Deepak Chopra - The Essential How to Know God: The Essence of the Souls Journey Into the Mystery of Mysteries

CONTENTS

For Herms Romijn

In what concerns divine things, belief is not appropriate.

Only certainty will do.

Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God.

SIMONE WEIL

AUTHORS NOTE

THERE ARE FEW THINGS IN LIFE THAT I FIND more gratifying than learning and teaching. We are all born with an insatiable curiosity about the world around us, and I was fortunate to grow up in a home that encouraged that appetite. Now, as an adult, I enjoy the best of both worlds: I can explore science, ancient wisdom, health, and spirit on the one hand, and on the other I can share what Ive learnedhelping others to satisfy their own curiositiesthrough my books and lectures.

When I speak to audiences, I find myself presenting my ideas in a manner that is concise or expansive depending on the length of time I have at my disposal. A five-minute segment on a morning television show requires a very different presentation from an hour on my weekly Sirius radio program, which in turn is very brief compared to one of the week-long courses I teach around the globe. It occurs to me that the same holds true for what we read. After all, we dont always have the luxury of taking the time to explore the book-long articulation of a new idea, but we might have the time, say, to take in the essence of that idea.

It was from this thought that the Essential series was born. This series begins with three books that have attracted substantial followings in their expanded versions: Ageless Body, Timeless Mind: The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old; How to Know God: The Souls Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries; The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence. In these new essential volumes, I have distilled the most important elements from the full-length originals. It is my hope that this series will be of value to first-time readers of my work, as well as to those who may have already read these books, but wish to be inspired by these ideas all over again.

The Essential How to Know God: The Essence of the Souls Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries explores the idea that God consciousness unfolds in seven stages. Each of these has value of its own, and each one bring us a step closer to full contact to the ultimate mystery, the mind of God. If God is a mirror in which we reveal ourselves to ourselves, which is my basic premise in these pages, then we see God as angry and judging when we ourselves are ruled by fear. In this same mirror we see God as endlessly loving when we arrive at an inspiring sense of our own limitless potential. In these pages I attempt to provide you, the reader, with a sense of this spiritual landscape, and ways to navigate it so you may experience your highest self. For this is the way to grant your self access to the ultimate reality, the state of infinite self-awareness where we come face to face with the Divine.

A REAL AND USEFUL GOD

GOD HAS MANAGED THE AMAZING FEAT OF being worshiped and invisible at the same time. Although it doesnt seem possible to offer a single fact about the Almighty that would hold up in a court of law, somehow the vast majority of people believe in Godas many as 96 percent, according to some polls. This reveals a huge gap between belief and what we call everyday reality. We need to heal this gap.

What would the facts be like if we had them? They would be as follows. Everything that we experience as material reality is born in an invisible realm beyond space and time, a realm revealed by science to consist of energy and information. Something turns the chaos of quantum soup into stars, galaxies, rain forests, human beings, and our own thoughts. We will see that it is not only possible to know this source of existence but to become intimate and at one with it. When this happens, we will have the experience of God.

After centuries of knowing God through faith, we are now ready to understand divine intelligence directly. In many ways this new knowledge reinforces what spiritual traditions have already promised. God is invisible and yet performs all miracles. He is the source of every impulse of love. Beauty and truth are both children of this God. In the absence of knowing the infinite source of energy and creativity, lifes miseries come into being. Getting close to God through a true knowing heals the fear of death, confirms the existence of the soul, and gives ultimate meaning to life.

Our whole notion of reality has actually been topsy-turvy. Instead of God being a vast, imaginary projection, he turns out to be the only thing that is real, and the whole universe, despite its immensity and solidity, is a projection of Gods nature.

From the very beginning of religion in the West, it was obvious that God had some kind of presence, known in Hebrew as Shekhinah. Shekhinah formed the halos around angels and the luminous joy in the face of a saint. If God has a presence, that means he can be experienced. This is a huge point, because in every other way God is invisible and untouchable.

We personify God as a convenient way of making him more like ourselves. However, what could possibly give us confidence in any kind of benevolent spiritual Being when thousands of years of religion have been so stained by bloodshed?

We need a model that is both part of religion yet not bounded by it. Shaped like a reality sandwich, the following three-part scheme fits our commonsense view of God.

God

TRANSITION ZONE

Material world

Only the middle element of our scheme, called the transition zone, is new or unusual. A transition zone implies that God and humans meet on common ground. Somewhere miracles take place, along with holy visions, angels, enlightenment, and hearing the voice of God.

Materialist arguments against God remain powerful because they are based on facts, but they fall apart once you dive deeper than the material world. Dame Julian of Norwich lived in England in the fourteenth century. Dame Julian asked God directly why he had created the world. The answer came back to her in ecstatic whispers:

You want to know your lords meaning in what I have done? Know it well, love was his meaning. Who reveals it to you? Love. What did he reveal to you? Love. Why does he reveal it to you? For love.

For Dame Julian, God was something to eat, drink, breathe, and see everywhere, as though she were an infatuated lover. Yet since the divine was her lover, she was elevated to cosmic heights, where the whole universe was a little thing, the size of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand.

When saints go almost mad with rapture, we find their expressions both baffling and yet very understandable. Although we have all gotten used to the absence of the sacred, we appreciate that journeys into the transition zone, the layer closer to God, continue to happen.

I dont believe saints and mystics are really so different from other human beings. If we look at our reality sandwich, the transition zone turns out to be subjective: This is where Gods presence is felt or seen. Anything subjective must involve the brain, since it takes millions of neurons firing together before you can have any experience.