Brotherhood Dharma, Destiny and the American Dream (38 page)

The Western doctor said that he would attack her inflammation with steroids and proceed with higher doses and various medications depending on how her symptoms responded. The acupuncturist on the panel said that her condition depended on several meridian
points that he could treat. The naturopath said that he would begin by examining her mouth, since he suspected that she might have mercury fillings in her teeth.

When it came to David’s turn, he offered no treatment. He came down from the dais and sat next to the woman, taking her hand.

“Tell me, when did you first feel this pain?” he asked. He had detected something elusive about her complaint. At that moment she burst into tears and unfolded a dreadful story. Her young son had died in an automobile crash, and soon after she began to feel abdominal pain. This increased when his estate fell into the hands of lawyers, whose unending battles led to enormous expenses. It had gotten to the point that she could no longer afford her mortgage payments, and meanwhile, her sense of shock and grief was overwhelming.

David listened to the woman, and as her rage and sorrow poured out, something cathartic seemed to be happening. David looked up at the audience.

“You all see what we should be treating? Her body is inflamed, her emotions are inflamed. These pent-up energies have made her sick.”

With some irony I can point out that all the things we prescribed in the early Nineties—diet, exercise, yoga, meditation, etc.—are now covered by Medicare in various parts of the system. More importantly, it has become accepted that the mind-body connection is vital. Hundreds of genes are affected by lifestyle changes. But when we reached out to other Sharp doctors—referrals from them would have been very helpful—one attending patiently explained, “Around here, we call what you do hucksterism.”

After two years David and I left Sharp, no doubt to their general relief, and we opened our own center in La Jolla. It was a point of pride that the place would be called a center for well-being. We intended to practice higher medicine. Like me, David fervently wanted this dream to come true. He also pointed out that it wouldn’t hurt if we prayed for more customers.

The first time that most Americans learned of my existence was when I appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s television show in 1993, invited to talk
about “the new old age.” The concept itself wasn’t new. Longevity has been a sliding bar since civilization began, with people living longer for all kinds of reasons. These were external for the most part: between them, better sanitation and the rise of modern medicine played the biggest part. But the new old age is different. It came about through rising expectations. Instead of expecting to become useless and feeble around age sixty-five and then going downhill from there, the baby boomer generation reframed old age as an extension of middle age, and possibly better. It would be an active time, when physical and mental vigor is maintained, and free of the stresses of work, retirement would be fulfilling in a new way. People could be free to live the way they had always wanted to.

Oprah didn’t need me to tell her audience things that were already being widely publicized. To a statistician the new old age was just a matter of creeping numbers. Baby boomers had already experienced unprecedented good health; their parents and grandparents had lived longer than previous generations. There was no reason for the trend not to continue. But I leaped in to promote a more radical idea. Aging is a mirror of a person’s consciousness. There is no biological imperative that cuts off human longevity. Our bodies respond to every kind of input, and the more consciously you respond, the better you will age.

Because aging hits home with everyone eventually, my idea caught on. Oprah was at the height of her influence—she also has a deep streak of spiritual seeking, as I discovered when we became close allies almost twenty years later. By having me on her show, she turned my book
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
into a bestseller. Many more people began to shout “Deepak!” when I was walking down the street. But for me the whole issue of aging was the opening wedge in my campaign to reinvent the body.

It was the perfect issue. Although everyone ages, no one dies of old age per se. It’s not a disease. At the moment of death, more than 99 percent of a person’s genes are intact, and if a key system of the body hadn’t broken down (typically the respiratory or cardiovascular system), more than 90 percent of cells could keep on living. It isn’t
even clear why aging should exist. The theory that we are genetically programmed to age is countered by the theory that genes become distorted through accidental mutations or outside damage.

Finding an answer to the mystery wasn’t necessary, however, if I could outline a way to keep aging at bay. A famous saying of the Buddha is that when you find yourself in a burning house, you should find a way to run out as fast as you can; you shouldn’t wait to find out how the fire started. Aging is like a house burning down very, very slowly, at about 1 percent a year, the average rate that people age after they turn thirty. One thing is certain in the midst of much uncertainty. Every cell participates in how we live, eavesdropping on every thought, empathizing with every feeling, taking the brunt of every decision. No part of the body gets to opt out when you take a drink; alcohol permeates the system. Yet so does depression; so does stress.

Conscious aging makes the best sense because the new old age is already a change in consciousness. It’s good for ninety-year-olds to go to the gym to keep their muscles from wasting away. This fact has always been true. What has kept ninety-year-olds from lifting weights or running on a treadmill was psychological: The whole thing was unthinkable, risky, or just not done. Aging as a whole can be reduced to one thing, the feedback loop that governs your body every minute you are alive. You receive inputs from every direction; your body responds. Into this automatic exchange you can either insert yourself as a conscious agent or not. Reinventing the body comes down to inserting yourself as the body’s leader, the force that issues orders based on life-supporting beliefs.

As I write, the radical concept behind
Ageless Body, Timeless Mind
has become commonplace—almost. The envelope keeps moving. It has been well established that positive lifestyle choices, in terms of exercise, diet, meditation, and stress, cause profound biological changes, down to the level of our genes. One physical marker for aging is the fraying of telomeres, which are the tail end of each chromosome. In young people telomeres are long; they cap the chromosome like the period at the end of a sentence, keeping its structure firmly intact. In older people telomeres appear to be shortened, as if the
genetic sentence is left dangling. The more a chromosome frays, the more a cell shows signs of aging. Yet it would seem that meditation increases the enzyme telomerase, which is critical for maintaining long telomeres.

By bits and pieces, the inevitability of aging has been pushed back. But that’s not good enough. What’s the point of reinventing the body? To regain something invisible, precious, and elusive: writing your own destiny. Each of us should be the author of our own lives. We are not meant to let biology write our destiny, or even karma. Karma is the accumulation of unconscious acts that return to bite us. Inject consciousness into the whole system—mind, body, and spirit—and the same thing always happens. Human beings become more human and acquire a sense of deeper being. Aging won’t be solved until the most outrageous idea from ancient India turns into a cliché. The idea was expressed by perhaps the most eminent sage of Vedanta, Adi Shankara, when he wrote that “people grow old and die because they see others grow old and die.”

To make this declaration less outrageous is within reach. But someone as persistent as me has to kick over the apple cart. All kinds of cherished beliefs need to roll into the gutter. The belief that aging is a curse, that the individual has no control over it, that dementia and memory loss are a roll of the dice, that cancer is looming in your future and cannot be stopped—all of these outworn beliefs are already shifting. They need to roll into the gutter once and for all.

God has been strikingly absent from this story so far. My life could be rewritten exclusively in terms of God, but that would require shifting gears. Everyone lives in more than one dimension. At the level of everyday life we pay attention to events around us. It matters deeply how we earn a living, raise a family, and handle the challenges that come our way before they become crises. Yet at a second level we intuit that something very different is going on. If you see your life only in terms of everyday events, spirituality can seem totally alien.

Put yourself in the place of a shepherd, stone mason, or farmer on the northern shore of the Sea of Galilee two thousand years ago. You
climb a hill in the hot sun, joining a group of listeners whose eyes are fixed on a wandering rabbi sitting under a tree. He begins to tell you certain truths that he has heard from God: Providence takes care of a fallen sparrow, so how much more will Providence take care of you? You are beloved of your Father in Heaven. Store up your goods with him—that is far better than storing up wheat in a granary. The birds of the air do not toil. The flowers in the field do not spin thread, and yet Solomon in all his glory is not arrayed as they are.

You would be inspired, but wouldn’t your reason rebel at the same time? Farmers who don’t store wheat over the winter will starve. Weavers who stop making cloth will go naked. The mystery of doing as Jesus advised—being in the world but not of it—isn’t peculiar to Christianity. Every spiritual tradition poses the same mystery, which comes down to surviving in this world while obeying the demands of a higher world.

The mystery can be solved only in consciousness. Is it possible to be aware of who you are in the world while also knowing your soul? I spent a long time too spooked about the whole issue to write about it. It was a point of pride that I didn’t use the words “God” or “soul” in the first few books I wrote, simply to escape their associations with organized religion. When a wit said, “God handed down the truth, and the Devil said, ‘Let me organize it,’” I laughed and nodded my head. But once you cross over from mind and body to spirit, there’s no hiding behind terminology. God has to be faced.

One thing meditation shows, very directly and personally, is that the mind is more than a daily stream of thoughts and sensations. There is a deeper level of silence, and every spiritual tradition points to it. Silence in itself seems to have no value, but it has overwhelming importance if it is our source. “Be still and know that I am God” only makes sense if stillness is pregnant with the divine. Christ echoes the Old Testament with “the Kingdom of Heaven is within.” This implies that you can pay attention to your life from a superficial level of the mind or from a deeper level. I became fond of a simple term, “second attention,” to describe this deeper level of awareness.

You could ignore every event in my life if you went from first attention
to second attention. Every question would change. Instead of “What’s happening?” you’d ask “Why is it happening?” Second attention is about the meaning of life. First attention is about labels: name, address, college, occupation, bank account, spouse’s name, and so on. It’s not just in America that these labels, which are attached to externals, are considered the right way to make your life meaningful. India, especially the new BRIC-certified India (after it joined fast-growing Brazil, Russia, and China as an enviable economy), espouses the same values.

Materialism is a path. There is nothing immoral about this path, but as a substitute for God it reaches the wrong destination. I once saw a multipart documentary on public television about the search for God. The host, who was very British and civilized, went around the world asking people if they had experienced God. He sat in gospel church pews and swayed with the music. He interviewed an African tribesman who had not only experienced God but could also draw his picture (the deity has a spiky black beard and very bushy eyebrows). In the last episode, after his trek is over, the host asks himself if he believes that God exists. He does, because his definition of God has shifted. God is whatever you worship with deep devotion. Therefore, to a rabid soccer fan, soccer is God.

As I was blending into American culture, the animus against a foreigner who dared to challenge Christianity was disturbing—and misplaced. (I’ve written two sympathetic books about Jesus.) But the real issue came down to showing the difference between religion and spirituality. America is supposedly the most churchgoing of developed nations. Up to 40 percent of the population attends religious services as compared to around 10 percent in England and Scandinavia. But churchgoing, as I saw it, was primarily social. It showed that you conformed to the norm of religious worship, which means that you accept groupthink. You define God secondhand, through revelations given to prophets and teachers many centuries ago.

Spirituality is firsthand experience. It takes you on an inner journey from hope and faith to real knowledge that no one else has spoon-fed you. For someone who holds this view, my timing was right. Millions
of Americans were quietly walking away from the faith they were brought up in. They no longer believed in the old verities, yet their yearning for God and the soul hadn’t died—far from it. Being on the spiritual path, trying to wake up, seeking God in odd corners of the world, perhaps even aiming at enlightenment, all of these became far more common and acceptable.

It was very annoying to religionists, the churchmen and rabbis who didn’t want the altars to topple. Yet I found pockets of openness, sometimes at places you’d expect, like the liberal divinity schools of the Ivy League, but also among some Jesuits. They wanted to sharpen their reasoning about Christ by understanding my logic. After several years speaking to every kind of audience, I set down my best argument in a book:
How to Know God.

God, I began, has pulled off the neat trick of being worshipped and invisible at the same time. He is accepted without direct experience, feared without knowing if he even exists. So in practical terms one must ask if God makes a difference. If you followed a believer all his life with a video camera mounted on his shoulder and an atheist outfitted the same way, would their lives turn out any differently? In other words, God can only be known by the difference he makes. Drinking water ends thirst. Eating food ends hunger. What does worshipping God do for you?