My darling, go home and tell your mother that you are coming with me. Tell her she needs to pack for you, for where we are going it can get quite cold.
Now go and be swift, for we must not tarry. The hour is late, and our dreams are waiting.
I hold your dreams very close to my heart, and I hope that you hold mine.
THE MORTAL MIND focuses on the physical; divine mind focuses on the spiritual. The mortal mind believes in limits; divine mind believes in limitlessness. The mortal mind believes in guilt and error; divine mind believes in forgiveness and innocence. Which mind we choose to think with literally makes the difference between relationship heaven and relationship hell.
The mortal mind asks, “What am I getting here?” Divine mind asks, “What am I giving here?” The mortal mind says, “Why isn’t the relationship this or that?” Divine mind asks, “What is the gift here? What is the meaning of this love?” The mortal mind says, “So-and-so did this wrong, or that wrong.” Divine mind says, “I desire to focus on the light in others, that I might experience the light in myself.”
Believing in finite resources, the mortal mind guides us to selfish thought and selfish behavior. This in turn destroys relationships.
In fact, it is divine mind which illumines our path to true intimacy, guiding us to the thoughts and feelings and perceptions that genuinely join our hearts to the hearts of others. For one thing, it makes us givers and not takers, and we only get to keep what we give away. Love guides us toward the spiritual and emotional generosity without which there is no true depth of connection, mystical or otherwise.
I WAS WORKING once with a group of teenagers, all of us sitting together in a small circle. I led an exercise in which we were to go around the group, each sharing our deepest dreams. Then, after each person had shared his or her dream, everyone else in the circle was to actively support it. At the beginning of the exercise, it went like this: Michael said that his deepest dream was to be a great artist. I then asked Shelly to support that dream, and she looked not at Michael but at me, and said, “Yeah, I think Michael could be a great artist. He draws real well.”
I said, “No, Shelly, look right at Michael. Look into his eyes. Speak to him in first person. Tell him if you think he has talent, and tell him you think he will be a great artist someday.”
“Michael,” she said, looking at him but still averting her eyes, “I think you’re a real good artist. I think you’ll be one, one day.”
“Not quite enough, Shelly,” I said. “It’s your job to convince him. Helping someone feel confident is part of holding their dream.”
“Michael,” she said, “I am absolutely sure that you will be a great artist someday. Your pictures are fantastic. I love them. One day the entire world will love them.”
“Much better, Shelly,” I said. “But life is hard, and he probably still needs a little more encouragement. Why should he believe you?”
“Believe what I’m telling you, Michael,” she said, now looking into his eyes as though the knack had been there all along. “Because I know what I know. I know this is true.”
“Shelly,” I said. “Where is Michael’s dream?”
“It’s in his heart,” she said, looking at me.
“Where else is his dream now, Shelly?” I asked her. “Is it anywhere else?”
“I guess it’s in my heart,” she said.
“Then tell him that.”
“I’m holding your dream in my heart, Michael.” Her smile was ageless now, and she held his gaze.
“Tell him it will be safe there, Shelly.”
“It will be safe there. I will keep it for you,” she said. “You don’t have to worry. I’m your friend and I’m holding your dream.”
I looked over at Michael and he was crying. I almost cried too, thinking how much pain I went through before I knew how to hold a man’s dreams.
YET IT’S HARD to show up for someone else when you don’t yet know how to show up for yourself. How can you give of yourself when you don’t really think you’re anything worth giving? How can you extend your light when you don’t really believe there is any in you? But the light in us is the light of God, and it’s there because He put it there. Lack of self-esteem is more arrogant than it is humble, suggesting the idea that God somehow created junk.
Low self-esteem is delusional. We’re all one in spirit, and thus we are deeply equal in essence. It is our spiritual essence and equality, not our differences, that form the basis for true self-esteem as well as regard for others. We all just happen to be hosts to God. So what’s not to love?
What this means, among other things, is that all of us have a lot to give. In fact, we have not yet begun to scratch the surface of our infinite potential. All of us are faucets through which divine waters would flow forth freely. And God’s gifts would not only pour into us every moment but would also pour through us, seeking to cleanse and nourish the entire world. We block that flow when we think that we personally have nothing to give. It’s the water, not the faucet, that ultimately matters. In any moment that our desire and willingness is to be of service to another, the faucet is miraculously turned on. If our prayer is, “Dear God, please use me to be of service,” then that is what we will be. And it is not for us to judge either the size or value of our gifts. Our job is to try to get out of the way, to defer to the spirit moving within us and become open channels for the flow of God’s love. That is what Jesus meant when he told us to become like little children: There is an innocence and grace that naturally and automatically pull all things into harmony and balance. Finding that place, through prayerfulness and meditation and constant practice, delivers us to an energy more peaceful, more illumined, than the ego mind can even conceive of. That energy lives by its own dictates, and would have us do the same. We are literally guided by its light, effortlessly, to higher and higher paths of unfoldment. When we step back and let a higher power lead us, what emerges are plans and schemes that far surpass the little ideas of our mortal minds.
A man once said to me, “But what would a day with us look like?” I could not answer him in a way that could satisfy his then-current frame of reference. What love does, if it is allowed to, is to combine people’s energies in ways that lift their lives to a mode of divine right order, where new ideas, new possibilities, and new opportunities for growth emanate directly from the heart of God.
Our job is to not abort the process.
I was having lunch one day with a very successful friend who was visiting my town. I said, “What are you doing tonight?” He said, “Nada,” with a tone that implied, “I’d love to do something!”
“Well,” I said. “There’s a woman speaking on relationships tonight over at the church. She’s really good. Do you want to come?”
“Great!” he said.
About an hour later, I had seen more of his life. It is a very big life on external levels. As the day wore on, I began to lose faith in the adequacy of my gift to him.
Finally I said to him, “You know, I don’t mean to disinvite you, but I really don’t know if you would like this talk. I’m not sure. . . . I mean, I don’t know. . . . Although, I could have someone pick you up, of course. . . . I couldn’t take you, but someone else could pick you up, and you could leave when you want to, and I mean, well, I would have you sit next to me, but then you could leave. . . .”
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
He of course opted for dinner and a movie with his friends, and I went to the lecture at the church. The entire talk related to the very issues that my friend was dealing with in his life. It would have delighted him. I had denied him the gifts that were trying to find him, by diminishing my own.
The next night I saw him and said, “I should have kidnapped you last night and taken you to that talk.”
“I know,” he said. “I could feel that.”
I learned something from that experience. My temporary lack of self-esteem in relation to the grand level of my friend’s existence had blocked the truth from me: that all gifts are equally significant, because they have nothing to do with the material world. I do not serve the world by false humility. I serve the world most by humbly accepting that God uses me, because God uses everyone and everything to serve the process of universal healing. We are constantly offered the gifts we most need to receive. The way to receive our gifts is to give our gifts, and that we cannot do if we are always questioning their value.
There is an overall scheme of perfection in the universe, and thinking we are somehow not part of its design only interferes with its unfoldment.
THE CHALLENGE of our generation is to move from me to we. That is the maturity we assume when we wish to learn to love each other from a healed and holy place. Narcissistic people are lonely.
Narcissistic people misunderstand independence, often mistaking the commitment to aloneness for psychological health. A woman I know once told me she was deeply touched by a man she had just met, who lived in another town. While they hadn’t known each other for long, she felt in her heart that something very special had occurred between them, a romantic magic that was very rare in both their lives.
Seeing her a couple of weeks later, I asked her how her relationship was going. “Well, it’s not,” she told me. “I mean, after all, I just met him. I think he’s fabulous, and we lift each other up into some incredible place. But I can’t go making major life decisions based on that.”
I hesitated. “Whoa,” I said. “I could have sworn we could. Should we base life decisions on something less important?”
She gave me the following excuses for why she couldn’t be with this man: one, he lived in another town (as though there aren’t airplanes); two, another man might be moving to be with her in this one (although she said she wasn’t in love with him); and three, she didn’t know if she could be with this new love and still pursue her career. What I kept thinking, as I listened to her, was that this was a woman who was unwilling to reach for love.
She was like someone waking up in the morning and on her bed is a breakfast tray, the morning paper, a good book, a telephone, and a remote for the TV. It’s all there. She’ll reach over for something to do, at some point, when she happens to be in the mood to do so.
So romance with this man was simply that for her: something else lying around, like a newspaper or a book that she might pick up sometime. She might reach over, but she had no plans to reach for. Neither her society nor her life experience had taught her that love is infinitely more important than either a breakfast tray, telephone, newspaper, book, or TV. Her heart told her it was—I could tell that from the way she described her feelings—but modern culture had told her, if anything, how neurotic her heart was to want to jump at this, how much more important a career is than passionate love, and how serious and adult it is to honor material considerations over the love we feel inside. She hadn’t yet considered that the voice of the heart is the voice for God.
She hesitantly asked me what I thought.
“I’m not sure you want to know,” I responded.
“But I really do want to know—sort of,” she laughed.
I paused, and then I said, “I think you’re dishonoring yourself. Jobs, houses, money, and even sex come and go, but love is like some magical bird. And once it flies away you have absolutely no power over if or when it will ever return.”
“It surprises me to hear you say that,” she said softly. “You’re a career woman. You obviously put your career first.”
“Boy, is that not true,” I said. “It might look that way to you, but I think that if I put my career first in the way you mean that, it wouldn’t be much of one. When my heart talks, I try to listen. Why should I validate my heart in every other area, but not relationships? I don’t think there’s any less importance in loving a man than in loving anything else. Relationships are certainly part of God’s plan! And everything in life is better when we have love in our lives.”
I had been like that woman once, thinking romance and God lived in different corners of the universe. Yet it was all just an insidious effort of my mind to keep my relationships out of God’s hands.
I thought my romantic longings deserved less respect than my longing for professional achievement. Many women of my age grew up with the twisted idea that men and babies should be secondary goals. What’s true love and the miracle of giving birth, next to the awesome high of delivering your first quarterly report?
That’s how dumb we were.
We were taught to go after things that we could control. Love, of course, drives you, and not the other way around. Most of us, both men and women, are terrified of merging our hearts with another. We say we’re not, but we are. Even when we’re in relationships, we avoid their mystical power. We turn lovers into roommates, butlers, or maids. We avoid the real light at the center of romantic passion. We’re afraid it would swallow us up.
And that’s because it would, and it does! Overwhelming our sense of separateness is in fact love’s spiritual purpose. The alchemy of love turns the small into the infinite. Enchanted romance is a fire meant to burn up our sense of otherness, from other people and from God Himself. So many of us went around saying for years, “I lose myself in other people too much. I need to stay out of relationships.” And often that was true. But after a period of time, that thought just became a rationalization for the avoidance of love. The day came, once we had developed ourselves and knew who we were, when many of us were only too happy to give up the trappings of our separateness. To resist intimacy, out of fear that if you love you will risk codependency or enmeshment, is like resisting eating food out of fear of obesity. That, as we know, is not wisdom but severe dysfunction. At a certain point, once you’ve established your separate identity, it’s imperative that you let yourself lose it again. Otherwise, you can never know love.
Dear God,
I feel that if I love this person,
I could lose everything that I have.
I have no idea where this love might take me,
and in his presence,
I don’t even care.
to have faith in this feeling?
Illumine my mind and heart,
dear God,
for my ship is lost at sea.
Amen
A career, you can control. Love, you can’t. Terrifying news that, but wonderful once you get the hang of it.
The reason intimacy is so important is that it does force us to surrender our sense of separateness, not in a neurotic way but in an enlightened way. I understand why women had to completely renegotiate our terms of partnership, after centuries of institutionalized subjugation, but at a certain point we have to show up enough to at least give men a chance to do it right. Both men and women are trying very hard today to rethink, redefine, and recast romantic partnership.
What I used to think—what lots of women I know used to think—is that I had more important things to do than love a man. To me, surrender to a man meant that I would have to give up myself so he could shine. I know there are men in relationships with whom that would indeed be true, but their numbers are diminishing. There’s a whole new world now, with new possibilities for union and equality.
Everyone, whether men, women, or children, as individuals or collectively, follow cycles of growth and rhythms of becoming. Whether a phase represents physical growth, as in a child’s body, or the awareness of an entire species, there is an evolutionary imperative to keep moving in the direction of a higher good.
The times we live in are like a planetary puberty, with hormones and chaos and longing leaking out all over. “I’m not who I used to be, but who am I then?” is practically painted in red over every event. And every unit of human identity—every one among us—is struggling to find the answer.
Women have been struggling to emerge like butterflies from the cocoon into which we were forced for the last few thousand years. The journey of our self-actualization—of our rising from the ashes of past physical, mental, and emotional oppression—is clearly one of the major dramas of modern Western civilization. The emergence of true feminine power and glory, while not easy and perhaps rarely accomplished in full, is at least a conscious effort on the part of millions of women.
But starving people have a hard time sharing food. When we ourselves are needy, the needs of others will always come last. So perhaps it’s not an accident that women, having been starved for so long and now finally experiencing how it feels to be at least partially fed, are beginning to notice the emotionally starving men all around us. They are starving, among other things, for our attention and approval. Isis didn’t say to Osiris, “Just stay down there! I don’t care.” Men, like women, have the need to be called forth.
It’s understandable that women’s adoration was withheld from our men for a while; we had thousands of years of bottled-up rage to express, and it didn’t exactly put us in a demure mood while we were going through that. Yet now, there is a new coming together between the sexes, as we find ourselves at a higher level of mutual honor and need. “I can’t go any further without you,” is at first a feeling we are afraid to admit, but then we exult in saying it once we know we’re in a place where it’s safe to do so. At a certain point, a woman can’t conceive new life, whether her own or her child’s, without a man’s input, and neither can he reproduce without us. Nature has ordained our utter interdependence, which is not, when seen through enchanted eyes, our damnation but our salvation.
If you say to a man, “I need you,” and his eyes look panicked, then definitely he’s not the man you belong with. But if you say to a man, “I need you,” and his eyes look amused, because he knows that you know you don’t really need him, but still he’s totally turned on that you would say it because he knows the level on which you do mean it, then I would suggest you take your shoes off and plan to stay a while.
Dear God,
Please protect and nourish
my beloved.
Surround him with Your power and grace.
Make clear the road that You would have him walk,
easy the goals You accomplish in his life,
and soft the pillow he rests on.
Use me to provide for him
an ever more wonderful life.
Amen
I can see how it’s been very hard for men for the last thirty years or so. “No, I don’t need you to open the car door for me.” (Read: “You jerk.”) “No, you are not invited to fix me, you will not be allowed to dominate me, and you better not dare put your feet on either my emotional or my material furniture.” (Read: “In fact, I’ll cut off your you-know-whats if you try.”) “No, I do not appreciate your efforts to make things better, because I’m sure it’s just another of your patriarchal, domineering, chauvinistic plans masquerading as a solution.” (Read: “You realize, of course, that I hate your entire sex.”)
And many of these poor guys got it. They themselves could see the destructiveness of the brutish, shadow side of the male personality, as much as we could—and they wanted to not be that, as much as we wanted to not be around it. Even this shows a desire to please us, at least subconsciously. Ironically, what then developed in them was the same syndrome with which women have been cursed for centuries: “I’ll hide who I really am, so you’ll like me.” And of course, it didn’t work. After we ripped their balls off, we started yelling at them contemptuously, “Why aren’t you a man!?!?”
Many men drew inward, shrinking from their own masculinity out of fear that it might harm someone. In the name of gentleness, but often stemming more from fear than from genuine tenderness, they shrank from their own male greatness. There are few dangers greater than the danger of an unrecognized belief, and the unrecognized belief that masculinity is somehow corrupt, in and of itself, has crippled both men and women for decades.
Some of the best men among us, the souls most equipped to usher in the romance and spirituality of the era now dawning, often acquiesced to the prejudice against powerful males. They withdrew from what they saw as the rat race, as appalled as we were at the violence and greed of white male power in America. As usual, the judgment was a slash to the heart of both judger and judged. Slowly, silently, and often unconsciously, these men began to mourn the loss of their own vigor and male assertiveness, painfully conflicted about their valid desire and aptitude for material manifestation. They could not obliterate their desire to go, to do, to build empires, to exert power in the world, yet held that desire deep within them like a guilty secret. Having been made to feel wrong, in essence, for the worldly expression of their own masculinity, they attitudinally crouched in a corner, secretly jealous of lesser men.
Often, they don’t want to admit it, but they wish that they had made more money. They don’t want to admit it, but they wish now that they did have a worldly empire. They don’t want to admit it, but they feel embarrassed that they don’t have the means to do certain things in the material world. All this can be corrected, of course, as soon as they recognize where they judged a certain trait, thus suppressing their own power to personify it. Forgiveness is the key to healing absolutely everything. What we judge in others, we deny ourselves. What we are willing to bless in others, we will allow ourselves. Judging a trait, even suppressing it, does not transform it. Allowing an energy to emerge, and asking that it be blessed by God and used for His/Her purposes, is the only way to lift it higher.
Not all men who make a lot of money do evil, brutish, domineering things with it—not by a long shot. Not all men who build worldly empires then use their empires to suppress and exploit and manipulate others—not by a long shot. And not all men of worldly means are spiritual morons—not by a long shot.
It’s worth mentioning, as well, that not all people who are struggling to survive are so holy and pure. The myth that money is the root of all evil was invented by the master, not the slave, and for the purposes of further enslavement. It is a thought that is sure to quiet the disempowered masses, but at a time like this, when empowerment is the buzz, that thought is being dropped from our minds like chains being thrown off long-bound shoulders. The attachment to money is a danger, as the attachment to anything is a danger. But money, like anything else, can be used in the service of furthering the good. And a lot of what would help the world most, right now, would be well served by an influx of cash.
Money is just a symbol, of course, for a certain kind of worldly power. But particularly for men, it is an important symbol, for it represents the power to wield a certain kind of authority in our society. To pretend otherwise is immature. This is not a negative authority, by the way, but a neutral authority. All of us should feel authorized to create. We don’t want a world where everyone feels equally disempowered; we want a world where everyone can feel equally empowered to manifest the power of good.
Making men wrong for the worldly expression of their masculine self, in any form, is like making men wrong for an erection. Fine if you want to do that, but don’t expect any more babies, or new life, if you do.
The story of Isis and Osiris reveals that the feminine does not just give birth to new life: it restores life where it is broken. Love is a feminine force, not just in women but in men as well, creating not out of “doing” but out of “being”—being loved, being appreciated, being honored, being wanted, being cherished, being respected, and being received at the deepest levels of our souls. That is why the deeper the state of our own emotional and spiritual being, the more of a psychic womb we are for the conception and gestation of an enchanted love.
For the last few decades, many men have supported our journey of mystical feminism, helping give birth to our more liberated identities as their mothers had given birth to them. Upon physical birth, we lie in our mother’s arms. Upon spiritual rebirth, the divine mother reaches through the lover to hold us once again.
And now, a new twist in the storyline of our cosmic rebirth is developing, as the souls of so many men among us are silently saying, “I helped birth you. Now please, birth me. Tell me it’s okay to be a man, the way I once told you it’s okay to be a woman. If you want to know what my dream is, my dream is to be me. Hold a space for who I am, and I will hold a space for who you are. Otherwise, I will never know myself. And until I know myself, I cannot know you.”
To know each other is the only reason we’re here. To truly know each other is to love each other, and to love each other is to know and love God. To know and love God is to co-create with Him, a world on earth as it is in heaven. Hallelujah, we will be naked and unembarrassed. Hallelujah, we will play in the garden. Hallelujah, we will all be free.
So rest in me, and I will rest in you. The rest is in the hands of God. . . .