The Untethered Soul (19 page)

Eventually you will see that in the way of the Tao you’re not going to wake up, see what to do, and then go do it. In the Tao, you are blind, and you have to learn how to be blind. You can never see where the Tao is going; you can only be there with it. A blind person walks down a city street with the use of a cane. Let’s give that cane a name: it’s the seeker of the extremes, it’s the feeler of the edges, it’s the toucher of the yin and the yang. People who walk with the use of that cane often tap from side to side. They’re not trying to find where they should walk; they’re trying to find where they shouldn’t walk. They’re finding the extremes. If you cannot see your way, all you can do is feel for the edges. But if you feel the edges, and don’t go there, you will stay in the Way. That’s how you live in the Tao.

All the great teachings reveal the way of the center, the way of balance. Constantly look to see if that’s where you are living or if you are lost in the extremes. The extremes create their opposites; the wise avoid them. Find the balance in the center and you will live in harmony.

How can anyone really know anything about God? We have so many teachings, so many concepts, and so many views about God. But they’ve all been touched by people. In the end, it’s amazing how much our ideas about God conform to the different cultures from which they come.

Fortunately, deep within us, there is a direct connection to the Divine. There is a part of our being that is beyond the personal self. You can consciously choose to identify with that part, rather than with the psyche or the body. When you do this, a natural transformation begins to take place within you. Over time, as you observe this transformation, you will see what it’s like to be coming toward God. You actually begin to know what it feels like to be moving in the direction of Spirit. The changes you see within you are reflective of the force you’re approaching. Just as rain makes you wet and fire makes you warm, so you can know the nature of God by looking into the mirror of your transformed self. This is not a philosophy; it is a direct experience.

Spiritual growth can be experienced just like anything else. You may have experienced a time in your life when you felt a lot of negativity, anger, and resentment. You know how that feels, and you know how you feel toward others when you’re feeling that way. You know how your heart feels, and you know what your thoughts and actions are like. You know that space. It’s not a philosophy; it’s a direct experience.

If you grow past that part of you, over time you will actually drift away from the feelings of tension and anxiety. The entire cloud of lower vibrations will appear further and further away from where you sit inside. The cloud may still be there, but if you don’t identify with it or hold onto it, it can no longer hold onto you. As you release the lower vibrations, you naturally stop thinking they’re you or that there’s anything you have to do about them. As you let go of them, your Spirit drifts upward.

How do you know your Spirit drifts upward? You know the same way you know that you’re breathing, the same way you know that your heart beats, and the same way you know that you have thoughts. You’re in there and you directly experience it.

What does it mean to drift upward? It’s an experience of being drawn further back inside yourself. You’re no longer held down to your earthly self, so you begin to feel more spaciousness inside. You feel that there’s more of a distance between you and the thoughts and emotions inside of you. You drift back, and then in and up.

How does it feel when you drift up? You don’t feel as much anger, fear, or self-consciousness. You don’t feel resentment toward people. You don’t close or get tight as often. Things still happen that you don’t want to happen, but they don’t seem to touch you as much. They can’t reach back to where you are because you’ve drifted behind the part of you that reacts to things. These are actual experiences, not merely something you were told about. It’s just what naturally happens when you let go of the lower vibrations of your being. You drift in and up to the deeper vibrations.

Where are you going? Even if you have no basis for understanding what is happening to you, you are still having the undeniable experience of going somewhere. What you begin to feel is that you’re going into your spiritual being. As you associate less with the physical and psychological parts of your being, you begin to identify more with the flow of pure energy.

What does it feel like to identify more with Spirit than with form? You used to walk around feeling anxiety and tension; now you walk around feeling love. You just feel love for no reason. Your backdrop is love. Your backdrop is openness, beauty, and appreciation. You don’t have to make yourself feel that way; that is how Spirit feels. If you were asked how the body normally feels, you might say that it’s generally uncomfortable about one thing or another. How about the psyche? If you were being totally honest, you’d probably say that it’s generally full of complaints and fears. Well, how does Spirit normally feel? The truth is, it always feels good. It always feels high. It always feels open and light.

Because of this, you naturally begin to center more and more on the spiritual part of your being. You do this not by reaching for Spirit, but by letting go of the rest. There really is no other way. The personal self cannot touch Spirit; you must release the personal self. As you release it, you drift back. As you go further back, you get higher. You get higher in vibration and higher in the amount of love and lightness that you feel. You just begin to soar. This happens in an ever-increasing, continuous progression.

As you let go and willingly release the physical, emotional, and mental aspects of your being, Spirit becomes your state. You don’t claim to understand what is happening to you; you just know that as you go further and further back, it gets more and more beautiful. You naturally begin to experience the vibrations that were described by the great saints and sages of different traditions. You realize that you, too, can have deep spiritual experiences and be “…in the Spirit on the Lord’s Day” (Rev. 1:10).

But ultimately, how do you really know anything about God? How can you ever know about what is beyond you? You know because those who have gone beyond have come back and said that the Spirit you’re experiencing is the doorway to God. When they let go of the lower aspects of their being, they experienced just what you’re experiencing. They felt tremendous love, Spirit, and light waking up inside of them. They felt that nothing could come in through their senses that was higher than what was already going on inside. They drifted further and further back and got higher and higher. Then one day, all of a sudden, they weren’t there. There was no sense of “I” anymore. There was no sense of a separateness experiencing the love and light. There was only the ultimate expansiveness of their sense of Self merging into the love and light, like a single drop of water merging into the ocean.

When the drop of consciousness that knows itself as an individual drifts back far enough, it becomes like the drop that falls into the ocean. The Atman (Soul) falls into the Paramatman (Supreme Soul). The individual consciousness falls into the Universal Oneness. And that’s it.

When that happens, people say interesting things like, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) and “…the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works” (John 14:10).

They all spoke like that. They said they had merged and that there was no differentiation within the Universal Oneness of God. The drop of consciousness, which is individual Spirit, is like a ray of light emanating from the sun. The individual ray is really no different from the sun. When consciousness stops identifying itself as the ray, it comes to know itself as the sun. Beings have merged into that state.

In the mystical Gospel of John, Christ says, “That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us … I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one…” (John 17:21-23). So it was taught in the Hindu Vedas; so it was taught in the Jewish Kabbalah; so it was written by the great Sufi mystic poets; and so it was taught in all the great religious traditions of all time. Such a state exists; one can merge into the Universal Absolute. One can merge into God.

This is how you know something about God. You become one with Him. Ultimately, the only way to know about God is by letting your being merge into The Being, and then seeing what happens to you. This is universal consciousness, and the qualities of the beings who have attained this deep state are similar in every religion.

What happens to one who walks this path toward God? What transformations do they go through along the way? To understand this, imagine what would happen if you started feeling tremendous love for all creatures, for every plant, for every animal, and for all the beauties of nature. Imagine if every child seemed like your own, and every person you saw looked like a beautiful flower, with its own color, its own expression, shape, and sounds. As you went deeper and deeper, you would start noticing a phenomenal thing—you are no longer judging. The process of judging has simply stopped. There is just appreciating and honoring. Where there used to be judging, there is now respecting, loving, and cherishing. To differentiate is to judge. To see, to experience, and to honor is to participate in life instead of standing back and judging it.

When you walk through a beautiful botanical garden, you feel open and light. You feel love. You see beauty. You don’t judge the shape and placement of every leaf. The leaves are of all sizes and shapes and they face every-which-way. That’s what makes them beautiful. What if you felt that way about people? What if they didn’t all have to dress the same, believe the same, or behave the same? What if they were like the flowers, and however they happened to be seemed beautiful to you?

If that happened, you’d get a glimpse of God. That’s the best way to know God. Watch what happens to you as you get closer to Him. It’s really the only way you can know anything about God. If you try to read about God in a book, you’ll find five other books that say the opposite. Better yet, you’ll find five interpretations of the same book. Somebody writes something and somebody else gets a Ph.D. proving it wrong. If you move your search for God down to the mental level, somebody will dispute it. It’s all part of the mind game.

You can’t know God that way. It must come from actual experience. That’s what happens to you when you meditate. That’s what happens when you let go of your lower self. You drift into Spirit, and as you drift into Spirit, these transformations take place within you. All you have to do is notice them, and you will start to notice the tendency toward the qualities of the Divine. The further back you go, the more you will see these natural qualities unfolding inside of you. Each step along the way, you get a clearer glimpse of what it must be like to sit in that Divine State.

There are those who know of the existence of the Divine Force. They’ve had enough direct inner experience to know that Divine Consciousness is a reality. They have seen glimpses of a force that is omniscient, omnipresent, and omnipotent; a force that is aware of all things at all times, equally. It is universally conscious.

What does creation look like from that Divine State? What have they seen, those who have gone beyond and looked through the eyes of God? They see that there is no judging. Judging faded away long ago. There’s just more beauty to see. Such a being feels, “Now I can see all the flowers at once. Now I can experience what each of my children and all of my diversity is doing. Now I can feel more love, more compassion, more understanding, and more admiration for all the different expressions and actions of my creation.” That is what it looks like to a saint. And a true saint dwells with God.

What if it is really true that God is not judging? What if God is loving? We all know that true love doesn’t judge. Love sees nothing but beauty in its beloved. There is no impurity. There is no possibility of impurity. No matter what it beholds, it’s all beautiful. That is how true love sees. That is what it looks like through the eyes of love. So if God is love, what must it look like through those eyes—the eyes that are filled with infinite love and unconditional compassion?

If you’ve ever really loved anybody, then you know what true love means. It means that you love them more than you love yourself. If you truly love someone, your love sees past their humanness. It embraces their whole being, including past wrongs and current shortcomings. It is like the unconditional love of a mother. A mother devotes every moment of her life to a child who is physically or mentally challenged. She thinks the child is beautiful. She doesn’t focus on the shortcomings; in fact, she doesn’t even see them as shortcomings.

What if that is how God looks upon His creation? Then you’ve lost out if you’ve been told otherwise. Instead of being encouraged to feel completely protected, loved, honored, and respected by the Divine Force, you’ve been taught that you’re being judged. Because you’ve been taught that, you feel guilt and fear. But guilt and fear do not open your connection to the Divine; they only serve to close your heart. The reality is that God’s way is love, and you can see this for yourself. If, for even one moment, you can look at someone with the eyes of true love, you’ll know those eyes are not yours. Your eyes could never look with that amount of love. Your eyes could never be that unconditional. Your eyes could never, even in a million years, see only beauty and total perfection in your beloved. Those are the eyes of God looking down through you.

When the hand of God reaches out to give through you, there’s nothing you wouldn’t give. You would give your last breath and never even think about it. It wouldn’t even cross your mind to hold back. You would give anything and everything for your beloved. When you feel love this deeply, you feel that it is coming from something greater than you. It is transcendental love. It is divine, unconditional, selfless love. The masters spoke of that love. The ones who went beyond said it’s the state you attain when you drift into Spirit. That is how Spirit looks upon its creation. That is what you should be taught. No matter what you do, and no matter what you’ve done, you will always be loved by Him.

When Christ told the story of the prodigal son to his disciples, he spoke of one son who had gone away and squandered all his wealth. Yet when he came home for help, his father treated him better than the son who had stayed home and worked. Christ explained that this was because one son had always been home, but the prodigal son had been lost, and the father had missed him. There was no judging—only loving (Luke 15:11-32).

Christ also said, “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone…” (John 8:7). What did he teach? What did he say? How did he look upon this world? He taught completely selfless, compassionate love. He hung on the cross next to thieves and robbers, and when a thief asked to be remembered, Christ said that he would share that day in heaven with him (Luke 23:39-43). What were his first words upon the cross? “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). That is the love of a mother. That’s how a mother talks about her child. The level of love and compassion is so deep that the child can do no wrong. If a mother can attain to selfless love, then what about God, the creator of love?