FOUR
The Miraculous Universe
Learning the basic tenets of the spiritual universe is the first step in the path to enlightenment. First we learn the principles; then we go through the process of trying to apply them in both our personal and collective experience.
Everyone is on a spiritual journey; most people just don’t know it. Spirituality refers not to some theological dynamic outside ourselves, but to how we choose to use our minds. The spiritual path is the path of the heart; at every moment, we’re either walking the path of love and creating happiness, or swerving from it and creating suffering. Every thought we think leads deeper into love or deeper into fear.
Love is sane, and fear is not. The loving mind is the “right mind”; the word “right-eous” refers to “right use.” In the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “The problem with the world today is that humanity is not in its right mind.”
The spiritual universe is the Mind of God. Miracles are the thoughts of love, extended from the Mind of God through the mind of humans and out into the world. God is Love, and as God’s children, so are we. Our purpose on earth is to think as God thinks, which means to love as God loves. When our minds are attuned to love, things unfold miraculously. Loving thought creates loving feelings, and loving feelings create loving behavior. In this way we create happiness for ourselves and for those around us.
Obviously, life doesn’t always go like that. But it should. For love is in fact our natural state, from which we have veered as a species and to which all of us long to return. In ways both large and small—from the small deviations from love that mar the landscapes of our personal relationships, to the horrors of war and genocide—humanity plays out a spiritual love/hate relationship with our true selves. We’re one with love, we turn away from love, and ultimately we return to love. That’s pretty much all there is.
When our minds are not attuned to love, the natural fabric of the universe is rent. But the universe is both self-organizing and self-correcting. When lost in the illusion of fear, we can return to love and thus return to peace. Each of us has been imbued with an Internal Teacher, a guide who’s been authorized by God to pave a path home for us when we’re lost in the pain of worldly illusion. We can call this force by many names (one of which is the Holy Spirit), but we cannot call on it in vain.
The miracle is a divine intercession on behalf of our spirit, restoring the celestial order. Miracles break us free of chains that otherwise bind us by lifting us above the fixed limitations of the mortal world. The ego’s chains are not material, but mental; they’re simply our fixed beliefs about the three-dimensional world. By transitioning from faith in the power of our disasters to faith in the power of God to heal them, we release the power of miracles to work on our behalf.
But in order to work miracles, good intentions are not enough. We need to do more than intend to see things differently; we must be willing to see things differently. “Dear God, I am willing to see this differently” is the most powerful prayer for miraculous transformation. Where the ego insists that the world should be different, the spirit seeks to see the world differently. Only then does the world really change. We can’t ask God for the “miracle” of things happening the way we want them to happen; the miracle is when we think about things the way God would have us think about them.
Spirit blesses, while the ego blames. Spirit forgives, while the ego attacks. Spirit allows, while the ego defends. Spirit is fully available in the present, while the ego is attached to past or future. In every moment we make a decision, consciously or unconsciously, whether to be host to God or hostage to the ego.
And the choice isn’t always easy. Your spouse has left you after twenty-five years—where is the miracle there? Your child has died of a drug overdose—where is the miracle there? You have lost your job and don’t know how you’ll support your family—where is the miracle there? Your doctor says you have only six months to live—where is the miracle there? You don’t know whether you’ll get the use of your legs back—where is the miracle there? You can’t escape the memories of past trauma—where is the miracle there?
The world will offer you many ways to numb your pain, to fortify your anger, and thus to deepen your despair. You can always find people to agree with you that you’ve been victimized, and on the mortal plane, you may have been. You can always find people to agree with you that a situation is hopeless, and from a rational perspective, it might seem that way. All of us to a greater or lesser degree go through experiences about which, from a worldly perspective, we have every right to feel angry, victimized, or agonizingly hopeless.
Yet even then we have a choice. We can build a case against those who hurt us—dooming ourselves to pain and self-pity. We can insist that no matter what anyone says, there is no hope in a situation going forward—dooming ourselves to complete despair. We can face the world with negativity and blame, defensiveness and attack, condemnation and anger—dooming ourselves to a cold and isolated existence.
Or we can have a miracle instead.
This choice to see a miracle means repudiating the ego’s thought system. It is the choice to stand our attitudinal ground despite the ego’s insistence that we’re at the mercy of a fear-laden world. This is the metaphysical meaning of Jesus’s words, “Satan, get thee behind me.” Your feelings of hopelessness are the ego’s prize, the pathways of its dark and bitter kingdom. But with God’s help you can rise above the ego. His light dispels the darkness and delivers us from the pain we feel there. He lifts us above the torment and the agony of the ego’s world.
I once asked a woman whose husband had left her what she thought might make her feel better, and her response was threefold: that her estranged husband’s new relationship would fail; that he would wake up and realize that he’d been a fool and would return to her; or that something awful would happen to him or to the new woman in his life! She laughed, but she was crying too.
All of us on some level can understand her answer. But in truth, such thoughts as those will only exacerbate her pain. The most powerful thought is a prayerful thought. When I’m praying for you, I’m praying for my own peace of mind. I can only have for myself what I am willing to wish for you.
I asked this woman whether she’d like a prayerful alternative to her current thoughts about her husband. And her response was perfect: “If a prayer might release me from the hell I’m in, then please, let’s say it.”
Dear God,
Please bless my former love,
Who has decided to move away from me.
Despite my resistance, I bless his path
And pray that he be happy.
Remove my temptation to judge him
Or to control him,
For binding him to my judgment
But binds me to my suffering.
Help me to forgive him, God,
And thus forgive myself.
Free him from my hooks, dear God,
And free me from my pain.
Amen
Prayer is the conduit of miracles. It shifts the universe by shifting us. The ego has an endless array of options by which to treat the problems it creates. But none of them do anything but drive us deeper into despair. One thing the ego will never suggest is that love is always the answer, because love is the ego’s dissolution and it knows it. It feeds on lovelessness for its survival, yet its survival is our destruction.
The ego views forgiveness as weakness and attack as strength. But love is not weakness; it is the power of God. The problem isn’t whether or not love works miracles; the problem is how much we resist love.
It’s easy enough to have faith in love when everyone around us is being nice and things are going the way we want them to. But life is a learning process through which we’re constantly challenged to love more deeply. The universe is intentional and will not be done with us until we’ve gotten to the place where love, and only love, is our reality. We’re not on this earth to just hang around; we’re here to actualize our enlightened potential. And the universe will make sure we do.
So yes, people will be unkind to us; and yes, things won’t always turn out the way we wish; and yes, there are tragedies in the world. But God’s store of miracles is infinite, and by standing for love we learn to call them forth. There is nothing that our holiness, or “whole mind,” cannot do. Holiness is the embodiment of the love that transforms all those experiences and releases us from our torment.
The search for holiness isn’t pink and gauzy; it’s tough and gritty. We don’t pretend not to be angry when we’re angry; we surrender our anger into the hands of God and tell Him we’re willing not to be. We don’t deny our tears when we’ve been abandoned or betrayed; we pray for the happiness of the person who hurt us, as an act of generosity toward ourselves. We don’t pretend that we’re not afraid or lonely; we place our fear and loneliness in God’s hands. All of this is a process and none of it is easy. Many tears have lined the paths of saints.
But God is with us during the difficult times as much as during any other. As we walk through the darkest nights of our souls, we are bolstered, should we care to be, by the power of faith that we are not alone.
FAITH
During times of emotional darkness, what does it actually mean to have faith?
Faith is a unique psychological orientation, a powerful reminder of the light of God that exists beyond the darkness. Faith helps us during periods of depression and sadness because it gives us the patience to endure. We understand that if we do the inner work, the work will pay off. Faith isn’t blind, it’s visionary. A pilot who cannot see the horizon does not conclude that the horizon isn’t there. Faith is like the pilot then flying on instruments. As the Bible tells us, “Blessed are those who do not see but have faith anyway.”
Faith is an aspect of consciousness; we’re constantly applying our faith to one world or the other. Our problem is that we tend to have more faith in the power of cancer to kill us than we have faith in the power of God to heal us.
There’s a divine order to the spiritual universe, and chaos of any kind is temporary. Faith is simply recognizing this. Whatever the ego casts down, God will ultimately lift back up. This is not just a belief; it’s spiritual intelligence. And spiritual intelligence gives us strength and fortitude. Faith as a container for our emotions is important because it gives us certainty in the face of uncertainty. During times of suffering it keeps us above the emotional waterline, giving us the strength to endure by knowing that whatever it is, this too shall pass. There is a huge emotional difference between “I’m depressed and I feel like this pain will never end” and “I’m depressed but I know that I’ll get through this.” It can be very dark on certain nights, but there is no question whether dawn will come. No matter what has happened in our lives, miracles are possible. The universe works like a GPS. Even if a wrong turn gets taken on the way to your destination, the GPS will simply recalibrate and provide another route. The destination is inner peace. Tough times occur, but they ultimately cannot and will not last as long as we choose love.
GOD’S INTELLIGENCE
The universe is alive, imbued with a natural intelligence guiding all things toward their highest good. This intelligence turns an embryo into a baby, a bud into a blossom, and an acorn into an oak tree. When we allow it to, it guides us to becoming the highest version of ourselves, living lives of happiness and peace. Learning how to align ourselves with this natural intelligence is the most intelligent thing we can possibly do.
In the Introduction to A Course in Miracles, it is written:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
Only love is ultimately real, and anything else is a temporary illusion manufactured by the mind. What is not love does not actually exist.
Obviously, such thinking runs counter to material evidence. Looking around, we perceive the world with our physical senses—all of which report that the world is very real indeed. Yet what the body’s senses report to us as “real world” is in fact a giant, collective, mortal hallucination. In the words of Albert Einstein, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” The material world is but a veil in front of a world that is more true, more real, more beautiful. It is a vast veil of illusion, created by the ego not to illuminate, but to hide, the world that lies beyond it.
Everything that causes us to suffer—from the most heinous abuses to the loss of a loved one—is happening within a realm of illusion. Such suffering is our human experience and should be respected as such, but the human experience alone is not the ultimate truth of who we are. We are beings of a world more real than this one; it is the world beyond the veil. The spiritual world is a universe of love and love only, where nothing but eternal peace and harmony exist.
The self that suffers, therefore, is not the real you. The world can throw terrible things your way, but it cannot change the reality of who you are. Who you really are is a being of love, completely unaffected by the lovelessness of the world.
The journey of enlightenment is a journey to a transformed sense of self, a conversion to a different sense of who we are and what the world is for. Although the ego argues that we are limited, guilty, temporary, vulnerable beings grasping for little bits of happiness within a world of scarcity, a spiritual worldview says we are none of those things. In God, we are innocent. We are abundant. We are complete. We are eternal.
And in remembering these things, we are happy at last. For they are more than abstractions. They are explosions of light.
CLOSING THE GAP
The mortal self—defined by the body, described in terms of worldly circumstances, and at the effect of the material world—is but an aspect of who we are. In fact, the body is like a wall we have built around an invisible self. That invisible self—be it called the Christ, or Buddha Mind, or shekinah, or by any other name—is who we essentially, fundamentally, and eternally are. You are not a body, but an eternal spirit. You were alive before your physical birth, and you will be alive beyond your physical death. What God creates cannot be uncreated.
It is a radical commitment to try to remember who we are in a world that does all it can, every moment of every day, to persuade us that we are who we really aren’t and that we aren’t who we really are. The world as we know it is organized around the denial of spiritual sight, treating bodies as real and spirit as fantasy. It rests on the presupposition that only what happens externally matters. As such, our modern civilization is spiritually blind. It is ignorant of the deeper reality and meaning of life. It is asleep to the deeper dynamics and evolutionary imperatives of human existence, and in its sleep it has produced nightmares for individuals and for the entire species.
The ravages produced by our spiritual ignorance are now being experienced on massive scales, producing deep psychological and emotional problems in individuals and seemingly unstoppable environmental and political destructiveness in the world. But such problems are not causes; they are effects that have resulted from a state of humanity in which we have become dissociated from what we truly are. Separated from who we are, we become neurotic at best and genuinely insane at worst.
The ego mind, the delusional self, seeks every moment of every day to annihilate God’s creation. Which means its goal is to annihilate you. Within this world, the ego can have devastating effects. All of this is happening within a vast illusion, but the effects of the illusion feel very real while we are in the midst of it. The role of the miracle-worker is not to ignore the darkness but to dispel it.
The ego’s world is as depressing as it is insane, of course. It posits us as temporary beings, when in fact we’re eternal. It posits us as separate from God, when in fact we are thoughts within His Mind. It posits us as separate from each other, when in fact we are created as one and remain as one. To heal our depression, we must close the mental gap between that which is the ego’s view of ourselves and others, and God’s view of ourselves and others. This is the only salvation from sadness and pain.
The ego is our own mental energy turned against us. Yet just as darkness is nothing but the absence of light, so fear is nothing but the absence of love. The ego is simply a mental miscreation, the delusional thought that we are not who in fact we are. In its mad belief that we are separate, it persuades us that we are alone . . . and endangered . . . and unloved. Of course we are depressed. And the healing of our depression lies in remembering who we are.
We are perfect, innocent children of God. That is God’s Reality, and God’s Reality is changeless. Moreover, we were created as one and on the level of spirit we are one. The ego is vigilant in its efforts to make us forget we are perfect, to make us forget we are innocent, and to make us forget we are one. The anxiety and mental anguish this forgetfulness produces is the real meaning of the word “hell.” The awareness of our oneness and the peace this pronounces is the meaning of the word “heaven.” Hell is not our natural habitat. Heaven is where we come from and where we belong—not just after we die, but every moment of every day.
THE GREAT LIE
Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” From a spiritual perspective, that despair is rooted in a delusion: the inaccurate perception that any part of life is separate from any other part. The misperception is maintained by the evidence of the physical senses, which experience reality in physical rather than spiritual terms, thus positing us as separate when in fact we are not. This central, pernicious belief in separation obliterates love and induces fear, by leading us to experience ourselves as separate from what, and from whom, we cannot in fact be separate. This delusion is the source of our despair because, on the level of thought, it cuts the oneness of our being into billions of separate pieces and thus violates our most fundamental sense of self.
We are, according to A Course in Miracles, like sunbeams thinking we are separate from the sun or waves in the ocean thinking we’re separate from other waves. Let’s consider what that means psychologically. If I’m a wave in the ocean and I think I’m separate from all the other waves, then how could I not be afraid of the ocean? How could I not feel powerless? How could I not be terrified that at any moment I might be overwhelmed by other waves? But if I think of myself as I really am—not separate at all from other waves—then I know that I am safe in the ocean and that the power of the ocean is my power too.
All suffering derives from our false attachment to the kingdom of the personal self. Pain is inevitable as long as we see ourselves as separate from the rest of life. Cells in the body that separate from their natural intelligence, forgetting their function and going off to form their own kingdoms, are called cancer cells. They’re malignant, having broken off from the great collaborative dance of life. And that is what has happened to humanity; we’ve been infected by a spiritual malignancy, in which, like cancer cells, we’ve forgotten that our function is to collaborate with other cells in order to foster the greater life of which we are all a part. Instead, we’ve been led to believe that there is no higher good than doing whatever we want to do—with no sense of greater responsibility to the whole of which we are part. And the power with which we are intended to create becomes a power by which we destroy.
Fearful attitudes, rooted in the belief in separation and forming a social toxicity that is poisoning our world, pervade every aspect of our society. Such toxicity is destructive to our psyches and even to our bodies. Whether it’s violence on TV or the violence of war, conflict between neighbors or conflict between races, it feels at times as though fear is everywhere and love is practically nowhere.
We grasp for love as though we’re gasping for air, yet too often we cannot find it. We’re lured into false beliefs about who we are and who we are to each other—essentially believing that we are ultimately nothing and we are nothing to each other; such beliefs accumulate to the point of becoming a massive, unquestioned lie that spreads across the consciousness of humanity like a blanket of doom. The lie is fortified so completely, so constantly, and so chronically that it seems like it must be true. But a ubiquitous lie is still a lie.
The lie is fortified everywhere. Our religions, our economies, our nationalities, our sexualities, our politics, our cultures: the ego uses all as evidence of our separateness and warns us constantly, “Do not trust each other!” We are taught to fear rather than to love one another. We perceive a world of scarcity—of lack, of danger—and from that perception we conclude that we must compete to get our needs met at the expense of whomever else. In truth, it is our perception of separation that creates the scarcity to begin with.
So what is the source of the lie, and how can it be removed? The truth is, it comes from no specific place because it comes from everywhere. It is simply human consciousness devoid of love. The ego mind is the psychological meaning of the devil’s lair, but there is no physical devil’s lair where all the lies of the world are concocted. Fear is the power of our minds turned against ourselves—the loveless, disassociated, despairing self. It’s our self-hatred posing as self-love.
Given the fact that fear rather than love prevails within the dominant thought system on the planet today, it is not surprising that so many of us are depressed: the organizing principles of modern civilization dislodge us spiritually from our place in the universe. A fear-based, materially obsessed mentality has leached a sense of spiritual purpose from the bones of our civilization, and this hurts us.
We do not—and cannot—emotionally fit into a world in which no transcendent meaning is ascribed to the experience of being human; in which no deep connection or mutual responsibility is presupposed in our connection to other living things; in which more forces exist to separate us than to unite us; and in which our worth is determined primarily by external factors. This maelstrom of diseased thinking—diseased in that none of it fosters love and all of it fosters fear—has turned our civilization into a petri dish of social pathology. It is a collective problem whose consequences we experience on an individual level.
And how could it be otherwise? How could a civilization that so marginalizes love not leave people heartbroken? The deep emotional suffering so rampant among us is a disease of the spirit and will not be healed on a material level. It will be healed only when addressed on a spiritual level.
A spiritual disease demands a spiritual solution, and a spiritual solution does not numb or avoid our suffering. To numb or avoid suffering is to fail to expose its source to the light of conscious awareness. If we are unaware of our pain, we cannot surrender it, and only pain surrendered is pain dissolved.
God will not take from us what we will not release to Him; to do so would be to violate our free will. Spiritual toxins must be brought to the surface in order to be released. They are released as a part of an emotional detoxification process, without which they remain within us to damage our lives. Our modern worldview does not recognize the emotional toxicity at its core. Our mechanistic, rationalistic, overly secularized worldview is toxic; therefore, our worldview needs to be healed before our suffering can be.
THE PATH TO HEALING
The genius of nature applies to both body and mind.
This extraordinary natural intelligence is obvious in the workings of our biological systems. In the creation of the human body, egg cell and sperm are first joined in a cellular marriage out of which arises a mind-boggling process of cell creation and division. Cells emerge and divide to become muscles, skin, organs, and blood. Brains, lungs, livers, hearts, fingernails, genitals, eyeballs, tongues, toes—all develop from billions and billions of tiny cells that are guided to collaborate with other cells in an infinitely creative process leading to the birth of a baby. Then, even after the birth, these processes continue in a way that supports the body in functioning and thriving as an independent being.
Notice that at no time does nature rely on you or me to do any of that. We ourselves did not author this process. The natural intelligence guiding our biological functioning simply is. And whether we think of this genius in spiritual or secular terms, the point is that this same genius applies to our psychological and emotional functioning as well. Just as biologically we are programmed to be born, spiritually we are programmed to be happy. Divine intelligence but uses the body as a means to a more creative end.
This is nature’s intention and the purpose of our lives: that we grow and thrive not only biologically, but also spiritually. Nature’s intelligence leads us to our highest creativity, goodness, and joy. The issue isn’t whether or not this intelligence exists, but only whether or not we follow it. Connected to that intelligence, which is love itself, we are guided to wholeness and inner peace. Disconnected from it, we are guided by ego into the darkness of chaos and pain. Free will simply means that the choice is up to us.
The mind is part of a perfectly orchestrated ecosystem, just as is the physical body. It has inbuilt mechanisms of survival, just as does the physical body. And it has ways to repair itself, just as does the physical body. The body would not survive were it not able to absorb a certain amount of injury, and neither would the mind. Both are imbued with brilliant immune systems, mechanisms of repair by which they heal injury and resist disease.
When we suffer an emotional trauma, we might feel as though we’ve been beaten up—because in a way we have been, either by ourselves, by others, or by life. Our inner selves have been bruised, and we need time to heal. When healing physically, we need to be gentle with our bodies; when healing emotionally, we need to be gentle with our hearts. Anyone who is depressed understands that the inner self can be in pain as great as any pain of the physical body.
A certain amount of sickness and pain is simply a part of life, and a certain amount of heartbreak is a part of life as well. It takes time to recover from a physical injury, and it takes time to recover from an emotional one. Our understanding this, and allowing for it, is simply part of living wisely. The period of time during which the mind is absorbing and processing loss, disappointment, and fear is not a disease. Feeling that loss, disappointment, and fear doesn’t necessarily mean that something is wrong. It simply means we are bruised and need time to heal.
People didn’t just start dying recently. People didn’t just start experiencing catastrophic situations recently. People didn’t just start enduring heartbreak recently. Over time, when faced with challenges and threats to our survival, we have adapted to meet threats on both external and internal levels. Both body and mind have developed immune systems, and the basis of the mind’s immune system is grief. Grief allows us to process incrementally what might be too shocking to the system to have to process all at once.
Grief over the normal losses of life should not be avoided, but accepted and embraced. It is a process—not an event—best served when we surrender to it fully. When our feelings have been deeply hurt, we need to settle into what might be a painful period with full understanding that this is going to be hard but we will get through it. We need to stock up on whatever helps us make it through; and gather people around us who are healthy, supportive, compassionate companions while we process our loss and move through our feelings. The grief will come in waves, and it will take as long as it takes. The last thing we need to do is tell ourselves to hurry, to get on with it, to push through, to “get over it.” We wouldn’t do that with our bodies, and we shouldn’t do it with our souls.
One of the neuroses of modernity is the impulse to rush what should not be rushed. We have taken the dictates of a business model and imposed them onto everything. If something makes us less “productive” for a period of time, then surely something must be wrong. But ultimately, what could be more productive than moving beyond deep debilitating sorrow and reclaiming our inner peace?
The right time to be heartbroken is when the heart is breaking. Just as an expectant mother sometimes serves her pregnancy best by resting comfortably, her feet up and drinking a cup of chamomile tea; so during times of grief we, too, are gestating the next phase of our lives and serve the process best simply by allowing it to be. We need to rest into who we are and where we are; in being gentle with ourselves, we make greater space for the gigantic processes of personal transformation that are occurring deep inside us. Spiritually, we are always dying and we are always being born.
Feeling appropriate respect for grief, we give ourselves greater permission to go through it. I remember when far more credence was given to the experience of deep grief; people weren’t expected to simply bounce back quickly after the death of a loved one. Family members might have worn black (which was unusual back then) for a year to signal their mourning. It was simply understood that people wouldn’t be themselves for a while, and they felt permission to not be themselves. Today, people are apt to feel guilty for grieving, after someone says to them: “It’s been a month since your mother died. Aren’t you over it yet?” At such a time, it’s more than okay—in fact, it’s very healthy—to say, “No, I’m not, and I probably won’t be for a while.”
We are not machines. We are human beings. And when we’re grieving, we’re moving through a profound and significant experience. A sorrowful time can be a sacred time. Respecting the heart when we are in pain, seeking to walk through the experience very close to God, doesn’t immediately make us less sad; but it makes our sadness begin to make sense. Dwelling in a sacred universe gives us a different emotional perspective, one in which life is ascribed a deeper meaning because we choose to see it from a deeper perspective. We choose to see all things, even our suffering, within the context of how deeply we might learn to love.
No matter what happens in life, it is our choice whether to play it deep or to play it shallow. And whenever we play life deep, we feel our feelings deeply. Times of great sadness might open up painful wounds that were buried before. They might be wounds that are not just ours, but generational or societal. Suffering through them with our hearts wide open is not for sissies, but for seekers. Those wounds were keeping us from being who we’re capable of being, and their coming up to be healed is part of our journey to enlightenment.
During that process, if we are forced to burn through what might seem at times like unbearable pain, we might weep. And that’s okay.