What Are You Hungry For? (25 page)

Power Points

•  Spiritual experiences depend on the mind-body connection. A spiritual feedback loop sends messages to the brain and every cell in the body.

•  The simplest definition of spirituality is self-awareness. Inside yourself is the peace, love, and truth that are attributes of God. When you contact this place, you meet your true self.

•  Your true self exists here and now. If you want to meet it, the only requirement is that you be present.

•  The present moment never ends, so the choices you make right now affect the rest of your life—life is an unbroken thread of “now” moments.

•  To be present, you can learn and practice certain awareness skills.

•  When your awareness is fully alive and expanded, you can have the ultimate spiritual experience: “I am the universe.” Your being merges with Being itself. Your mind touches the mind of God.

After every other hunger has been satisfied, there is still going to be a spiritual yearning that dwells inside you. It, too, can be satisfied once you know where the right nourishment can be found. The key is inspiration. When you feel inspired, you bring in spirit. When you bring in spirit, you feel inspired. This is the subtlest of feedback loops, yet it connects mind and body in the same way as other feedback loops. When your brain receives spiritual input, it sends messages to every cell in the body. These are chemical messages that decode inner peace and love into a language that can be understood by heart cells, the digestive tract, the skin, and every other organ.

It’s not correct to separate spirituality from the body. When you think about God, the soul, or spirit (however you define these terms), you are exposing trillions of cells to a hint of spiritual experience. The experience becomes deeper when thoughts turn into direct contact with the following:

The experience of feeling loved

Communion with nature

Physical sensations of lightness

Being at peace

Expansion of the heart

Feeling unbounded and limitless

A sense of unity with all things

A surge of awe and wonder

The experience of bliss

Everyone has had a glimpse of such experiences—if you recall the last time you were absorbed in the beauty of a sunset or the vastness of the ocean, you were nourishing the feedback loop of spirituality. I believe that everyone is naturally drawn to satisfy their spiritual hunger, which is why we are naturally drawn to these things.

Sometimes it takes only an accident to expose one’s inner nature. When I was a boy in India, I fell down while playing, hit my head, and passed out. When I came to, I found myself in a strange reality—the surroundings hadn’t changed, but I felt an immense expanse everywhere I looked (unwittingly, I was experiencing something that Don Juan says in one of Carlos Castaneda’s books: that for a sorcerer—one who really sees—there is infinity in every direction). The strange expansion of consciousness lasted only a moment or two, and another little boy might have forgotten it immediately. But I was deeply imprinted by it. Looking back, I realize that I had experienced awe for the first time. The rational mind is baffled by awe, and medically speaking, perhaps I was in a swoon or mildly concussed. But rational or not, awe enriches life from the inside, along with wonder, communion, love, and inspiration.

The trail of hormones and brain chemicals that we’ve been following grows faint in this area. But we know that spiritual experience isn’t invisible. There’s something real, not just a ghost in the machine. Studies of the brains of Tibetan Buddhist monks indicate that their years of meditation on the value of compassion left physical footprints; there was increased activity in the frontal lobes, where higher values like love and compassion take place. There was also a change of frequency in the region of the delta waves their brains produced; delta waves are associated with deep sleep. Meditation isn’t sleep but a state that is paradoxical, in that it combines deep rest with alertness. The chemical trail of meditation also leads to findings about lowered heart rate, decreased stress hormones, and normalized blood pressure. Brain changes include an increase in alpha waves, which are linked to creativity and “aha” moments.

These physical traces indicate that the feedback loop for spirituality is real. But footprints aren’t the same as experiencing the journey. To do that, you must transform your state of awareness. When awareness is completely alive, tuning in to the subtlest experiences
of love and joy, you have claimed the domain of spirituality. This is the most inspiring state to live in. Reality shifts in radical ways that everyday reality only hints at. A striking image from India’s Vedic tradition gives us a clue about what it means to be transformed. It’s the image of a clay jug, the kind village women carried to the well for water (and still do in rural India).

The jug’s molded sides define the space inside, which isn’t very large, and yet all around it, outside the walls, space is immense. Now shatter the jug. The walls are destroyed, but the space inside the jug remains. Only now, instead of seeming to be separate from all the space around it, there is no separation—the space inside the jug merges with infinite space. In the same way, people assume that they are enclosed in the walls of a separate body and a limited mind. But in reality, the separation is artificial. It’s literally true that infinity extends all around us even if we don’t choose to see it. Nothing divides us from this infinity. Each of us is merged into the whole, and what we prize in our lives—love, creativity, intelligence, truth—can expand without limitation. Human awareness has this capacity—so the mystic tradition in every culture asserts—and the way is always open.

All of us live inside boundaries and at the same time wish, deep down, that we didn’t have to. The greatest of mystical poets, Rumi, could see this almost a thousand years ago:

The verse is a passionate plea to the reader, asking for transformation, the kind of transformation that goes from a life of low expectations
to one of unbounded life and freedom. Reading Rumi, one feels a tingling sensation that is a hint of how much you and I want to be as free as he is, as passionate and joyous. At the same time, Rumi knows that the voice that calls to us is faint and fragile:

What he is talking about is our link to the source of mind and body. At the deepest level is a state of pure existence—or being—that is the goal of the spiritual journey. When you are connected to your own being, life itself is fulfilling, and inspiration can be found in every moment. Let me explain this a little more.

Spirituality is about reconnecting with who you really are. At the source, each of us experiences pure being. It’s pure because there isn’t any content. Being just is. Yet you won’t experience this as an empty state like the cold void of outer space. Instead, you find that being is very full. It has infinite possibilities. At this moment you aren’t speaking, but if you decide to, there is no limit to the number of sentences you could speak. These sentences aren’t programmed into you. They exist as possibilities, and whether you decide to say “To be or not to be, that is the question” or “Let’s watch the Nature Channel,” you are drawing on the reservoir of infinite potential that exists in your awareness. From that same reservoir you can tap into more than words. There are infinite discoveries to be made, infinite applications of creativity and intelligence.

Once you discover that you are a spiritual being, you will never see yourself any other way. A new self begins to be revealed. It is perfect,
lacking nothing in love, beauty, and wisdom. Such a self may seem incredible from where you stand now—skepticism is only natural before the spiritual journey becomes an important part of your life. On the spiritual journey you discover truths hidden from you in everyday life. To use your awareness for anything less is to fall short of your true self.

Up to now, I’ve focused on how you can use awareness to improve your life. But awareness isn’t simply a tool—it’s your essence. Human beings aren’t machines that learned to think. We are thoughts that learned to make a machine. In other words, the brain serves the mind, and in a natural (but still wondrous) way, you can create a spiritual brain. Exalted as it sounds to have an epiphany, the same brain that learns a foreign language is needed to unfold subtler levels of reality. These levels aren’t unknown lands; they exist here and now, only our brains aren’t attuned to perceive them. Your life is only as full as your awareness. When you turn your attention to spirituality, you begin to glimpse the unseen—it’s not a miracle, just an extension of looking inside yourself.

One obstacle to going beyond limitations is the word God. More people today describe themselves as spiritual but not religious. They have walked away from organized religion for one reason or another. An irritated interviewer once challenged me by arguing that “spiritual but not religious” made no sense.

“It does make sense,” I countered, “if you define spirituality without arguing over God, as all religions do.”

“So what’s your definition of spirituality?” he asked.

“It’s simple,” I said. “Self-awareness. All the promises of religion come true inside us. Spiritual experiences existed long before anyone organized a religion around them. Inside yourself is still the place you have to go.” He had no retort.

In the world’s wisdom traditions, spirit is located at a subtle level of awareness. The grosser levels of awareness are devoted to objects
and events “out there.” You use your five senses to navigate the physical world. But there is a finer kind of awareness that navigates the world “in here.” You turned to self-awareness at the beginning of this book when you started asking, “What am I hungry for?” Any time you ask yourself about what’s going on “in here,” you are using self-awareness. Whatever answer comes back, that’s who you are at that moment. The inner world exists to provide answers that can’t be gotten “out there.” The ultimate questions, such as “Who am I?,” “Why am I here?,” and “What is the meaning of life?,” go to the deepest level. The questions are about your true self, which means that you are exercising self-awareness.

We tend to assume that spirituality belongs to saints and devotees of religion—people who surrender their whole being to God. But self-awareness is universal. A spiritual experience happens whenever you are aware of your true self, which is loving and compassionate. Your true self feels safe in the world. In all directions it sees only peace. The constant experience of the true self is bliss, so whenever you feel a surge of joy, that’s your true self—for as long as your joy lasts, you have made direct contact. As we all know, joy fades. This isn’t a permanent loss, however. You have become detached from your true self, and making contact again is always possible. Every experience of love, bliss, a sense of belonging, inspiration, intuition, insight, and freedom provides a stepping-stone back to your true self.

To guide you back to your true self, I’m not asking that you undertake a long journey to an unknown destination. The place you want to reach is as close as the present moment. If your true self doesn’t exist here and now, it will never be reachable. All choices occur in the present moment, which means that what you are doing right now is
the most important action you can take, not the actions you hope or wish to take, or fear or regret taking. The rest of your life is a journey of nothing but present moments.

The present moment is more mysterious than people realize. First of all, you can’t pin it down. To illustrate, there is no doubt that you are going to have a new thought in the next few seconds (it’s estimated that our minds have a “moment” of thought or feeling every three seconds). When your next thought comes, it will fill the present moment. You’ll think a casual thought like “I’m hungry” or a serious thought like “I’m not in the job I really want.”