Serious, life-threatening illnesses are much more than a physical problem; they can have devastating psychological effects too, including severe depression and anxiety. How do you cope with the loss of your health and freedom, and the potential loss of your life, with the possibility that your plans and ambitions will be reduced to nothing? We’ve already seen how illnesses like cancer or ME can lead to gradual spiritual transformation, or post-traumatic growth. But sometimes the psychological trauma of illness can build up to such a pitch of intensity that sudden transformation can occur.
Last year I was invited to Barcelona for some publicity events for the Spanish translation of one of my books. After I had given a lecture at the University of Barcelona, one of the organizers gave me a lift back into the city centre with a friend of his. I had already noticed his friend during the lecture. There was something very striking about her – as well as being very beautiful, she had an unusual glow in her eyes, a look of powerful serenity. During the journey, I asked her about herself and she told me that she was a spiritual healer. I wasn’t surprised – I could almost recognize it in her eyes. But what did surprise me was how she had become a healer. She told me that it was the result of becoming ill with multiple sclerosis five years before.
When she was first told she had MS, Berta was devastated. There was an empty feeling in the pit of her stomach, as if she had vertigo. The thought that she would have to live with the disease for the rest of her life terrified and depressed her. Slowly, however, she began to accept the illness and integrate it into her day-to-day life.
A year after the diagnosis, she began some treatment with a powerful drug called Beta Interferon, which she had to inject herself with every two days. For the first few months the treatment went well and her symptoms diminished. But suddenly she began to feel a resistance to it, without understanding why. One day, just as she was about to inject herself, she had a realization: ‘This is not the path, not the way to cure yourself.’ Impulsively, she threw away the syringe and medication. She felt as though there was a new kind of certainty inside her, almost a new kind of energy.
Earlier, when her illness had been diagnosed, she had regularly had dizzy spells and giddiness, and had assumed it was just part of the normal symptoms of MS. But after this realization she began to pay more attention to these dizzy spells and became aware of them as energy processes. She began to experiment with them, finding that if she sat on the floor with her back straight and allowed the process to work itself out, the dizziness disappeared. She felt much more relaxed, with a lot more energy. She learned to pay full attention to the process and to give herself up to it completely. If she was at work and felt it beginning, she would say that she felt ill and go home to completely focus on it.
She began to attend workshops on channelling energy through movement and meditation, and started to have ecstatic experiences. The nature of the energy was joyful. Whenever it flowed through her it was as if she was floating on an ocean of bliss. Other people could feel it around her too; they told her that they felt invigorated and alert in her presence, even that they felt free of the physical or psychological problems that been afflicting them. Berta realized that she could use the energy to help others, and so she began her work as a spiritual healer.
Like Cheryl, Berta now sees her illness as a gift, which has given her access to a deep-rooted spiritual source which she had not been fully aware of before. She feels like a different person, so much so that when people ask her about her earlier life it’s difficult for her to connect it with who she is now. She has a deep sense of contentment and meaning, and – again like Cheryl – she has learned to trust life rather than strive to make things happen. The symptoms of her MS have been alleviated too:
I feel infinitely more content and at peace. I have found a joy that I never experienced even as a child, and, little by little, it’s becoming a permanent part of me. I am much more present and happy to be on this planet. I live one day at a time, aware that my life is a mystery, revealing itself as it unfolds.
I’ve also become much more patient. Before I found it difficult to wait for things to happen, but now I enjoy the waiting. In fact it doesn’t bother me much whether things happen or not. I would say that this patience and acceptance are the most profound parts of my transformation.
As a child I was obsessed with the idea of God. I always wondered why I couldn’t believe in him while others could. It was a very strange and disturbing feeling; instead of feeling the presence of God, I just felt his absence keenly. But now I feel connected to the God that is within me and the only thing that matters to me is knowing myself and accepting myself just as I am. That is my goal in life.
How do you think you would feel if you were in an accident and lost the use of all of your limbs? Like illness, disability is much more than a physical problem – along with the loss of the use of parts of their body, a person who becomes disabled has to deal with the loss of their independence and sense of status, the loss of activities they enjoyed and a changed body image. There’s no doubt that this can be a traumatic and depressing experience. Nevertheless, there is evidence that the horror you might feel at the prospect of becoming disabled – and the pity you might feel for those who are – is misplaced.
One of the most interesting developments in psychology over recent years has been the positive psychology movement, led by psychologists such as Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Positive psychologists examine the sources of human happiness and how different activities and experiences affect our level of well-being. They have made some very interesting discoveries: for example, that extremely rich people are not significantly happier than other people, and that after a few months, lottery winners aren’t significantly happier than they were before. 1
Research has also shown that people who become seriously disabled are much happier than we might think. One study found that people who had become paraplegic – that is, who had lost the use of their legs – as a result of spinal cord accidents quickly adapted to their new predicament. After eight weeks they generally reported feeling more positive than negative emotions and after a few years they were only 5 per cent less happy than able-bodied people. 2
A study of people who had become quadriplegic – that is, paralysed from the neck down – showed similar results. Three months after their accident, they were on average only 10 per cent less happy than before. After a year, they had almost returned to the same level of happiness as before their accident. Eighty-four per cent of people with extreme quadriplegia rated their lives as being ‘above average’ in quality. 3
This suggests that becoming disabled is certainly no barrier to happiness. But even more than this, it can be the trigger for permanent awakening.
On the morning of 7 July 2005, three bombs exploded on the London Underground. They were detonated by suicide bombers within 50 seconds of each other, with another exploding on a bus about an hour later. Fifty-six people were killed and around 700 injured.
The most serious explosion on the Underground was the third, on a train pulling out of King’s Cross station. Because it happened at a point where the underground tunnel was very narrow, the explosion was more concentrated, and 26 people died on this train alone. One person who was seriously injured in the blast was a young Australian woman named Gill Hicks, who was standing just a few feet away from the suicide bomber.
Gill had been living in London for 13 years, since her early twenties, working in architecture and design. Over the previous couple of years she had been feverishly busy; she was always the first to arrive at her office in the morning and the last to leave in the evening, and most of her mealtimes doubled as meetings. Her career was her life and recently she had started to achieve the success she’d been striving for. After running her own successful publishing company, she had been offered a job as a curator for the Design Council and been made a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Gill was the last person to be pulled alive from the wreckage of the train. In the minutes after the bomb went off, she hovered on the brink of death. She felt herself falling into blackness and experienced the ‘life review’ common to near-death experiences. As she describes it: ‘My life was flashing before my eyes, flickering through every scene, every happy and sad moment, everything I had ever done, said, experienced. It was all being played like a film running at high speed in my head.’ 4
The falling stopped and she was sure she was dead, but then became aware of voices screaming and other faint voices shouting reassurance: ‘Stay calm. It’s OK.’ She couldn’t speak and realized that she couldn’t feel her legs. Although the carriage was filled with thick grey smoke, she looked down and could see that her legs looked like an anatomical drawing. But rather than panicking, a deep calm arose inside her. She knew that she had to stay calm to survive. If she panicked or screamed, she would lose even more blood. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep, but forced herself to stay awake, hoping that someone would rescue her. There were two voices in her head, one willing her to hold on and survive, the other willing her to let go and allow herself to die. The second voice was beautiful and alluring. She had no fear of death at all – in fact, she longed for the peace it would bring. But she thought about all the people who mattered to her, all the people who loved her, and realized that she had to stay alive for their sake, to spare them the pain of bereavement. And as she made that decision, a rush of energy filled her and the second voice stopped, leaving only her urge to survive.
Then she was aware of a light – torchlight coming towards her. She heard the words ‘Priority one’ and felt someone placing a tag on her. Feeling that she was in safe hands, she let herself slip into unconsciousness.
Gill’s injuries were so severe that both her legs had to be amputated and doctors doubted that she would survive. But after two weeks of intensive care, she began to regain her strength. And as she realized that she was going to survive, she also became aware that she was a different person, who would be living what she referred to as ‘Life Two’.
Ever since then, Gill has had a new appreciation of life, an ability to value aspects that she took for granted before:
From the moment I was given the option of choosing life, I made a vow: that if I survived I would live a full life, a good and rich life. I vowed that I would never take anything – all that I have – for granted again. I would never forget how precious every single day is.
I have stayed true to that promise… Once you adopt that attitude and apply it to all areas of life, everything starts to look different… I still make a point of delighting in every mouthful of water, relishing every drop of coffee or tea, savouring every morsel of food and taking pleasure in every glass of wine. 5
This isn’t to say that Gill is completely free of regrets. She still misses her legs – not just because of what they enabled her to do, but as a part of her body that she used to have a relationship with. She still daydreams about how great it would be to jump out of bed, to paddle in the sea, to wear jeans and shoes again or to paint her toenails. But at the same time she has a new appreciation of her body, of the miracle of its healing processes and the amazingly intricate and complex things it does every second to keep her healthy and alive. As she watched it heal, it was, she says, ‘like witnessing a thousand miracles each and every day. I was in awe of my body; I was in awe of the human spirit.’ 6 She felt so grateful to her body that she promised herself she would never do anything to harm it ever again: ‘I made a promise, a vow, that I would look after myself, love myself, every day. I would feed my body good food… I wanted to repay it for not letting me down, for continuing the fight, not just for life itself, but for quality of life.’ 7
One positive aspect of losing her limbs, she says, is that she has been forced to live much more slowly, which has given her a heightened awareness of her experience and her surroundings: ‘Being slow – physically moving at a slower pace – has been an extraordinary experience. I have seen so much more, just by being able to stop, look and absorb.’ 8
Eight months after the bombings, Gill felt strong enough to return to work. However, her new outlook on life meant that her previous work at the Design Council no longer seemed as important. When she went back to her office to see her colleagues she picked up the ‘Urgent’ file on her desk, looked through all her reports and records, and threw them all straight in the bin. She soon resigned her position and was invited to become an ambassador for the charity Peace Direct, and later became an advocate for Leonard Cheshire Disability too. She has recently founded MAD for Peace (Making a Difference for Peace; see Further Information section for details ), which communicates through innovative and engaging projects everyone’s individual responsibility to create a world without extreme conflict. In 2009 she was awarded an MBE for her services to charity; in the same year, she was also voted Australian of the Year in the UK and awarded an honorary doctorate in philosophy for her contribution to the worlds of design and charity. For her, ‘Life Two’ has been an awakening, an invigorating and massively meaningful journey.
One person who has overcome even more severe difficulties than Gill Hicks, and been transformed even more radically and positively, is the American writer Michael Hutchison. Michael has suffered the most serious disabilities a human being can possibly suffer, without becoming self-pitying or despondent. In fact, he has become as happy and fulfilled as it is possible to be.
In 1998, Michael was a successful author in the field of science and spirituality. His book Megabrain , on how brain technology can be used to induce higher states of consciousness, had been a bestseller, and he had recently published another successful book about his experiments with flotation tanks. He regularly travelled across America and Europe, giving lectures and doing workshops, and had a young son he adored, who lived half the time with him and half with his ex-wife. He had recently started a new book which was going very well and had every reason to look forward to the future.
But then two tragic events occurred. The first was a fire. As Michael describes it:
One night I woke up, and the house was filled with black smoke. I ran out of my bedroom and saw my office was on fire, at the other end of the house, and I went running up there to put out the fire, but when I opened the door, I got hit by a wall of black smoke, which suffocated me and knocked me out. I almost died of smoke inhalation, but the worst thing was that almost everything I owned burned up, including the new book I was working on, all my notes, all my research, all my past writings on the computer and the manuscripts. It’s a big blow as a writer to see your entire life go up like that.
This was serious enough, but the second event was much more tragic. Michael was a keen runner; he loved running as a way of making himself feel mentally alert and generating new ideas for writing. But one day, shortly after he left hospital, he slipped and had a serious fall while running. Since he is such an articulate and fluent writer and speaker, from this point I’ll let him tell his story in his own words. I’ve put together the following account from my own conversations with him and his own written account of his experience, which he was kind enough to send me:
I got caught in a snowstorm and was heading for home, and I slipped on an ice patch on a bridge and fell head over heels a long distance down, onto the riverbed. My neck and the back of my head smashed into the rocks. Basically, I was lucky I didn’t get killed in the fall. I broke my spine. I was lying there in the icy waters, paralysed from the neck down, with only my face out of the water. I knew I was paralysed, and I couldn’t call for help, because I couldn’t breathe. And the frustrating thing was, I knew I was freezing to death, because I could feel the icy water just sucking the heat out of me.
Over a period of time I just felt myself dying. In fact I did die, as far as I know. It was an interesting experience. I felt as if I was just floating away down the river, and I let go. It was very peaceful. That was the first time I felt a sense of total bliss and the feeling of being home at last. Totally welcome, my place. There was no sense of other people, or of me as a person. The person that had been me was dead. There was a sense of a cosmic consciousness. Totally comfortable. In bliss. It went away when I woke up. I wanted to stay.
Anyway, I woke up in the operating room, having neurosurgery done on my spinal cord. I smashed five cervical vertebrae and almost died of head trauma from the fall, hypothermia and again from my spinal cord injury. The next time I woke up, I was in the intensive care unit again, dying from pneumonia. So, what I was dealing with was a number of near-death experiences in a short period of time. It knocked the wind out of me. I was feeling very low and very tired. I was paralysed from the neck down and, to make it worse, I had to wear a whole body brace that kept me totally stiff, up to the back of my head, with the tip of my chin pointing way up in the air, to keep me from moving my neck, so that the vertebrae, which had been fused in the operation, could heal.
Aside from the pain of the injuries, being unable to move was true misery – trapped in a painful position, without being able to move at all. I spent months totally paralysed with the brace on. I couldn’t do anything but stare directly at the ceiling, so my entire visual field was blank, and at first it was so incredibly mind-numbing you can’t possibly imagine it. I couldn’t read – which was the most agonizing loss to me, since I usually read several books every day – couldn’t watch movies, watch people, use the phone or the computer, or have a conversation or have sex.
To make it even worse, the doctors told me I could expect to be a quadriplegic for the rest of my life. They didn’t offer any hope of regaining much movement. I thought, ‘To hell with that,’ and spent hours and hours, for months, trying to get movement in my arms and legs.
After I’d been in the hospital for about four months, my money ran out. Medicaid wouldn’t cover me any more. So I had to leave, and there was no place for me to go. I was still pretty much paralysed, although I was getting some movement back in my arms and legs. My only course of action was to get admitted to a very grim nursing home where old people were wandering around shouting, screaming and yelling for help. The screaming never let up. It was like hell. The first year I was there, I truly bottomed out. I felt depressed and I couldn’t seem to think very clearly. I wished I didn’t have to wake up and I was in constant pain.
I started thinking my life was over. I remember thinking, ‘I still feel young, but I can’t move. I’m a writer, but I can’t move my hands, and I can’t write. I’m a thinker, but I can’t think clearly.’ I had to face it. This was real life. Everything was over. The book I was working on had disappeared and would never reappear. I had ended a long-term relationship a couple of months before the fire, so I didn’t have any companionship that I could fall back on or count on. I was totally alone and thought I would never have a relationship again. Things seemed pretty bleak.
After months of frustration, it began to hit me. The voice in my head said, ‘Let go, man, let go. Look at how you’re holding on. What do you think life’s telling you? All these near-death experiences – what do you think that’s all about? Dying, that’s what. You keep hanging onto life like you’re afraid to let go. It’s time to die.’ I realized my ego was holding on, trying to keep control. I knew it was time to let go.
Just at this point, they came to take me for a shower. They wheeled me down the hallway and hosed me off and as they wheeled me back to my room I suddenly found things began to happen. It was as if my entire being had been clenched in a tight fist and suddenly the fist opened up and let go completely. Everything dropped away. I began seeing and experiencing a kind of upwelling or emanation inside me. It was in front of my eyes, but also inside my eyes and inside my body, and it started flowing upward. It was emptiness, the void, but it was luminous. It was just a current of bliss. Over the next few hours, it became more and more intense.
As the days went by, I began to realize that I was existing in a sea of bliss. The simple beingness of being was bliss. It was fun to be alive. Every moment, even though I was in a lot of pain and was paralysed, there was still an intrinsic joy at being alive. I began to feel this bliss all around me.
I experimented with going into the bliss and each time I found it easier. I found that there was such an infinite amount to know that I didn’t think I could ever understand it. I spent several months just staring at my ceiling and going deeper and deeper inside myself. I learned to slip into blissful nothingness as a way of managing the pain. I disappeared and the pain was left behind. When the spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi was dying of cancer, people would come to him and say, ‘You must be in so much pain.’ And he would smile and say, ‘Yes, madam, there is pain, but there is no suffering.’ That’s how it was for me.
It’s now 13 years since Michael’s accident and he’s still in a state of bliss. His pain is still very intense – the soft padding between his lumbar vertebrae has disappeared due to chronic degenerative arthritis, so that his bones grind together whenever he moves his back. Even sitting up is very painful. But what he calls ‘going into nothingness’ is so effective as pain relief that he has even refused his doctor’s offer of inserting a permanent morphine drip into his spine.
As well as an intense feeling of bliss, Michael has an awareness that the whole world – the whole universe even – is pervaded with spiritual radiance. This radiance pervades everything and everyone, so that everything has essentially the same nature and is essentially one.
I feel oneness all the time – I can feel it with you now. It’s there from the moment I wake up. How can there be more than one? As I say, I first felt this radiant bliss like a vibration all over inside myself. But the more I got into it, the more I realized that it extended everywhere and connected everything together – all of the planets, all of the cosmos, everything in the universe.
It’s an invisible radiance. Every cell in your body generates light, a light that’s only visible to the inner eye. You have to have this awakening experience before it becomes visible. The light is the radiance, you can’t separate it. It’s radiant light bliss. The important thing is to let yourself be conscious and aware. No thoughts, no ideas, no images, nothing. That’s what it all comes down to, to be nothing. I learned to be nothing. And that’s the bliss.
Because of this sense of oneness, Michael has a heightened sense of compassion. Compassion is more than just the ability to imagine ourselves in other people’s shoes, it’s an experience of connection , of our shared identity. When we feel compassion, we directly sense the sufferings of others through the consciousness that we share with them. That’s why compassion increases as we become less selfish and egocentric – because the ego ‘walls us off’ from other people, breaks us off into islands of individuality. Michael doesn’t appear to experience any ego-separateness any more, and so senses this shared identity very strongly. As he says, ‘People can sense that I feel one with them. They can sense my compassion, and as a result my relationships are much better than they were before.’
Michael has lost all fear of death and has a constant freshness of perception and a sense of the miraculous nature of life:
Once you know that the bliss of life continues and is amplified in the bliss of death, you will have no fear of death any more. For most people the fear of death, even though they don’t think of it, is always there, lurking in their subconscious mind. Once you’ve lost your fear of death, your life changes in virtually every way. Fear and anxiety no longer exist in your life.
I have realized that just plain life itself is a pure miracle in every second! I can never get enough of it. Everywhere I look things that previously were just ordinary parts of life seem to have a special aura. Everything I look at has this beautiful and uncanny clarity. It’s just a pure pleasure to be in the world.
It’s a miracle that I’m alive at all, but when you live with the constant experience of being lived through by Consciousness, you see that everything is a miracle, every instant, pain or pleasure, good or bad. It’s all a miracle, emerging out of emptiness – that is, consciousness – instant by instant.
I love doing nothing. In the summer I can just sit in a reclining chair on my front porch and watch the leaves on the trees, the birds, an ant crawling up my leg. I just disappear.
One of the most common characteristics of the shifters’ new state of being is an awareness that there’s no need to strive, to force events to happen. This is the patience that Berta described earlier. There’s a willingness to let events unfold as they will and a sense that if we do this, all will be well. Michael feels this very strongly:
When I truly understood this, it was liberating to me, and it took a huge weight off my shoulders. I was totally free. Everything I did was God’s will… I breathed freely and easily and deeply and effortlessly. Everything happened effortlessly. And that freedom was Pure Being – the freedom to do good and the freedom to do evil, and the freedom to do all the stuff that’s between good and evil.
Like Gill Hicks, Michael isn’t completely free of regret – he misses being able to run, for example. But as he told me, ‘What the hell, I’m in bliss! Why would anybody give up what I have? Looking back, I thought I was a really happy man, but now it’s even better.’
Could there be any story more inspiring than Michael’s? All of the stories in this book illustrate the amazing resources of the human spirit, but his shows this more than any other. It’s surely tremendously reassuring to learn that a human being can transcend the kind of massive tragedy he suffered, not just in terms of learning to cope with it, but in terms of gaining access to a state of intense peace and joy. His story shows that no matter how much turmoil and misery we go through, it can’t destroy us. Even at the point of deepest desolation, there’s still the potential for recovery and transcendence. In fact there is much more potential for transcendence at this point than when life is easy and going according to plan.
One reason why Michael’s story is so remarkable is because he has made the biggest leap – the leap from the deepest level of tragedy to the highest intensity of awakening. As I suggested in Waking from Sleep , there are different intensities of awakening, both for temporary spiritual experiences and for wakefulness as a permanent state. At a lower intensity of awakening, the world becomes more real and alive and an atmosphere of harmony seems to pervade it. As awakening intensifies, we realize that the source of this harmony is a radiant energy which pervades everything, a kind of underlying ocean of spirit (Brahman , as the Indian Upanishads call it). We feel uplifted inside, filled with a sense that ‘all is well’ and the universe is benevolent and meaningful. Then, at a slightly higher intensity, we can sense the oneness of everything – we realize that, with this spirit-force pervading the world, there is no separation. Everything is a part of everything else and has the same source. And we experience ourselves as part of this oneness too; we realize that, in a sense, we are everything around us. And then, at what is perhaps the highest intensity of awakening – absolute wakefulness, as I call it – the whole material world dissolves away, leaving an ocean of pure spirit, and we become part of the blazing, radiant ground of reality.
Most of the shifters we’ve heard so far have described characteristics of a lower - to medium-intensity wakefulness – a heightened sense of awareness, a sense of meaning and inner well-being and connection to the world. But Michael’s wakefulness is of a higher intensity – perhaps even higher than Stephanie’s or Glyn’s – to the point where he can always see Brahman pervading all things, giving them radiance and bringing them into unity, where he can continually sense his own oneness with all things and where he is aware of them arising from the ‘emptiness’ of pure consciousness, the ‘ground’ of reality. He has clearly reached the high intensity of wakefulness which, throughout history, has been referred to as enlightenment.