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Excerpts

Introduction: Asking All the Right Questions

Turn on the TV any day of the week. What do you see? Teens glued to a video game or hanging out in shopping malls. Teens who hate school and make fun of anyone who is different from them. And when they try to be funny, teens come off as too smart for their teachers and too cool for their parents.

In other words, they have no soul.

But my experience tells a very different story. Teenagers worry about their souls more than any other group. Life is a riddle they are eager to solve but also feel troubled by. Teens really want to know who they are. They are old enough not to accept the stories given to children when the big questions come up:

Where's my life going?

Does God really exist?

Why does he allow so many bad things to happen?

Do I matter?

How am I ever going to make a difference?

Since you are a teenager holding this book in your hands, all these questions have run through your mind at some time. But I bet that since you first asked them, somewhere back in your childhood, most of the answers you received aren't that helpful anymore.

This isn't a book about Grandma going to heaven when she dies or God frowning down on you when you swipe cookies from the cookie jar. Whenever I talk with teenagers, they report having heard things like this as a child. They discovered something that's very true: Adults squirm when the big questions come up, especially the big spiritual ones. They don't want their kids to worry, so they give answers that all say one thing: "Don't worry. It's all okay."

And yet the big questions still keep coming up. At every age we all need to know what life is really all about. Not just on the surface, but deep down.

Teenagers are no exception. They deserve a spiritual life all their own. One that offers the kind of comfort we hope to give our children, but is different at the same time. More full of ideas. More mature. More fitting for the whole wide future that lies ahead.

That's what I've tried to do in this book, as fully and as honestly as possible. Not all the answers are nice answers. Does God let bad things happen? Yes; not always, but quite a lot of the time. Does that mean he is cruel? No, but you're really going to have to think, because a person who sits back and lets bad things happen is often cruel. Why is God different from a person, then? Let's talk about it.

That's the kind of discussion you are going to find in these pages -- challenging but not delivered in big words or nice thoughts that aren't really all true. It's based on the questions teenagers actually ask me. Some were asked in person, at public talks. Others were asked around the dinner table, because my son and daughter, Gotham and Mallika, were full of questions when they were teenagers (they're now adults and happily married, with families of their own). The remaining questions were submitted over the Internet, where a Web site was set up to invite teenagers to ask anything they wanted to know about spirituality.

So here it is, the thing you asked for. Not just answers to the big questions, but a guide to spirit as seen through the eyes of teenagers, a special group in society that deserves a spiritual life different from anyone's before or since. I salute your uniqueness and invite you to read on.

Copyright & © 2006 by Deepak Chopra