Super Brain (34 page)

Certain aspects of mindfulness come into play here, and they seem to be universal. They are important for anyone who doesn’t want to be trapped in futile wish fulfillment and faith that isn’t based in reality. You can only trust what you truly know.

How Do You Know?

When you truly know something, the following things apply:

You didn’t accept other people’s opinions. You found out on your own.

You didn’t give up too soon. You kept exploring despite blind alleys and false starts.

You trusted that you had the determination and curiosity to find out the truth. Half-truths left you dissatisfied.

What you truly know grew from the inside. It made you a different person, as different as two people when one of them has fallen deeply in love and the other hasn’t.

You trusted the process and didn’t let fear or discouragement impede it.

You paid attention to your emotions. The right path feels a certain way, satisfying and clear; uncertainty is queasy and gives off a bad smell.

You went beyond logic into those areas where intuition, insight, and wisdom actually count. They became real for you.

What makes this scenario universal is that the same process applies to the Buddha seeking enlightenment or to any young person learning how to be in a relationship or finding her purpose in life. By
dividing the process into its components, the huge questions about life, love, God, and the soul become manageable.

You can work on one ingredient at a time. Are you prone to accepting secondhand opinions? Do you distrust your own decisions? Is love too painful and confusing to explore deeply? These aren’t impossible obstacles. They are part of you, and therefore nothing can be nearer or more intimate. But let’s be even more specific. Think of a problem that you want to solve, something deeply meaningful to you. It can be as philosophical as “What is my purpose in life?” or as spiritual as “Does God love me?” It can be about a relationship or even a problem at work. Pick something hard to solve, where you feel doubt, resistance, and stuckness. You keep hoping to find an answer, but so far you haven’t been able to.

Whatever you choose, finding an answer that you can trust involves taking certain steps.

MOVING FROM HOPE TO FAITH TO KNOWLEDGE

Step 1:
Realize that your life is meant to progress.

Step 2:
Reflect on how good it is to truly know something rather than just hoping and believing. Don’t settle for less.

Step 3:
Write down your dilemma. Make three separate lists, for the things you hope are true, the things you believe are true, and the things you know are true.

Step 4:
Ask yourself why you know the things you know.

Step 5:
Apply what you know to those areas where you have doubts, where only hope and belief exist today.

As applied to God or the soul, we’ve taken an issue that most people consider mystical, requiring a leap of faith, and broken
it down. The brain likes to work coherently and methodically, even when it comes to spirituality. The first two steps are psychological preparation; the last three ask you to clear your mind and open the way for knowledge to enter. Let’s apply the steps to God now.

Step 1: Realize that your life is meant to progress

In spiritual terms, progressing means wanting to come to terms with God; you feel deserving and know that the benefits of a loving deity would be good in your life. This is the opposite of Pascal’s famous wager, which says that you might as well bet that God exists, because if you disbelieve and God turns out to be real, you might wind up in Hell. The problem is that Pascal’s wager is based on fear and doubt. Neither is a good motivator for spiritual growth. Instead, think of how fulfilling it will be to know whether God is real, not how bad it will be if you wind up on the wrong side of a bet.

Step 2: Reflect on how good it is to truly know something

Here you put your mind on finding God as a valid experience, not a trial of faith. When you sense doubts and misgivings—which we all have around God—don’t shrug them off. Open a space for the possibility that all the charges leveled against God might not be the whole story. Despite every woe that human life is heir to, including the very worst that are leveled against a loving God (genocides, wars, atomic weapons, despots, crime, disease, and death), the issue isn’t settled by any means. A loving God might still exist who allows humans to commit mistakes and learn at their own pace. Don’t jump to any conclusions, however. Adopt the attitude that you can solve the problems of violence, guilt, shame, anxiety, and prejudice—the roots of global problems—in your own life. Undertaking personal growth is far better than bemoaning the perennial state of human suffering.

Step 3: Write down your dilemma, making three separate lists, for the things you hope are true, the things you believe are true, and the things you know are true
.

The point here is to avoid generalizations and received opinion. Most people make a blanket judgment for or against God, then hedge their bets according to the situation at hand. (As the saying goes, there are no atheists in the foxholes. There are probably also few devotees praying in a singles bar after midnight.) By listing your hopes, beliefs, and real knowledge, you will surprise yourself. Spiritual issues are fascinating once you decide to pay attention to them. As a secondary benefit, you will sharpen and clarify your thinking, which aids your higher brain. Thinking is a skill organized in the neocortex, and this includes thinking about God.

So be frank. Do you secretly believe that God punishes sinners, or do you hope that he doesn’t? If both are true, note this in two lists, the one for hope and the one for beliefs. Do you think you’ve witnessed an act of grace or forgiveness? If so, put this down as something you know. As a beginning to spiritual exploration, this exercise is very revealing. Take time over your lists, and when you finish them, put them away where you can go back and consult them in the future—that’s a good way to see how well, and realistically, you are progressing.

Step 4: Ask yourself why you know the things you know

The blunt phrase “I know what I know” papers over a lot of complexity. Most people let their beliefs settle in place without considering where they came from. Do you believe in God (if you do) because your parents told you to, or you accepted the lessons in Sunday school? Perhaps your belief rests upon a desperate hope that the man upstairs is watching you; but to be realistic, you don’t actually know if God is a man, and upstairs could be anywhere, nowhere, or everywhere in creation.

To actually know about God, it’s certainly best to have personal experiences, but these cover a wider range than you might suppose.

Have you felt a divine or luminous presence?

Have you felt loved in an all-embracing way?

Have you felt a sudden surge of bliss or joy that you couldn’t attach a cause to?

Have you felt safe and cared for, as if your existence is accepted by the universe?

Do you experience times of deep inner calm, strength, or knowingness?

As you can see, the word
God
doesn’t have to be connected to experiences of expanded awareness, which is what you want your brain to register and remember. In polls, almost a majority of people say that they have seen a light around someone else, and many people have experienced healing or the power of positive thinking. The issue isn’t whether you have met God; the issue is your actual experience that might direct your mind to a world that reaches beyond the material.

As you consider the kind of experience that you know to be real in your own life, you can also think about scriptures and the people who wrote them. If you know that you enjoy reading the Bible or the poems of Rumi, if you have felt peace around a spiritual person or in a holy place, then you know something to be true. By paying attention and making such experiences significant, you go a long way toward finding your place in the spiritual matrix, just as you have a place in the matrix of life.

Step 5: Apply what you know to those areas where you have doubts

If you’ve taken the first four steps, you should have a good mind map of your present state of hope, belief, and knowledge. This alone
is very helpful, since it gives you a basis for any signs of change. Change requires intention, and if you tell your brain that you intend to look for God, your powers of perception start to increase. (Doesn’t this happen when you decide that you want to look for a love interest? Suddenly you see the people around in a different, sharper light—strangers turn into prospects for romance, or not.)

God likes to be engaged, which is to say, taking an interest in spiritual growth isn’t passive. You must open yourself up to walking the walk, spiritually speaking. Contrary to common belief, this doesn’t mean making a New Year’s resolution to go back to church (not that we advise against it by any means) or deciding overnight to be saintly and devout. Those are points of arrival more than points of departure. The core issue is how to act in such a way that the possibility of God becomes real.

We call such activity “subtle actions,” because they take place inside. Consider the following subtle actions and how you could adapt to them.

ACTING AS IF GOD MIGHT BE REAL

Meditate.

Have an open mind about spirituality. Examine any tendency to be reflexively skeptical and closed off.

See the good in people. Stop gossiping, blaming, and taking silent petty pleasure when bad things happen to people you don’t like.

Read uplifting poetry and scriptures from many sources.

Look into the lives of saints, sages, and seers from spiritual traditions East and West.

When in distress, ask to have your anxiety removed and your burden lessened.

Leave room for unexpected solutions. Don’t force the issue or fall back on the need to control.

Fully experience joy each day. Do this even if it’s only gazing at a blue sky or smelling a rose.

Spend time around children and absorb their spontaneous exuberance for life.

Be of service to someone in need.

Consider the possibility of forgiveness somewhere in your life where it will really make a difference.

Reflect on gratitude and the things you are grateful for.

When you feel anger, envy, or resentment in a situation, stand back, take a deep breath, and see if you can let it go. If not, at least postpone your negative reaction until a later time.

Be generous of spirit.

Expect the best unless you have evidence that something needs help, improvement, or criticism.

Find a way to enjoy your existence. Address the serious obstacles that prevent your enjoyment.

Do what you know to be good. Avoid what you know to be bad.

Find a path to personal fulfillment, however you define that word.

This list gives you some specificity so that God doesn’t become a vague wash of emotion or a topic to postpone until a crisis looms. We have avoided religiosity, not because we are arguing against any
faith but because the goal is different here. You want to gently train your brain to notice and value a new reality. Whether to participate in such a reality is your choice. Just be aware that if you want to attune yourself to the vast matrix of spiritual experience, your brain is ready to adapt.

In a sense, the simplest advice we’ve heard about God is also the most profound. At least once a day, let go and let one situation be handled by God or your soul or whatever agent of higher wisdom you choose. See if your life can take care of itself. For in the end, it isn’t the man upstairs—or an entire pantheon of gods—who direct the course of life. Life evolves within itself, and God is only a label we apply to unseen powers that exist, waiting to emerge, from within ourselves. When you read the following couplet of the great Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, be mindful of how you feel:

Listen, my heart, to the whispering of the world
.

That is how it makes love to you
.

Or this one:

How the desert yearns for the love of just one blade of grass!

The grass shakes her head, laughs, and flies away
.

If you feel the tenderness of the first couplet and the mystery of the second, a place inside you has been touched as surely as if God touched you. There is no difference, except that the experiences grow until the divine is real for you. This is your privilege. There is no need for it to be real for anyone else.

THE
REALITY ILLUSION