How To Know God Part 16

But it would be a mistake to think that the soul and the person are the same. My grandfather was an old man with thinning hair, p.r.o.ne to enthusiasm and fierce in his love for us. I have powerful memories of him, yet all his qualities and all my memories have nothing to do with his soul. Those qualities died with him; his soul did not. So the soul is like a carrier of the essence, but what is that essence like? If I can't experience my soul as an emotion, if everything I know about myself since birth is separate from my soul, it must not be a material thing.

In other words, the soul begins at the quantum level, which makes sense since the quantum level is also our doorway to G.o.d. To go through this door isn't something we choose; partic.i.p.ation is mandatory. In India the soul has two parts. One is called Jiva, which corresponds to the individual soul making its long journey through many lifetimes until it reaches full realization of G.o.d. When a child is taught that being good means your soul will go to heaven, it is Jiva that we are talking about.

Jiva is involved in action. It is affected by our good and bad acts; it rules our conscience, and all the seeds of karma are planted inside it.

The kind of person you turn out to be is rooted in Jiva, and the kind of life you make for yourself will change Jiva day by day.

The second half of the soul, called Atman, does not accompany us on any journey. It is pure spirit, made of the same essence as G.o.d. Atman cannot change in any way. It never reaches G.o.d because it never left in the first place. No matter how good or bad your life, your Atman remains constant; in fact, the worst criminal and the holiest saint have the same quality of soul when it is this aspect that is in question. There is no good approximation for Atman in the West, and many people might wonder why the soul has to be divided in this way.

The answer lies at the virtual level, for we have seen that all the familiar qualities of life, such as time, s.p.a.ce, energy, and matter, gradually fade into a shadowy existence until they disappear. But this disappearance leaves something intact-spirit itself. Jiva lives at the quantum level, Atman at the virtual. So the faintest, subtlest trace of "me" that can be detected at the quantum level is Jiva, and once it disappears, pure spirit remains-that is Atman. The distinction between them is absolutely necessary, for otherwise the path back to G.o.d would break down.

You need Jiva to remember who you are personally. You need Atman to remember yourself as pure spirit.

You need Jiva to have a reason to act, think, wish, and dream. You need Atman for the peace beyond all action.

You need Jiva to journey through time and s.p.a.ce. You need Atman to live in the timeless.

You need Jiva to preserve personality and ident.i.ty. You need Atman to become universal, beyond ident.i.ty.

As you can see, even though they are melded together as "soul," these two aspects are exact opposites in many ways. Such is the paradox of the soul that it manages to accommodate itself to our world of time, thought, and action while dwelling eternally in the spiritual world. The soul must be half-human, half-divine in order to give us a way to retain our ident.i.ty during all the prayer, meditation, seeking, and other spiritual work that is involved in finding G.o.d, and yet the soul must have a divine aspect that embodies the goal of all seeking.

On the material level I am not aware of my Atman. I walk and talk and think without any consciousness that my source lies much deeper. But at the soul level I am totally aware of who I am. The soul level is a very strange place, because it gives rise to all activity without being active itself. Think about that carefully. As I travel around from here to there, my soul doesn't move, because at the quantum level the field just ripples and vibrates-it doesn't change location from A to B. I am born, grow old, and die-these events have tremendous significance for my body and mind.

Yet at the quantum level nothing is born, grows old, or dies. There is no such thing as an old photon. We can get some clues to this riddle from a common device, a television set. When you see a TV character walking from left to right on the screen, your brain registers a false impression.

Nothing on that screen, not a single electron, has actually moved from left to right. With a magnifying gla.s.s you would see that the only activity taking place is the flickering of phosphors on the surface of the cathode-ray tube. If phosphor A is to the left of phosphor B, its flicker can be timed so that just as it goes off, phosphor B lights up. This trick makes it look as if something has moved from left to right, just as twinkling Christmas lights seem to circle around the tree.

Now let's apply the same trick to ourselves. When I get out of my chair and walk across the room, my body seems to be moving, but in fact nothing of the sort is happening at the quantum level. Instead, a series of virtual particles is flickering in and out to create the illusion of motion. This is such an important point that I want to give several more examples. Go to the beach where ocean waves are cras.h.i.+ng on the sh.o.r.e. If you wade out and put a cork on the water, your senses tell you that it will be carried along by the waves-but it isn't. The cork stays in place, bobbing up and down as the waves pa.s.s along. The water is also just moving up and down. It is the same water that hits the sh.o.r.e, not new water carried from miles away. The wave motion takes place only at the energy level, creating the illusion that the water is getting nearer to the sh.o.r.e. Now the examples get more mysterious: When two magnets are drawn to each other, what pulls them together is the magnetic field. But the field itself doesn't move. All over the world compa.s.s needles are wiggling, but the earth's magnetic poles aren't. How does a nonmoving field make a needle or two heavy pieces of iron move? Again it is an illusion-at the quantum level, virtual photons, acting as carriers of the magnetic force, flicker in and out, and because they do this in sequence, the appearance of motion is created.

Let's a.s.sume that we can accept the fact that you and I are not moving, either. To a quantum physicist, our bodies are just objects, like any other. A ball thrown across the room isn't moving, only winking in and out of existence at an incredibly fast speed at different locations, and we are no different. But here the mystery deepens. When the ball disappears for a nanosecond, only to reappear just the tiniest bit to the left or right, why didn't it disintegrate? After all, it was completely absent for a while, and there is no reason why its old shape and size and color shouldn't simply dissolve. Quantum physics can even calculate the odds that it won't reappear, that instead of a ball flying across the room, a bowl of pink Jell-O will suddenly appear. What keeps things together?

If we go back to the television, the answer is obvious. The characters walking across the screen are just phantoms, but they are organized phantoms. Their image is fixed on film or videotape, their motions are planned and worked out. In other words, there is intelligence behind the illusion. This presiding intelligence keeps the random flickers of photons from being truly random; it creates forms from formless electrical charges. For it turns out that not just the motion of a TV image is illusion, so is its color and shape. So is its voice, if the character happens to speak. No matter what quality you look for, it can be broken down to pulses of energy, and these pulsations have meaning only because a hidden director has created it.

This is essentially the argument for the soul. It holds reality together; it is my offscreen director, my presiding intelligence. I can think, talk, work, love, and dream, all because of the soul, yet the soul doesn't do any of these things. It is me, yet I would never recognize it if we came face-to-face. Everything that makes the difference between life and death must cross into this world via the soul. Today I sat down to see if I could list all the invisible events happening at the soul level, and the results inspire a deep awe at the "soul work" (which the medieval church called psychomachia) going on with every breath: Infinity is becoming finite.

The unmoving is starting to move.

The universe is shrinking to a location inside you.

Eternity is taking on the appearance of time.

Uncertainty is becoming certain.

The undefined is becoming definite.

That which has no cause is starting the chain of cause and effect.

Transcendence is coming down to earth.

The divine is taking on a body.

Randomness is turning into patterns.

The immortal is pretending to be born.

Reality is putting on the mask of illusion.

You share this soul work with G.o.d. He can be defined in infinite ways, but one version of G.o.d is that he is a process. The process involves bringing life into being. Science has its story about how life originated two billion years ago from a soup of organic chemicals. This soup, probably contained in the earth's ancient oceans, was struck by lightning and began to boil into primitive self-reproducing nucleic acids, from which the long chain of evolution proceeded. But from the spiritual viewpoint, life is being created all the time through the kind of soul work just listed.

There is more to life than raw creation. The soul, as every religious tradition has insisted, exists to bring an end to suffering. The same cannot be said about any other aspect of ourselves. The mind, ego, and emotions cause as much pain as pleasure; they can throw us into turmoil and confusion despite all our efforts to reach clarity and peace. The soul has been a.s.signed the unique function of working only for what is most evolutionary in each person's life. It couldn't accomplish this end by turning the infinite into the finite, the timeless into time, and so forth-these processes have no human value until we add another ingredient, the dispelling of suffering.

Someone who is attuned to the soul begins to perceive that a subtle guidance is at work. The soul is silent; therefore it cannot compete with the contentious voices heard in the mind. You can spend years overshadowed by anger, fear, greed, ambition, and all the other distractions of inner life, but none of that activity touches Atman. The soul has its own project in mind. The Vedas describe this project in terms of the five kleshas, or causes of human suffering. They are: 1. Ignorance about the nature of reality 2. Identification with the ego 3. Attraction toward objects of desire 4. Repulsion from objects of desire 5. Fear of death The great sages and seers who laid out this scheme of suffering all emphasize that all five causes boil down to one-the very first. When a person forgets that he has a soul, that his source is rooted in eternal Being, separation results, and from separation all other pain and suffering follows.

But for these ancient formulations to have any usefulness today, we have to update them. I think a modern restatement would go something like this: 1. A person thinks that only material existence is real and thus becomes totally ignorant of the source, which is quantum and virtual. He accepts the illusion of time and s.p.a.ce. When this happens, contact with the source is lost. The voice of the soul begins to grow fainter and fainter.

2. Drifting in separation, the person seeks desperately for something to cling to. Life cannot abide Being without a foundation; therefore the mind creates an ent.i.ty known as the ego. This "I" is the same as the personality. It is constructed from all kinds of experiences, and as these become all-important, the "I" and its needs have to be defended at all costs.

3. The ego has many needs, and so it begins to value the fulfillment of those needs. The whole world becomes a means to make the ego stronger, more important, and more secure. To that end, it pulls all kinds of objects toward itself: food, shelter, clothing, money, etc.

4. For a time this strategy seems to work. Although it never becomes truly secure, the ego finds that life can be filled up by acquiring more and more. No one can gain complete control over the environment, however; therefore the ego has to spend a great deal of time avoiding pain and danger. As attractive as certain things are, others are equally repulsive.

5. Caught in a whirlwind of seeking pleasure and avoiding pain, the person achieves many goals. The years pa.s.s, and separation does not even seem to be a problem anymore. However, there is an end to all this acquiring, all this experience for the sake of experience. Over it all looms the certainty that life will end. Fear of death becomes a source of suffering because death is the undeniable reminder that the ego's strategy for survival never solved the original problem-ignorance about how things really work.

If it is true that the five kleshas are still at work-and who could deny that they are?-then the influence of the soul is crucial.

Each klesha has its own momentum. We all know the powerful addiction of money, power, career, and ego needs of every type. This momentum has kept suffering alive despite the enormous changes in human existence from age to age. Against this momentum the soul provides a means of solving every cause of pain: 1. Ignorance of reality is solved by delving deeper into the mind. Awareness dives deeper than the material level to find its roots.

2. Identification with ego is solved by learning to identify with these deeper levels.

3. and 4. Attraction to outside objects-and repulsion from them-is solved by valuing the inner life above all.

5. Fear of death is solved when the soul is experienced directly, since the soul is never born and never dies.

As with the five causes of suffering, the five solutions all grow from the first one. If you explore the true nature of reality, all pain will eventually come to an end. In some form or other, religious teachings state this truth over and over. There is no way around the fact that it sounds abstract, yet this is the reality of how the soul operates. Your soul deals in abstractions like eternity and infinity so that you won't have to. It converts an inconceivable world into one that we can grasp and understand. Like a car's transmission, which takes the whirling motion of the engine and transforms it into the forward velocity that gets you where you want to go, the soul makes it possible for your life to move forward.

Eternity doesn't need to breathe; infinity doesn't need to find a job. But you need those things and more-you need to eat, work, love, and raise children-and these are made possible through the soul. Without it, there would only be quantum soup, a formless swirl of energy and particles.

Now let's see if we can test this new conception of the soul against tradition. Even though we are accustomed to using religious language about the soul, its duties are useful, not poetic. This fact has been hard to realize because the word soul has been used loosely to mean a person's deepest emotions, his heart, his highest aspirations, as well as more arcane things like the Holy Ghost. In the Bible, where the word soul is used hundreds of times, we find that it goes through every struggle of life. In the Old Testament we hear a lot about the peril of the soul.

Satan wants to grab it, the enemies of Israel want to destroy it, famine and illness make the soul heavy, and always there is the plea-this is heard over and over in the Psalms-for G.o.d to give balm and solace to the soul. Jehovah is fickle, however, and he can seem to betray even those souls offered up to him: the Book of Job begins with G.o.d and the devil gambling with the soul of a righteous man "who feared G.o.d and set his face against wrongdoing." For no other reason than to test him, G.o.d allows Satan to inflict any harm he wishes against Job except to "touch his person." Job's travails with sickness, poverty, family misfortune, and social rejection describe a condition of suffering that was familiar to the Hebrews and later to the Christians; the fact that G.o.d never again speaks in the Bible is an ominous after-note: the soul has been left to survive its tests alone.

The New Testament continues the same drama but more in terms of salvation and redemption. Since Jesus offers an explicit promise of an afterlife, going to heaven is the goal of the soul, and escaping d.a.m.nation is its greatest challenge. In all this turmoil, one senses that the soul travels through life undergoing every anxiety felt by the person. It isn't aloof or apart but very much down here in the mud of battle. The paradox is that throughout this highly emotional involvement, no biblical writer ever defines what the soul is. As a result, the word remains as diffuse in the end as it was at the outset. If I say to you, "My soul was touched" or "I mean this from the bottom of my soul" or "That person has a lot of soul,"

nothing specific is being conveyed.

I would venture that the sacred masters, whatever religion they are a.s.sociated with, were trying to be quite specific. In their awareness the soul meant something much like what we have been describing-a connection between the world of the five senses and a world of inconceivable things like eternity, infinity, omniscience, grace, and every other quality of the unmanifest.

Parables are basically coded stories about the soul and its function. In other words, they take an abstraction like "the unmoving starts to move"

or "the immortal pretends to be born" and expresses it in language that is more understandable. Some parables are so simple that we hardly realize their spiritual meaning-every child has heard about the six blind men and the elephant. Each blind man grabs a different part of the beast. The blind man who grabs the leg says, "An elephant is very like a tree." The one who grabs the trunk says, "An elephant is very like a snake." The one who grabs the tail says, "An elephant is very like a rope," and so forth.

Originally the story had to do with the five senses and the mind being unable to grasp the nature of G.o.d, the moral being that divine reality was too vast to be understood by thought, sight, sound, touch, or taste. Other interpretations hold that the blind men are the branches of Vedic philosophy, which in all their specialized learning cannot grasp the wholeness of Brahman, the One and All.

Jesus told thirty-nine parables, and these are easier to connect with the soul, largely because he delivered the morals himself. The first one is in the fifth book of Matthew: You are light for all the world. A town that stands on a hill cannot be hidden. When a lamp is lit, it isn't put under a bushel basket but on the stand, where it gives light to everyone in the house. And you, like the lamp, must shed light among all men, so that when they see the good you do, they may give praise to your Father in heaven.

On the surface this parable is so simple that it hardly needs to be interpreted. The phrase "don't hide your light under a bushel basket"

means that virtue should be seen so it can have a good effect. But the word light has a deeper meaning spiritually, in the sense of awakened awareness, and therefore this is also a parable about the soul. Jesus is saying that like a lamp hidden under a basket, the body hides the soul. He tells the disciples not to let this happen but to allow the soul's awareness to manifest itself. In other words, live from the soul level if you expect other people to believe that you are connected to G.o.d, for when they see that you are, they will believe it of themselves as well.

Any of the other famous parables, whether about the mustard seed or the prodigal son or the servant who buries his talents, are equally multidimensional. The actors in them can be seen as aspects of the soul.

In fact, these vignettes are so effective and colorful that the soul gets overlooked. The same happens in real life. It is very hard to realize that our origin, our source, is not of this world. Here I am with all my qualities. People see me and hear me; they believe in my existence. Yet my reality is paper-thin at the quantum level, where there is no sound, sight, texture, color, or anything else recognizable. The soul is the junction point between my virtual self and my physical self. It is the organizing intelligence that keeps me intact. This is an exceptional feat, given that every atom of my body is pure empty s.p.a.ce with flashes of energy pa.s.sing through it for no more than a few millionths of a second.

Reality is truly sneaking up on us from nowhere and catching us off guard at every second. (In a beautiful aphorism the great Bengali poet Tagore says, "Life is only the perpetual surprise that I exist.") It is unsettling to confront the fact that none of my cherished qualities are real, yet it is a fact. Let us say that I like the color blue, feel happy, and value my personal freedom. These are three disparate qualities about me. But when I get in my car and drive across town, does the color blue move with me? When I take a bath, does my happiness get wet? When I go to bed, does my personal freedom go to sleep?

It was just this sort of questioning that made the ancient sages realize that we must possess a soul. There is something intangible and undefined about us that yet gets born into this world as a visible, defined creation. In the Bhagavad-Gita this aspect is called the "inward dweller"

and it is said that fire cannot burn it, water cannot make it wet, wind cannot blow it away, and a sword cannot cut it in two. For all the poetry in that expression, the fact of the soul appears to be undeniable, for stripped of all religious connotations, the essence of each person cannot be reduced to matter or thoughts or any fixed quality.

If you try to do without the soul, you wind up with a handful of nothing.

To underscore this, I need to bring back the concept of the field. A magnet attracts iron because it creates a magnetic field around itself. As we saw before, the field doesn't move, yet the iron does. If you tried to locate the exact point where the unmoving field touches the moving iron, where would you be? The answer is that you would be at the point of uncertainty. A very definite object, a piece of iron, is interacting with a completely undefined thing, a field. The two get closer and closer. The iron starts out as a solid lump of matter with weight and motion. The field starts out with no solidity or motion, or any other material qualities. They approach, and of course neither one wants to give up its nature. The field wants to remain boundless, timeless, and undefined. The iron wants to remain exactly the opposite. Inevitably, they meet as strangers, barely shaking hands, suspicious of each other. This is the famous region of uncertainty defined by Heisenberg, where the defined world meets the undefined field. What can you say about it? Only that it connects two very different worlds without living in either.

At this point of uncertainty, a photon may shoot out of a star to travel across the universe, yet nothing really travels. Only a certain charge flickers into existence, pa.s.ses its energy to another charge, and disappears again. It's the same trick as the television seeming to be populated by living people. Only in this case the trick isn't just a trick. It is as real as anything gets. Or to put it another way, as unreal as anything gets. There is a Zen story about two disciples who are looking at a flag fluttering in the breeze. "See that?" one says. "No one can doubt that the flag is moving." The other disagrees, "No, it is the wind moving. The flag has no motion of its own."

They continue this debate until the master comes along, and he says, "You are both wrong. Only consciousness is moving." This is the kind of tale that often gets repeated as the answer to a Zen riddle, but which no one really understands. Now we are in a position to see the point. The flag stands for any material object that seems to move, the wind is the invisible field or force that creates that motion, but in the deeper reality, neither is moving. Only consciousness-which means intelligence-is at work, here and in all things.

It is profound to realize that my true self is not rooted in time and s.p.a.ce. Virtual reality is my source, and like a light wave my body flows out of it, but the source doesn't go anywhere. Therefore my connection to that source doesn't go anywhere, either. Thus the soul is part of me, but not any part my senses will ever detect. No religious claim is being made here; these are stubborn quantum facts. I have never left my source; it is always with me. The famous detachment of great sages comes from knowing full well that they are not confined by any fixed definition. Tagore has a beautiful way of expressing this: When I was born and saw the light I was no stranger in this world- Something inscrutable, shapeless, and without words Appeared in the form of my mother.

So when I die, the same unknown will appear again As ever known to me....

GATANJALI.

The metaphor of birth is totally appropriate, because the timeless doesn't just turn into time. Something entirely new is born. Infinity doesn't merely shrink until it becomes small and manageable-numberless dimensions give birth to just three or four. What you call your soul manages this birth, not once but thousands of times per second. I call this concept "genesis now." There can never be a single genesis, since virtual reality would just swallow everything back up again. Super-gravity, like an immense yawning black hole, has an insatiable appet.i.te. It wants to devour time and make it timeless; it wants to engulf matter and energy to return them to virtual photons.

Why isn't the whole world swallowed up? Because creation insists on happening. Life can't be stopped, even by the infinite forces arrayed against it. Genesis now is the ongoing project that is behind all your actions. Soul work never stops. Attempting to put yourself in a box, defining yourself by labels and qualities until you are a finished product once and for all, is as false as trying to put G.o.d in a box. The great spiritual traditions have been trying to tell us this with all their teachings. We otherwise would forget that the constant churning of eternity, infinity, and immortality is all that is happening.

There is nothing else. This alone makes us real.

THE STATE OF UNION.

Believe it or not, we find ourselves very close to the soul now. We have whittled away the scientific objections to G.o.d by placing him outside the reach of measurement. This means that a person's subjective experience of G.o.d can't be challenged-at the quantum level, objectivity and subjectivity merge into each other. The point of merger is the soul; therefore knowing G.o.d comes down to this: like a photon nearing a black hole, your mind hits a wall as it tries to think about the soul. The soul is comfortable with uncertainty; it accepts that you can be two places at once (time and eternity); it observes cosmic intelligence at work and is not bothered that the creative force is outside the universe. We have a simple picture of the situation, then: The mind is creeping closer and closer to the soul, which sits on the edge of G.o.d's world, at the event horizon. The gap of separation is wide when there is no perception of spirit; it grows smaller as the mind figures out what is happening. Eventually the two will get so close that mind and soul have no choice but to merge. When that happens, the resemblance to a black hole is striking. To the mind, it will be as if falling into G.o.d's world lasts forever, an eternity in bliss consciousness. From G.o.d's side, the merging takes place in a split second; indeed, if we stand completely in G.o.d's world, where time has no meaning, the whole process never even occurred. The mind was part of the soul all along, only without knowing it.

One could rightfully claim that the words of Jesus, "Ask and you will receive, knock and the door will open," are an iron law. The instant that your mind pays any attention to the soul, it is pulled toward it, with the inevitable result that all separation will close. Subjectively this journey toward the soul (a better phrase than journey of the soul) is perceived as the seven stages that we have already covered. But objectively, the process is much more like a particle of light crossing the event horizon.

The fact that our minds can register this journey is astonis.h.i.+ng, because the whole time that it is happening, ordinary thought and perception continue. Two shoppers pus.h.i.+ng grocery carts are doing the same thing in the material world, but one could be having an epiphany. The word ecstasy derives from Greek roots that mean to stand apart or outside-this is the role of second attention, to stand outside material life and witness the dawn of ecstasy. If you regard the soul as a kind of force field steadily pulling the mind toward it, every one of the seven stages can be described as the closing of separation: Stage One:I am in such separation that I sense deep fear inside.

Stage Two:I don't feel so separate; I am gaining a sense of power.

Stage Three:Something larger than me is drawing near; I feel much more peaceful.

Stage Four:I am beginning to intuit what that larger thing is-it must be G.o.d.

Stage Five:My actions and thoughts are drawing on G.o.d's force field, as if we are both involved in everything.

Stage Six:G.o.d and I are almost together now, I feel no separation; my mind is G.o.d's mind.

Stage Seven:I see no difference between myself and G.o.d.

In ancient India this closing of the gap was described as yoga or union (the same Sanskrit root gave us the verb "to yoke"). Because the Indian sages had thousands of years to a.n.a.lyze it, the entire process of joining with the soul was turned into a science. Yoga precedes Hinduism, which is a particular religion, and at its inception, the practices of Yoga were intended to be universal. The ancient sages had at their disposal the power to witness their own spiritual evolution, which boiled down to watching the mind approach the soul. What they discovered can be stated in a few cardinal points: Evolution takes place inside. It isn't a matter of pilgrimages, observances, and obeying religious rules. No codes of conduct can alter the fact that every mind is on a soul journey.

Evolution is automatic. In the larger view, the soul is always pulling at us. Its force field is inescapable.

A person is required to pay attention. Since the journey to the soul happens only in awareness, if you block out awareness you impede your progress; if you pay attention, you build up momentum.

The final goal is inevitable. No one can resist the soul forever. Saints and sinners are on the same road.

It is better to cooperate than to resist. The soul is the source of truth and love. If you try to avoid it, those things will not increase in your life. If you cooperate, your life will be organized with the help of infinite power and intelligence as it flows from G.o.d.

External action still counts. Action is a physical process linked to the mind; the two cannot be separated, so even though this is a journey of the mind, outer activity either helps or detracts.

None of these statements is startling (or particularly Indian). The fact that Yoga was later identified with extremely esoteric practices is secondary. Because it started out as a neutral way of describing the reality of spiritual awakening, Yoga is no less and no more objective than our quantum model; in both cases one is concerned with how ordinary reality alters the closer one gets to the event horizon. This might be a good place to mention, for those who do not already know, that the physical exercises gathered under the name of Hatha Yoga const.i.tute the smallest part of a huge body of understanding; they are not necessary on the spiritual journey, yet they are highly useful to those who feel attracted in that direction.

If you accept that Yoga is accurate in its description, then any aspect of life can be filtered through it. Let me take the issue of ident.i.ty and view it in terms of initial separation that gradually becomes a state of union: IDENt.i.tY.

Stage One:I am small and insignificant, stranded on the vast expanse of Nature. I hope I can survive.

Stage Two:I can do more than survive; I can compete and fulfill more of my needs.

Stage Three:I am peaceful inside. My inner world is beginning to satisfy me more than outward things.

Stage Four:I am self-sufficient. Things may not always go my way, but that doesn't shake me anymore.

Stage Five:I have discovered how to manifest my desires from within.

My inner world turned out to have power.

Stage Six:Six: I am at the center of an immense scheme of Power and intelligence that emanates from G.o.d.

Stage Seven:I am.

You can accurately graph a person's spiritual growth on this scale alone.

The ego moves from an isolated, helpless state to a realization that it might have power; then it looks for where the power comes from, at first deciding that it must be external, in the form of money and status, but in time realizing that the source of power is internal. More time pa.s.ses and the difference between inner and outer power dissolves. All of reality is perceived as having one source; in the end, you are that source. Let's try another issue, that of faith: FAITH.

Stage One:Faith is a matter of survival, If I don't pray to G.o.d, he can destroy me.

Stage Two:I'm beginning to have faith in myself. I pray to G.o.d to help me get what I want.