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Signs of Spiritual Transformations
Adapted from The Book of Secrets by Deepak Chopra (Three Rivers Press, 2004).
The six emergent spiritual properties are clarity of awareness, knowingness, reverence for life, absence of violence, fearlessness and wholeness.
Clarity means being awake to yourself around the clock, in waking, sleeping and dreaming. Instead of being overshadowed by externals, your awareness is always open to itself. Clarity feels totally alert, and carefree.
Knowingness means being in touch with the level of the mind where every question is answered. It is related to genius, although knowingness isn’t focused on music, mathematics, or other specific subjects. Your area of knowledge is life itself and the movement of consciousness on every level. Knowingness feels wise, confident, unshakable, and yet humble.
Reverence for life means being in touch with the life force. You feel the same power flowing through you as through every living thing; even the dust in a beam of light dances to the same rhythm. Reverence for life feels warm, connected and exhilarating.
Non-violence means being in harmony with every action. There is no opposition between what you do and what anyone else does. Your desires do not clash with another person’s well-being. When you look around you see conflict in the world at large but not in your world. You emanate peace like a force field that subdues conflict in your surroundings. Non-violence feels peaceful, still and completely without resistance.
Fearlessness means total security. Fear is a jolt from the past; it reminds us of the moment when we left a place of belonging and found ourselves in a place of vulnerability. The Bhagavad Gita says that fear is born of separation, implying that the original cause of fear was the loss of unity. Ultimately, that separation is not a fall from grace but a loss of who you really are. To be fearless feels, therefore, like yourself.
Wholeness means including everything, leaving nothing out. At present we each experience life sliced up into bits of time, bits of experience, bits of activity. We cling to our limited sense of self to protect the slices from falling apart. But it’s impossible to find continuity in this way, hard as the ego tries in its struggle to make life hang together. Wholeness is a state beyond personality. It emerges when “I am” as it applies to you is the same “I am” everywhere. Wholeness feels solid, eternal, without beginning or end.
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Open Yourself to the Unknown
Adapted from The Book of Secrets, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004)
Who you think you are is not real but a concoction of past events, desires, and memories. This concoction has a life of its own–it motors forward through time and space experiencing only those things that it knows. A new experience isn’t really new; it’s just a slight twist on very familiar sensations.
To open yourself to the unknown means cutting the ground out from under your familiar reactions and habits. Notice how often the same words come out of your mouth, the same likes and dislikes dictate what you do with your time, the same people fill your life with routine.
All of this familiarity is like a shell. The unknown is outside the shell, and to encounter it, you have to be willing to welcome it in.
shared by Wysti
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Your Emotional Debt
By: Deepak Chopra
On the surface, everyday life has become much more comfortable than ever before. Yet people still lead lives of quiet desperation. The source of this desperation is repression, a sense that you cannot be what you want to be, cannot feel what you want to feel, cannot do what you want to do.
A creator should never be trapped in this way. No authority looms over you to enforce repression; it is entirely self-forced. Any part of yourself that you cannot face puts a barrier between you and reality.
Yet emotions are entirely private. Only you know how you feel, and when you stop censoring your emotions, the effect goes far beyond feeling better. Your aim is not to experience only positive emotions.
We all owe emotional debts to the past, in the form of feelings we couldn’t allow ourselves to express. The past isn’t over as long as these debts go unpaid. You don’t have to return to the person who made you angry or afraid, with the intention of revising how the past turned out. For that person, the impact can never be the same as it is for you.
Every hidden, blocked feeling is like a chunk of frozen consciousness. It is another obstacle between you and the silent witness that must be dissolved. Time and attention have to be paid, sitting with your feelings and letting them say what they have to say.
The purpose of getting rid of emotional debt is to find your place in the present.
Adapted from The Book of Secrets by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 2004).
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Your Pure Soul Presence
Take a moment to become aware of who is reading this page. Do you feel a presence? That presence is not your mind; it’s your soul. The mind might be saying, What am I going to have for lunch? or I wonder what time it is. The inner dialogue happens in the presence of the soul.
Thoughts come and go, feelings come and go. The molecules of the body come and go. But they come and go in this presence.This presence, the soul, recycles itself as your memories, your moods, and even your personality, because you don’t have the same personality today that you had when you were 5 years of age, or when you were 15.
You personality is an expression of the evolving universe; it’s constantly changing, growing, evolving, transforming.
Who is going through this experience? The real you–the you that we call pure consciousness, the field of intelligence, the inner self, the soul, the spirit, the infinite consciousness, the Being within you. Here, we have used all of these terms synonymously.
If you get in touch with this presence, if you really become intimate with it because it’s your own inner self, then you will know experientially, without anybody telling you, that this presence was there before you were born, and it will be there after you die.
Adapted from Power, Freedom and Grace, by Deepak Chopra (Amber-Allen Publishing Inc., 2006).
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Once A Person Learns To Transcend...
Once a person learns to transcend, his mind is opened to itself in a fresh way. That is very beneficial, as we have seen, but it is not the whole story. You can also learn to manipulate the subtle layers of the mind. For that, special techniques exist, the first of which is called primordial sound. It takes its name from the faint vibrations that can be detected when the mind is almost totally quiet.
According to Ayurveda, these fainter-than-faint sounds are not incidental: all of nature is made up of them. In the complete stillness of the quantum mechanical universe, primordial sounds are born, form patterns, and in time blossom into matter, energy, and all the infinite variety of things made of matter and energy–Mars, trees, rocks, and human beings.
The theory behind primordial sound treatment is that the mind can return to the quantum level, introduce certain sounds that may have become distorted somewhere along the line, and thus have a profound healing influence in the body.
Adapted from Perfect Health, by Deepak Chopra (Harmony Books, 1991).
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