After reading these accounts of people who’ve undergone transformation after intense turmoil and trauma or through close encounters with death, you might be thinking, ‘This is all very interesting, but what does it mean for me ?’ What relevance does it have for those of us who are living relatively secure and contented lives? After all, no one would seriously recommend making a conscious effort to bring turmoil and trauma into their life or stage an encounter with death.
Nevertheless, there are some very important lessons we can learn from the shifters’ experiences and some ways in which we can follow their lead without actually inflicting suffering on ourselves. In this final chapter, I’m going to suggest three of these: conscious detachment, spiritual practice and developing an awareness of death.
If we know that the awakening effect of turmoil or an encounter with death is due to the dissolving of psychological attachments, then perhaps we can live our lives in such a way that we’re relatively free of attachments. Perhaps we can simply make a conscious effort to detach ourselves.
In fact, this is something that spiritual seekers throughout history have attempted to do. This is the root of the traditional spiritual practice of renunciation, for example. Renunciation means relinquishing family life and sex (by being celibate), worldly pleasures and personal ambitions. Spiritual seekers also expected to practise ‘voluntary poverty’ – that is, to have a bare minimum of possessions, not to own any property and to live without any unnecessary comforts. This is the basis of the monastic way of life: monks and nuns give up everything in their quest for spiritual development, or enlightenment.
From a modern (or post-modern) perspective, renunciation seems unhealthy. It implies a duality between ‘the spirit’ and ‘the world’, as if there’s something innately un spiritual about the world of relationships, sex, family and work, and that spiritual development is only possible through rejecting all of them. But surely – and this is my personal view – this distinction is false. A true spirituality should be part of the everyday world and encompass every aspect of our life, especially our relationships.
Nevertheless, the goal of renunciation is to create a state of detachment. By renouncing ‘the world’, monks and mystics are trying to avoid developing any psychological attachments. They’re consciously trying to create a state of ‘having nothing, possessing everything’, the state of nakedness that Henry Miller found himself in after arriving in Paris or the state of desolation that Kevin found himself in after his life fell apart due to his alcoholism. By ‘emptying their souls’ in this way, they’re trying to ensure that they don’t build up a superficial ego self which would obscure their true spiritual self. Or, in terms of energy, they’re trying to intensify the ‘powers of the soul’ by making sure that they aren’t dissipated by psychological attachments.
In the Christian mystical tradition, the connection between detachment and spiritual awakening is especially strong. Detachment was a part of the process of ‘purgation’ (also including asceticism), which led to a state of ‘illumination’, the point at which the mystic first awakened to the divine reality. Some mystics ended their development there, but for others illumination was followed by the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’, the terrible state in which the mystic felt abandoned by the divine. But the Dark Night of the Soul was a process of further detachment. After breaking their attachment to the world of possessions and ambitions, now the mystics had to break the final attachment: to their own ego. If they did this, they reached the final mystical state of deification, or union, and became one with the divine.
Needless to say, I don’t believe it’s necessary for us to go to these extremes. It’s possible to be free of psychological attachments to a large degree without rejecting ‘the world’ and shutting ourselves up in monasteries or going to live in the desert. We can do this simply by identifying our attachments and consciously trying to reduce our dependency on them. For example, you might be aware that you’re attached to possessions or money. You might enjoy the feeling of buying ‘nice’ things, of owning jewellery and expensive ornaments and of impressing other people with your fashionable clothes and beautiful house. Similarly, you might be able to identify a strong attachment to your appearance, so that you feel the need to look good in order to feel good about yourself. Or, closely linked to this, you might be aware that you’re attached to your youth. The idea of getting old may depress you, so that you try hard to make yourself look younger. Or perhaps you might feel attached to the home environment you’ve grown up in and the people you’ve known all your life, so that you feel slightly threatened by the wider world.
Giving up any attachment feels uncomfortable at first and brings a sense of lack or insecurity. This is natural – after all, the attachment has been helping to prop up the ego, so that we feel fragile without it, like a child without stabilizers on their bike for the first time. But in the same way that a child learns to balance on the bike, we quickly grow stronger and find that we didn’t really need the attachment after all. Our true self seems to grow into the space left by it, giving us a greater sense of wholeness and well-being. If you make a conscious effort to ‘downshift’ by no longer buying unnecessary things, or take the decision to no longer invest so much time and attention in your appearance, you’ll probably be surprised at how strong and liberated this makes you feel.
To a large extent, this is a question of realizing that we shouldn’t rely on external things for our well-being. Attention, possessions, success and status can give us a kind of happiness, but it’s a very temporary and fragile one. It usually only comes in short bursts, which we quickly grow used to, so that we need bigger and bigger ‘fixes’. But by ‘slaking off’ our attachments, we exchange this temporary happiness for access to the deeper and richer – and much more stable – well-being of our own true selves.
However, it’s also important to go deeper and address the root cause of our need for psychological attachments: our fragile and separate ego, which needs to be reinforced by attachments. We can reduce our need for attachments by working on the ego directly and attempting to heal its separateness and sense of lack. Perhaps the most effective way of doing this is through meditation. In fact, this is the basic aim of meditation: to weaken the ego as a structure so that its boundaries become softer and so that our normal sense of separation and isolation is replaced by a sense of connection and wholeness.
Mindfulness exercises and meditative physical exercises such as yoga or t’ai chi can achieve a similar healing effect. Acts of service – such as bringing up children, doing charity or community work, counselling or teaching – can soften the boundaries of the ego too, enabling us to transcend self-centredness and develop a strong sense of empathy and connection with others. Or for a formal and structured approach, we could follow a recognized spiritual path, such as the Buddhist, Tantric or Taoist ways. Essentially, every spiritual path is a movement beyond ego-separateness towards connection and union.
Any path or practice which helps you to cultivate an inner well-being and wholeness will reduce your need for psychological attachments. You won’t need them any more in the same way that a completed building doesn’t need scaffolding or support.
Perhaps the most effective way of developing a state of detachment, however, is by cultivating an awareness of death. We’ve seen that encountering death is one of the most powerful ways of dissolving psychological attachments, and it’s possible to harness this transformational power without actually risking dying.
We’re taught that death is something we should shy away from and try to forget about. And it’s certainly true that becoming aware of death can create anxiety and depression. But there’s a difference between being aware of death as a concept and being confronted with the reality of it and forced to deal with it as an imminent prospect.
This relates to the point I made in the last chapter about the importance of facing rather than avoiding distress and turmoil. In psychology, there’s a theory called Terror Management, which suggests that a large part of all human behaviour is generated by the unconscious fear of death. This fear generates a fundamental anxiety and unease which we try to offset with behaviour such as seeking status or strongly defending the values of our culture. We feel threatened by death and so seek security and significance to defend ourselves against it. Studies have shown, for example, that when people are made more aware of their own mortality, they tend to become more nationalistic and tribal and more materialistic. 1
However, this is just what happens when we’re passively aware of death, without confronting it as a reality. When we face up to it actively and directly, there’s a good chance that we’ll transcend this anxiety and insecurity and experience its full transformational potential. Paradoxically, as we saw in the last chapter, facing up to our own mortality fully may release us from the fear of death.
One way in which we can do this without actually endangering our life is through undergoing a kind of simulated death. For example, the transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof, working together with his wife Christina, has found that in non-ordinary states of consciousness induced by LSD or breathing exercises, it’s possible for individuals to relive the experience of being born. In Grof’s view, the process of birth has such strong parallels with the process of dying that to relive your own birth also means to experience your own death. As a result, he speaks of the ‘death-rebirth’ experience. According to him, those who undergo this experience are permanently transformed. The filters that restrict their normal awareness fall away, so that perception becomes much more intense. Nothing is familiar or taken for granted. As Grof writes:
We may feel that we are really seeing the world for the first time in our lives. Everything around us, even the most ordinary and familiar scenes, seems unusually exacting and stimulating. People report entirely new ways of appreciating and enjoying their loved ones, the sound of music, the beauties of nature. 2
Their time orientation also changes – the future and past become much less important than the present. But most significantly, Grof also describes them as becoming free of psychological attachments, aware of the ‘futility of exaggerated ambitions, attachment to money, status, fame and power’. 3 In other words, the effects are exactly the same as actually encountering death.
But even more simply, we can achieve a similar effect by imagining our own death – or, more strictly, imagining that we only have a certain amount of time left to live. The poet and author Stephen Levine did this as an experiment. After spending 25 years working with the dying as a counsellor and therapist, he was well aware of the positive effects of encountering death and always thought it a terrible shame that these only occurred at the end of a person’s life. So he and his wife decided to tell themselves that they were going to die exactly a year from that moment and live as if that really were the case.
During his ‘final’ year, Levine reviewed his life and felt ashamed of some of the things he’d done, but at the same time felt compassion towards his younger self. He forgave the people who’d wronged him, repaired his relationships with people he’d fallen out with and renewed old friendships. He found that he felt increased gratitude for his life and had a heightened sense of presence and of beauty. At the end of the year, he reflected that:
My life has changed in subtle and unexpected ways. My sense of time has changed – there seems to be more of the present. A new found energy has been liberated… My relationships with friends have deepened, and in some cases, blossomed again. Afflictive emotions, particularly to do with the past, have become considerably less cumbersome. And love is more available and sustainable. It feels as though I have made peace with my life. 4
In addition to facing up to our own mortality, it’s important to face death fully when it happens to people around us. When relatives and friends die, we shouldn’t be tempted to try to distract ourselves from our grief but allow ourselves to feel the loss and emptiness of bereavement, however painful it might be. It’s important to contemplate the full of meaning of the person’s death and to be aware that the same thing is going to happen to us at some point.
This is the purpose of the ‘cemetery meditations’ recommended in Buddhism. In the Satipatthana Sutta , the Buddha tells his monks that if they see a dead body, whether it is one that is newly dead, one being eaten by animals or one that’s nothing more than a skeleton or a pile of bones, they should tell themselves: ‘Verily, also my own body is of the same nature; such it will become and will not escape it.’ In this way, the monk becomes aware of the impermanence of life and, in the Buddha’s words, ‘lives detached, and clings to nothing in the world’. 5
It’s also important to share the company of relatives and friends who are dying. Again, we might be tempted to shy away from the reality of their predicament and be afraid of awkwardness and embarrassment. But as well as being a great comfort to them, sharing their company will intensify our own awareness of death as we watch them preparing to take a journey which we’ll also be making at some point.
This is why working with the dying – as a counsellor, nurse or hospice volunteer – can be a profound experience. In Chapter 7 , we saw how working as a hospice volunteer changed Paul McDermott’s life, giving him a new spiritual awareness and positive attitude towards death. It’s quite common for hospice workers to be affected in this way. Being so close to death on a daily basis is a powerful spur for their personal development. A friend of mine who was a hospice nurse described how ‘as they get nearer to death, people don’t pretend any more. They drop all their masks and become who they really are. They become honest and vulnerable. And once you experience that in others, you can’t play roles yourself any more. You have to be completely authentic in every aspect of your life.’ For her, being a hospice nurse – or a ‘midwife for the dying’ as she calls it – was a great privilege. ‘After you’ve helped someone to die, it teaches you a lot,’ she says. ‘On one level, you’re aware of how precious life is – too precious to waste doing things you don’t want to do. But there’s a meaning to it as well. The sense of connection makes you feel that there’s something more, a deeper dimension to life.’
All of these methods have the same basic principle: they’re all just different ways of reminding ourselves of our own mortality. It’s actually quite difficult for us to remember death, partly because of our death-denying culture, but also because of the limitations of our mind. The mind is designed to focus on present and immediate realities rather than bigger and more abstract ones such as death. It has a microscopic focus, whereas death is a macrocosmic reality. (This is also why it’s so difficult for us to treat environmental problems with the full seriousness they deserve.)
As a consequence, it’s important for us to make a conscious effort to remind ourselves of death. If you’re not able to try the methods I’ve suggested above, at least spend a few minutes of every day thinking about your own death, contemplating the fact that you’re only on this planet for a certain amount of time, that death could strike you down at any moment and that when it does, all of your possessions, achievements, status and knowledge will dissolve into nothing. As Sogyal Rinpoche puts it in The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying , ‘It is important to reflect calmly, again and again, that death is real, and comes without warning .’ 6
This may seem morbid to some people, but it’s really only a question of facing up to reality. Ultimately, we’re all in the same position as a cancer patient who’s been told they only have a certain amount of time left to live – it’s just that we don’t know how much time we have left and it’s likely that most of us will have more time than the cancer patient. Even if there is life after death – and I personally believe that there is, in some form – it doesn’t change the fact that when this life ends we’ll be separated from everything and everyone we know. Death is always present, and its transformational power is always accessible to us, as long as we’re courageous enough to face it. And the more real it becomes to us, the weaker and fewer our psychological attachments will be.
So, by cultivating this awareness of death at the same time as practising conscious detachment and meditation (or another form of spiritual practice), it’s possible that we’ll weaken our superficial ego self to such an extent that we’ll remain permanently connected to the higher, truer self beneath it. Deprived of its building blocks, the ego will then be unable to obscure and suppress our higher self.
All of the experiences we’ve looked at illustrate the amazing, infinite reserves of the human spirit. No matter how deep into suffering and misery we plunge, no matter how much hardship the world can send our way, even if we lose our health, our friends or partners, our possessions and careers, the use of our limbs – we aren’t just able to cope with these terrible events, we’re able to transcend them. The most devastating experiences and events may be able to damage us temporarily, but they don’t have to destroy us. On the contrary, in times of suffering, an alchemical agent is released inside us that transmutes trauma and hardship into joy and serenity, and tragedy into spiritual awakening.
Most of us live in fear – of death, of being left by our partner, of becoming ill, of losing our job, our success and possessions, of the future, and so on. But the stories we’ve looked at teach us that all of this fear is misplaced. As long as we’re prepared to face up to pain and suffering, there is nothing for us to be afraid of. Even the most traumatic experiences – like cancer, bereavement or becoming severely disabled – have an underlying positivity. Beneath their terrible, painful surface there is a massive reservoir of spiritual potential.
Several of the shifters I spoke to told me that they felt lucky to have gone through such trauma and turmoil, because if they hadn’t, they wouldn’t have experienced the transformation that followed. I would never be so patronizing as to say that anyone who goes through intense suffering is ‘lucky’. I would never suggest that we should welcome suffering, or seek it out. But there will always be some degree of suffering in our lives, and when it comes, we should try not to see it in wholly negative terms. We should always be aware that, buried inside it, there is an opportunity for growth and transformation.
The experiences we’ve looked at also illustrate how close spiritual awakening is to us. It exists as a potential inside everyone . It’s just that normally the potential is dormant. To manifest itself, it normally has to be triggered by turmoil and trauma. However, if we know it’s there, latent in the same way that a butterfly is latent inside a caterpillar, then it should be possible to release it in other ways too, for example through the kinds of psychological or spiritual practices I’ve just outlined.
There is nothing esoteric or otherworldly about this state. On the contrary, for those who experience it, it’s completely natural and comfortable, almost a state which they ought to have existed in all along. In comparison, our normal psyche seems a kind of aberration, a trance-like state of disconnection and discord which should never have become normal. The shifters have woken up from this trance into a more real, meaningful and harmonious world.
And the knowledge that enlightenment is latent in all of us could change our perspective of the human race. The Utopian visions of New Age philosophers no longer seem so unrealistic. Since so many ‘ordinary’ people have already undergone this shift, it’s possible to envision a world in which everyone has undergone it, in which enlightenment is our normal state. This would be a completely different world – a world in which people no longer exploit and oppress each other in their search for wealth, status and power; a world in which people are aware of the beauty and aliveness of the world around them and so respect nature rather than just seeing it as a supply of resources; a world in which people exist in a state of well-being rather than one of discord, and so no longer spend their lives trying to escape from their own selves or in a fruitless search for fulfilment; a world in which people live in harmony with themselves and with each other.
This is just a dream, of course – but it’s closer to reality than I ever would have thought before writing this book.