How to Know God by Deepak Chopra

Author:Deepak Chopra
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Body, Christian religious experience, Religion & beliefs, Art, Spirituality - General, Religion, God, Experience (Religion), Christianity: General, Christianity, Spirituality, Spiritual life, Inspirational, Christian Life, Mind & Spirit, General, Theology, Christian spirituality & religious experience, Religious life & practice
ISBN: 9780762411580
Publisher: Running Press Book Publishers
Published: 2001-09-09T20:00:00+00:00

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 God'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 God, 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 God is free from cause and effect, to want

nirvana means that you want to attain God-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 God. Many devout Christians find themselves

utterly baffled by Eastern spirituality because they cannot resolve this

paradox. How can God 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, shining with virtue. But

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