the balance towar devolution rather than entr opy and decay, you ar e a true
spiritual war rior. Wholeness Is Close, Not F ar Away
There is a map of human consciousness that holds true in
every wisdom tradition. In this map a timeless God serves
as the sour ce of cr eation. Even when the wor d “God” isn’t
used, as in Buddhism, ther e is a state without division; it is
whole; it contains everything both visible and invisible. The
undivided state of Being then divides itself into the visible
and invisible aspects of cr eation. Out of itself, oneness
creates the many . You can imagine the map as a cir cle with
a point in the middle. The point r epresents God as the
source, which is smaller than the smallest particle of
anything. The cir cle also r epresents God, but God as the
manifest universe, which is lar ger than the lar gest anything. But for the map to be accurate, you must see the cir cle as
constantly e xpanding, lik e the universe af ter the big bang. Unlik e the physical cosmos, though, God e xpands at inﬁnite
speed in all dir ections. This signiﬁes the limitless potential of
Being once it enters cr eation. So far, the map may seem
esoteric, and many people would not see much practical
value in it. (I once had a woman say to me that she was
repelled by the wor ds “One” or “ All” as applied to God. T o
her, they signiﬁed being swallowed up in a sea of blankness,
a divine void.) Our minds can’t grasp inﬁnite e xpansion in all
directions. But mak e the map personal. See your sour ce as
a point while your whole world is an e xpanding cir cle. The
more you see, understand, and e xperience, the bigger the
circle gets. Y et it is always e xpanding fr om the sour ce. What
this means is that the sour ce is never far away . It’s a
constant. When you can e xperience yourself as your sour ce and
your world at the same time, you have become whole. Thereason that your sour ce seems far away is that you have
identiﬁed with all the separate things in your world,
neglecting the cr eative origin that mak es everything
possible. (This is lik e forgetting your mother as you gr ow up. No amount of for getting will erase the fact that you had a
mother who was your sour ce.) It isn’t possible to lose the
connection to your sour ce entir ely, because consciousness
is what the sour ce is made of . Being awar e that you ar e
alive means that you ar e connected to consciousness. This
makes the connection sound passive, however, and it isn’t. Through this connection pours every thought you’ve ever
had. Ther e’s also a silent side to consciousness that works
to keep you alive physically . Your heart is awar e of what
your liver is doing, not in wor ds but thr ough messages
encoded in chemicals and electrical signals. Y our body
requir es an inﬁnite range of r esponses to be coor dinated
among hundr eds of billions of cells. This is an aspect of
consciousness that never gains a voice, but its intelligence
far surpasses that of any genius. Ordinary people wor ry that God may be so far away that
he has for gotten us, while r eligious enthusiasts fervently
believe that God is close at hand every moment. Both views
have a ﬂaw . “Near ” and “ far” are actually false ter ms. They
derive fr om duality, since near is the opposite of far . But
imagine the color blue. Befor e you saw it in your mind, was
the color blue close to you or far away? Say the wor d
“elephant” to yourself . Befor e you br ought it to mind, was
your vocabulary far fr om you or nearby? W e use
consciousness for individual r easons, in the service of “I,
me, and mine,” but you can locate yourself in time and
space without being able to locate your consciousness. There is no distance between you and a memory, you and
your ne xt thought. F rom the perspective of wholeness, since
everything is being coor dinated at once, distance isn’t
relevant.Which leads to an e xciting conclusion: your potential for
change isn’t far away, either . Potential is the same as
unseen possibilities. Either you see that something is
possible or you don’t. So the impossible is just another
name for the unseen. Thus the shadow, which mak es you
see a limited, fearful world full of thr eat and dark
possibilities, is masking many unseen possibilities that could
spring into your awar eness if you e xpanded beyond the
shadow . Without e xpansion you ar e forced to have nar row
vision. Think of having a bad toothache. The pain occupies
your whole attention; you can’t think of anything else. If the
human race wer e in constant physical pain, consciousness
would never have e xpanded. F ear is anticipated pain, and it
has the same eﬀect of nar rowing your awar eness. Wholeness, it tur ns out, is the same as ﬁnding your sour ce. There is no division at the sour ce. You don’t have to conquer
every aspect of yourself that is tinged with darkness (which
would be impossible in any case). Become who you r eally
are, and fr om that moment on darkness is no longer
anything you can identif y with. You ar e living near the sour ce of consciousness when the
following ar e true:
You ar e at peace. You cannot be shak en from your center . You have self -knowledge. You empathize without judgment. You see yourself as part of the whole. You ar e not in the world. The world is in you. Your actions spontaneously beneﬁt you. Your desir es manifest easily, without friction or struggle. You can perfor m intense action with detachment. You ar e not personally invested in any outcome.You know how to sur render . The r eality of God is visible everywher e.
The best possible time is the pr esent. Wholeness Is Beyond the Shadow
Human beings have fought against the shadow for untold
centuries, but as far as I have ever discover ed, it has never
been defeated. The only ones who conquer the shadow
don’t ﬁght it; they transcend it. When you transcend, you go
beyond. In everyday life we transcend all the time. F or
example, when a mother sees her young child being crank y
and demanding, she doesn’t meet the child on those
grounds. She r ealizes that he’s tir ed and needs to sleep. What has she done? She has transcended the level of the
problem, moving to a diﬀer ent level to ﬁnd the solution. This
gives rise to a spiritual truth: the level of the pr oblem is
never the level of the solution. Instinctively we know this, yet applying it brings us to
grief. Our fantasies for ce us to ﬁgur e out which side is good
and which is bad, in hopes that if we choose the winning
side, victory will be total. It never is. Every dilemma has two
sides. Every war fought in the name of God depends on an
illusion, because the other side r elies on God just as much. (Has any ar my adopted the slogan, “V ictory is ours because
God is not on our side”?) The enemies of transcendence
play right into the hands of the shadow . You ar e choosing
not to transcend when you struggle at the level of the
problem. Consider the following:
You have a chr onic pain. Instead of going to the doctor,
you tak e mor e painkillers.You hear that someone dislik es you. Y ou ﬁnd r easons to
dislik e that person. Your child is ﬁghting with another child at school. Y ou
are certain that your child is in the right. You hear that a couple is getting a divor ce. You choose
sides. An evangelist comes to your door pr eaching a new
religion. Y ou slam the door in her face, because your
God is the right one. These ar e all instances in which the option to transcend has
been r ejected, and since these ar e such common situations,
it’s not har d to see how the shadow gains power . In each
case, one side has been labeled good and the other bad. Someone is made wr ong, so that you can feel right. Being
judgmental is validated as a healthy way to view the world. The pr ocess of escaping the fog of illusion begins when you
realize that no one is beneﬁting e xcept the shadow . You will
never be right enough, victorious enough, or virtuous
enough to dispel the anger, r esentment, and fear that ar e
engender ed in the people you have made wr ong. Once you
see this, transcendence becomes a viable option. Y ou start
looking for the level of the solution rather than the level of
the pr oblem. Wholeness R esolves All Conﬂicts
I wish that the wor d “transcend” didn’t come loaded with
mystical connotations. When you r ealize that you can “go
beyond” in any situation, transcending comes down to
earth. Conﬂict is the natur e of duality . Resolving conﬂicts is
the natur e of wholeness. This is only natural. When you
aren’t just black or white, good or bad, light or dark, but
both sides at once, conﬂict melts away . The ﬁrst step is themost important. Shif t your allegiance away fr om duality . Quit labeling, blaming, and judging. Give up fantasies of
showing the world that you ar e right and others ar e wrong. Spiritual teachers have oﬀer ed this advice for centuries. Remember what the V edas pr oclaim: “Y ou ar e not in the
world. The world is in you.” Jesus taught that the kingdom of
heaven is within. Ther e has been no lack of teachings about
the path to unity . But people don’t heed these teachings, because the
invisible world holds too much inﬂuence, much of it dark. Wholeness isn’t r eal until the hidden conﬂicts in your life ar e
resolved. L et me outline these conﬂicts in ascending or der,
beginning at the most basic level, such as what a helpless
child might e xperience. Each conﬂict becomes mor e diﬃcult
than the one befor e, until we r each the level of spiritual
conﬂict, which is lik e a war inside your soul:
The conﬂict between being safe and being unsafe. The conﬂict between love and fear . The conﬂict between desir e and necessity . The conﬂict between acceptance and r ejection. The conﬂict between the One and the many . These conﬂicts ensnar e everyone, e xtending far beyond
the individual. Think of the countries that pr oclaim peace,
but feel so unsafe that their r eal ener gies go to ar maments
and defense. They haven’t r esolved the basic pr oblem of
how to feel safe. Think of the times you have wanted to
express love to someone, but felt afraid and vulnerable. Y ou
are in the same position as war ring factions in a civil war
who cannot embrace each other as one people. Conﬂict is
entangled in everything, fr om relationships to inter national
diplomacy .Safe V ersus Unsafe
The solution: Be established in your true self . What does it tak e to feel safe in an uncertain world that is
beyond your contr ol? The gr eat sages and teachers based
their answer on the fundamental axiom that duality is
unsafe and wholeness is safe. This is one of the gr eat
forgotten lessons. Many people work desperately to be safe
by building up their defenses. They wall themselves oﬀ fr om
the scarier elements of society . They cushion their e xistence
with money and possessions. They lock the doors and pray
that some unseen catastr ophe doesn’t strik e. These tactics
derive fr om a primitive belief that says that if your body is
safe fr om har m, you ar e safe. P erhaps we inherited this
predisposition; per haps it suits our materialistic way of life. People in past ages didn’t feel safe unless the gods, or God,
approved their actions. T o that end, they would tolerate
being impoverished as long as or ganized r eligion told them
that their souls wer e assur ed of salvation. The moder n view is that safety is psychological. T o be safe
in the world, you must ﬁnd the inner k ey to safety . Houses,
money, and possessions ar e irrelevant. In fact, some of the
most insecur e people ar e the ones who feel driven to
excesses of wealth and success. The k ey to feeling safe
psychologically is elusive. F reudian psychology holds that
parenting in the ﬁrst thr ee years deter mines how safe a
child feels gr owing up. Jungian psychology holds that feeling
unsafe must be r ooted in the collective psyche and
speciﬁcally in the shadow, with its shar ed fund of fear and
anxiety . But if you look at the r esults of a century of
therapy, the psychological answer has bar ely work ed in
either case. So much insight and brilliance led to little mor e
than the rise of P rozac and a generation of therapists who
spend most of their time writing pr escriptions for drugs.You will feel safe when you discover that you have a cor e
self. It exists at your sour ce, as we saw pr eviously . At the
source ther e is no division, and ther efore the e xternal world
can’t thr eaten the inner world. Anxiety needs an e xternal
focus, whether it’s the memory of some past trauma or a
free-ﬂoating fear that cr eates dr ead simply because what
comes ne xt is not known. Y our cor e self is stable and
permanent; ther efore it has nothing to fear fr om change. The unknown is necessary for change. When you mak e
peace with that fact, the world will transfor m itself fr om a
place of constant risk to the playgr ound of the une xpected. Love V ersus F ear
The solution: Align with love as a for ce within. Once you feel safe, you know that you have a right to be
here. In or der to feel that you actually belong, however, you
must feel loved. L ove is r eassurance that you ar e cherished. Its opposite, which many people feel, is that you ar e a
random speck tossed about in a chaotic world. The only
sane r eaction to that situation is fear . Religion has made
stabs at oﬀering complete and ultimate r eassurance that
God loves each of us, but at the same time it clings to the
image of a fearsome, vengeful God. The r eason that this
duality is never r esolved isn’t mysterious. No one will ever
meet God and ask if God r eally loves us or despises us, if
God wants us saved or damned. F rom Moses to Muhammad,
the divine has been confr onted and ask ed that very
question. The answer always seems to be both. To escape fear, trusting in a loving God won’t work,
because that is either an intellectual choice, which is always
open to doubt, or an emotional one, which is always open to
hurt. As long as you can doubt or be hurt, naturally divine
love will seem untrustworthy . Yet in consciousness we ar eable to e xperience the ﬂow of love as a constant for ce, not a
personal whim of the deity . The ancient rishis  of India
aﬃrmed that bliss ( ananda  in Sanskrit) is not gained or lost. It is built into the natur e of consciousness. Bliss in its pur est
form is ecstasy, joy, raptur e. But consciousness unfolds fr om
unmanifest and invisible to manifest and visible. As this
unfoldment happens, bliss becomes an aspect of natur e that
has many qualities:
Bliss is dynamic—it moves and changes. Bliss is evolutionary—it gr ows. Bliss is pervasive—it wants to enter everything. Bliss is desir ous—it seeks fulﬁllment. Bliss is inspiring—it incr eases by cr eating new for ms to
inhabit. Bliss is unif ying—it shatters boundaries of separation. In the W est we ascribe these qualities to love, which is
bliss under another name. L ove mak es two hearts one. L ove
inspir es gr eat poetry and works of art. It br eaks down the
barriers between people. Ther e is a tradition that venerates
love going back as far as the r ecords of time. Y et ther e is no
doubt that we live in a loveless age, thanks to sk epticism
and materialism. Neither for ce set out to r enounce love, but
they have r educed love to brain chemicals, psychological
conditioning, good or bad par enting, and mental health. None of these things ar e wholly negative; they lead to
valuable insights. F or good or ill, however, the tradition of
exalting love as holy has been gr eatly weak ened. What is
left is that each person must discover whether the for ce of
love can be e xperienced; seeking love has become another
form of spiritual seeking. I am fond of technology and gadgets, one of which is
Twitter . I began to send and r eceive tweets by the hundr eds,and the whole activity became seductive. One day I was
tweeted with a question: “I’m looking for love. How can I
ﬁnd the right one? Does he even e xist?” Immediately I
tweeted back, “Stop looking for the right one. Be the right
one.” It was an instinctive r eply, and I was amazed to
discover that my answer was r etweeted (i.e., forwar ded) to
two million people. The r eason this seemed lik e such a novel
answer, I came to r ealize, is that love has become such a
problem that people genuinely ar e baﬄed about wher e it
exists. A r eply that seemed natural to me was e xotic to
many others. What does it tak e to be the right one, which means to ﬁnd
love within? It tak es the absence of fear . Love doesn’t need
seeking. Lik e the air you br eathe, it e xists as part of natur e;
it’s a given. Y et, lik e any aspect of your cor e self, it can be
mask ed. In fact, e xternal love is of ten ir relevant. Someone
who is depr essed and anxious or who has a damaged sense
of self won’t r espond easily (sometimes not at all) to loving
gestur es from another person. T o ﬁnd love, you must be
capable of seeing yourself as lovable. The cor e self tak es a
simple view—“I am love”—because at the sour ce that is
exactly who you ar e. But in a world of conﬂicting values, this
simple statement becomes confused and comple x. The fog
of illusion cr eates fear . Remove the fear, and what r emains
is love. Desire V ersus Necessity
The solution: Choiceless awar eness. “It has to be this way .” How many times have you hear d
these wor ds or thought them to yourself? Life pr esents us
with impasses. W e want to do something, but the way is
block ed. P erhaps someone with an inﬂated ego says, “My
way or the highway .” Mor e often, two people ar e stuckbecause they can’t communicate. A t one e xtreme is
psychological compulsion, such as phobias (“I’m too afraid
to do X ”) and obsessions (“I can’t get my mind oﬀ Y ”). These
look lik e very diﬀer ent situations. A husband who r efuses to
go to a mar riage counselor doesn’t obviously r esemble a
phobic who can’t stand heights or an obsessive-compulsive
who washes her hands twenty times a day . But ther e is a
common denominator . Each of them is trapped between
desir e and necessity . The r esult is also the same: they ar e
no longer fr ee to choose. Endless ener gy is wasted trying to get past impasses. W e
call upon mediators, negotiators, and judges to settle
disputes, yet in the ﬁnal wash the party who loses always
feels aggrieved. The conﬂict may be r esolved on the
surface, but not under neath. W e go to doctors and
therapists in the hopes that some illness can be diagnosed
and tr eated. Her e at least ther e’s a chance of looking
deeper . Yet the diagnosis is usually much easier to ﬁnd than
the tr eatment. P rozac and r elated antidepr essants have
proved eﬀective in quelling the symptoms of obsessive-
compulsive disor der (OCD), but not in actually healing the
underlying condition, which r eturns if the patient goes oﬀ
medication. Yet no matter how skillful you ar e at negotiating, no
matter how tactful and empathic you happen to be, the
conﬂict between desir e and necessity can’t be totally
resolved. Life itself pr esents situations wher e you can’t get
what you want. Not everyone mar ries the man or woman of
their dr eams. F ailure in business is always possible. W inning
is kept out of one’s grasp. T o a pessimist, ther e are mor e
frustrations inher ent in life than satisfactions. The sages and
guides in every wisdom tradition have seen that desir e is
often block ed. It’s surprising, then, that the V edic tradition
of India har dly ever touches upon r esignation, patience, and
self-sacriﬁce as virtues. Instead, the deepest wisdom of
India teaches that ther e is a state known as “choicelessawar eness.” A t ﬁrst sight this seems synonymous with
giving up. Y ou don’t mak e a choice, you give up taking
sides. We need to be clear : choiceless awar eness isn’t about
giving up on what you want. It’s about shif ting your
allegiance away fr om what the ego wants to what the
universe wants. In choiceless awar eness you let
consciousness mak e all the decisions. In other wor ds, the
thing you want is also the best thing you could want. In such
a state of awar eness, accor ding to the ancient rishis,  there
is no r esistance fr om inside or out. Natur e upholds your
desir es thr ough a cosmic for ce known as dharma. It is a very
ﬂuid ter m. To the average person in India, to be in your
dharma means that you have found the right work and
manage to do the right thing in your behavior . Dhar ma is
virtue or right living. A t a deeper level, being in your dharma
means that you ar e on the cor rect path spiritually . You ar e
following the pr ecepts of your r eligion and not falling into
traps along the way . But neither of these states r esolves the conﬂict between “I
want to ” and “I have to .” Desir e and necessity r emain at
war. If anything, righteous people ﬁnd themselves bound by
far mor e duties and obligations than or dinary people, since
religions of every stripe mak e many demands and attempt
to curb all kinds of desir es. Only choiceless awar eness
brings the conﬂict to an end, because when you r each this
level of consciousness, what you want is also what you need
to do, for your good and the good of the whole world. In choiceless awar eness, no one needs to tell you the
rules of dharma. Instead, you have assimilated the dharma
—you actually live the axiom, “I am not in the world; the
world is in me.” T o maintain such a state r equir es dedicated
personal gr owth, but everyone has e xperienced times lik e
the following:
You ar e car efree.There is an absence of guilt and self -judgment. You experience a feeling of rightness. Outside conditions don’t block you. Other people cooperate without putting up r esistance. The fruits of your actions ar e positive. Desir e ends in a feeling of fulﬁllment and satisfaction. As you can see, this is a special combination of
ingredients. Y et when you align with the for ce of dharma,
this is your nor mal state. It’s not enough simply to get what
you want. Many people, if they have enough power and
money, can fulﬁll their slightest whim without much eﬀort. But feeling satisﬁed and fulﬁlled is much rar er, and of ten
the e xercise of power and money only inﬂames a person’s
desir es and leads to deeper dissatisfaction. Y ou can’t satisf y
your ego by giving it everything it wants, because the ego’s
whole r eason for e xistence is to accumulate. It wants mor e
money, possessions, status, love, power, and on and on. The machinery is ﬁx ed in place; it runs on a set pr ogram
that is all but impossible to r ewrite. The desir es of the ego
are superﬁcial. Y our true self is without ego . You ar en’t
aiming for gain; you don’t fear loss. When you give of
yourself, you ar en’t secr etly calculating what you’ll get in
return. We are fortunate that ther e is another way to view the
world, not fr om the ego’s perspective, but fr om beyond ego,
wher e wholeness e xists. As the ego’s hold is weak ened,
there’s a subtle fusing of “I want to ” and “I must.” T o act as
the dharma—the will of God—would have you act totally
naturally . You’re simply being yourself . Acceptance V ersus RejectionThe solution: Unbounded awar eness. Fear of r ejection cripples millions of people. It mak es
unrequited love a tragedy understood in every cultur e.
Spiritually, you cannot be r ejected unless you r eject
yourself . I doubt that any message has been so
misunderstood, for when someone else r ejects you, the pain
feels inﬂicted, and you ar e the victim. T o unravel how
rejection works, ther efore, we need to look deeper into the
whole issue of judgment. This isn’t a new topic, yet ther e’s
something new to add. All judgment comes down to judging
against yourself . Self -judgment tak es many for ms, such as
fear of failur e, a sense of victimization, a general lack of
conﬁdence, and so on. Much of the time ther e is only a
vague feeling of “I’m not good enough” or “No matter how
much I achieve, I’m actually a fraud.”
Many people hit upon a false solution. They develop an
ideal image and then try to live up to this image and
convince the world that it’s who they ar e. (Hence the legend
of the perfect pick up line that always works on women in a
singles bar, a desperate fantasy that one can connect
through image alone.) An idealized self -image can be so
convincing that you even convince yourself . How many
investment bank ers, in the wak e of the r eckless gr eed that
nearly br ought down the world economy in 2008, continued
to see themselves as not just innocent, but superior to the
disaster they set in motion? An idealized self sounds lik e a model of acceptance. Listen
to what it tells you: “Y ou’re doing the right thing. Y ou’re in
contr ol. No one can hurt you. Just k eep being the way you
are now .” Thus shielded, you can har dly do wr ong, and if
you do, your misdeeds ar e quickly cover ed up and
forgotten. The beauty of having an ideal image of yourself is
that you actually do feel good about who you ar e. The
image substitutes for painful r eality .As you would e xpect by now, the shadow has something
to say in this matter . At regular intervals some icon of
righteous ness, usually a pr eacher or public moralist, falls
into scandal. Invariably these individuals have committed
the very sins they accuse others of, impr oper se xual
misbehavior being the most typical. Cynically we imagine
that these Elmer Gantrys ar e rank hypocrites, that they live
out the sham of public virtue so that they can pursue vice in
private. In reality fallen icons ar e extreme e xamples of an
idealized self -image. Their powers of denial wer e
super human. The shadow couldn’t touch them. Then when
the shadow did surface, an enor mous sense of guilt and
shame surfaced with it. Once they fall, these pr ofessional
saints indulge in e xtremes of public atonement. Even in
contrition, nothing feels r eal.
_OceanofPDF.com_The_Shadow_Effect_-_Deepak_Chopra.txt
Summarize the following text section accurately and concisely. Maintain specific details and numerical information, and use anti-repetition mechanisms:

        Here are the typical for ms that pr ojection can tak e:Superiority : “I know that I’m better than you. Y ou
should see this and acknowledge it. ”
Injustice:  “It’s unfair that these bad things ar e
happening to me,” or “I don’t deserve this. ”
Arrogance:  “I’m too pr oud to bother with you. Y our
very pr esence ir ritates me. ”
Defensiveness:  “You’re attacking me, so I’m not
listening to you. ”
Blame:  “I didn’t do anything. It’s all your fault. ”
Idealizing others:  “My father was lik e a god when I
was little,” “My mother was the best in the world,”
or “The man I mar ry will be my her o. ”
Prejudice:  “He’s one of them, and you know what
they’r e like,” or “ Be car eful. Their kind is
danger ous. ”
Jealousy : “You’re thinking of betraying me. I can see
it. ”
Paranoia:  “They’r e out to get me,” or “I see the
conspiracy no one else sees. ”
Whenever any of these attitudes appear, ther e is an
unconscious feeling hidden in the shadow that you cannot
face. Her e are some typical e xamples:
Superiority  disguises the feeling that you ar e a
failur e or that others would r eject you if they knew
who you r eally ar e. Injustice  disguises the feeling of sinfulness or the
sense that you ar e always to blame. Arrogance  disguises bottled-up anger, and beneath
that lies deep-seated pain. Defensiveness  disguises the feeling that you ar e
unworthy and weak. Unless you defend yourself
from others, you will start attacking yourself. Blame  disguises the feeling that you ar e at fault
and should be ashamed of yourself. Idealizing others  disguises the feeling that you ar e
a weak, helpless child who needs pr otection and
taking car e of. Prejudice  disguises the feeling that you ar e inferior
and deserve to be r ejected. Jealousy  disguises your own impulse to stray or a
sense of se xual inadequacy. Paranoia  disguises deep-seated, overwhelming
anxiety. As you can see, pr ojection is far mor e subtle than anyone
imagines. Y et it is the open gate to the shadow. It is a
painful gate, though, since what you see as faults in others
masks what you feel about yourself. It would be ideal if we
could stop blaming and judging all at once. In r eality,
undoing the shadow is always a pr ocess. T o stop pr ojecting
you must see what you’r e doing, contact the feeling that is
hidden beneath the surface, and mak e peace with that
feeling. See what you’r e doing:  Is it easy to r ecognize when you’r e
projecting. One clue is negativity—pr ojection is never
neutral. It manifests as negative ener gy because what it’s
disguising is negative. This tur ns out to be a help. Y ou know
when you’r e feeling angry or anxious. Those ar e shadow
feelings. But when you ar e aiming your anger at someone or
something or seeing r easons everywher e to be afraid
(negativity is pr esent), you have a clear e xample of
projection. I hope you can see the diﬀer ence between
feelings and pr ojecting those feelings; feeling angry isuseful, while aiming anger in the for m of blame isn’t. Society wants you to k eep blaming, because “us versus
them” thinking is a way—a very bad way—to hold society
together. Hence the small voice inside your head that wants
to get “them”—the ter rorists, the godless Communists, the
drug dealers, criminals, or child abusers. The list is endless. Instead of buying into all the r easons for blaming “them”
and judging all their faults (r easons that can be valid), tak e
a diﬀer ent path. L ook at yourself and what the blame game
says about you. One time the noted Indian spiritual teacher J. Krishnamurti
was giving a talk, and someone in the audience stood up to
ask a question. “I want peace in the world. I abhor war. What can I do to bring about peace. ”
“Stop being the cause of war,” Krishnamurti r eplied. The questioner was tak en aback. “I am not in favor of war. I only want peace. ”
Krishnamurti shook his head. “Inside you is the cause of
every war. It is your violence, hidden and denied, that leads
to wars of every kind, whether it is war inside your home,
against others in society, or between nations. ”
His reply mak es us uncomfortable, but I think it’s true,
because the V edic rishis  (seers) pr oclaimed, “Y ou ar e not in
the world. The world is in you. ” If that is so, then the
violence of the world is in each of us. Befor e the concept of
the shadow emer ged, such a statement sounded mystical. But once you see that you ar e participating in a shar ed self,
you can also see that every impulse of anger, fear,
resentment, and aggr ession leads dir ectly fr om you to the
collective unconscious and back again. I realize that catching yourself every time you pr oject your
own hidden negativity isn’t always easy. Denial is powerful. The shadow is secr etive. When you idealize somebody else,
a her o you hold up to the light and call perfect, it’s har d to
see any underlying negativity. But ther e is, because this
fantasy of perfection in someone else hides a deep sense ofinferiority in yourself. But if you go back to the chart about
projection and consult it of ten, you will ﬁnd it easier to catch
yourself using this defense. Contact your hidden feelings:  The minute you see that
you ar e projecting a hidden feeling is the moment you need
to contact it. Don’t delay. The door of opportunity closes
very quickly. But befor e it does, ther e’s a gap. Just befor e
you er ect your defense, you actually feel the thing you don’t
want to feel. Here’s an e xample given to me by a young man. He was
very poor in graduate school, but had pr osper ous friends
who used to invite him to dinner. One night sitting ar ound
the table, he thought of a curious anecdote. “Remember when we wer e in L ondon last summer. ” he
said, tur ning to his host. “Y ou and your wife started ar guing
right ther e on the sidewalk. Y ou both raised your voices,
while I just stood ther e. You wer e so busy scr eaming, you
didn’t notice that a van had pulled up behind you. On the
side of the van wer e the wor ds ‘Blue T antrum. ’ I guess that’s
an example of synchr onicity or something. ”
The other guests nodded and mur mured, and the
conversation moved on. But af terwar d the hostess took the
young man aside. “Why did you want to humiliate us lik e
that. ” she ask ed angrily. “I wasn’t humiliating you,” he pr otested. “I was telling a
story that I thought was inter esting. ”
“Go back,” the hostess said. “ Put yourself in the moment
when you decided to tell the story. What did you feel. ”
The young man shrugged. “Nothing. The story just came
to me. ”
She shook her head. “No, at that moment you had a
malicious impulse. Not just any story came to mind. One
that embar rassed us did. ”
Not many people have the nerve, or the acumen, to
analyze a ﬂeeting moment in this way. It’s to the young
man’s cr edit that the confr ontation work ed. He told me, “Ididn’t automatically defend myself. I went back, and she
was right. I had felt jealous at that moment. Her e was a
table of food and wine I couldn’t aﬀor d to buy. At a certain
level, it was humiliating to be ther e and know I couldn’t
recipr ocate. ” Which is why, to hide his own humiliation, he
turned the situation ar ound and told a story in which
someone else was humiliated. In this little e xample we see the traits you need if you
want to feel what is hidden inside: alertness, willingness,
openness, honesty, and courage. Or to put it another way, if
you don’t stop yourself and ask, “What am I r eally feeling
right now. ” you ar e turning your back on alertness,
willingness, openness, honesty, and courage. Y ou ar e letting
the shadow win. Make peace with your feelings:  Once you can feel what’s
really ther e, you have a choice. Several choices, actually. You can push the feeling back down. Y ou can blame yourself
for not being a good person. Y ou can attack the feeling,
lament it, or apologize for it. None of these choices ar e
productive. They play into the shadow’s hands by
reinfor cing the unwanted feeling and making it even mor e
unwanted. It sounds strange, but feelings have feelings. Being part of
you, they know when they ar e unwanted. F ear cooperates
by hiding; anger cooperates by pr etending it doesn’t e xist. That’s mor e than half the pr oblem. How can you heal an
unwanted feeling when it’s trying not to cooperate. Y ou
can’t. Until you mak e peace with negative feelings, they will
persist. The way to deal with negativity is to acknowledge it. Nothing mor e is needed. No dramatic confr ontation, no
catharsis. F eel the feeling, whether it’s anger, fear, envy,
aggression, or anything else, and say, “I see you. Y ou belong
to me. ” Y ou don’t have to feel ﬁne about your unwanted
feeling. This is a pr ocess. Anger and fear will r eturn; so will
any deeply hidden emotion. When one does, acknowledgeit. As time goes on, the message will get thr ough. Y our
unwanted feelings will start to feel less unwanted. When that happens, you will begin to hear their story. Packaged inside every feeling is a tale: “I am this way for a
reason. ” Be open to the story that comes out, no matter
what it is. Every past trauma you have ever e xperienced,
from a car accident to r ejection in love, fr om losing a job to
failing in school, has deposited its r emains in the shadow. You have been accumulating what some psychologists call
“emotional debt to the past. ” T o pay back this debt, you
listen to the story that lies behind it. L et’s say the story is “I
never got over not making the baseball team” or “I feel
guilty that I stole money fr om Mom’s purse. ” Most stories
are rooted in childhood, because childhood is the lear ning
ground for guilt, shame, r esentment, inferiority, and all of
the most primal negativity we car ry around with us. Having hear d the story, be accepting. T ell yourself that
you had a valid r eason for holding on to negativity. You had
no choice, because it was secr etly deposited and then
remained hidden. Ther efore, you did nothing wr ong. Y our old
feelings stuck ar ound to pr otect you fr om having the same
wound r epeated. Mak e peace with this now, and you have
turned a negative into a positive. F ear wasn’t holding on to
hurt you; it thought you needed to be on guar d in case of
another hurt—another girl or guy r ejects you, another
parent scolds you, another boss ﬁr es you. But those things
aren’t going to happen again, certainly not in the very same
way. The last thing you want to do is to r ecycle these old
emotions. That’s very tempting, of course. Caught in a
frustrating situation, we’r e all tempted to r each into our bag
of emotions and haul out anger. At tense moments we r each
in and pull out anxiety. However, if you k eep r ecycling
emotions fr om the past, you will only wind up r einfor cing the
past. None of us need to pr otect ourselves fr om a childhood
that is long past. Even if similar situations occur—not that
anyone can pr edict them—all of us ar e overpr otected
already. We don’t stor e one r eason to be afraid, but dozens
and dozens, and just so we don’t for get them, we
participate in collective fear about enemies, crime, natural
disasters, and so forth. It won’t do you any har m to mak e
peace with as much fear, anger, and aggr ession as you can. The psyche will still r emember what it needs to. Having lear ned how to deal with pr ojection, you can ask
the ne xt question. Why do you need to defend yourself at
all. This becomes a k ey issue, because it calls into question
the main r eason the shadow e xists. Step 2: Detach and Let Go
Why is it har d to let go of negative emotions. Ther e’s mor e
than one r eason. F irst, negative emotions ar e the tip of the
iceber g, so every time you get angry or anxious, for
example, ther e is much mor e of those feelings stor ed in the
shadow. Second, negativity is stick y. It holds on to us just as
much as we hold on to it. This stickiness is a survival
mechanism. F eelings think they have a right to e xist. Lik e
you, your emotions justif y their e xistence. They oﬀer
reasons; they build a convincing story. Despite all these
things, however, you can let go of negativity once you know
how. The pr ocess begins by acknowledging your feelings,
however unwanted, and bringing them to the surface. W e’ve
cover ed that step. Now you need to detach yourself fr om
the negativity. Ther e’s a balancing act her e, because you
want to tak e responsibility (“This is mine”) without going
overboar d and identif ying with your negativity (“This is
me”). Negativity isn’t you once you know your true self,
which is beyond the shadow. So consider any negativereaction as though it wer e like an aller gy or the ﬂu,
something that changes your situation for the moment only. An aller gy is yours, but it isn’t you. The ﬂu brings misery,
but that doesn’t mean you ar e doomed to be a miserable
person. When you ﬁnd ways to undo the stickiness of negativity,
you will become mor e detached. The following statements
work towar d detachment:
“I can get thr ough this. It won’t last for ever. ”
“I’ve felt this way befor e. I can deal with it. ”
“I won’t feel better unloading on someone else. ”
“No one ever wins the blame game. ”
“Acting out leads to r egret and guilt. ”
“I can be patient. L et’s see if I cool down in a while. ”
“I’m not alone. I can call someone to help me thr ough
this bad patch. ”
“I am much mor e than my feelings. ”
“Moods come and go, even the worst moods. ”
“I know how to center myself. ”
If you can mak e any of these statements true, then you
are adding to your coping skills. How do you mak e them
true. By wanting them to be. Y ou must intend to be
detached, center ed, patient, and self -awar e. If you have that
intention, automatically you ar e aligning with detachment. The opposite is to be so attached that you incr ease the
stickiness of negativity. That occurs when you have the
following kinds of thoughts:
“I feel hor rible. I don’t deserve this. Why me. ”
“Somebody’s going to pay. I didn’t bring this on myself. ”“Who can I unload this on. ”
“This is making me crazy. ”
“Nobody can help me. ”
“How can I distract myself until this feeling goes away. ”
“I need my drug of choice to get thr ough this. ”
“When I’m feeling this bad, everybody better look out. ”
“I want to be r escued. ”
“Somebody has it in for me. ”
“This has to be settled right now. ”
“I can’t help how I feel. It’s just how I’m wir ed. ”
I realize that “detachment” is a ter m that people in the
West identif y with Easter n fatalism or indiﬀer ence. So mak e
this the ﬁrst concept you r eframe in a positive way. Detachment doesn’t show indiﬀer ence. It shows that you
really don’t want negativity to stick to you. Step 3: Give Up Self -Judgment
You get the emotions you think you deserve. Y et many times
these ar en’t the emotions you want. F ar from it. Everyone is
in the position of juggling “bad” feelings with “good” ones,
which comes down to self -judgment. W rapped up in the
“bad” feelings—anger, fear, envy, hostility, victimization,
self-pity, and aggr ession—is a self -image that needs these
negative emotions. No two people use them e xactly alik e. We build up our identities in unique ways. Some people use
fear to motivate themselves to over come challenges; others
use it to feel dependent and victimized. Some deploy anger
to contr ol anyone in their vicinity; others ar e afraid of anger
and never show it. Y et your sense of self, and ther efore your
self-worth, ar e tied up in every feeling you have. Every emotion is valid in some way or another. But when
you add the ingr edient of self -judgment, any emotion can be
damaging. L ove has destr oyed lives when it was misplaced,
warped, or r ejected. “I was only trying to help” sounds lik e a
positive statement bor n of caring, but how of ten does it
mask unwelcome intrusion. Y ou can shape a nonjudgmental
self-image anytime you want. Countless people want to, and
almost as many e xperts tell us how. But if your emotions
have negative eﬀects, you won’t be able to cr eate the self
you want. It’s very diﬃcult to feel good about yourself if
primal emotions lik e anger and fear ar e allowed to have
their own way. So, what to do. If r epression and suppr ession
don’t work, neither does letting negative emotions run fr ee. I place a high value on sympathy. If you can look at
yourself and say, “It’s all right. I understand,” you ar e doing
two things at once. Y ou ar e taking the judgment out of your
emotions, and you ar e giving yourself per mission to be who
you ar e. Sympathy is an emotion we tend to dir ect outwar d. We forget to grant it to ourselves. I was r eminded of this by
a striking encounter I had with a young woman who came
up to ask me a question. “I listen to people all the time,” she said. “I was just
wondering, can being sympathetic go too far. ”
I asked her to describe what happens when she listens to
people. “It’s strange,” she said. “When I get up in the mor ning I
listen to my family and sympathize. I’ve been that way since
I was a child. A t work people bring me their tr oubles,
because they know I will be sympathetic. But r ecently even
people on the str eet, perfect strangers, suddenly come up
to me to tell me their tr oubles. I hear all kinds of stories. ”
“And you always tak e the time to oﬀer sympathy. ” I
asked. She nodded. “I don’t think you’r e har ming yourself,” I said. She look ed
relieved. “In fact,” I went on, “I think you ar e remark able
without r ealizing it. I’m grateful you e xist. ”This was une xpected, and she was embar rassed. Not
many of us can say that our main pr oblem is an e xcess of
sympathy for others. “But ther e are pitfalls,” I told her. “Sympathy is a synonym
for compassion. The wor d ‘compassion’ means to suﬀer
with. That’s wher e one must draw the line. Y our sympathy
will be ill-spent if it e xhausts you. It must not overwhelm
you or cause you to feel as bad as the one you sympathize
with,” I said. When it’s valid, compassion is as valuable for the one who
gives it as for the one who r eceives it. A fterwar d, I thought
about how this applies to the self. Inside each of us is a
voice that sits in judgment. Call it a conscience or the
super ego, this voice doesn’t come fr om an outside judge or
parent. But it acts independent, evaluating the worth of who
we ar e and what we’r e thinking. L et’s say you get angry at
someone unjustly and later feel guilty about ﬂying oﬀ the
handle. The judgmental voice in your head says, “Y ou wer e
wrong. Y ou pr obably got yourself in tr ouble, and you
deserve it. ” P erhaps these wor ds ar e helpful in a certain
way. But this judgmental voice is just you; ther efore, in
judging against you, it is actually judging against itself. There is no independent, objective judge inside. The voice
that labels you as wr ong or bad is a ﬁctional character, and
what you’ll notice is that this character never sympathizes. To keep its power over you, it must intimidate you. What would happen if you started to sympathize with
yourself. The inner judge would begin to dissolve. In the
case of this young woman, I sensed that she wasn’t
manipulating her sympathy selﬁshly, as people do when
they say, “ After seeing how badly oﬀ my friend is, I feel
much better about myself. ” Instead, she was letting her
sympathy ﬂow by listening and opening a channel. W e must
do the same for ourselves. Even better if that channel leads
to God. A t its highest, compassion has a healing r ole to play. When you oﬀer sympathy, the woes of another ar e hear d
and passed on to a higher level of awar eness. We’re not talking about r enouncing your conscience. But
when conscience becomes punishing and mak es you feel
unworthy, it has gone too far. It’s time to r elease the
judgment that k eeps you bound inside a nar row self -
conception. In the r ealm of spirit or God—call it what you
will—suﬀering can be healed. Thr ough your sympathy, you
open a channel to the healing powers. Aspir e to be such a
channel. It is one of life’s gr eatest joys, and certainly the
purest. Step 4: Rebuild Y our Emotional Body
As any negative emotion surfaces, you can r eplace it with
something new. I call this r ebuilding your emotional body. We all have a mental image of what a desirable physical
body is lik e—trim, healthy, youthful, fr esh, pleasing to look
at. But we don’t use those qualities with r egard to our
emotions, our “emotional body. ” The emotional body, lik e
the physical body, must be pr operly nourished. It can gr ow
tired and ﬂabby when the same r esponses to the world ar e
repeated over and over. It becomes diseased when e xposed
to toxins and unhealthy inﬂuences. Every time you feel a negative emotion, your emotional
body is e xpressing discomfort, sor eness, fatigue, or pain. Pay attention to these symptoms just as you would to
physical pain and discomfort. If you had a r ock in your shoe,
you wouldn’t hesitate to r emove it. Y et how long have you
endur ed emotional r ocks in your shoe. In many ways, our
priorities should be r eversed. Think of the time and money
spent to avoid aging. W e expend enor mous eﬀort and car e
to mak e sur e that our bodies can be healthy and functional
into advanced old age. Y et ironically, it’s the emotional body
that is immune to aging. Ther e is no r eason for emotionsever to gr ow old, because the sour ce of fr eshness and
renewal is always at hand. Y our emotional body should
remain ener getic, alert, ﬂe xible, and pleasing to e xperience. I think a single phrase, “the lightness of being,” covers all of
these qualities. Childr en naturally feel lightness in their being. They play
and laugh; they for get traumas and bounce back quickly. Whatever they feel quickly comes to the surface. This
carefree period may not last long. Observing a young child
closely, you can see the beginning of tendencies that will
lead to futur e suﬀering, as the shadow teaches its tactics of
projection, blame, guilt, and all the r est. That’s why
rebuilding the emotional body is the best long-ter m strategy
for everyone—your futur e depends on undoing your past. The k ey is to have a vision. Then you can implement your
vision every day. Ther e’s no lack of detailed advice, in this
book and fr om many other sour ces. But without a vision,
even the best advice becomes haphazar d and piecemeal. A vision for r ebuilding the emotional body includes at least
some of the following points:
Becoming mor e whole
Learning to be r esilient
Dispelling the demons of the past
Healing old wounds
Expecting the best and highest for yourself
Adopting r ealistic ideals
Giving of yourself
Being gener ous, especially with your spirit
Seeing thr ough your fears
Learning self -acceptance
Communicating with God or your higher selfThe most important single thing in r ebuilding your
emotional body is becoming mor e whole. Emotions can’t be
reshaped in iso lation. They mer ge and blend with thoughts,
actions, aspirations, wishes, and r elationships. Every feeling
you have invisibly moves outwar d into your envir onment,
aﬀecting the people ar ound you and ultimately society and
the world at lar ge. Having work ed with thousands of people
over the years, I’ve come to see that without wholeness, all
we can cr eate is superﬁcial change. Ther efore, let’s see if
we can appr oach your life as one r eality, a pr ocess that
encompasses every thought and action you have ever had
or will have. This may sound rather overwhelming, but to escape the
fog of illusion, the only way out is r eality. In truth ther e is
only one r eality. You have no way of separating yourself
from it. Nor would you wish to once you see the enor mous
advantage of living in wholeness. Y our separate self, which
has such a huge personal stak e in the world, isn’t who you
really ar e. In fact, it may be a total illusion, which is what
the Buddha said. The self you defend every day as your
unique point of view is a convenient ﬁction that mak es the
ego feel good. What the ego doesn’t r ealize, however, is
that it would feel even better if it gave up its nar row, selﬁsh
stake in the world. When that happens, the true self can
emer ge. Then and only then is wholeness possible. A NEW REALITY, A NEW POWER
Wholeness over comes the shadow by absorbing it. Evil and
wrong-doing ar e no longer isolated. Earlier I mentioned that
damaging the ecosystem is an e xample of how misbehavior
can be denied and swept under the carpet. But as attitudes
change, we’ve discover ed that the ecosystem is totally
interconnected. Everyone’s behavior aﬀects everyone else. There is no part of the planet that can be isolated, as ifimmune to ecological har m done by other parts. Wholeness
changes our entir e perspective. Now e xpand the wor d “ecosystem” to a br oader conte xt. Wholeness must e xpand to tak e account of the laws that
contr ol pollution, social battles over global war ming,
personal attitudes about r ecycling, and ultimately our very
way of being happy. Can we continue to be happy with a
way of life that is slowly destr oying the natural world. Everything you can possibly think of is encompassed by the
ecosystem. It is the web of r elationships in which we all
exist. If you understand the web of r elationships as an
invisible place wher e everything comes together, you begin
to see wholeness wher e divisions once e xisted. In the cur rent debate over the envir onment, two paths lie
open. W e can continue to deny the pr oblem or we can face
it. The ﬁrst path is a false solution, because it doesn’t
resolve the underlying fear and guilt of ecological
destruction and futur e disasters. The second path eliminates
fear and guilt the only way that pr oves viable: by solving the
problem that leads to those emotions. The same holds true
for the shadow. The pr oblem calls for a holistic appr oach to
solve it. Denial is a false solution. If you acknowledge and embrace your shadow, it is
actually nurturing, because the whole of life is nurturing—
that is, life e xists to sustain itself. When we get stuck in the
drama of good versus evil, we impose our own limited
perspective. A fter all, even when someone is committing a
violent crime or going to war or victimizing someone else,
the wr ongdoer’s cells and or gans don’t shut down. The
body’s allegiance is to life, no matter how confused and
conﬂicted the mind becomes. A New W orldviewThe miracle plays of the Middle Ages, which wer e perfor med
on feast days, took the grim seriousness of evil and tur ned it
into a cosmic jok e. The Devil is a comic character who
engages in every kind of bad deed, tempting souls and
bringing tor ment, yet the Devil fails to see that in the end
God is mor e powerful. Satan himself will be r edeemed. In
the end, the jok e is on him; no one is out of God’s r each. In
religious ter ms these miracle plays ar e saying that
wholeness always over comes separation. If you see the
world in ter ms of good versus evil, you have missed the
cosmic jok e. Whatever you think is wr ong about yourself and too
painful to confr ont can be seen a diﬀer ent way. Life—
meaning your life and mine—transcends any win- or-lose
orientation. Wholeness goes beyond simplistic cause-and-
eﬀect e xplanations. In the web of r elationship, you function
in a much lar ger conte xt. Once you see yourself as part of
the whole, a new understanding arises. Ther e is no need to
label yourself or anyone else as part of the good- versus-evil,
right- versus-wr ong drama. Y ou can e xchange judgment for
the real e xperience of compassion, love, and for giveness. That is the healing that comes with being whole. But the holistic viewpoint also unleashes a deeper
intuitive knowingness—you see why things ar e the way they
are. It’s common to hear people say, “Ther e’s a r eason for
everything that happens,” but usually, if ask ed what the
reason is, they don’t actually know. The mind k eeps
searching in vain for cause-and-eﬀect e xplanations. This
eﬀort gets us into strange speculations: “I once cheated on
my wife and now this bankruptcy is payback” “I used to be
full of anger, and now I have cancer ” “The community quit
believing in God’s commandments, and now a hur ricane has
leveled it. ” Even if you r eject such dark connections, you
probably still harbor superstitions along the same lines,
because we all do. We wer en’t taught another way to
explain the unseen workings of r eality. Let me suggest another way. What if everything that
exists, visible or invisible, ﬁts into a single scheme. In this
scheme, the entir e universe is made of consciousness. The
largest events, such as the birth and death of galaxies, ar e
connected to the smallest, the interactions of subatomic
particles. Everything is part of one consciousness, which
earlier ages called the mind of God. W e don’t have to use
religious ter ms. But lik e the traditional concept of God,
consciousness is inﬁnite, all-embracing, all-powerful, and all-
knowing. It unfolds into myriad for ms and shapes. V iewed
through the ﬁve senses, some of these for ms don’t appear
conscious. It sounds peculiar to say that a jellyﬁsh pulsating
in the P aciﬁc Ocean, a r ock on the side of Mt. Ever est, and a
raindr op falling in Brazil ar e conscious. But we’r e not talking
about possessing a brain. A jellyﬁsh, a r ock, and a raindr op
don’t have thoughts and feelings (so far as we know—it’s
good to k eep an open mind about the unknown). Ther efore,
we don’t feel intimately connected to the “ nonconscious”
life ar ound us. When we stand apart fr om objects and lower cr eatur es, as
we call them, something huge is being missed. Ther e are
principles that embrace all things. L ook at a cell in your
body and an electr on hurtling thr ough the darkness of
space, and at an invisible level some deep similarities
emer ge:
Every action is coor dinated with every other action. Information is shar ed by every part of the whole. Communication is instantaneous. Energy is r eshaped into countless variations, yet never
lost. Evolution pr oduces mor e intricate for ms as time
unfolds. Consciousness e xpands as for ms become mor e
comple x. These ar e very abstract ter ms, I know, but ultimately
there is no need for wor ds at all. When you see yourself as
separate, wor ds seem to matter much mor e than being. After all, being is passive, something we tak e for granted,
while wor ds run our lives, ﬁll our heads, bring people
together, and drive them apart. Y et all these words couldn’t
exist without the silent intelligence inside every cell. The
power that holds your body together, coor dinating an
inﬁnite number of biological actions per second among
hundr eds of billions of cells, is mor e primal than thinking
and using wor ds. Primal doesn’t mean primitive, a mistak e we mak e when
we get too pr oud of human r eason. The consciousness
found everywher e is ine xpressible; it far e xceeds the human
mind. If we list the things that come to us fr om a mysterious
source, that we e xperience deeply without wor ds, it’s a
wonder that anyone ever doubted the e xistence of the
invisible world. Her e’s a short list:
Love
Creativity
The sense of being alive
Beauty
Inspiration
Intuition
Dreams
Visions
Yearning
FulﬁllmentThe sense of belonging
Awe, wonder
Ecstasy, bliss
The numinous, a sense of the divine
A life ﬁlled with all these invisible qualities would be
nothing less than a new way of being. No one would
willingly r efuse wonder, cr eativity, love, and all the r est. Y et
millions of people do. They e xperi ence bliss and fulﬁllment
in small doses that quickly fade. They fail to get past the
shadow, which guar ds the riches of the unconscious with
sharp claws and fangs. I once hear d a guru lament to his
audience, “I show you the gates of heaven, and when a
goblin springs up shouting ‘Boo. ’ you run away. ”
Fear, anger, insecurity, anxiety, and the other aspects of
the shadow feel lik e much mor e than “ Boo. ” If we ar e going
to reach heaven’s gates, the only self that can get us ther e
is the one we have. That’s the dilemma. How can a divided
self ever attain wholeness. I’d lik e to pr opose that it can,
but the way isn’t what most seek ers think it is. Krishnamurti,
the most dry -eyed, even ruthless of Indian sages, said,
“Freedom isn’t the end of the path. It’s the beginning. Ther e
is nowher e to go. Freedom is the ﬁrst and the last thing on
the path. ” He wasn’t trying to mystif y his followers. Krishnamurti’s doctrine of the ﬁrst and last fr eedom, as he
dubbed it, was his way of saying that wholeness—the state
of complete fr eedom—isn’t about choosing this or that. It
isn’t about being good instead of bad, pur e instead of
impur e. Wholeness has no divisions. It is everything. Therefore, it must be the beginning and the end at the same
time. Our job is to tur n this insight into a practical way of
life. What Is Wholeness Lik e. The glory of human e xistence doesn’t lie in all the things
that mak e us unique. It lies in the fact that we can unite
with cosmic intelligence; each of us can become a conscious
part of the whole. When that happens, you gain a world that
is bar ely suggested by the thoughts and feelings of
everyday life. It’s practical to live holistically, because with
all of consciousness to draw upon, you will be much mor e
creative and imaginative, much less judgmental. But for any
of these beneﬁts to come about, you have to e xperience
what wholeness is r eally lik e. Let’s go into that now. Wholeness W ants to Heal Y ou
Wholeness always tries to r estor e itself. Your body has a
complete ar ray of healing techniques. Wholeness and
healing ar e intimately connected (the two wor ds derive fr om
the same r oot wor d in Sanskrit). What does the body do to
restor e wholeness. It seeks balance. Every cell communicates with every other. No part is mor e important than the whole. Rest and activity ar e har monized. In the midst of constant activity, ther e is a stable
foundation (known as homeostasis). Every cell adapts to change in the envir onment. Stress is counter ed and br ought under contr ol (disease
and discomfort ar e basically the r esult of str ess). In each case, the body is k eeping itself whole. The healing
system e xtends everywher e. Your heart, brain, and liver
cells all perfor m diﬀer ent functions, but k eeping alive and
healthy is their common goal; ther efore, wholeness is mor eimportant than any single activity. If you look at your body
as a metaphor for your life, what does it mean. You will value balance. The separate aspects of your life will work towar d a
common purpose. Every aspect of living will assume equal value. Rest will ﬁnd a nor mal r hythm with activity. Your cor e self, which is calm and at peace, won’t be
disturbed in the midst of activity. As your situation changes, you will adapt and r emain
resilient. At the ﬁrst signs that str ess is thr owing you out of your
comfort zone, you will notice and r espond. You will value your well-being over any individual
experience. I’ve couched these points in general ter ms, but consider
how diﬀer ently two people would live if one chose
wholeness and the other didn’t. Wholeness Is Always a Gain, Never a L oss
To be whole is to be fully healed. If that is true, then no
matter how well you live your life, you ar e not fully healed
until the split self has been transfor med. Ther e are many
ways to achieve a good life, and countless people ﬁnd
reasons not to seek wholeness (one of the biggest r easons
for this is that they have never been e xposed to a vision of
the higher self as it r eally e xists). It’s crucial to know that
you won’t stop being yourself if you seek transfor mation. The world of contrasts is seductive and dramatic. W ithout
contrast, would we be doomed to eter nal sameness. Thestronger the light, the gr eater the shadow. This isn’t
something cr eated by humankind; it’s the way natur e works. The alter native isn’t work able. If the universe did not have
creative for ces simultaneously opposing the for ce of decay,
or entr opy, ther e would be no universe. Let’s say only the evolutionary, cr eative impulse e xisted in
the universe. What would happen. The cosmos would
rapidly run out of matter and ener gy to use for new for ms,
since the old ones would never wear out or become
obsolete. In personal ter ms, we speak of becoming an
evolved person, but if you only evolved without dissolving
the old person that you wer e in the past, you would be a
perpetual infant, child, adolescent, and adult at the same
time. Y our body would have countless layers of skin because
old, dead cells wer en’t sloughed oﬀ; your stomach lining
would swell gr otesquely without the work of digestive
enzymes that constantly devour it so that it can be r eplaced
every month. On the other hand, if only the impulse of inertia or
destruction e xisted, the universe would rapidly bur n itself
out. Entr opy would cause “heat death” in short or der, as the
cosmos devolved into a cold, static void. W e need these two
opposing for ces, but that isn’t an ar gument for dualism. In
fact, it’s a str ong ar gument for wholeness, since it tak es a
larger perspective than that fr om either side to k eep them
in balance. Your body is capable of going into hyper drive when the
stress response is trigger ed. A ﬂood of adr enaline speeds up
the heart, draws e xtra ener gy from the bloodstr eam, alerts
the mind, heightens the senses, and kicks you into gear for
ﬁght or ﬂight. But if the str ess response goes uncheck ed, it
will kill you very quickly, in a matter of minutes. This has
actually been observed in patients who have spent a length
of time on ster oids. The drugs they tak e to suppr ess
inﬂammation, for e xample, also suppr ess the body’s
hormone system. If you suddenly withdraw those drugs, thebody has no ability to secr ete the right balance of
hormones. Ther efore, you can walk up behind one of these
patients, shout “ Boo. ” and send the person into a state in
which str ess hor mones speed up the heart to a danger ous
degree, of ten with fatal r esults. At the ego level we constantly fool ourselves into thinking
that being absolutely good is possible. Never again will we
lie, cheat, feel jealous, lose our temper, or give in to anxiety. This intention never works out, because being good all the
time is as rigid as being anything else all the time. Ther e are
moments when it’s absolutely right and healthy to get angry
or be afraid. The ﬂaw in positive thinking is that you can’t
be positive all the time. It’s sane to ﬁght against dictators,
oppose oppr ession in all its for ms, tell cor rupt power br okers
that they ar e wrong, and on and on. Life pr esents challenges
from the dark side. W e don’t have to demonize the shadow;
it’s the sour ce of almost every challenge worth facing. The illusion that we fall into is thinking that life for ces us
to choose between good and evil. In r eality ther e’s a thir d
way, which is to be whole. F rom the perspective of
wholeness, you can balance the darkness and the light,
being a slave to neither. The opposition between the two
can be tur ned into cr eative tension. The good guys have to
keep winning, but the bad guys better not lose altogether,
because that would be the end of the story. The universe
would become lik e a museum, fossilized and mummiﬁed
forever. The ideal is that the for ces of truth, goodness, beauty, and
harmony stay a step ahead of the dark for ces. Y our body
manages to achieve that, as does the universe as a whole. We can’t deny the fact that life-for ms ar e constantly
evolving, moving to higher levels of abstraction, cr eativity,
imagination, insight, and inspiration. Something is
maintaining the balance, but tipping it slightly in favor of
evolution. In many ways, spirituality does no mor e than
imitate natur e. If you can help tip the balance towar devolution rather than entr opy and decay, you ar e a true
spiritual war rior. Wholeness Is Close, Not F ar Away
There is a map of human consciousness that holds true in
every wisdom tradition. In this map a timeless God serves
as the sour ce of cr eation. Even when the wor d “God” isn’t
used, as in Buddhism, ther e is a state without division; it is
whole; it contains everything both visible and invisible. The
undivided state of Being then divides itself into the visible
and invisible aspects of cr eation. Out of itself, oneness
creates the many. You can imagine the map as a cir cle with
a point in the middle. The point r epresents God as the
source, which is smaller than the smallest particle of
anything. The cir cle also r epresents God, but God as the
manifest universe, which is lar ger than the lar gest anything. But for the map to be accurate, you must see the cir cle as
constantly e xpanding, lik e the universe af ter the big bang. Unlik e the physical cosmos, though, God e xpands at inﬁnite
speed in all dir ections. This signiﬁes the limitless potential of
Being once it enters cr eation. So far, the map may seem
esoteric, and many people would not see much practical
value in it. (I once had a woman say to me that she was
repelled by the wor ds “One” or “ All” as applied to God. T o
her, they signiﬁed being swallowed up in a sea of blankness,
a divine void. ) Our minds can’t grasp inﬁnite e xpansion in all
directions. But mak e the map personal. See your sour ce as
a point while your whole world is an e xpanding cir cle. The
more you see, understand, and e xperience, the bigger the
circle gets. Y et it is always e xpanding fr om the sour ce. What
this means is that the sour ce is never far away. It’s a
constant. When you can e xperience yourself as your sour ce and
your world at the same time, you have become whole. Thereason that your sour ce seems far away is that you have
identiﬁed with all the separate things in your world,
neglecting the cr eative origin that mak es everything
possible. (This is lik e forgetting your mother as you gr ow up. No amount of for getting will erase the fact that you had a
mother who was your sour ce. ) It isn’t possible to lose the
connection to your sour ce entir ely, because consciousness
is what the sour ce is made of. Being awar e that you ar e
alive means that you ar e connected to consciousness. This
makes the connection sound passive, however, and it isn’t. Through this connection pours every thought you’ve ever
had. Ther e’s also a silent side to consciousness that works
to keep you alive physically. Your heart is awar e of what
your liver is doing, not in wor ds but thr ough messages
encoded in chemicals and electrical signals. Y our body
requir es an inﬁnite range of r esponses to be coor dinated
among hundr eds of billions of cells. This is an aspect of
consciousness that never gains a voice, but its intelligence
far surpasses that of any genius. Ordinary people wor ry that God may be so far away that
he has for gotten us, while r eligious enthusiasts fervently
believe that God is close at hand every moment. Both views
have a ﬂaw. “Near ” and “ far” are actually false ter ms. They
derive fr om duality, since near is the opposite of far. But
imagine the color blue. Befor e you saw it in your mind, was
the color blue close to you or far away. Say the wor d
“elephant” to yourself. Befor e you br ought it to mind, was
your vocabulary far fr om you or nearby. W e use
consciousness for individual r easons, in the service of “I,
me, and mine,” but you can locate yourself in time and
space without being able to locate your consciousness. There is no distance between you and a memory, you and
your ne xt thought. F rom the perspective of wholeness, since
everything is being coor dinated at once, distance isn’t
relevant. Which leads to an e xciting conclusion: your potential for
change isn’t far away, either. Potential is the same as
unseen possibilities. Either you see that something is
possible or you don’t. So the impossible is just another
name for the unseen. Thus the shadow, which mak es you
see a limited, fearful world full of thr eat and dark
possibilities, is masking many unseen possibilities that could
spring into your awar eness if you e xpanded beyond the
shadow. Without e xpansion you ar e forced to have nar row
vision. Think of having a bad toothache. The pain occupies
your whole attention; you can’t think of anything else. If the
human race wer e in constant physical pain, consciousness
would never have e xpanded. F ear is anticipated pain, and it
has the same eﬀect of nar rowing your awar eness. Wholeness, it tur ns out, is the same as ﬁnding your sour ce. There is no division at the sour ce. You don’t have to conquer
every aspect of yourself that is tinged with darkness (which
would be impossible in any case). Become who you r eally
are, and fr om that moment on darkness is no longer
anything you can identif y with. You ar e living near the sour ce of consciousness when the
following ar e true:
You ar e at peace. You cannot be shak en from your center. You have self -knowledge. You empathize without judgment. You see yourself as part of the whole. You ar e not in the world.
To undo the shadow, you must see what you're doing, contact the feeling that is hidden beneath the surface, and make peace with that feeling.
What is the key to undoing the shadow?
The main reason the shadow exists is because we have been accumulating "emotional debt to the past" and are not willing to confront and heal our negative emotions.
What is the main reason the shadow exists?
The key to repressing the shadow is to deny, suppress, or judge your negative emotions, which only reinforces the unwanted feeling and makes it even more unwanted.
What is the key to repressing the shadow?
The purpose of the shadow is to teach us that we are not separate from the world, and that our negative emotions are a part of our shared psyche.
What is the purpose of the shadow?
The ultimate goal of the spiritual path is to transcend the ego and become one with the universe, allowing for wholeness and oneness with the divine.
What is the ultimate goal of the spiritual path?