Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (43 page)

Two days after he was discharged, I walked into a store down the block from the hospital and saw this man smoking a cigarette through his tracheotomy. The power of addiction was at work, certainly, but there was something more fundamental. If you light up your fifth cigarette of the day without thinking, you are doing something unconsciously, as is the nature of habits. If you see yourself lighting up the cigarette, you are aware of what you’re doing. But self-awareness goes further; it says, “What am I doing to myself?” Posing questions, reflecting on your behavior, taking your life seriously—these are all self-aware behaviors. The promotion of self-awareness is how we can take the next leap in well-being. The fact that the universe is self-aware makes the argument even stronger. It would mean that to live unconsciously is like throwing away our cosmic birthright.

In the midst of all this progress, which was very heartening, the starkness of medicine’s life-and-death choices arose. In 2010 David began to have a defect in his sight that led to a minor automobile accident. He decided to go in for a CAT scan, and looking at it, he made a self-diagnosis.

“I have sad news,” he told me on the phone. The scan had found a fast-growing malignant tumor known as a glioblastoma. The irony of the diagnosis was extraordinarily painful—a brilliant neurologist
having a fatal brain tumor. His disease, as far as we know, has no specific risk factors. But later I learned that as a child David and his sister had both received heavy doses of radiation to treat enlarged tonsils. No one at the time recognized the long-term effects of radiation exposure (the Fifties saw groups of tourists being bused from Las Vegas to watch atomic bomb tests from a “safe” distance, protected with only sunglasses). As an experimental treatment, some children with swollen tonsils had their heads put under an X-ray machine that radiated the tonsils until the swelling shrank. I can’t escape the thought that David’s brain tumor was related to radiation; it was telling that his sister had died of cancer.

As an Ayurvedic physician trained in Western medicine, David used the best of both worlds to fight his disease, including surgery. He knew that the tumor was largely inoperable, but he was haunted by the prospect of leaving his family behind. He long outlived his prognosis, which originally gave him only a few months. He fought with his usual optimism and joy. Before his first operation, he told me, “I hope more light comes in than goes out.”

David continued to teach courses at the center even when he was nearly blind as a consequence of his treatments. On January 31, 2012, he died. He referred to death as taking off a temporary disguise. I did my best to write a tribute, although his passing was an incalculable loss: “David has been my friend, partner, teacher, trusted colleague, and younger brother for more than twenty years. He touched my heart, influenced the way I think, and expanded my spirit. David approached life from a place of unlimited possibilities. His wisdom, courage, and love will continue to inspire all of us for decades to come.”

I’m a compulsive notetaker, and in one notebook, under “Chinese fable,” I see an old entry about a spiritual master who is walking in the evening with a disciple.

The master is discoursing on a familiar theme, that the world is an illusion. Reality hides behind a mask, sending us invisible messages.
We will never be free until we tear the mask away and see what lies beyond.

The disciple is baffled and resistant. “I believe in the world that I can see. Why shouldn’t I? It makes no sense to say that the world is a dream.”

The master replies, “It will, once you realize that you are the one being dreamed.”

This parable comes to mind because the dream that we all read about, the American dream, is actually a massive defense against dreaming. In America materialism rules, and this country’s enormous advances in science refute any spiritual nonsense about life as a dream. Walk in front of a bus and you’ll see how much of a dream it is. The oldest texts on this issue date back to the Upanishads of ancient India. As America sits at the head of the world’s banquet table, it must be annoying that anyone from the Third World, as it was once called, would defy the very notion of materialism.

But it’s not a question of defiance. It’s a question of what is. Every day offers a chance to find out what’s real; every day offers a chance to reinforce illusion instead. When you go to sleep at night, your dreams aren’t a threat, because even if a tiger is about to eat you, you will wake up from the dream. If the ancient rishis are to be believed, they must show us how to wake up from the dream we call waking existence.

Despite its faith in materialism, America is the best place to wake up from that dream, even better than India in its glory days of the great sages. An untouchable who cringed in the dirt as the Buddha passed by would have been astounded to have the Buddha stop to bless him. His heart might have burst; his whole existence could have changed in an instant. But for ages the turn to spirituality was forced, because the alternative was miserable poverty, ignorance, disease, and the rigidity of social authority. In America, where everyday existence is lavish by comparison, the choice to be spiritual isn’t forced. It’s free, and free choices are the ones that we can abide by for a lifetime.

Every year I return to an inspired book called
I Am That,
by the South Indian guru Nisargadatta Maharaj. He was always poor, and he had a completely unschooled background. As a boy plowing the family plot behind a bullock, Nisargadatta had spiritual yearnings. He sought out a teacher, and the teacher said, “For you the path is simple. Whenever you are tempted to think that you are a person, remind yourself, I am That.” Nisargadatta took his teacher at his word. In the Indian tradition, “That” (
tat
) is the unnamable essence, the infinite source that cannot have a name since it permeates everything. It is sometimes called the unknown by which all things are known.

Nisargadatta went home and kept reminding himself that he was not anything that has a label. If he started to think “I am a man,” “I am a poor farmer,” or even “I am a person thinking this thought,” he would stop and substitute the same phrase, “I am that.” Extraordinarily the seed must have fallen on incredibly fertile ground, because without any other practice or discipline, he became enlightened. Devotees began to gather, and spontaneously this illiterate peasant uttered wisdom of the highest order.

India may look like a country of credulous believers, but Nisargadatta had more than his share of cranky, cantankerous followers. His book mostly consists of conversation with querulous visitors. One of them says, “I don’t see anything spiritual about you. We are just two old men sitting in a room waiting for someone to bring us our lunch.”

To which Nisargadatta gives an answer that brings tears to the eyes: “You see two old men waiting for lunch because that is your reality. It is made of your experience and memories. Such a reality is closed and private. My reality isn’t private. It is built from infinite, unbounded consciousness, and fortunately it is open to all.”

The visitor isn’t mollified. “If you live in such a superior world, why do you bother being in mine?”

Nisargadatta replies, “Because it brings me joy to help others wake up.”

There is really no arguing with that, and no one has ever reached a higher reality, a better world, or God except through the joy of living.
Misery isn’t a stairway to heaven. The miracle is that waking up never ends; it’s a universal experience. “The process” is about nothing else. The real impediment is drowsiness.

One of the most brilliant opening sentences I’ve ever read is in a book that had its heyday in the early Eighties,
A Course in Miracles:
“This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary.” The soul doesn’t push anyone to abandon their reality. The time must be right for each person.

Everyone has moments when the veil falls away. We sense that there is more to life than a random existence presided over by physical laws. The universe is purposeless according to physics, yet no one can tell us how purpose entered into the scheme. Living things can’t survive without a purpose, even when it is as primitive as needing to eat and breathe. Human beings have gone much further. We exhibit all the qualities that physics insists on excluding from the cosmos: meaning, beauty, truth, love, intelligence, and creativity. Science can delete those things from its data, but to turn around and say that the data explains who we are strikes me as delusional.

I’ve gone head-to-head with numerous defenders of materialism, and the most blinkered ones insist that everything that makes life worthwhile—love, beauty, creativity, and all the rest—must have a physical explanation. This “must” is their blind spot. It took centuries before Kepler discovered that the planets in the solar system move in elliptical orbits because under the Ptolemaic system, which viewed geometry as divine, planets “must” move in a perfect circle. For people who pride themselves on rationality, scientists can become overheated when you encroach on their belief in “must.” I’ve seen Nobel laureates sputter with rage at the proposition that the mind creates the brain and not the other way around.

The argument usually starts with smiling confidence on their side, and a hint of pity for me. They declare that no one can possibly doubt that the brain creates the mind. Just look at any brain scan showing different areas of the brain lighting up when thought occurs.

I reply that radio tubes light up when music is played. That doesn’t mean that radios compose the music. This meets with a shrug. So
I press the point. I say that the brain can’t possibly create the mind because brain cells don’t think. People think. There’s a big difference. My opponent looks put out. It’s ridiculous to state that brain cells don’t think. That’s all they do, if you are talking about the cerebral cortex, or higher brain.

Really? I point out that the brain is fueled almost entirely by glucose, or blood sugar. The chemical makeup of blood sugar isn’t very different from sucrose, the sugar we spoon into our coffee. Is he saying that a sugar cube can think? This doesn’t even get a reply. Signs of sputtering are beginning to show.

If the sugar in my coffee can’t think, I say, then show me where in the chain of chemical events inside the body did glucose start to think. In fact, where in the vast scheme of cosmology, going back 13.7 billion years, did the step occur that created consciousness out of totally unconscious ingredients? A challenge like that usually brings the sputtering to a full boil. But materialism can’t abandon its “must.” Falling back on the demand that mind must come from matter, science tends to kick the can down the road. All the mysteries that cannot be answered today will surely be answered sometime in the future.

If that turns out to be my opponent’s final position, I say, “In the meantime, you believe in pure animism.” Animism is a quality of so-called primitive religions that attributes spirit to trees, totems, and ancestral shrines. If science is attributing mind to sugar molecules, isn’t that the same thing?

Before Einstein there were explorers of consciousness who made earthshaking discoveries; they were Einsteins in the inner universe. One of their most fundamental discoveries is stated by Lord Krishna in the Gita when he declares, “I am the field and the knower of the field.” There’s a double meaning here. God is addressing a great warrior on the field of battle, which has a literal meaning. But he also means the field of life and, beyond that, the field of divine existence. In a few words, Krishna points to who we really are: multidimensional creatures, spanning the physical, mental, and spiritual fields.
Even simpler are two words from the Vedas, “
Aham Brahmasmi
” (“I am the universe”).

To get to that point, to be able to look at yourself as a multidimensional creature, you must creep out of drowsiness. Drowsiness is a comforting state, and we can’t be naïve. Many people don’t want to wake up; others will vituperatively defend the reality they espouse. But the dream comes with built-in defects that cannot be ignored. I’ve already touched upon two—war and the aging process—but the greatest defect is subtle. We don’t really know who we are. Human beings are engaged in forgetting their true nature as privileged children of the universe.

People tell me that the age of the guru is past. The new age demands that each person become their own guru. I’d be happy if that happened, but how? Someone in India posed the same question a hundred years ago. His name was Aurobindo Ghose, and he probably lived the most exciting spiritual life of anyone in history. Aurobindo grew up at the height of empire, and he was sent in the 1880s to get a proper English education. But faced with prejudice at Cambridge despite his brilliance, Aurobindo returned home. He became a fighter for Indian independence, and when the British jailed him once and threatened to do it again, he fled to the French-controlled state of Pondicherry. He renounced politics for spirituality, which he pursued as Sri Aurobindo, one of the most widely known gurus in the first half of the twentieth century.

An extraordinary idea was seeded in Aurobindo’s mind. Human beings, he declared, were not a final product. They were in transition, moving toward the goal of God-consciousness. He was zealous to bring his extraordinary idea to the world. Everyone must be told that, like a gentle rain, higher consciousness is descending on the world. Its influence will change humanity forever.

This story comes to mind because I look at myself and wonder: For all my sense of being a separate person running after his own dreams, perhaps I am merely being raised by the same wave of consciousness that Aurobindo spotted. I’m a cork on the ocean who thinks he’s a
yacht. It would come as a relief, actually, to know that I am not a final product, that this jerry-rigged construction I call a self is transitional. There’s something tragic about finding a dried-up cocoon that has fallen to the ground, knowing that a butterfly will never emerge from it. Every butterfly automatically gets a second birth when it breaks free of the larval stage and spreads its wings in the sun. Human beings must choose. As long as you have a personal stake in the world, you can’t have a second birth in spirit. You will be too busy dealing with the aftermath of your first birth.