How To Know God Part 2

If you believe in a rock, you are automatically believing in G.o.d. Let me explain.

Ordinary reality is only the top layer of our sandwich. The material world is full of familiar objects that we can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell. As big objects become very small, shrinking to the size of atoms, our senses fail us. Theoretically the shrinkage has to stop somewhere, because no atom is smaller than hydrogen, the first material particle to be born out of the Big Bang. But in fact an amazing transformation happens beyond the atom-everything solid disappears. Atoms are composed of vibrating energy packets that have no solidity at all, no ma.s.s or size, nothing for the senses to see or touch. The Latin word for a packet or package is quantum, the word chosen to describe one unit of energy inside the atom, and, as it turned out, a new level of reality.

At the quantum level nothing of the material world is left intact. It is strange enough to hold up your hand and realize that it is actually, at a deeper level, invisible vibrations taking place in a void. Even at the atomic level all objects are revealed as 99.9999 percent empty s.p.a.ce. On its own scale, the distance between a whirling electron and the nucleus it revolves around is wider than the distance between the earth and the sun.

But you could never capture that electron anyway, since it too breaks down into energy vibrations that wink in and out of existence millions of times per second. Therefore the whole universe is a quantum mirage, winking in and out of existence millions of times per second. At the quantum level the whole cosmos is like a blinking light. There are no stars or galaxies, only vibrating energy fields that our senses are too dull and slow to pick up given the incredible speed at which light and electricity move.

In the animal kingdom some nervous systems are much faster than ours and others much slower. A snail's neurons pick up signals from the outside world so slowly, for example, that events any faster than three seconds would not be perceived. In other words, if a snail was looking at an apple, and I quickly reached in and s.n.a.t.c.hed it away, the snail would not be able to detect my hand. It would "see" the apple disappear before its very eyes. In the same way, quantum flashes are millions of times too rapid for us to register, so our brains play a trick on us by "seeing"

solid objects that are continuous in time and s.p.a.ce, the same way that a movie seems continuous. A movie consists of twenty-four still pictures flas.h.i.+ng by per second, with twenty-four gaps of blackness as each frame is taken away and a new one put in its place. But since our brains cannot perceive forty-eight stop-motion events in one second, the illusion of the movie is created.

Now speed this up by many powers of ten and you get the trick of the movie we call real life. You and I exist as flas.h.i.+ng photons with a black void in between each flash-the quantum light show comprises our whole body, our every thought and wish, and every event we take part in. In other words, we are being created, over and over again, all the time. Genesis is now and always has been. Who is behind this never-ending creation? Whose power of mind or vision is capable of taking the universe away and putting it back again in a fraction of a second?

The power of creation-whatever it turns out to be-lies even beyond energy, a force with the ability to turn gaseous clouds of dust into stars and eventually into DNA. In the terminology of physics, we refer to this pre-quantum level as virtual. When you go beyond all energy, there is nothing, a void. Visible light becomes virtual light; real s.p.a.ce becomes virtual s.p.a.ce; real time becomes virtual time. In the process, all properties vanish. Light no longer s.h.i.+nes, s.p.a.ce covers no distance, time is eternal. This is the womb of creation, infinitely dynamic and alive.

Words like empty, dark, and cold do not apply to it. The virtual domain is so inconceivable that only religious language seems to touch it at all.

Today in India a devout believer may greet the dawn with an ancient Vedic hymn: In the beginning, There was neither existence nor nonexistence, All this world was unmanifest energy...

The One breathed, without breath, by Its own power Nothing else was there....

RIG-VEDA.

In modern terms, this verse tells us that G.o.d can only be found in a virtual state, where all energy is stored before creation. Physics has struggled hard with this state that comes before time and s.p.a.ce, and so has popular imagination. It may surprise many to learn that the familiar image of G.o.d as a patriarch in a white robe seated on his throne has little authority, even in Judaic scripture. The image appears only once, in the Book of Daniel, whereas we are told many times in the books of Moses that G.o.d is without human form.

The best working theory about creation reads as follows: Before the Big Bang s.p.a.ce was unbounded, expanded like an accordion into infinite pleats or dimensions, while time existed in seed form, an eternal presence without events and therefore needing no past, present, or future. This state was utterly void in one sense and utterly full in another. It contained nothing we could possibly perceive, yet the potential for everything resided here. As the Vedic seers declared, neither existence nor nonexistence could be found, since those terms apply only to things that have a beginning, middle, and end. Physicists often refer to this state as a singularity: s.p.a.ce, time, and the entire material universe were once contained in a point. A singularity is conceived as the smallest dot you can imagine, and therefore not a dot at all.

Now if you can imagine that the cosmos exploded into being in a dazzling flash of light from this one point, you must then go a step further.

Because the pre-creation state has no time, it is still here. The Big Bang has never happened in the virtual domain, and yet paradoxically all Big Bangs have happened-no matter how many times the universe expands across billions of light-years, only to collapse back onto itself and withdraw back into the void, nothing will change at the virtual level. This is as close as physics has come to the religious notion of a G.o.d who is omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. Omni means all, and the virtual state, since it has no boundaries of any kind, is properly called the All.

It isn't surprising that we find it so difficult to speak about the All.

In India seers often referred to it simply as That, or tat in Sanskrit. At the moment of enlightenment, a person is able to go past the five senses to perceive the only truth that can be uttered: "I am That, You are That, and all this is That." The meaning isn't a riddle; it simply states that behind the veil of creation, the pre-creation state still exists, enclosing everything.

A physicist friend once stated the same truth in newer words: "You must realize, Deepak, that time is just a cosmic convenience that keeps everything from happening all at once. This convenience is needed at the material level, but not at deeper levels. Therefore if you could see yourself in your virtual state, all the chaos and swirling galaxies would make perfect sense. They form one pattern unfolding in perfect symmetry.

Viewed from this perspective, the end point of all creation is now. The whole cosmos has conspired to create you and me sitting here this very second."

Nothing is more fascinating than to watch science blurring its edges into spirit. There are no easier words for the transition zone than "quantum"

and no easier words for G.o.d than "virtual." To track down a miracle, one must go into these domains. Miracles indicate that reality doesn't begin and end at the material level. "How do I find G.o.d?" a young disciple once asked a famous guru in India. (1) "I can't see any evidence that He is anywhere around us, and millions of people live very well without him."

"Everything without G.o.d happens in s.p.a.ce and time. This is the world you are used to," his guru replied. "s.p.a.ce and time are like a net that has trapped you, but nets always have holes. Find such a hole and jump through it. Then G.o.d will be obvious." Every religious tradition contains such loopholes, escape routes into a world beyond ours. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that his role in life is to point the disciples away from the rule of the five senses, which are totally confined to s.p.a.ce-time: (2) I shall give you what no eye has seen and what no ear has heard and what no hand has touched and what has never occurred to the human mind.

This promise was certainly carried out whenever Jesus performed any one of his thirty or so miracles, but it is fascinating to observe that often they were performed with considerable reluctance, as if they were somehow beside the point. The real point was to see that our senses aren't trustworthy at all. The incurable leper only appears that way, the few loaves and fishes are only an illusion, the storm on the Sea of Galilee can be calmed by a mere act of will. After healing the leper with his touch, Jesus sounds particularly impatient with anyone overawed by what he has done.

Then Jesus dismissed him with this stern warning: "Be sure you say nothing to anybody. Go and show yourself to the priest, and make the offering laid down by Moses for your cleansing; that will certify the cure."

Naturally the miraculously healed man couldn't help himself and told everyone he ran into. Word spread, until Jesus couldn't stay in the town because of the uproar. Teeming crowds wanted their own miracle; he fled to the countryside, where they continued to pursue him. Would we also be so overawed as to miss the larger point? I think so. In India today there is a well-known woman saint who reputedly cured a leper by touching his sores. I remember reading too about a guru who used to let anyone into his house on feast days, holding the laws of hospitality to be sacred. He was not rich, and his followers were distressed that hundreds of guests would appear at his door to be fed. The guru only smiled and made a strange request. "Keep feeding everyone from those buckets of rice and lentils,"

he said, "but first cover them with a cloth." The buckets were covered so that no one could see into them, and as many times as the ladles were dipped in, there was always more food to go around. In this way the guru performed the same miracle as Jesus.

It is easy to be awed by such stories, but is it helpful when we seek to know facts? From our awe a wealth of superst.i.tion, fable, and often false hope has developed. Yet in the blurring of the quantum and the miraculous, a single reality is beginning to emerge. Stephen Hawking indicated in his A Brief History of Time that if the laws of nature were deeply explored, we would one day know the mind of G.o.d. (3) Here he echoed a famous remark by Einstein: "I want to know how G.o.d thinks, everything else is a detail."

Because he was a rare visionary, I hope that Einstein would accept as a start the following map of how G.o.d thinks: Virtual domain = the field of spirit Quantum domain = the field of mind Material reality = the field of physical existence If you feel secure with these terms, you can clear up mystery after mystery-literally all the paradoxes of religion start to unravel, and G.o.d's ways make sense for the first time. Let me give an example from the field of healing: Some decades ago an Italian army officer was taken on a stretcher to the shrine of Lourdes. He was suffering from bone cancer in its most advanced metastasized stage. One hip joint was so ravaged that it had all but dissolved, and his leg was kept attached only by a splint. The officer had no desperate expectations of a cure, but he took the holy waters, along with thousands of other pilgrims who flock to this site. Over the next few months a careful X-ray record was kept as his cancer was miraculously healed. This did not just entail the malignancy disappearing: His entire hip joint regrew. Medical science has no explanation for such a thing, and the Italian military officer became one of the authenticated healings attributed to the Virgin Mary at Lourdes. (I believe around seventy of these have been verified since such claims have been examined by a panel of doctors adhering to the strictest standards of proof.) If we refer to our model, this healing involves a unique event: All three levels of reality were in communication. The soldier's body and his cancer were on the material level. His prayers were on the quantum level. G.o.d's intervention came from the virtual level. In one sense this seems to make a miracle seem very cold-blooded and clinical. But in another sense it makes everything a miracle. And why shouldn't that be so? The fact is that stars, mountains, monarch b.u.t.terflies, and a single skin cell all depend on the same open lines of communication. The flow of reality is miraculous because invisible emptiness gets transformed into the brilliant orange of a b.u.t.terfly's wing or the ma.s.sive solidity of a mountain without any effort at all.

This unseen power is sacred and mythic but present all the time. Science is guilty of trying to explain it away instead of explaining it. A real Theory of Everything would instruct us in the art of living on all three levels of reality with equal power and security. Saints strive to get to that point; it is the true meaning of enlightenment.

This is all to say that G.o.d's mystery is the same as the mystery of the world. The promise made by Jesus, to show what no human mind has ever conceived, has been fulfilled during our lifetime. Indeed, Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, stated that quantum physics is not only stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think. We are brought face-to-face with one of the mystic's primary beliefs: Whatever can be thought of has already been created by G.o.d and is real somewhere, if not in this world, then in another.

Religious trappings offend many rigorous scientists, but do we have to have any? I remember as a young doctor reading about a patient suffering from terminal cancer who was cured literally by an injection of saline, ordinary salt water. He had entered the hospital, his body completely disfigured by swollen malignant lymph nodes. This was in the fifties when medicine was riding a crest of optimism about finding a cure for cancer very quickly. Patients were routinely killed or nearly killed with doses of mustard gas, the same poison used on soldiers in the trenches in World War I but also the first crude chemotherapy.

This man was desperate to be given the latest wonder treatment, known as Krebiozen. His doctor despaired of wasting the drug on someone who would probably be dead before the week was out. But out of pity he arranged for a single dose of Krebiozen and injected it on a Friday. He left over the weekend, fully expecting never to see his charge again, but on his return Monday morning, the patient was jubilant. Every trace of cancer had vanished; his lymph nodes had returned to normal, and he felt completely well. Stunned, his doctor released him as cured, knowing full well that a single dose of Krebiozen could not possibly have made a difference over a few days.

But the story becomes, if anything, much stranger. After some time had pa.s.sed, the patient read in the newspaper that testing on Krebiozen had proved ineffective. Within a matter of days his cancer returned, and once again he entered the hospital in a terminal state. His doctor had nothing to give him, so he resorted to the most drastic of placebos. He told the man that he would be injected with "new, improved" Krebiozen, while in reality giving him nothing but saline solution.

Again the man was healed in a matter of days. For the second time, he left without evidence of cancer in his body. The story doesn't have a happy ending, because when he later discovered that all hope for Krebiozen was abandoned, he contracted lymph cancer for the third time, and this time he died rapidly.

But the essence of the story is that spirit acts by flowing from the virtual to the quantum to the material level. This is what all miracles have in common, whether they occur with religious trappings or not. The crucial importance of religion is not to be discarded, however. Faith in G.o.d is a way of opening the lines of communication beyond the material. So is prayer or hope. The mind cannot do it simply by thinking. If there is ever going to be a science of miracles, it begins with intangibles that are rooted in spirit.

We are only partway toward solving the mystery. Once again I gaze upon the Great Pyramid of Cheops; only this time I don't see an awesome pile of sandstone but an idea-several ideas, actually. The first is sheer spiritual audacity. This pyramid was once entirely sheathed in a layer of white limestone, because its builders wanted to out-dazzle the sun. That was the whole point, in fact. Without equality to the sun G.o.d, these audacious ancients would just have been glorified worker ants. This is a reminder that human beings aspire to be more than human.

The other idea behind the pyramid is wonder. Sacred sites tell us that we are wondrous creatures who should be doing wondrous works. And you can still see that here, for it would be more than four thousand years before another structure encompa.s.sed such a volume of s.p.a.ce, and that happened on a flat sandbar on the east coast of Florida.

The Vertical a.s.sembly Building at the Kennedy s.p.a.ce Center is tall enough to hold a Saturn V moon rocket upright and has proportions boggling the mind. Standing as it does on a featureless landscape, you think you are close to it when you still have a mile to go. But it isn't just the scale of the thing that awes us. This building is also an idea, the idea that we will find our origins and our cosmic family. The Greek G.o.ds were once our family, along with the Indian G.o.ds and Jehovah of the Book of Genesis. All were cosmic beings, and we traced our origins back to the beginning of the cosmos.

Now the giant rockets blast off; one will soon go to gather interstellar dust, on the off chance that it will contain even one microorganism. If a single bacterium comes back from deep s.p.a.ce, we will have found our own cosmic seed. It's not a whole family, but it's a beginning. As the old myths wear out, new ones spring up in our souls. Prometheus brought us fire, and now these rockets are the fire we send back to the G.o.ds. We are returning the gift and also reaching out. We crave to know that we are sacred once again. Are we? The answer isn't in the galactic dust but in ourselves. The deepest levels of the quantum domain are the common ground where our hands reach out to touch G.o.d. When that happens, there is a double wonder: What we touch is divine, but it is also ourselves.

Before we proceed any further, I want to offer three lists that summarize where we are. These don't need to be memorized or studied; everything contained in them will be discussed in clear, simple language as we move ahead. But this seems like a good place to pause and reflect. Without using religious terminology, we have discovered a great many facts about G.o.d. They are strange facts perhaps, not easily translated into ordinary life. There is no doubt, though, that from these seeds a complete vision of G.o.d will blossom.

VIRTUAL DOMAIN = SPIRIT.

No energy No time Unbounded-every point in s.p.a.ce is every other point Wholeness exists at every point Infinite silence Infinite dynamism Infinitely correlated Infinite organizing power Infinite creative potential Eternal Unmeasurable Immortal, beyond birth and death Acausal QUANTUM DOMAIN = MIND.

Creation manifests.

Energy exists.

Time begins.

s.p.a.ce expands from its source.

Events are uncertain.

Waves and particles alternate with one another.

Only probabilities can be measured.

Cause and effect are fluid.

Birth and death occur at the speed of light.

Information is embedded in energy.

MATERIAL REALITY = VISIBLE UNIVERSE.

Events are definite.

Objects have firm boundaries.

Matter dominates over energy.

Three-dimensional Knowable by the five senses Time flows in a straight line.

Changeable Subject to decay Organisms are born and die.

Predictable Cause and effect are fixed.

Three.

SEVEN STAGES OF G.o.d.

If you don't make yourself equal to G.o.d, you can't perceive G.o.d.

-ANONYMOUS CHRISTIAN HERETIC, THIRD CENTURY.

Each person is ent.i.tled to some version of G.o.d that seems real, yet many versions contradict one another. On a long trip to India a few years ago, we had stopped the car to look at a family of Himalayan monkeys playing by the side of the road. Thirty seconds after we got out, a whole band of monkeys, maybe a hundred strong, descended upon us. While everyone was snapping photos and throwing bits of fruit and bread, I noticed not far away an old village woman all by herself, kneeling before a makes.h.i.+ft shrine under a tree. She was praying to Hanuman, a G.o.d in the shape of a monkey. I realized then that this pack hung around to grab food from the altar and any handouts they could charm from tourists like us.

What is the difference, I thought, between these chattering, clever animals, who knew all the tricks to catch our attention, and a G.o.d?

Hanuman, who could fly and was known as "son of the wind," once journeyed to these same Himalayas. When Prince Rama's brother lay dying from a grievous wound received in battle, the flying monkey-king was sent to bring back the one special herb that would save his life. Hanuman looked everywhere but couldn't find the herb, so in frustration he ripped up the whole mountain where the plant grew and sped it back to lay it at Rama's feet.

The old woman kneeling at the rickety shrine certainly knew this story from childhood, but why would she wors.h.i.+p a monkey, even a mythic flying one, and even a king? Her face was as devout as anyone praying to the queen of heaven or the son of G.o.d. Was her prayer going astray because of whom she prayed to? Was it going anywhere at all?

We are now ready to answer the simplest but most profound question: Who is G.o.d? He cannot just be impersonal-a principle or a level of reality or a field. We went into the quantum and virtual domains to establish a basis for the sacred, yet that was only the beginning. In all religions G.o.d is described as infinite and unbounded, which creates a huge problem. An infinite G.o.d is nowhere and everywhere at the same time. He transcends nature, and therefore you cannot find him. As we said at the outset, one must a.s.sume that G.o.d leaves no fingerprints in the material world.

This gives us no choice but to find a subst.i.tute for infinity that retains something of G.o.d, enough so that we feel his presence. The Book of Genesis declares that G.o.d created Adam in his own image, but we have been returning the favor almost since the beginning, fas.h.i.+oning G.o.d in our image over and over again. In India these images include almost every creature, event, or phenomenon. Lightning can be wors.h.i.+ped as coming from the G.o.d Indra, a rupee coin as a symbol of Lakshmi, G.o.ddess of prosperity.

The taxicabs of Delhi and Bombay may be protected by plastic figures of Ganesh, a cheerfully smiling elephant with a potbelly, dangling from the rearview mirror. In all these cases, however, there is an understanding that only one thing is really being wors.h.i.+ped-the self. The same "I" that gives a person a sense of ident.i.ty extending beyond the physical body, expanding to embrace nature, the universe, and ultimately pure spirit.

In the West it would be exotic to wors.h.i.+p a monkey G.o.d but scandalous to wors.h.i.+p the self. The anecdote is told of an English anthropologist researching into the beliefs of Hinduism. One day he goes creeping through the forest and spies an old man dancing in a grove of trees. In ecstasy the old man embraces their trunks and says, "Lord, how I love you." Then he falls to the ground and chants, "Blessed are you, my Lord." Jumping to his feet, he raises his arms to the sky and cries, "I am overjoyed to hear your voice and see your face."

Unable to stand the spectacle any longer, the anthropologist jumps out of the bushes. "I must tell you, my good man, that you are quite crazy," he says.

"Why is that?" the old man asks in confusion.

"Because here you are all alone in the woods, and you think that you're talking to G.o.d," says the anthropologist.

"What do you mean, alone?" the old man replies.

To anyone who wors.h.i.+ps G.o.d as the self, it is obvious that none of us are alone. The "self" isn't personal ego but a pervasive presence that cannot be escaped. The East seems to have no difficulties here, but as you go west, uneasiness mounts. In the third century of the Christian era, an unknown heretic wrote, "If you don't make yourself equal to G.o.d, you can't perceive G.o.d." This belief did not succeed as dogma (the heresy here is of course that human and divine are not equal in Christianity), but at other levels it is undeniable.

The G.o.d of any religion is only a fragment of G.o.d. This has to be true, because a being who is unbounded has no image, no role to play, no location either inside or outside the cosmos, whereas religions offer many images-father, mother, lawgiver, judge, ruler of the universe. There are seven versions of G.o.d, which can be a.s.sociated with organized faiths. Each one is a fragment, but so complete as to create a unique world: Stage one: G.o.d the Protector Stage two: G.o.d the Almighty Stage three: G.o.d of Peace Stage four: G.o.d the Redeemer Stage five: G.o.d the Creator Stage six: G.o.d of Miracles Stage seven: G.o.d of Pure Being-"I Am"

Each stage meets a particular human need, which is only natural. In the face of nature's overwhelming forces, humans needed a G.o.d who would protect them from harm. When they felt that they had broken the law or committed wrongdoing, people turned to a G.o.d who would judge them on the one hand and redeem their sins on the other. In this way, purely from self-interest, the project of creating G.o.d in our own image proceeded-and continues to proceed.

Several of these stages, such as Redeemer and Creator, sound familiar from the Bible, and now that Buddhism has become more popular in the West, the final stage, where G.o.d is experienced as eternal silence and pure being, is not as foreign as it once would have been. But we are not comparing religions here; no stage is absolute in its claim to truth. Each one implies a different relations.h.i.+p, however. If you see yourself as one of G.o.d's children, then his relations.h.i.+p to you will be as a protector or a maker of rules; this relations.h.i.+p s.h.i.+fts if you see yourself as a creator-then you start to share some of G.o.d's functions. You stand on more equal ground, until finally, at the stage of "I am," the same pure being is common to both G.o.d and humans. In the progress from stage one to stage seven, the wide gap between G.o.d and his wors.h.i.+pers becomes narrower and eventually closes. Therefore we can say that we keep creating G.o.d in our image for a reason that is more than vanity; we want to bring him home to us, to achieve intimacy. Yet whether you see G.o.d as an almighty judge who punishes or as a benign source of inner peace, he isn't exclusively that.

To an atheist, all forms of deity are a false projection, pure and simple.

We attribute human traits to G.o.d such as mercy and love, set these traits upon an altar, and then proceed to pray to them. Every image of G.o.d, then, including the most abstract ones, is completely empty (by abstract I mean the G.o.d of Islam and orthodox Judaism, neither of which is allowed to be portrayed with a human face). According to the atheist, religion is the ultimate illusion since we are only wors.h.i.+ping ourselves secondhand.

There are two ways to respond to this accusation. The first is the argument that an infinite G.o.d should be wors.h.i.+ped in all ways; the second is the argument that G.o.d has to be approached in stages, for otherwise one could never close the huge gap between him and us. I think the second argument is the more telling one. Unless we can see ourselves in the mirror, we will never see G.o.d there. Consider the list again, and you will see how G.o.d s.h.i.+fts in response to very human situations: G.o.d is a protector to those who see themselves in danger.

G.o.d is almighty to those who want power (or lack any way of getting power).

G.o.d brings peace to those who have discovered their own inner world.

G.o.d redeems those who are conscious of committing a sin.

G.o.d is the creator when we wonder where the world came from.

G.o.d is behind miracles when the laws of nature are suddenly revoked without warning.

G.o.d is existence itself-"I Am"-to those who feel ecstasy and a sense of pure being.

In our search for the one and only one G.o.d, we pursue the impossible. The issue isn't how many G.o.ds exist, but how completely our own needs can be spiritually fulfilled. When someone asks, "Is there really a G.o.d?" the most legitimate answer is, "Who's asking?" The perceiver is intimately linked to his perceptions. The fact that we single out traits like mercy and love, judgment and redemption, shows that we are forced to give G.o.d human attributes, but that is absolutely proper if those traits came from G.o.d in the first place. In other words, a circle connects the human and the divine. From the virtual level, which is our source, the qualities of spirit flow until they reach us in the material world. We experience this flow as our own inner impulses, and this is also appropriate, because for every stage of G.o.d there exists a specific biological response. The brain is an instrument of the mind, but it is a very convincing one. All that we really know about the brain is that it creates our perception, our thinking, and our motor activity. But these are powerful things. On the material plane, the brain is our only way of registering reality, and spirit must be filtered through biology.

No one uses the entire brain at once. We select from a range of built-in mechanisms. There are seven of these, as we saw, that directly relate to spiritual experience: 1. Fight-or-flight response 2. Reactive response 3. Restful awareness response 4. Intuitive response 5. Creative response 6. Visionary response 7. Sacred response In the opening chapter I gave a thumbnail description of each, but even in abbreviated form you may have begun to see how much of your own spiritual life is based on habitual or even unconscious reflex: Fight or flight is a primitive, atavistic response to protect yourself, inherited from animals. It energizes the body to meet outside danger and threat. This is the reflex that sends a mother into a burning house to save her child.

The reactive response makes us defend our ego and its needs. When we compete and seek to rise above others, we automatically look out for "me"

as opposed to "the other." This is the reflex that fuels the stock market, political parties, and religious conflict.

Restful awareness is the first step away from outside forces. This response brings inner calm in the face of chaos or threats. We turn to it in prayer and meditation.

The intuitive response calls upon the inner world for more than peace and calm. We ask inside for answers and solutions. This state is a.s.sociated with synchronicity, flashes of insight, and religious awakening.

The creative response breaks free from old patterns. It gives up the known to explore the unknown. Creativity is synonymous with the flow of inspiration.

The visionary response embraces a universal "me" in place of the isolated ego. It looks beyond all boundaries and is not fixed by the laws of nature that limit earlier stages. Miracles become possible for the first time.