The most important decision we make is whether we
believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.
— ALBERT EINSTEIN
Since she was a child, Trish had always been terrified of snakes. When she was little, her family vacationed at a place with an outhouse, and she had always been warned that snakes can live in the outhouse toilets, where they can lurk in the dark before jumping up and biting you when you’re sitting on the pot. Because of this, she was always on the lookout for snakes in toilets.
She never saw a snake in the outhouse toilet when she was a child, but as an adult, all snakes, even harmless little garter snakes, left her quaking in her sneakers. One night, Trish and her husband were at the farmhouse they owned on 40 acres of rustic countryside in the North Georgia mountains when she had to go to the bathroom. She looked in the toilet first, as she always did, and then sat down and peed. When she was done, she stood up, and seeing something brown in the toilet when she hadn’t moved her bowels, she did a double take.
That’s when her husband heard her let out a bloodcurdling scream.
There, in the bowl of the toilet, was a large poisonous cottonmouth snake, swimming happily in the water. She hadn’t seen it when she first went to sit down. It must have been hidden under the rim of the wooden toilet seat. With no easy way to remove the snake from the toilet until they could get help in the morning, Trish was terrified to stay in the farmhouse that night. She insisted upon leaving the house until her husband found a way to block the bathroom door, trapping the snake in the bathroom if it somehow escaped the toilet bowl.
The next morning, the snake was not visible in the toilet any longer, so Trish’s husband called a plumber, who showed up, ironically, with a “plumber’s snake,” meant to get rid of anything that might be blocking the drain pipes. Unfortunately, when the plumber “snaked” the pipes, the cottonmouth was killed. The plumber removed pieces of it until the pipes were clear, thinking Trish’s fears would be relieved after that.
But the nightmare wasn’t over. In the course of the next day, Trish found 13 baby cottonmouths all over the house—in a teapot, on the staircase, under a carpet, under a pile of clothes. Perhaps the mama cottonmouth had come inside to lay eggs. Maybe the babies were coming out of the sinks through the pipes. It was hard to say how they got there.
Trish never could relax in that farmhouse after that. It’s been empty now for years, but she’s still afraid to go back and get the house ready to sell. Her husband died years ago and she can’t face going back alone. And she still has to psych herself up every time she gets near a toilet, reminding herself that what happened is in the past and that there’s not likely to be a real snake under the toilet seat ever again.
What Trish experienced when she saw that cottonmouth in her toilet was true fear. She really could have been hurt by that poisonous snake, so her initial reaction was appropriate. But the snake phobia that has shadowed her since is understandable false fear. When you experience something terrifying and life-threatening like this, it’s easy to conclude that you live in a dangerous world, and the conclusion gets reinforced by your neurobiology. Trish’s amygdala, which helps form “implicit memories,” stored this snake experience deep in her unconscious mind, and as her limbic brain kept getting repetitively triggered, the amygdala tinged these memories with more and more fear residues. When this happens, fear takes on a life of its own, and it’s easy to conclude that the world must be a dangerous place where we always need to be on the alert.
Originally, Trish’s stress responses were triggered by a real threat (true fear). Poisonous snakes in your house are a danger in need of a remedy. But once the snakes were gone, what remained—fear of toilets and an even more generalized undercurrent of chronic fear—was a remembered or imagined threat (false fear). This is a warning system malfunction, alerting us to dangers that don’t actually threaten us. And it’s really nothing but a thought—I live in a dangerous world.
If we question Fearful Assumption #3, “It’s a dangerous world,” we could probably brainstorm lots of counterarguments providing evidence to contradict this thought. As Albert Einstein said, “The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.” Because Trish is my mother, I know she has collected mounds of evidence that it’s not really a dangerous world, in spite of what happened with the snakes. Mom is a woman of great faith, so she used the power of her mighty mind to round up all the evidence she could that she lives in a friendly universe. She has witnessed what felt like very purposeful miracles. She has witnessed encounters with what she considers angels. She feels the intimate presence of a divine force in her life. And she trusts that when things happen that her Small Self doesn’t want, they’re happening for a purpose.
Mom’s two biggest fears were living alone and snakes. First she survived the snake incident, and then my father died during my Perfect Storm, leaving her alone for the last nine years. Sitting with me on the dock on the lake by her house where she used to live with my father, she said, “Maybe this all happened so I could learn that even if what I fear most happens, I can handle it. Once I’ve survived that, I guess I can handle anything.”
When I asked Mom whether she believed it was possible that her biggest fears came true for some cosmic purpose so she could grow, she conceded that this might be possible. Could she buy into the idea that it’s a purposeful universe?
Mom nodded.
LIFE IN A “DANGEROUS WORLD”
Do we live in a dangerous world? After the events of September 11, many people certainly thought so. In the wake of that tragedy, people were so afraid of being killed in a plane hijacking that many switched from flying to driving, even though the biggest risk of traveling by plane is the drive to the airport. In fact, one professor calculated that even if terrorists were hijacking and crashing one jet per week, a person flying once a month would only have a 1-in-135,000 chance of being killed in a plane hijacking, a miniscule risk compared to the annual 1-in-6,000 risk of being killed in a car crash.
In fact, Gerd Gigerenzer, a Berlin psychologist, anticipating that September 11 would lead to more traffic fatalities that year, began tracking the data. As expected, fatalities on American roads soared after September 11. Gigerenzer was able to ferret out the number of unnecessary car crash fatalities that happened only because people were now more afraid of flying. The number was 1,595—more than half the number of those who died in the terrorist attacks. Irrational fear caused 1,595 people to die unnecessarily.1
The fear that paralyzed the nation didn’t stop at fear of plane travel. When anthrax infected 22 people through the mail in the fall of 2001, 30,000 people began taking the antibiotic Cipro, often without a prescription. More people likely got sick from this powerful and dangerous superdrug than the 22 people who were infected with anthrax. Fear didn’t protect them. It put them at further risk.
Then the nation experienced more health scares. In 2002, news broke that some of the smallpox virus stockpiled in the former Soviet Union might have found its way into the hands of terrorists. Smallpox fears escalated, even though there hasn’t been a case of smallpox in the United States since the 1940s. In 2003, when severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) emerged in Asia, there were only 7,000 cases in the entire world and less than 100 in the United States. But that didn’t keep Americans from wearing masks, boycotting plane travel, and avoiding Chinese restaurants.
When news of swine flu hit the media in 2009, hundreds of thousands of people began stockpiling the antiviral Tamiflu, while rushing to hospitals for even the slightest symptom. In 2011, when an earthquake caused a tsunami to devastate the Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, people as far away as the United States began buying up the nation’s supply of potassium iodide, believed to help protect the thyroid gland from radiation exposure, until prices of the limited supply of the supplement began skyrocketing on eBay.
The public’s wildly overblown reaction to these health scares—which in the big picture of the world’s woes posed minimal risk—highlights something tragic happening in the modern psyche. We’re not just afraid of real threats to our lives, the ones true fear can serve to protect us from. We’re also afraid of rare, usually nonfatal viruses and far off, undetectable levels of radiation.
Yes, there are real dangers in our world, but we’ve lost touch with the statistical likelihood of these dangers, and as a result, many of us live in chronic fear. We’re afraid of pesticides, hormones in milk, chemicals in food, poisons in our water supply, genetically modified organisms, and toxins in our air. We’re worried about mercury in our fish and fillings, bacteria in our cheese, lead in our paint, leaky breast implants, and mold in our basements. We’re afraid of toxins in our cosmetics, poisons in plastics, and contamination of our meat. We’re anxious about whether microwave ovens, cell phones, and deodorant will kill us. We’re terrified of cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s, and herpes.
As if that’s not enough, we also fear pedophiles, terrorists, shark attacks, methamphetamine, car accidents, tornados, and pit bulls. We’ve been afraid of global warming, nuclear war, Y2K, meteors, extraterrestrials, the end of the Mayan calendar, and “the big one” striking a major city. We’re frightened of school shootings, movie theater shootings, drive-by shootings, and car bombs. We fear for our safety on a daily basis and wonder whether we’ll ever again feel like we’re out of harm’s way.
And yet, in all measurable ways, we’ve never been safer. It’s true across the developed world. Just for example, Americans enjoyed life spans 60 percent longer in 2000 than in 1900.2 In 1900, a baby born in England had a life expectancy of 46 years. In 1980, it was 74 years. Today, in Canada, for example, the life expectancy is more than 80 years.
For most of human history, giving birth was the riskiest thing a woman could do. It still is for some women in developing countries, where 440 women die giving birth for every 100,000 children delivered. But in the developed world, only 20 out of 100,000 women die as a result of pregnancy. It’s never been safer to have a baby.
Children are also safer than ever now. In England in 1900, 14 percent of all children died. By 1997, that number had fallen to 0.58 percent. While most parents confess to being terrified that they will lose a child, since 1970 alone, the death rate of American children has fallen by more than two-thirds.
We’re not just living longer—we’re living healthier. Fewer people develop chronic illnesses, and those who do get sick develop illnesses 10 to 25 years later in life than in years gone by. Even when people do get sick, the illnesses tend to be less severe. And people in developed countries today are less likely to become disabled.
We fear war, but from a historical perspective, we’re living in one of the most peaceful times in human history. Fewer wars are being fought, and when war does happen, fewer people die. While people in developed countries are clearly more prosperous than those in developing countries, even those in developing countries are enjoying an improved quality of life. While still alarmingly high, the proportion of people in the developing world who are malnourished fell from 28 percent to 17 percent in the two decades following 1980.3
By all measures, we in the developed world are the healthiest, smartest, richest, safest people in human history. And yet, we have never been more afraid.
But it doesn’t have to be this way …
IS IT A DANGEROUS WORLD?
When life has the potential to scare you with snakes in the toilet, cancers with no treatment, and genocide, it’s no wonder people conclude that we live in a hostile universe. If you’ve suffered the traumas of abuse, abandonment, rejection, loss, illness, physical pain, the aftermath of violence, or other tragedies that leave you feeling unsafe, it’s only natural to conclude that you live in a dangerous world. However, if you live on constant high alert, your body will get stuck in chronic repetitive stress response and you’ll predispose your body to illness, in addition to making yourself needlessly unhappy.
Certainly, nobody is suggesting that the world doesn’t hold real dangers. But is the thought “It’s a dangerous world” true? What if you believed something different instead? What if, instead of a dangerous world, I suggest to you that it’s a purposeful universe? Could you buy into that as an alternative?
When I suggest that we live in a purposeful universe rather than a dangerous world, I’m not suggesting that scary things don’t happen or that you’ll always be immune to tragedy. I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t be aware of danger or ignore all fear signals. I’m also not suggesting you’ll always get what you want. What I am suggesting is that the universe may be orderly and meaningful even if we don’t understand how it operates, and we may be protected by a loving Universal Intelligence that guides us through outer signs and inner knowing.
When you come to trust that you live in a purposeful rather than a hostile universe, false fear starts to lose its foothold. You develop a sense of safety that runs deeper than how much money is in your bank account or how much you feel loved by your spouse or whether or not your doctor gave you a clean bill of health. You begin to trust that whatever happens—even if it’s not what you would have wished—contributes to your growth as a soul. When your commitment to soul growth supersedes your desire to get what you want, there’s so much less to fear because you’re not guarding against uncertainty or grasping at what you don’t want to lose. This doesn’t mean you don’t take necessary steps to ensure your financial security, tend your relationships, guard against risk, or care for your body. It means you let go of the constant clutching for control.
Most of us are control freaks, and this attempt to control life leads to a lot of false fear. But when you believe you live in a purposeful universe, you realize the universe doesn’t need you to be in charge, so you don’t need to be afraid of letting go of the reins. Living in a purposeful universe allows you to come into right relationship with uncertainty because now, instead of viewing uncertainty with suspicion or fear, you can be at peace in the face of the unknown. Instead of guarding against loss, you can trust that even loss has a purpose, even if you don’t know exactly what it is.
Once you begin to trust in this way, you’ll find that false fear, while it may still show up, no longer rules your life. Instead of panicking when you lose your job, you trust that the perfect job will appear in the perfect timing. Instead of clinging to a love affair when it’s ending, you trust that the dissolution of the relationship is a sign that a healthier, happier relationship is on the way. Instead of feeling afraid when you have a health scare, you have faith that whatever happens, it’s all a welcome part of your soul’s evolution. Even if you’re faced with the ultimate bad news—that you may lose the life of a loved one or even your own life, you’re able to trust the process and the outcome.
This doesn’t mean you won’t have emotional responses. If you lose a loved one, break up with someone you love, or face your own health battle, professional failure, or financial loss, of course you’re going to experience grief, anger, and sadness. Trusting that you live in a purposeful universe is not about taking some spiritual bypass that skips you past painful emotions, but you don’t have to get stuck in those emotions or in the victim stories that tend to arise when the universe doesn’t deliver what you desired.
Living in a purposeful universe means that you have faith in a guiding force that is navigating life with you. You know that you are not alone, and this inner knowing offers protection against fear. The guiding force may organize around a religion you espouse as your own, or it may not. You may call this guiding force God or Buddha or Jesus or Allah or Quan Yin or the Divine or the Universe itself. You may perceive it as energy or even a wind of sorts, something that blows in the direction of the highest good and carries you with it if you let it. You may believe this guiding force comes from within you, or you may think of it as something outside of yourself.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe this guidance comes from the deity of your choice, the Universe, energy, or your own Inner Pilot Light. What matters is that you trust that you don’t have to micromanage every single little detail of your life because you know you are constantly being guided toward what is most aligned with the highest good, even if you don’t know exactly what that will be. This guidance may be very subtle, but when you start to look for it, you’ll see it more and more. Signs will guide your path. Synchronicities you can’t explain will remind you that there is more than scientific materialism at work in the world around us. You may experience examples of extraordinary knowing, when you suddenly know something you shouldn’t be able to know—something that helps you protect yourself or someone you know. You may even experience what seems like a miracle, and it may grant you the courage you thought you could never muster. This guiding force tends to pester you, and if you miss one sign, you’re likely to receive another one.
15 WAYS THE PURPOSEFUL UNIVERSE GUIDES YOU
“THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING”
Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer, Ph.D., author of Extraordinary Knowing, was a professor and researcher in the psychology department of the University of California at Berkeley and at the University Medical Center in San Francisco. Lisby, as she was known to her friends, was a skeptical scientist, not inclined to pay much attention to “woo woo” ideas. Then something unusual happened. In 1991, when her 11-year-old daughter Meg’s handmade harp was stolen from the theater where she was playing, Lisby spent two months trying to recover the harp. The police got involved. She contacted instrument dealers all over the country. A CBS TV news story aired. But nothing worked. The harp was gone.
After she had given up hope, a friend of Lisby’s said, “If you really want that harp back, you should be willing to try anything. What about calling a dowser?” Lisby had the kind of eyebrow-raising response most legitimate scientists would have to such a suggestion. From what she knew, dowsers were odd people who walked around with forked sticks telling you where to drill wells. But Lisby’s friend told her that really good dowsers could find not just underground water, but also lost objects. Lisby didn’t believe a dowser could find the harp, but with nothing to lose, she contacted the president of the American Society of Dowsers, Harold McCoy, in Fayetteville, Arkansas. She explained that a harp had been stolen from Oakland, California, and asked Harold if he could help her locate it.
Harold said, “Give me a second. I’ll tell you if it’s still in Oakland.” He was silent for a moment and then said, “Well, it’s still there. Send me a street map of Oakland and I’ll locate that harp for you.”
Lisby overnighted Harold a map of Oakland. Two days later, he called to give her the address where the harp was located. Lisby passed the information along to the police, who shook their heads. They couldn’t issue a search warrant based on a hunch. So Lisby decided to drive to the address Harold had given her, where she posted flyers for two blocks around, offering a reward for the return of the harp.
Three days later, her phone rang. A man said that his neighbor had recently showed him the exact harp the flyer was describing. He said he would arrange to deliver it to her in the parking lot of an all-night Safeway. Lisby showed up at the appointed time and place, where a young man loaded the harp into the back of her station wagon.
Looking at the recovered harp, Lisby concluded, “This changes everything.”
Lisby began asking colleagues and clients about their own “This changes everything” moments. What she discovered was that many people had had similar experiences of either personally knowing things they shouldn’t have known or meeting someone who did in a way that felt extremely purposeful. She shared many of these stories of what scientists call “anomalous cognition” in Extraordinary Knowing. What I found most interesting about these stories of intuitive knowing was that what they knew didn’t seem random. People weren’t just intuiting what song was going to be on the radio next. Most of the time, what they extraordinarily knew contributed either to protecting themselves or to helping, comforting, or even saving the life of someone else.
One of the stories Lisby shared in Extraordinary Knowing was about a neurosurgeon who had been suffering from severe migraines that weren’t responding to treatment. His doctor referred him for therapy with Lisby. Upon interviewing him, she discovered that his headaches had begun when he stopped teaching medical students and residents, which he loved. She asked why he had stopped teaching. He was reluctant to answer, but finally he confessed that he felt he couldn’t explain to those he taught why he never seemed to lose a patient, in spite of the dangerous brain surgeries he performed. The reason, he finally explained, was that as soon as he realized his patient needed surgery, he camped out at the patient’s bedside and waited … sometimes for 30 seconds, sometimes for hours. He waited for something he felt he couldn’t explain to medical students or residents without them dismissing him as crazy. What he waited for was a distinctive white light that appeared around the patient’s head. Until the light appeared, he knew it wasn’t safe to operate. Once the light showed up, it was his signal to take the patient to the operating room: a purposeful sign, unexplainable by ordinary measures, that helped this doctor protect his patients.
Other psychologists and physicians shared similarly purposeful examples of extraordinary knowing with Lisby, often in hushed tones and under the promise of privacy. One of these distinguished psychoanalysts was Patrick Casement, whose books on clinical technique are considered psychology classics. He had heard about Lisby’s experience with the harp and wanted to share his own story with her.
In 1952, when Casement was 17, he was staying with his father’s mother for the Easter holidays. That week, his grandmother confided in him that she had only one real regret in her life. She had once deeply loved a dear friend, but during the war, when people kept relocating, the two of them lost touch. She had tried to find her friend, but all her efforts resulted in nothing more than returned letters.
On Easter Sunday, Casement attended a service at a church about four miles from his grandmother’s house. Afterward, rather than taking the bus home, he decided to walk because he wanted to test out the solution he’d come up with to a school mathematics question. He had worked out exactly how fast he would have to walk so the bus couldn’t catch up with him. He figured that if his calculations were wrong, he’d be able to hop on the bus and ride the rest of the way home. He was committed to walking those four miles at exactly the right pace, in order to prove that his mathematical calculations were correct.
But Casement’s plan got derailed when, 20 minutes later, he surprised himself by sticking his thumb out to hitchhike. He said, “I was shocked to find that—in what I can only call a reflex action, as though my right arm had suddenly taken on a life of its own—I put out my right hand to thumb down one particular car. I was utterly astonished to watch myself defeating my own purpose. To my relief, the car drove past—my race against the bus was, I thought, not to be spoilt. But a moment later the car suddenly stopped. Since, regrettably, I had thumbed it down, I felt I had to accept the offered lift.”
Casement got into the car and thanked the woman inside, who was being chauffeured by her driver. He imagined it must have been she who ordered the driver to go back and pick him up. The woman in the car asked Casement, “Were you at Winchester?” Casement had no idea what prompted the question, but he answered that yes, indeed, he was attending school at Winchester.
The woman in the car replied, “If you are there now, you won’t know the person I am thinking of. He was called Roddie Casement and he went to Winchester, but that must have been a long time ago now.” Roddie Casement was Patrick’s father.
When he told her so, she was delighted. “Is his mother still alive?” she asked. Casement told her that not only was Roddie Casement’s mother—Patrick’s grandmother—still alive, but in fact, they would be driving right past her house two miles down the road. The lady then told Casement a story about how she had been trying to track down her very dear friend, whom she had lost touch with during the war. The friend she was seeking was Casement’s grandmother, the same woman who had been searching for her. The two were reunited that day and spent the day together. Casement’s grandmother died soon afterwards.
Reflecting back on what happened, Casement told Lisby, “Perhaps this lady saw a physical similarity between myself at seventeen and my father at a similar age. But that does not explain why my arm took on a life of its own and suddenly thumbed a lift from that particular car, forcing me to abandon my carefully calculated walk, the last thing I wanted to do. What I do know is accepting that lift meant my grandmother died happily, having finally met up with her beloved friend.”
Maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe Casement’s experience offers a bit of evidence of a purposeful universe. There’s no way to prove it, but Lisby found that stories such as this one are common in the world of psychology and medicine.
Lisby spoke to one nurse who worked in the neonatal intensive care unit. This nurse often knew things she shouldn’t have known, basing her clinical judgment on what she called “hunches.” Her hunches saved a lot of babies’ lives, and others on the unit came to trust them. Another doctor said to Lisby, “Because I’m so involved in getting to know [my patients], it’s like I have a sense of smell—a literal smell—for how things are with them.” She could smell death … literally. She could even smell where in the body disease was. She said, “It comes with a kind of certainty that is like smell, any smell that’s strong and overpowering. You know you smell it, there’s no doubt.” This smell would guide her treatment decisions, but her boss would question her, and she didn’t know how to rationalize her decisions. “What could I say—I got a smell?”
PURPOSE AND PROTECTION
What if the neurosurgeon really did see a white light around his patients’ heads? What if this doctor really did get a smell? What if these doctors are being guided in some way in order to help save lives? Since Lisby had uncovered so many stories of health care providers who had intuitive experiences suggesting that we are being guided in some purposeful way, I thought I’d poke around and see if the people I knew had had any similar experiences.
My friend and mentor Rachel Naomi Remen, who was pediatric faculty at Stanford before writing Kitchen Table Wisdom, told me the story of a toddler who came into the emergency room at 3 A.M. one morning when she was a brand-new intern. The child seemed happy and lively, but his mother insisted he was in danger. “There is something terribly wrong,” she said. “My baby is going to die.”
Rachel ordered all the standard tests, with normal results. The only unusual signs were a slightly elevated respiration rate and half a degree of fever. Baffled, she asked her resident’s permission to do a lumbar puncture, a painful test rarely performed unless there’s clear evidence that meningitis might be the diagnosis. The resident scoffed. “Send them home,” he said, and walked out.
But when Rachel tried to send the baby home, the mother burst into tears. “Please, doctor,” she said, and Rachel suddenly just knew she was right. “One more test,” she told the mother, and she did a lumbar puncture. She had just inserted a needle into the baby’s spinal canal when the enraged resident burst in shouting, “What are you doing?” As she turned toward him, his expression changed. Looking back at the needle, she saw the first drop of pus flow through it. The baby had meningitis. If she had sent him home, he would have been dead within hours.
Rachel told me another story about unexplainable knowing from her personal life. When Rachel’s father died, Rachel’s elderly mother came to live with her. The house where Rachel was living was too small for the two of them and Rachel started looking for a bigger home. They had found a perfect house, a duplex, shared by a lovely older woman. It was spacious with beautiful views and seemed just right to Rachel.
But Rachel’s mother didn’t think so. Once a powerful, professional woman in her own right, at 80 she had become absentminded and forgetful and sometimes confused. Still she was usually supportive of Rachel’s decisions as she had been all of Rachel’s life. But even before entering the house she had said, “We cannot live here.”
Rachel was surprised. “Why not, Mom?” she asked. “It is perfect for us.” But her mother kept saying over and over, “We cannot live here,” without offering a reason for her strong objection. This made no sense to Rachel and she continued to bring up all the pluses of this new home. Finally her mother took Rachel’s arm. In an urgent voice she said, “We cannot LIVE here, Rachel. We cannot LIVE in this house.” So Rachel gave up and eventually they found another home.
A few months later, a violent storm hit the area, causing extensive flooding, many mudslides, and much structural damage. The duplex Rachel loved so was in the path of a huge mudslide and destroyed. Fortunately, the older woman occupying the other side of the house was not home at the time, but Rachel and her mother were at home … and safe in their new house. They would have certainly been injured if not killed had they rented the duplex.
Another physician friend told me his own experience of feeling guided at work in a way that felt purposeful and protective. Sean was a medical resident, still learning the skills doctors need in order to feel confident in emergency situations, when he found himself struggling to access the radial artery of a patient in shock in order to insert a line into it. The patient’s arteries were clamped down from shock, and Sean could not thread the guide wire that needed to go into the narrow blood vessel. After many futile attempts, Sean became panicked, looking around for help and finding no one, knowing that this critical step was necessary to save the patient’s life.
Then something came over Sean, and he found himself stepping back from the patient’s bed and closing his eyes. A sense of peace overtook him, and he did something he had never done. He asked the Universe for help. He didn’t really know who he was asking, but he heard a voice say, “Go ahead.”
He thanked the voice and felt energized and reassured. When he opened his eyes and stepped up to the patient, without doubt, hesitation, or difficulty, Sean was able to access the patient’s radial artery immediately, and the patient’s life was saved.
Thinking back on it, Sean said, “It felt as though my hand was guided into the right place by an external force, and this phenomenon gave me a sense of amazement and awe. This was the first time I really felt connected to another level, a benevolent force. Since then, I’ve felt this guidance many, many times when helping to provide solutions to my patients. I firmly believe we have access to a whole other level in order to help each other, and I believe that our universe is indeed a friendly place that we create on an ongoing basis.”
I was talking to my friend Tosha Silver about how guidance like this shows up, and she referred me to a story in her book Outrageous Openness. In one of the many stories she shares about letting the Divine take the lead, she writes about her straitlaced, highly skeptical economics professor friend Don, who liked to introduce Tosha as his “wacky psychic pal with a degree from Yale.” One day, Tosha asked him, “Really, Don, total truth. Has anything ever happened that made you wonder if you had the full picture? Anything ever rock your perfect little rational world?”
Don went on to tell her about one night when he was in college, when he went to sleep before his roommate had come home for the night. At 3 A.M., Don awoke with a pounding heart and heard his roommate calling his name—twice. But the room was empty. He put on his clothes, stumbled out to his VW Bug, and started driving, only it was more like the car was driving itself. Don was drawn, like a magnet, to a spot ten blocks away, where he found his roommate buried under a snowbank, drunk, disoriented, and freezing.
Tosha was fascinated. “Man, you gotta be kidding me. This didn’t change your life at all?”
Don said, “No way. I had to see it all as a coincidence. If I hadn’t, I would have had to question everything.”
When such things happen, people tend to either respond the way Lisby did and conclude “This changes everything” or sweep it under the carpet the way Don did. But I’m a little baffled about why people would deny such experiences. Perhaps they’re afraid of what they don’t understand. Personally, I find that stories like this actually make me less afraid, because they affirm my worldview: in a purposeful universe, we don’t need to always be on guard against a dangerous world.
I wondered if other people had experiences of intuitive knowing that left them feeling comforted and less afraid. I sought out stories from my friends and colleagues, my online community, my blog readers, Facebook, and Twitter. I asked people to tell me about anything they had personally experienced that made them believe they lived in a purposeful universe. Over five hundred people submitted their stories of how they knew things they couldn’t have known, and because of what they intuitively knew, saved someone’s life—or their own. They told stories of telepathic messages they received from loved ones in danger, intuitive knowing that alerted them to trouble, and messages in dreams that solved problems and offered protection. They talked about what they considered miracles—people who appeared at just the right time, unexplainable cures for seemingly incurable illnesses, miraculous guidance that saved lives, and visitations from beings beyond this world.
I can’t prove that the stories those in my online community shared with me are real, but they had the ring of truth to them. You could sense from those who told their stories how profoundly they were moved by their experiences and how much these experiences grew their faith. I could relate to how these people seemed to feel because I have seen the evidence too.
MY EVIDENCE FOR A PURPOSEFUL UNIVERSE
I was about eight years old, vacationing in North Carolina with my parents, where we were camping on the plot of land owned by my grandparents. It was autumn, and the fall leaves were raining their yellows and oranges across the landscape, but unusual weather resulted in fewer than usual of the bright crimson maple leaves my mother cherished. Planning to wax the fall leaves and decorate our table, Mom sent us out into the woods in search of the rare bright-red leaves, but I couldn’t find a single one. I walked for what felt like miles along the yellow and brown leaf-lined dirt paths, until finally, I spotted a red one, high on a branch that hung over a steep cliff.
Longing to impress my mother with my spectacular find, I shimmied out on the tree limb, perched over the steep cliff, and plucked the bright-red leaf off the branch, just as the branch cracked. I spilled down the hillside, dropping my red leaf. I was spared from plummeting onto the rocks below by a small shrub I was able to grab.
There I was using all of my eight-year-old strength to cling to that shrub, when a man with a warm, loving smile on his face appeared above me. Without saying a word, he gazed down at me, then lowered his walking stick over the edge. I don’t know how I managed to grab onto that stick without falling, but I did, and the man pulled me up the hill. When I turned to thank him, he had vanished. I ran up and down the road, calling for him, but he never appeared again.
When I told Mom my story, she told me I had just been blessed with a miracle, that God had sent an angel to save my life. I was less concerned about angels than about disappointing my mother by failing to bring home the beautiful red leaf that had fluttered away when the tree branch broke.
Then Mom said, “What’s that?” She pulled something out of my pocket.
It was the red leaf.
Was this experience “real” or not? Perhaps rather than being saved by an angel, I was rescued by a hiker who just walked faster than me and managed to slip away before I noticed him. Maybe I hallucinated the whole thing. Jeffrey Kripal, Ph.D., a religious studies professor at Rice University who studies mystical experiences, suggests that perhaps we need not ask whether such experiences are “real” or “unreal.” He proposes that we consider a third category—one that leaves room for the metaphoric and symbolic. He suggests that if a mystical experience offers guidance, eases fear, provides comfort, or expands consciousness, that is enough. Either way, the experience left my eight-year-old self with a conviction that there are things in this world—unseen things—that guide and protect us, and because of this, I don’t need to live in fear.
As I grew older, I had other experiences that affirmed my worldview. Like many of the physicians Lisby interviewed, I started knowing things I shouldn’t have known, things that seemed to protect my patients. One day, in the emergency room when I was a medical resident, a pregnant patient came in with what looked like the flu. All of her blood tests were normal, and I had no reason to believe anything else was wrong with her. My attending physician wanted to send her home, but for reasons I couldn’t explain, I just knew her baby was in danger. I recommended a test that my teacher thought was crazy—an amniocentesis to assess the amniotic fluid around the baby. For some reason, my attending trusted my intuition and let me do the test. It turned out the amniotic fluid was infected with a bacteria that would have killed the baby had we not diagnosed it early enough to deliver the baby prematurely and start her on antibiotics.
I began getting other information that didn’t come from my cognitive mind. I would be talking to someone I’d just met when I would sense something about the person that I couldn’t have known and didn’t have a way to verify as true. I’d sense that someone had been sexually molested as a child. Or I’d get a feeling that she was worried she would be laid off from her job or that she was thinking about leaving her husband. Later, the person would confide in me and confirm what I had sensed. It wasn’t something I could rely on; sometimes I would get this kind of information, and often I would not. But the information I did get often seemed to be helpful in easing the suffering of my patients.
One day, when I was hiking, I saw a waking vision, like a movie being played on an invisible movie screen in front of me: I was sitting on the floor of my guest house, my back against a wall, with my client April lying in my arms, the back of her head resting on my chest. The movie was very specific—a lit candle, a crystal in April’s hand, the scent of a specific aromatherapy oil. A voice-over said, “If you do this, she’ll get better.”
To my rational mind, the vision I saw was just plain crazy. First of all, April was my client. What I saw would be completely inappropriate for the kind of relationship we had. Second, as you know from reading her story earlier, April was a bodyguard with post-traumatic stress disorder who couldn’t turn her back to anyone. Asking her to lie with her back to me would be insane. Third, I was not exactly the crystal-using kind of doctor. I didn’t even own a crystal.
I wasn’t sure what I was seeing. Was I making this all up? Was it just my imagination? Or was it something else? What if the voice-over I heard was true? What if I recreated what I saw in the vision and April’s health problems got better? April was dealing with a variety of different chronic health conditions, most notably a rare type of anemia no hematologist had ever been able to properly diagnose, and she spent days every month connected to intravenous lines for infusions her doctors said she would require for the rest of her life.
As crazy as it sounded, I had experienced enough strange intuitive experiences with positive outcomes that I was coming to trust my intuition. I decided to run it by April. She agreed to try it, so we set up a session. The results shocked both of us, as well as her physician. It has now been over three years since April last got an infusion, and her blood count has been normal ever since.
I can’t explain how I knew what I knew, and I certainly can’t explain why April’s anemia was cured. As Sir Arthur Eddington said, “Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” Whatever it was, the experience changed us both.
After this experience—and after reading Lisby’s book—I found myself becoming increasingly curious about the science of anomalous cognition. As a cognitive doctor, I had little inclination to meander into that fuzzy realm, much less to include a discussion of it in my book. But I was intrigued by the idea that intuition might be the vehicle through which the spirit realm communicates with the human realm. When life is confusing and we’re having a hard time making decisions, perhaps we humans get guided toward the highest good by spiritual forces via our intuition. Wouldn’t it be comforting if this were true? Might knowing that you’re always being guided by well-meaning spiritual influences make you less afraid?
I started interviewing more people about their personal experiences of extraordinary knowing, and what struck me was that those who had come to trust their intuition were capable of taking great risks because they could sense whether or not the risk taking was aligned with their highest good. It can be a fine line between fearless and reckless, but these people didn’t strike me as reckless. The people I interviewed who had cultivated and learned to trust their intuition felt like they were always being guided, and they were supported by this guidance more than they were controlled by their fears. One woman’s story in particular struck me as an example of how difficult decisions can be made when you trust your intuition and the guidance of a purposeful universe.
A CURE BEYOND FEAR
When Kathleen was diagnosed with cervical cancer, her doctor wanted to schedule her for surgery right away. Kathleen wasn’t at all surprised about the cancer. Intuitively, she had known something was wrong, so the diagnosis only confirmed what she had already sensed. Six months earlier, she, along with her husband and three sons, had left the spiritual commune that had been their home for 12 years. The story of why they left was the stuff of bad made-for-TV movies. But once they escaped and moved to Los Angeles, things began to unravel. Kathleen lost all patience with her kids and worried that she had become a bad mother. She had trouble controlling her anger and was afraid she might hurt her children. She knew she had to get away to work on healing herself. Even though she was terrified about abandoning her family, she finally told her husband she needed to leave for a while—to decompress so she could come back and be a good mother and wife. Her husband begged her not to go, but Kathleen’s intuition insisted. Leaving her family behind, she moved to Mt. Shasta, which was reputed to be full of healing energies believed to rejuvenate the body and soul. She thought Mt. Shasta might be able to help her reclaim herself.
That’s when her doctor called her to tell her she had cancer. According to the doctor, the pathology slides had been reviewed by two labs. The diagnosis was unequivocal. The doctor insisted she come back to Los Angeles and get surgery right away. But Kathleen just knew she wasn’t supposed to get the surgery. She felt a keen intuition that she would die if she did. The idea that she might refuse cancer treatment sounded crazy to Kathleen’s cognitive mind. Her doctor had warned her about what could happen if she refused to act right away with aggressive treatment. The cancer could spread and other organs could be affected. The doctor assured her that there was no way the cancer could go away on its own. Refusing treatment was a death sentence.
Kathleen was frightened. She really didn’t want to die. But the voice of her intuition was stronger than the voice of her fear, so she decided against the surgery, because deep down, she just knew that the cancer was only the symptom. Her inner wisdom told her that if she didn’t heal the underlying causes of her illness, the cancer would just come back.
Her doctor had explained that her cancer was most likely related to infection with the human papillomavirus, a virus known to transform healthy cervical cells into cancer. But Kathleen suspected it was more than that. The cancer was just a manifestation of something deeper. Perhaps the virus had caused her cancer, but she sensed that she had been susceptible to the virus because of an unhealed emotional wound that weakened her immune system and predisposed her to it. Her intuition told her that she had to heal the emotional wound first. After that, if the cancer was still there, she would get the surgery. She worried about how much she was upsetting her husband, but she was even more afraid that if she didn’t do this, her family would lose her anyway. She dove into her healing journey with both feet.
Kathleen set about creating a treatment plan aimed at healing her mind’s illness, while also tending to the needs of her body with holistic treatments. Putting her health into the hands of her intuitive knowing, Kathleen carefully sought out a team of practitioners to support her. Holistic health care providers recommended herbal tinctures, supplements, diet changes, and tai chi. Kathleen felt deeply nurtured by them, but she suspected what they were offering wasn’t enough to cure her. They focused mostly on external treatments, and Kathleen’s intuition kept coming back to the emotional wound she knew she’d have to face.
Then she met Joseph, who does deep-tissue bodywork meant to release not only the physiological knots in the muscles, but also the emotional blocks held in those knots. When Joseph began massaging Kathleen, she felt the breaking of a reservoir of fear-laced rage. Writhing on the massage table, nauseated and sobbing, Kathleen moved through her anger and fear. The knotted mass of who she had become began to slowly and deeply unwind.
Between sessions, Kathleen went to the gym, took walks up the mountain, and cried in her room over how much she missed her three sons. Then one day, in the sauna at the gym, she met Kandis, a therapist who used a technique for healing the immune system aimed at identifying the moment in time when a life-negating decision is made. The goal of the treatment is to first release pent-up emotions of anger, guilt, and fear, then create a new life-affirming choice meant to activate the immune system.
Kathleen’s work with Kandis began as talk therapy, aimed at ferreting out the major wounding events in Kathleen’s life. Next, Kandis used kinesiology testing to see which of these events was directly weakening Kathleen’s immune system, allowing her cancer to take hold. The muscle testing only further confirmed what Kathleen had already intuitively sensed about her past.
Kathleen had been only 15 when she found out she was pregnant. Nine months later, she was 16, lying in a hospital bed alone, wracked with labor pains. Suddenly, there was an emergency. Without asking her permission, the hospital staff grabbed her legs and tied them to the stirrups. Kathleen panicked, feeling violated. The doctor announced that he needed to do an episiotomy. Before she could consent, two nurses held her down by the shoulders. As she bucked, trying to get away, she felt large hands thrusting inside of her, then the agony of cutting through flesh.
It worked. The baby boy she was planning to give up for adoption slid out.
While sharing this story with Kandis, Kathleen suddenly understood why it wasn’t just any cancer her weakened immune system allowed to manifest. It was her cervix, the portal through which that abandoned baby had come. It all made perfect sense. She hated her reproductive organs. She hated herself for giving up her baby. She knew she would have to heal this too.
Kandis took Kathleen to a mirror and invited her to look into the eyes of her teenage self. She instructed her to offer compassion to that young girl for what she had been through. Kathleen could feel the emotions of the loss all over again—the confusion, the tensions in her family, the agony of the birth, the love for the baby, the despair of the loss. The emotions felt almost too overwhelming to bear, but somehow, she was able to open her heart to that hurting teenager. After that session, Kathleen knew she had been healed.
By this point, it had been six months since she had moved to Mt. Shasta. Kathleen knew it was time to go home. She returned to Los Angeles and asked her doctor to biopsy her cervix.
The cancer was gone, and it never came back.
I was fascinated by Kathleen’s story. The cognitive physician part of me thought her decision to refuse conventional cancer treatment was pretty reckless. Why would someone risk her life when she was a mother with young children who had a potentially curable cancer that responds well to treatment? Yet somehow, Kathleen just knew everything would be okay if she took an unconventional course.
Few people I meet in everyday life trust their intuition enough to let it make tough decisions the way Kathleen did. Instead, they’re motivated by fear, and they let fear make their decisions because they think fear protects them. Kathleen trusted something else more than she trusted fear, and it resulted in a spontaneous remission from cancer. I started to wonder what would happen if more of us learned how to tune in to our intuition and trust the guidance we get from this inner compass. Would it be safe to make decisions in this way? Is intuition something we all have? Is there any evidence that all of us might have ways of knowing things we shouldn’t know? My scientist brain wanted to know, and I had a feeling my answers might lie in the data reviewed in Lisby’s book.
As I pondered the link between intuition and fear, I grew more convinced that anomalous cognition and courage were somehow related. If fear arises because of the limiting belief that we live in a dangerous world, and if courage stems from the trust that we’re always being guided and protected in a purposeful universe, anomalous cognition may offer a bridge that allows Universal Intelligence to guide us meaningfully via our own intuition. Perhaps “psychic” abilities aren’t just the province of people in muumuus with crystal balls. Maybe all of us can cultivate and learn to trust this kind of intuitive knowing that can help us make safe, healthy, courageous decisions. Is there evidence that my theory is true? As a scientist, I don’t tend to take things like this on blind faith. I like evidence, and in case you do too, I’ll share some of the scientific data suggesting that extraordinary knowing may be something real and available to us all.
SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE OF ANOMALOUS COGNITION
In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine, Ph.D., and his wife, Louisa Rhine, Ph.D., pioneered the study of anomalous cognition at Duke University. The Rhines established the Rhine Research Center, and it is still run today by their daughter, Sally Rhine Feather, Ph.D. In 1948, Louisa Rhine began collecting letters written by people who were describing their experiences of extraordinary knowing. Her criteria for including these letters in her database required that the storyteller appear to be sharing the story in good faith, be of sound mind, and supply concrete factual information not available through any of the conventional five senses. She favored stories with extensive detail. Although she received over 30,000 letters, fewer than half of these made the cut for her database.
While Louisa Rhine was more interested in the stories, which provided a glimpse into a realm of experiences that she deemed difficult to explain away as mistakes of testimony, overinterpretation, imagination, coincidence, or lunacy, her husband was more interested in the science of precognition, which is defined as the ability to foresee an event before it happens, to essentially glimpse the future. J. B. Rhine’s research focused on studying ordinary individuals who claimed no unusual abilities, using conventional scientific methods and procedures. Their primary goal was to definitively determine, using rigorously controlled scientific methodology, whether or not anomalous mental capacities could be proven to exist.
Researchers used a deck of 25 specially designed cards created by Karl Zener. Each card portrayed one of five simple geometric designs—a star, a square, wavy lines, a circle, and a plus sign. Two types of tests were performed. One tested clairvoyance, asking subjects to name a card that no other knew had been flipped up. The second type of experiment tested telepathy, and subjects were asked to name a card another person was thinking of. A correct guess was deemed a “hit.” With 25 cards, pure chance would predict that people would guess 5 correctly. The researchers wanted to see if their subjects could outperform chance. After three years and 100,000 tests with ordinary research participants, the Rhines were able to demonstrate positive and statistically significant results well beyond chance, which suggested that anomalous mental capacities were indeed possible within the ordinary population.4
Their research led them to a young divinity student, Hubert E. Pearce, Jr., who far outperformed ordinary individuals in his ability to predict the cards. Pearce was studied by Rhine’s research assistant Joseph Pratt. Pratt and Pearce would separate themselves by distance—Pratt in the Duke physics building and Pearce in the Duke library—and after they synchronized their watches, Pratt would shuffle a deck of these “Zener cards,” pick the top card off the deck, and lay it facedown on the table in front of him. Meanwhile, Pearce would write down which card he thought Pratt was laying down. A minute later, Pratt would pick another card and repeat this procedure until all 25 cards were turned over. Then he’d shuffle the cards and start over again. The two men conducted 1,850 trials, during which Pearce correctly guessed the right cards 558 times. Pure chance would have him guessing correctly 370 times. The odds that Pearce would correctly guess 558 cards out of 1,850 were 22 billion to 1.
Based on the Pearce-Pratt experiments, Rhine coined a new term—extra-sensory perception, or ESP. In 1934, Rhine published Extra-Sensory Perception, which was widely embraced by the public and reached millions of readers. As the first real scientist rigorously testing anomalous cognition, Rhine’s data made quite a splash in both the academic world and in the press. News media and popular journals like The New York Times and Scientific American snatched it up. Academic institutions called the research “epoch-making.” And anomalous cognition made its way into university psychology classes.
But then controversy erupted. A series of assaults plagued Rhine and his research. Critics claimed that his data was methodologically flawed. The Rhines took the critiques of their methods to heart and redesigned their studies. Much of the critique revolved around “sensory leakage”—ways in which the ordinary five senses might have “leaked” to subjects and influenced the cards they chose. In response, the Rhines replaced the human card shufflers with machines and isolated all subjects in separate locations from the testers, making them incapable of getting clues from sensory leakage. In 1937, the American Institute of Mathematics proclaimed the lab’s procedures and statistical methods fully valid.
In 1938, the Rhine research was critiqued in a public debate forum at the convention of the American Psychological Association. Rhine, as well as Gardner Murphy and one of Rhine’s statisticians, met with resounding applause after fielding the debate questions. By all accounts, Rhine had the support of his colleagues.
But controversy once again plagued Rhine when he published his follow-up book, Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years, or ESP-60 as it came to be known. Initially the book appeared on Harvard’s required reading lists for the introductory psychology classes. But soon thereafter, Rhine’s book was denounced as “pseudoscience” and disappeared from college reading lists. After that, the American Psychological Association stopped talking publicly about ESP and other anomalous mental capacities. In spite of the public’s widespread curiosity about his work, Rhine’s lab settled into scientific obscurity, with its data published only in the obscure Journal of Parapsychology. In her book The Gift, Sally Feather Rhine discusses the current status of the Rhine lab and says, “Our efforts today no longer focus on whether ESP exists; we have strong evidence that it does.” Yet, here we are, living in a world of scientists and rationalists who raise eyebrows if you suggest that precognition is real.
The mainstream world of science still dismisses the existence of anomalous cognition. But if you look at the scientific data objectively, and if you honor the experiences of everyday people, it’s hard not to conclude that anomalous cognition is real. Can I prove it without a doubt? No. Why is this? If anomalous cognition is a real human ability, why isn’t the scientific data more conclusive? I have to wonder whether our scientific methods of determining what is “real” are simply too limited to verify all the mysteries of the universe. Maybe intuition isn’t meant to be used to predict cards. Maybe that’s not purposeful enough. Maybe it’s reserved for what really matters—anticipating danger, protecting those we love, intuiting when it’s time to leave a relationship, or knowing how to make the right medical treatment decisions. All I can say is that my intuition has saved me many times, and it has helped me protect others, and somehow, this makes me feel safer and more capable of taking risks.
TRAGEDY IN A PURPOSEFUL WORLD
I wouldn’t be a real scientist if I didn’t acknowledge what some might view as evidence that flies in the face of the idea of a purposeful universe. How can we say it’s not a dangerous world when our world has been through the Holocaust or the Rwanda genocide? What about incest and school shootings and child abductions and children who get cancer? What about women sold into sexual slavery and natural disasters that devastate communities? What about wars that kill innocent people? How can a purposeful universe allow such atrocities?
The honest answer is I don’t know. That’s the thing about life’s purpose. It’s all a mystery. Suggesting that it’s a purposeful universe doesn’t mean that things will always work out the way we want. As spirits having a human experience, we have free will, and because we’re human, we’re prone to mistakes. Inner and outer guidance is always available to us, but too often, we ignore it. We violate it. We sell our souls in order to get what our Small Selves desire. When this happens, suffering ensues. I can only imagine that our creator weeps as we destroy our environment and inflict genocide upon one another. Surely, our creator hopes we wake up soon.
It’s so tempting to think we know what’s “good” or “bad” and to get upset when things don’t go our way. But perhaps our purposeful universe isn’t so black-and-white. For example, California has been in the midst of a terrible drought, ostensibly as a result of human-inflicted climate change. The fires have been burning through the state, and the animals are dying. A friend of mine suggested that we need to gather in ceremony to do a rain dance and pray for relief from the drought. It’s easy to assume that the “best” thing would be a giant rainstorm. But what if that’s not what’s best? What if our purposeful universe has a grander plan, and it’s actually more aligned for California to get so dry that wildfires burn homes to the ground in order to wake us up to the gravity of how much we’re destroying our planet? Maybe devastation from drought will help us turn things around before it’s too late to save ourselves. Or maybe not.
Considering such things raises more questions than answers. Why is one person gifted with a premonition that saves a child’s life, while another has no such knowing and gets blindsided by a child’s seemingly senseless death? Why does one person experience a miraculous healing from a terminal disease, while another dies? If there is a Universal Intelligence that guides and protects us, why doesn’t it intervene to prevent genocide, war, and violence against children?
Philosophers and theologians have pondered such questions for millennia and there are many beliefs, but none can be proven. We have to keep trusting that if we live in a purposeful universe in which we are unconditionally loved, there must be a reason for even the most seemingly senseless losses we experience. We are not at the mercy of a random, chaotic universe. We are not being punished because of our imperfections or spiritual disobedience. We are not being thrown to the proverbial wolves because we’re not worthy of grace. This means we must trust that whatever happens, it is purposeful, and we will someday be granted insight into the nature of what happens in life.
As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path.”
Once you realize that nothing is random, that you weren’t the victim of bad luck or bad genes or hostile forces, that even illnesses and those who hurt you were teachers of your soul and deserving of gratitude, you’re ready to transform your relationship with fear and uncertainty. Once you make the essential choice to trust that the universe is a purposeful place, you may find that you are less afraid of all that you have to lose, because you’re willing to lose everything if it’s aligned with this greater purpose. You no longer think it’s your job to protect and guard and armor up, because you know that life unarmored is filled with so much more love and intimacy. Trusting that you live in a purposeful universe opens the portal so you can come into right relationship with uncertainty. You can lean into uncertainty, open to mystery with wonder and awe, rather than avoiding risk or uncertainty at all costs. You open yourself to the unearned blessings of grace, and something shifts. This changes everything. You are gifted with courage and can take right action, claiming your place in this purposeful universe.
Walter Kohn, the American theoretical physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1998, said, “I have been influenced in my thinking by the writing of Einstein who has made remarks to the effect that when he contemplated the world he sensed an underlying Force much greater than any human force. I feel very much the same. There is a sense of awe, a sense of reverence, and a sense of great mystery.”
Perhaps we’re meant to lean into the mystery without understanding it all. Perhaps this is where we truly become brave.
COURAGE-CULTIVATING EXERCISE #9
Consider the Evidence
For assistance with this process, visit TheFearCureBook.com and download the free Prescription for Courage Kit, which includes a guided meditation meant to guide you in a reflection that will help you recall evidence that you live in a purposeful universe.
COURAGE-CULTIVATING EXERCISE #10
Find Meaning in Everything
We may never fully understand why things happen the way they do, but when we shift how we perceive what happens, especially when we’re in the midst of something that feels scary, we realize that it’s possible to find meaning in even the most seemingly meaningless events. You can apply this practice whenever you find yourself spiraling into victimhood.
COURAGE-CULTIVATING EXERCISE #11
Ask to Be Shown
Not sure you believe it’s a purposeful universe? Not feeling guided? Never experienced something that leaves you wondering if there might be more? Feeling doubtful about whether a divine presence even exists? Sometimes those of us with very cognitive minds need evidence. Try a little experiment. Whatever it is you trust—whether it’s God, Buddha, Mohammed, Pachamama, or your Inner Pilot Light—try asking for evidence of a purposeful universe or guidance in a way you’ll be able to clearly identify. Be as specific or general as feels right for you. Then be sure to release attachment to any outcome. If you get obsessed about grasping for evidence or guidance, the clutching energy can interfere with the flow of guidance, so it’s important not to make the quest for guidance yet another goal the Small Self can obsess about.
After you do this, pay close attention to your dreams, be on the lookout for synchronicities, notice messages that appear in books, on billboards, or on license plates, listen to your intuition, call upon all your senses to spot the guidance that’s always trying to reach us, and stay alert for evidence of a purposeful universe. Keep in mind that this is not about making demands on the Divine. It’s an offering, an invitation to the Divine to help you grow your trust. If you don’t get a sign, don’t despair. You haven’t been abandoned. Your guidance will come. Be patient and trust that your guidance will arrive in divine timing in the perfect way.