In a world so filled with tender magic—from sleeping infants to children playing, to lovers smiling, to friendships that last, to flowers blooming, to the violet hope of sunrise, to the fiery magnificence of sunset, to the brilliance of the body, to the fragile glories of nature, to the wonder of animals, to our capacity to forgive, to the mercy of God, to the kindness of strangers, and a list that could go on and on until it’s clear that there really is no end to the manifold expressions of love on earth—there is, as well, something else.
And what is that?
Why—in a world where we can be moved to tears by a work of art—does there also exist molestation, rape, innocents with slit throats, unjustly held prisoners, starving children, torture, genocide, war, slavery, and all manner of horrific and unnecessary suffering that exists for no other reason than that someone is cruel enough to inflict it or someone else doesn’t care enough to stop it? What force exists, in our minds and in our world, that proactively and seemingly inexorably moves to cause the suffering and destruction of living things?
Why, if God is love, does evil exist?
We live in a world of constant juxtaposition between joy that’s possible and pain that’s all too common. We hope for love and success and abundance, but we never quite forget that there is always lurking the possibility of disaster. We know there is good in the world, but we know that there is something else as well. And we are living at a time when a contest between the two is both intense and intensifying. Whatever it is that leads human beings to hate, to destroy, and to kill has taken on a collective force like never before, as technology and globalization now give it the capacity to not just strike, but to strike us all, together, as one. Never has there been such an urgent need to dismantle this force, whatever it is, that is so contemptuous of love and intent on destroying us all. This is not just a force that seeks to inconvenience us. It is a force that wishes to see us dead.
Yet this force is in fact an antiforce. It does not so much do anything, as it gets us to do its bidding. It is a place where we have forgotten who we are, and thus act as we are not. It is a darkness that, like all darkness, is not an actual presence, but is rather the absence of light. It is a black hole in psychic space that exists when light is unseen for even a moment. And the only true light is love.
The problem of what to do with this darkness—called by many names but here termed the “shadow”—is a question that has plagued humanity since its earliest beginnings. There has never been, that we know of, a community or civilization on earth in which love prevailed at all times. Yet we continue to dream of it. Such a state, according to certain religions of the world, is called paradise. Certain religious and spiritual texts suggest we have an ancient memory of such a state, though this state was not of the earth at all. It was our spiritual beginnings, a dimension of pure love whence we come and to which we passionately long to return. The fact that we live at times, even most of the time, so separated from this state of pure love is a psychic rupture of such intense proportions as to traumatize us every moment of our lives. Just as the planet moves so fast that we can’t even feel we’re moving, we’re traumatized at such a deep level that we don’t even know we’re in trauma.
Separated from love, we are separated from God. Separated from God, we are separated from ourselves. And separated from ourselves, we are insane.
In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The problem with the world is that humanity is not in its right mind.” That is the problem with the world, indeed. There is a place we go into, both individually and collectively, that is the absence of who and what we are and what we are here to do. It is an inversion of our power, a perversion of our identity, and a subversion of our mission on earth.
The problem is this is not so obvious when we are actually there, for it is a place of gross, cosmic confusion. We are prone to feel, when we are separated from love, that our anger is justified, our blaming another is only reasonable, and our attacking someone is in righteous self-defense even when it is not. Either that, or worse. At times, a person—sometimes even whole nations—can become so sucked into the black hole of lovelessness as to be at the effect of its most extreme, even heinous intentions, for this thing, which is actually a no-thing, is not inert. Human consciousness is like a pilot light that never goes off. The problem is it is used to create either a life-producing heat or a life-destroying conflagration. Where there is no love, there is fear. And fear, once it has gripped the mind, is like a vice that threatens to crush the soul.
So that’s what it is, this thing we call the shadow. It does not appear, in most of our lives, as a gigantic fire, but simply as a slow burn. It is you when you make the stupid remark, hurting someone you love and possibly ruining a relationship. Or you when you do the stupid thing that sabotages your career. Or you when you pick up the drink, although you know you’re an alcoholic and that if you continue doing this it will kill you. In other words, it is the you within you that does not wish you well. It is your shadow, and it can only be eliminated by shining forth your light.
God’s love both dwells within us and extends out from us every moment of every day. When we are living in alignment with our true selves as God created us, we receive love constantly and then extend it outward as we have received it. That is what it means to live in the light.
Yet as commonsensical as this sounds, it does not feel like common sense when someone has behaved in a way that seems undeserving of our love. At such a moment, extending our love to that person feels like the wrong thing to do, and withholding our love feels right. That moment—that little bit of unloving thought that seems like just a tiny thing, just a reasonable judgment—is the root of all evil. It is the cornerstone of the shadow’s thought system, for it involves a separation from God and a casting of blame. God never withholds love, and we achieve sanity by learning to love as God loves.
Our task, if we are to cast out the shadow, is to learn to think only immortal thoughts, even though we live on the mortal plane. Our higher thought forms will lift the frequency of the planet, and the world will then transform.
But what about now? What makes us forget who we are, thus turning off the light and splitting the world into two separate states—love and fear? It is one thought: that someone is guilty. How we deal with human imperfection is the essential question that decides whether we dwell in the shadow or in light.
God does not look at a person who has made a mistake the same way we do. God does not seek to punish us when we have made mistakes, but to correct us. When we return to our right minds, loving unconditionally and unwaveringly, then the world itself will self-correct.
That does not mean we lose discernment, boundaries, or brain cells. Divine love is not a weakness. God’s love is not a gooey love. It’s not even always “nice,” in a kind of pink, fuzzy way. It involves radical truth telling, the kind of truth that the heart knows even when the mind resists it. It has less to do with style and more to do with substance. There are ways to very sweetly withhold love, putting too much emphasis on a half-baked understanding of the words “positive” and “supportive” and there are ways to extend love with a kind of harshly realistic honesty that only appears, much later, to have been love at all.
It is time for all of us to get deeply serious about love. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., it is time to inject “new meaning into the veins of human civilization.” We need to expand our sense of love beyond the personal, to its social and political implications as well. Only in doing so will we cast out darkness that now hangs like a specter above the world. Living in the darkness, we are living in the shadow. And in the shadow, suffering reigns.
IT MIGHT NOT BE REAL, BUT IT SURE LOOKS REAL
Sometimes you have a fight with someone you love and you can’t even believe it’s happening. It feels like a nightmare. You actually hear yourself saying, “This can’t be happening!” And that’s because it isn’t—you are lost in a parallel universe, a hallucination of separation and conflict.
Years ago, I told myself not to worry about the Devil, because that was all in my mind. And then I remember what happened next. I simply stood there, stopped in my tracks by the thought that, in fact, that was the worst place it could possibly be. I’m not so much comforted by the idea that there’s no Devil out there stalking the planet for my soul, as staggered by the idea that there is an ever-present tendency within my own thinking to perceive without love and thus make myself miserable.
So where did this “tendency” come from? If God is love and love only, and God is all-powerful, then how did a counterforce ever come into being?
The answer, metaphysically, is that actually it did not. Nothing but God’s love exists, and in the words of A Course in Miracles, “What is all-encompassing can have no opposite.” The operative reason for how an illusory world that actually does not exist but seems so strongly to exist came into being is the principle of free will.
We can think whatever we want to think. Our thoughts, however, have power no matter what we think, because our creative power comes from God. The law of cause and effect guarantees that we will experience the result of whatever it is we choose to think. When we think with love, we are cocreating with God and therefore cocreate more love. When we think without love, however, we manufacture fear. What that means is that we have split minds. One part of us dwells in the light, eternally at one with God’s love. Yet another part of us—a part most often aligned with the mortal world—dwells in darkness. And that is the shadow self.
God doesn’t see the shadow because, not being love, it does not actually exist. Yet being all-love Himself, He registered our suffering when we fell into the darkness and provided for us an instantaneous healing. In that moment, He created a loving alternative to our self-imposed insanity and fear. This alternative is like a divine ambassador that dwells with us in the world of darkness, always available to lead us back to light, should we request it. This ambassador has many names, from Thought Adjuster to the Holy Spirit. For our purposes here, we will call it the Illuminator.
In A Course in Miracles, it is said that we are not perfect or that we would not have been born—but that it is our mission to become perfect here. It is our mission to transcend the shadow and become our true self. The Illuminator acts as a bridge between our shadow self and our light. It has been empowered by God to use all the forces of heaven and earth to lead us out of the darkness back into light. It does so first and foremost by reminding us that the darkness is not real. When we are lost in the darkness, our greatest power lies in calling on the Illuminator, whose task is to separate truth from illusion. We do this through prayer, and through willingness. “I’m willing to see this differently” is a sentence that gives the Illuminator permission to enter into our thought system and lead us from insanity back to truth.
A few years ago I went to visit a friend, who already had several close girlfriends at her home when I arrived. One woman in the group had a manner of speaking that seemed to me very grandiose, so much so that every time she spoke I felt as if someone were running fingernails across a blackboard. Obviously my mind was wild with judgment, as I could not understand how someone could possibly be so affected in the way she spoke.
As a seeker on the path, I knew that the problem was not with the woman, but within myself—my own lack of compassion. I inwardly said a prayer and expressed my willingness to see her differently. Almost instantly, or so it seemed to me, one of the other women in the room said to the woman whom I’d been judging so fiercely, “I heard your father is being let out of prison. Is that true?”
As I listened, I heard her story unfold. Although I don’t remember all the specifics, I do remember that this woman had been held captive by her own father throughout much of her childhood in the basement of their home. She had eventually been rescued, and her father had gone to jail for many years. Hearing of this woman’s suffering, I realized why she spoke the way she did. She literally had no model of a healthy adult persona growing up; she didn’t even know how to speak in a natural way and was doing her best to piece together what she considered a normal personality. The same mannerisms that had aroused in me such judgment five minutes earlier now aroused in me deep admiration and compassion. She had not changed, but I had. In praying, I had called forth the light. The Illuminator entered into the world of darkness and delivered me from my shadow self, my judgmental self, by giving me the piece of information that would replace my thoughts of fear with thoughts of love.
And where, in this lifetime, had I gotten my tendency to judge so harshly to begin with? From a metaphysical perspective, I was not born with it. We are not born in original sin, or error, but in fundamental and primal innocence.
I seem to have a very powerful birth memory. I can’t know of course whether it’s actually true, but I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. I even remember seeing the light fixture that hangs over operating tables, which adds to my feeling that this might be true. According to the memory, I came into this world with an infinite amount of love to give, beyond anything I’ve allowed myself to feel since.
But this was in 1952, when doctors still thought they were supposed to slap newborn babies to get them to breathe. So just as I felt this extraordinary love beaming out of me to all living things, in the very next moment I felt myself slapped. The doctor, whom I already loved, had hit me. I remember being absolutely and totally confused, hurt, and traumatized. Why would he do that? I just could not believe that this had happened. And then my mind went blank. I descended into whatever I descended into, and that was that.
That memory, or whatever it is, speaks to the question of whether we are born with the shadow. The answer is no, we are born in perfect love. But whoever we are and whatever we have been through, something or someone—often with the best of intentions—casts us into the realm of shadow, and the task of the rest of our lives will be to exit the darkness and return to light.
From that one moment as a newborn—that one traumatic split from love that reenacted within me the separation of all humanity from the love at our core—I would be forever tempted to lose sight of love. Having been denied love, even for a moment, I am now tempted to deny love to others. And the purpose of my life, as it is the purpose of all our lives, is to remember the love within me by remembering its presence in everyone else.
The woman at my friend’s house, admirable though she was, tempted me at first to judgment. But I asked for help, and I was given it. As soon as I was willing to see the light in her, my own light returned. And the shadow was gone.
WHERE THERE’S NO LOVE, EXPECT FEAR
Any thought not filled with love is an invitation for the shadow to enter. We are led to believe in the myth of neutrality: that we don’t really need to love as long as we don’t actively do harm. But every thought either heals or harms. The infinitely creative power of thought guarantees that whatever we choose to think will result in an effect. If I do not choose to love—if I choose to withhold my love at all—then in that moment there is created a psychic void. And fear will rush in to fill the space.
This applies to my thoughts about others and to my thoughts about myself. Having focused on aspects of someone else’s shadow, I cannot but enter my own: the angry one, the controlling one, the needy one, the dishonest one, the manipulative one, and so forth. Once I enter the darkness of blame and judgment, I’m blinded to my own light and cannot find my better self.
Or having forgotten the essential truth of my own being—not appreciating myself by appreciating the divine light that dwells within me—I fall easily into the trap of self-destructive behavior. I engage in whatever form of self-sabotage will make others forget, as I have forgotten, who I really am. Whether we are attacking others or attacking ourselves, the shadow provides the temptation to thoughts of destruction and insanity.
The mind in its natural state is in constant communion with the spirit of love. But the shadow, like love, has its ambassadors within us—thoughts that lure us constantly to perceive in a loveless way. “He said he would hire me and he didn’t; he is such a bastard.” “Her politics disgust me; I can’t stand her.” “Eat the whole cake; it doesn’t matter what the doctor said.” “It doesn’t matter if you keep that money; they will never know.” The world is dominated by thoughts of fear, and we are constantly fortified in our shadow beliefs.
In the absence of prayer or meditation—an experience of shared love between Creator and the created—we are easily tempted to perceive without love, thus entering the shadow zone within ourselves. Whether we are projecting guilt onto others, actually harming another, or engaging in addictive or self-hating behavior that hurts primarily ourselves, the shadow exerts an ugly influence.
Yet why should we be surprised? Most of us wake up in the morning and, in effect, surrender our minds to darkness. The first thing we do is turn on the computer, read the newspaper, or turn on radio or television news. We download thought forms of fear from literally all over the world, allowing our minds, at a time when they are most open to new impressions, to be influenced by the fear-based thinking that dominates our culture. Of course we respond from shadow, for all we’ve looked at is shadow! Of course we feel depressed, unhappy, out of sorts, and cynical. The world is dominated by fear-based thinking, and on the mortal plane fear speaks first and fear speaks loudest. There’s no darkness to analyze here, so much as light we need to turn on! In order to avoid the clutches of the shadow, we must constantly reach for the light.
The voice of love is called in both Judaism and Christianity the “still, small voice” for God. That is the voice of the Illuminator, and even five minutes of serious meditation in the morning can guarantee that it will guide our thinking throughout the day. How much better this world would be if more of us would cultivate the sacred in our daily lives. Our busyness is often our enemy, making it hard for us to slow down long enough to breathe in the ethers of the spiritual planes. Just as we sometimes sit in front of our computers while a file is downloading, knowing there’s nothing we can do to rush the process, so there is no way to simply give a quick nod to love as we rush out the door in the morning and expect the realms of darkness and fear to not invade our day.
In slowing down, we’re more likely to cultivate quiet. Our modern lifestyle is too often prey to shadow thoughts for no other reason than that it’s too noisy. Too much television, too much computer, too much outer stimulation diminishes the light that is found only in reflective and contemplative thought. Silence is an attitudinal muscle we build up, giving us the capacity to more easily transform the energies conjured up by the shadow self.
Another way to cultivate light is to commune with others in a holy space. In spiritual groups joined in love and devotion—religious or otherwise—a field of love is magnified so that it lifts all members in the group up to a higher vibration. When you are at church, synagogue, twelve-step meetings, or other group meditations, listening to your heart seems natural. Your shadow self seems far away, neither evident nor triggered. The temptation to enter your shadow still exists and needs to be dealt with, but one of the ways the shadow is diminished is by joining with others in the search for light.
When we’re with other people who are saying, “I want to listen to my heart, I need to ask what the most loving thing would be, I want to be ethical, I want to hear God’s voice,” then it becomes easier to live that way. Like any habit, it becomes easier to cultivate when we’re around others doing the same. In developing the habits of spiritual practice, you ground yourself in the light of your true being. If you do not so ground yourself, do not be surprised when you say or do things that you later regret.
On an average day in the life of an average person, the number of shadow thoughts that come up is astronomical. We do our best, we try to be good, but our brain is constantly active, and the tendency toward fear-based thought is always there. But the Illuminator is there as well. And the Illuminator is authorized by God to give us whatever help we need.
Talking to my therapist one day, I was sharing with him that I felt in a very negative place. I told him I was in a place of self-loathing.
He asked me, “What is your case against yourself?”
I said, “I hate myself because I’m so negative.” I could see the irony, but I couldn’t laugh. Or maybe I did.
He suggested that I try something. “Be in the flow of gratitude,” he said. “Whenever you are having that kind of negative thought, go into naming all the things you have to be grateful for.”
And I found that technique to be very powerful. For hours, I’d been on a rampage of negativity, but as soon as I began the flow of gratitude, it was as though my shadow disappeared the way the Wicked Witch melted when Dorothy threw water on her. And it was the same phenomenon, really. The shadow isn’t even real. It just appears so. And as soon as it’s exposed to light, then the darkness disappears. The problem, then, was not just the presence of my negativity, but the absence of my positivity! As soon as I filled my mind with gratitude, the shadow trait of self-hatred could no longer exist. In the presence of love, fear is gone.
But let us not underestimate the power of the shadow. It’s not enough to just meditate sometimes; we should mediate daily. It’s not enough, if you’re a recovering addict, to attend a meeting every once in a while; you should attend a meeting every day. It’s not enough that we forgive a few people; we must try our best to forgive everyone, for only love is real. If I withhold it from anyone, then I withhold it from myself. And it’s not enough to love only when it’s easy; we must try to expand our capacity to love even when it’s hard.
The shadows that are lurking today, in our own circumstances and around our planet, demand nothing short of sacred illumination if we are to cast them out. And each of us can add to the light by adding to our love. Of course we love our children, but it’s no longer enough to just love our own children. We must learn to love the children on the other side of town and the other side of the world. It’s easy enough to love those who agree with us and treat us well. We must learn to love those with whom we do not agree and who have not necessarily treated us justly. Just as we work to build up our muscles, we must work to expand our capacity to love.
There is only one thing that can triumph over our lower self, our shadow self, and that is our higher self. And the higher self dwells within the highest love of all: the love of our Creator, in whom there is no darkness, no suffering or fear. It is psychologically unrealistic to underestimate the power of the shadow, but it is spiritually immature to underestimate the power of God. Prayer is not just a symbol; it is a force. Meditation is not just something that relaxes us; it is something that harmonizes the energies of the universe. Forgiveness doesn’t just make us feel better; it literally transforms the heart. All the powers that emanate from God are powers that will set us free.
To the shadow, the light is an enemy. But to the light, the shadow is nothing. It simply does not exist.
BY THE WAY, IT’S ON THE MOVE
Consciousness is a dynamic, creative energy. It is not inert, it is not stagnant. It is always expanding in whatever direction it’s moving. Love will always build on love, and fear will always build on fear. The shadow is an inexorable drive toward suffering and pain.
Yet how does this thing—which itself is an illusion, which itself has no life—act as though it does? The answer to that is that although fear itself is not real, the power of thought that carries it is. Fear is like an explosive device, and thought is the missile on which it rides. The mind is created to be a conduit of the divine, delivering explosions of love, but free will means we can direct it otherwise, should we choose.
Your mind is always either extending love or projecting fear as well as subconsciously planning how to do more of the same. The shadow is your own mind turned against yourself. Just as Lucifer was the most beautiful angel in heaven before he fell and a cancer cell was a normal working cell before it went haywire, the shadow is your own thinking turned in the wrong direction. It is your self-hatred masquerading as self-love. Your shadow is as intelligent as you are, because it is your own intelligence co-opted for fear’s purposes. It has all the attributes of life, because it has attached itself to your life. And like all life, it seeks to preserve itself.
Whenever love is near, the shadow becomes particularly active in order to guard against its own demise. It knows that love is its only real enemy. When the shadow senses love, when it senses the light in you, it literally runs for its life. The shadow will try, in whatever way possible, to invalidate, suppress, make wrong the good in you—for it knows that once you remember the light of your true self, it’s gone. And so it fights.
Thus the well-known phrase, “Love brings up everything unlike itself.” You met someone with whom your soul feels is a sacred connection? Beware, you’re likely to do something stupid in that person’s presence. You have an extraordinary chance to manifest your dreams? Beware, you’re likely to sabotage the opportunity. And that is the shadow: the evil twin of your better self.
Until there is a conscious movement away from fear toward love, the dynamic energy of fear will be acting as a destructive force that takes no prisoners. It can lead to something as seemingly small as an incident in which you say something stupid but harmless or as consequential as an action that could actually ruin your life. We should neither underestimate its power nor doubt its viciousness, for the shadow is on a rampage—sometimes in a slow and long drawn-out fashion and sometimes more quickly—but it is always intentional in the direction of pain.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, it is said that alcoholism is a “progressive disease.” What this means is that it will not stay put; if you’ve got a problem with alcohol today, then you’ll have even a bigger problem with it tomorrow unless you deal with it. And its ultimate goal is destruction, even to the point of death. An addiction such as alcoholism isn’t just about alcohol; it’s about the movement of dark energy, a shadow force that plagues both body and soul. And the reason so many millions of addicts have gotten sober through AA is that the program makes it clear that only a spiritual experience can save them. Only God is powerful enough to overcome the shadow, whatever its form.
When Jesus said, in the Bible, that we should be of good cheer for he had “overcome” the world, the word he chose there is particularly fascinating. He didn’t say that he had “fixed” the world. He said that he had “overcome” dark forces, by being lifted to the realm of consciousness where lower thought forms no longer had power to limit him. And that is the shadow’s challenge to us: that we reach so high for the light above—the deep sanity of a higher and more loving perspective—that the shadow itself is rendered powerless.
GROUP SHADOWS
We all recognize the shadow when it takes individual form: a person who is angry, controlling, dishonest, violent, and so forth. But sometimes it’s just as important to recognize the collective shadow of a group. Groups such as nations are made up of individuals; therefore it’s not surprising that the personality characteristics of its members show up in the collective behavior of the group. But what is less obvious is how energy created in a group—whether loving or fearful—is magnified; the energy of two or more minds thinking in the same way is not just the sum of those two. It increases exponentially.
Terrorism is an example. A pathological ideology can spread like a cancer throughout an entire population. Once large enough numbers of people are enrolled in the destructive thought forms that make up the ideology, the force of their combined energy can be truly confounding to even the most technologically advanced purveyors of brute force. The reason this is true is that the actual power of the terrorist threat lies not in its ideological roots, but in the passionate conviction with which so many people are drawn into it. Terrorists have conviction, and therein lies their power. Our power to override their destructive intensity lies in our ability to love with as much conviction as they show in hate. Hating with conviction, they draw forth more hatred; when we love with greater conviction, we will draw forth more love.
Just as no person is perfect, so neither is any group. The shadow hides itself from the conscious awareness of both individual and collective, posing always as the light, although it is the essence of darkness. A quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the shadow of nationalism when posing as patriotism: “When a whole nation is roaring Patriotism at the top of its voice, I am fain to explore the cleanness of its hands and purity of its heart.” It is often when a group is violating its principles the most that it claims to be standing up for them the most enthusiastically. The shadow is sly in the way it covers its tracks, whether using religion as a cover for burning people at the stake or using patriotism as a cover for imperialistic misadventures.
But just as the collective shadow can bring us down, the collective light can bring us up. Any great literature; popular expressions such as fairy tales, films like Avatar, and books like the Harry Potter series; and obviously, genuine religious or spiritual group practice—all are examples of collective beams of light.
In the movie Avatar, the collective shadow of contemporary America is on full display. We see the dangerous marriage of predatory capitalism to the full might of American militarism, an intellectual haughtiness that disallows deference to spiritual principles, an arrogant disregard for the sacredness of the environment, and an imperialistic tendency to take whatever it wants for no other reason than that it wants to. The ugliness of America’s shadow gets a full-on spotlight in this passion play of a film. Yet what lifts the story beyond mere finger-pointing to the level of illumination is its perspicacity regarding the light that is never too far from the shadow.
The Illuminator is always poised to provide an alternative to darkness, drawing loving hearts to the scene of the shadow the way red blood cells are drawn to a wound. Yes, there are characters in the film who represent our worst, but there are also characters who represent our best, and that is important. Within every individual as well as every group, the better angels of our nature do exist. Like darkness, they are on the move (notice that angels are always pictured with wings, while the Devil is not). And in the larger scope of things, the light always wins out in the end. In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., “The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” We can forget the truth, but the universe never does.
Every person and every group of people has a shadow; that does not make us bad. It makes us human. The point is not to hate the shadow, for it is simply our wounded places that need to be healed. But the point is not to deny the shadow either, for darkness is only dispersed when it is brought to light. We must face the shadow, as individuals and as groups; to do so is not an act of self-hate, but of self-love. True pilgrims are those who face their darkness and surrender it to the power of love; true patriots are those who face the darkness of their nation and surrender it to the power of truth.
Even when we are lost in our shadow, there is a part of us that knows better. Even in a group that displays wrong-minded behavior, there are always individuals who hold out for truth—whether Aryan Germans who hid Jews during World War II at the risk of their own lives or the earthlings who heroically came to the defense of the Na’vi citizenry of Pandora in Avatar. There is historical evidence as well as mythical lore that reveal the ultimate triumph of love. The significance of World War II lies not only in the evil of Hitler, but in the brilliance and sacrifice of those who defeated him. The archetypal truth of Avatar lies not only in the violence that was done to the Na’vi, but also in how the violence ended. The ultimate point of great religious stories is not the crucifixion but the resurrection, not the slavery of the Israelites but their deliverance to the Promised Land. Now, in our day and age, with so many shadows threatening, it behooves us to remember that shadows appear very dark, but are as nothing before true light.
This truth can be very hard to accept, when all rational evidence points not only to the reality of the shadow, but also to its permanence. The miracle of illumination, however, does not come from rational evidence; it comes literally from “out of the blue,” a consummate visual symbol for the realms of pure potentiality. The potential for infinite breakthrough emerges when our proactive embrace of the light is even greater than our fear of the dark.
We cannot perceive that light with the body’s eyes. It is a reality that calls for a different kind of seeing. Mortal manifestation is “real,” but only immortal love is “Real.” In the words of Albert Einstein when speaking of the physical world, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
If we identify only with the mortal world, then fear does indeed seem justified. But if we extend our perceptions beyond this world, then we see things in a higher and more hopeful light. We see that it’s programmed into the true nature of things that love will always reassert itself. Although we are doomed to fall into the shadow—to descend into the psychic underworld of our own unhealed places—we are also guaranteed deliverance. The Illuminator is an eternal presence, active not only within the individual heart, but also within the collective psyche. When individuals humble themselves, asking for forgiveness and correction, then mercy arrives. And the same is true for a group. When German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder apologized to the Polish people for the murder of half a million Poles during World War II, and when Pope John Paul II apologized for the Inquisition, such “purification of memory,” as these admissions were described by the late pope, called down a light from the consciousness of heaven and shadows were dispersed.
Individuals are on a path of destiny, and so are groups. Sometimes, we take two steps forward into love and then one step back into the shadow. But the lure of the light is in the final analysis much greater than the lure of the dark.
GOOD INTENTIONS ARE NOT ENOUGH
The modern mind has undeservedly high self-esteem; it is arrogant in its belief that it can simply “decide” what it wants and then make it happen. Yet think of the things that fall away from its grasp: the end to unnecessary suffering, world peace, a healthy planet. Why, in a world so full of genius, does the shadow still lurk and cause the problems it does?
One of the reasons the modern world remains at the effect of the shadow is that it fails to recognize the shadow’s metaphysical roots. Evil is an energy, just as love is an energy. It arises from fear, and fear arises from lovelessness. Trying to eradicate darkness only by material means is to deal with it on the level of effect, but not cause. You can cut off a wart, but it will grow back unless its roots are burned out. And the roots of evil are not material.
But there is a difference between nonmaterial energy that is simply mental and the kind that is spiritual. Many people today have an inflated view of the power of “intention.” But in fact, as it says in A Course in Miracles, your good intentions are not enough. For alcoholics, merely intending to no longer drink will not quite do the trick; merely intending to be a better spouse is not quite enough, if an actual change in behavior is necessary. Yet sometimes the change of behavior that is called for in life is not so easy to achieve. Mere intention to do better can be overridden by the power of the shadow. The shadow can override our best intentions, and only love can override the shadow.
Love is God, and God is love. Whether people call on God using the name “God” or simply give up all resistance to love—in which case God is present, even if unacknowledged—the divine power of love is the only power great enough to cast out evil. Whether it’s the wisdom to know that feeding more of the starving children of the world is one of the best ways to eliminate future terrorist threats, or surrendering our character defects to God for healing and asking that they be removed, there is a deference to the higher power of love without which we cannot overcome the power of fear.
The shadow’s lair is not in your conscious mind, but in your subconscious mind. You don’t consciously decide to do the stupid thing. You don’t consciously decide to say something that would make your spouse hate you. You don’t consciously decide to get drunk at your daughter’s wedding and ruin everything. “The Devil made me do it” is not as unsophisticated a notion as it sounds. Good intentions make the Devil laugh. But what don’t make him laugh are prayer, atonement, forgiveness, and love. Those things make him leave.
Which brings up the question of religion. Why, if religion is a conduit for divine love, does so much evil still lurk in the world and even within its own ranks? How does one of the largest religious institutions in the world come to harbor pedophiles in its priesthood? And the answer of course is that some religion has nothing at all to do with God. In fact, if anything, the shadow—the energetic counterforce to God—loves to play in the fields of religion. It loves to confuse, and it’s definitely confusing to the mind when doctrine or dogma based on love is actually a cover for the grossest lovelessness.
If a religious person hates, God is not present. If an atheist loves, then there He is. As it says in A Course in Miracles, the line in the Bible that “God shall not be mocked” means that He isn’t.
When seeking religious discernment, however, it’s important to not throw out the baby with the bathwater. The Latin root of the word “religion” is religio, which means to “bind back.” Real religion—whether it occurs within the context of an organized institution or a more universal spirituality—reconnects us to the truth of who we are, to the love at our core, and to the compassion that heals. The only way to overcome the shadow is to become our true self, and whatever it is that takes us to that place is in its essence a religious experience. For some people, that is an experience at church, synagogue, mosque, or shrine; for some, it is the experience of a spiritual or psychotherapeutic practice; for some, it is the experience of nature; for some, it is the experience of holding their child in their arms for the first time. The point is not what gets us to the experience, but rather what happens to us and within us once we are there. Something changes in us once we have returned to the core of our being, if even just for a moment. It gives us a taste of what’s possible, within us and around us. It lifts the veil that shrouds the reality of love, and the extent of our true power. Once we’re realigned with our essential nature, we’ll have the power to make shadows disappear.
According to A Course in Miracles, “miracles occur naturally as expressions of love.” Whenever our hearts are open, the darkness is replaced by light. In the meantime—whether it’s in a type of medicine that doesn’t include a holistic perspective, a religion that doesn’t include love, a therapy that doesn’t include a higher power, or a relationship that doesn’t include a sacred dimension—the shadow will hover around the door until some moment of fear. Then at that point it will steal through the darkness and put a stake through the heart of someone’s dreams.
OWNING AND ATONING
No matter how much we understand about the shadow, the point is to get rid of it. But to do this, we must own it first. The solution to the problem of the shadow, in both Jewish and Christian thought, is the principle of atonement. It is the idea that once we have acknowledged our sins and surrendered them to God with true remorse, we are released from their spiritual consequences. (“Sin” derives from an archery term meaning you’ve missed the mark; the spiritual meaning of the word “sin” is “error.”)
Buddha described the law of karma, which basically means cause and effect—action, reaction, action, reaction. The principle of atonement means that in a moment of grace, bad karma is burned. Atonement is a kind of cosmic reset button, by which mortal shadow thoughts are undone and replaced by the perfection of love.
In the Catholic religion, the practice of confession is an ongoing experience of atonement, as penitents confess their sins and ask God for forgiveness. In the Jewish religion, the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur, is the holiest day of the year. On that day, Jews admit and ask forgiveness for all sins committed during the year leading up to that day; they ask God for the chance to be inscribed for another year in the Book of Life. In Alcoholics Anonymous, addicts are advised to take a fearless moral inventory, admitting their character defects and asking God to remove them. All of these are examples of the spiritual process by which the shadow, when brought to the light, is then transformed through the power of atonement.
Atonement exists because it is necessary. We are all human, we are all wounded, and we all fall prey to the shadow side of human existence. We have all fallen, yes, but we are not without the means to rise back up. In order to do so, however, we must commit to the power that rebuilds our wings. We must be willing to bring our darkness to light and to consciously and willingly surrender it to God.
Let’s say I have come to realize that a difficult situation in my life was caused by my own error or personality defect. Perhaps I was controlling in a relationship and so created conflict with a friend or family member. Atonement calls for me to recognize my shadow aspect—in this instance, my controlling nature—and ask God to remove it.
As we’ve discussed before, it’s not enough to just say, “Okay, I won’t be controlling anymore.” That is certainly a good resolution and may go a long way toward correcting behavior. But when a trait is an actual pattern within your personality—a shadow face you wear that is truly you at your worst or near worst—then it has become entrenched within your attitudinal matrix. It is not enough to just decide to be different, because the shadow has overridden your normal decision-making powers. Once a shadow persona has developed—you the cynical, you the jealous, you the raging—then healing requires that you atone: that you take responsibility for the damage you might have already done and ask God to change your heart.
It is critically important that we look deeply at our own thoughts and actions—particularly where they have been mistaken. In doing so we are addressing not only our individual shadow, but the collective shadow as well. Ultimately, the healing of the world will emerge not from our changing and correcting others, but from our willingness to change and correct ourselves. Since all minds are joined, our ability to self-correct has a corrective influence on the entire universe. In a very real way, it’s the only thing that does.
This correction might begin with a nudge from conscience. Conscience is healthy shame—a temporary discomfort that comes not from the shadow, but from the light. It is only a sociopath, after all, who feels no remorse. It is part of what makes us human, that something in us knows when we have been wrong.
The process of atonement involves courage, compassion, and honesty with oneself: “I bring this up. I realize it is my wound. I’m willing to look at it, and I’m willing to change.” It is so easy, when a situation is difficult, to cast all blame for the problem onto others. But the true seeker says, “What did I do wrong? What was my part in this disaster?”
If we don’t look at where we’re dishonest, harsh, unforgiving, disrespectful, greedy, domineering, and so on, then we cannot change that thing. If we just suppress our shadow, trying to disown it, then it exists as an unintegrated fractal of our personality. And we have no power over what we have not explored. Whatever it is, it will act like an emotional terrorist embedded within our psyche, able to ambush us at any time. It will make itself known in one situation or another as a psychic scream we cannot ignore. This is nature’s brilliant way of forcing us to look at something, for nothing gets our attention like going through a personal disaster and knowing that we caused it.
The shadow acts like a series of land mines in your personality. You think you’re doing so well—you’ve got your list together, your organization together, your business plan together, your money together—you think you’ve got everything so together, and then you go do something that totally blows everything. You can hardly believe it. Nobody else blew it—you blew it. And you finally realize that until you deal with that part of your personality, you’ll probably blow it again.
I asked a woman once, “Are you in a relationship now?” And she said, “I hate who I am when I’m in a relationship. I’d rather not be in one.” So many people can relate. We say to ourselves, “I don’t even want to go out there. I don’t want to attract a relationship or a business opportunity or whatever, until I have healed whatever part of myself that is sure to sabotage it when and if it happens.”
It takes courage to deeply look at ourselves, but we can’t have real freedom and peace until we do. That’s why we want to be careful not to overemphasize a quick and easy trip to happiness. Enlightenment gets us to joy, but not immediately. First we must face the sorrow that stands in front of it.
We must take the time to reflect on our own dysfunction, our shadows, because unless we look at them, they remain in place. But this can be hard. We heal through a kind of detox process, and sometimes we have to burn through difficult feelings as they come up for review. Something emerges from the shadow of our subconscious mind, giving us the chance to see it clearly, and we are horrified to think we were ever like that. But we are not left at that place without the Illuminator’s help. If we so choose, we can surrender our darkness and ask that it be healed. God will not take from us what we do not consciously release to Him, for to do so would be a violation of our free will. But what we do surrender and atone for is then transformed.
Such inner work can be painful, but it is vital and unavoidable. Emotional pain is important, just as physical pain is. If you had broken a leg and it wasn’t painful, how would you know it needed to be reset? Physical pain is a way the body says, “Look at this. Care for this. Tend to this.” And psychic pain is the same. Sometimes we need to say, “I need to tend to this pain. Why is it here? What is this situation trying to tell me? What part of myself do I need to address?” If you go to the doctor with a torn knee, the doctor doesn’t say, “Well, let’s look at that elbow.” It is the same with God. The wound must be looked at. And the physician, both human and divine, is not there to judge you, but to heal you.
We’re often afraid of taking a good look at our shadow, because we want to avoid the shame or embarrassment that might come along with admitting our mistakes. We feel if we take a deep look at ourselves, we’ll be too exposed. We don’t want to look at our own shadow, because we’re afraid of what we might see. But the only thing we should actually fear is not looking at it, for our denial of the shadow is exactly what fuels it.
At first you say, “I don’t want to look at it, because I’ll hate myself.” But then you say, “No, I have to look at it, because otherwise I can’t release it to God.” And something counterintuitive and wonderful happens when you do. One day I looked at something in myself that I had been avoiding because it was too painful. Yet once I did take a look, I had an unexpected surprise. Rather than feeling self-hatred, I was flooded with compassion for myself, because I realized how much pain I would have had to be in to develop that sort of coping mechanism to begin with.
All of us are scarred, yet the problem is that our scars don’t show up as such in the eyes of other people. Rather, they show up as character defects. If a three-year-old is screaming and crying, we’re likely to say, “Oh, the poor darling is so tired.” But when you’re a crying and screaming forty-year-old—even if your pain is directly related to your trauma as a three-year-old—people don’t say, “Oh, he’s so tired.” They say, “He’s horrible.”
Your character defects are not where you’re bad, but where you’re wounded. But no matter who or what caused the wound, it’s yours now and you’re responsible for it. The only person who can bring it up and release it is you. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where you got your character defects anyway. They’re yours now. You can’t live with a sign around your neck saying, “It’s not my fault. My parents were difficult.” Your only way out of your conundrum is to take total responsibility for those defects.
Your character defects are the way you self-sabotage, the way you hurt yourself and others. That’s why you have to look at them. Until you take complete responsibility for your own experience, you can’t change it. But once you’ve truly looked at yourself, you can start healing. You’ve opened your eyes and now you see. “I see that I did that. I admit it. I get it. I atone for my error. I am willing to make amends. I am willing to make it right. And I pray to become a better person now.”
In the moments when you acted out of your shadow, you didn’t wake up that morning and say, “I think I’ll be a jerk today.” You didn’t go into a meeting and say, “I’m going to say and do things that make people reject me.” No, in those moments, you didn’t realize you were doing it. You were at the effect of the shadow. The shadow cast you into darkness, and you were blinded to the light. And so you suffered.
The shadow leads us to do something stupid and then punishes us savagely for having been so dumb. The shadow has no mercy, but God does. Hell is what the shadow creates here, and love is what delivers us from it. Atonement is an aspect of God’s love. As we atone, we are freed from our dysfunctional patterns and the trajectory of events they produced. This is the miracle of personal transformation. Having delivered our wrong-minded past decisions to God, we can say, with a line from a prayer in A Course in Miracles, “I will not feel guilty, for the Holy Spirit will undo all consequences of my wrong decision if I will let Him.” Once you atone with a sincere and humble heart, you are released from the karmic maelstrom of your shadow drama.
Once we have owned who we are in the shadow, we can continue our journey back into the light. We don’t heal by pouring pink paint over our issues, pretending they’re not there or blaming them all on other people. We heal by knowing that whatever shadows hide our light are headquartered inside our own minds. It is our responsibility to admit that they’re there, open the door to God, and let Him shine them away. He always has, and He always will.
FORGIVE YOURSELF, FORGIVE THEM
Someone might have hurt you fifteen years ago, and you’re still not shutting up about what that person did to you. But if you’re honest with yourself, you might have hurt someone else fifteen years ago and you haven’t even looked at it for the last fourteen. We’re very big on seeing what other people did to us, but we’re not so big on looking at what we might have done to others.
The shadow has no problem focusing on the shadow—as long as it’s the shadow in other people! “That person is acting out of his shadow, and that person is acting out of her shadow, and all those other people are acting out of their shadow—but me? What shadow?” More damage is inflicted by people who think they have it all together than by people who have been humbled by the realization that they probably do not. People who have looked deeply into the shadow know that it’s not just a little thing or a trivial mistake—it’s a cosmic counterforce to the goodness of the world, and it takes any opportunity presented it to wreak havoc on the human heart. Nothing is a greater opportunity for the shadow than our thinking that all our problems lie in other people.
A projection of guilt onto others is endemic to the mortal world. From the moment we’re born, we’re taught a belief system that reinforces our sense of separateness: “I’m in my body, and you’re in yours. And God is outside us both.” More fractured perception emanates from our sense of separation than from any other thing.
First of all, if I’m separate from God, then I am separate from my source, and I feel traumatized the way a baby is traumatized if ripped away from the mother. This trauma induces fear, and I am then likely to be triggered by any person or situation that seems to be taking from me what I think I need—even if that’s not the case. My shadow would likely manifest as paranoia or neediness.
Second, if I’m separate from the rest of the world, then I feel powerless, given that I am so small and the world is so huge. This sense of separation leads me to believe that I am weak, when in fact, as a child of the divine, I have infinite resources of strength within. My shadow would then likely manifest as my playing small and being too fearful to stand in my own strength.
Third, if I’m separate from other people, then I am separated from the experience of love and unity that is my birthright as a human being. I cannot help but feel a deep existential loneliness instead of the joy that I am meant to feel in the company of other people. My shadow would likely manifest as either overattachment or under-attachment to others, a superiority or an inferiority complex, manipulative behavior, defensiveness, or a domineering or controlling personality.
Last, all of the above aspects of separation involve a sense of separation from self, from which all other forms of shadow emerge. If I am separate from myself, and my true self is love, then I am separate from love. My shadow would likely manifest as anything seemingly not-love toward myself or others, from substance abuse to violence.
Since all shadow manifestations are rooted in thoughts of separation, then healing the mistaken thought that we are separate from the rest of life—from our Creator, from other people, and from other created things—is the ultimate solution to the problem of the shadow. This reconciliation of mind and spirit, the soul’s return to its divine knowing, is the point of illumination that casts out all darkness.
And what is the light we see, when our minds are reconciled to truth? We see not only that we are one with others, but also that all of us carry seeds of the divine. We were created by God, in the image of God, in the likeness of God. We are perfect, as all His creations are. We deserve from ourselves and from each other the same mercy that God shows to each of us. And when we remember this—when our minds are healed of the delusion that our shadows define us—then showing mercy and forgiveness comes naturally.
What is important is not the form your shadow takes. The point is that your shadow developed for one reason and one reason only. In a moment, love left—or so you thought it did. It doesn’t matter if it left in the form of a mother’s abandonment or a father’s anger. What matters is that in that traumatic, primal moment you lost conscious contact with the experience of God’s love. And you went temporarily insane. Now, every time that trauma is triggered, you go insane again. The issue is not what caused the trauma. It doesn’t ultimately matter what mortal drama led up to it. What matters is that your spirit be restored. What matters is that you reconnect with love now, that your mind be healed of its insanity now, that you forgive yourself and others now.
Forgiveness does not mean that you see the darkness, but then give it amnesty. Rather, it means that you see the darkness, but then choose to overlook it. And you overlook it not because you are in denial, but because you know that the shadow is not real. There is negative denial, and there is positive denial. You are simply denying what is not there.
When you are needy, that is not the real you. When you are acting out, that is not the real you. When you are angry, that is not the real you. The real you is a divine, loving, and changeless being. It can become temporarily invisible, hidden behind a shadowy veil, but it cannot be uncreated, because God created it. It is always there.
The shadow is an illusory self, the mask of an imposter. It has “real” effects within the mortal world—from sabotaging yourself to repelling others—but forgiveness means extending your perception beyond the real to the Real, beyond mortal darkness to the eternal light. And when you see that Reality, in yourself or others, you gain the power to invoke it. We heal when we feel forgiven. We heal in the presence of compassion. If you really want someone to change, the miracle lies in your ability to see how perfect they already are.
The shadow does not leave when it is attacked; it heals when it is forgiven. We do not take off our shadowy mask in the presence of someone who blames us, but rather in the presence of someone who says through words or behavior, “I know this is not who you are.” We miraculously heal in the presence of someone who believes in our light even when we are lost in our darkness. And when we learn to see others in the light of their true being, whether they are showing us that light or not, then we have the power to work that miracle for them.
Forgiveness is an action, but it springs from an attitude. It can be difficult to forgive someone whose behavior has hurt us, unless we have grounded our perceptions in a constant effort to see beyond the darkness of the personality.
Spiritual practice is key to our power as light-bearers, for we cannot extend peace if we do not cultivate it. Our thoughts and attitudes need persistent training in a world so intent on convincing us that we are who we are not and that we are not who, in fact, we are. The thinking of love is completely opposite the thinking that dominates this world; that is why we must be constantly reminded of the light. Just as you take a shower or bath in the morning to get yesterday’s dirt off your body, you do your spiritual practice in the morning to get yesterday’s thinking off your mind and heart.
The world is constantly luring us into thoughts of fear rather than love—attack, defense, anger, judgment, and so forth. It would constantly convince us that the shadow is real and that the light is not. “That person is a jerk. That person is to blame. That person is guilty.” Or, conversely, “I am a jerk. I am to blame. I am guilty.” Yet projecting guilt onto yourself is ultimately no less blasphemous than projecting it onto others.
Real forgiveness means knowing that no one is actually guilty. All of us are innocent in the eyes of God. It is our light and not our darkness that is real.
“RESIST YE NOT LOVE”
Given that Buddha was enlightened under the Bodhi tree and paved the way for a life of compassion, given that Moses simply touched the sea and it parted, given that Jesus was resurrected and rose above death, you’d think we would take those things more seriously. You’d think we would apply their messages more consistently, opening our hearts, parting some waters, and rising above some illusions of our own.
Although billions of souls profess belief in the religions of the world, there is an evolutionary step we seem not yet to be taking. Humanity stays stuck in the shadow, despite all the beings of light and the messages of love that have emerged throughout our history. The great enlightened masters and teachers are our evolutionary elder brothers, beings who’ve actualized the divine light that resides inside us all. Every religion is a door to that light, and still the door remains too often closed.
And why is that? Why, given the suffering that the shadow imposes, do we not embrace more seriously the light?
In my book A Return to Love, one paragraph seems to have struck a chord with people. There is a sentence in that paragraph that I believe is the reason: It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
A big “Bingo!” seems to come up for many people when they read that line. We realize that our problem, if we’re honest with ourselves, is not so much that we are imprisoned by the shadow, but that we avoid the light. We actively resist the emergence into our better self. And as long as we don’t deal with that, then the pattern of avoidance goes unquestioned and unchallenged. The only way we can escape the shadow is to outgrow it, to drop it like the set of old and outworn clothing that it is, and become the spiritual giants we are intended to be.
Bizarre though it might seem, our shadow is a comfort zone. As long as we are being weak, we bear no responsibility for being strong. We don’t owe it to anyone to shine as long as we remain shrouded in darkness. Our emotional habit is to avoid the light. We might say we’re waiting for the light to shine on us, but it can’t shine on us, because it’s not shining from us.
Somewhere deep inside, we know this. Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. We are standing on the brink of a huge step forward into the light of our true being, not just as individuals, but also as a species. And yet we still hold back somehow. In a final moment of “Shall I, or shall I not?” we are actually pretending to ourselves that we have a choice.
What is your alternative to getting clean and sober—that you die of the disease? What is your alternative to forgiveness—that you become bitter and hard? What is our alternative to seeing the sacred in nature—that we destroy the earth? What is our alternative to peace—that we blow up the world?
The shadow would actually say yes to those things, with a classic repertoire of the insidious and insane. “Have another drink; it’s no big deal.” “Never forget how much that hurt.” “The poor will always be with us.” “The earth will be okay; don’t worry.” And the best one yet for the age we live in: “What, are you soft on terrorism or something?”
There is a magic that happens when you simply say no. “No, I don’t wish to be weak anymore. No, I don’t wish to act stupidly anymore. No, I don’t wish to be known for my defects. No, I don’t wish to waste my talents anymore. No, I don’t wish to play small anymore.”
And there is magic as well when we learn to say yes. “Yes, I will make a choice to love, and I will make that choice each and every day. Yes, I devote myself to the light, and I proactively choose to serve it. In a “sacred marriage” to the divine beloved, I not only commit to higher possibilities and perspective, but—equally important—I forsake all others. Of course you could become cynical. Of course you could become bitter. Of course you could just go along. The point is you don’t choose to anymore.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking, so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
We have reached a point where humanity is going to travel in one direction or another. We are being forced to choose a path of fear or love. We are moving toward the darkness, or we are moving toward the light. We know what the path of fear would offer. If attack thoughts reach a high enough pitch—let’s say, a few hundred nuclear bombs lobbed around the world—then the insanity of the shadow would finally be assuaged. For all would then be dark.
And what about the path to love? What would a world of light look like, were our physical eyes able to see it at all?
I once had a dream I will never forget. I walked into a room that was much like a large restaurant. Everyone there turned around to enthusiastically greet each new person who arrived. In the middle of the room was a gigantic, sparkling fountain, and around the walls people were sitting in booths made to look like large white swans. The other colors in the room were blue, green, and turquoise. The people at every table were deeply engrossed in the most joyful conversations. It was the happiest environment I could ever imagine.
When I woke up, my first thought was that that must be heaven. I looked at the dream that way until I read in A Course in Miracles that the line “heaven and earth shall pass away” means that they will no longer exist as two separate states. The point of that dream was not what heaven will look like, but what earth will look like. We will live on earth—as our evolutionary elder brothers did—and yet, like them, think only the thoughts of heaven. We will live on earth, but know a heavenly joy. We will live in a world now saturated with fear, but the light within us will shine so brightly that the darkness shall be no more.
I believe most of us believe, deep down, that we can rise up and become the people we are capable of being. We can actualize our divine potential. We can cast out all shadows through a passionate embrace of light. We can become a species of such light-filled consciousness that in our presence all darkness automatically disappears.
We can. And this is not a dream. As any one of us at any time chooses love over fear, we add to a great wave of love that is washing over the world even now. For the sake of the newborn and the flush of new love, for the glory of nature and the wonder of animals, for the mercy of God and the sake of our grandchildren, to honor the sunrise and preserve the sunset—it’s time.