How To Know God Part 9

Grace.

In stage six it is no longer necessary to seek G.o.d, just as we do not have to seek gravity. G.o.d is inescapable and constant. Sometimes he is felt with ecstasy, but just as often there can be pain, anguish, and confusion.

This mixture of feelings reminds us that two ent.i.ties are coming into conjunction. One is spirit, the other is body. The body can perceive spirit only through the nervous system. As the intensity of G.o.d increases, the nervous system is overwhelmed by it. There is no choice but to adapt, yet adaptation can cause sensations of intense burning, tremors, blackouts, and fainting, along with fear and semipsychotic states. It is still quite common to come across medical "explanations" of saintly visions as epileptic seizures, for example, and the blinding light of holy visions as a by-product of severe migraines. How do we know that this isn't true?

One obvious reb.u.t.tal is that migraines and epilepsy aren't inspiring. They do not bring wisdom and insight, whereas saints appear to be pure examples of grace at work. One thinks of the Polish mystic, Father Maximilian Kolbe, a saintly figure who died under the n.a.z.is at Auschwitz. (3) Although emaciated and a longtime sufferer from tuberculosis, Kolbe gave away most of his meager rations to other prisoners. When utterly parched with thirst, he was offered a contraband cup of tea by a doctor also imprisoned in the camp, but refused to take it because the other inmates had nothing to drink. Without complaint, Father Maximilian endured incessant beatings and torture. In the end, he was present when another prisoner was condemned to die of starvation in an underground vault. Kolbe volunteered to take the man's place. When the crypt was opened some days later, everyone had perished but he, and he was killed with a lethal injection.

In his own eyes Kolbe was not a martyr. A few fellow prisoners, and even some n.a.z.is, gave firsthand accounts of the state of grace he occupied. A Jewish survivor testified under oath that Father Maximilian emanated light when he prayed at night. (This account is seconded by several others in the years before the priest was arrested.) In demeanor he was simple and humble. When asked how he could endure with such gentleness the treatment he was receiving at the hands of the n.a.z.is, he said only that evil must be met with love.

Few saint stories are more moving than this one, which leaves us feeling that grace might be superhuman. In one sense it is, in that G.o.d's presence overcomes the most intense conditions of pain and suffering. In another sense, though, grace offers constant support in everyday life. There is no way to tell, as we work through each stage of inner growth, whether we are actually doing anything through our own will. An Indian master was once asked, "When we strive to reach higher states of consciousness, are we really doing anything or is it just happening to us?"

"It could be seen either way," he replied. "You are doing your part, but the real motivation comes from outside you. If you wanted to be strictly accurate, it is all happening to you."

If G.o.d is like a force field in stage six, grace is his magnetic pull.

Grace adapts itself to each person. We make our choices, some of which are good for us, some bad, and then grace shapes the results. To express this another way, each of us does things that have unexpected consequences. Our foresight is limited; therefore our actions are always subject to blindness about what will happen next.

The word karma includes both the action and the unpredictable results.

Five people can make a fortune, yet for each one the money creates different consequences, which can range from misery to contentment. The same holds true for any action. Why isn't karma mechanical? Why doesn't action A always lead to result B? The law of karma is often compared to simple cause and effect, using the a.n.a.logy of billiard b.a.l.l.s being hit with a cue stick. The angles and bounces in a billiard game are very complex, but a skilled player can compute his shot in advance with extreme accuracy, thereby predicting the path of a ball even after it has left his control.

If karma were mechanical, the same would hold for our actions. We would plan them out, let them go, and be sure of a certain result. Theoretically nothing prevents this. In actuality we are stymied by the sheer complexity of what needs to be calculated. Everyone performs millions of actions every day-strictly speaking, every thought is a karma, along with every breath, every bite of food, etc.-so the billiard game in this case has a nearly infinite number of b.a.l.l.s. But something unfathomable is at work here: grace.

With his supreme intelligence, G.o.d has no trouble calculating an infinite number of billiard b.a.l.l.s or an infinite number of karmas. This mechanical operation could be as easily performed by a supercomputer. Yet G.o.d also loves his creation and wants to be joined with it as intimately as possible, so he throws into his calculation the following special instruction: Let all of a person's actions bounce and collide any way they have to, but leave a clue that spirit is watching.

When you feel you have been touched by grace, that is your clue that G.o.d exists and cares about what happens to you. I know a middle-aged man, now the owner of his own computer firm, whose entrepreneurial streak first surfaced when he was twenty. Unfortunately, at that time it took the form of smuggling drugs across the Caribbean in a light plane.

"I only made one trip before I was detained by the customs officials and almost arrested. As it happens, I didn't have any cargo left on board. But they never found out why, and that is an amazing story," he says. "I was flying out of the Bahamas when we encountered dense cloud cover. I dipped down to escape it, but the fog went down to ground level. Somehow in all this maneuvering, my partner and I lost our bearings. We wasted time trying to get back on course, growing more and more worried. The Caribbean is a great deal of ocean and only a few small places to land.

"We began to run out of fuel and panic set in. My partner started shouting, and we jettisoned all our extra gas cans, then the cargo, and finally our luggage in an attempt to get lighter. The fog didn't lift, and I could tell that my co-pilot was frozen with fear. He was sure that we were going to die. At that moment, I had the unearthly certainty that we weren't.

"I looked to my left, and a hole opened in the fog. I could see a tiny island beneath my wing tip, and on it a short dirt landing strip. I dove the plane through as the clouds closed up again, and we landed, only to have five customs officials converge on us half an hour later. But the whole time of our interrogation, I heard an inner voice that told me my life had been saved for a reason. I didn't become religious in any conventional sense, but this was something I never doubted again."

Whether operating on the level of a saint or a criminal, grace is the ingredient that saves karma from being heartlessly mechanical. Grace is thus linked to free will. A billiard ball must follow its a.s.signed trajectory, and a thief who commits robbery a hundred times would seem to be just as set on his course. But even though his karma is set, at any given moment he has the opportunity to stop and mend his ways. Grace can take the form of a simple thought, "Maybe I should quit," or it can be an overwhelming transformation like the one endured by Saint Paul on the road to Damascus when the divine light blinded him and struck him from his horse. In either case, the impulse to move toward spirit is the result of grace.

What is the nature of good and evil? ...

Good is a cosmic force.

Evil is another aspect of the same force.

It is so difficult to be good that eventually a person must give up. This is a realization that arrives in stage six. Being good seems easy at first, when it is a simple matter of obeying the rules and staying out of trouble. It becomes harder after conscience enters in, because our conscience is often at odds with desire. This is the phase, familiar to every three-year-old, when one voice inside whispers "Do it!" while another says, "Better not." In Christianity this struggle is predestined to end with the victory of good, since G.o.d is more powerful than Satan, but in Hinduism the forces of light and darkness will battle eternally, the balance of power s.h.i.+fting in cycles that last thousands of years.

If Hinduism is right, then trying to resist evil is ultimately pointless.

The demons (called asuras in Sanskrit) never give up. They can't, in fact, since they are built into the structure of nature, where death and decay are inevitable. As the Indian sages see it, the universe depends as much on death as it does on life. "People fear dying without thinking," one master remarked. "If you got your fantasy of living forever, you would be condemning yourself to eternal senility." Because the body breaks down over time, and even the galaxies are heading toward "heat death" when the stars burn out their supply of energy, the universe must contain a mechanism for renewal. Death is the escape route it has devised.

In stage six a person is visionary enough to see this. He still retains a conception of good. It is the force of evolution that lies behind birth, growth, love, truth, and beauty. He also retains a conception of evil. It is the force that opposes evolution-we would call it entropy-leading to decomposition, dissolution, inertia, and "sin" (in the special sense of any action that doesn't help a person's evolution). However, to the visionary these are two sides of the same force. G.o.d created both because both are needed; G.o.d is in the evil as much as in the good.

One should emphasize that this isn't an ethical viewpoint. You can't argue against it by saying, "Look at this atrocity and that horror. Don't tell me G.o.d is there." Every stage of inner growth is an interpretation, and each interpretation is valid. If you see victims of crimes and heartrending injustice, that is real for you, but the saint, even as he brings untold compa.s.sion to such people, may not see victims at all. I am reluctant to go too deeply into this, because the grip of victimization is so powerful. To tell the abused and the abuser that they are locked in the same dance is hard to get across-ask any therapist who works with battered women.

I think there is no doubt, however, that the saint sees the sinner inside himself, just as the saint accepts evil as calmly as any other occurrence.

It is reported by eyewitnesses that when Father Maximilian was being injected with poison by the n.a.z.is, he used his last ounce of strength to bare his arm willingly to the needle. During those terrible days when he was trapped in a crypt with other prisoners, the concentration camp guards were astonished by the atmosphere of peace created around the Franciscan monk. This story does not mitigate the evil of n.a.z.ism, which has to be countered at its own level. But the working out of the soul stands apart, and at some point the dance of good and evil becomes one.

What is my life challenge? ...

To attain liberation.

When stage six dawns, the purpose of life changes. Instead of striving for goodness and virtue, the person aims to escape bondage. I don't mean escape by dying and going to heaven, although that interpretation certainly is valid for those who hold it. The real escape of stage six is karmic. Karma is infinite and ongoing. Cause and effect never ends; its entanglement is so overwhelming that you could not end even a portion of your personal karma. But G.o.d's force field, as we have been calling it, exerts an attraction to pull the soul out of the range of karma. Cause and effect will not be destroyed. The most enlightened saint still has a physical body subject to decay and death; he still eats, drinks, and sleeps. However, all of this energy gets used in a different way.

"If you spent every moment turning every thought and action to good," an Indian master told his disciples, "you would be just as far from enlightenment as someone who used every moment for evil." Surprising as this sounds, for we all equate goodness and G.o.d, the force of goodness is still karmic. Good deeds have their own rewards, just as bad deeds do.

What if you don't want any reward at all but just to be free? This is the state Buddhists call nirvana, much misunderstood when it is translated as "oblivion."

Nirvana is the release from karmic influences, the end of the dance of opposites. The visionary response enables you to see that wanting A or B is always going to lead to its opposite. If I am born wealthy, I may be delighted at first. I can fulfill any desire and follow any whim. But eventually boredom sets in; I will grow restless, and in many cases my life will be burdened by the heavy responsibility of managing my wealth.

So as I toss in bed, worried about all these irksome things, I will begin to think how nice it is to be poor. The poor have little to lose; they are free of duties on corporate boards and charities.

However long it takes, according to Buddhism, my mind will eventually desire the opposite of what I have. The karmic pendulum swings until it reaches the extreme of poverty, and then it will pull me back toward wealth again. Since only G.o.d is free from cause and effect, to want nirvana means that you want to attain G.o.d-realization. In the earlier stages of growth this ambition would be impossible, and most religions condemn it as blasphemy. Nirvana isn't moral. Good and evil don't count anymore, once they are seen as the two faces of the same duality. For the sake of keeping society together, religions hold it as a duty to respect goodness and abhor evil. Hence a paradox: the person who wants to be liberated is acting against G.o.d. Many devout Christians find themselves utterly baffled by Eastern spirituality because they cannot resolve this paradox. How can G.o.d want us to be good and yet want us to go beyond good?

The answer takes place entirely in consciousness. Saints in every culture turn out to be exemplars of goodness, s.h.i.+ning with virtue. But the Bhaghavad-Gita informs us that there are no outward signs of enlightenment, which means that saints do not have to obey any conventional standards of behavior. In India there exists the "left-hand path" to G.o.d. On this path a devotee shuns conventional virtue and goodness. s.e.xual abstinence is often replaced with s.e.xual indulgence (usually in a highly ritualized way). One might give up a loving home to live in a graveyard; some tantric devotees go so far as to sleep with corpses and eat the most repulsive decayed food. In other cases the left-hand path is not so extreme, but it is always different from orthodox religious observance.

The left-hand path may seem like the dark side of spirituality, totally deluded in its barbarity and insanity-certainly Christian missionaries to India had no problem holding that interpretation. They shuddered to look upon Kali with her necklace of skulls and blood dripping from her fangs.

What kind of mother was this? But the left-hand way is thousands of years old, its origins in sacred texts that exhibit as much wisdom as any in the world. They state that G.o.d cannot be confined in any way. His infinite grace encompa.s.ses death and decay; he is in the corpse as well as the newborn baby. For some (very few) people, to see this truth isn't enough; they want to experience it. And G.o.d will not deny them. In the West our abhorrence of the left-hand path doesn't need to be challenged. Cultures each go their own way. I wonder, though, what went through Socrates' mind as he drank the cup of hemlock. It is possible, since he willed his own death by refusing to escape the court's sentence, that the poison was sweet to him. And Father Maximilian may have felt bliss when the fatal needle went into his arm. In stage six the alchemy of turning evil into a blessing is a mystery that is solved by longing for liberation.

What is my greatest strength? ...

Holiness.

What is my biggest hurdle? ...

False idealism.

Skeptics often point out that gullibility increases the more someone needs a miracle. Since miracles are required to prove that a saint is real (at least in Catholicism), there is a tremendous temptation to make one up. In stage six little room is left for any kind of wrongdoing, but in the tiny crevice that is left, a person could lose the distinction between holiness and false idealism. Let me give an example.

In 1531, a native Indian in Mexico was walking on foot toward the settlement of the Spanish conquerors near Mexico City when a beautiful lady appeared to him on the summit of a hill. She gave him a message to take to the bishop and offered her blessing. In awe, the Indian, whose name comes down to us as Juan Diego, did as he was told. When he recounted his vision, the bishop was skeptical, but then one of the most delicate of Christian miracles occurred. Juan Diego opened his rough-woven cloak and out spilled beautiful red roses. At that moment he and the wonder-struck bishop observed that a painting of the Virgin Mother had appeared inside his cloak, which now hangs in a magnificent basilica in Hidalgo, outside Mexico City, on the spot where the miracle of Guadalupe occurred.

As with the Shroud of Turin, skeptics have wanted to run tests on this miraculous image to see if it was painted by human hands. They point out how conveniently this apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared, just when the Spanish were most zealous to convert Indians. (The miracle did lead to ma.s.s conversions.) On the face of it, one might say that any event that helped end the slaughter of the Native Americans was a kind of miracle.

Yet lost somewhere in history is this distinction between holiness and false idealism.

Holiness is what makes a miracle miraculous; more is needed than simply defying the laws of nature. Illusionists can do that when they throw knives blindfolded or saw a woman in half. As long as you don't know the secret, the illusion is a miracle. In this section I have been speculating on how miracles work, but the deeper secret is why they are holy. The saint isn't a magician. He transforms more than lead into gold; a saint transforms the stuff of the soul. His att.i.tude is one of simplicity and purity. The first American to be canonized as a saint was Frances Cabrini.

When she was still an impoverished nun in Italy, Mother Cabrini was praying when another sister broke into her room without knocking.

To her astonishment, the room was filled with a soft radiance. The sister was speechless, but Mother Cabrini remarked offhandedly, "This isn't anything. Just ignore it and go on with what you were doing." From that day on, the saint made sure that her privacy was securely kept, and the only clue for outsiders was a faint light that occasionally crept out underneath her door. It is a mark of the true miracle worker to be comfortable with G.o.d's power. Holiness is marked by a selfless innocence-I would like to think that even if the image at Guadalupe is a forgery, at least the roses were real. Trying to be holy is not innocent. It may be well intentioned, but in stage six idealism has no place; only the real thing will do. J. Krishnamurti, during his more than sixty years of spiritual teaching, used to point out something very interesting about happiness. "If you are feeling very happy," he said, "you don't have to speak about it. Happiness is its own thing and needs no words; it doesn't even need to be thought about. But the instant you start to say, 'I am happy,' this innocence is lost. You have created a gap, however small, between yourself and the genuine feeling. So do not think that when you speak of G.o.d, you are near him. Your words have created the gap that you must cross to get back to him, and you will never cross it with your mind."

Idealism is born of the mind. In stage six the saint may sing about G.o.d and even speak about him, but the holy relations.h.i.+p is so private that nothing can break in on it.

What is my greatest temptation? ...

Martyrdom.

Are saints tempted to turn into martyrs? In the third century we are told that there was an epidemic of martyrdom in the Roman empire. At that time Christianity was not recognized as an official religion but seen as a cult, which could be prosecuted under the law. (Oddly, it wasn't the wors.h.i.+p of Jesus that offended the courts but the fact that Christianity was too new to be lawful.) Those who would not sacrifice to the emperor as a G.o.d were sentenced to death, and eager Christians gave up their lives in the arena as proof of their faith.

Traditionally it is held that the martyrs were legion and that they played a huge part in converting the pagan world. Spectators could not believe their eyes when they saw Christians smiling and singing hymns as the lion tore them to pieces. The spectacle shook their confidence in the old G.o.ds and helped pave the way for the final victory of the new religion in 313, when it became the official faith of the empire. But tradition strays from the facts in two ways. First, the number of martyrs was probably much smaller than once believed. Most Christians willingly escaped the death sentence by such stratagems as sending a servant to sacrifice to the emperor in their place. Second, one large segment of the faith did not believe in martyrdom. The so-called Gnostics held that G.o.d existed entirely within oneself. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost were all aspects of consciousness. Therefore holiness was everywhere, in every person, and the emperor could be as divine as anyone else.

For this and other heresies, the Gnostics were despised and persecuted as soon as the Christian bishops came to power. By wiping them out, the early church installed martyrdom as one of the highest paths to G.o.d. Dying for the faith became exalted as imitation of Christ. It must also have set a symbolic pattern in place, for we find such gentle souls as Saint Francis of a.s.sisi enduring the terrible anguish of stigmata. This is the phenomenon whereby one personally undergoes crucifixion by bleeding from the palms and feet like Christ on the cross.

I am not denigrating martyrdom here, only pointing out that stage six is not the end of the journey, not quite yet. As long as suffering holds any temptation, there is some hint of sin, and in that arises the last tiny separation between G.o.d and the devotee. The ego retains enough power to say that "I" am proving my holiness to G.o.d. In the next stage there will be nothing left to prove and therefore no "I" at all. Getting to that point is the last struggle of the saint. From the outside, we can't quite imagine what it must be like. The wonder of performing miracles should bring enough happiness; to have G.o.d inside you must be the highest joy.

Yet it isn't. By the smallest hair there is a distance to go. Amazingly, in that fraction of distance an entire world will be created.

STAGE SEVEN:.

G.o.d OF PURE BEING-"I AM"

(Sacred Response) There is a G.o.d who can only be experienced by going beyond experience.

Down below us, the river was as pure as green crystal. The mountain road was winding, so much that I didn't look at the water despite its beauty, for fear of missing our landmark-a door on the side of the cliff. Unlikely though it was, that's what we were told to look for. But what cliff? The Ganges cuts a roaring gorge a hundred miles from its source in the Himalayas, and cliffs were everywhere.

"Wait, I think that's it!" someone cried from the backseat. The last bend in the road had swung us close to the edge of the canyon. Peering over it, one could just spy a narrow dirt trail leading-it was true-to a door in the cliff. We pulled onto the shoulder of the road and the five of us jumped out, scrambling down the trail to find whoever had the key. We had been told to look for an old saint, a bearded ascetic who had lived here for many years. At the end of the track was a rickety hut but no saint inside it, only a teenage monk who politely said that his master wouldn't be available for hours. What about the key? He shook his head. Then we saw that the door to the holy cave was so rotted that the lock had fallen off.

Could we go inside, then? He shrugged. "Why not?"

The door was not only unlocked but falling off its hinges. I pulled it open with a creak; inside was a tunnel. We snaked in a line through the darkness, and the tunnel got lower and narrower, like a mine shaft. It seemed to go on for a hundred yards before opening out into a proper cave where you could stand up straight again. We had no lights with us, and only the faintest glimmer of sunlight still penetrated from the outside world.

The teenage monk had exacted a promise of total silence once we entered the cave. Meditation had taken place here for several thousand years, ever since the great sage Vasishtha had stopped by in legendary times. You could feel it immediately. Vasishtha was the tutor to Prince Rama, an awesome duty considering that Rama was a G.o.d.

So here we were, not just in a sacred place but in a holy of holies. I have the misfortune of generally missing out on holiness. Many of India's saints strike me with less than wonder, and I have sat through a number of mystical initiations-such as the one where a woman saint opened the sacred spot on the top of my skull to let a stream of air blow out from the crown-without feeling a thing. In this cave, however, I felt that the world was disappearing. After a moment I could hardly remember the winding road above the Ganges; a few minutes more on the cold stone floor with eyes closed, and our whole holiday trip faded away.

This was a good place to meet the G.o.d of stage seven, who is known when all else is forgotten. Each person is tied to the world by a thousand invisible threads of mental activity-time, place, ident.i.ty, and all past experiences. In the dark I began to lose more of these threads. Could I go far enough to forget myself? "Everything about you is a fragment," a guru told his disciples. "Your mind acc.u.mulates these fragments from moment to moment. When you think you know something, you refer only to some sc.r.a.p of the past. Can such a mind ever know the whole? Obviously not."

The G.o.d of stage seven is holistic-he encompa.s.ses everything. To know him, you would have to possess a mind to match. One day on a walk the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was kicked unconscious by a horse, and when he came to he found himself in a strange state; it seemed as if the world had no boundaries and he was a speck of consciousness floating in a vast ocean. This "oceanic feeling"-a phrase also used by Freud-was impersonal; Rousseau felt fused with everything-the earth, the sky, everyone around him. He felt ecstatic and free in that state, which quickly pa.s.sed and yet left a strong impression that haunted him for the rest of his life.

In Vasishtha's cave, individuals have sought the same feeling for millennia, and so was I. This involved nothing I was consciously doing. It was more like a memory lapse. Everyone's mind is like an automated wake-up device in a hotel, which never stops sending its reminders. Mine churns with a thousand sc.r.a.ps of memory related to who I am. Some are about my family or my job, others are about the car and the house, the plane tickets, the luggage, the half-empty gas tank-the whole tapestry of life that somehow doesn't add up to a whole.

As my mind revolves and buzzes with this data, it keeps a.s.suring me that I am real. Why do I need this a.s.surance? No one asks this question as long as the world is with us. We blend into the scenery and accept its reality.

But put anyone in Vasishtha's cave and the bits and pieces of ident.i.ty will stop coming up so much. The glitter of memory ceases its dazzling flicker and then you cut to the chase ... which is?

Nothing. A void with no activity. G.o.d.

To find G.o.d in an empty room-to find the ultimate G.o.d in an empty room-is the experience that miracle workers sacrifice all their powers for. In place of the highest ecstasy, one gets emptiness. The G.o.d of stage seven is so intangible that he can be defined by no qualities. Nothing remains to hold on to. In the ancient Indian tradition, they define this aspect of spirit only by negation. In stage seven G.o.d is Unborn Undying Unchanging Unmoving Unmanifest Immeasurable Invisible Intangible Infinite This G.o.d cannot be thought of even as a great light, and therefore to many Westerners he may seem like death. But "lifeless" isn't one of the negatives that describe him. The empty void contains the potential for all life and all experience. The one positive quality that can be attached to G.o.d in stage seven is existence, or pure being. No matter how blank the void gets, it still exists, and that is enough to give birth to the universe.

The mystery of stage seven is that nothingness can mask infinity. If we had jumped to this stage at the outset, proving the reality of such a G.o.d would not have been possible. You have to climb the spiritual ladder from one rung to the next. Now that we are high enough to view the whole landscape, it's time to kick the ladder away. No support at all, not even the mind, is needed.

For stage seven to be real, there must be a corresponding response in the brain. Subjectively we know that there is, because in every age people report the experience of unity, in which the observer collapses into the observed. In cases of autism a patient may blend so completely into the world that he has to cling to a tree to make sure that it exists; the poet Wordsworth had just this experience as a child. He referred to "spots of time" in which an unearthly sensation made him feel suspended in immortality. In those moments he still existed, but not as a creature of time and place.

Brain researchers have caught epileptic seizures on their scans, another instance where patients report unearthly feelings and losing ident.i.ty. But such examples do not account for the sacred response, as I will call it.

Altered brain waves and subjective reports do not capture the mind's ability to comprehend wholeness. Objectively this state goes beyond miracles in that the person does nothing to affect reality except look at it, yet in that looking the laws of nature s.h.i.+ft more profoundly than in miracles.

Let me hasten to give an example. Recently a paranormal investigator named Marilyn Schlitz wanted to test if anything like second sight was real.

Schlitz chose the phenomenon of just turning around to discover that you were being watched from behind, which she called "covert observation." She took a group of subjects and looked at them through a video camera in another room. By turning the camera off and on, she could test whether each person was aware of being watched, even with the observer not physically present. Rather than relying upon subjective guesses, she used an instrument resembling a lie detector; it measured even the faintest changes in the skin's response to electrical current.

The experiment was a success-up to two-thirds of the subjects showed changes in skin conductivity while being observed from a distance. Schlitz announced the success of her experiment, only to find that another researcher who tried to duplicate it failed miserably. He used exactly the same methods, but in his laboratory almost no one responded with second sight; they couldn't tell the difference between being watched and not being watched. Schlitz was baffled but confident enough to invite the second researcher to come to her lab. The two of them ran the experiment again, choosing subjects at the last moment to ensure that there was no tampering.

Again Schlitz obtained her results, but when she consulted her colleague, he had obtained nothing. This was an extraordinary moment. How could two people run the same objective test with such dramatically different results? The only viable answer, as Schlitz saw it, must lie in the researcher himself. The outcome depended on who you are. As far as I know, this is as close as anyone has come to verifying that observer and observation can collapse into one. This fusion lies at the heart of the sacred response, because in unity all separation ends.

We have other clues to the reality of this response, some negative and some positive. The negative clues center on the "shyness syndrome," in which strange phenomena refuse to be photographed. Everything from ghosts to the bending of keys to UFO abductions are attested to by people who have no trouble pa.s.sing lie-detector tests, yet when the time comes to photograph these phenomena, they don't show up. Positive clues come from experiments like the cla.s.sic ones performed at the Princeton engineering department in the 1970s, where subjects were asked to stare at a machine that randomly spit out zeros and ones (known as a random number generator). Their task was to use their minds to sway the machine to generate more ones than zeros, or vice versa. No one touched the machine or changed its software program.

The results were surprising. Using nothing but focused attention, most people could in fact significantly influence the outcome. Instead of spewing out exactly equal numbers of zeros and ones, the machine skewed 5 percent or more away from randomness. The reason that Schlitz's test goes even further is that she wanted a random trial in the interest of being unbiased, but she got skewed results anyway, depending on who was running the test.

The sacred response is the last step in this direction. It supports the notion that there is no observer separate from the observation. Everything around us is the product of who we are. In stage seven you no longer project G.o.d; you project everything, which is the same as being in the movie, outside the move, and the movie itself. In unity consciousness no separation is left. We no longer create G.o.d in our image, not even the faintest image of a holy ghost.

Who am I? ...

The source.

A person who reaches stage seven is so free of attachment that if you ask, "Who are you?" the only answer is: "I am." This is the very answer that Jehovah gave Moses in the book of Exodus when he spoke from the burning bush. Moses was herding sheep on the side of a mountain when G.o.d appeared.

He was awestruck but also troubled that no one would believe him about talking with G.o.d. If Moses was going to be a holy messenger, at least he needed G.o.d's name, but when asked what it was, G.o.d replied, "I am that I am."

To equate G.o.d with existence seems to strip him of power and majesty and knowledge. But our quantum model tells us otherwise. At the virtual level there is no energy, time, or s.p.a.ce. This apparent void, however, is the source of everything measurable as energy, time, and s.p.a.ce, just as a blank mind is the source of all thoughts. Sir Isaac Newton believed that the universe was literally G.o.d's blank mind, and all of the stars and galaxies were his thoughts.

If G.o.d has a home, it has to be in the void. Otherwise he would be limited. Can we really know such a boundless deity? In stage seven two impossible things must converge. The person has to be reduced to the merest point, a speck of ident.i.ty closing the last minuscule gap between himself and G.o.d. At the same time, just when separation is healed, the tiny point has to expand to infinity. The mystics describe this as "the One becomes All." To put it into scientific terms, when you cross into the quantum zone, s.p.a.ce-time collapses into itself. The tiniest thing in existence merges with the greatest; point and infinity are equal.

If you can get the skeptical mind to believe in this state (which isn't easy) the obvious question is "So what?" The process really does sound like dying, because no matter how you approach it, one must give up the known world to attain stage seven. The miracle worker in stage six is already detached, but he retains inner joy and whatever faint intentions that motivate him to perform his miracles. In stage seven there is no joy, compa.s.sion, light, or truth. The end of the chase is the ultimate gamble.

You don't play for all or nothing; you play for all and nothing.

The problem with models is that they are always inadequate; they select a portion of reality and leave the rest behind. How do you find a model for All and Nothing? The Chinese called it the Tao, meaning the offstage presence that gives the world life, shape, purpose, and flow. Rumi uses the same image: There is someone who looks after us From behind the curtain.

In truth we are not here This is our shadow.

In stage seven you go behind the screen and join whoever is there. This is the source. The spiritual journey takes you to the place where you began as a soul, a mere point of consciousness, naked and undressed of qualities. This source is yourself. "I am" is what you can say to describe it, just as G.o.d did. To imagine what it feels like in stage seven, be with me in Vasishtha's cave. As I forgot everything else, I didn't forget to be. In that unattached state there is nothing to hold on to as a label or description: You don't think about time. A G.o.d of pure being is unborn and undying.

You have no desire to pursue anything. A G.o.d of pure being is unchanging.

Stillness envelops you. A G.o.d of pure being is unmoving.

Nothing in your mind comes to the surface. A G.o.d of pure being is unmanifest.

You can't locate yourself with the five senses. A G.o.d of pure being is invisible and intangible.