HOW TO “LET LIFE LIVE THROUGH YOU”

There’s a profound idea behind the Sufi poet Rumi’s phrase, “letting life live through you.” It refers to gaining power through surrender, which sounds like a contradiction. Sitting passively and letting things happen seems like a recipe for being powerless. And that’s true, but Rumi meant something else.

Packed into his statement are some assumptions about the nature of life. The first and most important is that life is selfsufficient. It can take care of itself. That’s certainly true of every life form from one-celled micro-organisms up to higher primates. No loving creature besides Homo sapiens can think about the nature of life. An amoeba is free to be an amoeba, a tiger a tiger, a chimpanzee a chimpanzee because every process required to maintain its species is completely taken care of by its DNA.

Nothing in human DNA sets us free to make our own choices, yet somehow we do; even the genes responsible for our higher brain, which is the most developed among living things, is a recipe for building nerve cells, not an instruction manual for how to use those cells. Neuroscience assures us that everything about the mind will eventually be traced to the structure of the brain, but that’s like saying that if you analyze every cell in Shakespeare’s brain you will find the text of Hamlet and King Lear.

Most people, I think, would accept Rumi’s assumption that life can take care of itself at the level of cells and DNA, and they’d have no trouble acknowledging that human beings are designed to freely make all the choices, large and small, that make up daily life.

The problem is that these two things don’t fit together. The human brain operates by chemical and electrical processes that are fixed by the laws of physics and chemistry. There is no room for freedom of choice. Potassium ions being exchanged across the membrane of a neuron have no capacity to think about the future or store memories of the past. Yet we do both things all the time. We also can tell the difference between dream, imagination, and reality; we know that an image in the mind’s eye isn’t the same as an image entering the physical eye through the optic nerve; we enjoy 3-D movies without believing that we are viewing the 3-D world.

Rumi solves this disparity by assuming that life silently takes care of the mind as well as cells and DNA. In fact, there is no division between life and mind. Consciousness permeates both. Rumi isn’t alone in accepting that there is nothing, either “in here” or “out there,’ that isn’t consciousness. Therefore, when he advises us to let life live through us, he is promising that life can take care of everything because it is only taking care of itself.

But if that’s true, why isn’t life already on the job? What about major problems like pain and suffering, bad karma, accidents, self-destructive behavior, abusive relationships, violent crime, prejudice, and wars? It seems very likely that letting life live through you will only make you helpless to deal with these age-old problems. On the plus side letting life live through you implies openness, acceptance, non-judgment, and peacefulness, which are all desirable. On the negative side, Evil and violence alone, not to mention the other bad aspects of human nature, aren’t solved. The potential threat seems to outweigh the rewards.

But Rumi isn’t advocating turning the other cheek. It might be clearer to say, “Let life live through you in all its fullness, making the right choices according to each situation.” You would still defend your country and ask for protection from crime, just as you’d still take out accident insurance and tend to your blood pressure. What changes runs deeper than everyday behavior.

First, you stop putting up resistance motivated by fear. You test “yes” before you automatically say “no.” Second, you stop reacting in an automatic reflexive way. Instead, you pause and let your mind bring a more considered response. You start listening to the people around you instead of taking responsibility for every decision, and you pay those people respect. You assume that a solution is always possible, which defeats defeatism.

You can practice these changes to see how they work out. The common theme that runs through them is to stop and listen more attentively to your inner self instead of your ego. A choice made from the state of centered calmness indicates that you are bypassing the ego’s snap judgments, putting yourself in a place of equilibrium from which solutions emerge with less resistance. Once you get into the habit of doing this or simply saying, “Let me think about that, okay,” you are allowing a deeper intelligence to connect with you.

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY THE AUTHOR ARE PERSONAL

Deepak Chopra The writer is MD, FACP, FRCP founder of the Chopra Foundation, a non-profit entity for research on well-being and humanitarianism, and Chopra Global