EIGHT

Changing Ourselves, Changing the World

Many years ago during a period of time when I was deeply depressed, I often felt a strange presence, like someone sitting on the edge of my bed in the wee hours of the morning. This presence was a tall, thin shade sitting erect and very still, facing in a direction perpendicular to my body. I knew he wasn’t a physical being, but I knew he was there. And I knew who he was.

I cannot describe what it meant to me that he was present. He never said any words or gave me any message. He was simply there. And I felt him around, not just at night. Although I sensed his actual presence at the end of my bed at night, during the day I simply felt him keeping watch.

Depressed and lonely, I was such a mess in those days. I knew I had turned into a rather pathetic person. I realized people looked at me with pity, thinking, “Too bad about Marianne.” My cousin told me years later that during that time, my father said to her with tears in his eyes, “I don’t know what to do with an afflicted child.”

And afflicted I was. I knew I was in trouble, and it wasn’t a given that I would ever again be the person I had been before. In my desperation, I began trying to negotiate with God. If He would help me—if He would lift me up and give me back my life—then I would surrender the rest of my life to Him. I would do whatever He wanted me to do.

Months passed, and slowly but surely—with the help of an excellent psychiatrist, the love of family and friends, and surely God’s help—my life began to come back together. I remember one day being at work and feeling once again the presence that had been around me all those months. This time, however, it didn’t feel comforting so much as slightly encroaching.

Inwardly, I spoke to him: “Look, I’m really grateful to you for being here so long. You really helped me, and I’m very, very grateful. But I’m really doing well, and I’m sure you have so many other people to help. I’m absolutely fine. Thank you so, so much, and I will never forget how nice you were to me when I needed it.”

I was telling God He could go now.

A few weeks later, I was at a formal cocktail party, wandering through the very large house by myself. I entered a room where a small circle of men in tuxedos were talking to one another, with drinks in their hands. One of the men turned and looked at me. Clearly, at this point, I was daydreaming. The man was Jesus.

He looked at me, and with no emotion, no recrimination, no attitude whatsoever, he said very simply, “I thought we had a deal.”

And that was it. In that moment, I began my journey to a destiny that’s nothing like I would ever have imagined. Whenever people ask me “How did your career begin?” I always think of Jesus at that cocktail party all those years ago.

During that period of my life, I felt like my skull was a priceless ancient vase that had been smashed. Its shattered pieces, too numerous to count, had exploded into outer space. And this turned out to be the opening to a whole new life for me. As my skull came fully back into place, it seemed that something entered my head which hadn’t been there before.

Yes, that was a time when I was deeply depressed; but it also was a time when I was spiritually informed. On the other side of that dark night of my soul, I knew, saw, and understood things that I hadn’t known, seen, or understood before. I’ve known other people who have reported similar transformations. Sometimes we have to be shaken out of our attachment to one world before we can recognize another.

WHEN SUFFERING AWAKENS US

Even the deepest darkness can reveal God’s light.

Several years ago, my friend Teresa’s twenty-one-year-old son was murdered. One cannot imagine a greater pain, but Teresa and her family have moved through their suffering with an eye toward life beyond it. Several years since the tragedy, Teresa is now an activist for victims’ rights and a prison advocate who speaks to prisoners about emotional healing between victims and perpetrators. She told me that through this work, she has found her life’s mission.

Although her anger at her son’s unrepentant murderer has been a torment to her soul and remains so, the opportunity to speak to others imprisoned for the same crime has diminished her suffering. In speaking to prisoners serving life sentences for murder, Teresa has found many whose hearts are indeed repentant—and in their apologies, and their offers to be of help to her in her work, she has found solace.

One prisoner shared with her how he now fully grasps the extent of the pain he caused his victim’s parents. “No matter how much time I do in prison,” he told her, “I realize I cannot give them back their daughter.”

The depth of his remorse made Teresa think about the depth of her own anger; she said she realized that in a very real way, this prisoner was now freer than she was—because his atonement delivered him, while her unrelenting anger has kept her bound.

She seeks to forgive because she seeks to be free, but surely none of us would doubt the difficulty of that task. God works in mysterious ways, and Teresa says that the work she does now has helped to heal her heart. Her experience working with prisoners has changed her life, opening her to the possibility that there is light in the midst of the deepest darkness. She describes her work both with prisoners and as a victims’ advocate as a lifesaver, telling me, “Even given the reality of the most devastating, horrific acts of violence, I now feel that there is hope.”

WHO WE CHOOSE TO BECOME

Some powerful figures in history have been transformed in ultimately positive ways by experiences that were outwardly devastating. One of the most compelling of such stories is the life of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32nd president of the United States.

When he was a young man, Roosevelt was the epitome of someone who had it all. He was tall and handsome, brilliant and wealthy, married with several children. His cousin Theodore had been president of the United States, and his own career seemed guaranteed to go as far as he chose to take it.

One day in 1921, while on vacation at his family lake house in Canada, Roosevelt took a swim. Within hours of returning home he was suffering chills, within days his limbs were numb, and within weeks he was diagnosed with polio.

Yet this tragedy was not the end of his story; in a profound way, it was just the beginning. Roosevelt would never walk again without the help of iron braces and canes, but from the crucible of his suffering he emerged as someone who did as much to ameliorate the suffering of others as has anyone in history.

Three years after his diagnosis, Roosevelt traveled to a resort in Warm Springs, Georgia, known for its eighty-eight-degree natural springs. Its hot waters eased his physical pain, but at least as importantly, the kindness of those he met there lifted his spirits. Few others at Warm Springs had ever heard of the Roosevelts of Hyde Park, New York. They didn’t know of FDR’s wealth or care about his power. To those he met at Warm Springs, many of them poor, he was just another sufferer, a saddened man who needed the waters to soothe his pain. They cared for him simply because he was a human being who shared their affliction. Through that experience, Roosevelt came to know, and to depend upon, the kindness of people he most probably would never have met otherwise.

This is a common theme—a recurrent archetype—on the journey out of suffering. People arrive to help us in our darkest hours, and they often come oddly disguised. Someone we might never have met, or respected—much less looked to for help—ends up giving us pivotal assistance that we could not have gotten elsewhere. People at a ramshackle resort helped heal Roosevelt in ways that all the doctors at the best medical institutions could not do. Not all God’s angels have letters on their doors announcing that they are angels. Nothing humbles us like being helped by people whose help we never thought we would need.

Years later, when Roosevelt became president, he was faced with the suffering of millions left poverty-stricken by the crash of the stock market in 1929. Given his own socioeconomic background, he may not have had a deep, visceral compassion for the millions of unemployed people struggling during the Great Depression. He was a very rich man from a very rich family, and he could easily have walled himself off emotionally from those who suffered the most at that time. They were not the likes of the Roosevelts of Hyde Park; but they were very much the likes of the people Roosevelt had known, and come to depend upon, in Warm Springs, Georgia.

Now it was his turn to give back. His empathy for the hardships endured by average Americans at that time inspired the New Deal, an array of social and economic programs that brought relief to millions of people. Roosevelt was not a perfect man—there were many left outside the circle of his compassion—but someone with less empathy would not have accomplished the New Deal, nor perhaps even tried. My own father grew up in poverty and spoke admiringly of Roosevelt throughout his life as the man who had saved my father’s family from ruin. Until the day he died in 1995, anytime you asked Daddy who he voted for on Election Day, his response was always the same: “I voted for Roosevelt.”

Roosevelt’s suffering helped turn him into the man he needed to be to alleviate the suffering of millions. When tragedies occur, we don’t always get an answer to the question, “Why did this happen to me?” But we can always question what blessing can still come from the experience.

We cannot always choose whether or not we suffer, but we can choose whether or not our suffering will have been in vain. From the person who loses his or her eyesight and then becomes an advocate for the blind; to the parent who forms a foundation in his or her late child’s memory; to the athlete who loses limbs and then founds an athletic organization for others similarly challenged—a key to transcending our suffering is to use it as a blessing on the lives of others.

It would be a mistake to idealize suffering, but it would also be a mistake to diminish its relevance to the formation of character. In the words of poet Khalil Gibran, “Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Too many people are sad about unimportant things, perhaps because they won’t let themselves be sad about the larger tragedies of life. Swiss psychologist Carl Jung said, “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.” In allowing our hearts to be pierced by instances of genuine suffering, both in our own lives and in the lives of others, we counterintuitively become more available to some of life’s most exquisite opportunities for happiness.

Nothing makes us stronger than having climbed out of the deepest valleys of despair to the highest peaks of joy, and nothing pushes us from behind like angels reminding us not to forget the others who are scaling the mountain with us. Once having reached the peak, we find that we’re no longer crying—and even more importantly, we find we’re no longer alone.

Once we embrace the realization that happiness 24/7 is not promised in life, we gain a more mature acceptance of life’s ups and downs. Things do not always go as we wish, not everything is under our control, and no matter what happens, life on earth is a temporary ride. When we are honest with ourselves, we recognize that every day holds the potential for heartbreak. But joy doesn’t rest on trusting that every day will unfold as we wish; sometimes it rests on simply appreciating the fact that today, on this day, everything is fine. The rough times in our lives can lead us to feeling, among other things, greater gratitude for life when it goes well. Having lost things that were precious, we learn to be much happier with the things that remain. Suffering can leave us scarred, yet still, in almost mysterious ways, we can become better people for having gone through it. Sometimes the fact that “I’ll never be the same again” is not such a bad thing. We won’t be who we used to be, but who we become now is completely up to us.

Dear God,

Please make of my life

A beautiful thing.

Guide me on an illumined journey

From the darkness of the world

To the light that is You.

Make of me a conduit

Of good

That I might help transform the world.

Set my feet upon a hero’s journey

And my heart on an enlightened path.

Amen

SPIRITUAL MATURITY

When suffering has led us to the realization that to find ultimate answers we should go to God, the question then becomes, but where do I go to find God?

Now, in the twenty-first century, our great religious stories bear a new and modern look. For they are more practically applicable to the issues of contemporary life than many people realize. They can be freed from the lifeless containers of institutionalized religion or mere academic pursuit to which they’re often relegated. We can breathe the life of immediate, practical relevance into what otherwise can be perceived as mere metaphor or concept.

One doesn’t have to be clergy, a monk, a teacher, or anything special to search for enlightenment. The call of the soul is universal. It doesn’t require particular beliefs because it is an experience, an understanding that begins as an abstraction and then leads to what A Course in Miracles calls a “journey without distance” from the head to the heart.

Often, people want to know the how-tos of enlightenment, as though a few easy steps should be able to do it. But forgiveness, compassion, atonement, and faith are not always easy steps—even when we understand their importance. Enlightenment involves more than a collection of metaphysical data; it involves the actual practice, application, and embodiment of love.

The purpose of religion is not just to tell stories, but to change our lives. And the religious experience is just that: an experience. Only when that experience is an opening to love does it truly have anything to do with God. And God’s truth cannot be monopolized by any group or institution, no matter what those groups say and no matter how many centuries they’ve been saying it.

The purpose of religion is to bind us back to our right minds, which is the mystical intelligence of the universe. A Course in Miracles says that, in their essence, religion and psychotherapy are the same thing. Regardless of what words we use, salvation lies in the healing of our minds.

Enlightenment, then, applies to earth as much as to heaven. A Course in Miracles says that the line in the Bible “Heaven and earth shall pass away” means that in time they will no longer exist as two separate states. The realms of practical experience and ideal consciousness will be as one.

Enlightenment isn’t a learning, but an unlearning. It’s a process, usually involving a lot of trial and error, through which we come to reject the ego’s guidance and accept love’s guidance instead. It’s not just an expansion of who we are, but the dissolution of a false self that’s been masquerading as who we are. As an egoless state of consciousness, it is actually our natural state of being. And while few of us can say that we’ve attained it on a consistent basis, most of us have had moments when we’ve been there—moments when we felt free to love and to be loved. Until we become enlightened masters, we will still make mistakes and stumble and fall with everyone else. But we can become people for whom the good days, the happy times, are more the rule than the exception. And that itself is a miracle.

Light, according to A Course in Miracles, means “understanding.” The enlightened mind is the mind that understands. It understands that only love is real, and nothing else exists. It understands that illusions dissolve in the presence of love. It understands that we, and everything about our lives, can change.

Enlightenment and miracles naturally go together, because the mind that’s healed of fear is a vessel of love, and the mind that is a vessel of love works miracles. When light begins to dawn on our minds, the darkness of the deepest night recedes.

EMBRACING MIRACLES

When we forgive, when we atone, when we apologize, when we own our mistakes, when we extend compassion, we are not just being “nice.” We’re following immutable laws of the universe. Spiritual principles are based on internal laws of consciousness as fixed and unalterable as any laws of science. We know that holding a grievance toward another will block a miracle as surely as letting go of a book from our hands will make it fall onto the ground.

This is particularly important when we’re depressed, because at no time are we more tempted to thoughts of hopelessness and negativity. Thoughts like “Nothing will ever be good again” and “All hope is lost”—not to mention, “I hate those people for how they treated me”—are mental meanderings that disrupt the flow of miracles.

Week after week, for more than thirty years, I’ve spoken to audiences about how love works miracles. As often as not, someone in the audience is crying, trying to lift themselves up from the regions of despair—heartbreak over a broken love affair, the pain of a bitter divorce, the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness, financial ruin, the acceptance of a loved one’s, or their own, addiction, and so forth. My message to them is never that they shouldn’t cry. Having been where they are, that’s the last thing I would say to them. But I would say, as others have said to me during the times of my own suffering, that God works miracles. And that He never runs out of them.

Some periods of life are not easy. They call for deep inner work and emotional heavy lifting. This might mean you have to accept what feels unacceptable, or forgive what feels like the unforgivable. It might mean taking a painful look at yourself, or being open to change in areas where you can’t imagine yourself changing. Spiritual comfort doesn’t derive from simply throwing a little white light around an issue. It’s not like you grasp a spiritual principle or two and voilà, your pain is gone. Rather, you start learning and applying the principles and voilà, you’re on your way.

Spiritual work is not an easy way to cope, like something we grab on to as a substitute for serious psychological remedy. It is a walk through what can be a very deep, dark psychic jungle, knowing that monsters lurk among the trees but with the hero’s dedication to conquering them. Spirituality isn’t the purview of the weak; it’s the purview of the brave.

The spiritual journey dredges up the mud of our subconscious fears, yet it does so in order to remove them. In the words of Carl Jung, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Fear and negativity that remain hidden in the darkness of our unconsciousness have the power to hurt us; when brought to the light of conscious awareness, they can then be surrendered to God and miraculously transformed.

While all this is going on, it’s understandable that we’re depressed. But that doesn’t necessarily mean something is wrong. It simply means that the work is being done: something is being looked at, something is being endured, and ultimately something is being healed. Sadness during the process is natural; we’re looking at things that are not easy to look at, and changing in ways that involve vulnerability before God and sometimes before other people as well.

Sometimes we have to walk a painful path in order to get to the path’s end, but the experience becomes a holy crucible when we make the walk with God.

MYSTICAL TRADITION AND SPIRITUAL TRUTH

Mysticism is the path of the heart. It is not a religion, but rather a holy river of universal themes that runs through the great religious and spiritual systems of the world. It does not posit an external broker for our spiritual lives in the form of a human being or institution, but rather the presence of a divinely inspired guidance system that dwells within us all.

Spiritual conversion is not to a doctrine or dogma, but to a different way of seeing. We gain new eyes when we extend our perception beyond the darkness of the world to the light that lies beyond. Spiritual light is the transcendent field of infinite possibilities that exist beyond circumstances that the ego would claim are all sewn up. That is how spiritual truth lights our way out of darkness. It restores our hope by realigning our thoughts with the idea that in God all things are possible.

Regardless of the terrible perversions of religious truth that the ego so slyly promulgates, the great religious stories remain keys that unlock our psychological mysteries. Religious stories are not just symbols; they are mystical codes. When understood metaphysically, they remove the veil that hides the light kept hidden by the ego. The great religious figures of history reveal common undeniable truths.

Whether universal principles are articulated in Christianity or Alcoholics Anonymous, Judaism or A Course in Miracles, Islam or Buddhism or Hinduism or wherever, they are ours to mine for spiritual treasure if we wish. A contemporary generation of seekers now looks to those universal truths for help in guiding us out of the dark morass that is this time in human history.

The great religious traditions are spiritual renditions of the hero’s journey. This journey is our common search for meaning within a world often dominated by the meaningless. The goal of a spiritual life is the attainment of inner peace, achieved through the application of loving principles to our everyday concerns. These principles are invisible forces that, when applied, wield unlimited power to change our lives.

Great religious stories reveal eternally relevant information. They guide us through the confusion of mortal existence to the clarity of spiritual truth. There is one spiritual Truth with a capital T, spoken in many different ways and told through many different filters, both secular and religious. Like a classic Cole Porter song sung by Frank Sinatra in 1943 and then again by U2 in 2010, every age has the right—and a responsibility to itself—to refresh its understanding of spiritual principles according to its own perspective and experience. It is said in the Jewish tradition that every generation must rediscover God for itself.

One thing that does not change, generation to generation, is that people suffer and look for suffering’s end. Suffering is at the core of all the great religious tales because it is at the core of the human experience. The lives of Buddha, Moses, and Jesus are three that created explosions of light within the collective psyche of humanity, all bearing witness to, enduring, and transforming the pain of living. From Buddha’s observation of suffering when he first left his father’s house, to Moses guiding the Israelites out of their suffering in Egypt, to the suffering of Jesus on the cross—all three point to the suffering of the world, and to our deliverance from it.

Exploring Buddha, Moses, and Jesus through the lens of miracle-minded thinking adds a dimension of understanding to the truths they reveal. Their stories, their suffering, and the deliverance they provided, illumine our experience and expand our hearts.

Suffering the trials and tribulations of the world, or identifying with those who suffer them, spiritually transforms us. Through their own suffering, great spiritual figures have been transformed and then gifted the ages with divine illumination. It was not simply that Buddha, or Moses, or Jesus became privy to some abstract understanding that they could pass along to the rest of us. Something much deeper than that occurred, of course. They were themselves in-formed. They received divine truths not abstractly but viscerally, not just through intellect but through experience, in order to become conduits for the transmission of that information into the minds of others.

Because all minds are joined and mind itself is eternal, when anyone, anywhere at any time, attains a state of consciousness in which the spiritual world penetrates the material, the opportunity is created for anyone else, anywhere and at any time, to do the same. The consciousness of a great religious figure is a tunnel of perpetual energy—a door, a vortex, or whatever words we use to describe it—through which others can more easily enter into the same higher consciousness. Like evolutionary elders, they achieve a state toward which all of us are moving; their having done so makes our journeys more achievable. Their story, their mission, becomes an imprint on our own psyches that carries transformational power to transfigure us as it transfigured them.

We’re not asked to reenact the suffering of the great religious figures, but merely to learn from it so that we too might come to embody the messages they received.

When we ourselves are suffering—at the mercy of spiritual ignorance, slaves to our own egos, enduring physical disease or injury, or any other deep trial—spiritual light is the hand of God reaching down to lift us up. Great spiritual teachings are lights that cast out darkness from our minds, ladders of consciousness out of the depths of our despair. The religious experience—not a mere adherence to doctrine or dogma, but rather a genuine encounter with God when we call out to Him in our helplessness and pain—is the opening of a door through which we exit the realm of spiritual darkness.

This is not to glorify suffering, but simply to recognize that even there, God is. Often, the things that mark the end of one life are simply the beginnings of a new one. Unless we allow our suffering to teach us what it can teach us, however—total and utter reliance on God’s Love as the one and only source of our happiness, not in some things but in all things—then our pain will never seem to have been anything more than a result of random chaos with no ultimate meaning. Like everything else, it will have whatever meaning we ascribe to it. To love, above all else, is the meaning of our lives—to place the extension of compassion for other sentient beings at the top of our list when we consider why we were born, why we wake up every morning, why we do what we do, and why we go where we go. Anything else is ultimately meaningless and will never be powerful enough to end our suffering or provide a way to true peace. We might not ever attain, at least in this lifetime, the enlightened consciousness of Buddha, or Moses, or Jesus; but the effort itself makes life worth living, brings suffering to an end, and makes happiness a fundamental and achievable goal.