This is a book about a miracle: the miracle of how psychological turmoil and suffering can bring about spiritual transformation.
Imagine reaching a point where you’ve lost everything, perhaps as a result of serious illness, depression or addiction. You’ve lost your career, your spouse or family, your hopes for the future and your self-esteem, and you’re so desperate that you don’t feel as though you can go on any more. You feel as if you’ve been completely broken and reduced to nothing.
Or perhaps it’s an encounter with death: imagine that you’ve been told you have a disease such as cancer and may only have a certain amount of time left to live. Everything which has brought you happiness seems to have been taken away. Everything you’ve worked so hard to build up and everything you’ve imagined will be in your future dissolves into nothing. There seems to be nothing in front of you except pain, loss and death.
But then a shift occurs inside you. Something gives way; an old self dies and a new one is born. Suddenly you feel a sense of lightness and freedom, as if ties have been cut and weights have been lifted. The world seems a different place, with a new sense of meaning, harmony and beauty. Past and future no longer have any meaning and the worries which filled your mind before no longer matter. All that does matter is the shining ‘is-ness’ you can see around you and the glorious present that you’re living through.
And this isn’t just a temporary change. The initial intensity of the experience may fade after a few days, but you’re never the same again. You’re filled with a permanent sense of well-being and a new appreciation for life. You never take anything for granted ever again – you’re permanently aware of the value of life itself, of your friends and family, of the beauty of the world, of your health and freedom. You find yourself no longer trying as hard to make things happen; instead you’re content to relax and let events unfold. Your mind is permanently free of worry and anxiety, and rather than spending your life chasing after status, success and wealth, you spend your time trying to help other people or to further your own spiritual development.
This might seem like a fantasy. And it’s true that, in most cases, psychological turmoil doesn’t have any positive effects. Often we just feel pain, which we want to end as soon as possible. For many people, the process of dying is just full of anguish and sorrow, unredeemed by any sense of freedom or well-being. But for others, intense turmoil is a kind of ‘spiritual alchemy’, transforming the ‘base metal’ of suffering into the ‘gold’ of intense well-being and freedom.
In this book you’ll encounter many remarkable people who have undergone this shift: a 60-year-old man who was spiritually reborn after almost dying of a heart attack; a recovering alcoholic who shifted to a permanent state of enlightenment after hitting ‘rock bottom’ and losing everything; a middle-aged woman who gained powerful spiritual insights through becoming ill with cancer; and a man who became paralysed after falling from a bridge onto a riverbed, struggled for months with pain and despair, then underwent a spiritual rebirth and now lives in a state of permanent bliss.
I became aware of this phenomenon while I was doing the research for my last book, Waking from Sleep . While collecting examples of awakening experiences, I came across people who said they had ‘woken up’ after periods of intense turmoil in their lives. Moreover, these people hadn’t just had an awakening experience , but had woken up permanently . They had never fallen back to sleep. They had a permanent heightened awareness, a sense of connection to nature or the cosmos as a whole, a sense of meaning and purpose, and a permanent inner well-being, free of worry or anxiety. They had attained what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called ‘self-actualization’ – the highest level of personal development, when a person is completely integrated and perceives reality at its fullest intensity.
Once I began to seek out people who had undergone this transformation, I was amazed at how easily they came to me. Some people replied to a note I put on my website, but others I found by accident – a colleague, one of my students, a friend of a friend, a person I got to know on a course. There was nothing unusual about any of them. Most ‘shifters’ (as I decided to term them, based on the fact that they had undergone a psychological shift) were fairly ‘ordinary’ people with normal jobs and families – for example, an architect, an IT developer, a TV writer, a marketing manager, the manager of a heating and plumbing business, the manager of a launderette. Very few of them had known anything about spiritual experiences or spiritual traditions beforehand. (As a result, most of them found it difficult to understand what had happened to them at first.)
I came across so many examples of this transformation that I began to realize that it was much more common than I’d thought. I interviewed 33 shifters in the end, but could easily have spoken to more. 1 People continued to contact me, offering their own experiences of transformation triggered by suffering, but at some point I had to decide that I had enough material. (I’ve kept the details of all the others who contacted me and plan to interview them at a later date and to include their experiences on a database.)
Some shifters had never talked about their transformation, or had tried to but only met with incomprehension. With this in mind, I’m sure that there are thousands of other people out there who have undergone this experience but never shared it with anyone for fear of being seen as ‘weird’. If you’re one of them, don’t hesitate to contact me through my website (see Further Information section ).
One purpose of this book is simply to tell the shifters’ amazing stories, based on the interviews they gave me. We begin by looking at how psychological turmoil can trigger temporary awakening experiences, then look at permanent transformation through different types of suffering and turmoil in turn, including illness, disability, loss, addiction and general stress, depression and upheaval. All of these can have the same transformative effect. The source of the psychological turmoil doesn’t seem to be so significant. As long as it’s very intense and occurs over a long period, any type of turmoil can lead to permanent awakening.
We will see that some shifters go on to be spiritual teachers. Many modern spiritual teachers, such as Eckhart Tolle, Catherine Ingram and Russel Williams (all of whom I interviewed for this book), have experienced a sudden and dramatic spiritual awakening after a long period of turmoil.
Following this, in the second part of the book, we look specifically at how an encounter with death can bring about this transformation. This can happen through a sudden event, such as a heart attack or a car crash, or, more frequently, when a person learns that they have a chronic illness, such as cancer, and may only have a certain amount of time left to live. Many people who encounter death in this way experience a spiritual awakening. Even if they know for certain that they’re going to die, they experience a powerful sense of well-being. Rather than feeling anxious or bitter – although they may go through an initial stage of this – they accept death and feel a miraculous sense of wholeness and freedom and the glory of living fully in the present. This is such a common response to encounters with death that I have called this section of the book ‘Death: The Great Awakener’.
In the third part of the book, I look into the question of why these experiences occur. Why does suffering have this amazing transformational power? And why do some people undergo this shift while others who experience a similar degree of turmoil or trauma do not?
We will see that one of the most important factors is letting go , or detachment. Throughout history, spiritual traditions and teachers have emphasized the importance of becoming psychologically free of attachment to possessions, ambitions and regrets, or to ideas of our own status, success or importance. To some extent, spiritual development is a process of becoming more detached in this way and more self-sufficient and inwardly whole. And it seems that suffering and turmoil can spontaneously generate this state.
Finally, in the last chapter of the book, we look at what this means in terms of our own lives. Do we really need to endure suffering or come close to death to become free, or is there a different route we can take? I will suggest that we can all attain a similar state of awakening without putting ourselves through intense suffering.
For me personally, one of the biggest effects of this book has been to make me realize how common the phenomenon of enlightenment – or permanent wakefulness – actually is. We tend to think of it as something esoteric which only happens to ‘special’ people – to mystics and gurus, spiritual seekers in India or Tibet. But in actual fact, it’s something which happens in everyday life to ‘ordinary’ people. From my own experience, I would say that it’s quite likely that there is an ‘awakened’ person – probably someone whose awakening was triggered by turmoil – amongst your circle of family, friends, acquaintances and colleagues. Perhaps you’re even such a person yourself.
Writing this book has been a massively rewarding experience. It’s been a privilege to interview so many amazing, courageous people, who have overcome such massive difficulties and emerged in a new, higher state of being. After every interview I felt inspired for days, filled with a sense of well-being and an awareness of the almost infinite capacity of human beings to transcend suffering and transform themselves. Those feelings returned later, when I transcribed and reread the interviews. I still have them now, when I read the stories – and I hope you will too.