The complete human is one who has faced self-destruction standing at what William James called ‘the perilous edge’ … and has dared to turn back and face the universe.
Several years ago I fell from our roof, hit my head, and developed amnesia. I soon learned a great deal about the benefits of amnesia. It improved my marriage and family life dramatically when I could not remember the things I used to criticize them for, or the things I had felt angry, resentful, or hurt about. When my memory came back, I had a difficult time with my wife and children because then I remembered all their faults. A therapist friend said she could help me and save me from years of therapy. I asked her how. She wrote something on a piece of paper, handed it to me, and said, “Go home and read this, and live what it says.” What she handed me was Corinthians 1:13. It describes what love is and teaches that, although you may appear to have everything, without love, you have nothing.
When you are enlightened, you understand the power of love. Ask yourself, why do we say: kill with kindness, torment with tenderness, love is blind, love thine enemies, and love thy neighbor as thyself? Therein lies the answer to life and enlightenment.
Several years ago there was a series of conferences titled Body and Soul. I always thought people were more likely to bare their souls than their bodies, and so I did one presentation exposing parts of my body to make people aware of how they felt about their own bodies. I felt sad when people came up afterward and told me they were embarrassed or felt bad about their own bodies. To me they seemed perfect. Today, however, I feel much more strongly about getting in touch with and exposing our souls.
We need to respond to our souls and live a soulful life. I can’t put into words how I would define soul, but it contains our spirit and our deepest needs and meanings related to our life and how we live it. Many of us never speak about these needs and feelings until a crisis or disaster occurs to awaken us to life. I think we know when we are living a soulful life by how our body and our heart feel in relationship to what we are doing, thinking, and feeling. Joseph Campbell said, “If you can see your path laid out in front of you step by step, you know it’s not your path. Your own path you make with every step you take. That’s why it’s your path.”1 He was talking about living a soul-expanding life.
I recently received a book about the benefits of massage from a therapist who was treating someone with what is commonly called multiple personality disorder. Jung suggested — and I am convinced he was right — that we are all multiple personalities. He believed that the goal of each individual is to form a relationship with each of his or her personalities, rather than to suppress one in favor of the other(s). He also believed that in psychoanalysis “the doctor has to establish a relationship with both halves of his patient’s personality, because only from them both, and not merely from one half with the suppression of the other, can he put together a whole and complete man. The latter alternative is what the patient has been doing all along.”2
I know — and so does my wife, from the way I behave — that I will do things and speak of things that are beyond my own understanding, and I cannot explain where they came from. I fully accept that within me reside many individuals. When I read this massage therapist’s book, I wondered: when you get a massage, do you really know who is being massaged, or which of the multiples needs the massage but doesn’t get it because a more aggressive personality wants it and takes over the body?
I am not kidding when I say these things. I know from experience and from recorded cases of people with a dissociative disorder that a person can have allergies, diabetes, asthma, and other afflictions associated only with one personality, and a shift to another personality eliminates the disease or problem. But when you think about the roles and situations we become so attached to, perhaps all of us do this to some extent in our lives. We all need to pay attention to the personalities living within us and harmonize them with our soul’s desires and needs.
From my perspective, achieving that true balance and using our bodies and light to become soulful in our actions is what life is all about. Think of yourself as a candle. The flame reaches up to the heavens, hoping to reunite with the divine, while the wax and wick represent our earthly bodies and keep us connected and grounded. The flame consumes the wax fuel, and the quality of that fuel is reflected in the purity of the flame. The candle illuminates the world we choose to participate in by sharing our light and love. When we die, that light and love are handed on to future generations. Therein lies our immortality. The light from the candle becomes the pathway to learning about life, just as words are pathways to sharing and understanding ideas.
I create new words on a regular basis, mostly by means of accidents on my computer keyboard. But as Jung said, there are no accidents, so let me share with you the meanings I have found in some of these new words.
When I wrote an article for massage therapists and misspelled massage, I created the word meassage. It said to me that there is a message in our touch. In other words, every massage given carries a precious message. Recently I was rereading The Meaning of Love, edited by Ashley Montagu in 1953, and once again I was impressed by the power of touch to communicate love. Montagu reports that the absence of touch led to an almost 100 percent early mortality rate in children from orphanages where caregivers were fearful that their touch would spread infections from infant to infant and so had avoided touching the babies. Another of my accidental words was GGOD, and to me it describes doing things the way our creator would want us to. What is important is not to know God but to imitate God, and when you do GGod things, you are doing just that.
Then there was liove. For me, that unites living and loving. Those two things should never be separated, but humankind has a problem with this owing to our misunderstanding of separateness. We are not separate, but different parts of one whole. Separation is merely a perception, not a reality. Yin could not exist without yang; the yin/yang symbol shows two shapes with identical outlines that, when inverted and combined, create the circle of wholeness. It is the existence of one that reveals the other. Without one of the two, wholeness no longer exists. So it is with living and loving. Remember, life is not about trying to be perfect but about being complete. Learning this is the soul’s work, and when you become aware that nothing is separate, you will be complete; your life will be about living and loving.
I try to learn from many different religions so that I get the message and act as God would want me to act. I was reading something the other day that fit very well with Joseph Campbell’s statement that religion may be a misinterpretation of mythology. In other words, there is a message for us in religion that is taught through myths and metaphors, but it is often lost when the writings are interpreted only in the literal sense. What I read said that the word Torah should not be translated to mean “the bible” or “the law,” but should be understood to mean “teachings or instruction.”
When I study a religion, I want to learn how to live my life so that it is meaningful, and the messages taught by that religion’s observations or practices enhance my life and the lives of others. When we interpret religious texts as the law, words become our Lord, and we get into conflict with each other over meanings of the words, or who is obeying the law, and how to interpret the law. But when we see religion as something that can guide us, we can have a dialogue about what we see within it and not fight over who is right and who is going to hell.
Finding common themes of guidance in religions, philosophies, or things people write confirms for me that these themes must be meaningful and effective. When I read Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth, I recognized the rebirthing, or born-again, context for survival behavior in his words. He said that heroism is the will to be oneself; the hero is the seeker and the “ism” is the mystery that the seeker seeks to know. In other words, you want to bring forth your true self; you want to be reborn and experience the cycles of change. When you do this, your inner nature is talking. Your soul self — your true self — and its power come forth. This may sound impractical or strictly philosophical, but it is really very basic.
We create our lives by what we decide, think, and act upon each day. We are creating the script for the myth that becomes our life. In my life I have followed what felt right for me, and I am very happy that I did so, instead of worrying about what looked best and appropriate to others. I don’t feel as if I have wasted my time here. When I am being interviewed on the radio, somebody always gives me a cue toward the end of the program, saying: “We are running out of time.” This motivates me to share that we will all run out of time someday.
Developing your spiritual self is about living; it’s about the things you choose to do and fill your mind and body with. But it is also about being — not thinking or doing — just being. This brings to mind the story of an old farmer in Somerset, England, who used to sit on a tree stump every evening and gaze across the fields. One day a boy from the village walked by and stopped to ask the old man what he was staring at for so long. The farmer looked at the boy for a long moment. Then with his slow, West Country accent, he said, “Zumm times I sits and thinks, and then zumm times I juz’ sits.”
We are human beings, not human doings. So don’t identify yourself by a role you fulfill; be aware that your divinity defines who you are. Daydreaming and gazing without thought, especially when looking at natural scenes and landscapes, is another way to fulfill your spirit. How many times have you walked past a flowering bush that is humming with bees and other insects while they gather nectar and pollen? Next time, stop for awhile. Just watch and listen. Don’t identify the shrub or judge the load each bee carries on its legs; give way to the moment, observe, and forget that you exist. Become nothing and allow everything around you to just be what it is.
When you have a problem, present it to nature and ask for an answer. One time I asked how I could still help people when I was tired of traveling around the world. The answer I received was to spread my seeds as a flower does. I realized then that I didn’t have to travel. My words became the seeds, and they didn’t need to be delivered in person. My books, CDs, website, and radio and television interviews all became the garden where people could go for help. Another time, when I had a problem that seemed overwhelming, I was shown a skunk cabbage that grew through the pavement and blossomed in the sunlight. I couldn’t believe a plant sprout could be strong and wise enough to keep pushing until the pavement cracked.
Our senses of sight, hearing, smell, and touch were designed to feed our bodies with information that helps us survive. When we allow them to bask in beauty and rest in nature, our senses also feed our souls. They transport us, letting us know our connection with life. When we rest our thinking minds and allow nature, the collective consciousness, to stimulate our senses, our thoughts become clear, like the still pond that, undisturbed by wind or current, magnifies the fish swimming below its surface and, at the same time, mirrors the clouds drifting overhead. It is in moments like these that we come to know God.
I have been asked many times to describe what made me aware of my spiritual self and of God, and of the things that changed my perspective. Many of those experiences are shared in this book and in my other writings, such as the time when a voice spoke to me in my state of calm and stillness and told me to go to the shelter where I found the dog Buddy, after writing Buddy’s Candle; and another time, when my dad appeared to me in a dream after he died and showed me a healthier way to deal with my grief — a way that helped many others heal from theirs; and my experiences with the mystics and psychics who recognized and even drew George, my inner guide, as he stood beside me on the podium.
Perhaps the first time I became aware of my spiritual self was when I was four years old and I was home in bed with one of my frequent ear infections. I took a toy telephone I was playing with and unscrewed the dial. I put all the pieces in my mouth, as I had seen carpenters do with nails so they could hold them there and pull them out one at a time to use. The problem was that I aspirated the pieces and went into laryngospasm. I can still feel my intercostal muscles and diaphragm contracting forcefully, trying to get some air into my lungs, but nothing worked and I was unable to make any sounds to attract help. I had no sense of time, but suddenly realized I was not struggling anymore. I was now at the head of the bed watching myself dying.
I found it fascinating to be free of my body, and it was a blessing. I never stopped to think about how I could still see and think while outside my body. I was feeling sorry that my mother, who was in the kitchen, would find me dead, but I thought it over and found my new state preferable. Intellectually, I chose death over life.
Then the boy on the bed had an agonal seizure, vomited, and all the toy pieces came flying out. He began to breathe again, and I was very angry as I returned to my body against my will. I can still remember yelling, “Who did that?” My thought as a four-year-old was that there was a God who had a schedule, and I wasn’t supposed to die now. So an angel apparently did a Heimlich maneuver on me. That’s the way I would explain it today.
I really do believe there is a schedule we create unconsciously, and that idea was supported by experiences I had later in life. Twice I have had my car totaled by people driving through red lights and hitting it, and as I said before, I fell off our roof when the top rung on my wooden ladder snapped. In none of these incidents did any significant injury occur to my body.
When considering my life as a child, a husband and father, a healer, an artist, and a writer and speaker, and all the facets of experience that gave me different perspectives, I have come to realize that life is unexplainable. Many of my attitude changes, understandings, and transformations came from the faces and stories of patients and other people who became my teachers. But the knowledge that God is a loving, intelligent, and conscious energy has come to me mostly from dreams, drawings, and past-life and near-death experiences. All of them, I believe, were meant to be my teachers, since I sought none of them and they happened to me in spite of myself.
It doesn’t matter if you are reading my books or those of other modern or ancient writers, philosophers, teachers, and guides. None of us have anything new to say about life, love, and matters of the soul; but the way each person expresses this wisdom is different. Each generation tells its own truth, and yet each one repeats ancient wisdom. So read the wisdom of the sages and learn from those who have gone before us. Which path you take makes little difference. Don’t wait for a personal disaster to bring you the gift of enlightenment. You may know the saying “If you seek enlightenment, seek it as a man whose hair is on fire seeks water.” It takes that kind of desire to truly face the light.
Read, read, and read. Listen to audio books and CDs and read. Study the lives and words of Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Epictetus, Lao Tzu, and others. Delve into the poetry and essays of masters such as Dante, Rumi, Gibran, Emerson, and Thoreau. Explore the writings and lectures of modern-day spiritual leaders such as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Sri Chinmoy, Joseph Campbell, and Jung. Inspire yourself reading the works of physicists, scientists, and astronauts whose search for knowledge has broken the illusion of borders between earth and the rest of the universe and taught us that we are in the universe. Enthuse yourself with delighted expectation. Make reading a daily practice, even if only for a few minutes each day. Open your mind and read with a child’s curiosity. And reread the same books every few years, because if they do not become more enlightening, you haven’t become more enlightened.