“The mind is an iceberg. It floats with only one-seventh of its bulk above water.”
— Sigmund Freud
One night my wife and I, who had bought tickets to see the incomparable Martin Short perform a one-man show at the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, Florida, were given $20 apiece in chips as a perk for purchasing the tickets. The stipulation was that we could only gamble them on slot machines. I’m not a gambler, but it doesn’t take one to know that these one-eyed bandits are the hardest places to win at in any casino. But, heck, we had 20 bucks apiece in chips to play for free before the show started. They couldn’t even be redeemed for $20 in cash, so, we figured that we might as well play.
My wife won a few dollars and then finally quit. I was having far better luck. Before you knew it, I was up $10, then $30, then $60 and so on. Up $60, I put the $20 in chips in my pocket, so that I couldn’t lose; I was now having fun playing with house money. Eventually, my winnings soared to about $135, and then I decided to quit. I had, by that time, won enough money for my wife and I to see Martin Short for free, courtesy of Lady Luck.
Higher consciousness is a lot like playing with house money. The sense of its freedom is so profound, that the sense of unshakability is so palpable. Once you realized that your Self is in the field of the Transcendent, you also experience that you cannot be touched by anything in the world that we know. In other words, no matter what happens, you cannot lose your Self. It doesn’t mean that you don’t experience sadness when things happen that hurt the heart; it’s just that nothing can hurt your true Self. Another way of saying it is no matter what happens in life you cannot lose. And most of what happens adds another layer of joy to the unshakeable peace that is your daily moment-by-moment experience—24/7, as we saw in previous chapters.
As a result, there’s a feeling of great freedom, freedom to be spontaneous, freedom to express yourself, freedom to play. While the expression, “Playing with house money,” is a good analogy it is for higher consciousness, after all, only an analogy—it doesn’t come close to expressing the inner condition of the realized man. It reminds me of the time I spent five months with Maharishi on an advanced training course called the TM-Sidhi program in San Moritz, Switzerland. Every now and then I would send these gorgeous postcards home to those whom I loved—this was long before the advent of email, attachments, and the Internet--and would usually say something on the card along the lines of “No matter how beautiful the front of this postcard is, it doesn’t do justice to the sheer sublime beauty that are the Swiss Alps.” The advent of email, attachments and the Internet haven’t changed that fact one iota.
When I was a boy, my friends and I used to play a game that was a variation of Tag, called Ringolevio. There was an expression that we used to shout when we were able to free others who were in “jail.” That expression was “Home free all.” And, in a certain sense, higher consciousness is a state where you are both home and free, and for all time—on a 24/7 basis.