

MOSTLY A MYSTIC  
Reflections on a Spiritual (But Not Religious) Life

First Digital Edition

© Copyright 2015 by D. Patrick Miller

SMASHWORDS EDITION

FEARLESS BOOKS

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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the express written permission of the publisher.

All quotes from A Course in Miracles are taken from the Standard Third Edition published by the Foundation for Inner Peace, PO Box 598, Mill Valley, CA 94942-0598, www.acim.org. The Course is not now under copyright, but the author wishes to express his appreciation to the Foundation for their generosity and cooperation through the years of granting permission for numerous excerpts from the Course in the essays appearing in this book, when published prior to the revocation of copyright.

### Table of Contents

Foreword by Jacob Needleman

Introduction

Chapter 1: Flight Patterns

Chapter 2: Back to the Real World

Chapter 3: All Shook Up

Chapter 4: The Perfect Mother

Chapter 5: A Healing Catastrophe

Chapter 6: Climbing the Stone Face of Fear

Chapter 7: Homeless

Chapter 8: Ending My Religion

Chapter 9: Miracles Over the Long Haul

Chapter 10: The Co$t of Not Selling Out

Appendix Note

Chapter 11: Ending the War Within

Chapter 12: Why You Don't Trust Reporters — And What They Could Do About It

Chapter 13: Genesis Corrected

Acknowledgments
Foreword

I met Patrick Miller a quarter of a century ago, when he approached me for an interview that would appear in The Sun magazine. That interview became the first of six which he recently collected and published under the title Necessary Wisdom.

Not more than ten minutes into that first interview I said to myself: This is not an "interview"; it's a conversation.

And then, again, five minutes later, I was saying to myself: This is a special kind of conversation: it's a dialogue.

Let me explain. In one form or another an "interview" is concerned solely with the person interviewed, in this case me — my thought, my views, my actions, my life. In a conversation, however, two people are concerned with each other's views, thoughts, opinions. A conversation is about us, we — two human beings confronting or opening to each other as separate individuals.

But a dialogue is a special kind of conversation that is dedicated to a specific issue or question. In our case it was to be questions concerning the spiritual search in the midst of modern life — questions such as the meaning of God or mysticism or love, or even the possible spiritual significance of money, in our inflamed materialistic world.

Did Patrick and I come to new insights about these issues? Yes, certainly, to a degree.

Eventually, however, I realized that our dialogues were spiritual events themselves, events that responded to the issues not only by the intellectual content of our exchange, but by the quality of mutual listening that emerged between us. That is to say: by the human energy of mutual attention that touched us.

In Christian art there exist images showing two individuals speaking to each other while just above them there hovers a white dove — symbolizing the descent of the holy spirit. I am not saying that our dialogues attained that exalted level. But I am saying that the work of mutual listening, which entails the noble effort of two people fully accepting each other into their own minds, is a forerunner of human love. Such mutual listening, such unconditional mutual attention, however transitory it may be, or even the mere effort itself to practice such listening — is in its way more of an answer to questions of the spirit than words or ideas alone can ever be.

And in whatever sense Patrick here describes himself as "mostly a mystic," or as "spiritual but not religious," the simple fact is that in this book he is listening to and for the spiritual life of our culture with both a critical and an open-hearted attention. In that sense this constantly insightful and touching memoir is rooted in a lifelong conversation, and perhaps even an ardent, ongoing dialogue — a dialogue with the world around us, with all its silent questions and noisy "answers," and all our spiritual hopes and struggles. — Jacob Needleman

Philosopher Jacob Needleman has been teaching and writing about the riches of the inner life for four decades. A professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University who has been featured on Bill Moyers' "World of Ideas" series, Needleman's most recent works include What is God? and An Unknown World ( from Tarcher/Penguin), and the Fearless Books title Necessary Wisdom: Jacob Needleman Talks About God, Time, Money, Love, and the Need for Philosophy in Conversations with D. Patrick Miller.

#### "Be cheerful but grave."

— Paramahansa Yogananda

###  Introduction

Although the stock photo appearing on the cover of this book appears suspiciously Photoshopped to my graphic artist's eye, I chose it because it reflects a formative experience of my spiritual life. Eight or nine years old at the time, I was standing in the second floor den of our family's house before a broad expanse of windows, watching a ferocious night thunderstorm soak the flood plain that lay a couple hundred feet below me, down the hill from the house. Back then, that plain — bordered on one side by a small creek that I spent much of my childhood splashing around in — was populated with about twenty-five oak, hickory, and walnut trees of at least a hundred years vintage. Every occurrence of lightning, coming ever closer, briefly illuminated them in stark relief, like the skeletons of mysterious giants standing in a wading pool, suddenly revealed in a stop-action flash.

Then, as the pelting rain softened, a strange electric buzzzz went through the room before everything I could see went totally white for a second, followed immediately by a pounding smash that shook the entire house. My mother and two sisters in the living room screamed and within seconds, it seemed, my father had rushed up the stairs from his basement workshop into the den and grabbed me by the shoulders, as if to haul me to safety — not unlike he had done about five years before when our first house, built on the same floor plan, burned to the ground. Then he had dragged me from my bedroom, half-asleep, through smoke and cinders and out the one exit that was not already consumed in flames.

This time, the fire was outside and already safely contained. We both stood there in wonder watching a few tall tongues of flame, rapidly shortening in a heavier rain, issuing from the neatly split trunk of one of the formerly tallest trees on the plain, about three hundred yards from where we stood in the den. Had the windows in front of us been solid sheet glass instead of an array of narrow panes, they surely would have shattered from the sonic impact.

In the next morning's bright sunlight, my dad and I went down to examine the still-smoking hulk of the shattered tree. One half had completely fallen over to the ground; the other was splintered in several standing shards, all of them seared with charcoal burns. While violent summertime weather, including the occasional tornado and flooding rains, wasn't uncommon in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, this experience had shaken me like nothing before.

Suddenly I understood the relative powerlessness of human beings before the forces of nature that we liked to think we could control or protect ourselves from. And I understood as well how the notion of a violent, punishing God could not only have arisen in the primitive minds of early humans, but been passed on without too much reconsideration through generations of religious thought. The Biblical God I was learning about in Sunday School at that age was certainly a confusing fellow, offering infinite mercy and unconditional love at certain moments and eternal damnation at others, sometimes for what seemed like relatively minor misconduct — bad behaviors that He, after all, had provided us with the choice and capacity to commit.

Thankfully I outgrew these bewildering notions of a Lightning God within a few years, growing into a more rational if naïve agnosticism that would serve me reasonably well before lightning of a different variety struck my life in my early thirties. That lightning strike is described in detail in Chapter 5, "A Healing Catastrophe," and it marked the beginning of my explicit spiritual path.

But as this book of memories details, my unrecognized spiritual life began much earlier, probably with the apparent accident of being born into an emotionally troubled family. While we outwardly lived the comfortable life of the upper middle class, we privately lived the life of a small group of human beings struggling with the inner fires, lightning bolts, and grievous floods of barely manageable insanity. It would be a long time before I grew into a useful spiritual outlook that taught me how to forgive and transcend at least some of that insanity. And I would eventually comprehend that such insanity was part and parcel of what we ambivalently call "the human condition" — and not just the peculiar invention of the Millers living out on Plott Road, up the hill from Reedy Creek.

##   
Writing as a saving grace

My mom was a frustrated writer and successfully instilled in me the notion that I would pick up where she never left off. She started me in on reading two years before public school could get hold of me — with the dubious result that my poor sister Karen had to listen to me, a first-grader, reading to her sixth-grade class from Moby Dick in a freakish performance of literary legerdemain that, so far as I can figure, did absolutely no one any good. By junior high I was contributing to an unauthorized alternative newspaper, and in high school and college I wrote for both the official campus papers and rebellious upstarts that I had a hand in starting. Later, after moving my life to California, I would write for an environmental activist journal and the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian, whose motto declared that it was "a newspaper's duty to print the news and raise hell."

Indeed, my early career as an investigative journalist focused on environmental issues was based on the convictions that something was certainly wrong with the world, that those responsible for ecological wrongdoing needed to be rooted out and exposed, and that I was just the guy to do it. (The world can seem so simple before you turn twenty-five!) What I shortly learned, however, was that all the 'convictions' required by investigative journalism made me sick to my stomach. Not to mention that it could take years of dogged research and writing to expose just one bad guy — as Woodward and Bernstein, my heroes at one time, exposed Richard Nixon. Soon I realized: What about the next bad guy? How long would it take to convict him? I had to admit I had much bigger ambitions than chasing down political miscreants; I really wanted to save the world.

Thus my investigative career was short-lived, and I knocked around writing poetry, satire, and incomplete fictions while learning typography and other graphic arts — technical skills that would later serve me in good stead as an independent publisher — without having much sense of purpose in life, until the spiritual awakening of my thirties. Thereafter my writing career took off in earnest, leading to over one hundred articles in print for such media as Yoga Journal and The Sun (published in my native North Carolina), and eventually my current career as a book author, editor, and independent publisher. Initially skeptical of the online revolution that began to overtake all our lives in the 1990s (yes, I sheepishly admit once thinking, "E-mail? That will never work!"), I eventually became a webmaster, blogger, and e-book producer as well.

I never felt moved to write a personal history from start to finish, but over the years I did write a disconnected series of autobiographical essays, usually with a spiritual bent, that I have assembled and connected for this collection. Although they are not arranged in a strict chronological fashion, these pieces cover my life from my childhood in the 1950s to the present day. Each one is footnoted with its original publication when available. Thus they offer a kind of literary vérité in that each one conveys the writing skills and styles I possessed at the time. I've done minimal editing or rewrite save for the purpose of updating useful information. Because they are driven by themes instead of linear time, some of these pieces have minor overlaps presenting some of the same stories or ideas from slightly differing perspectives. To me, this actually represents the nature of spiritual reflection, which seldom proceeds in a straight line from start to finish, but is often revisiting past beliefs and experiences in the light of new learning. Finally, a closing Appendix presents three published articles that, while not strictly autobiographical, exemplify how a spiritual perspective influenced some of my best work in journalism and satire.

Regardless of my mother's intention in pushing me toward a literary career, writing began to save my sanity with my teen journals — and it has continued to provide that saving grace through a professional career now encompassing forty-some years. Sometimes I wish I had followed the rest of my mother's advice: that is, to first become a safely tenured English professor who could write with the security of an academic institution and steady salary behind him. Instead, I quit college to bicycle across the United States, co-writing an exceptionally concise and poorly paid travelogue series with my pedaling partner, Win Minter, for the Charlotte Observer. A couple years later, I quit my first real job in the San Francisco advertising realm to pursue the professionally itinerant path of a freelance writer, self-employed graphic artist, and independent publisher (a career choice described in more detail in Chapter 9, "The Co$t of Not Selling Out.") About the best I can say for myself, Mom, is that this irrational path proved to be my route to becoming a Real Writer — although I don't know that I'd recommend it to a young person with literary aspirations and any hope for financial security. While I've been professionally identified as a journalist, copywriter, graphic designer, book author, editor, and publisher, the life history outlined in this book clearly establishes that I am mostly a mystic... with all the dubious intuitions, inexplicable certainties, and glimpses of the transcendent that go along with such an identification.

##   
An unexpected membership

As such, I'm both a member of an ancient esoteric lineage and a product of my times, in which more and more people are identifying themselves as "spiritual but not religious" even if they don't know exactly what that means. I hope the course of this book helps readers understand a few things about what that identification does mean, and why it's so significant to our culture at this time.

One of the first clues to the surfacing of the "SBNR" attitude appeared in 1988, when the utterly mainstream periodical known as Better Homes and Gardens magazine conducted a survey on "Religion, Spirituality, and American Families." The poll drew a whopping 80,000 responses, far more than most public opinion samplings, and included these findings:

"Some results suggest that respondents' spirituality is strongest on a personal level. The largest group (62%) say that in recent years they have begun or intensified personal spiritual study and activities (compared to 23% who say they have become closer to a religious organization). 68% say that when faced with a spiritual dilemma, prayer/meditation guides them most (compared to 14% who say the clergy guides them most during such times)...."

It's significant that a pre-1990s poll even distinguished between "religion" and "spirituality," a parsing of terminology that would have been left entirely up to theologians not long before. Since that time, a number of succeeding polls have indicated that people who identify themselves as "spiritual but not religious" comprise up to 33 percent of the adult American populace, possibly higher in Western Europe, and the percentage keeps rising. This catchphrase has also entered the popular parlance on matchmaking sites, gained its own Wikipedia entry, and spawned at least one website, SBNR.org. In the spring of 2010, a truly startling survey was released by Lifeway Christian Resources, a research and marketing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, which might be assumed to be trolling for good news pertaining to mainstream religious practice. Instead, Lifeway's research suggested that 72% of the under-30 Millennial generation identify themselves as SBNR. As Lifeway president Thom Rainer said, the continuance of this trend may mean that "the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships."

Of course, since no one has precisely defined what it means to be "spiritual but not religious," we could be talking about little more than a vague sentiment held by an increasing number of people who can't be bothered to support their local church, synagogue, or mosque but nonetheless don't want to think of themselves as unspiritual. In Western culture where scientific rationality has such a powerful hold on popular consciousness, even that stingy interpretation of the data is significant. It's more likely that people raised in the contemporary Western mindset increasingly find the myths, rituals, and rules of mainstream religions difficult to swallow, much less live by. Yet many of them have spontaneously experienced or deliberately pursued firsthand mystical experiences that cannot be sufficiently explained (or explained away) by science.

There is an enormously positive potential in this view of the SBNR phenomenon. It could signal the beginning of a mass cultural maturation in which increasing numbers of people refuse to accept either traditional theologies or reductive rationalism to explain the fundamental mysteries of human existence (chief among them being the simple question, "Who am I?"). After all, the great religions were founded in the individual visions and experiences of prophets like Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and the Buddha, who refused to accept the traditional answers of their own times, and courageously explored the ultimate "ground of being" for themselves. Their revelations were later codified into religions that were supposed to provide infallible guidance for the masses — but it can be convincingly argued that a lot has gotten lost in the translation of every profound spiritual teaching into a social religion. In the best possible light, then, SBNR signals the willingness of huge numbers of people to become their own prophets — with all the ontological hazards, conceptual detours, and spiritual bypasses that do-it-yourself enlightenment entails.

In America, we traditionally turn to religion, psychotherapy, self-help, or shopping in understandably desperate attempts to fix our lives or soothe our souls. Starting out on an authentic spiritual path may begin with such a motivation, but eventually leads to the recognition that our lives are healed and our sanity saved not by finding the right answers to all our problems, but by learning to ask better and deeper questions about exactly who and what we are — not to mention how we came up with all these problems.

In this book there are frequent references to my core spiritual discipline, A Course in Miracles (ACIM), but it's not the purpose of this book to present its history or fully explain its philosophy. Anyone interesting in learning more about ACIM can refer to two of my earlier books: Understanding A Course in Miracles (TenSpeed/Random House), which is a history and critical analysis of the teaching; and Living with Miracles (Tarcher/Penguin), which provides a basic introduction to the experience of studying the Course. In many ways ACIM is a foundation stone of the modern SBNR phenomenon, influencing many people beyond its core following with ideas that have begun to enter popular awareness without their source being identified.

##   
The geography of a spiritual path

As a publisher in the field of contemporary spirituality, I've received a mountain of manuscripts promising all the answers everyone would ever need: guides to accelerated enlightenment, tips for total wellness, and sure-fire, divinely approved methods to achieve personal wealth and power. If even a fraction of these spiritual nostrums had delivered the goods, my own life would have become a series of ever-brightening explosions of greater consciousness, finally culminating in the full flowering of Affluent Guruhood. That seems to be the American way of spiritual evolution, at least for some with extroverted personalities and a certain chutzpah.

Yet my spiritual life has never felt like a fireworks display of enlightenment-bursts building to a grand finale. When I picture it, my spiritual life looks like something completely different.

Imagine that you've spent years building a house in your mind to give you a sense of safety against the inevitable storms, deep freezes, and hot spells of life. This inner house is far from perfect; in fact, most of the rooms seem to need remodeling as soon as they're finished. But at least you've got a home of your own. Call this home the ego, your normal sense of self, arduously constructed from the raw materials of the psyche, and following a haphazard blueprint based on your personal experiences and beliefs, your likes and dislikes, your hopes and dreams.

One day you're sitting comfortably in the living room of your ego-home when the floor suddenly drops out to reveal a rushing river where you thought you had laid a firm foundation. Hanging on for dear life to a shuddering bookshelf, you realize that the house crashing down around you has become a mortal danger, likely to snuff you out at any moment with a flying shard of window glass or a tumbling timber. Your only hope of survival is to let go of your familiar home, drop into the river and literally "go with the flow."

This river is the onrushing life of the soul, which cannot be long hidden or confined even in the most spacious of homes built by the ego. Falling into the inner life of the soul is commonly called a spiritual awakening and is usually precipitated by a profound crisis: an illness or ominous diagnosis; "bottoming out" with a serious addiction; the loss of a loved one through death or divorce; the collapse of a career or the failure of an important plan. Whatever it is, this crisis shakes apart our usual foundations, and immediately makes us aware that we no longer control our own life (if we ever actually did).

But few of us can swim for long in the soul's turbulent waters. Sooner or later, you manage to struggle to one bank of the river and pull yourself onto solid ground, gasping for breath and wondering how you'll survive in a strange new territory. After a while, you may notice that the scenery ain't bad from this new vantage point. You get to thinking that this might be just the place to build a new, finer house than before, in sight of the magnificent river, but wisely removed by a few hundred yards. Who knows — you might even start a school here to teach spiritual river-rafting!

If you do stop here to rebuild a home for your ego, it will simply never occur to you that rivers tend to flood every now and then.

If you're not focused on rebuilding a shelter immediately, you may notice that a footpath runs by the river where you dragged yourself onshore. In one direction the path will lead to the river's source; in the other direction, to its destination. Without knowing how you know, you realize that the source and the destination of this river are the same, and it doesn't really matter which way you head.

And so you start walking.

As the days stretch into months and then years, you learn to live a life in the wild, following the river. Sometimes the going is rough; you get lost in the underbrush, losing sight of the river and discovering that you've walked in circles just to get back to where you were days before. Sometimes the path turns muddy and steep, and you fall back two steps for every three you climb. Sometimes you slide into the river and get swept away again for a while.

All these trials are part of the spiritual journey toward selflessness, the placeless destination that you started heading for the moment you fell out of the house of ego. If you're handy, you may learn how to build yourself a canoe out of tree bark. But after a few days of coasting upon the soul's river — justifiably proud of your ingenuity and your determination to get ahead spiritually — you realize that it's not really the speed of this journey that matters.

What matters is the seriousness with which you are following the route of the river. If you're really serious, you'll find yourself laughing pretty often at how ludicrous your situation is. Because regardless of your station in life in the everyday visible world — and no matter what anyone else thinks of you, whether they call you genius, guru, or fool — you know that you are truly an inward, homeless wanderer following a river without end for no reason you can practically explain. On this journey, you'll certainly never get ahead of anyone!

So this is how I picture my spiritual life — stumbling uncertainly along a rocky path somewhere between the devil and the deep blue sea, pausing occasionally for attacks of helpless hilarity. Despite the wild rigors of following my path by the river all these years, I don't miss that old house I once built. When I think back, I remember how alone I usually felt within its walls. Sitting out by the river and watching its complex, ceaseless flow, I know that I am flowing there too, my soul inseparably mixed with all the souls who create the water of life.

The latter portion of this introduction previously appeared in the online Elephant Journal.

\- 1 -

# Flight Patterns

Previously published as a Fearless e-Book

I encountered my first spiritual discipline in the main downtown branch of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Library in North Carolina, in 1965 or thereabouts. I was around twelve years of age, but I'm not sure of the exact date. Utterly by accident (or so it seemed), I came across a peculiar book entitled The Projection of the Astral Body by Sylvan Muldoon and Hereward Carrington, first published in 1929 (and kept alive in succeeding editions ever since). Initially I was just fascinated by the names Sylvan and Hereward; I was used to far more prosaic monikers like those of my uncles Guy, Bud, and Dude. (And their names weren't on any books.) I had no idea what "projection of the astral body" meant, but I checked the book out nonetheless and took it home, feeling the need to keep it hidden from my parents. Somehow I knew there was something they wouldn't like about it.

I was soon enraptured by Sylvan and Hereward's central proposition: that the physical human body housed an ethereal doppelganger, the "astral body," which could leave the body at will and fly around. In his introduction, Hereward noted some of the other names by which the astral body had been theretofore identified: "the etheric body, the mental body, the spiritual body, the desire body, the radiant body, the resurrection body, the double, the luminous body, the subtle body, the fluidic body, the shining body, the phantom body..." Regardless of terminology, I was rapidly convinced that astral projection was essentially a free flight pass, without need of wings, propellers, or an airport. It was thrilling to think that I could slip out of my body, with self-awareness and senses intact, and zoom around the world at will. The notion was exotic; I had certainly never heard of anyone local doing it, so I assumed it came easier to folks with names like Sylvan (for, as it turned out, Hereward was merely his earth-bound editor and apparently not a zoomer himself).

Yet at the same time the notion was oddly commonsensical: Of course I should be able to fly! I had certainly dreamt about it often enough, and those dreams always felt so real that it was hard to believe they were entirely products of my imagination. It was as if I could remember flying, but only when I slept. So why hadn't anyone told me how to go about it in my waking hours? Why was it a secret hidden in a musty corner of the public library? Why was I learning about it from these old dead guys and not, say, at Sunday School? After all, at church we heard about the soul all the time, and according to my understanding, the soul zoomed up to heaven after you kicked the bucket. But here were Hereward and Sylvan suggesting that something very much like the soul could leave the body at any old time, and return! If all this were true, then this was earthshaking news of the first order. I had to try it out.

Fortunately, Sylvan had documented the process in great detail, and offered several methods to induce projection. In looking back over his book recently, I was impressed by the thoroughness and knowledgeability with which the author addressed several techniques of consciousness alteration that I would later come to know by other names — including progressive relaxation, meditation, and dream yoga. It's remarkable to realize now that I had a very real spiritual initiation at such a young age, albeit without the in-person guidance of a teacher. I wonder now if a guru or yoga master would have steered me away from the severe fright that was soon to follow — or perhaps led me to it straightaway.

At any rate, from all of Sylvan's suggestions I cobbled together a method for free-flight induction that might best be called a prone meditation. Two or three times a week I would lie down on my bed, usually picking a mid-afternoon hour when I was not likely to fall asleep, and when I had the house or at least my room to myself. I'd begin relaxing sections of my body in an orderly manner, beginning with the feet and moving upward. Once I settled on a reasonably comfortable position, I made it a rule not to move a muscle, as my guidebook suggested that it was necessary to still the body and slow the heartbeat to a minimum in order to induce a "physical incapacity" that would allow the astral self to disengage. Any movement, however slight, would slow or reverse that process.

The goal, in short, was to consciously induce paralysis, such as I had sometimes experienced while struggling to awaken from scary dreams. (According to WebMD, such sleep paralysis is fairly common, occurring in about 40% of adults, and they often notice it first in their teen years. "There's no need to fear nighttime demons or alien abductors," the website reassures, and thank God for that.) It was in this paralytic state, Sylvan advised, that the "phantom" could separate entirely from the physical body, save for a silver cord attached at each end to the heads of the physical and astral bodies. Helpful illustrations were provided. If this cord ever broke, by the way, one's physical body and its double would permanently separate, and you'd be dead. So there was an element of danger in this exotic practice. I was hooked.

##   
Drifting out of church

Looking back at the inception of my first spiritual practice, it's interesting to note that it began around the time that my family quit going to the local Methodist Church. We'd attended pretty regularly for as long as I could remember, but I was never quite sure why. We participated in very few church activities outside services; in fact my mom had nixed my joining the church's Boy Scout troop on the grounds that it was too dangerous (all that camping in snakey woods and knot-tying, I suppose). And there were a number of things about church that I just didn't get, beginning with the fact that you had to dress up for it.

I could never understand why one's appearance mattered to an all-powerful Creator who lived in a faraway heaven; from what I understood, He went around in loose white robes, which was weird but not constricting. Given that He never wore a tie and jacket, I just couldn't see why He'd object to me showing up to church in play clothes. And Sunday School — there was a total mystery. It was very unlike real school, in that the teachers didn't seem to be real teachers, but just folks from the neighborhood who happened to know some of the Bible. Often they didn't seem to know much else. Thank God they didn't give us tests or grades, which was another oddity of this kind of "school."

Then there was the Bible problem itself — and that was a big one for me. In regular school, you could go to the library and research things you needed to know from a very wide variety of books — best of all, weighty multi-volume references like Encyclopaedia Britannica, which seemed to contain everything there was to know. But in Sunday School, the Bible was the sole substitute for the Britannica and everything else — the only accepted source of information. The problem was that the Bible often didn't make sense, or seemed unduly concerned with who begat whom very long ago in some faraway part of the world. Who cared?

And if you asked questions about what the Bible meant or why one was supposed to care about all those begats, the Sunday School teachers just told you to read more of the Bible until you understood. Failing that, you were just supposed to "believe" — although, considering the great complexity and occasional absurdity of what the Bible said, it seemed impossible to believe all of it. In sum, it was a perplexing state of affairs. Sometimes I wondered where religion had come from in the first place, and how it came to be something you were supposed to do even though it didn't really seem like it mattered much to anyone for six and three-quarters days of the week.

When my family stopped going to church, it became clearer why we had been going in the first place. Throughout my childhood, our church had a preacher named Jim Bailey who seemed to bring a sparkle to my mother's eyes. I remember that his sermons were usually pretty interesting; he just talked and joked like a regular person about real-life things and how they related to being a Christian. That was okay, and sometimes I learned something from this preacher. He didn't scream about us all being sinners or going to hell, behavior which I'd heard was common for the Southern Baptists and Holy Rollers (the latter whom I'd never actually seen, but desperately wanted to).

Now rumor had it that the Rev. Bailey sometimes drank and swore outside the pulpit, and had a hard time getting to church on time because of his Sunday morning hunting excursions. All that made him enough of a rebel to impress my mother, but perhaps there was something more going on. Because when Bailey's unpreacherly behavior finally got him dismissed from our church and sent on down the circuit, my mom got pretty upset. Twice we went to hear his successor, a white-haired, possibly dead gentleman whose languid sermons could induce rigor mortis in his audience in five minutes flat. After that my mom announced that she would no longer "waste my time listening to that pious sonofabitch" — and suddenly, religion didn't seem to matter anymore. No more Sunday dress-up, no more puzzling Sunday School lessons, and no more having to believe in a Bible I couldn't make heads or tails of. My dad didn't seem to care one way or another, so our family's churchgoing era ended. It was sort of a miracle, really.

##   
Pursuing astral catalepsy

Cut to my semi-darkened bedroom four or five weeks after I began pursuing the goal of astral projection. Slipping the bonds of the body had turned out to be more difficult than I anticipated; a number of times I had just fallen asleep and awakened with a jerk about an hour later, woozy and disappointed. But every time I hadn't fallen asleep, some very interesting things had happened. It was fairly easy to lay still long enough to enter a kind of soft, cottony state where my self-awareness felt larger than my physical body, as if I'd simultaneously inflated and become weightless, like a big, self-shaped balloon. After ten minutes or so of that sensation, I often felt that I was somehow drifting away from my prone body at an upward, diagonal angle. Until I learned not to pay attention to that, I would abruptly jerk my eyes open and look around, thinking, Have I done it? Taking a look at the room would abruptly deflate all the floating sensations, and that projection session would be over.

Gradually I learned to stay still through these distractions, and that was when things began to get literally heavy. The puffy, floating sensations would eventually dissipate, replaced by an increasing leadenness of my limbs. They would progressively feel more dense until it seemed that I couldn't lift them if I tried — and this, I realized, was the onset of the paralysis, or "astral catalepsy" that Sylvan had described in considerable detail. Following that condition, he advised, one was likely to enter a vibratory stage that could become quite violent, and if one passed through that without breaking concentration, a cognizance of astral separation would soon follow. By that time you'd be vertical, sort of floating on luminous feet, and able to look down on the resting physical body you'd just left. Then you could go spy on people without being seen. (Sylvan didn't actually promote that feature, but it was my chief ulterior motive in pursuing astral projection.)

So on this particular afternoon, I had passed through the puffy, floating stage and gone quite deep into the heaviness when I realized, with a pulse of anxiety, that I really couldn't move even if I wanted to. My limbs were like stone, sunk far into the mattress, and felt utterly unresponsive. Sylvan had warned that latter stages of the process could bring up a "fear of projection" that could bring everything to a halt, so I just breathed deeply and let the paralysis be. And then it began: first a subtle shaking in the extremities that rapidly turned into a full-body vibration that was soon completely chaotic and all-consuming. In fact I couldn't tell what was shaking exactly; it seemed that my body was going to rattle itself into component atoms, but just a few moments before I'd been totally paralyzed, so that didn't make sense. It would be more accurate to say there was a violent rattling, with no body at all. It was happening to me, but I couldn't tell where "me" was anymore.

Whatever was going on, it was getting scary as hell. I couldn't tell how much time was passing, and there was no way to cry out for help or reverse the process. I suddenly became obsessed with the thought I am going to die! and with a monumental effort, sucked in enough air to manage a panicked shout. This seemed to re-energize my body; I still couldn't move my limbs but at least I could feel where they were again. With the same desperate effort that I had used to waken from dream paralysis, I willed myself back into control of my body and abruptly jerked upright in bed, damp with sweat and tears, gasping and shivering.

This was the closest I ever came to completing Sylvan Muldoon's recipe for astral projection. In later years, as I took on a scientific bent, I would wonder about just what had been going on physiologically in all those weeks of progressive relaxation sessions. I had definitely been learning to slow my heartbeat and respiration, and to this day I wonder if I nearly did kill myself by gradually shutting down all my vital functions. Is such a thing possible? I don't know — but I also can't be sure about whether I just let the "fear of projection" stop me from completing the esoteric process that Sylvan and Hereward described in such comprehensive and convincing detail. Whatever happened, I could never get close to that exceptional vibratory state again. After a couple weeks I returned to the relaxation practice, but I always got nervous before paralysis set in, breaking my concentration. Twelve soon turned to thirteen, and before long my body was demanding attention in ways that made astral projection less of a priority.

Nonetheless, the seeds of my later spiritual life had been firmly planted in my consciousness. The theory and practice that Hereward and Sylvan had documented, plus my own experimentation with that practice, had made me acutely aware that everything was not necessarily as it seemed at the daily, concrete levels of our physicality and ordinary self-awareness. There were quite possibly other realms of experience that could be accessed with the right kind of discipline and a focused intention, and those realms could very well be profoundly revelatory. They might even provide the keys to the mysteries of existence and creation itself — the same keys that religion promised, yet failed to deliver in any exciting or even halfway convincing package.

##   
Resuming flights

After my youthful astral attempts, I didn't get seriously disjointed from my body again until my thirties, and then I didn't mean to. One fateful morning when I was just a couple months from turning thirty-two, I awoke with an awesome stomachache. Remembering the religious mechanism of sin, atonement, and redemption, I immediately swore off banana cream pie. But as my sickness intensified over the next few weeks, I had to face the likelihood that something more serious than indigestion was laying me low.

Within another couple months I was suffering from a whole phalanx of symptoms that were novel and terrifying, including severe joint pains that traveled hither and yon, weekly migraine headaches, vertigo, constant stomach pain accompanied by intestinal bloating, mental fuzziness and forgetfulness, and what I would later learn was called "non-refreshing sleep" — meaning that I would wake from twelve to fourteen hours of fitful dozing in total exhaustion, able to function minimally for no more than a few hours before lapsing into unconsciousness again.

Various medical approaches of both standard and alternative varieties failed to provide either a diagnosis or treatment until I had the good fortune to be examined by a young MD whose practice focused on the contemporary AIDS scourge. After a series of tests and a lot of personal questions, he told me that it looked like I had "chronic fatigue syndrome" (CFS), at the time a brand-new diagnosis that was controversial, had no known treatment regimen, and was thought to be applicable chiefly to women. "The good news is that you aren't going to die," my doctor told me. "The bad news is that you're going to feel like you're dying for quite a while." (See Chapter 5 for more detail on this episode.)

Interestingly enough, the onset of CFS coincided with a period in which my Dreamland Airport opened for frequent astral flights. I'd been briefly fascinated with dream study in my college days, reading enough Freud and Jung to get a grasp on their theories of subconscious urges and archetypal energies. But my illness plunged me into an intense and prolonged period of altered-state submersion, where my dreams essentially became the foreground of my day-to-day experience. I was in a light, fitful state of sleep for at least twelve hours daily, sometimes more — and because that sleep was non-refreshing, my waking hours were bleary and unfocused. It's fair to say that I was semi-conscious most of the time during the first two years of CFS, the period in which I hit bottom both physiologically and psychologically, afterward commencing a slow, uneven turnaround toward renewed health.

The content and impact of my dreams ranged from the horrifying to the ecstatic, and in later years I would be able to look back and see how the sustained eruption of unconscious ideas and energies contributed powerfully to the progressive if chaotic reshaping of my psyche. I resumed a dream journal that I hadn't pursued since my college studies, and within a few months I had developed the capacity to awaken after each dream and record it in nearly total detail. Around this time I first ran across some literature on "lucid dreaming," or the capacity to become conscious while dreaming and exert some limited control over the experience. As soon as I read about it, I abruptly began to dream lucidly — and lucidity was almost always associated with flying.

Because of my journal, I was able to notice a distinct dreaming pattern that would lead to lucidity. First I would have a dream about being aboard or trying to pilot an airplane that was attempting to get off the ground in perilous circumstances. Often this involved a takeoff down a busy city street that was densely overlaid with power lines, so that the plane could not gather speed or ascend. I'd awaken from such dreams with a distinct sense of frustration and disappointment. Then, perhaps two days later I'd experience another dream involving an airplane which had managed to reach a traveling altitude, but was steering poorly or going into a steep dive after wobbling for a short period. This type of experience often devolved into a classic falling dream, from which I'd awaken with a jerk or a shout just before crashing into the ground.

Finally, the third or fourth dream in such a series would take place on an airplane which I'd suddenly realize that I didn't need in order to fly. Or I'd not be flying at all, but would notice something bizarre in my environs that could only happen in a dream, and thence "awaken" to the circumstances. What followed the recognition of lucidity could best be described as a panicky sense of liberation. Knowing that everything was happening inside my own mind and thus there were none of the usual physical or social limits on what I could do, I'd abruptly want to do anything and everything I could think of. About half the time, the first impulse was sexual, but that never lasted long because all ordinary bodily sensations had become thin and vaporous. From Sylvan Muldoon's perspective, the body we experience in a dream is the astral self — a kind of luminous ether that's body-shaped but has none of the structural or sensual properties of the physical self, and thus can't actually be used for sex. At least, I never succeeded in the attempt, beyond a few phantasmal embraces.

Without fail, however, every lucid dream rapidly evinced an intense desire to fly. And it was always at that point that things got very interesting indeed. If the dream scenario was inside any kind of shelter, I would immediately want to go outside — and I'd always take the most direct route, which was to pass directly through a wall or door. Compared to the furtive, elusive sensations of astral sex, the experience of passing through walls and other solid objects was always quite specific and realistic. I could feel my energetic essence, or whatever the astral body is composed of, being slowed but not stopped by the material I was passing through. A wooden door or plastered wood-frame wall was relatively easy; a brick or concrete wall was more difficult, as if my astral atoms each had to negotiate their way individually through these denser materials.

##   
Remembering how to do it

To this day, I wonder where these very distinct sensations came from. Everything else I'd ever experienced in a dream could be written off as imagination based on some form of memory from waking life. But I was quite sure that I had never walked through a wall or door while awake — yet in the lucid dream, passing through solid obstacles had all the specificity of a remembered experience. I was clearly dreaming, because other aspects of the experience would be bizarre, plainly out-of-kilter with the physical environments known to my waking self. But when I passed through something solid in a dream, it was because I knew how; I'd been there, done that.

Likewise, I knew all the ins and outs of flying. A common element of my lucid dreams was wanting to show off to other people in the dream: "Look at me! I can fly!" For some reason, no one ever noticed, or cared if they did. (Perhaps for those you meet in the astral realm, it's about as exciting as announcing "Look! I can drive a car!" to other folks in a parking lot.) At any rate, I would soon give up on trying to impress people and simply launch myself into the sky. Without fail, my lucid dreams took place at nighttime, even if I happened to be sleeping during the day. There was always a visible moon, and I would always have the urge, eventually, to zoom up toward it. For a while I might flit around in the treetops or from rooftop to rooftop, depending on the particular dream scenario, and then I'd go for a lunar landing. Along the way, I'd find myself turning or fluttering my hands or feet in very specific ways to turn or gain altitude or speed, just as if I were a pilot adjusting the flaps or tail of an airplane. Again, I had very specific, instinctual knowledge of how to do all this, something I certainly never had the opportunity to learn in waking life.

Once in flight, the main challenge turned out to be staying lucid. The higher I zoomed in the sky, the thinner my consciousness seemed to become, and I could sense that I would soon either wake up or slip back to the conditions of a normal, nonlucid dream. Over time I discovered that spinning as I zoomed upward helped prolong lucidity, and also seemed to increase my acceleration. But as luck would have it, I could never reach the moon, or even get close. The higher and faster I flew, the more my sense of excitement and liberation increased, until my consciousness would abruptly blink and, in most cases, I'd awaken with a sense of both exhilaration and disappointment. For I had surely "slipped the surly bonds of earth," as the World War I pilot-poet J.G. Magee Jr. wrote in his classic poem High Flight —

And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod

The high untrespassed sanctity of space,

Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

In fact, I would never quite attain the astral altitude to enable that mystical touch. But the closer I seemed to get, the more I sensed that this was the real ambition behind my lifelong urge to zoom, beginning with the earliest experiments I'd undertaken with Hereward and Sylvan's guidebook. As I gradually realized, in the depths of my illness, that I was undergoing an authentic spiritual awakening, I wondered if I would ever reach the heights I wanted to.

It's been a long time since I felt the desire to detach from my physical body and go spy on the neighbors from behind an etheric veil. I don't even feel trapped by own personality in the way that I used to, before the health and spiritual crisis that redirected my life. On the other hand, I certainly don't live in a luminous vale of unceasing bliss; life can still be pretty difficult and aggravating at times. There are those days, frankly, when I regard my chosen spiritual path as an annoying burden, and would just like to discover the magical key to "getting ahead" in life, like any good American.

Yet there are also those moments, unbidden and unexpected, when the typical anxieties and mundane obsessions of life on this planet abruptly dissolve, and every step I take feels lighter and lighter, as if my body were progressively less bound to the ground by gravity and grief. An inexplicable joy overtakes my consciousness, and I am suddenly both weightless and unbounded, neither here nor there and completely off the clock. At such moments, I seem to be recollecting a state that I inhabited before the cruel imposition of time, and that's when I know that I've always been flying.

\- 2 -

Back to the Real World  
Originally published in THE SUN, August 1988

#

"I loose the world from all I thought it was."

Workbook Lesson 132, A Course in Miracles

There was a time in my youth when everything in the world felt unreal to me. The sensation took hold in my early teens, held almost complete sway over my consciousness by age twenty, then gradually declined over the following five years. The feeling was at once so subtle and pervasive that it seemed impossible to discuss with anyone; to do so would have meant questioning my own sanity (about which I was far more defensive than I am today). So the sensation that nothing was real became a secret, as private as it was powerful.

I felt a numbing gap between the things in the world and my experience of them, between my relationships and my emotions, and especially between my private thoughts and my effects in the world. It was as if my daily awareness were a cataract, a clouded lens that could not be cleaned or replaced. Frequently I had the troubling thought: I am not living my real life, and would subsequently experience a palpable fear that I might spend the rest of my days in this state, while the opportunity for a real life — whatever that might be — slipped farther and farther away. Thoreau's observation that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation" held great significance for me. I felt poised upon the brink of a career in desperation, and I so admired my father' s stoic ways that I was likely to keep quiet about it forever.

From a psychological perspective, I can diagnose this period as a kind of adolescent shock, which may be inevitable along the road from childhood naiveté to adult autonomy. It's the shock that results from our so-called "loss of innocence," as the perception of our parents as perfect and all-powerful protectors diminishes and is replaced by a need to "make it" on our own. It is difficult to imagine this transition taking place without deep emotional crises and some scarring. It may in fact be the toughest transition anyone makes. Plentiful evidence exists that many people never complete it entirely, translating resentments against their parents into seemingly insoluble and repetitive arguments with friends, lovers, spouses and, all too often, their own children.

Current psychotherapeutic treatment often consists of counselors helping clients come to terms with childhood and adolescent crises that have never ended, whose repercussions still shock them and distort their lives. Thus, maturity is arrested wherever pain lingers. "Adult children of alcoholics" is an apt label for the human condition that results from growing up caught in that particular web of woe. And anyone who cannot transcend the wounds of growing up remains, to some extent, an "adult child."

I now believe — as do many therapists — that true adulthood arrives with the capacity to forgive. By forgiveness, however, I do not mean the willingness to excuse someone else's obvious or assumed guilt for the sake of magnanimity or simply to "get past the past." Mature forgiveness is primarily an act of surrender, that is, the willingness to relinquish our most cherished and defensive beliefs about reality itself. That forgiveness may include releasing others from blame — and the emotional catharsis that brings — but it spreads far beyond that, as it calls out one's own ego-based definitions of how things and people really are.

For people unused to considering philosophical questions — and who consequently accept the version of reality passed on by society and advertised by its media — this forgiveness can be doubly difficult. It first requires accepting responsibility for one's own perceptions and admitting that we do not all see the world the same way; a particular person's view of the world at any moment is significantly colored by transitory emotions, recalcitrant prejudices, and deep complexes from personal traumas. For many, this realization would be a major philosophical achievement, requiring a degree of introspection that our society generally finds suspect. But the second step into real forgiveness — the willingness to surrender our most fundamental prejudices — is a great challenge indeed.

This level of forgiveness can be reached meditatively through Lesson 132 of A Course in Miracles, "I loose the world from all I thought it was." In my experience, this more sophisticated forgiveness brings an unexpected result: joyful glimpses of a world of innocence, which I thought had disappeared forever with childhood. "The real world is attained simply by the complete forgiveness of the old," suggests the Course Text in Chapter 16 — "the world you see without forgiveness."

##   
Recalling the confidence of innocence

The state of childhood innocence, which I would further define as consciousness undivided by fear, was poetically described by Wordsworth in "Ode: Intimations of Immortality":

There was a time when meadow, grove and stream

The earth and every common sight

Did seem to me

Appareled in celestial light

The glory and the freshness of a dream.
My earliest memories come from such a world, where I ran through viney woods too fast to look where I was going, trusting that I could not be injured or get lost in natural surroundings that usually felt more comfortable than human company. My experience of the outdoors was instinctively shamanistic; I saw all things, stones as well as snakes, as beings with some kind of spiritual if unspoken intelligence, on equal footing with me. Only gradually did I become embarrassed about conversing with trees and animals — an embarrassment that no doubt increased in direct proportion to my desire to be "grown-up."

When my father told me that thunder resulted from God rolling a wheelbarrow over a great wooden bridge, that idea seemed both awesome and reassuring. But even at the age of five, I did not take the story literally, nor did I imagine a heaven physically placed in the universe where such a bridge could exist. I was aware even than that there could be other explanations for thunder; I was willing for more than one idea to be true without it negating another. I'm happy to say that I've recently regained at least a fragment of this innocent consciousness which, in allowing for an array of truths — mythic, emotional, poetic, and empirical — is actually more sophisticated than a narrowly scientific or religious state of mind. I think the fear of being seen as childish or crazy severely limits our enjoyment of the world around us, thus inducing a state of boredom that in turn gives rise to much of the stupidity and meanness that often seem to characterize the human condition. In fact, these ills signify that the dues we pay for adult respectability are too high, and bring some "benefits" of questionable value.

Perhaps the most damaging sacrifice we make on the altar of adulthood is that of forgetting how to learn. We think it is natural that our capacity to learn decreases over time, and that the refinement of our senses and intellect requires a narrowing of interests. But we can see from watching infants that they are learning about everything all at once and all the time. It often appears to me that we take this great inborn learning capacity and gradually convert it to worry — a function dubious usefulness that is nonetheless considered mature and inevitable, if not indispensable.

What we lose thereby is what the Indian philosopher Krishnamurti, in Think on These Things, called the confidence of innocence, "the confidence of a child who is so completely innocent he will try anything." Krishnamurti clearly distinguished this inborn attitude from self-confidence, which he described as "always colored by this arrogance of the self, the feeling 'It is I who do it.'" He maintained that the development of self-confidence — an attitude highly valued in Western society — actually serves to keep our beliefs and behavior within the confines of societal expectations, and seriously blunts our true potential. It is "innocent confidence that will bring about a new civilization," Krishnamurti suggested, "but this innocent confidence cannot come into being as long as you remain within the societal pattern."

##   
Accepting the defeat of childhood

I first read these thoughts of Krishnamurti during my adolescence — when my sense of unreality was coming on strong — and I found them at once absorbing, encouraging, and aggravating. I mistook much of what he said about breaking free of social patterns as supportive of my youthful urge to rebel, and many years were to pass before I understood that most forms of rebellion — whether adolescent, sexual, political, or cultural — actually comprise an important part of dominant social patterns. A description of a particular society that included only its predominant and conformist behaviors would be seriously incomplete; in order to understand a society's "personality," one needs to see the rebellions it inspires, and how it weathers or is changed by them. (The same could be said for the psychological study of individuals, whose internal conflicts, if honestly conveyed, are usually more revealing than the personae they present to public view.)

I was both angered and awed by Krishnamurti for most of the years of my passage into adulthood. But my personal frustration with this distant teacher was one of the healthiest and most compelling feelings I experienced between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. He spoke, in a sense, to the instinctive part of me that remembered my innocent confidence. He reminded me that I had once observed and learned about the world in a much faster, more inclusive and insightful manner. And he reminded me that it was the child in me — not the increasingly confused young adult — who knew how to do this. I was angry because I could see no way out of losing my innocence.

As a child who often received warnings from my parents and teachers about being too idealistic, I felt this loss keenly. I was very frustrated during my high school years about the discrepancy between what I felt to be true learning and the education I was receiving. My overall desire was essentially religious, although I would have strongly resisted that label at the time. I simply wanted the world to make sense, so that I could see how I belonged in it. I was fairly certain that I was unlikely to gain understanding through some final answer to the mysteries of human existence. Growing up in the Christian fundamentalist culture of North Carolina had made it amply clear to me that people who accepted and clung to final answers seldom displayed a natural curiosity. I felt, even if I could not have articulated it at the time, that the process of instinctive, innocent learning was the meaning of life. Thus, making sense of the world was a matter of continual discovery, not reaching a final conclusion or, on the other hand, admitting defeat in the face of too much contradictory information. Yet a sense of defeat haunted my late teens, maximizing my feeling that nothing around me was real anymore. As I approached the inevitability of living on my own without a clear sense of purpose (or a practical choice of career), I felt increasing pressure to accept the "real world" of 20th century capitalist America: that world of "making a living" which, for all but a lucky few, clearly entailed boredom and no small degree of servitude for the sake of survival. I gradually came to the unpleasant conclusion that growing up meant facing these disheartening facts and doing the best I could in the situation. But the emotional cost of this conclusion was dangerously high: the more I faced the "real world," the less real I felt.

In my early twenties, I moved to the San Francisco Bay area of California, which had a decidedly more tolerant social atmosphere than my native culture. This change and the rapid personal growth that ensued gradually brought me back in touch with my physical and social environment. It now seems clear that my sense of unreality decreased as I developed adult autonomy — but at the cost of most of my youthful idealism. I gradually came to accept that the real world was inherently confused, conflictive, and dangerous, a floating crap game at best. It seemed that the most you could do in life was to look out for yourself, your friends and family, and to demonstrate a wider compassion or political concern when you could spare the time. The child's magical world of learning — where you looked around to see what you could find — had painfully and inexorably become the adult world of survival, where you usually had to be looking out for number one.

My buy-in to society was not successful, however. I spent less than a year in a "promising" and stressful advertising career in downtown San Francisco, before a substantial raise — and a letter from the bosses alluding to "a bright future together" — gave me a bad case of the willies. (See Chapter 10, "The Co$t of Not Selling Out.") I resorted to a break-even form of self-employment which would allow me time to write, an activity from childhood that felt too necessary to sacrifice to the altar of practicality.

But subsistence turned out to be nearly a full-time job, and often I had to face the fact that I had neither the confidence nor the curiosity to find steady direction as a writer. Throughout my late twenties I grappled inconclusively with a divided sense of self that didn't seem to measure up to anything — not the world of conventional success, and certainly not my inner world of idealism, now significantly fragmented by conflicting ambitions. I thought of myself as kind and good, yet many of my relationships, particularly with women, were increasingly difficult. My deliberate optimism about life was strangely colored by undercurrents of cynical black humor and largely unconscious waves of anger. And though I failed to see the pattern of illness until it was too late, my physical health was steadily deteriorating.

##   
Learning how to learn again

At the age of 32, I suffered a serious collapse of my overall immune system (detailed in Chapter 5). My capacity to work was dramatically curtailed for almost two years, and within the first six months of the illness I had reached a point of near-total collapse of my ego as well. Although I knew, from medical diagnosis as well as my own gut feeling, that the illness was not terminal, I did not know any longer why I was living. It seemed readily and cruelly apparent that nothing I had tried in life had worked, and that my lifelong pattern of serving two masters — my inborn idealism and my learned pragmatism — had only weakened and divided me.

Not coincidentally, I spent the six months during which my self-confidence was deteriorating trying to establish an external cause and cure for my illness. I resisted suggestions about psychological sources until my holistic MD prescribed a mild sedative for my chief symptom, continual and severe stomach pain. He thought that much of my suffering was due to anxiety. Having a great distrust of moodaltering drugs, I was greatly surprised when I improved dramatically upon first taking the sedative. The drug did not prove to be a cure, but it was undeniably a key to the locked door of my own consciousness.

As a poet since the age of nine, I had often peered in the windows of the "house of the mind," and felt that I was more aware than most people of my own inner processes. That may even have been true at the time; but it wasn't saying much, as I was soon to find out. A great many things of which I was at best peripherally aware had been going on in my deep consciousness. These included a self-punishing pessimism that subtly undermined most of my conscious efforts in the world, and a complementary suspicion about my true motives. Simply put, I didn't know why I did what I did, and seldom expected much good to come from my exertions, regardless of what I said or hoped to the contrary. (This was essentially a slowly suicidal frame of mind, but I don't think it was extraordinary in terms of the general population.)

As a miraculous fringe benefit of my sobering insight into my own negative character, I experienced a spontaneous regeneration of my instinctive capacity to learn. I entered therapy for the first time in my life. I also began to read voraciously. The general subject matter was psychological and spiritual, including some aspects of human experience and speculation (including past-life recall and psychic capacities) that I would have regarded not long before as foolish. It might seem to the skeptical reader that my critical sensibility suffered because of my illness, but in fact I was not collecting new beliefs. I was simply experiencing the unexpected return of a long-lost, childlike curiosity about all the possibilities that might bear upon my rapidly changing experience. These possibilities were also arising out of my own consciousness, as the emotional power and vivid imagery of my dreams became more important and unforgettable than ever before, leading me into the most detailed dream records of my life.

Shortly after this burst of learning energy, I came across the strange book known as A Course in Miracles (ACIM). I read of it in a much thinner book, Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights, by Willis Harman and Howard Rheingold. In light of my recent suffering and the resurgence of my curiosity, their brief description of the Course's perspective struck home:

Our internal beliefs create what is perceived as reality, and we are imprisoned by the cage of our wrong beliefs. Since these beliefs are the problem, the basic solution is to replace these unconscious beliefs by different ones, by affirming new beliefs. The one crucial choice is to accept direction by the part of yourself that knows the way to health, wholeness, and success — the still, small voice within.

I doubt that I could have found any usefulness to this perspective had I not already experienced firsthand its fundamental premise: that reality is determined by our beliefs, and not the other way around. I suspect that the idea of "creating your own reality" still seems unlikely to many — and is certainly misinterpreted by some of its adherents — chiefly for one reason: many people are not aware of most of their beliefs. And they are critically unaware of the power of unconscious beliefs to contradict and undermine those that are consciously held.

A therapeutic exercise that a friend of mine once undertook can effectively illustrate this phenomenon. She was told by her counselor to catalog all her beliefs, writing down anything that came to mind regardless of whether the beliefs recorded concerned matters of great or little import. After several days — which could arguably allow for only scratching the surface of one's belief system — my friend reported being astonished that her collected beliefs could be divided almost neatly in half, into two sets of ideas about reality whose apparent net effect was to oppose and cancel each other out.

By the time I came upon the Course, I was living in a similar state of zero-belief. My long-standing division of consciousness, between the idealistic and the practical, had finally canceled out who I thought I was, until I had become simply someone who suffered. Yet when I began to take responsibility for my suffering, tentatively accepting that my own beliefs (and not just cruel fate) had led me to this state, I suddenly became someone who could learn again. The real world was changing faster than ever before; after painfully subdividing and narrowing for fifteen years, it was abruptly opening up whole again, into a limitless vista of unexplored information, sensations, visions, and possibilities. At this point I undertook my study of A Course in Miracles as a curiosity, uncertain of my commitment to stick with it and hardly expecting that it would become the most influential teacher I had ever known.

##   
Loosing the world to save it

"There is no world!" the Course exclaims in its discussion of Lesson 132. "This is the central thought the course attempts to teach. Not everyone is ready to accept it.... But healing is the gift of those who are prepared to learn there is no world, and can accept the lesson now. Their readiness will bring the lesson to them in some form which they can understand and recognize."

In retrospect I have realized that I could not have been more ready for the first section of the Course Workbook, described in the introduction as "dealing with the undoing of the way you see now." Because my life had not been working, the way I saw things was ripe to be undone. Many of the initial lessons — such as "Nothing I see... means anything," "I am never upset for the reason I think," "My mind is preoccupied with past thoughts," and "I see nothing as it is now"

— struck me not as challenges but as reasonable likelihoods. These lessons are obviously inimical to ordinary self-confidence, and could be accepted without substantial resistance only by those who have somehow retained a large measure of "innocent confidence," or those who are sick and weary. It is possibly for the latter type of person — of which I was a prime example — that the Course is primarily intended. In interviews I've conducted with its students, the majority reported that they undertook the Course during periods of personal crisis.

And if we — as an undeniably sick and weary society — do create the reality we see reported in the news, then we have an urgent need to "loose the world" from the anticipation of further conflict and deprivation. It seems increasingly clear that political solutions will be insufficient in themselves, as they are based on widely divergent and opposing beliefs (often religious beliefs) about reality itself. Technological evolution does change the material nature of the human struggle, but technology tends to serve the divided purposes of society rather than to clarify or ennoble, them, often creating as many problems as it solves. So if one wishes to save the world — a unified goal so idealistic that activists sensibly shy away from it, working instead on saving whales, ozone, human rights, or economic freedom — the solution will have to take root in the human mind, and thence flower in all minds.

The Course repeatedly suggests that the power of the mind can be our salvation, as it has unwittingly been the instrument of our misery, loneliness, and conflicts. And it makes the mechanism sound quite simple — incredibly simple in comparison to the complex strategies usually devised for "converting" people to a variety of causes. It suggests that the mere intent to loose the world, amplified by conscious practice and meditative quietness, will "increase the freedom sent through your ideas to all the world...." The Course further asserts:

You need not realize that healing comes to many brothers far across the world, as well as to the ones you see nearby, as you send out these thoughts to bless the world. But you will sense your own release, although you may not fully understand as yet that you could never be released alone. [from Lesson 132]

Indeed, I cannot prove any sort of psychic transmission of the benefits I have experienced through my study of the Course and whatever degree of "loosing the world" I have so far achieved. I have observed significant changes in my close relationships, and I am aware that I generate much less hostility or suspicion from strangers — most likely because I express much less of those feelings in a subtle, unconscious manner. But I both hope and expect that the joy I am experiencing as I regain my natural powers of learning will be felt by others, encouraging them toward a similar renascence and consequent sense of belonging.

##   
Regaining authenticity

This belonging is the feeling that unified my childhood consciousness; it was lost in the disorientation of adolescence, when the world became unreal to me. Perhaps the best way to express it is this: I am certain of nothing except that I am here to learn. For me this is the essence of innocent confidence, and it cannot long exist in a mind obsessed with physical survival or the defense of egotism.

But just as a child's energetic learning occurs under the protection of parents as godly powers, the adults who would regain this capacity must have a sense of mature, internalized guidance from a creator and protector. The religions of the world basically represent the social ritualization of the individual process of finding (or rediscovering) God, but the historical evidence seems to suggest that ritual which is passed on or enforced as a matter of belief effectively limits the development of a flexible and personally responsible spirituality.

A Course in Miracles, as well as some other contemporary approaches to spirituality, emphasizes that deep investigation into one's own consciousness is sufficient for one to regain an innate grasp of God as a universal, caring, and responsive intelligence. Hence the second part of the Course Workbook is concerned with "the acquisition of true perception." The Course is one of very few spiritual disciplines presenting specifi meditative concepts that do not require the student's ritual acceptance. Thus the Workbook's Introduction states:

Remember only this: you need not believe the ideas, you need not accept them, and you need not even welcome them. Some of them you may actively resist. None of this will matter, or decrease their efficacy. But do not allow yourself to make exceptions in applying the ideas the workbook contains, and whatever your reactions to the ideas may be, use them. Nothing more than that is required.

This prescription brings scientific rigor to the realm of consciousness. The Course ultimately relies on the student's own powers of investigation to discover the nature of reality, using the Course as an experiential guidebook rather than a catechism. The aim is not to suggest or instill a new set of beliefs, but to undo old ones and let an often-repressed inner wisdom take their place: "The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is what beyond can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance."

By "removing the blocks" to my own awareness, I've realized that only the presence of love makes the world feel real. Perhaps the primary way to that presence is through fearless curiosity, about the world within as well as the world without."Religion," suggested Krishnamurti, "is to love without motive, to be generous, to be good, for only then are we real human beings; but goodness, generosity, or love does not come into being save through the search for reality." (My emphasis.)

It probably goes without saying that this genuinely religious search holds enormous and radical portents for contemporary society. In general, our educational systems, our churches, and our methods of government are too inflexible to allow its full exercise, and no existing economic system would find it to be "good business." For it sometimes requires our "becoming as little children" in order to release ourselves from the fearful thoughts we have literally institutionalized into our society. This entails yielding up — that is to say forgiving — many of the customary parameters of adulthood, such as "healthy" ego identification, conventional notions of self-confidence, the belief in scarcity (which institutionalizes greed) and, most importantly, the belief in limited compassion (which institutionalizes hatred).

The way to such momentous changes in human values is not clear, and what the Course refers to as "a complete reversal of the thinking of the world" may seem absurd and impossible. But I, for one, have been led by my own experience, natural curiosity, and meditative discipline to a state of mind that entertains these possibilities. After years of thrashing about in a senseless world that seemed to oppose my highest aspirations, I have forgiven that world by realizing that it was largely defined and limited by own pessimism. I'm no longer concerned with defining what the "real world" is — perhaps, as the Course asserts, there is no world at all — but I do know that I have regained a sense of personal authenticity. I know that I am here to learn and, through writing, to teach whatever I can discover, record, and synthesize. No other definition of myself is needed.

When I remember that I knew this much about myself as a child of twelve or so, I marvel at the incredible capacity of our society, particularly our educational system, to confuse and intimidate our confidently innocent children in order to produce quietly desperate (or openly violent) adults. This happens because we feel it is wise and scientific to deliver our children into a world where direct experience of a transcendent yet internalized teacher is seldom achieved. We do this by subtly and overtly telling adolescents that the wide-open, free-ranging exercise of curiosity that taught them how to walk, talk, sense their environment, and develop intellectual capacities during childhood must be sharply curtailed in favor of cultural conformity and the struggle to survive. Introspection — which leads us to experience God through observing our own consciousness — is widely regarded as a waste of time, and generally withers in most adults despite its inarguable status as a uniquely human instinct.

But this forgetful world, too, is about to be forgiven, as the increasingly serious consequences of our self-ignorance provide us with the stinging motivation to let stupidity go in favor of our evolution. Within fewer years than we might expect, I think that our common understanding of God will undergo a rapid maturation, leaving far behind the ridiculous questions of whether God is dead or exists as an anthropomorphic Big Daddy enforcing only a particularly theology. We will become concerned instead with the daily action of universal consciousness within our own lives — that is, with the diverse fulfillments of love as the unifying human function.

This seems to be the intent of A Course in Miracles as a radical tool of consciousness. Certainly no one should mistake it for a mere adjunct to therapy or a massive collection of soothing homilies about human potential. It intends to guide us toward releasing our world from our present limiting definitions, into an unprecedented phrase of ecstatic human development. That real world — of human potential realized and ongoing, instead of theorized or dreamed about — may look like an impossible dream for now. Yet I sense that it is irresistible, inevitable, and imminent. Its arrival awaits our willingness to have it. That desire arises naturally, through our unleashed capacity to learn, as we loose the world from all the thoughts of condemnation we have so long enforced upon it.
- 3 -

All Shook Up  
Previously unpublished

On a sunny Saturday in Santa Cruz, California when I was in my late twenties, I experienced one of the most instructive disappointments of my life. I had signed up for a workshop with a teacher from the Sufi tradition -— a teacher who was hardly known outside a certain circle, but respected enough within it to draw fifty people to a daylong event. I had read and enjoyed several of this teacher's books, but what sold me on the occasion were the reports of an ex-girlfriend who had joined the teacher's mystical school.

She and I talked a lot on the phone back then, sifting through the shards of our failed romance, and for a few months it seemed that every other sentence out of my friend's mouth was about her remarkable teacher. She had become so enamored of either his personality or his path (judging by his pictures, I was pretty sure it wasn't his physique) that at one point she requested a private audience with the teacher to announce her decision to dedicate herself wholly to his way.

"That's wonderful, and I hope you follow through on your commitment," the teacher had told her. To her great dismay, he added, "But I'm leaving and you can't go with me." Indeed, his school soon disbanded and thereafter he took his show on the road, eventually settling in Santa Cruz for a while. My friend moved on with her life, but I was fascinated by this story and decided that I had to see this paradoxical teacher in action for myself. I knew from my reading that the Sufis tend to teach by indirection and contradiction, and thus the shock that the teacher had delivered to my friend was really in keeping with his tradition. Secretly, I was in the market for some kind of shock myself.

At the time I was hardly living a spiritual life. Having given up on becoming an investigative reporter a few years earlier, I was working for myself as a freelance typographer and occasionally published writer, dreaming of the day I would have saved enough money to write fulltime. My work life was halfway satisfying, my love life seemed more or less okay, and I didn't have the slightest idea of what my purpose on this earth might be. I felt that I'd always had a spiritual side, but the center of my life was unhappily wrapped up with self-preservation and a sardonic suspicion of the world at large.

While I kept telling myself and a few friends that I was going to the workshop purely on a lark, I was privately imagining a far more dramatic purpose. Somehow I expected the teacher to see through me, to single me out and expose my failings, hypocrisies, and half-heartedness before the world ─ or at least in front of the workshop participants ─ and then deliver some kind of spiritual shock that would finally get my life going in the right direction. I anticipated that the experience would be difficult, perhaps even humiliating, but worth it in the long run. In short, I expected to get all shook up. Something deep within was telling me that it was about time.

##   
Just another revival meeting

From the moment that I arrived at the registration table for the workshop, I was already feeling uncomfortable ─ but not in the way I expected. People I had never met greeted me like a long-lost friend, and I immediately sensed an agenda of drawing people into the teacher's school. In fact most of the workshop attendees seemed to know each other already and thus any newcomers received special attention; we were told enthusiastically of the wonderful experiences that lay just minutes ahead. Already I felt singled out, but only as the recipient of a sales pitch.

Things got steadily worse once the program started. The teacher didn't even show for the first couple hours, while a variety of veteran students stood before the group and testified to the saving graces of the path they had been following under their teacher's wise direction. Marriages had been saved, money had come at just the right time, outright miracles of physical healing had occurred; all the stuff one might expect at an old-style revival meeting, but somewhat Californianized. I began to wonder if my few years as an investigative reporter had been too many, because I felt more cynical than ever. It seemed that I was surrounded by deluded, unthinking sycophants wearing insincere smiles, and by mid-morning the day ahead was looking dismally long. I was decidedly not on the way to a spiritual breakthrough.

When the teacher finally appeared just before lunch, I felt embarrassed for him and increasingly angry about what I was witnessing. Unless my eyes deceived me, the teacher was six sheets to the wind, slurring his words and rambling incoherently about themes from his books that I already knew well enough. He had written about overcoming alcoholism through his spiritual discipline, but it looked pretty clear to me that he was relapsing.

What was even more disturbing was that no one besides myself seemed to notice! People were nodding their heads and voicing expressions of amazement at every nonsensical pearl that dropped from the teacher's mouth. I felt like I was in the middle of an "Emperor's New Clothes" parade for the esoteric set.

After the teacher's initial presentation I sat alone at lunch, morosely chewing through the vegetarian lunch I'd paid for while refusing several chirpy offers of companionship from the already initiated (or brainwashed?) members of the school. I considered escaping right then and there, but a morbid curiosity and a determination to wring some value out of the workshop fee kept me in place.

To make a long afternoon short, I came to regret that decision. By the time the workshop ended with a cloying, hand-holding, singing-in-a-circle session about six in the evening, I was utterly furious. I pounded on the dashboard for the two-hour drive home, alternately laughing and cursing about what a ludicrous waste of time the day had been. My former girlfriend's stock had certainly gone down in my view as well.

##   
An unexpected lesson

At the time, I failed to notice how disproportionate my anger was. Nor did I think it odd that I remained angry about the workshop for several months afterward, bad-mouthing the experience, the teacher, and those damned Sufis every chance I got. One day when I was reprising the bitter experience in my mind once again, I had a stunning realization: I was all shook up! The workshop had delivered a tremendous shock to me after all, but only because my expectations for it had been so thoroughly defeated.

Instead of publicly exposing me, the teacher had inadvertently revealed all my worst aspects ─ an insecure superiority, presumptuousness, and a self-reinforcing alienation ─ to myself. And now, months later, I finally grasped the spiritual lesson that would redirect my life from that point forward: Do not expect others to do your spiritual work for you. My bitterness over the whole experience abruptly dissolved into laughter, and I resolved never to underestimate the Sufi way again.

As revelatory as this experience proved, it would have an even more surprising postscript. About a year after the Santa Cruz debacle, the same teacher passed through my hometown for another daylong workshop. I signed up again, this time expecting nothing from the teacher but nonetheless feeling a peculiar gratitude for the unexpected lesson I had learned from him.

This time, the workshop proved to be one of the most enjoyable and instructive experiences of my life. The teacher appeared sober, calm, and clear-eyed, conveying a number of useful insights throughout a well-planned program. There was no coterie of slavish followers and not a trace of the hypocrisy that had seemed so evident a year before.

I kept wondering: Has the teacher changed, or have I?

These memorable encounters with an unpredictable teacher were just a couple tremors of my spiritual awakening; the major quake would strike years later. But these early lessons in disillusionment and personal responsibility set the stage for all my later learning, and may well have saved me from far more time-consuming and destructive experiences with exploitive gurus.

These experiences also gave me a dramatic, first-hand illustration of the difference between being a religious follower and a spiritual seeker. Like most people, I would have to start dropping some religious and psychological baggage before I could take the first step on an authentic spiritual path.
- 4 -

The Perfect Mother  
Previously published as a Fearless e-Book

I awoke groggily on a Saturday morning in my sister Karen's former bedroom, having bicycled five miles from my dormitory the evening before to spend an uneasy weekend with my parents.

My own childhood room, now full of stored junk, was next to this one, and from it came a strange sound of grunting and scuffling. As I sat up in bed, my mother and father burst in from the short, narrow hallway connecting the two rooms, stumbling in a peculiar clinch that ended in a bruising crash against the closed bedroom door. As I blinked fully awake I suddenly recognized that they were struggling over a shotgun that was waving crazily in my general direction. Without thinking I dove off the side of the bed and rolled into a defensive crouch that seemed kind of silly and melodramatic even as I did it; how had I suddenly ended up in the middle of a bad television melodrama?

Watching my folks warily from around the corner of the bed, the weirdness of the scene intensified even as the apparent danger deflated. It was clear they were not bickering over who would get to shoot me. Instead, they were in the middle of some other power struggle that they had somehow jointly decided I should witness. As I stood, no longer afraid of being a target, I began to feel my habitual exasperation with my mom. This was obviously the latest dramatization of her periodic threats to commit suicide, and my patient, usually passive father had intervened. It was strange that a habitual pill-popper would resort to a firearm — and I couldn't figure out where she got it — but I didn't have time to think this through before striding over and adding another hand to the gun and saying, "Let go, Mother. This is just silly." With a cold, flat voice that I knew all too well from her depressive episodes, my mother said, with just a hint of gloating, "It's not me. It's your father."

As my blood ran cold I looked to my dad's face, contorted with tension and streaming with tears. His tears were something I couldn't ever remember seeing. He couldn't look me in the eye, and obviously felt ashamed about losing control.

"Dad?" I said quizzically, to which he replied through gritted teeth:

"Take the shells. Take the shells away."

I then noticed that one of his shaking hands held a box of shotgun shells, a couple of which had spilled on the floor. I bent down, picked up the strays and put them back in the box, then took the box away from my dad as he had directed. Then I said to both my parents, "Give me the gun too. I'm going to put it away."

"It doesn't matter," my mother objected. "You can't really hide it. He'll find it if he wants to."

"We'll just see about that," I replied testily. "Let go." As they both complied, I suddenly remembered the gun's history. It was my granddad's gun, practically an antique. In an episode that was completely out of character for both of us, my dad had tried to teach me to shoot with it when I was about nine years old. God only knows why, but one afternoon after school he brought it out and showed it to me, then crouched beside me and helped me aim it at a tiny blackbird flying overhead. I was excited and full of dread. My dad must have sensed this because he said, as we aimed together, "Don't worry. I don't think we could hit a dad-blamed thing." The gun went off as he pulled the trigger with his finger over mine. I would have been knocked to the ground if I'd not been in my father's embrace, and I saw a soft pink spray in the air before the bird cartwheeled crazily to earth. We slowly walked over and looked at the bloody mess on the ground. I felt sick to my stomach. My father said sternly, "I'll put this gun away now, and we'll leave it be. I don't want you messing with it."

I had not seen the gun since that afternoon, nine or ten years before; it had been out of sight and out of mind. Unlike many Southern men of his age, my dad was neither a hunter nor a stock-car racing fan; he was an electrician, compulsive lawn-mower, and woodshop tinkerer. He had probably not taken the gun in hand since the day of the bird murder, so I knew that he had to be under extreme duress. As I went down to the basement and searched anxiously for a perfect hiding place for the weapon — my mother was right; there was no place I could keep it from him — I imagined the scenario that had likely led him to this extreme: My mother, who had probably not had more than two hours of successive sleep in one night for the last twenty years, had harangued my dad with her manic, hostile chatter all night long until he simply couldn't take it anymore. He went for the gun to get some long-term, quality silence. My mother had gotten in his way.

It would not occur to me for quite a while that she had placed herself in danger to save his life. It was also impossible to imagine that he intended anything but suicide.

At any rate, when I returned from the basement my parents had separated from their bizarre clinch. My mother had gone to bed, and my father was sitting in his office den, staring out the windows at the hundred-year-old oak and hickory trees that inhabited the flood plain down the hill from our large house. I entered the den and firmly said, "Dad...," not knowing what would follow. Without turning his head he said, "I don't want you calling your sisters. Nobody else has to know about this. Let's just let it ride."

Unable to help myself, I answered with a rueful chuckle. "No, Dad, that ain't gonna happen. I'm going to call Judy and Karen now and make sure one of them gets over here. Then I'm going to bike to Will's house."

Will was my college roommate, a religious studies major who enjoyed, in my view, the perfect family life. His mom was a high school Home Economics teacher who baked multiple pies every weekend (at least when I was visiting), and his dad was a tractor salesman who was a dead ringer for Ben Cartwright on "Bonanza." True, their family life had its own stresses: their eldest son, almost thirty, was developmentally disabled, showing little interest in anything besides eating pies and amassing a vast LP collection about which he held a savant-like knowledge. The middle son was a somewhat stern young minister whom Will admired beyond all reason. But the parents' support of their boys was beyond reproach.

For instance: Both Will and I had been in the last year of the draft lottery as the Vietnam War was winding down. In my last year of high school I remember looking at my draft notice with a sickening dread and wondering how I could possibly survive basic training. I was a hopeless four-eyes so I wouldn't end up in combat, but I was inclined toward seeking conscientious objector status. However, I'd heard that you had to have exemplary community support, not to mention the backing of your family, to overcome the conservative bias of a North Carolina draft board. I didn't have any community to speak of; we'd quit going to church years ago, and we didn't socialize with neighbors or community groups. Also, my mother was a rabid Richard Nixon fan. So pursuing CO status was out of the question, and Canada might as well have been Mars in terms of the courage or practical capacity I would need to escape there.

By contrast, not long after I'd met Will at college, he'd proudly shown me his certificate of Conscientious Objector status, won with the unified support of his small-town Presbyterian church and his folks. Obviously, he had the perfect mom and dad. (Me, I just got lucky with a high lottery number.)

So after calling my sisters and telling them what had gone down on that precipitous morning, I loaded my panniers and set out for the fifteen-mile ride to Will's house. I'd called ahead and given him a brief digest of what was going on, but asked him not to tell his parents, as I didn't want to be over-indulged with sympathy. Will's mother BettyJo (whom he insisted on calling "BJ" with a mischievous leer, much to her undying embarrassment) was naturally solicitous to the point of being syrupy, and I didn't want to trigger too much of her attention. I also didn't want to air out my family's ongoing, near-gothic soap opera within the idyllic atmosphere of Will's home.

The bike ride to his house from my own helped use up the adrenaline rush of the morning's bizarre standoff, and I marveled as I rode up the long gravel driveway that my morning had begun with a brush with death. More or less, anyway, depending on the quotient of melodrama I assigned to the whole ordeal. As I unpacked my bike, Will came out and gave me a kind smile which I answered with a quizzical expression. He reassured me: "It's okay, I didn't tell them anything. My mom always loves when you come here anyway."

Minutes later when I entered the kitchen, the aroma of several pies already heavily painting the air, BettyJo embraced me and said warmly, out of Will's earshot, "It's so good to see you, honey. We always appreciate you coming by. You're such a stabilizing influence for Will."

Suddenly recalling my panicky dive off the bed not three hours before, I could only laugh out loud.

##   
Suicide and possession

About two years later, when I was twenty, my mother committed suicide. She took enough of her wide array of anti-depressants to stop her heart — twice, or so I remember — but the same modern medical system that had facilitated her self-killing revived her twice. She lay in a coma for several days, with an unclear prognosis about her mental capacity if and when she awakened. I was at the hospital when she did. Although she was intubated and could not speak, she managed to indicate that she wanted to write something down in the presence of myself and my dad. Her hands shook crazily as she scrawled large letters onto a note pad, eventually composing the strange message:

I did m ean

to hur t anyon e

Earlier in her life, my mom had been an English teacher for young vets returning home after World War II. As I learned over the side of the hospital bed to decipher her scrawl, I couldn't help but think how embarrassed she would be to see her error. Or had she inadvertently told the truth — that her long-held self-hatred and generalized hostility toward others had finally resulted in a genuinely dramatic attempt to hurt anyone? Either way, the message was just too much. I choked and burst into tears, then ran out of the room, through the long hallway of the psychiatric ward, and down the stairs to take a long walk outside.

A couple weeks later, my sisters and I went to see Dr. Wright, my mother's psychiatrist for at least the previous decade. Family therapy was not so fashionable back in the 1970s, and so we had never met him. My mom had a tendency to canonize certain men in her life, beginning with her late father and ending with Dr. Wright, who could apparently do no wrong. It was not that my mother ever made discernible progress with her condition, then called "manic-depressive" and nowadays labeled with the more technical "bipolar." It was rather that Dr. Wright seemed to support her long-standing belief that something had always been wrong with her brain, and provided a neverending stream of powerful prescription drugs to mollify the effects of her neurobiological disorder.

Through the years of our growing up, my mother had always let my sisters and myself know that we were also to blame for a good share of her problems. In fact we were all almost too good for our own sakes, considering that we grew up in the Fifties and Sixties in the midst of rambunctious social change. We didn't drink or do drugs, and nobody got pregnant or got anyone pregnant. No, the problem with us was more ontological. Judy, the oldest, has told me that when she was a young teen, she was accosted by Mother as she came out of the bathroom one day. Out of the blue Judy was abruptly informed, "You ruined my life! If you hadn't been born, I could have been an actress." She then disappeared into the bedroom and closed the door, the hallmark sign of slipping into days of wordless depression.

Each of us got messages like that while we were growing up, so whether or not we were behaving was beside the point. By the time of the suicide, we were all pretty certain that we had done something wrong, or could at least do something better to help our mother get by, in view of her bad-brain problem. Since Dr. Wright probably knew her better than anyone else and was a doctor of the brain besides, he would surely have answers. I remember steeling myself to hear his professional opinion, because I had a distinct misgiving about my role. I really couldn't see what I'd been doing that was so harmful — but she was my mother after all, and she'd nearly killed herself. There had to be something we could do.

After listening to us pour out our concerns and vague guilt, the graying Dr. Wright shook his head and smiled at us with an odd look of helplessness. "I have to tell you kids that I'm really surprised. It's not just that you've come to express concern for your mother, which is admirable. I'm surprised that you can manage to express concern for anyone besides yourselves. Frankly I'm amazed that any of you can even function, given what I know about your mother."

What transpired next was the first major awakening of my life, a profound shock that would soon alter the direction of my young adulthood. Dr. Wright went on to tell us that not only were we not to blame for any of our mother's problems, but that the sanest thing we could do in the present circumstance was to put as much distance as we could between her and ourselves, permanently. "Your mother nearly killed herself and I couldn't do anything to prevent it," he confessed. "I'm convinced she will try again, and the next time she may take one of you with her."

He further revealed that he considered his years of treating of our mother a failure, and that she had essentially been dictating the course of treatment for some time. She had effectively resisted talk therapy, group therapy, hypnosis, and several rounds of electroshock over the years. Dr. Wright allowed that he had even considered the use of LSD back when it was still legal and known mostly to the psychiatric community, but eventually decided that the risk of a very bad trip, with no return home, was too high. But my mother believed in pills and had made it clear that she would rely solely on pharmaceuticals to treat whatever was wrong with her brain.

Dr. Wright was certain that her problems were not primarily neurobiological, but he couldn't prove it. "Your mother shows all the telltale signs of having been chronically abused as a child, probably by both parents but certainly by her father," he told us. "But she's totally buried all the memories and compensated by reimagining her dad as some kind of a saint, which your father has told me was definitely not the case." At this point I remembered my father rolling his eyes every time my mother would repeat the story of how her carpenter father, when given the opportunity to bid on the building of a church, insisted on doing the work for free. There were many such stories of her childhood in my mother's repertoire, each one far too good (or melodramatic) to be true.

"Still, I can't work directly on the central problem because I've never gotten your mother even close to bringing it to the surface," Dr. Wright continued. "She is the most stubborn and treatment-resistant patient I have ever known, and she's essentially overpowered me. I have shared her case with many of my colleagues and no one has been able to help me figure her out." (In fact Dr. Wright apparently turned my mother into a legend in the Charlotte, N.C. psychiatric community, because when he passed away some years later my mother couldn't find a prescribing psychiatrist closer than Greensboro, nearly a hundred miles away.)

Near the end of our bracing hour with my mother's beloved shrink, he repeated his warning: "I'm sorry that I don't have any better news, but I still consider your mother to be a danger to herself and others, particularly to you kids. My advice is to get away from her and keep your distance. This is especially critical now, because we've reached the end of the line with her drug regimen. I'm going to take her off everything as soon as she's released from the hospital, which will be soon. I don't know what the results may be, but I'm not optimistic."

True to his words, Dr. Wright did quickly wean my mother from her drugs, at least for a while. One result was probably not what he expected. A month or so after being released from the hospital, my mother experienced several of what she called "lightning depressions," precipitous drops in mood that would strike her in the middle of walking across a room or washing dishes, ending just as abruptly within a few hours. After the last one, she demonstrated noticeably less mania and irascibility than before. She seemed somewhat cowed for a while, perhaps still ashamed over her suicide attempt.

I was at home from the dorm one Sunday afternoon — I had not yet taken Dr. Wright's advice to heart — when my mother pulled me aside in the kitchen and began whispering in a conspiratorial tone: "Son, you know I'm not a religious woman," she began, "and I'm the last person to talk about things like this. I'm not telling your sisters because I just don't think they'd understand, but you will."

"Uh, okay," I said tentatively. I had never liked this direction of conversation with my mother. There had been many times before when she'd said that I was going to be privy to something my sisters couldn't know, because only I would understand her since "you and I are really alike." This included her frequent prediction that I too would someday have to deal with chronic depression — "because you and I are really alike."

Now my mother darted her eyes this way and that before continuing in her low whisper. "Son, after that last depression, somebody left my body."

"What?!" I replied in a shocked whisper, not sure I'd heard what she said.

"Somebody left my body," she repeated. "Somebody evil, somebody I never knew was there before. I guess all the drugs covered him up, and when I went through those lightning depressions it was like some kind of a struggle was going on. He was trying to hold onto me, but he couldn't anymore. The last time I came out of it, well, I felt somebody really bad, and definitely a male, just leave me." She sighed and looked greatly relieved. "And I don't know why exactly, but I just feel like I'm going to be all right now."

"Wow," I replied softly, otherwise at a loss for words. A chill had come and gone over my skin, and I was on the verge of tears. Like all my mother's stories, this one was well-told and it was hard to tell what its quotient of truth might be. But one thing was for sure: Judy had not prevented my mom from becoming an actress after all.

##   
Repeating the stories

For a while after my mother's cold-turkey exorcism, she was better, if not exactly all right. Dr. Wright had put the fear of God in me, so to speak, and not long after that critical hour with him I quit college. I did not feel safe being financially dependent on my folks anymore, and I told them so. This decision, plus the one that soon followed — moving into an anarchic commune with some college pals and a girlfriend, just a few miles from campus where I'd taken a paying job — must have felt to my mother like she had totally lost her son. I wasn't thinking about her feelings, though. I was trying to piece together a life of my own with scarce resources and a troubled emotional life.

For about six weeks, I fell into extreme exhaustion, leading to the only hospitalization of my life. I was convinced that I had contracted mono, as all the symptoms fit, but after a week of tests detecting nothing, the attending physician came to my room and handed me a free sample of anti-depressants. "Why are you giving me these?" I asked. "I've got mono."

"No, your test for mono was negative," he said gently, "and so were all the other tests. Look son, I'm aware of your mother's psychiatric history and I know that these problems tend to run in families. Let's just try this new drug and see what happens."

I nodded numbly and said nothing else. When the doctor left the room I dropped the meds on the food tray, gathered my belongings together, and checked out of the hospital. I was not about to give either my mother or the medical establishment the satisfaction of following in her footsteps.

Not long after the commune and my romance fell apart, I departed with a friend on a great adventure, bicycling from North Carolina to California in a three-month odyssey that would mark the biggest change of venue in my life. My mom wanted us to drive one of my dad's vans with our bikes in it, taking breaks for some safe little rides, or she wanted us to fly at her expense; anything but actually bicycling three thousand miles across the country. But we had signed a contract with the Charlotte Observer to write a weekly travel column, and there was quite a bit more riding on that adventure. It felt necessary to work for all the miles of the journey with my own muscle, breath, and sweat. To my mind that hard labor would somehow cement the considerable distance I was putting between my past and my future, my childhood and my adulthood, and me and my mom.

In a physical sense, the escape certainly worked. My mother couldn't kill me if she was in Charlotte and I was in Berkeley, where I landed for good after an initial six-month sojourn in San Francisco. Nor could she continue to haunt my life, or so I thought. But in fact she was with me constantly in ways that I did not recognize at the time. While she had instilled and encouraged in me the desire to be a writer at a very early age, I spent my twenties unable to focus on any particular kind of writing, vacillating between investigative journalism, poetry, satire, abortive attempts at fiction, and reflective journaling. I wanted to be a "real writer," but something always seemed to be in the way of success. I was often vaguely angry and dissatisfied with life in general.

In an ironic but psychologically predictable twist, I tended to echo my mother's style of dramatic storytelling with a set of sardonic, melodramatic tales of my own — mostly about her. I'd tell everyone I knew about the horrible holiday seasons of my youth, always beginning with my birthday in November, when my mother would slide into her worst depressive patterns. Several years she had ended up in a psychiatric ward by Christmas Day. I would tell about the embarrassing loads of presents that I'd face on these holidays, and how they always made me feel empty and estranged. I'd tell about the time I countered all my mom's manic materialism with a single, hand-crafted Christmas gift for her on which I'd lavished hours of work, only to have it received with the remark, "What is this junk? I don't want trash. I want a real present, bought in a store!" I'd recount watching my father hand my mother an expensive anniversary ring one autumn afternoon outside the house, only to see her throw it in the gravel and stride wordlessly into the house with a similar remark about not wanting "junk." My dad sheepishly picked up the ring, slipped it into his pocket and said to me, "She'll take it later. We'll just let it ride for now."

There were always plenty of such stories to tell; I could have written a book if I'd put my mind to it. If I'd interviewed my sisters, we'd have a three-volume set.

##   
The onset of crisis and forgiveness

In the autumn of 1985, when I was almost thirty-two, I fell prey to a serious illness that was eventually diagnosed as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (see next chapter). After a couple months of bewilderment and failed medical approaches, my mind and heart began to open in an unprecedented way as I gradually surrendered trying to fight my illness. Instead, I began to take care of myself — which I was only then recognizing as an entirely different process, and not something that I had learned growing up. By completely shutting down the familiar patterns and activities of my life, the illness provided me with the uncomfortable "luxury" of enough time and quiet to reflect on the kind of life I had been living just before I was stricken. I was dismayed to realize how narrow, driven, and ungenerous I had become — and tentatively I began to ask for some kind of guidance from beyond myself. These entreaties were my first attempts at real prayer, for the Christian prayers I had learned as a child had always been empty recitations whose purpose I had never understood.

The guidance I sought came almost immediately, first in the form of a new curiosity: For the first time in years, I began to learn rapidly, reading across a broad spectrum of subjects ranging from immunology to Jungian psychology to metaphysics. I also saw a variety of alternative health practitioners and counselors on a oneor two-visit basis, trying to sample as many perspectives on my experience as I could afford. It was during this time that I encountered A Course in Miracles (ACIM), the contemporary psycho-spiritual teaching that blends a heady mix of Eastern metaphysics and Western psychology with a daunting, workbook-driven discipline of daily meditations.

Had I not been so desperate to invoke big changes in my life I don't know that I ever could have gotten started with the Course, laden as it is with Christian language to which I initially had a powerfully negative reaction. But I noticed from the beginning that changes in both my moods and physiology were beginning to take place as I undertook my study, albeit in ways that were impossible to comprehend at the time. I soon came to understand, at least, that the Course's intent is not to induce any religious beliefs, but to change the way a student's mind works. Its primary tool for this change is a profound and sometimes infuriating initiation into a relentless, uncompromising style of forgiveness.

"Forgiveness is the great need of this world," suggests the Course, "but that is because it is a world of illusions. Those who forgive are thus releasing themselves from illusions, while those who withhold forgiveness are binding themselves to them. As you condemn only yourself, so do you forgive only yourself."

This commentary appears in the text accompanying Lesson 46 of the ACIM Workbook, "God is the love in which I forgive." These instructions follow:

Today's exercises require at least three full five-minute practice periods, and as many shorter ones as possible. Begin the longer practice periods by repeating today's idea to yourself, as usual. Close your eyes as you do so, and spend a minute or two in searching your mind for those whom you have not forgiven. It does not matter "how much" you have not forgiven them. You have forgiven them entirely or not at all.

If you are doing the exercises well you should have no difficulty in finding a number of people you have not forgiven. It is a safe rule that anyone you do not like is a suitable subject. Mention each one by name, and say:

God is the Love in which I forgive you, [name].

The purpose of the first phase of today's practice periods is to put you in a position to forgive yourself. After you have applied the idea to all those who have come to mind, tell yourself:

God is the Love in which I forgive myself....

When I encountered this lesson, I had no difficulty in finding someone whom I had not forgiven. In fact, my usual suspect would remain unchanged for months, throughout all the subsequent lessons that also required the identification of someone unforgiven. But I was disturbed by the notion that forgiving my mother had anything to do with forgiving myself. I was quite sure I had not done anything to require anyone's pardon, including my own. I was, after all, a victim, and I had the dramatic testimony of an expert psychiatrist to back me up.

So, as was often the case in my early experience with Course lessons, the immediate result of this directed practice was that I felt more defensive and angry than forgiving. I'd never thought much about forgiveness before the Course, assuming that it was kind of a favor you asked for when you wanted to stop feeling bad about something you'd done, or an act of generosity granted to others to let them off the hook for something bad they had done. Truth to tell, the issue just hadn't come up that much in my life before. But the Course insisted on forgiveness as the key to sanity, happiness, sound relationships, self-knowledge — as the key to just about everything.

Bit by bit, however, as I spent time on Lesson 46 and closely related ones, I began to sense the connection between forgiving my mother and myself. I had been angry with her because of all the things she had done and the self-created mythology she lived by, shored up by all her questionable stories. She didn't live in the real world, but I had to. I'd become so angry with her and her self-deceptions, without recognizing the depth of my anger, that I'd gotten sick from it.

But then I would remember that I had escaped, and now lived far from her influence, besides infrequent phone calls and even less frequent visits home. No one was forcing me to stay angry, yet her aggravating presence was always with me — in large part because of all the stories I kept telling about her. Gradually I began to recognize that I had been living by a pained mythology of my own, built upon fragmentary and increasingly distant memories. I'd gotten in the habit of reiterating and reinforcing that mythology in order to keep the melodrama of my victimhood going as long as possible. The connection between chronic victimhood and chronic illness was coming into a startling focus.

These realizations began to soften my wall of resentment toward my mom, but it was still a long way from toppling over. No matter how much I might be aggravating my own condition in the present, I was still not at fault for all I'd had to deal with in growing up, and neither of my parents had ever been accountable for that. I did not need an abject apology from them to move on — but I did need, at least, an admission that things had often been crazy and out of control when I was a kid.

That's why what happened next was particularly startling. Several months after I had begun the Course Workbook discipline, my parents came to California to check on my health. They were convinced that I had AIDS, despite all my protests to the contrary, because AIDS was something they were hearing about in the news, and it was the worst possible thing that could happen. CFS was simply off their map of the possible, and no amount of explaining on my part was going to make it real. They believed accredited physicians, however, so they came out to visit mine and he effectively reassured them that I was not dying.

After their appointment with him, my parents came by my apartment. Haltingly, I began to tell them about my experience with the Course. I did not say outright that I was trying to forgive them, only that I was beginning to look at the past differently and get a better understanding of what we had all gone through as a family. Out of the blue, my mother cast her eyes to the floor and said, "Well, I guess I've never understood why I have always been so angry and hateful toward people, especially my own family." My father took her hand and said, "No, Janie, I've never understood it either, and I didn't know how to help you." The effect of hearing these words was like a soundless shock wave; I was literally rendered speechless. My parents said nothing more, and an awkward silence ensued. The mutual admission of the central illness of our family was so unexpected that I simply couldn't comprehend its significance on the spot. I don't remember what was said before they left, but immediately afterward I went outside and walked and wept for about two hours. I felt simultaneously relieved and grateful, yet powerfully disoriented. My parents had quickly and efficiently admitted their truth in my presence, without my insistence or cajoling, and thus effectively robbed me of a very powerful resentment.

At that time, I was not entirely sure that this revelation was all to the good, because a new worry was beginning to surface in my mind. I was sensing that real forgiveness was much more profound than letting my parents off the hook. It also meant that I was going to change much more than I had anticipated. In the short term, all I could think was: "What will I do now?" After all, recounting the extreme stories of my childhood and feeling resentful about it had used a lot of my time!

The shock of my parents' confession was the second major turning point in my struggle with CFS, but it did not make the path ahead short and smooth. I grappled with fairly severe symptoms for at least two more years, I tried a variety of other medical approaches and substances, both mainstream and alternative, to treat the diabolically creative chaos of an immune system run amok. While some approaches were ineffective and others ameliorated particular symptoms, I was increasingly aware that the real engine of my overall recovery was forgiveness.

##   
Deciding where the buck would stop

About three years into my health crisis, I was beginning to turn the corner on the syndrome, occasionally reaching plateaus of healthier functioning that suggested a complete recovery was possible. The sixteen-hour marathons of non-refreshing sleep had subsided, ironically replaced by a tendency toward good old insomnia. During my sleepless nights, I often felt sharply disturbed and restless, and began to understand firsthand just how harrowing it must have been for my mother to go through her entire adulthood on far too little sleep.

One night the sense of disturbance became increasingly acute, and I found myself drifting back and forth between horrific nightmares and semi-wakefulness, sometimes uncertain of which state of consciousness I was inhabiting. Finally giving up on sleep about three a.m., I spent the hours until dawn writing the following poem for my mother — essentially an open letter from my disturbed psyche to hers.

On Sleeplessness ( for my mother)

Very early, your heart burst open

like an overstuffed suitcase, and the clothes, jewelry,

well-worn dolls, watches, crutches and cameos

of your ancestors spilled inside you.

Your soul was draped with grief before

you could speak, and no one could see

that your first lullaby should be a threnody.

The unhappy dead are petulant beings,

peering through the eyes of their living kin

to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel.

No one told you who their voices were,

and why they murmured of so much bitterness and fear.

No one taught you that the lost ones need first

to be heard, then forgiven and released.

And so, drawn

by your strength and independence, these spirits

rushed in through your broken heart like

a river flooding the breach of a dam.

They took back the clothes and jewelry,

putting on whatever they found at random,

shoving and fighting each other to try on

precious things that might prettify their misery.

Feeding on the life that should have been yours alone,

these desperate souls of many disguises then

possessed you. It is they who, unable to rest,

have stolen your sleep for so many years.

You know,  
they thought I was an open door as well.  
Lately they have brought their morbid partying

into my stomach and my dreams —

but when I awaken in the night, I know them.

Not their names or faces, but their truths and traumas:

Someone starved. Someone was born dead and,

like a turtle trapped on its back, struggled to move

in a useless body and silence the screams

of his terrified mother. Someone murdered,

someone was slain, a father ignored and

abused his daughters with an anger he inherited.

I recognize a family, like any human group,

with a legacy of pain and unspoken longing.

And by watching you I have learned their desire...

I can bring them peace,  
but they must give up thieving the sleep of the living.  
I am the poet and the storyteller, their voice  
and their master. I will honor them,

but I will put them to rest.

The experience of writing this poem gave me a new appreciation for my mother's dramatically reported experience of "someone leaving her body." But I also understood that she had long been haunted by more than one demon of a shadowy past, likely extending backward generations before her. She did not grow up in a psychological, self-reflective age, and family secrets like incest were far more likely to be buried than confronted. There was no telling what secret wounds her parents carried within them, the pain of which was far more likely to be taken out upon their children than recognized, much less forgiven. And so the savagery and helplessness of the human condition at its worst would likely be repeated without surcease. The end of the poem was my recognition that, given the advantages of psychological awareness and an effective spiritual discipline, the buck could stop with me. When I shared this poem with my mom, I learned something surprising. Perhaps because I was getting better, she seemed more curious and less fearful about what exactly I had been going through, and began asking detailed questions about all the symptoms of CFS. When I'd given a full description, she made this report: "When I was about your age, I was going through almost exactly the same kind of symptoms. The regular doctors couldn't figure it out, so they started sending me to psychiatrists."

And the psychiatrists gave you barbituates, I remember thinking, because that was the drug of choice to administer to crazy housewives in the 1950s. Whether my mom and I were karmically or genetically wired for the same illness at the same age, it was her misfortune to display these symptoms in circumstances that would lead to a lifelong prescription drug addiction. I'd never thought of my predicament this way before, but suddenly I realized that I'd gotten off lucky.

##   
A little book of forgiveness

There were many significant ways in which my struggle with chronic fatigue syndrome — and the spiritual discipline that ensued — ultimately benefited me. One was the seemingly accidental discovery of my calling as a writer. As I pulled out of the depths of CFS, I began writing for magazines on a wide variety of subjects that I had begun researching in my path of recovery: alternative health approaches, dreamwork, yoga, Jungian and transpersonal psychologies, A Course in Miracles, and more. I eventually called this work "the journalism of consciousness" and would pursue it for a decade, publishing scores of articles and several books along the way. This led to my current work as an independent publisher specializing in contemporary spirituality. One day in 1992, the year that I now mark as the end of my seven-year health crisis, I finished a meditation with the words "a little book of forgiveness" surfacing in my mind. For the next week, I did little else but write a first draft of the book, which came to me as a series of thoughts and prayer-like aphorisms that loosely chronicled the spiritual process I had followed during my illness.

The process was as close to automatic writing as I've ever experienced; I felt driven by an inspired compulsion, a healthy mania. I knew from the start that this was work was another kind of open, extended letter to my mom, although it did not directly address or even mention her save for the dedication, which read: "To my mother, who would have preferred a novel." When she previewed the draft manuscript of the book, she concurred with the dedication. Yet she also allowed that she found the work very moving and that she would want to order twenty-five copies as soon as it became available in print, "because I know at least that many people who need it." To this day I wonder if she meant that she knew that many people who needed to learn to forgive, or that she knew that many who would have a hard time forgiving her.

After A Little Book of Forgiveness was published in 1994, I received a number of letters from readers that unexpectedly provided the finish to my forgiveness process with my mother. Many people wrote to say that they had released some kind of grudge or grievance while reading the book; several thanked me for helping them improve or save a close relationship. One handwritten note in wavery script came from a 98-year-old retired psychiatrist, who said his psychiatrist had given him a copy of the book. I wrote back to this correspondent that when he reached the century mark, he probably deserved to take a break from treatment.

Then came the letter from a young college coed, revealing that she too had been given A Little Book of Forgiveness by a counselor, following a brutal rape in her senior year of high school that had left her suicidal. Were it not for my book, she wrote, she was sure that she would be in her grave instead of her first dormitory room.

Nothing in my experience could have prepared me for the powerful mix of feelings that arose from the reading of this letter. It was simultaneously gratifying and confusing, as I wasn't quite sure how I had become a person who could receive such a thank-you. After all, forgiveness was never exactly my bright idea. I had been dragged into my practice of this spiritual challenge — if not kicking and screaming, at least thrashing and moaning — and often worried about what I might be sacrificing along the way. After all, if I did not remain in judgment of my crazy mother and certain other problematic people, then how would they ever change? And how would all that was wrong in the world ever be put right?

Staring at the letter from the young woman, I found myself confronted by a new kind of questioning: What should be any different now? Should I have had an easier childhood, so I never had to learn about forgiveness? Should my mom have learned to control her worst tendencies, or should my father have been stronger and kept her in check? Should the doctors have not given her so many drugs? Should her father have actually been a saint instead of a likely abuser? Should Southerners not be crazy?

I could no longer answer such questions with my former certainty.

##   
A peaceful passing

Dr. Wright was wrong. My mother never seriously attempted suicide again, and she did not take anyone with her into death. She passed away peacefully in her bed at age 72 from an aneurysm. The coroner guessed that she probably awoke and sat up, then felt dizzy and passed out. That was what her final posture in this world suggested. It was an extraordinarily peaceful death for someone whose struggle with life had been so profound; it was a break she deserved.

Later on that same day, my father gave the bag of her personal effects that the coroner had collected, including her wedding ring, to my sisters, saying "Here, take this. I don't want any of it." When they offered to stay at the house with him overnight, he replied "Nope, that's okay. I'm going out to dinner." Knowing my dad, I suspect that this was said with more relief than bitterness; he was just happy to be off the hook. Although he spent the last dozen years on his own in a slow decline from Parkinson's, my sisters and I watched him become a warmer, funnier, and more cantankerous fellow than we had known growing up, when he had his hands full dealing with my mom — and when he couldn't deal, just "letting it ride."

Forgiving is not forgetting. I can still easily recall the worst episodes I experienced with my mother, and even let myself get worked up about them for a while. But I don't do that much anymore, because it serves no purpose. I realize that the worst memories are just stories that I've renewed and revised in my mind to yield the ultimate dramatic effect, just as my mom would have done. We were alike after all.

But I haven't made up everything. It's undeniable that the mother of my past did not bake multiple pies or make me feel safe, cared for, and accepted. I was probably warped in some lasting ways by her powerful influence. Yet because learning to comprehend, forgive, and accept her was the key to healing myself and finding some peace in the world that I see, I believe that she is now, and always will be, the perfect mother.
- 5 -

A Healing Catastrophe  
Originally published under a different title in Yoga Journal in 1993

About fifty years after it first began to be diagnosed, the malady known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) continues to plague at least a million people in the United States and more overseas, where it is known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME. As a syndrome — that is, a collection of symptoms and conditions rather than a single identifiable malady — CFS is characterized by exceptional and prolonged exhaustion, unrefreshing sleep, various digestive impairments and other allergic reactions, as well as depression and cognitive difficulties. It cannot yet be detected with a single medical test, nor are there any proven modes of successful treatment. Controversy continues over the medical origins and exact nature of CFS, making it not just a debilitating disease, but a political challenge as well. Victims of the illness who can barely function in their daily lives face the additional burden of getting medical professionals to take their condition seriously.

Even when doctors do respect the reality and profound impairment that CFS/ME represents, there is so far not much they can do for their patients. The San Francisco Chronicle reported on March 26, 2014, on a conference in San Francisco where Dr. Charles Lapp, who runs a CFS clinic in North Carolina, told the attendees, "We have no known cause, no cure.... I feel patients do best when they accept the illness — when they accept that they're a new person, with new energy levels and new limitations."

I was diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome in 1985, when the diagnosis was still fairly new, and struggled through two years of rapidly declining health, then five more of a slow recovery, until I reached a point in 1992 where I could consider myself completely cured of CFS. While I sometimes experience faint echoes of the syndrome's conditions when I am dealing with undue stress or a more conventional illness like influenza, I have remained in generally good health since overcoming CFS. Along the way, I decidedly became a new person — albeit one with higher energy levels and far greater capacities than I had before. That's because CFS proved to be the inception of a profound spiritual crisis that changed the entire direction of my life. Without recognizing it as such, I believe that I could well have suffered with CFS much longer, and possibly still be inflicted with it today.

##   
The onset

I t began in the summer of 1985, a few months before I would turn thirty-two, with a late-night stomachache involving extreme bloating and gas pains. No stranger to episodic intestinal trouble, I presumed the sickness would be gone in the morning, and promised myself to eat a little more carefully in the future. But I awoke the next day completely exhausted and still bloated, even though my stomach was now empty — a peculiar combination of symptoms that was unfamiliar to me.

For a couple of days, I assumed I had a stomach virus. After several weeks of severe indigestion, declining energy, and low-grade fevers, I decided I had an unseasonable flu. After about one month and a useless visit to a medical doctor who was mystified by my complex of symptoms, I concluded independently that I had probably been exposed to Giardia while swimming in a freshwater lake shortly before becoming ill. My symptoms weren't quite right for that kind of parasitic infection, but I was worried enough to consider the possibility that something out of the ordinary was happening.

I was now sleeping fitfully for ten to twelve hours nightly, but waking with less energy than when I went to bed. My memory and thinking processes had turned foggy, causing me to misplace my keys or wallet several times a week. I was experiencing traveling pains and weakness in my joints and muscles, most severely in my mid-back. And whatever I ate seemed to explode in my stomach. Except for a nine-week bout of mononucleosis when I was twenty, I had never been ill for so long — and this sickness was much more violent and progressive. I was beginning to lose weight steadily, if not rapidly, and I had very little energy for work. At the time I was a freelance phototypesetter working alone at night in an office full of cigarette smoke and photochemical fumes that had accumulated during the workday. I noticed that my symptoms either disappeared or escalated rapidly while I was at work — a common pattern for the early stages of chemical hypersensitivity, as I would learn a few months later.

Lacking health insurance and distrusting conventional doctors, I pursued testing for giardiasis from the county health services. Increasingly convinced that I had contracted some kind of "bug" that was steadily destroying my health, I was also increasingly determined to identify and eliminate the evil foreign agent. My chronic discomfort and worry was turning into a helpless anger with an unidentified target. It would be a while before I began to realize that the same anger I was feeling had been there well before my illness, and was now only surfacing in my awareness.

When two sets of tests for giardia over several weeks both came back negative, I was stunned — stunned enough to begin considering that the rapidly deteriorating condition of my body might have something to do with my state of mind. For the first time in several years, I resumed a daily journal and made these initial, prescient notes:

What has been going on here? No one has yet prescribed writing as the cure for a crisis in the gut, but I'm undertaking it just in case an elusive insight may make a difference. I have lost touch with why I have always written: to sort things out. And look at me now: I'm having a crisis of sorting things out, at the basic, physical, nutritive level.... The thought arises repeatedly: This discomfort and disease is only a warning, if sometimes a violent one. It will cause me to steer toward a new situation, whose particulars I can't yet imagine.

##   
Acupuncture, diet, and diagnosis

The first six months of my illness were a dizzying dive into nearly constant exhaustion, severe indigestion, muscle pains, migraine headaches, mental confusion, and emotional terror. By December 1985, I had suspended work entirely for a month, and although I would return to a light schedule afterward, my freelance business had been dealt a fatal blow. A longstanding if not healthy intimate relationship with a woman succumbed to the stress of the illness after only a few months, and my male roommate was made so uncomfortable by my condition that our friendship suffered significantly as well.

I began to recede into a cocoon of suffering and involuntary self-absorption, able on many days to do nothing more than make a short trip to the grocery store. On other days I would sleep for up to sixteen hours, which seemed to do nothing for my fading energy. All the while, I was increasingly overtaken by a profound sadness and resentment, which I continued to assume were entirely the effects of my disease. I desperately wanted my normal life back, but it seemed to be slipping farther and farther away.

An exception to my isolation was the care and attention of an old friend who was studying to become an acupuncturist at the time. The treatments I received at the clinic where she worked gave me my first hope that the course of my illness might be reversed, because I discovered that acupuncture provided substantial but short-lived relief from my stomach pains and briefly brought up my energy as well. Continued treatments with needles and Chinese herbs seemed to do nothing for my underlying condition, however, and I began to ask around for referrals to a medical doctor with a holistic perspective. Soon I experienced the first of many uncanny coincidences that gave me hope for healing, and that occurred more often as I learned to trust both my intuition and the logic of the illness itself — a logic that was certainly beyond my rational understanding. Waiting in a curtained treatment room at the acupuncture clinic for one of the student practitioners, I was greeted by a young MD whom I had met seven years earlier, when I was a weekly newspaper reporter covering his losing battle with the Internal Revenue Service as a war tax protestor. He turned out to be precisely the type of medical advisor I was looking for. His practice was holistically oriented and consisted mainly of AIDS and ARC (AIDS-related complex) patients who suffered from symptoms similar to, but significantly more serious than my own.

The battery of standard medical tests this doctor administered were both reassuring and perplexing. They showed that I did not have AIDS, I did not have an ulcer, and I did not show incipient signs of any cancer or other potentially fatal disease. According to the blood tests and x-rays, in fact, I "had" nothing at all; all my vital signs were normal, in some cases excellent. I just happened to be terribly sick.

Following the lead of my stomach symptoms, my doctor placed me on a rotation diet to detect any food allergies I might have, but this testing also proved inconclusive over several months. It seemed that at various times I was allergic to everything I ate or to nothing at all. I was referred to an allergy specialist, who gave me my first official if confusing diagnosis: immune hypersensitivity to environmental chemicals, intestinal candidiasis (a parasitic overgrowth of candida, a naturally occurring yeast in the gut), and what was then called Epstein-Barr virus (CEBV), alluding to a vague connection with the mononucleosis I had experienced about a decade earlier. (Epstein-Barr is the virus that causes mono.)

By 1988, this kind of complex diagnosis was being labeled chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), soon qualified thereafter as chronic fatigue immune dysfunction syndrome (CFIDS). The latter name was developed by CFS specialists and activists to lend a greater seriousness to the diagnosis, since it associates the disorder more closely with AIDS, autoimmune deficiency syndrome. With rare and questionable exceptions, however, CFS remains nonfatal, and the acronym "CFIDS" has lately fallen into disuse. It should also be noted that CFS has long been diagnosed in Great Britain as myalgic encephalomyelitis and denoted by the acronym "ME." Fibromyalgia, originally considered one of the identifying symptoms of CFS, is now often diagnosed separately although it shares characteristics with CFS.

My physician administered a major shock when he prescribed for me a sedative called Xanax, citing his opinion that my very real symptoms were increasingly exacerbated by a high level of anxiety. My first response was, "I'm not anxious, I'm sick!" But I knew that my doctor was not the type to prescribe sedatives lightly, and I did not know what else to try. Thus there could have been little of the "placebo effect" occurring when, to my great surprise, I experienced a marked improvement in both my mood and my symptoms during the first few days on Xanax. Like the hero of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, I felt like I was walking on a trampoline, but the drug induced a welcome experience of release. My desperate hold on something inside myself had been chemically relaxed, and I recognized for the first time what anxiety was by experiencing its relative absence.

(Xanax is now less often prescribed than it was during the period I was taking it, due to subsequent reports that it could become highly addictive for some people. This never proved to be the case for me; I took it regularly for about one year and periodically for several years after that. As its usefulness to me declined, I stopped using Xanax voluntarily without any ill effects. Some medical doctors prescribe various sedatives and psychoactive drugs such as Prozac and Paxil for CFS and fibromyalgia. For reasons that are not clearly understood, these drugs sometimes have a positive physiological effect on these conditions, apart from their psychoactive properties. Research and testing of various antiviral drugs continues, but so far there is no convincing approach to CFS in this realm.)

From my experience, I would advise anyone suffering from CFS or fibromyalgia to ask their medical doctor about the possible benefits and disadvantages of taking any type of drugs, and not to worry about the psychological stigma that might be attached to psycho-actives. I was very uncomfortable with taking a drug seen as a sedative at first, but its benefits rapidly outweighed that disadvantage.

##   
Dreams, music, and tears

Realizing that I had long failed to recognize my own anxiety opened up the second phase of my experience with CFS, as I moved from a focus on the physical experience to a focus on the psychological. In relatively short order I would move from there to a spiritual perspective, but I want to emphasize, especially for current CFS sufferers, that none of these perspectives canceled out the others. That is, I did not abandon medical or physical routes to wellness as I took on a more psychological perspective, and trying to comprehend my personal psychology was inextricably linked to the ego-surrender that I would eventually recognize to be at the heart of my CFS experience. In fact, understanding CFS required that I learn to recognize and take care of my wholeness as a physical, psychological, and spiritual being. Both allopathic medicine and conventional psychotherapy generally fail to take this overall view of our reality and our health, and I think this is one reason that both fields have had great difficulty treating CFS successfully.

The drug-induced recognition of my anxiety propelled me into a short course (nine weeks) of psychotherapy, during which I began to pour out my family history for the therapist, who served me chiefly as a kind and patient sounding board. Up to this point, I would not have said that I was "in denial" about my traumatic adolescence. I liked to think that I had a sensible forgive-and-forget attitude about the difficult experiences that I clearly remembered. But talking to the therapist helped me realize that I had never confronted my history at deeper levels of feeling, where my conscious rationalizations were mostly contradicted. Through the array of symptoms triggered by CFS, those deeply imprinted feelings were now erupting in my awareness and my body.

During and soon after this brief therapy, my mind and heart opened in an unprecedented way as I gradually surrendered trying to fight or be "in charge" of my illness. Instead, I began to take care of myself — which I was only then recognizing as an entirely different process. By completely shutting down the familiar patterns and activities of my life, the illness provided me with the uncomfortable "luxury" of enough time and quiet to reflect on the kind of life I had been living before I was stricken. I was dismayed to realize how narrow, driven, and ungenerous I had become — and tentatively I began to ask for some kind of guidance from beyond myself. These entreaties were my first attempts at real prayer, for the Christian prayers I had learned as a child had always been empty recitations whose purpose I had never understood. At that time I considered myself an atheist, and I still do, albeit with a much greater respect for inner resources.

The guidance I sought came almost immediately, first in the form of a new curiosity: For the first time in years, I began to learn rapidly, reading across a broad spectrum of subjects ranging from immunology to Jungian psychology to metaphysics. I also saw a variety of health practitioners and counselors on a oneor two-visit basis, trying to sample as many perspectives on my experience as I could afford. CFS is a multi-faceted challenge, and for me the lesson of its diabolical variety was that I needed to develop more points of view on life — even if some of them seemed to give me contradictory information. Only later would I realize that spiritual maturity requires the willingness to "live in paradox," simultaneously entertaining opposing perspectives on reality without feeling forced to settle on a single truth.

Around this same time, my dream life became especially vivid and dramatic. Since my sleep was both plentiful and fitful, it was relatively easy to develop almost total dream recall; soon I could awaken after every dream and write it down in detail. I would continue this intensive dreamwork at various levels of intensity for the next two years, filling several notebooks. Often the dream messages needed little interpretation and gave me an explicit sense of direction for my healing, as illustrated by this dream from December 1985, during the most severe phase of my illness:

I am a captive in a POW camp. I've been in a good mood, not taking the situation seriously, but talking to other prisoners makes me realize that I've been imprisoned for a long time. One woman who seems to be an old friend sits in my cell combing her hair, and sadly remarks, "I knew you before the life went out of you." Suddenly I feel that I've been silent for years, and I start thinking of ways to escape — whether I can make a knife with a piece of paper, for instance. I have my dream notebook with me, and I realize the guards have made a mistake in allowing me to have it, because there is metal in the ring binding.

It was also during the severest phase of my suffering that I became exceptionally sensitive to music, experiencing profound emotional release from listening to certain musical styles and rhythms (especially anything derived from my Scotch-Irish heritage). I made repeating tape loops of a few songs by the contemporary singer and instrumentalist Enya, listening to them over and over again for hours at a time. This induced an altered state during which the music unlocked torrents of tears, long fits of wailing, and sometimes an instinctive, trancelike dancing. Alone at home for most of the day, I could arrange these "letting go" sessions so as not to disturb anyone (or embarrass myself). Still, it took some time to learn to be uninhibited, even in near-total isolation. I was astonished to find myself overcome in these sessions by waves of bitter anger, wild grief, and deep desolation — feelings sometimes attached to particular memories, but just as often

unspecific and seemingly primal.

Also during this time I discovered the process work of Arnold Mindell, as described in his book Working with the Dreaming Body. Suggesting that the symptoms of an illness are directly comparable to the images in a dream, Mindell writes that people with chronic or extreme suffering may sometimes need to "amplify" or exaggerate their symptoms in order to draw out their hidden meanings or purposes. Since I was constantly trying to relax my chronic stomach tension, working in the opposite direction was a provocative and somewhat frightening idea. But experimenting with and refining Mindell's concepts for myself led me through a number of dramatic healing experiences, at both physical and psychological levels. It also taught me a better understanding of tension as a bodily message — one that needs to be interpreted and attended to before it is "relaxed" away.

##   
Changing course

Of all the helpful perspectives and teachings that influenced my journey through CFS, none affected me so strongly as the contemporary psychospiritual discipline known as A Course in Miracles (ACIM). I encountered it in November 1985, one week after my thirty-second birthday, while I was still on a steep slide into suffering and confusion. Thus I was primed for the fi st section of its Workbook's 365 meditation lessons, which aims to break up one's habitual way of looking at the world. The Course advises the student to look upon any difficulty in life with this focus: "I do not know what anything, including this, means. And so I do not know how to respond to it. And I will not use my own past learning as the light to guide me now." (ACIM Text, Chapter 14, Section XI).

Practicing the surrender of prejudices based on one's past egocentric learning is a central emphasis of the Course Workbook, which in conjunction with its massive Text eventually leads students toward a different kind of guiding light, the intuitive and altruistic wisdom of their own "internal teacher."

Initially skeptical of the Course's Christian, patriarchal language and its sheer mass and density, I was nonetheless pulled into intensive study by its electrifying relevance to my situation. "To be fatigued is to be dis-spirited," suggests ACIM, "but to be inspired is to be in the spirit. To be egocentric is to be dis-spirited, but to be Self-centered in the right sense is to be inspired or in spirit. The truly inspired are enlightened and cannot abide in darkness." (ACIM Text, Chapter 4 Introduction).

Although I would continue to encounter other powerful teachings during my CFS experience — for instance, for about nine months I consulted the I Ching almost daily as a training in intuitive thinking — the Course rapidly became the centerpiece of my recovery from CFS. It vastly accelerated the recognition and release of the deep anger that I came to see as the primary stressor of my immune system. It also helped me to define my own sense of spirituality and bring it into the foreground of my life.

Prior to CFS, my peripheral curiosity about spiritual experience was something I shared with few people and could not connect with my relationships, work, or sense of purpose in the world. The Course helped me to understand that I had become ill in large part because my mind and body were longing to regain the spiritual energy I had known as a child, but lost touch with during my adolescence and young adulthood.

Through the slow, uncertain evolution of my CFS recovery that began in 1986 — encompassing many long plateaus, frustrating relapses, and heartening bursts of improvement — A Course in Miracles would serve as a steady beacon of inner guidance. It helped me make sense of all the physical, medical, and psychological work that still lay ahead in my recovery from CFS.

##   
Is CFS physiological or psychosomatic?

My experience convinced me that CFS is a genuine medical disorder triggered by one or more infectious agents that take advantage of immune system weaknesses with a wide variety of causes. At other times in my life I have experienced short-term depressions with relatively brief and shallow physical side effects. By contrast, the distinctive symptoms of CFS hit me too hard and suddenly to be psychosomatic in the usual sense of the word. At the time I was struck with CFS symptoms, I was anything but consciously depressed. Both my business and my personal creative work were at a high point — if not entirely satisfying — and I was on the go most of the time. While I was experiencing noticeable stress in some relationships, I did not regard it as anything out of the ordinary. I just thought that some people — besides myself, that is — were hard to get along with.

What I was not aware of was what I now recognize as "deep stress": the fundamental and substantial tension of maintaining and defending the personality I had built for myself by my early thirties. This personality carried a great deal of unexplored, unexpressed resentment and sadness that had been invisibly sapping my vitality for years. Those suppressed emotions showed through in my personality chiefly as a sarcastic fatalism about life.

Inwardly, I was beset by circular and repetitive worries, although my calm demeanor mostly concealed this stress from other people. In spiritual terms, before CFS I was living only the life of the ego, intensely persecuted by my own self-doubt and regarding life as a high-risk game in which I felt I was constantly falling behind. My personality was beginning to crack under the strain of its own contradictions, but at the time I could not imagine another, more peaceful way to live. (I now suspect that this sort of deep stress underlies many kinds of illness, particularly those involving autoimmune failure.) I'm convinced that my deteriorating physical and psychological health made me susceptible to whatever viruses or other agents cause CFS; thus it is my conclusion that the syndrome is physiologically triggered but psychologically reinforced.

More than any other illness or ailment I have experienced, CFS made it clear to me that the artificial division of mind and body made by conventional medicine is counterproductive and even dangerous. But for anyone suffering from CFS, the particular causes matter somewhat less than what will reduce the symptoms. If it is helpful to anyone, let me say that I made no progress with CFS as long as I wished for my life to return to its prior, "normal" state. Only when I realized that my previous life was devastated, and that I had to accept a life as a full-time sick person for an indeterminate length of time, did the progression of my illness begin to slow. When I surrendered the kind of control I was used to having, I could begin to consider the possibility of living differently when I recovered. As I did that, helpful information and intuitions about better ways to feel, think, and relate began to flow toward me.

##   
How well did I get?

Since this essay was first published, I consider myself fully recovered from the CFS siege I experienced from 1985 to 1992. Since 1997— the year I took on the challenges of becoming an independent publisher — I have had several stress-related episodes of exhaustion and one three-month bout of a tenacious flu. These episodes of compromised immunity did not involve the full complex of CFS symp-toms, but rather the narrower range of symptoms one would normally associate with short-term exhaustion or influenza.

There are significant ways in which I am more than 100 percent recovered from CFS — meaning that I'm physically and emotionally healthier overall than before the illness struck. My general physical vitality is much stronger, largely because I exercise four to five times weekly instead of once or twice. Before CFS, I would have regarded my current level of physical activity as "too athletic" and anti-intellectual, out of sync with my personality. Now I have a better idea of what my body requires to be healthy, without such harmful and unnecessarily limiting ideas getting in the way.

My emotional health has improved profoundly because I have mostly unlearned, chiefly through the Course discipline, my erstwhile habits of blaming, resentment, and self-persecution. Now I have relatively few doubts about myself not because I have replaced them with "self-esteem," but because I have learned to place my faith and confidence in my own internal teacher. The Course calls this the Holy Spirit; I call it a sense of silent, intuitive guidance that I feel within me, but whose source is certainly far greater and wiser than my own personality.

##   
Accepting paradox, learning patience

I'm not saying that anyone with CFS must necessarily look on his or her illness as a spiritual crisis in order to get better. I am reporting that my own recovery did not begin until I surrendered my erstwhile pride, defensiveness, and self-image. Then I had to accept that my life would be redirected from the inside out in ways unpredictable and possibly unacceptable to my ego up to that point.

In her book Puer Aeturnus, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz intimated the same idea in psychological terms: "If we take the unconscious and the process of individuation [developing one's wholeness] seriously, we cannot arrange our own lives any longer. . . . Many people accept their suffering, but with a tinge of resignation. They put up with it, and then it does not help. It must be a positive acceptance, and I would say that you can only get the meaning if you accept." How can we positively accept our own suffering? The words that come to mind from my own experience are "paradox" and "patience" — paradox being the decision to embrace pain as a teacher (for as long as we can stand it), and patience being what we must develop to endure that embrace fruitfully. What intrigues me about the CFS experience is that it virtually enforces the learning of patience. As frighteningly ill as I became during my initial nine-month crash into the depths of my sickness, I always had a gut-level certainty that it would not kill or permanently impair me. But after the first few months, I comprehended that recovery would take a long time and require a thorough reshaping of myself, so I might as well settle in for the long haul. Learning how not to aggravate my suffering with impatience for a rapid, total cure taught me a lot of compassion for the complexity and intractability of human suffering in general.

A frequent criticism of holistic philosophies that seek psychological or spiritual meaning in physical illness is that they tend to blame the victims for their own suffering. I went through such a negative process myself a number of times. For instance, I would realize that my perpetually bubbling stomach was "angry" with suppressed hostilities, and then I would chide myself for being an angry, suppressed person. It took me a while to realize that the search for meaning and the attachment of blame are not the same process, even though it is a common human habit to react to unpleasant realizations with self-blame.

Over time, I learned to stop blaming myself for being an angry and suppressed person, which allowed me to explore exactly what my long-buried angers were about. As they've surfaced, I've been able to question the justification for every form of anger I've recognized in myself. Thus, when my stomach gets "riled up" nowadays, I'm better able to listen to its complaints without blaming myself or anyone else for my suffering. Likewise, I'm better able to listen to other people's angry or upset feelings without blaming them for any problems or difficulties between us.

##   
CFS and surrender

When I first tried to write this article, I experienced a two-week relapse severe enough to cause me to postpone the project. I experienced another, lesser relapse when I began again three months later, but this time I knew I would be able to complete the work. Internally, the second relapse felt like the shedding of an old skin, the final shaking-off of my identity as a CFS sufferer.

Another way of putting it is that I was experiencing some deep reluctance to be fully well, despite my long-standing conscious desire to become so. I've learned that the ego is often divided against itself and can be more attached to the presumed nobility of suffering — and the familiarity of an old self — than to the vitality of health. Still another lesson of CFS for me was that I grew up with a number of unhealthy habits and had grown accustomed to a significant degree of physical and psychological suffering even before my immune system collapsed. Unlearning unhealthiness is a kind of surrender I must still face from time to time.

But once one is firmly on a spiritual path the ego becomes subject to many deaths — that is, the surrendering of habitual fears, defenses, and beliefs — and always resists the next breakthrough of some aspect of the larger self. After the breakthrough — when one has become less selfish, more humble, less afraid, more open, and otherwise more wise — it's clear that there was nothing to fear after all.

As someone who has had to learn to compassionately decode my physical symptoms in order to recognize many of my more deeply rooted feelings, I now regard most of my brief illnesses as times of such ego death. After a while, this kind of dying comes more easily. One of the great gifts of my CFS experience has been a reduced discomfort with inner change. Most people, I believe, spend their lives evading experiences of ego surrender, with the result that they are largely cut off from their true inner spirit, as well as their full vitality.

A life starved of spiritual vitality is a life of struggle, confusion, and misery; I know because I spent my teens and twenties there. The onset of CFS allowed the eruption of my long-suppressed spiritual life, and I will always be grateful for that despite the exceptional pain and discomfort that came with it. Whether spiritual rebirth is the potential meaning of CFS for other sufferers, I can't say for sure. But I would tell anyone that it's certainly worth investigating.

\- 6 -

Climbing the Stone Face of Fear  
Originally published in THE SUN in July 1989

#

For about an hour I had maintained the professional distance that is the boon or bane of journalism, depending on how you look at it. Calling from Berkeley, CA, I was interviewing Dean Halverson of International Students, Inc., an evangelical Christian organization in Colorado Springs, CO. Halverson and I had both conducted exhaustive research into the spiritual document known as A Course in Miracles (ACIM), although from significantly different viewpoints. I called Halverson for some background on his writing about the Course in recent years for the Spiritual Counterfeits Project, a Berkeley-based organization devoted to examining Eastern religions and New Age spirituality from a Christian perspective.

While I acknowledged to Halverson at the outset that I was a serious student of the Course and was also researching it as a journalist, I was careful not to challenge his published interpretation of the purpose and true origins of ACIM: that it is essentially an elaborate satanic strategy of deception. My sole intent for the interview was to update Halvorsen's two-year-old public statements, and my best tool seemed to be the cool professionalism of the reporter, who must deliberately suspend his personal reactions in order to procure the maximum information — without getting snagged in sticky arguments. As useful as this sort of "objectivity" can be, I'm never entirely comfortable with the kind of withholding it entails.

Halverson was on to me, however. When I thanked him for his time and cooperation, promising that if I quoted him he would receive a preview draft of the manuscript for fact and quote checking, he said, "You mean that's all?"

"Well, yes. That's all I need to know at the present time."

In a tone that was somehow both contentious and companionable, Halverson asked, "you mean we aren't going to get into it?"

So we got into it, and the ensuing two hours of much more personal discussion were at turns truly exploratory and maddeningly circular. Halverson — who prefers not to be labeled a "fundamentalist" because of the word's "anti-intellectual connotations in the popular media" — returned again and again to the Bible as his standard against which all ideas and beliefs must be judged. I once accused him of tautological thinking: "You keep saying that the Bible is true because it's true."

"No," he countered, "it's true because it fits reality."

Since I can claim no significant degree of Biblical scholarship, I had no effective counterargument save the observation that the Bible has inspired a vast array of Christian practices, which obviously do not reflect a whole and seamless picture of reality. Halverson himself agrees with the Spiritual Counterfeit Project's characterization of Christian Science, Mormonism, and Jehovah's Witnesses as "mainline cults" that distort the Gospel. These distortions arise, he contends, from Christians misinterpreting the Word. I then told Halverson that I had the feeling other kinds of Christians might say the same thing about his perspective, leaving the innocent observer with the question: Which Christian am I to believe?

For his part, Halverson seemed genuinely concerned that I had no infallible sense of truth. He sounded almost sad when he asked, "You mean to tell me that you're never really sure of what's true?"

"Not absolutely," I responded. I told him I had some solid assumptions by which I live every day. But my experience as a spirituallyinclined journalist has convinced me that all my assumptions are vulnerable to new information. To me it seems dishonest to assert absolute certainty. Faith, I argued, is the practical extension of one's spiritual assumptions in the face of an uncertain and possibly illusory world. For Halverson, it was clear that faith meant defense of the Gospel as he understands it, and stewardship of a very real world as it plainly appears. So much uncertainty on my part could only be the symptom of a mind that has not accepted Christ as its savior.

For me, the most poignant moment of our dialogue came as we were discussing the efficacy of A Course in Miracles as a problem-solving stratagem. Surprisingly, Halverson admitted that a Course student and a Bible student might come to similarly ethical decisions about moral dilemmas in the short term, but that Course students would be misled in the long run — because, he explained, "the Bible tells us that Satan will present himself disguised as an angel of light." I replied that I thought the "long run" is eventually the sum of short-term events and decisions, each of which can be judged by the dictum, "By their fruits shall ye know them" — which appears in both the Bible and the Course.

I added that I thought the unique value of the Course is its experiential approach to the application of very big and difficult metaphysical concepts in our everyday life and consciousness. "The Course repeatedly suggests that there are only two emotions: love and fear," I told Halverson, "and that one of them is useless and not even real. Are you willing to consider the possibility that, ultimately speaking, 'there is nothing to fear'?"

Halverson's reply was a quite serious warning about the agent of evil he believes to be loose in our world. "Are you willing to consider," he replied, "that there most certainly is?"

##   
The barrage of fear

As I write this several weeks later, Halverson's assumption certainly seems supported by the news of the day. A cargo door on an aging airliner tears loose high above the Pacific, sending several people to their deaths. One or two bodies, it is suspected, were sucked into the jet engines. Scientists report that the ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere continues to accelerate, although urban residents may enjoy some degree of protection by virtue of the interference from smog. The choice, it seems, is between skin cancer and lung cancer. Here in tolerant northern California, a controversy erupts over whether white supremacist skinheads will be allowed to hold an "Aryan Woodstock" on private land. (The judge rules that they may gather, but curiously bans any music.) And half a world away, a religious fundamentalist sentences a heretical novelist in Britain to death, resulting in the firebombing of a local bookstore.

So it seems that a reasonably aware citizen of the world with access to a newspaper really has no choice about considering whether there is something to fear. We are all barraged with fear, these days attached to global circumstances seemingly beyond our control. And the suspicion that a unified, malevolent intelligence manipulates all these circumstances conjures up an even deeper fear. One can easily imagine a satanic influence behind the religious insults and counterattacks between Salman Rushdie and the Ayatollah Khomeini, but is the Devil also behind the metal fatigue on a Boeing airliner? Is he in charge of killer earthquakes, while God gives us only beautiful sunsets? Or is it part of God's incomprehensible mercy to bring pain and death to the relatively innocent, the apparently evil, and the "saved" alike? Are we humans no more than pawns in a struggle between these titans of creation and destruction?

If so, this is not a metaphysics that inspires me toward growth, compassion, or a greater curiosity about the nature of reality. Any goals except immediate, maximum security and personal comfort seem senseless in this view. While this may sound simplistic, I think it's exactly this "get mine while I can" perspective that operates very powerfully in our society at an unconscious level. It has a lot to do with what we've made of capitalism, and it has inarguably contaminated the message of contemporary Christian fundamentalists. That several of them have recently been confronted by their internal contradictions gives at least some hope for the corrective capacity of Christianity. Televangelist Jim Bakker may be a slow learner, but he has nonetheless experienced firsthand a conflict within his consciousness that a "godless" capitalist like Donald Trump likely has not — simply because Trump doesn't ever have to reconcile "the art of the deal" with any avowed higher purpose. (In a recent interview, Trump allowed that he really doesn't believe in heaven or hell, but he is pretty sure that we all go somewhere after death. "For the life of me," he admitted to the reporter, "I don't know where that is.")

The contention that there is nothing to fear is much less common as a worldly modus operandi, but it is hardly a novel idea. It's a factor in the stunts of daredevils, who face down death for the sake of a record, public notoriety, or the simple highs of sensation. However banal they may appear, such stunts do contain the germ of a spiritual choice: the voluntary denial of fear for the sake of proving that the normal boundaries of physicality can be transcended by the power of intent. This is one way of exercising fearlessness. This is why a Harry Houdini or Evel Knievel can command fascination; we are less impressed by their specialized training than by their "daring the devil" — or God — to punish them for attempting superhuman feats. They are classic examples of Jung's puer aeternus, the eternal youth who seeks to break earthly bonds by challenging earthly fears.

But a more useful understanding of this concept paradoxically arrives just as fear seems ubiquitous, mighty, and unavoidable. As we approach a new millennium, the likelihood of surviving beyond it is dimmed by the destructive potential of our nuclear weaponry, our reckless consumption of limited natural resources, and the pollution resulting from our hyperactive industrialism. But the world cannot now hope that everything will be all right when the "enemy" is vanquished. We are faced everywhere with the collective consequences of human decisions, and assigning our errors to the influence of Satan strikes me as yet another way to increase our sense of hopelessness.

After all, if Satan's been so successful thus far, what's to stop him now? Especially since those who recognize his actions see him in countless different disguises, almost always worn by anyone but themselves. In a recent conversation about fundamentalism, philosopher Jacob Needleman remarked to me, "If anything, the chief work of the Devil is making people imagine they know how to recognize him." I would venture to guess that the Devil is made most uneasy by those who know how to use a mirror.

Clearly, placing blame on mysterious, malevolent, and exterior agents is, in itself, increasingly destructive in a time of genuinely global crises. The growing necessity of transferring our loyalty from the personal to the collective immediately alters the way we perceive our problems. If we're all in this together, then it becomes impractical to accuse anyone in particular of being inspired or led by evil. So we're led abruptly to the paradoxical consideration that the only agent of evil in the world may be fear itself — an emotion that all of us experience. Thus it becomes critically important to understand the nature of fear as it arises within ourselves, so that we can determine whether we can control, reduce, or even eliminate its destructive effects. This requires real intimacy with fear — a discipline that most of us prefer to leave to daredevils.

##   
Fear vs. the objects of fear

It has been observed, most notably by Carl Jung, that conventional religious practice serves largely to protect people from the frights, disorientation, and surrender inherent in firsthand spiritual experience. A popular saying puts it this way: "Religion is for those afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there."

Despite its unfriendliness to religion, mainstream science has colluded in this process by discounting inner experience, such as dreams and visions, as meaningless brain wave activity or "paranormal" phenomena undeserving of serious research. In modern America, "the good life" picks up where religion and science leave off, inundating us with a wide variety of often mindless entertainments that stave off the fear of being left alone with nothing to do. Bereft of religious beliefs, scientific reassurances, or compelling distractions, the average person faces the mystery and chaos of the self with confusion, growing anxiety, and finally terror. Unaware that the terror is a doorway to a changed existence with a profound sense of purpose, one can mistake for salvation any opportunity to escape from this great fear. But all such opportunities merely delay the inevitable, perhaps for a lifetime. The first step in facing fear — a step which may have to be repeated countless times in different situations — is to recognize the difference between fear and the object of fear. The failure to make this seemingly obvious distinction is the source of endless confusion. One way out of that confusion is to see that we are all afraid of different things. One might say that all our fears stem from the inevitability of personal, physical annihilation, but even that is not necessarily accurate. Some people, I among them, may fear prolonged or crippling pain more than death.

On a personal, everyday level, I think we all engage in a wealth of subtle, semi-conscious maneuvers to stave off more specific terrors that actually serve as building blocks of our ego-identities. These terrors can be highly personalized, driving us into more or less extreme behaviors that make us inexplicable to people who do not share our particular fears, but are driven by their own.

In her book The Enneagram, Helen Palmer gives a remarkably clear digest of nine personality types derived from their characteristic behaviors. Common to all types, Palmer says, are three chief subtypes that determine the "flavor" of their characteristic concerns and expressions. They are: the social subtype, driven to establish or fit in with a group or institution; the sexual or one-to-one subtype, characterized by the tendency to identify primarily with intimate relationships; and the self-preservation subtype, concerned chiefly with personal survival. While all of us experience these concerns, one or another tends to predominate in most individuals. Thus, we will tend to assume that everyone places the same emphasis on our own particular fixation. In any relationship, such unspoken assumptions concerning what another person cares about the most can cause considerable confusion and perplexing disagreement.

During the last three years, I have watched the gradual uncovering of my own self-preservation fixation with all the anxiety of a nuclear power technician witnessing the uncovering of a reactor core. The pure, uncontrolled power of a root terror can seem too hot to handle, and usually it is indeed submerged by the evasions and compensations of the everyday personality. But there can come a time when, as a result of physical illness, psychological crisis, or conscious choice, one's "emergency core cooling system" can no longer inhibit the internal reactive process that drives one's fixation.

Personally, I experienced illness, crisis, and choice as an evolutionary sequence. Because my physical malaise — eventually diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) — resisted identification in its early stages, I was forced to consider psychological and spiritual causes that I would not have explored had modern medicine provided me with a quick, miraculous cure. In spiritual terms, my illness was triggered by a lifelong confusion of purpose: I did not know whether I should serve God or myself. More precisely, I had always harbored a secret desire to serve God somehow but was certain that I couldn't make a living at it — and that I'd open myself up to a lot of ridicule if I announced such a goal while retaining a professional identification as a journalist. (After all, some of the people who made the loudest noises about serving God did some of the stupidest, most self-serving, and cruelest things around.) In a very real sense, self-preservation and service were opposed in my mind.

Nowadays I tell people that I was initiated to a genuine spiritual path because my stomach left me no choice. According to another useful personality typology — the Jungian system that identifies four primary functions of feeling, intellect, sensation, and intuition — I am a feeling type, who has made my unlucky belly the repository for all the emotions that were otherwise inexpressible in my first three decades of life. Eventually that made for an unholy, indigestible mess down there, and when the physical organ reached its limit for storage of emotions, I was forced to begin dealing with them consciously, by remembering them, witnessing their arousal within myself, and meticulously considering their meaning. This is a process of selfawareness that I still work on assiduously today, and I believe that process to be the only real and lasting cure for CFS — and possibly some other autoimmune diseases as well. As modern medicine slowly embraces meaning, I think this kind of understanding will become more useful and widespread.

"To be fatigued is to be dis-spirited," suggests the Course, "but to be inspired is to be in the spirit. To be egocentric is to be dis-spirited, but to be self-centered in the right sense is to be inspired or in spirit. The truly inspired are enlightened and cannot abide in darkness."

##   
Following an unlucrative bliss

With my decision to pick up the Course in 1985, I began raising the stakes on my old personality in ways that I've only recently begun to understand. The Course repeatedly suggests that there is no need to "search" for meaning, as if it resided in exotic locales like the Himalayas, because the creative love of God resides within His creations. So our real work consists of identifying and removing "the obstacles to the awareness of love's presence" within ourselves. Thus the seeker is on "a journey without distance to a goal that has never changed."

This poetic language doesn't fully prepare one for the rigor and raw anxiety of facing the obstacles to the awareness of love's presence — and that may be intentional. Informed in full beforehand of the primitive accommodations available for spiritual travelers along this journey without distance, most people would probably not sign up for the trip.

To make a long story shorter, I've discovered that some of my greatest terrors have arisen in the wake of my most serious commitments. Chief among these was the decision, less than a year ago, to commit fully to my work as a spiritually inclined journalist, to which I had previously given a part-time, half-hearted involvement. This kind of decision has been nobly called "following one's bliss," which again is poetic language for the kind of decision that usually (if not always) plants one squarely against the flow of a society built on purely economic ethics. In the first year of my undertaking, I found myself experiencing not only unprecedented inspiration and productivity, but also poverty unmatched in my lifetime. The stress of that dissonance has unmasked the face of my self-preservation terror.

Two kinds of experience, which occurred several times in different ways, began to give me a key to the puzzle of fear. One was the observation that the worst kind of terror — a clammy, nauseating wave of fear for the morrow that would literally awaken me in the middle of the night — literally arose from my stomach. It was a physical symptom first, then an emotion without words, and then a thought I could articulate without actually understanding its logic. But I realized that the fear began inside me, at a private moment when I was neither starving nor about to be thrown out by a wrathful landlord. The fear felt not only familiar and habitual, but at times ancient. It was not a novel, instinctive, defensive reaction to the situation at hand, but rather a throwing-out, or projection, of an emotion that was somehow always there within me, awaiting a target.

The other kind of experience had to do with the fact that my terror was never consistent. If I was worrying about the rent, for instance (always a favorite), I could be obsessed for one day, terrified in the middle of the night, and indifferent it about the next day — while the actual circumstances had not changed in any way. So again it was made clear to me that I was not responding to an endangering situation with a "natural" reaction, but rather viewing a collection of circumstances through the perspective of my rising and ebbing fears.

The repetition of these two kinds of experience eventually led me to the intellectual realization that my terror never did me any good. Fear is never creative or instructive. We think that young children must learn to be afraid of a hot stove, for instance, or of cars rushing by on the street, but in fact they can be educated about physical dangers with information rather than fear. Until children are capable of understanding the information, they must be protected from such dangers, of course — but indoctrinating children with fear even before they can handle information is nothing but punishment. It is this kind of punishment — which directly propagates ignorance — that I believe we are all in the habit of doling out to ourselves. It is, in fact, the way of the world.

##   
Facing a cruel god

After one of my dark nights of the soul — or of the stomach, to be exact — I half-awoke in exhaustion and sat up in bed to review the Course lesson that suggests "there is no cruelty in God and none in me." In the commentary following this meditation is a description of fear as an idol, a "cruel god" made of stone whose blood-smeared lips breathe fire. It continues:

Yet do not think that fear is the escape from fear. Let us remember what the text has stressed about the obstacles to peace. The final one... a seeming obstacle with the appearance of a solid block, impenetrable, fearful and beyond surmounting, is the fear of God Himself. Here is the basic premise which enthrones the thought of fear as god. For fear is loved by those who worship it, and love appears to be invested now with cruelty.

Where does the totally insane belief in gods of vengeance come from? Love has not confused its attributes with those of fear. Yet must the worshippers of fear perceive their own confusion in fear's "enemy"; its cruelty as now a part of love. And what becomes more fearful than the Heart of Love itself? The blood appears to be upon His Lips; the fire comes from Him. And He is terrible above all else, cruel beyond conception, striking down all who acknowledge Him to be their God.

The choice you make today is certain. For you look for the last time upon this bit of carven stone you made, and call it god no longer. . . . (ACIM Workbook Lesson 170)

This was pretty heavy reading first thing in the morning, so I put the book aside lapsed into a half-dream in which I found myself facing a vast stone wall covered with Mayan-style carvings of enormous, brooding faces. I was dressed in full military gear, and my back was against another wall, so that I was enclosed in a trench no more than six feet wide, perhaps fifty feet high and extending infinitely to either side. With all the suspensefulness of a bad sci-fi flick, it was apparent that the walls were inching inexorably together for the apparent purpose of crushing me alive. My weaponry was useless for defense in these circumstances.

At that point I became a little more awake, and was about to end the movie abruptly, but instead decided to consciously invent a resolution for the dream scenario. It was then that I realized I was so close to the stone faces that they no longer looked terrifying, or even like faces at all — all I could see were the deep indentations of the carvings. I realized that I could gain a foothold in these indentations, and rather rapidly I climbed up the stone wall and over the top. To my great surprise, I found there a vast, sunlit meadow that gave me a sense of peaceful rescue.

At this point I became fully awake and immediately thought, "Just another new age visualization." I might thus have cynically dismissed the dream had I not been intrigued by exactly what it meant to climb the carved faces of the stone idols. Then I realized that his was an apt metaphor for the process of examining my terrors. When circumstances required me to face the objects of my fear up close, these objects began to lose their power. What might look like a terrifying, scowling god at thirty feet looked like an intriguing pattern of sculpted lines at six feet. In the very details of my projected terror, I could find footholds to ascend it. Then I could understand there was nothing fearful living in the stone after all.

Of course, this does not solve the problem of why fear begins within me, or anyone, to start with. But it is an image that reminds me that curiosity and creativity reside there, too.

"There is nothing to fear," the Course suggests. It goes on to explain:

The presence of fear is a sure sign that you are trusting in your own strength. The awareness that there is nothing to fear shows that somewhere in your mind, though not necessarily in a place you recognize as yet, you have remembered God, and let His strength take the place of your weakness. The instant you are willing to do this there is indeed nothing to fear. (ACIM Workbook Lesson 48)

The puzzle of how I can be myself in everyday situations, and yet not depend on my own strength, is not one I've figured out yet. I suspect, however, that it is less likely to be resolved intellectually than by the continuing process of surrendering fear — and the selfpunishment it entails — and seeing where that leads.

As a journalist, I find that this process actually increases my curiosity and fairness. Five years ago, I would have had nothing to ask of an evangelical Christian like Dean Halverson, because I would have judged him beforehand as unworthy of a hearing, much less my personal involvement in a spirited discussion. Probably I would also have had some unrecognized fear of his judgment upon me. But now I can respect and engage him, without converting to his beliefs or condemning him for them. It seems important to remember that we are altogether something more than our beliefs. I don't share Halverson's particular fears, and I wouldn't ask him to share mine. I think it is better that we share our mutual concern for the world's welfare, and at last try to trust that the strength of God will suffice when we falter. How each of us contacts or discovers that strength is a personal matter. For me, it presently requires climbing the stone face of fear.
- 7 -

# Homeless

Originally published in THE SUN in September 1989

I come to this essay as a sort of benediction for a part of my life just passed: thirteen years in my second home, a place that grew so comfortable that I could not imagine ever leaving. When I tried to explain my none-too-rational motivations for departing, a friend remarked, "Sometimes God shows the way by closing doors instead of opening them."

This became a memorable metaphor for my process of change: all the doors behind and to either side of me had slammed shut during the last two years. Ahead, I could see or sense only one at a time, silently swinging open to reveal at least enough light to be worth following. Americans are supposed to move because they're following opportunity; I was moving because of an inner voice saying simply, "Go now," and offering no explanation or financial aid. This is where what Joseph Campbell calls "following your bliss" will get you: deep into the territory of uncertainty.

To be honest, I'd done such a thing before, when I left my native home in North Carolina at age 22 to bicycle out west and discover the dreamland of sunlight and tolerance, California. I had much less an idea of where I was going than I did this time; all I knew was that had to get out of the South, and California was as far as one could go while staying on the American mainland. Because we had friends in Los Angeles, my partner and I settled on southern California as our destination, but somewhere in the middle of our trek we rerouted to the San Francisco Bay area, which became my second home. Now at age 35, I've arrived at my long-forgotten goal, two hours south of Los Angeles in a town of surfers and meditators — blessed by a paradisiacal Mediterranean climate — called Encinitas. (The Spanish word means "little live oaks.") In my best state of mind, I know exactly why I am here: to write more, to meditate more, to let emerge from myself a new potential that has been frustrated by habits and attitudes accumulated in Berkeley.

In another state of mind, I dream that I have a brother who looks very much like me. (In actuality, my would-have-been brother was miscarried by my mother after an auto accident.) He is savagely attacking me and my sister. I resist him gently as long as I can, but it becomes apparent that he intends to do us real harm. I grab a kitchen knife and sink it into the underside of his forearm, sickened by the feel of the blade lodging in his flesh. He stops his attack, and stares at his arm with a schizophrenic half-smile. I begin to apologize: "I'm so sorry, I didn't know else to do to stop you." He strangely replies, "It's OK. Actually, it feels pretty good."

Awakened by this dream a few days after I unpacked in Encinitas, I reflected on the tendency of the unconscious to exaggerate feelings that are suppressed in waking life. It was not too long before I grasped what I'd been ignoring, perhaps out of sheer necessity, while in my adventurous and super-efficient moving state of mind: this hurts, AND it feels pretty good. A week earlier, I had wept intermittently for the first two hours of piloting a rented truck away from Berkeley; then I had abruptly shifted into an "on the road" buoyancy. Sadness and elation had continued to alternate, but the dream called my attention to the mysterious necessity to merge them, however contradictory they seemed. This, AND that, together; my "brother" could feel it. He was wounded, but the wound had abruptly cured a very bad attitude.

This is the shock of growth; in plants, it is called root shock, when a young flower or sapling must adjust to new soil because it has outgrown its first potting. It is also the shock of homelessness, when one must leave the old for the new. And without a doubt, it is the feeling of the birth trauma, when the body leaves the womb to become an independent, lonely being. This, and that: the pain and the glory of self-awareness. But virtually all spiritual traditions suggest that humanity suffers from an even greater leave-taking: our departure from the Kingdom of God, wherever that is, and whatever it might mean.

##   
Fire in the house

Housing is a kind of secondary body, a constructed means for being at home on the Earth — since evolution has somehow seen fit to make humans, alone among all the animals, unable to nest comfortably in nature. As a child I remember seeing snakes in the grass, fish in the lake, and birds in the trees; then I would turn to our big white house on the hill and wonder, why do we need a house anyway? When I was about five that house burned down entirely. Our dog, a fluffy Spitz who liked to sleep in the pump house underneath the light bulb that kept our water from freezing in the wintertime, somehow managed to push his blanket up against that bulb late one night, thus starting the fire. So said the firemen. The dog survived. I was awakened by someone who grabbed my arm and pulled me so hard that I never got on my feet till I was outside; my father had rescued me while my mother crawled under the smoke to get to the telephone. My two sisters had been awakened first when the three small windows on the front door, about ten feet from their own closed door, exploded from the heat.

For a while after that our home was a trailer perched on the hillside; I've seen pictures of it but can't recall it. My mother says that I had to be sedated at night for weeks, because tree branches that scraped on the roof of the trailer would remind me of the fire and I'd wake up screaming. I remember none of this. My memories of the fire are entirely pleasant: We all went to the neighbors' house in the middle of the night — a truly extraordinary event —, and drank hot chocolate and watched a big fire. A few years later, when we lived in an exact replica of the house that had burned, my mother caught me setting fire to my bedspread. It scared her so much that she didn't spank me; she simply stopped speaking to me for a couple days. All this I remember vividly. I remember that the box of matches represented a fascinating question: How much fire did there have to be before it was out of control? What was the most fire I could put out? It was a scientific experiment, really, driven by an emotional fixation well beyond my comprehension.

I have a much better handle on the issue of Promethean control than I used to. But fire will probably always be a part of what I look for in a home; I love woodstoves and fireplaces. Something that once made me homeless is now something I prefer to have in my home.

It makes me wonder: Can I look around my room and see mementos of other past traumas? Is anyone's home entirely protective, or is a home partially a library of our pains? What makes us feel comfortable may be more complex than we usually think. Home is a place to call our own, but the need for it reflects our discomfort at being on the Earth in the first place. We try to create a place where we belong, because most of us cannot truly belong, beyond the artifice of a camping trip, in Mother Nature. She seems to have expelled us as a species, at some point, like our own mothers expelled each one of us.

##   
The spiritual danger of homelessness

In a recent interview, Robert Hayes, attorney and founder of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said:

There's an incredible danger to homelessness. . . . There's a spiritual danger. Who the hell wants to raise a child in a society that leaves weak people on the streets? What is it doing to you and me to go home at night past prone bodies sleeping on sidewalks? And what does it do to our sense of national purpose and self-confidence? How in the world do we think we can beat acid rain or create the technology to beat cancer or AIDS? We can't build housing, we can't put bricks together to create places for folks to live.

The discomfort that people in this country feel when they look upon other people who appear to be homeless is more than economic guilt, I believe. At some level we realize that our society is throwing a significant number of its members out of their refuge, out where they must face not only the most basic challenges of survival, but also the basic spiritual terror of not belonging. Robert Hayes suggests that many of the people we identify as homeless are actually those who are homeless and mentally ill — perhaps ten percent of the total. "Most homeless people you pass by," Hayes points out, "you can't tell they're homeless, because they're going to do everything possible to hide that for reasons of survival.... If you don't look homeless, you can sit in a coffee shop for the price of a cup of coffee through a cold day...."

But if you can have a home — especially if you can buy a home — you can look and feel as if you belonged. You have a private and quiet place, some kind of claim staked against the wilderness of simply being here. You can escape the cold without the perpetual company of strangers, without prevailing on the kindness of a coffee shop cashier. You can even sit at home and look mentally ill.

There's a postcard I see for sale locally, that shows a splendid Southern California sunset with the words, "Just Another Shitty Day in Paradise." This is a card that someone homeless could send and really mean, I suppose.

This paradise is an area where real estate speculation is a much-touted route to success. The July 1989 issue of California magazine shows an exultant man on the cover, "The Man Who Would Be Trump": Donald T. Sterling, who owns much of the real estate in Beverly Hills. "If the buying and selling of human shelter is southern California's most popular sport," writer Tom Huth opines, "Donald T. Sterling is a champion at it.... He bought $1 billion of real estate back in the Sixties and Seventies while other men were busy learning how to cry."

The primary reason that real estate speculation is the area's favorite sport, of course, is that this is an area where it's relatively pleasant to be year-round. The natural environment exacts a minimum of suffering from the body; the reminders of our mysterious exile from nature are mild. So paradise becomes a hot property, to be divided and subdivided into as many homes as possible. And the successful real estate speculator owns more of paradise than anyone else; therefore, he does not have to learn to cry. He is well-insulated — or so we might like to believe — from the fundamental homesickness that has overtaken another man, an anonymous man with cracked and dirty feet, sleeping on a bench at the beach, not appreciating the glorious southern California sunset.

##   
Home inside

In a review of a Bruce Springsteen concert in 1988, Joel Selvin wrote:

[Springsteen] carefully explained to the crowd that the song ["Born to Run"] represented "a nice romantic idea" of two kids running off in the night looking for some place to call home. "But I've come to realize," he said, "that home is inside."

Are we ever at home in the body? In my copy of Bhagavad-Gita As It Is, there's an illustration depicting a section of movie film. In each frame, a man with knee-length red pants is running. The caption says, "The body changes, but the soul remains the same. Although there are many movie frames, when seen consecutively they appear as one picture. Similarly, although one's body is changing at every second, it appears to be the same body."

It's a startling thought: one's body is changing at every second. And yet we look in the mirror and call ourselves by names we've had for years. We print business cards that give our address and telephone number, but who will answer the phone at that number tomorrow? The same man who was running in red pants yesterday? How much of us stays the same from day to day? Why do we not change so much as to be unrecognizable? Who exactly is trying to be at home in this body?

Every spiritual perspective I can think of finds the body problematic. It must always be disciplined, or repressed, or seen through. "I am not a body," states A Course in Miracles as an affirmative meditation. "I am free." Does this mean that to feel at home in the body is to be a spiritual prisoner? Are we ever at home in the body?

In the I Ching, the Chinese Book Of Changes (Wilhelm/Baynes edition), the judgment for hexagram #52 reads: "Keeping still. Keeping his back still so that he no longer feels his body..." and the commentary explains:

"The back is named because in the back are located all the nerve fibers that mediate movement. If the movement of these spinal nerves is brought to a standstill, the ego, with its restlessness, disappears as it were. When a man has thus becomes calm, he may turn to the outside world. He no longer sees in it the struggle and tumult of individual beings, and therefore he has that true peace of mind which is needed for understanding the great laws of the universe and for acting in harmony with them. Whoever acts from these deep levels makes no mistakes."

This is obviously a prescription for meditation, and it directly suggests that the body itself is our restlessness, a thing always seeking a home that it cannot find because it is homelessness incarnate. So it must be stilled, by a process often called "going within." Then we, like Bruce Springsteen, may find that our only real home here is our own awareness. How many of us are never at home simply because we never come to a full stop?

##   
A burial at home

The Course states:

Perhaps you think it is your childhood home that you would find again. The childhood of your body, and its place of shelter, are a memory now so distorted that you merely hold a picture of a past that never happened. (ACIM Workbook Lesson 182)

Before I made the trip from Berkeley to Encinitas, I went to North Carolina to see my family. Behind me were weeks of packing up one life and preparing for another, deciding what belongings and symbols of my second home would be useful in my third. Behind also were hours of long talks — with a lover, close friends, and others — about the transitions in our relationships. I was leaving home, but as part of a web of relationships I was also changing other people's experience of home. It was difficult to explain my decision. The part that felt like destiny, like a strong, sure, if unexpected change of current, was almost impossible to articulate. I was still recovering from a long illness that had decimated my professional life, so I often fell back on business failure as a rational, if reductive, explanation. It was harder to explain that my departure from a familiar home represented a death for some long-held ideas about myself.

So it seemed fitting that one of my first undertakings on native soil was a burial — that of an ancient family dog who died the same day I arrived. The next day my father and I went out behind the garden where the family pets have always been buried. I dug a hole while my father brought the body up the driveway in a red wheelbarrow. Bloated, the dog was a tight fit in my quick dig; when I tugged on him to get his legs in, tufts of white hair came out freely in my hand. I thought about how the Buddhists meditate on corpses to liberate themselves from bodily fixation, but my feeling was that the old dog was returning home — back to the soil from which all earthly beings have drawn themselves up. Walking dirt, all of us.

My Baptist sister, who originally owned the dog, called and suggested we "say a few words" over the remains, but the ceremony was much more Zenlike in the end: no words at all, just the filling-in of red clay soil, tamping it down, and covering the grave with large coils of insulated copper wire (my father is a retired electrician). The purpose was to protect the grave from investigatory digging by a new pup on the premises, but I thought of the coiled wires as heavy-duty wreaths. This somehow reminded me of working with my father and uncle during my high-school summers. I remembered how my father treated cuts on his hands with light machine oil and black electrician's tape, which he considered standard first-aid. I remembered crawling under suburban houses to drag connecting wires from the circuit-breakers to the various rooms. Once, when the power to a particular house was turned back on, it happened that flipping the switch for the garage light turned on the bulbs in the master bathroom. "Cub tracks!" cried my uncle, a call that always meant my novice handiwork had bespoken itself again.

So this is home, too: a dense latticework of memories that connect to one another by a thousand different roots, sinking vaguely into the antiquity of birth and, for all I know, veining through previous lives as well. Just visiting an old home place causes the memories to float up, reminding us of who we used to be. And when we have worked sufficiently to disentangle ourselves from such memories, another homelessness ensues. Each new stage of maturity entails some degree of escape from the patterns of the past — and so growing up is necessarily a kind of wandering into the unknown.

As if I needed any more symbolism for my changes, outside my room at my parents' home was a nest of young birds, balanced precariously on a narrow wooden ledge just underneath the outdoor ceiling of the front porch. They grew visibly day by day during the two weeks I was there, and about two days before my departure I woke one morning and looked out the window to see all four tiny birds fluffed up in the nest, shouldering each other about, as if they were ready to leap but didn't know how. My parents and I wondered whether the young birds would literally be pushed out of the nest by their mother, but their graduation happened differently. When my father went out the front door with a camera, they suddenly flew all at once. Apparently they did not wish their leaving home to become a media event.

##   
Self-realization in the surf

In Autobiography Of A Yogi, Paramahansa Yogananda wrote:

The Hindu scriptures teach that man is attracted to this particular Earth to learn, more completely in each successive life, the infinite ways in which the Spirit may be expressed through, and dominant over, material conditions. East and West are learning this great truth in different ways, and should gladly share with each other their discoveries.

Since 1936, Encinitas has been the site of a Self-Realization Fellowship retreat, built for Paramahansa Yogananda by an American devotee. Yogananda was one of the first Indian gurus to bring Eastern spiritual traditions to the West, and apparently one of the last to be widely respected in this country. The Self-Realization Fellowship still operates a meditation-by-mail lesson service for those studying Yogananda's brand of kriya yoga, and operates the local ashram as a retreat for devotees in what the teacher called "the Encinitas setting of perfect beauty."

I discovered Encinitas by accident. I had been visiting friends on an exploratory trip to San Diego, expecting that city to be my southern California destination, when I drove northward along the coast just to look around. I was in Encinitas for no more than a few minutes before I felt inexplicably at home. I wandered onto the grounds of the Self-Realization retreat, where an exquisitely maintained meditation garden is kept open to the public from 9 to 5 daily. I took a seat on a bench atop a cliff overlooking the vast Pacific, feeling myself overtaken by a mood of victorious exploration, like a conqueror laying claim to new territory by virtue of having gotten lost there. This giddiness is surely the American heritage.

Within five minutes I was deluged by tears that did not abate for another twenty minutes. Now I felt overwhelmed by my recent defeats and departures, and it seemed that this garden was a safe place to be submerged in that feeling, and then come up for new air. I found myself repeating quietly, "If this is what you want, if this is what you want," not at all sure of whom I was speaking to.

A month later, I found a comfortable studio apartment, a little refuge against homelessness, in my first hour of looking in Encinitas. I did not even have to place my truckful of belongings in storage before moving in. It was such an unprecedented piece of good luck, considering my material difficulties of the previous few years, that it felt eerily prearranged.

For most of us, I suppose, home is where life seems easiest. Unless we are adhering to some kind of learning discipline that requires life in a dormitory or monastery, we do not put up with too many built-in discomforts in our home. The discomforts built into life on Earth — which Hinduism suggests is a learning discipline in itself — are plenty. I do not expect always to be at home here, nor perhaps for very long. My need for fire in my home place seems at least temporarily replaced by the need for the ocean nearby, within view of my door, within a five-minute walk. I like to stand on the cliffs here and watch the young surfers float their way out beyond the first breakers, to a place where they can sit on their surfboards and, like meditators, face the infinite. They are waiting for waves, for the rolling surges that rise up out of the stillness and yield a few seconds of ecstatic acceleration. Southern California is a land of comfort, promise, and confusion.

Everyone wants to live here. Everyone wants to park a perfect sports car on the beach here. A few miles south of Encinitas, in ritzy Del Mar, the mayor is suggesting that color-coded flags be posted on the beach to warn the denizens of paradise on those days when they should "restrict activity" because the air is unsafe to be inhaled in large quantities.

##   
An endless search for home

A Course in Miracles states:

We speak today for everyone who walks this world, for he is not at home. He goes uncertainly about in endless search, seeking in darkness what he cannot find, not recognizing what it is he seeks. A thousand homes he makes, yet none contents his restless mind. He does not understand he builds in vain. The home he seeks can not be made by him. There is no substitute for Heaven. All he ever made was hell. (ACIM Workbook Lesson 182)

This judgment sounds harsh, but it is perhaps the only one that leads to a sense of home within our homelessness, and true direction within our restlessness. In our unreflective state, none of us is at home, and we are driven by desires that lead us one way and then another. We think we will be settled when we have enough money, or the right relationship, or a nice home, or $2 billion worth of real estate. If brought into contact with spiritual principles, we may look them over and say they're very nice — or crazy — ideas, and then go back to the daily, deadly search for gratification in the world of the body, the world of things. It is terrifying to look in the mirror and realize that our identification with the form we see is the first and grandest error of our lives.

Paradoxically, it is the error we cannot completely undo as long as we are here. Hating that error can be as painful and unproductive as never perceiving it. But we can always begin carefully unlearning it, thereby learning the "infinite ways in which the Spirit may be expressed through . . . material conditions."

One of those infinite ways is surely a practical compassion for ourselves, for everyone, within the context of our spiritual wandering. Robert Hayes has said that our collective inability to care for the homeless is merely a lack of "political will," a will that ebbed during the administration of President Reagan, who publicly stated that he believes many homeless people choose their condition. Metaphysically speaking, that is an interesting contention; but I suspect it was spoken as a means of reality-avoidance, not an exploration of reality's deeper levels.

We all try to avoid the deep experience of homelessness that the Course and other spiritual disciplines suggest we must face to realize our true purpose here. Political will rises from our fundamental experience of that purpose. If we can face the truth about how it feels to be here on Earth, always searching for an elusive home, then we may begin to see how the plight of the man sleeping on the bench is not unlike the plight of the successful real estate speculator. Neither has found a permanent refuge. Both must look every day for a better one than they presently have. They may not understand that they are driven by the same suffering, of which their respective poverty and wealth are only symptoms.

Perhaps the only home here is found in the discipline of remembering that we are more alike than we appear, and that "wanting it all" brings only isolation. Seeking constantly after all the things, places, and sensations that ultimately do not save or satisfy us is a stultifying and even suicidal experience. It is a process opposed to genuine learning and growth. Sifting through the mysterious material world, looking for the elusive reminders of our home in the spirit, is the process that gradually invokes peace, grace, and compassion in our lives. This is our real work, which rewards us with a sense of belonging, however temporary, in our bodies on this Earth.

UPDATE: Since this article was published, I returned to northern California, first in Berkeley for twelve years, and then my current residence in Napa for the last five.

Homelessness remains a chronic social and economic issue in the United States, one that is often pushed aside by the media in favor of more dramatic or appealing stories. The National Coalition for the Homeless remains an influential political lobby and direct-aid organization. See www.nationalhomeless.org.
\- 8 -

# Ending My Religion

Originally published in THE SUN in April 2002

I grew up in the hyper-Christian culture of Charlotte, North Carolina, within spitting distance of Jim and Tammy Bakker's illfated Praise the Lord Ministry and other evangelical fiefdoms too numerous to count. But because my mother believed in Faulkner and Steinbeck above all other gods, my upbringing was more literary than religious; for that, my gratitude to her knows no bounds.

By early adulthood, I had fallen in with a group of sardonic and proudly rational peers whose favorite response to the oft-posed question "Have you found Jesus Christ?" was "What? Have you Christians lost him again?" We scoffed at religion, figuring that quick wits and skepticism would get us through life far more effectively than piety and faith.

But a jaundiced eye will only take you so far. In my early thirties, ten years into my Berkeley, California, citizenship — and thus about as far from conventional religious beliefs as could be — I was laid low by chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). As it became clear that I would find no simple medical solution for my illness, I began to doubt all my assumptions about how the world worked and what I was doing here — in short, my entire concept of reality. That was just the inner damage; out in the "real world," I soon lost my livelihood, my home of six years, and several close, defining relationships.

They say there are no atheists in foxholes; I would add that there are not many with a long sojourn in a sickbed on their resume. The spiritual conversion experience that often visits those who have hit rock bottom due to illness, addiction, or depression can be looked at in two ways: either people crack under the pressure and take flight from their senses, or they crack under the pressure and catch a healing glimpse of a new reality. Reviewing my own experience over the past sixteen years, I would say that both perspectives are correct. You have to go a little nuts to begin looking at the world in a whole new way, and that style of seeing can have an authentic healing effect.

The danger of the conversion experience is that you may conclude that being perpetually unhinged is a requirement of being spiritual. Then you start thumbing your nose at all conventional forms of logic and common sense — and, before long, you've become an easy mark for a corrupt guru who needs unquestioning followers to bankroll and applaud him. Worse yet, you may become a guru yourself.

Because I began my adult life with some training in investigative journalism, I was never a good candidate for a wholesale religious conversion. To this day, I tend to respond to all extraordinary claims — whether they concern spiritual advancement, investment schemes, or political salvation — with an "Oh, really?" and an urge to uncover the shadow side of whatever good news is being foisted upon me. Early in my conversion experience, however, I realized that this healthy skepticism had become a poisonous cynicism, amplifying the chronic stress that had led to my collapse.

I appreciate that my skepticism also inoculated me against the foolishness that can waylay novices on the spiritual path: I never fell for a guru and thus never had to become disillusioned about one. Allowing myself to become a little nutty and irrational did open me up to certain mystical experiences that were genuinely healing. At the same time, keeping a critical eye on such experiences helped me to sort wishful thinking from actual outcomes, and to temper a renewed idealism with a practical realism.

These days, I believe that honoring our innumerable flaws and frailties is key to a sensible and sustainable spirituality. Such a downwardly mobile faith, however, is hardly ever discussed by gurus or promulgated in best-selling books. In fact, the most common and serious flaw of contemporary New Age thinking is the belief that human experience is somehow meant to be a brightly lit carnival of optimum health, perfect love, universal peace, and material wealth. If you are not yet experiencing an unlimited high of personal comfort and universal consciousness, says the New Age, then you soon will — right after the next meditation retreat, group hug, or synchronized mass prayer, which we can now participate in through e-mail.

But the fact is, we humans get sick and die; we hate each other and make war; and a great many of us are desperately poor and always will be. Those of us who have the luxury to contemplate our consciousness at expensive retreats and world healing conferences are the beneficiaries of an unjust economic system that reflects the truth of our mass consciousness far more than do our solemnly repeated affirmations. Herding our ancient, innately conflicted drives of fear, self-defense, and greed toward an oceanic altruism is certainly a worthy goal, but one toward which we make painfully slow progress, despite our best intentions.

I have always wanted to see a spiritual conference advertise that attendees will come away with an immeasurably small improvement in their consciousness — and only if they work exceptionally hard and pay exquisite attention to the proceedings. Admittedly, it wouldn't be very good marketing, but it would reflect the truth about how difficult it is to change ourselves. Human beings rarely get anything meaningful done over the weekend.

Despite my skeptical outlook, I believe in human and spiritual progress, because I've experienced substantial positive change in my own life and witnessed it in the lives of others. I would go so far as to say that the changes stemming from my spiritual awakening have been profound: I recovered from a serious illness, found meaningful work, and basically got over my grudge against the world.

In the years that followed, I became as religious a person as I think I could ever be, even becoming publicly identified with a particular path while studying and writing about a broad range of spiritual subject matter. I wrote three books and nearly a hundred magazine articles in a long effort to practice what I gamely identified as "the journalism of consciousness." (An evangelical Christian scholar I once interviewed characterized my work in pithier terms: right after I called him a "fundamentalist," he called me a "New Age reporter." Ouch.)

Oddly enough, the strong sense of spiritual guidance I developed is now steering me away from thinking, talking, or writing much about spirituality. Every new book in the field seems to say the same old thing, and every advertised workshop looks like a means to help people find ever-loftier rationalizations for maintaining their self-absorption. (Do we really need "the courage to be rich"?) Whereas I used to look forward to interviewing the latest wise man or woman, now I'm much more interested in talking to the average businessperson or the neighborhood soccer coach. I've grown more attracted to people whose spirituality is immanent or unconscious. I'd rather have a fleeting, wordless experience of the meaning of life than talk about it for hours on end. In short, it seems the time has come to end my religion.

##   
Shopping for truth

The "spiritual supermarket" that has blossomed in our culture over the last few decades has resulted in a wild mélange of teachings and gurus outside the religious mainstream. Each new popular teaching enjoys a brief vogue before being debunked in public, thence to retreat to its former anonymity with a small core group of true believers still intact. So it was with Werner Erhard's est and Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (now Osho in his publishing afterlife); so will it be with yoga, which is currently enjoying unprecedented popularity as a health regimen if not as a spiritual path. American culture dictates that muckraking journalists will soon begin exposing corrupt yoga masters and institutes, leading to some prominent yoga-is-bad-for-you articles and a consequent ebbing of the yogic tide. But many people's lives will have been changed for the better by yoga nonetheless, and its influence on our culture will persist.

Anyone who tries to understand esoteric paths needs to appreciate that even the strangest perspective will probably benefit someone, regardless of how silly or weird it looks to most of us. I have several good friends who swear by the positive, life-altering effects of est or the Forum, which I've always regarded as an overpriced workshop in remedial responsibility. I have a very intelligent and down-to-earth business associate who faithfully follows the Urantia Book, even though I find that enormous tome impenetrable to reading, much less a useful interpretation. And I know for sure that I have friends of considerable sophistication and proven loyalty who still question my sanity because I became involved with A Course in Miracles (ACIM).

For the uninitiated, the Course is a very long (twelve-hundred-plus pages) book providing a self-contained contemporary spiritual teaching that mixes Eastern metaphysics, Christian terminology, and mystical psychology, with more than a dash of creaky old Gnosticism tossed in for flavor. It offers both a lengthy philosophical discourse and an intensive built-in meditative workshop, in the form of a lesson-a-day workbook. The Course was written in secret during the late 1960s by a Columbia University psychologist named Helen Schucman, who professed to be ambivalent about religion. She claimed that she didn't understand what she was writing, and furthermore resented the seven-year task of recording ACIM, which she said had been dictated to her by a subconscious and decidedly mystical force. After the Course was published in 1976, Schucman rarely spoke about it in public and was never reconciled to its message of forgiveness and brotherhood. She died in 1981.

In fact, the book, which rolls on for hundreds of pages at a time in flawless iambic pentameter, claims its own spiritual authorship — namely that of the historical Jesus Christ speaking through a human channel to bring a corrected version of his original message to the world. Despite the great good that the Course has brought into my life, I've often wished Dr. Schucman had left the Jesus part out. I wish she had just admitted she was nuts.

If you're wondering why I'd ever confess to following the teachings of a book written by someone who heard voices and was possibly certifiable, my first defense is that there are some notable precedents for this kind of thing. Roger Walsh, an entirely respectable professor of philosophy and psychiatry at the University of California-Irvine — and a Course student himself — points out that the landscape of religious history is littered with disreputable visionaries: "Jesus was condemned as a common criminal; Lao-Tzu wandered off into the desert a total unknown; Confucius couldn't hold down a job; and Mohammed was a suspect camel driver on whom a lot of people waged war."

My second defense — admittedly more to the point — is that the Course showed up in my life when I was desperate for something that would heal me, and it worked. It did not work in the sense of being a magic mind-pill that took away all my physical aches and psychic pains. It worked in the sense of inspiring me to reorient my life, which I had fairly well wrecked by my early thirties. The challenges I faced included forgiving my parents (a major task), learning how to take care of my health, finding both a voice and a worthwhile purpose as a writer, and giving up the kneejerk bitterness that I'd come to believe was my emotional birthright.

As if all that were not enough, the Course also delivered exactly what it promised: the development of a reliable "inner voice" that has become my primary source of guidance. Before the Course, I can remember the torture I went through in making difficult decisions: weighing the pros and cons and coming to a rational conclusion independent of my gut feelings (which were usually dominated by an inarticulate fear). The results of this process were generally messy and sometimes cruel to myself and others. I often had to abandon my hard-won strategy for doing the right thing in favor of simply reacting against overwhelming and unexpected circumstances.

Although my current way of making decisions is hardly infallible, it is far more peaceful, instinctive, and responsive to the unpredictable factors that can affect any chosen course of action. Though I still weigh pros and cons and try to come to sensible conclusions, I never settle for a merely rational answer; I wait silently until a message of guidance comes to me — and it always does, in fairly short order and often with surprising specificity. Occasionally, it is a weird, unexplained directive: "Go into that store and wander around until you run into someone you know." (And someone familiar does show up.) But, more often, it is an essential confirmation of my own common sense: "Don't send that smartass e-mail to that editor; you'll regret it immediately!"

I think of this inner voice as "advanced intuition." By this, I do not mean that my intuition is better than anyone else's, only that it's far more reliable than what I used to have. I have no idea what the source of my inner voice is, and I feel no need to identify it. I certainly do not believe it is the voice of Jesus Christ, or a dead ancestor with a quavery Irish brogue, or a high-ranking Pleiadian sending me psychic data packets from a spaceship zipping betwixt the rings of Saturn (although that last notion would be especially fun).

Recently, my inner voice had a surprise in store when I was trying to decide what direction to take in writing about the Course itself. I awakened in the middle of a night in a hotel room before an ACIM conference, which I would be covering as a journalist, and experienced a strong sense of displacement, an out-of-sortsness that made me feel as if I should depart the premises immediately. I sat up in bed to clear my head and let my stomach calm down, and a communication of startling clarity surfaced in my mind, a distinct as a message in one of those eight-ball fortunetelling toys. The voice told me, "Your part is done now."

##   
Reporting on a new religion

If a typical Course student exists, I've never been one. From the beginning, I mixed my personal study of the teaching with a conscious effort to treat it as the subject of an ongoing investigation. I was consistently aware of being the first serious reporter on the scene. Before my work, most of what was written about the Course had come either from its teachers and promoters or from hostile critics. A smattering of superficial newspaper features cropped up in between, all with the same general angle: "Local Group Espouses Strange New Religion; Looks Harmless Enough."

My professional credentials as a journalist gained me almost immediate entree to the leading teachers of the Course: from the presidents of the two closely related foundations that own the copyright on the book and manage its far-flung translation program, to such popular freelance promulgators as Marianne Williamson and Jerry Jampolsky, whose books based on Course principles generated major spikes in sales of ACIM. Thus I had what most Course students do not: a comprehensive view of the politics of this nascent spiritual movement, which provided an intriguing counterpoint to my study of its teachings. I remember talking about this unique perspective with the late Rick Fields — my editor at Yoga Journal when I was a regular contributor in the late 90s. Rick had preceded me in this kind of work as an early chronicler of American Buddhism and was known for his classic history When the Swans Came to the Lake. "You get to be the first journalist on the scene of a new religion," Rick told me — and then, with a fraternal clap on my shoulder, he added, "Good luck!"

The discomfort of reporting on one's own spiritual path has been with me from the beginning. I don't believe that a so-called objective observer can do a thorough assessment of a profound teaching. You have to become "indoctrinated" to the extent that the teaching becomes ingrained, enabling you to grasp its meaning in a way that far surpasses an intellectual understanding of its major principles. From a journalistic point of view, however, becoming a follower to any degree compromises one's ability to report dispassionately. And true believers in a spiritual tradition often look with suspicion upon a journalist proposing to present a balanced view of their path, regardless of whether that journalist also claims to be a serious initiate.

When I wrote my book The Complete Story of the Course (since revised and published as Understanding A Course in Miracles by TenSpeed/ Random House), I dealt with this unusual conflict of interest up front, admitting that I was a Course student who had experienced powerful benefits from the teaching. But I also dedicated two chapters to various critics of ACIM, whom I had gone to considerable trouble to seek out and interview at length. And I wrote as fairly as I could about the roots of a controversy that some Course proponents would have preferred I not cover at all — a controversy that has since erupted into a virtual civil war within the loose Course "community."

That controversy concerns the copyright of ACIM and the use of the book by diverse teachers and interpreters. On one side are the two foundations that publish ACIM, which have become far more stringent about protecting their intellectual property in recent years. On the other side is an assortment of dissidents who want copyright protections relaxed or dispensed with entirely, arguing that ACIM is a sacred, spiritually authored document that transcends mere earthly property rights. The latter argument has not yet succeeded in earthly courts, however, where the foundations have won most of the litigation. But the dissidents keep trying, and there has been precious little progress made toward reconciliation in the spirit of the Course's fundamental principle of forgiveness.

Most reporters would be thrilled at the eruption of such a controversy on their beat, but I have covered it only reluctantly. (I've always lacked a proper journalistic bloodlust.) I have editorialized in favor of the foundations' retaining the copyright while allowing "fair use" of the Course material under far more liberal guidelines than are generally followed in commercial publishing. In other words, I have taken a moderate position in a situation characterized by extremism. And the more I hew to the middle, the more I have been criticized for losing my objectivity. Since this criticism has come from both sides in the fight, I feel confident that I'm right where I should be.

More dismaying than any personal or professional criticism has been the rising volume of what I can only call "Jesus talk." When arguments of legality or common sense look as if they're failing for either side in the Course battle, participants rely more heavily on arguments about "what Jesus wants." Depending on whom you listen to, Jesus either wants copyright protection and has from the beginning, or considers it an obscene interference in the free and unfettered spread of his word. Since all those involved assert that they personally consult with Jesus on a regular basis, one can only conclude that Christ, like so many of us, doesn't really know what he wants.

In this Jesus talk, I hear creepy echoes from my youth. I'm afraid that my fellow Course students are going to ask me if I've really found Jesus Christ, or have just been a pretender all along. In a spiritual movement characterized by fairly high IQs and a significant number of refugees from far more conservative religious traditions, this trend toward an esoteric fundamentalism seems especially ironic. But perhaps it's inevitable: once we find anything that profoundly changes our lives for the better, we want to turn it into the answer for everyone, backed by an unimpeachable authority. Anyone who believes that such evangelical certitude will not ultimately reach the stage of religious persecution is naïve.

Not long ago, I appeared at an ACIM conference in San Francisco, where I was approached by a woman and her husband in the hotel lobby between sessions. Spying my name tag, the woman asked, "You're the reporter, right?"

"Yes," I confessed, always a little fearful of what I'm going to hear next after being identified as "the reporter."

"Well, we really wanted to meet you, because we think that you, of all the people here, might be willing to hear us out about something." By now the husband was nodding enthusiastically, lending his wife moral support on a matter of obvious concern to them both.

"Here's the thing," the woman said, stepping a little closer and speaking conpiratorially: "We've both been Course students for years, and it's changed our lives completely, but we think this business about Jesus is getting out of hand. I mean, what's more likely: that a guy who died two thousand years ago jumped into Helen's head and dictated this long book to her, or that Helen was this crazy, brilliant person who wrote the whole thing herself, but was so embarrassed about it that she made up the Jesus part just so she didn't have to take responsibility for the message? Really, now, which makes more sense to you?"

The wife finished her confession in a breathless rush, looking to me excitedly for confirmation as her husband repeated, "Come on, he died two thousand years ago."

I was so surprised to encounter two vocal skeptics at a gathering of the faithful that I had to laugh. "Shhh!" I replied. "Keep up that kind of talk, and you'll get us all removed from the premises."

"Tell me about it," the wife replied dryly. "I've already been asked to leave my Course study group just for bringing it up."

##   
The problem of fascination

Some years ago, I interviewed philosopher Jacob Needleman about the pros and cons of mystical paths, and he made some points about the problem of "fascination" that have stayed with me to this day. Let's say that you have an alcohol problem, and you awaken one day with your face in a foul-smelling gutter and suddenly decide that drinking yourself to death is no way to live. The good Samaritan who lifts you from the curb mentions an AA meeting down the street, and you decide that you might as well give the cliché-ridden recovery movement a try.

As it turns out, the Twelve Steps prove to be your saving grace. In just a few years, you've not only managed to dry out, but become a sponsor for other benighted souls making their way back from the brink of oblivion. Before long, it is difficult for you to look at the world in any terms other than "addiction and recovery," and you find yourself becoming more and more critical of so-called social drinkers and others who obviously have not submitted to the will of a Higher Power. The very idea that you could someday live without your meetings is anathema.

What's happened is that you've switched addictions. Being addicted to recovery is far healthier than being addicted to alcohol, but in terms of spiritual growth, it is nonetheless a detour or delay. Needleman suggests that anyone who encounters a genuine mystical path, and experiences profound benefits in his or her life as a result, will be prone to fascination with the path. It's important to stay alert to the effects of that fascination, lest it go on too long and begin suppressing one's growth rather than encouraging it.

It's not that fascination is a bad thing in itself; in fact, a deep experience of any path requires an initial fascination. But I believe that the ultimate aim of most spiritual paths is to enable us to become masters of our own consciousness. Becoming the master of your consciousness begins with the capacity to hear and follow an internal "guiding voice," literal or figurative, that transcends any religious, social, or legal rules — even the mystical guidelines that helped you find this inner guidance in the first place. The necessity of cultivating one's own guiding voice is one message that can be drawn from the paradoxical Zen teaching "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The idea is certainly not that you must kill any wise people you encounter. The point is that you must "kill the Buddha" because otherwise you will believe that the Buddha is special and different from the rest of us: enlightened, just plain better. The student is really being encouraged to kill the idea of superiority within himself, so that he will be better able to experience his own Buddha nature as the exalted yet ordinary core of his true self. Then he will be able to see the Buddha within everyone he meets — and nobody has to get killed.

And so it goes with any genuine path of transformation: if we are serious about reshaping our lives in a spiritual way, we first need to be fascinated with our chosen path, and then to let this fascination die so that our spirituality becomes internalized, ordinary, even invisible, though no less real and effective. I'm guessing that this transition is what my own sense of guidance is leading me toward, as I find myself retreating from my self-appointed role as a spiritual reporter.

As much as a fresh spiritual perspective once enlarged my view of what was possible and significant, the temptation to take on a spiritual identity has threatened to narrow my outlook on life. Now I find myself facing the puzzle of how to forget my spirituality in order to keep it real.

UPDATE: About six months after this essay was published, I received a manuscript entitled The Disappearance of the Universe from an unknown writer and Course student, Gary Renard. Published by Fearless Books in 2003, the book immediately became a hit among Course students and has since sold over 200,000 copies in two editions, from Fearless and Hay House. This re-involved me with the Course community, to say the least, but as a publisher rather than a reporter.

In 2011, Tarcher/Penguin published my book Living with Miracles, a mix of spiritual reporting and how-to advice based on my experience as a Course student. I've also published both print books and e-books by other Course writers, and helped many others with editing or publishing assistance.

In 2004, the Course copyright controversy ended with a New York State Superior Court decision revoking the copyright, and the trademarks were lifted soon after.
- 9 -

Miracles over the Long Haul  
This is the transcript of a spoken presentation delivered at the "Listen, Learn, and Do!" Conference, sponsored by Community Miracles Center, San Francisco, CA in Feb. 2011.

#

I'm here to talk about "learning over the long haul" with A Course in Miracles. I hope I can speak on that subject with some authority because I've been a Course student for over 25 years now, and have written two books on the subject.

I'll be focusing mainly on the question of why a serious involvement with ACIM does tend to be a long-term gig, why it seems impossible for most people to get through it — or just get over it — in a few months or even years. I'm also going to talk about three paradoxes that tend to crop up in long-term study.

Now I want to tell a true, personal story of romance and heartbreak, although in this particular case, it was not much of a romance or heartbreak. It did turn out to be a good illustration for me of how every kind of relationship is a teaching and learning relationship, even if we don't recognize it at the time. As the Text says in Chapter 8, "When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. As you see him you will see yourself. As you treat him you will treat yourself. As you think of him you will think of yourself. Never forget this, for in him you will find yourself or lose yourself."

So here's a strange little tale of finding myself, as it were.

Back in 2006, I was in the throes of divorce after fifteen years of marriage, and I was indulging in all kinds of adventurous and erratic behavior. One of those erratic behaviors was making social contacts through online personals. I felt so weird about doing this that the service I chose was one syndicated by The Onion.com, the satirical newspaper. I felt that if I was going to end up dating again in my 50s, it was going to be a joke so I might as well go through a joke newspaper. Actually, what was interesting about that particular service was that it tended to draw fairly literate people with a countercultural bent, and the format encouraged a lot of writing. I was immediately drawn to women who were good writers, and I mostly had entertaining and interesting contacts that way. I'd felt pretty sheepish about getting involved with online personals, but after six months or so I was mostly enjoying myself, even if no serious romances were developing.

And then came Choosy. (Now Choosy is not her real name of course; that's just a clever disguise I'm using so you don't guess that her real name is... Ralph.) I had seen Choosy on the Onion personals and thought she was pretty cute, and very well-spoken in terms of what she wrote about herself. So after going through her self-description and thinking it over for a few days, on the evening of January 1, 2007, I sent her an introduction through the online email service provided by the format, and waited to see what happened. I figured I might as well start the new year with an adventure.

Well, I didn't have long to wait. In less than a minute, I had a response from Choosy! In fact, it was so fast that I could hardly believe she had time to read my letter. And then, as I read through what she had written to me, I realized that she had NOT yet read my letter. Instead, it appeared that Choosy had noticed my personal and then written her introduction to me at exactly the same time I wrote to her. Sounds like a match made in heaven, right? I mean, what are the odds?! We exchanged a flurry of notes after that, along the lines of

"Wait a minute, were YOU answering ME?" until we both confirmed that we had written each other independently and simultaneously. I'll admit that I was tempted to think it was some kind of a miracle.

And at first, everything went smoothly. We had fun on our first few dates; we did have some things in common besides our timing, and she was very smart and cute, and I guess she liked me too. But there were some differences between us that rapidly began to loom larger and larger as the days and dates went by. One of them was our spirituality. Choosy liked to watch TV, and one of her favorite shows was a ghost-hunting show on the Discovery Channel. She also had a few photographic self-portraits in her apartment that were kind of pale and ethereal, and all this got me curious about what her spiritual leanings were. I had not told her that I was a member of a major modern spiritual cult. I'd learned from experience that the Course is just not the sort of thing one brings up on a first date, unless you've lucked into meeting a fellow Course cultist, and you'll generally know that right away. There's just this connection that happens when you're out on a first date, and you're sizing each other up, and you're both in the habit of thinking, "Nothing I see in this room means anything."

At any rate, I got around to asking Choosy if she had any religious or spiritual leanings, and she said, "Oh no, I'm pretty much an atheist. I just like ghosts."

This was kind of intriguing; I didn't know that I'd ever met a self-declared atheist who was fascinated by ghosts. It didn't quite hang together, if you know what I mean. I was really curious so I said, "But what do you like about ghosts exactly? I mean, why is that important to you?"

Choosy answered, "Oh, I don't know. Wanna go to a movie?"

Needless to say, I soon decided that Choosy was not living up to her spiritual potential. So on a later date I started telling her the whole story of my involvement with A Course in Miracles — how I used to consider myself a total atheist too, how I'd come across the Course when I was very ill with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, how it helped me through the illness and recovery, and so on. And probably on and on, to tell the truth. Because after a while I noticed that Choosy was sitting there with a blank smile on her face, clearly just tolerating me, while probably thinking, "Please God-who-doesn't-exist, make him stop soon."

So, guess what — on January 31, exactly 30 days following our first contact, Choosy dumped me. Can you believe it? Shocking! I was mad for a couple days and then pretty much forgot about it because, in fact, I'd seen enough movies for a while. (Going to the movies was our go-to strategy whenever the conversation failed, which was more and more often as the thirty days went by.)

Anyway, flash forward about two years. By that time I'm somewhat more emotionally stable and I'm in a new partnership. One day I come out of the Berkeley YMCA, and I almost literally run into Choosy crossing a street. All of a sudden, she was just there, right in front of me. It was the first time I'd seen her since we dated, and she didn't look well. She'd gotten very thin and looked pale and ethereal, sort of like a ghost. I couldn't honestly say, "Hey you look great!" so I just asked, "So how have you been?" and Choosy said, "Well, not too good I guess. I've been pretty sick for a while and just got diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. I'm glad I ran into you because I remember that you had it. So if you have any advice, I'd appreciate it."

I told Choosy I'd be happy to help, and in fact we would exchange a few e-mails after that in which I gave her some medical information and references. But here's the kicker. While we're standing there, Choosy gets this odd look on her face and says, "So maybe there's another reason I ran into you" and I said, "Yeah?" and she said, "Yeah, here's the thing. I was talking to my therapist yesterday and he said he thought I might benefit from looking into A Course in Miracles."

"Oh, really?" I said.

"Yeah," she said. "I told my therapist I'd met this guy who was really into it but I didn't remember much. So I'm really glad I ran into you today, because I do remember one thing about it and I'd really like to check it out with you."

"Sure," I said, happy to help. Naturally I was thinking that maybe Choosy was ready to see the light! "So what do you need to know?"

Choosy looked one way and then the other, like she didn't want to be overheard, and then leaned closer to me and asked, "Isn't the Course mostly for, like, crazy people?"

Before I tell you what I actually said in response, let's look at what was going through my head. First was the thought, Wow, I really made a great impression on you, didn't I? and then, "Yeah, babe, why do you think your therapist recommends it for YOU?

But I didn't say either of those things. Instead I just laughed and said, "Yeah, that's pretty much true. As long as you understand that the Course says we're ALL crazy people."

And it certainly does say that. Thinking over Choosy's question, I got curious about how many times the Course mentions insanity or madness. I went to my electronic copy of the Standard Third Edition and did a few searches. Following now, just a few of the greatest hits (citations from ACIM in standard nomenclature appear in brackets):

As you look with open eyes upon your world, it must occur to you that you have withdrawn into insanity. You see what is not there, and you hear what makes no sound. Your manifestations of emotions are the opposite of what the emotions are. You communicate with no one, and you are as isolated from reality as if you were alone in all the universe. In your madness you overlook reality completely, and you see only your own split mind everywhere you look. God calls you and you do not hear, for you are preoccupied with your own voice.... [T-13.V.6]

Think of the freedom in the recognition that you are not bound by all the strange and twisted laws you have set up to save you. You really think that you would starve unless you have stacks of green paper strips and piles of metal discs. You really think a small round pellet or some fluid pushed into your veins through a sharpened needle will ward off disease and death. You really think you are alone unless another body is with you.

It is insanity that thinks these things. You call them laws, and put them under different names in a long catalogue of rituals that have no use and serve no purpose. You think you must obey the "laws" of medicine, of economics and of health. Protect the body, and you will be saved.

These are not laws, but madness... [W-76.3-5]

Atonement remedies the strange idea that it is possible to doubt yourself, and be unsure of what you really are. This is the depth of madness. Yet it is the universal question of the world. What does this mean except the world is mad? Why share its madness in the sad belief that what is universal here is true? [W-39.6]

Let me repeat that the ego's qualifications as a guide are singularly unfortunate, and that it is a remarkably poor choice as a teacher of salvation. Anyone who elects a totally insane guide must be totally insane himself. [T-9.VI.8]

The ingeniousness of the ego to preserve itself is enormous, but it stems from the very power of the mind the ego denies. This means that the ego attacks what is preserving it, whichmust result in extreme anxiety. That is why the ego never recognizes what it is doing. It is perfectly logical but clearly insane. The ego draws upon the one source that is totally inimical to its existence for its existence. Fearful of perceiving the power of this source, it is forced to depreciate it. This threatens its own existence, a state which it finds intolerable. Remaining logical but still insane, the ego resolves this completely insane dilemma in a completely insane way. It does not perceive its existence as threatened by projecting the threat onto you, and perceiving your being as nonexistent. This ensures its continuance if you side with it, by guaranteeing that you will not know your own safety. [T-7.VI.3]

And finally:

... the journey into darkness has been long and cruel, and you have gone deep into it. [T-18.III.3]

So the first reason that the Course is a long-term discipline is that its diagnosis of our basic problem as human beings is so radical. It says that we're not just a litt neurotic, or occasionally unbalanced, or messed-up in our relationships. No, the Course says we are all stark raving mad, utterly mistaken about who and what we are, and constantly pursuing counterproductive, ego-driven strategies in order to remain stuck in our tragic delusion.

We're so nuts that we're not even aware of what reality is, and have substituted for reality a dream of our own making. The purpose of the Course is not really to "improve our lives," in the usual sense, because it says we're not really living here at all. Instead we are struggling to preserve ourselves and somehow "get ahead" in what the Course calls a "dream of death":

Failure is all about you while you seek for goals that cannot be achieved. You look for permanence in the impermanent, for love where there is none, for safety in the midst of danger; im-mortality within the darkness of the dream of death. Who could succeed where contradiction is the setting of his searching, and the place to which he comes to find stability? [W-131.1]

So we can safely assume that getting over this much craziness is not easily or quickly achieved. But how long does it take? The Course Workbook is organized as a one-year task, so presumably that's how long it takes — but we all know that's ridiculous. I first read through the Text and completed the Workbook in about 18 months, and I felt like I was going at warp speed. The only reason I could get through it that fast was that I was sitting at home sick most of the time, and had plenty of time to read and study. But I can look back now and recognize that even after the first five years of frequent review and study, I actually understood very little of what the Course was saying. Even now, I have no idea of how "far along" I am after 25 years — which may be a very tiny drop in the bucket of time, if you take seriously the hints that are dropped in the Workbook itself.

For instance, Lesson 97, "I am spirit," offers a startling moment of good news/bad news when it says, "Each time you practice, awareness is brought a little nearer at least; sometimes a thousand years or more are saved."

The good news here is that practicing Workbook lessons can save you at least a thousand years; the bad news is, "A thousand years?!" What kind of timeline are we looking at here, anyway? Unfortunately we don't really get a more specific schedule than that. It's especially confusing when you consider that later, in the Manual for Teachers, the Course asks the question "Is reincarnation so?" and then answers, more or less: Well, not really, but if helps you to believe in it, go right ahead.

So the Course is implying that, one way or another, getting over our serious case of madness is a very long-term proposition. That makes my 25 years of study look like hardly anything, and so you may want to take what I have to say with a grain of salt. But I do want to pass on three major paradoxes that I've gained over my years of study.

Each of these has to do with distinguishing what we might commonly expect to happen from studying the Course, when we're starting out, as opposed to what actually happens over the long term.

I should note that this is not because the Course itself is contradictory, although it can sometimes seem this way. The Course calls itself "a simple teaching in the obvious," but remember that it also said that "contradiction is the setting of our searching." We live in an insane world of perpetual paradox and constant contradiction, and thus our experience of the Course will not be exempt from contradiction. The paradoxes I'm going to speak about here arise from the ways in which the Course opposes our habitual insanity, and what happens when we try to make sense of it from within the contradictory setting of our searching.

So, the first paradox is:

The Course is here for our happiness. It is NOT here to make us feel better.

Now, wanting to feel better may seem like the most natural thing in the world, and in fact all of medicine and psychotherapy is devoted to that goal. It's also not unusual for people to turn to religion or spirituality in a quest to feel better, although God is often seen as a kind of last resort.

For instance, in the 12 Step mode of recovery, people are encouraged to turn to a "higher power" or "God of their understanding" after their own attempts to feel better have led them into addiction. Many folks enter recovery only after some kind of "bottoming out" experience in which all their attempts to feel better have left them feeling just awful. So, both therapy and recovery are focused on helping us feel better and function more effectively in the world. That's not really the aim of the Course. What the Course does is challenge our whole notion of who it is that needs to feel better. Obviously, somebody who wants to feel better is somebody who feels bad. The Course calls that somebody the "ego." If we devote our lives to making the ego feel better, we'll be undertaking a never-ending and fruitless task — because, according to ACIM, the ego is simply a part of our mind that's devoted to feeling bad and fearful, all the while telling you that there's nothing more important than making it feel better.

By contrast, the Course takes aim at our identification with the ego, and suggests that our real Self is something quite different. For one thing, it's not encased in a body, and it's not subject to the laws of time and space. And it doesn't ever need to feel better — because its perpetual state of feeling is joy. Now here's what the Course has to say about joy: "Joy is eternal. You can be sure indeed that any seeming happiness that does not last is really fear." [T-22.II.3]

Uh-oh. If this is true, it means that the happiness that comes from falling in love, or getting a great job, or having a wonderful dinner, or going to a mind-blowing ACIM conference — well, if all those kinds of happiness do not continue, unchanging, forever, then they are just mood swings of the ego and as such, amount to different kinds of fear. This is unwelcome news, because in fact the kinds of happiness that do not last are about all that most of us have experienced. And virtually everyone has gone through periods of depression in which every shred of happiness has disappeared, seemingly forever. But every once in a while, and especially if you've had any kind of spiritual discipline, you may have gotten a whiff or a glimpse of that eternal joy, the kind of happiness that never goes away.

It first happened for me many years ago, not long after I had started the Course and while I was very sick and, at the ego level, quite unhappy. I was spending most of my time by myself, I was broke and could hardly work, I had eleven of the fourteen identifying symptoms of CFS going on simultaneously, and I didn't really see much purpose in hanging around any longer on the earthly plane. I wouldn't say I was exactly suicidal;, I just wasn't making any plans.

And yet, every once in a while during that extremely down-in-thedumps period, I would slip into a state of unreasonable and seemingly infinite happiness. It was as if none of my present circumstances mattered because they were not the determinants of this happiness. In fact, this happiness wasn't determined by anything — it just was, and it far surpassed any good mood I could remember, any kind of feeling good that came from my life going well. It seemed that the key to this great, unreasonable happiness was absolute surrender. When I had given up all struggle and pride and attachment to ideas about who I was or what life was supposed to be about, then that happiness was just there. Oddly enough, that happiness did not wipe out all my suffering; I still felt quite ill and uncomfortable, but all that just didn't seem to matter. This illogical happiness existed by itself, independent of what my body and normal sense of self were going through.

There was another odd thing about this happiness. While the intensity of it definitely faded as I would slip back into worrying about my condition and my fate, it never really went away entirely. I think that's because it's unconditional; by that I mean that it didn't derive from anything I was doing at the time, although it seems reasonable to conclude that I became aware of that happiness because of my work with the Course. Bit by bit, as I did the Workbook lessons and came to understand how forgiveness works, I became more open to remembering a completely different state of being than what I was used to. Then, at random moments, I'd get a full-bore experience of that other life — which the Course says is my real life, the life of eternal and unchanging Spirit. Once you touch that life, it becomes an undying presence, a backdrop or foundation for everything else that is going on.

In fact that happiness is with me now, but that doesn't mean I'm always in a good mood, or that I'm necessarily looking happy. In fact, in spiritual circles of all kinds, definitely including Course circles, people sometimes trick themselves into acting happy because they think they're supposed to be happy, and the result is a kind of giddiness that doesn't have much depth or endurance to it. ACIM editor Ken Wapnick used to say that when new students of the Course would tell him how much happier they had become after just a few months of study, "I tend to think they're not getting it yet."

When I say that an unconditional happiness is always with me, it means that I no longer have an existential despair, like I did before the spiritual crisis of my illness.

Before my illness, I was secretly angry about everything; that's what I mean by existential despair. Underneath it all, I was just pissed off. And in a very real sense, I went through seven years of illness and recovery in order to face and release that deep anger.

And that's the irony of this happiness thing. The way that I got to this experience of unconditional happiness, and the way that many people seem to get to it, is through a whole lot of not "feeling better." A Course in Miracles is not a ticket for going straight to the joy and wholeness of Spirit from the misery of an insane ego. Instead it instructs you in a process of facing all the obstacles you have imposed between yourself and your real life, or between yourself and true happiness. When you're facing any particular obstacle, like a long-held grievance, or an illness, or simple grief, you might not be feeling so good. But the point is that the Course helps you distinguish between your obstacles and reality itself. Love is always your ultimate reality; anything less is an obstacle which can, and eventually should be, forgiven.

This is why the Course says in its Introduction, "The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love's presence, which is your natural inheritance."

When I felt an unreasonable happiness for the first time, it meant I had become aware of love's presence. Once I experienced it, I didn't need to know what it meant; the experience is self-explanatory, you might say. But how I got there was through an intense and profound sense of surrender, facing a whole multitude of blocks to that awareness, until I felt that those blocks had pretty much defeated me — or perhaps that I had defeated myself with all those blocks.

Either way, I didn't get there by a self-help process of learning to make myself "feel better." This is such an important thing to remember as you work long-term with the Course. The intelligence behind this teaching — or JC, or J, as some people refer to him — is not really interested in how your day is going, whether you're winning or losing, falling in love or fighting back tears, feeling better or feeling worse. All those ups and downs and mood swings are aspects of your time-bound ego life, and they are ALL, in different ways, blocks to your awareness of love's presence.

And feeling bad is not necessarily the worst kind of block. In my own experience, feeling really bad was the key to my first glimpse of love's presence, which delivered that undying happiness. I had to feel really bad before I could surrender, and experience a whole different order of reality. To be honest, I sometimes feel the most distance from my spiritual discipline when I'm feeling pretty good, when things have been going well for me and life on this earth seems okay. In the good times, you can easily be lulled into a comfortable sense that "this is all there is" and you've done pretty well in the world, all things considered. So why look for anything better?

From the Course point of view, you need to forgive feeling good as much as you do feeling bad, because they are both functions of the ego as it looks upon an illusory world and makes a judgment call about how it's doing. Of course, there's nothing wrong with feeling good; there's nothing wrong with feeling bad, either. It's feeling bad, however, that's most likely to encourage us to make a change in how we're living. And if you're feeling really bad, you may be encouraged to make a very big change, like "loosing the world from all you thought it was," to paraphrase a Course lesson. When you're feeling pretty good about how things are going, you're probably less likely to let go of the world. So that's the first paradox of long-term Course study, this seeming contradiction between feeling good and actually being happy.

The second major paradox I'd like to discuss has to do with enlightenment, and to get into that one I'm going tell a Zen teaching tale. It seems there was a very dedicated student living in a monastery who was constantly frustrated by the fact that all his hours of daily meditation seemed to yield so little. He was serious about the contemplative life and he was gradually becoming a more peaceful person, but years were going by without him having a big vision or an all-encompassing moment of enlightenment. Once a week in session with his master, he'd ask, "When will I be enlightened?" and his master would answer, "Just keep meditating. Something will happen soon." And so the student would trudge back to his room and sit his ass down on the pillow and resume meditating.

Then one day, the master's own meditation was interrupted by this student bursting into his room, laughing and flushed with excitement. "It happened, Master!" he cried out. "It happened! In my meditation this morning I had a full vision of the Buddha! He was right there in my room! I had a real vision!"

The master just smiled and said, "That's wonderful. So keep on meditating, and soon these visions will go away."

This story is an illustration of the second paradox of Course study that I want to describe today. And that is: The Course is not here to help you achieve enlightenment. It IS here to help you get everything else out of the way.

Or as the Course puts it at the beginning of Lesson 188, "The peace of God is shining in me now": "Why wait for Heaven? Those who seek the light are merely covering their eyes. The light is in them now. Enlightenment is but a recognition, not a change at all."

What the Course is getting at here is that enlightenment is nothing special; it's not some kind of reward or distinction you earn after years of meditation or prayer. It's not something you "get," like the Zen student got a vision of the Buddha after years of meditation. His teacher told him to keep on meditating because the teacher knew that the vision of the Buddha was likely to become just another obstacle to enlightenment, just another way for the student to hold onto being someone special.

Once enlightened, you have not been raised above the ordinary class of human beings and become a very special person. Both the Course and Zen would suggest that enlightenment instead means becoming selfless, that is, without any specialness whatsoever. So you might well become enlightened, and no one would notice. Zen alludes to this in the old saying, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water." The difference in before and after is that before, the ego-self is chopping wood and carrying water; afterward, no-self is doing it. You'll be a much happier woodchopper and water-carrier than you were before, but that doesn't necessarily mean anyone else will see any difference.

Still, the Course implies that there might be something subtly "different" about enlightenment when it says:

There is a way of living in the world that is not here, although it seems to be. You do not change appearance, though you smile more frequently. Your forehead is serene; your eyes are quiet. And the ones who walk the world as you do recognize their own. Yet those who have not yet perceived the way will recognize you also, and believe that you are like them, as you were before. [W-155.1]

In a sense, you're much more "special" than an enlightened being right now, because of your particular style of covering your eyes. Lesson 69 says, "My grievances hide the light of the world in me." Each one of us has a customized set of grievances that we use to hide the light from ourselves in our own special way. That means that no one else can fully understand just how bad we've had it, or why our particular set of grievances works so well to keep us "endarkened." We may hear that Joe Schmoe over there has become enlightened, and think "Well, it was easy for him, after all. If he'd had my parents or my illness or my karma, we'd see just how fast he became enlightened."

In fact, the enlightened Joe Schmoe has done nothing more special than removing his hands from his eyes — which, in Course terms, means letting go of all his grievances no matter what they are. Total surrender of everything that's bugging you, in other words. Complete and unconditional forgiveness of not just your personal issues, but the whole, wide crazy world and the universe, and all the multiverses, if they're out there. According to the Course, you can achieve this surrender in an instant — particularly the "holy instant" in which you align your purpose totally with that of your brothers — or you can take howsoever many thousands of years. It appears that most of us are electing the thousands-of-years option, but you never know. We could all change our minds by lunchtime!

Now here's a final irony, or paradox of long-time Course study. The longer you practice as a dedicated Course student, the sooner you will realize that the Course itself doesn't matter. I know that doesn't quite make sense, but I said it was a paradox. The aim of the Course is not to make you believe in what it says, or choose it over any other religion of spiritual path, or promote it to the unenlightened world. The aim of the Course is to help you learn not to need it. It's to give you a step-by-step process of removing your hands from your eyes, so that eventually you may realize, "Oh, this is so easy! And I feel so much better this way."

Because, like I said, the Course is all about feeling better!

To clarify what I mean by the Course itself becoming unimportant, I'd like to close with part of Workbook Lesson 189, which is a fairly good expression of the long-term goals of the Course. This is not all of this lesson; I'm excerpting it in order to end with one of my favorite passages of the entire teaching.

LESSON 189.

I feel the Love of God within me now.

There is a light in you the world can not perceive. And with its eyes you will not see this light, for you are blinded by the world. Yet you have eyes to see it. It is there for you to look upon. It was not placed in you to be kept hidden from your sight. This light is a reflection of the thought we practice now. To feel the Love of God within you is to see the world anew, shining in innocence, alive with hope, and blessed with perfect charity and love.

Who could feel fear in such a world as this? It welcomes you, rejoices that you came, and sings your praises as it keeps you safe from every form of danger and of pain. It offers you a warm and gentle home in which to stay a while. It blesses you throughout the day, and watches through the night as silent guardian of your holy sleep. It sees salvation in you, and protects the light in you, in which it sees its own. It offers you its flowers and its snow, in thankfulness for your benevolence.

This is the world the Love of God reveals. It is so different from the world you see through darkened eyes of malice and of fear, that one belies the other. Only one can be perceived at all. The other one is wholly meaningless. A world in which forgiveness shines on everything, and peace offers its gentle light to everyone, is inconceivable to those who see a world of hatred rising from attack, poised to avenge, to murder and destroy.

Yet is the world of hatred equally unseen and inconceivable to those who feel God's Love in them. Their world reflects the quietness and peace that shines in them; the gentleness and innocence they see surrounding them; the joy with which they look out from the endless wells of joy within. What they have felt in them they look upon, and see its sure reflection everywhere.

What would you see? The choice is given you. But learn and do not let your mind forget this law of seeing: You will look upon that which you feel within. If hatred finds a place within your heart, you will perceive a fearful world, held cruelly in death's sharp-pointed, bony fingers. If you feel the Love of God within you, you will look out on a world of mercy and of love.

Today we pass illusions, as we seek to reach to what is true in us, and feel its all-embracing tenderness, its Love which knows us perfect as itself, its sight which is the gift its Love bestows on us. We learn the way today. It is as sure as Love itself, to which it carries us. For its simplicity avoids the snares the foolish convolutions of the world's apparent reasoning but serve to hide.

Simply do this: Be still, and lay aside all thoughts of what youareandwhat Godis; all conceptsyouhavelearnedaboutthe world; all images you hold about yourself. Empty your mind of everything it thinks is either true or false, or good or bad, of every thought it judges worthy, and all the ideas of which it is ashamed. Hold onto nothing. Do not bring with you one thought the past has taught, nor one belief you ever learned before from anything. Forget this world, forget this course, and

come with wholly empty hands unto your God. . . .
- 10 -

# The Co$t of Not Selling Out

Originally published as a Fearless e-Book. The names of all colleagues have been changed.

A while back I was going through old papers and books, trying to throw out whatever I could to create a bit more storage space in the tiny cottage I was renting, when I uncovered a long-lost document. This piece of business stationery marked a major change of direction in my professional life, a decisive point of no return. The letterhead bore 70s-style, oversized chunky lettering announcing the name of the advertising typography firm in San Francisco where I worked in my early twenties, and these handwritten words:

Patrick,  
Here's looking forward to a mutually rewarding future. As of this pay period your salary will be increased to $606.66 per check (7.00 per hour).

Steve & Rob

The year was 1979; the raise amounted to $1.50 per hour. Although the letter didn't say so, this raise signified my promotion from a rank-and-file typesetter to an unofficial middle manager. Steve and Rob, my employers, were acknowledging that for several months I'd been supervising the 3pm-to-midnight swing shift employing several people after S&R left for their suburban homes around six. The raise and "mutually rewarding" reference clearly put me into direct competition with Kevin, the official day shift manager, to become profit-sharing partners with the owners, or even a successor, at some undetermined point in the future.

While staring at the letter and check after pulling them out of the envelope, I realized that this promotion represented an even bigger opportunity: to parlay my increasing familiarity with several major advertising agencies in the city into a copy-writing job. I was the only typesetter at our firm with writing ambitions, having already worked as a reporter at the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local weekly newspaper. I took every opportunity to correct grammatical errors or improve syntax in the copy we received from the agencies, improvements that were sometimes noticed and appreciated.

I was certain I could succeed as a copywriter; I just knew I had the chops. For as an ex-girlfriend had once critiqued my prose style: "You're very artful, you know. I'm just not sure you're a real artist." That may sound mean, but it was probably an accurate assessment of my writing at the tender age of twenty-something. When I was savoring my big raise, it sounded like the ticket to a lucrative advertising career. After all, artfulness might be all I needed to make it big. I spent the evening staring at the check and letter, fantasizing how and when I might transform myself from a lowly typesetter/manager into a copywriter/advertising tycoon.

When I arrived for work the next day, I'd rehearsed the response that my feverishly anticipatory mind and heart were telling me to give to Steve & Rob. So when the time came and we three stood face to face, I began by cordially acknowledging their generosity and appreciation of all my hard work. Then I gave notice, turning my back on the raise and my best connection to a lucrative future.

##   
The repulsions of a real job

For all the allure that big-time advertising held, it was outweighed by several repulsive elements of my first corporate-style employment. One was simply the insane pressure that seemed endemic to the ad industry. My bosses had given me an unforgettable lesson in that pressure on my very first day.

In that technically primitive era, Photoshop was ten years from its first release and Stegosauri still roamed the beaten-earth streets of San Francisco. The photo-typesetting industry that had succeeded hot-metal type by the 1970s was computerized, but nominally so. Keyboards and cathode-ray monitors were hooked up to relatively slow electronic brains that could do only two things: set type and run cursor-bug races. But on my first day, I didn't even get one of the snazzy monochrome monitors. Instead I was assigned to a real dinosaur of the industry: a blind keyboard console held over from the hot type era, modified to generate the same punch-code tape that the new computers did.

By "blind," I mean that there was no readable output of what one was typing, and there was no memory. If you made a single typing error, you had to start over. If you didn't know what each keystroke looked like as a short series of holes punched through black paper tape, then you didn't even know whether you had made an error. On top of that, errors were costly. They could confuse the central output computer generating the actual phototype used by the layout department, slowing down everyone's work.

For my first assignment, I was given a page of copy for a simple ad, a visual key to punch-code, and a deadline of one hour. I was severely instructed by Kevin that the shop was very busy that day and no one could afford a slowdown caused by coding errors, so I had better be careful but quick. After making several false starts, I nervously turned in my first roll of punch-code tape on time and watched it shut down the central processor for nearly an hour; it had to be reprogrammed.

Another anxious try ended in the same result, generating dirty looks from almost everyone in the office and a head-shaking sneer from Kev. By the afternoon he had assigned me to menial clean-up tasks around the office.

I was humiliated and tearful, knowing that I had abjectly failed on my first day on the job. Just a few weeks before when I'd been simultaneously juggling graphic and reporting deadlines at the Guardian, I'd thought I had a tough job. But if this was what advertising was going to be like, I was definitely not cut out for it.

At the end of my shift I sheepishly slipped into Steve's office to face him and Rob, starting my litany of apologies before they could even get a word out. I apologized for overestimating my skills, for slowing down the day's production, and for generally being an incompetent loser. S&R listened with blank faces, nodding gravely throughout, and when I had finished my mea culpa Rob smiled gently and said, "Well, we appreciate that you tried so hard, and we're sorry that the pace was a little bit too much for you." I smiled weakly in return, prepared for the dismissive coup de grace that was surely coming.

"But really, we don't care about any of that," Rob suddenly chuckled with a devilish grin. He then exchanged a knowing look with Steve, who added: "Yeah, all we care about is that you're still here. You took all that, and you didn't quit! So we'll start showing you the ropes tomorrow."

Stumbling out of the office with an undoubtedly dazed look on my face, I ran into Kev, who winked and congenially slapped me on the back, cheerily exclaiming, "See you tomorrow!" At that moment I finally grasped that I'd been hazed, and had survived an initiation designed to subject me to failure. So this was what the advertising world was like: insanely pressured, innately deceptive, and favoring survival of either the toughest or the most co-dependent. It made weekly journalism look like a picnic.

For a while, I'd be hooked.

In fact I'd soon be overworking, not just because I tended to surpass the often unreasonable orders I was given, but also because I felt a need to compensate for the political fallout of the copy we were producing. Most of the work for our commercial type shop consisted of glossy magazine ads and brochures for Chevron, major pharmaceutical corporations, junk-food conglomerates, and the Mitchell Bros. porn emporium that had given "Behind the Green Door" and other pornochic classics to the world. I loved type and graphics as a pure craft, but seeing my corporate work displayed in local and national media was increasingly unsettling.

So, as soon as I'd earned Steve and Rob's trust to open the shop on weekends alone, I went back to earlier work I'd had as a media volunteer for Friends of the Earth, where I'd served an internship when I first arrived in San Francisco. For me, staying in advertising was either going to mean a crippling double workload or giving up my political ideals.

Once when I'd dared to question Steve about the social and political consequences of the advertising we helped create, I first heard the phrase that served as a production mantra around the shop: "Garbage in, garbage out. I don't give a damn about what any of it says. Just focus on setting great type, okay?"

And we did. The main reason that I lasted even one year in a generally lunatic environment was that S&R's perfectionist zeal coincided perfectly with my own. Unlike the other typesetters, I was not there primarily for the paycheck, but to fulfill an irresistible drive to do something, anything, to the nth degree of excellence. Unlike the slippery-fish challenge of writing, typography could be executed perfectly, or nearly so.

By contrast, every time I sat down to write something I felt like a beginner, like I was trying something I had no business attempting, and that would likely result in a craven failure. Much of this unease with writing persists even thirty-odd years later, though I now believe that the continuing renewal of this "beginner's mind" is important to writing well. But with type, I loved the feeling of sitting down at the keyboard with the knowledge I know how to do this, and becoming more skilled and confident with every excursion.

##   
Taking on the boss

In fact it was my growing confidence that would lead me into a crucial conflict with Steve. After about nine months of employment — three of them spent manning a lonely solo swing shift — I'd been unofficially placed in charge of two other night workers as the shop's workload continued to grow. Although I wasn't yet paid for the extra work, I was now managing the crew, directing the workflow, and even taking in new jobs that were coming over the transom from harried agency clients working late. But I was still not allowed to ship a job without Steve & Rob's personal approval. All projects that I supervised had to be left on the shipping desk for a morning review, without exception. Usually the bosses found nothing wrong or demanded some niggling correction (niggling, at least, from my point of view — because, like I said, I was devoted to perfection.). But I was not trusted to make any final quality control call on my own. That was an offense carrying the penalty of termination.

Thus all the elements were in place for a crisis of customer service vs. corporate authority. At about eight p.m. one evening, I received a panicked phone call from a young ad designer at one of the biggest agencies in town, begging me to set the type for a "Ronald McDonald House" charity event poster that absolutely had to ship by midnight. She was grievously behind schedule, she confessed, and her job was on the line. If I couldn't help her, she was cooked.

But if I did what the client needed, then I'd be cooked. Not only would I have to ship the completed job without S&R's approval, I'd also have to ship something imperfect. The poster called for some very large type that was supposed to be produced via the Typositor, a hand-cranked filmstrip typesetter (it was the dark ages, remember). No one on my shift knew how to operate it. I could produce type that large on the computer, but it would be a little fuzzy around the edges. This was not really a problem for a poster meant to be viewed from several feet away, but nonetheless it would fall far short of the shop's technical standards. I tried to call both Steve & Rob for guidance, but got no answer at either home number (no texting; see dark ages, above).

By the time I got back to the designer, she was literally whimpering to be rescued, so I decided that serving the client trumped saving my skin. I produced the job entirely on my own to save any of my shift cohorts from being implicated in my crime, wrote up the invoice with a substantial rush charge, and got the phototype delivered via high-priced night courier to a very grateful client. With a heavy heart, I placed the portfolio of reproduction proofs on the "Out" desk stamped SHIPPED, and prepared myself to get canned the next day. On the bus home across the San Francisco Bay, well after midnight, I wondered whether it was too soon to jump ship to one of the big agencies; perhaps the grateful ad designer would put in a good word for me with her bosses?

The next day, getting called on the carpet turned out to be weirder but less catastrophic than I'd anticipated. Steve was clearly steamed when he ordered me into his office as soon as I entered the premises. I took a seat on the couch farthest from where he sat in an office chair; Rob perched on the corner of his desk. But the distance was little protection, for as soon as I'd taken a seat the MacDonald's job portfolio came sailing through the air from Steve's desk. I flailed at the proof copies as they scattered on the floor and Steve sternly inquired, "So I just want to know one thing, Patrick."

"Yes?" I murmured weakly, my eyes falling on the scratchy headline type I'd knowingly shipped out under the firm's prestigious logo.

"Why are you trying to hurt me?"

The question was so unexpected, so bizarre and inappropriate, that I was temporarily rendered speechless. Eventually I started in on my defense: I'd been in a tight spot with no simple solution; I decided that the client's need outweighed shop protocols; I took sole responsibility and was willing to bear the consequences. As I warmed to the task, I pointed out that the client was happy, thus her boss at the big agency was happy, and apparently even MacDonald's was happy. The only unhappy person was Steve... and, no, my insurrection wasn't a personal attack. I was just doing my job. When I finished my semi-hysterical testimony, Steve slowly shook his head and gravely announced that I was "on probation" until further notice, then stalked out the door.

Then, in a classic expression of the bad cop/good cop routine that I saw my bosses play out so many times, Rob smiled and said, "Don't worry, it's not a big deal. You did the right thing." As he ushered me out the door, hand reassuringly on my shoulder, he chirpily inquired, "Wanna learn the Typositor?"

In retrospect, I think this showdown led to the offer of a raise and promotion a couple months later. No matter how offended Steve had been by my affront to his authority, I'd clearly demonstrated leadership, correctly making the judgment call that our clients' satisfaction trumped following the rules. Not only that: as the shop's business was growing prodigiously and the number of employees was increasing, there were more and more personnel issues arising from the bosses' dictatorial and schizophrenic style of running the office. They were only too happy to have another middle manager to serve as their mouthpiece and enforcer.

Anticipating the stress of that role played a large part in my decision to refuse the promotion. But the biggest issue was something closer to my heart. However financially rewarding advertising might prove to be, I wanted to be a real writer, whatever that was. A couple years before I had focused that desire in the direction of investigative reporting, only to discover that I didn't have the long-term intestinal fortitude required by a crusading style of journalism focused largely on affixing blame. I felt I was meant to do something else as a writer, but I wasn't sure what that was.

Even though I sensed that I could eventually succeed in a career as an advertising copy man, I was uneasy about what it would do to my aesthetic sensibilities. All the commercial copy I'd read — and after a year in ad typography I'd read a lot — was characteristically terse, clever, impactful, and essentially misleading. What was that going to do to my prose style over the long term?

I also had reason for concern about what such a career would do to my general well-being. Not long before my fateful decision, I'd heard the story of a prominent ad executive we all knew, who retired early at fifty-five with a very comfortable pension to write the novel that had always been burning inside him — only to drop dead of a heart attack in the first week of his well-funded creative liberation. Extrapolating from what I already knew of the pressures of the ad business, I couldn't reassure myself that I'd avoid a similar fate.

##   
Coming to Power

So I quit the San Francisco advertising job with the big future, and went to work in my hometown of Berkeley. This decision initiated a habit of self-employment that persists to this day, thirty-odd years later. At first I freelanced for several small typesetting firms, leading me into relationships with two one-person ad agencies which were characterized by their owners' excessive demands for typographic perfection and more constant attention than the local shops cared to provide. Given my recent training, I was their perfect service provider, and soon both of these small-time ad execs asked me to set their type exclusively. I swung a deal with a type shop owner to rent her equipment at night — she was only too happy to get my crazy clients off her back — and went back to work on the swing shift I knew so well, albeit this time with no boss but myself.

For the next four years, the little Berkeley type shop where I pursued my nocturnal, break-even business with a tidy yet exceptional client base would be my professional home. To say that the work environment diverged from the San Francisco advertising realm is quite an understatement. For the most part, I was politically much more comfortable, as most of the end clients of my service were local small businesses, nonprofit and/or leftie political causes and, in a few cases, authors producing their own books for independent publication. (In this respect as well as many others, Berkeley was well ahead of the cultural wave.) While ethical dilemmas occasionally arose, they were, well... different than the typical crises of conscience I'd faced in San Francisco.

For instance: While I mostly worked on my own, I sometimes put in a day shift for the type shop where I rented equipment, or took on some of their overflow work as an independent contractor. Besides myself, the shop was staffed entirely by women, and had a reputation around the Bay area as a leading feminist book producer. For that reason, the shop was approached to typeset a book for a lesbian sado-masochist group in the City. The project was a catch-all manual including philosophical essays, memoir pieces, how-to guides, and a few graphic illustrations effectively providing the kind of everything-you-always-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-etc. information for the radically feminine BDSM crowd.

The shop owner happily accepted the project, but an unexpected crisis soon arose: One by one, each woman assigned to set the type refused to continue after coming across passages that proved too difficult to stomach. "Garbage in garbage out" was not the operative credo of this shop, and in fact the owner had always respected her employees' occasional requests to be taken off jobs that either offended or bored them too deeply. But this time, a bizarre paradox of political correctness was leading directly to a production crisis, because the job was being progressively delayed by at least three women's refusals to contribute keystrokes. When the staff 's one openly gay member also declined to have anything to do with it, the owner turned to her last resort: the night-owl freelancer often referred to by the staff as Our Only Boy.

Of course I dutifully assumed the responsibility of taking on the emergency turnaround of a high-profile, politically sensitive project. After all, I'd promised to help the shop owner whenever I could; there was some prurient curiosity involved; and I was frankly in awe of the BDSM group's cleverness in devising what I then felt (and still feel today) was the most brilliant nonfiction title I'd ever seen: Coming to Power.

In fact, when I started the job's rescue I couldn't quite understand why the female typesetters had taken such offense. I happened to begin typing on an essay that quite reasonably explained the rationale for controlled, consensual abuse: that most participants came to such behaviors from a background of severe, nonconsensual abuse, usually at the hands of males, and that by agreeing to pursue rituals of power with a regimen of "safe words" and carefully observed limits, these women were actually liberating themselves from patriarchal power structures while transforming apparent inflictions of cruelty into ecstatic rites of sensual love.

All quite reasonable, I remember thinking; makes perfect sense to me. (Remember, I'd already worked in corporate advertising; I had a soft spot for abuse.) Then the next chapter detailed some techniques and hardware, including how to rig a bed with pulleys and nipple clamps. My hands paused over the keyboard in a prolonged startle reaction, and I understood exactly why, given a different anatomical set, I might have felt too squeamish to continue producing this particular kind of manual.

But I did, and the book was finished on schedule, if not in good harmony. The shop owner later got into a tiff with the client over refusing to take a public credit on the copyright page. I wasn't there for the showdown. But I can only suspect the client was properly chagrined to learn that the book had sparked the equivalent of a wildcat strike by every female on the staff of the SF Bay area's leading feminist type shop, and finally had to be completed by, of all people, a guy.

##   
Listening for a calling

Such were the sociopolitics of Berkeley as the twentieth century slouched toward its kinky denouement. Later I would get acquainted with a female, hetero S&M proponent who, having learned of my involvement with Coming to Power, gave me a rather forceful enlistment pitch, but I steadfastly refused to try out the scene. I was less concerned with extreme sexual explorations than I was with my writing career, which continued to sputter as I struggled to manage my subsistence business and tried to find the time — and more importantly, the inspiration — to write.

The problem was that after leaving investigative journalism, I had no clear calling as a writer. I wrote a few poems and got them published, and occasionally placed a feature article or interview on something that provoked my curiosity. But where I'd thought I was going to save the world as a reporter, I simply didn't know what I was doing as a self-employed typographer and part-time scribbler. I tried self-publishing a satirical magazine and then twenty-one issues of a literary newsletter. The latter was sort of a blog in print, produced at great cost because I would spare no expense on fine paper and topnotch printing — all for the sake of entertaining myself and generally puzzling a handful of paying subscribers. As I slipped into my thirties without a distinct raison d'être, I felt that I'd probably made the right decision by not selling out my talents to mainstream advertising. But the question remained: What had I protected those talents for?

####   
An instructive catastrophe

At age thirty-two, in the same stage of life when Jesus Christ ran into major trouble, my own life fell apart. I was not crucified, but for a while I felt like I was being unfairly persecuted. Instead of the Romans, my tormentors were a collection of violent, intensifying physical disorders that were eventually diagnosed as chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). At the time, this diagnosis was brand-new and applied mostly to women; when I first learned about CFS I remember ruefully thinking that my feminist sympathies were getting out of hand. For a while, I was looking for anybody or anything that could be blamed for this sudden roadblock in front of a life path that had been, to tell the truth, headed nowhere.

To make a long and tortuous story shorter, CFS proved to be a highly instructive catastrophe spanning seven years of illness and recovery. Along with many other dramatic effects, this catastrophe led me from unconscious anger to a discipline of forgiveness, from generally poor health habits to learning how to take care of myself, and from one career to another. As it soon became obvious that long exposure to toxic photochemicals was one of the triggers for my illness, I was forced to quit the business of phototypesetting (at roughly the same time that the entire industry was succumbing to that killer app, Photoshop).

As I entered a slow recovery, I began to work in journalism again, but this time as a magazine writer for a wide variety of periodicals including Yoga Journal and The Sun. I investigated many of the same topics that had proven critical to my healing process: contemporary spirituality, transpersonal psychology, yoga, alternative healing modalities, and studies of human potential.

The crusading reporter that I was in my twenties would have been shocked to see this turn in my work by my forties, but in retrospect I recognize that some kind of radical evolution is endemic to the process of "real writing." Regardless of the style or genre, any writer working for more than money is necessarily involved in a deep selfinvestigation aimed at uncovering a different sense of self, or quality of consciousness, than he or she may normally be comfortable with.

As the Gospel of Thomas famously quotes JC, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you." When I first fell ill, I felt crucified largely because I was not recognizing that a suppressed inner life was beginning to make itself known. Instead, it felt like a vicious stranger within myself was trying to kill me. Healing, for me, was not just a matter of repairing my physiology but of integrating an inner consciousness that had been gone too long squelched and unexpressed. As I did that, I discovered that I had something to write about: a calling, as it were. And as that calling gained traction, I was sure that I was finally on the way to a writing career that was creatively, spiritually, and financially rewarding.

##   
Not so fast

Nine books and a hundred or so magazine articles later, not to mention ten years of webmastering and online publishing, I've reached a sort of career apogee that has sparked some bemused reflection. With two nonfiction books in circulation from major New York houses and several more titles, including two novels, under the imprint of my own press, I've realized that I've achieved my vague, youthful goal of becoming a Real Writer. I managed to rise above mere artfulness, and I did not sell out my skills to advertising. In terms of creative ambition, you might say I've come to power — but the result has been something short of orgasmic. In fact, my recent assessment of all my apparent success so far has been rather diffident, something along the lines of: Hmm. Well then. What now?

If I'm honest, the answer to that last question is: It would be nice to make a living someday. Perhaps because most authors known to the public and showing up in the press have best-sellers and sometimes movie spin-offs under their belt, there remains a persistent mythology that writing is a lucrative profession. Anyone who's labored for a lifetime outside the glare of the industry's klieg lights will tell a different story. Most career writers have to depend on an alternate income source to survive; many of them teach writing. (In the last ten years, I've derived most of my cash flow from critiquing, editing, and consulting on publication for other writers, essentially teaching outside the classroom.) Other authors have different daytime careers (say, advertising) that enable them to take the time and exert the prodigious effort to sit down regularly at the keyboard and, as the old saying goes, open a vein.

In my younger days, I would have said that money didn't really matter to me, or that I didn't want too much success because it could so easily waylay my higher creative, ethical, and spiritual goals. It's a funny pass when you reach the point of being able to say that you've essentially met your inner marks and now wouldn't mind hitting some external ones — like, say, enough money to live on comfortably.

##   
Measures of success

This ambivalent assessment of my career was intensified when I got the latest edition of my adult report card from the federal government. It's officially titled "Your Social Security Statement" and purports to tell me how many retirement dollars I'll be entitled to when I take up lawn bowling fulltime, but it makes me feel just like my public school report cards used to.

No — it makes me feel worse than that, because I always had pretty good report cards when I was a kid. The Social Security Administration doesn't hand out letter grades, they just tell you what your taxable income has been for every year you reported to the IRS. The ghost of every April 15th you've tried to forget is resurrected in cold black and white. For a career freelance writer and independent publisher, it's a chilling experience indeed.

It's said that most folks are more reluctant to reveal their financial secrets than their dankest sexual intimacies, but I've been in the soul-baring business so long I have hardly any discretion left. So here goes. Since 1972 when I entered the work force as a college cafeteria floormopper, including my brief advertising career and all the following years of self-employment, I've netted a grand total of about $300,000. Including a peak year when I grossed about $75,000 and no less than eight years when I was in the hole on my profit-and-loss statements — two of them in my first four years as an indie publisher — I've averaged an annual taxable income of about $7700. While I was variously employed in my youth as a sandwich-maker, faux-French waiter, and horse-jump builder before becoming a typesetter, I owe most of my earnings record after 1979 to the lifelong attempt to "make it" as a writer.

I don't have a reliable conversion scale, but given my middle-class origins and the earning potential indicated by all those good grades in school, I have the awful feeling that I haven't scraped by with a "B" or "C" on this cumulative earnings exam. I'm afraid I'm looking at a "D."

Yet even in my worst mood of critical self-assessment, I am not so materialistic that I gauge my success solely in terms of dollars earned (or not). I'm reasonably certain that my magazine writing and book authorship over the last twenty-odd years have positively influenced the lives of thousands, and I've received hundreds of letters attesting to such influence. I fondly remember the quavering handwriting of a retired, 98-year-old psychiatrist expressing gratefulness that his psychiatrist had given him a copy of my 1994 volume A Little Book of Forgiveness. I wrote him back with the suggestion that when he hit 100, he probably deserved to take a break from therapy.

Then there was the charming and articulate essay from a 15-yearold girl who discovered a copy of my Book of Practical Faith while rummaging through her grand-dad's luggage, read it on the spot, and decided to share with me a few points that she thought I'd missed. (I had.) I was so charmed that I rewarded her with a free copy of my forgiveness title. She wrote back on Hello Kitty stationery to say, "Thank you for that other book. It is not as good as the first one."

That memory still brings tears to my eyes, but not like the letter from a college coed who wrote to tell me that a counselor had given her my work on forgiveness while she was suicidal, following a brutal rape in her senior year of high school. Were it not for my book, she wrote, she was quite certain she would be in her grave instead of her first dorm room.

Doesn't that kind of success make up for chronic shortfalls of income? Well, yes and no. I have found that the warm feelings I get from such correspondence have a way of fading to black when I face cold and unforgiving documents like utility bills, credit card statements, and my Social Security report card. I don't know how many times I have gone over all my financial documents to conclude "This is not working" — but soon I'm back to work on the next article, the next book, or the next potentially lucrative feature for my literary website.

I wonder if there is anyone who is utterly free of attempting to measure their success — or if it is an anxiety whose genetic encoding is as sure and undeniable as the will to survive itself. I know where my particular flavor of success anxiety comes from, because it owes a lot to the person who paid the most attention to my childhood report cards. My mother suffered with what psychiatrists call "projective identification syndrome," and it was my identity upon which she chose to project a lot of her frustrated desire to be a writer.

Almost until the day she died, my mom had a penchant for calling me up to discuss the latest huge advance granted to some author whom she had read about in the newspaper. Every story had a similar denouement: "Well, you know they told him he'd never be able to do it, but he just sat down and wrote that book and now they've given him a million dollars for it!" I could never be sure if it was the same "they" who first discouraged and then paid off the latest lucky writer — would that literary justice really was so sweet! — but her point was made nonetheless.

The fact that my mother's literary tastes declined over the years didn't help. I remember with special distaste her Dean Koontz phase, when she would call to tell me what his latest advance was, or how much he had made by selling the film rights to one of his horrific yarns. "But Mom," I always wanted to answer, "he's the literary equivalent of Satan!" My actual response was always something like "So how's the weather back there, anyway?"

##   
A life lesson

At any rate, I do have a valuable life lesson to impart on this subject: If one is going to play the torturous game of measuring success, happiness lies in choosing the right scale of comparison. After receiving my discouraging marks from the Social Security Administration, I set out to research just where my earnings total might fall on a relevant scale. (The stats to follow are six or seven years old, but I doubt that they've changed for the better.)

On the web I first searched data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which yielded the general rule of thumb that your typical college-graduate professional, gender unspecified, earns a mean average of $50,000 a year. I could easily dismiss myself from that punishing scale, as I didn't finish college and there's so much about me that's not typical. Then I ran across the average salary for a newspaper staff writer — $26,000 — and felt a little better. But that's still not me, I thought.

Finally, I found a sense of belonging in a report on writers' incomes compiled by Nancy DuVergne Smith for the National Writers Union. Gravely noting that magazines' payments to freelance writers have declined by fifty percent in real dollars since the 1960s, Smith went on to break down writers' incomes in several categories, including "Full Time Small Press Magazine Writers." (That's more or less my club, even if I never meant to end up with this lifetime membership.)

And it was in those statistics where I finally found some news that was startling, disheartening, and encouraging all at once. My fellow club members earned the least of anyone from writing — "52 percent earn less than $6,000 and the median is $4000." Well then! Compared to a group mean of $4000, my lifetime yearly average of $7700 doesn't look so bad after all. One could almost call it an unqualified success.

I will not, however, do any research to see how this income compares to that of a top advertising copywriter or agency executive with, say, thirty years under his belt. Knowing what I know already, I'm not sure I want to be apprised of the full cost of not selling out.

Appendix

The following three articles, while not strictly autobiographical, represent different examples of how my writing career was spiritually influenced. Each piece represents some of my best work in each style. The first article is an example of feature journalism, the second is an investigative report and commentary, and the third is a satirical diversion.

\- 11 -

# Ending the War Within

Originally published in Yoga Journal in 1997

"My bad life began when I was eight years old," says Rosa, a thirty-year-old native of El Salvador who speaks English with a poetic and sometimes shattering simplicity. She remembers a childhood violently scarred by her country's war with neighboring Honduras: "Everything started with the guns and fights, killing the children, ladies, old people. After that everything is afraid because I saw many people killed by soldiers. Then somebody likes to kill me when I was fifteen years old. And that was terrible."

Rosa is talking with me in the office of her psychotherapist, Maryanna Eckberg, clinical director of the Healing Center for Survivors of Political Torture, a United Nations-funded program affiliated with the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. When Rosa's story spills out too fast for her to use English, Eckberg translates for us. But it seems that no language barrier could impede the force of the story Rosa has to tell — the story of a "bad life" turning into a better one by dint of her own determination and with the help of an innovative program blending political activism with the healing arts of psychotherapy and bodywork.

When Rosa was fifteen, El Salvador was in the grip of civil war. When a priest active in the liberation theology movement was assassinated near her village, Rosa and her neighbors suffered a lethal fallout.

"Somebody run in the church to say, 'The Father is die!' The soldiers killed him because he is a good man who helped all the children and poor people. Everybody came to that place where he's die, and after that the soldiers say everybody is a guerrilla, and that's why they have to kill everybody."

A few days after the priest's killing, Rosa gave birth to her first daughter. The young mother was sleeping in bed a half-hour later when soldiers broke into her house. "They say, 'I want to kill you' and shot me in the stomach. Then they kill all my neighbors who live around my house. They came back two days later and say, 'Oh, you no die? Why you not die yet?' and they made me walk around to see all the people they killed..."

Rosa switches to rapid-fire Spanish. "All of her insides were torn up," Eckberg relates. "They repeatedly threatened to kill her during the week she was held captive. She doesn't understand why they didn't finish it."

Instead Rosa was left on the road to die. "I hurt a lot, three times as much as having a baby. There is nobody to give me nothing for the hurt." Two days later Rosa was rescued and transported to a hospital; her mother had escaped with Rosa's baby soon after the shooting. Rosa was operated on and a doctor told her she was strong and could survive. In fact she was perilously weak; she had not eaten since two days before giving birth and would receive little nutrition at the hospital. Rosa believes that a few days after the operation, she was given a choice not to go on.

"I remember when I die," Rosa says forcefully, regarding me with a challenging stare. "You must believe me, it's true. One night I think somebody pulls hard on my feet, and something is out of my body. I know something is out, because I see the body — it's mine! I go up and up, and I see dark, and I see angels pointing this way and that way, and I go in the middle. It's beautiful. I remember it's beautiful. But I no see my girl, because my mom took her when I get shot. So when I went up, I said, 'Give me a life. I'd like to see my girl grow up.' And I cried there, I cry and cry and boom! I'm back in my body again. That's why I say I live now for my children."

Rosa falls silent and her broad, expressive face is downcast and pensive as she fiddles with a ring of keys in her lap. Eckberg asks her how she's feeling and Rosa murmurs, almost inaudibly, "Muy bien."

##   
The symptoms of torture

Rosa is one of at least 100,000 people living in the United States who have been tortured by foreign governments, according to the Minneapolis-based Center for Victims of Torture. Their nationalities are as universal as cruelty itself: Cambodian, Vietnamese, Bosnian, Iraqi, African, Central and Latin American. In the Bay area, the Family Health Center at San Francisco General Hospital says that out of its 36,000 annual client contacts, at least five thousand are survivors of torture. The actual number may well be higher, because torture victims are often refugees who are slow to seek professional treatment for a variety of reasons: poverty, language and cultural barriers, and distrust of government programs or the medical profession. (It's estimated that one-fifth of all tortures involve medical personnel.)

The psychological and somatic symptoms suffered by torture survivors can also elude their own perceptions of what constitutes an illness. Not surprisingly, many of them struggle with chronic fear and anxiety, experienced as chronic hyper-reactions to normal stress, depression, or sleeping disorders. Besides the lingering effects of actual wounds inflicted in the course of torture, victims may suffer inexplicable psychophysical problems.

For instance, Maria, a Nicaraguan woman in her early forties, has suffered for twenty years from a recurrent vomiting syndrome, with violent spasms coming on several times daily for months at a time. Maria was a victim of "indirect torture," living under a siege of bombardment while her sister and cousin were held captive by the Somoza government during battles with the revolutionary Sandinistas. After a couple months Maria's sister disappeared without a trace; her cousin was slowly bled to death by being used as a "living blood bank" for wounded government soldiers. Although treated medically in her native country and Russia, Maria did not understand that her vomiting syndrome was related to her traumatic war experiences until she came to San Francisco and entered psychotherapy for the first time via the Healing Center.

Torture is perpetrated during times of war by all sides, and unstable regimes in faraway countries hardly hold an exclusive franchise on its use. Not until January 1997 did the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officially ban the use of torture, while admitting that it had taught abusive techniques to foreign agents as recently as the early 80s.

The CIA issued the statement after the Baltimore Sun threatened a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to force the declassification of a 1983 CIA counterspy interrogation manual devoted to "Human Resource Exploitation Training." And the U.S. Army's "School of the Americas" (renamed in 2001 as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC) in Fort Benning, Georgia has long been criticized as a covert training ground for US-backed terrorism and torture in Latin America.

##   
Somatic psychotherapy

The problems that brought Rosa to the Healing Center for Survivors of Political Torture include depression, vomiting and chronic stomach pain, and paralyzing anxiety. "When I have bad things happen to me, somebody hurt me or something, I remember when I die and say, 'Why did I live?' Sometimes when I get angry or sad, then everything comes and I am in the hole, the black well. Sometimes I am screaming 'I need help! Somebody help me!' Sometimes nobody helps me, and sometimes somebody helps."

Maryanna Eckberg is a "somatic psychotherapist," meaning that she takes a body-oriented approach to Rosa's treatment. "I started working with her breathing immediately, helping her learn to center and ground herself before we ever started talking about what happened to her. At the same time she was getting bodywork treatments from other practitioners, which helped her stay balanced."

Like others with post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD), Rosa's symptoms are rooted in the pre-verbal part of the brain. "In PTSD victims it's the autonomic system that's altered," says Eckberg, "which is very resistant to change. That's why cortex thinking can't override it very well. Explanations don't turn off biological responses."

Thus, conventional "talk therapy" for torture survivors must be carefully conducted. "When survivors talk about traumatic experiences, it's important that they do not relive them," comments Eckberg. "They must be grounded in their bodily experience and their present reality. Telling what happened to them must be paced so that they are in charge of their emotional and bodily responses in order to avoid 'flooding' and re-traumatization."

The Healing Center begins the treatment of all its clients with somatic psychotherapy, also providing them with as many other healing approaches as possible, from conventional massage to chiropractic, acupuncture, breathwork, and instruction in yoga. "Bodywork often begins immediately because the most important thing for torture survivors is to regain a sense of being in charge of their bodies," says Eckberg. "Just a little bit of grounding can provide a lot of positive change in how these survivors experience themselves."

On the other hand, therapeutic modes have to be carefully chosen according to the needs of individual clients, because some forms of bodywork could be perceived as invasive or threatening. But in general the instinctive language of bodywork is universally understood, perhaps encountering more cultural resistance among Westerners than any other population.

##   
Politics and bodywork

"Hands-on healing traditions are generally accepted everywhere except the developed West, where medical science has made us suspicious of them," comments Don Hanlon Johnson, who co-founded the Healing Center with Eckberg. A former Jesuit with roots in both the 60s peace movement and the development of somatics in America, Johnson says that he was initially surprised to find a wide gulf between hardcore political activists and those in the consciousness and bodywork movements.

A longtime associate of Ida Rolf, Johnson remembers that he was undergoing deep-tissue manipulation around the same time he was involved with the anti-war protests led by radical priest Daniel Berrigan. "Rolfing made me feel stronger and more present in the world of activism," Johnson remembers. "I always saw that kind of healing as politically significant. To my bewilderment I soon learned that the bodywork field was largely apolitical. On the other hand, political activists were often insulting to bodyworkers who were politically concerned, accusing us of being 'Esalen types' who catered only to the needs of the rich."

Keeping his eyes open for opportunities to merge his interests, Johnson first learned of a growing network of social service centers for torture survivors about a decade ago. (There are now about a hundred such centers worldwide, with two of the most significant located in Minneapolis and Copenhagen.) Early attempts to introduce conventional physiotherapies at these centers were awkward. For instance,

Swedish massage proved too invasive for some torture victims, and soon psychologists were being brought in to supervise bodywork. "I thought this was the perfect place for holistic therapists and practitioners to come in," comments Johnson. After talking to his peers and forming study groups to develop an integrated healing approach for torture survivors, Johnson and his colleagues procured a seed grant for the Healing Center from the United Nations. "Our unique niche is developing teams of therapists and bodyworkers who focus on a non-intrusive, respectful healing process."

Besides easing the lingering pain of torture victims, Johnson feels that the Healing Center also taps a long repressed potential in the somatics movement. "Most of the bodyworkers I know have an intense political longing, a desire to contribute to the common good that transcends individual betterment. And historically they've found very little outlet for it. Bodyworkers are really changed by this work, seeing the enormous impact of it."

##   
A surprising prognosis

Part of the impact of the Healing Center's work owes to a surprising characteristic of torture victims: many of them seem to recover more rapidly than conventional therapy clients who suffered early childhood abuse. Childhood trauma that wounds the formation of personality is generally more difficult to overcome than political torture, which is usually inflicted on adults whose psychological identities are more or less intact.

"For a person who's been beaten as an adult for clearly political reasons, it seems to be easier to recover than for an adult who was beaten as a child and didn't know why," explains Johnson. Where child abuse victims need to gradually uncover the truth of what happened to them, torture survivors can usually recall their central trauma. They have a greater need to "normalize" the resultant effects.

Says Maryanna Eckberg, "Our aim is to help survivors understand that while their experience has been extraordinary, their responses to it are normal — that is, what should be expected when you've lived through torture. This is a tremendous relief for most of our clients. They're often frightened about whether they're going crazy, or they simply don't know why their bodies seem so out of control with all their symptoms."

In Rosa's case, her depression and stomach sickness have decreased significantly since she began working with Eckberg. "Sometimes I stayed for three days in my room," Rosa remembers of her pre-treatment life. "I don't want to see anybody and I don't want to leave and I don't want to go anywhere. My body would like to die, and I cry a lot." Now Eckberg says that Rosa deals remarkably well with a stressful home situation that includes four daughters and a husband who were all traumatized by the war in their homeland. (The entire family has political asylum status in the United States.) "When problems arise Rosa manages them much better than she used to," observes Eckberg. "Now she gets upset, but she doesn't go into flashbacks or get so sick." While Rosa would like to become a nurse, she faces daunting obstacles, including the language barrier and a low-paying job as a caretaker for senior citizens. Still, in the latter circumstance Rosa finds a silver lining:

"When I die I promise to God that I'd be a good person, even though sometimes I can't do it. But the people I work for love me. When they tell me 'You're a good person and I'm happy to know you,' they make me happy." I think that helps me." Rosa also gives her therapist the kind of endorsement that any professional helper would like to hear: "When I have big problems now I have Maryanna in my mind. Because she believes me and understands what my feeling is, then I know she loves me. Before when I get problems, nobody loves me and I wonder why I'm living..."

Rosa switches to Spanish. "She says she thinks that God left her on the earth for a reason," Eckberg translates. "She needs to tell her story." "He gave me the life back!" Rosa exclaims in English. "Now I'm better and I know that life is beautiful, but sometimes it's very hard. That's why I fight to live."
UPDATE: Maryanna Eckberg passed away in 1999 and the  San Francisco Healing Center closed thereafter. The multi-disciplinary treatment of survivors of torture continues under the auspices of such organizations as Survivors International:  http://traumarecoverycenter.org/services/survivors-international/ and the Center for Victims of Torture: http://www.cvt.org/.

Don Hanlon Johnson can be contacted via his website at www.donhanlonjohnson.com.

\- 12 -

# Why You Don't Trust Reporters — And What They Could Do About It

Originally published in the East Bay Express, August 2, 1996

When I was trained in my early twenties in investigative reporting, I was schooled in an adversarial attitude toward the subjects of my stories — including subjects who had consented to be interviewed and quoted. When I re-entered journalism in my thirties with a spiritual perspective, I decided that effective reporting could be done in a collaborative style. This did not always go over well with my colleagues and editors, one of whom canceled one of my feature interviews when she learned that I had allowed the interview subject to preview her quotes in a draft manuscript before publication. Later, I went on to write several stories about the attitudes and practices of journalism, including this one, perhaps my proudest achievement as a recovering investigative journalist. In this piece, I set out to prove that a collaborative attitude could both respect and reveal an interview subject in a classic investigative style.

If you've ever dealt with the press, the following scenario may sound bitterly familiar. Reporter X calls to interview you for a story about yourself or your involvement in some newsworthy event. If, like most people, you've never been directly contacted by a reporter before, you're probably excited, maybe even a bit anxious. But Reporter X assures you that the story will portray you in a fair and positive light. Perhaps a few questions make you a little uncomfortable, but X seems to take your clumsy, unprepared explanations at face value. New to this whole fame thing, you ask if you can read what's going to be written about you before it's published.

"Well," Reporter X replies guardedly, "I'm afraid there won't be time for that. I just never seem to get ahead of my deadlines, heh heh. And besides," X adds sternly, "that sort of thing just isn't done in journalism."

Oh, okay — you didn't know. It's not clear to you why that sort of thing isn't done, but X is a seasoned journalist who surely knows the ropes better than you, a mere citizen of the republic. So you forget about it, looking forward to seeing your name in print and your unique story shared with the dwindling number of people who still read. But on the big day the article appears, you get a call from a friend who worriedly asks, "Have you seen those awful things the paper is saying about you?"

Now a sick feeling wells up within, and for good reason. For the story about you by Reporter X turns out to be a character assassination, full of either outright misquotes or things you really said placed in a vile and twisted context. The total effect is to make you look like a crook, a hypocrite, or a complete fool. Stunned and embittered, you swear to yourself never to be taken in by a reporter again.

If you've never been interviewed by the press, this scenario may sound extreme or unlikely. Consider, then, the true and unfortunate case of Kevin S. An enthusiastic customer-relations rep working in the Seattle headquarters of the Starbucks coffeehouse empire, 25-year-old Kevin received a call earlier this year from a San Francisco citizen who said he'd been wondering why Starbucks had not yet opened a store in his neighborhood, the Lower Haight. Kevin revealed that there would soon be a new Starbucks outlet on Market Street, but the caller lamented that was too far away. Would it help the cause if he circulated a petition for a new Starbucks? the caller asked. Sure, said Kevin.

But the anonymous caller pressed further, wanting to know if Starbucks might be invited to replace one of the independent coffeehouses already in the neighborhood. Kevin confirmed that Starbucks' real estate department might bid on a viable property if a lease came up for grabs. When the caller asked if it was "weird" for a caffeine fan like himself to be petitioning Starbucks directly for a new shop, Kevin answered, "No, not at all. We appreciate your enthusiasm." Poor Kevin. Little did he know that his anonymous caller was actually Jack Boulware, an SF Weekly reporter who would recount the conversation in the most unflattering light imaginable for an edition of his column "Slap Shots." Pretending to be a Starbucks fan in order to set up his source as a public relations "puppet," Boulware also characterized Kevin in his "Coffee Achievers" story as a "goon," "stooge," "drone," "slave," "twit," and — in a crowning burst of invective — as a "soul-less, ball-less little fuck... definitely in league with the devil."

Pretty funny, huh? Unless you happen to be Kevin S., a young fellow simply trying to do his job of answering the queries and complaints of real Starbucks customers calling in from around the nation. "The caller sounded friendly and interested in Starbucks," Kevin told me recently. "If I'd thought that anything else was going on, I'd have immediately switched the call to media relations." Which is arguably where the call belonged — if the disguised call of a reporter who was "cringing at my own lie" (as Boulware admitted in print) really deserved to be taken by anyone.

A lot is revealed about the mindset of modern journalism in this story: not only that a reporter would deliberately misrepresent himself and openly malign a source in this way, but also that the editor of his paper would print the results and subsequently offer no apologies. Indeed, it appears that Boulware was applauded by his journalistic peers for his approach. The column demeaning Kevin S. was later published in the nationwide coffeehouse magazine Cups [now out of print] as one of the editors' "favorite reprints."

But the editorial indiscretions of an alternative weekly and a javahouse journal can't be said to represent the ethics of American journalism as a whole, the reader may protest. Surely such antagonism and betrayal of sources doesn't go on at such prestigious publications as, say, The New Yorker. If that's what you're thinking, let's briefly review the case of staff writer Janet Malcolm.

Malcolm was sued for libel by her source Jeffrey Masson, the renegade Freudian analyst and author who charged her with misquoting him and irreparably damaging his reputation in a lengthy profile she wrote for The New Yorker in 1982. The case got oodles of anxious press attention during its journey through the courts; an initial 1993 decision went Masson's way, but the jury deadlocked on damages and the entire case was retried. In late 1994 the US District Court in San Francisco heard the case, and this time Malcolm was acquitted. Masson's appeal of this decision was denied on June 5 of this year, apparently ending the lengthy litigation.

Some observers have concluded that Malcolm and Masson were simply two unpleasant characters who deserved the misery they inflicted upon each other. But one part of the story was incontestable: Malcolm had deliberately befriended Masson and then used his unguarded personal revelations to portray him in a savagely critical light.

Perhaps the sole benefit of the Malcolm-Masson dust-up was that it seemed to stir the dark waters of journalism's collective unconscious — enough so that lately some prominent reporters and media are actually engaging in a little self-examination. Not surprisingly, what they're seeing when they look in the mirror is not a pretty sight.

A year ago the Columbia Journalism Review set the tone for the New Guilt of reporters with a cover story entitled "Generation of Vipers." In it, National Journal reporter Paul Starobin observed that "the current of casual disdain running through today's journalism is rooted in a deep and abiding cynicism, a reflexive suspicion of face-value explanations, [and] an inclination to ascribe ignoble motives...."

More recently, Atlantic Monthly's Washington editor James Fallows came out with his press critique, Breaking the News, a book which is receiving some grudging, maybe-he's-got-a-point reviews from his peers. "If 'investigation' was the word for jounalism in the Woodward and Bernstein era," says Fallows, "attitude and snarl are the words now.... The 'toughness' of today's media is mainly a toughness of demeanor rather than real toughness of reporting, investigation, or substantive change."

Here at home, the tough-guy niche at the Express is filled by Paul Rauber in his political gossip column, "Sticks & Stones." The title alone should serve as fair warning to Rauber's subjects and sources. But over the eight years of the column's run some people have nonetheless been shocked by what they perceive as his hostile or cavalier handling of their quotes, stories, and reputations.

Local attorney and recent judicial candidate Anna DeLeon complained in a 1994 letter to the Express about being victimized by Rauber's cynicism. In 1993 Berkeley City Councilwoman Dona Spring got into a running print battle with Rauber in which she complained that his coverage of her stance on an anti-panhandling ordinance was "completely twisted." A raft of subsequent letters from Spring supporters charged Rauber with carrying on a "personal vendetta" and making "shrill, distorted, and vindictive attacks." More recently, the Express twice ran a retraction of some statements that Rauber had made about a local music club owner.

As an independent reporter investigating journalistic ethics, I have no interest in presenting evidence for either side of these controversies. When I contacted Paul Rauber recently, I was chiefly curious to learn why he apparently revels in his aggressive adversarial stance. While he doesn't pull Boulware-style stunts, Rauber nonetheless comes across to many observers as an antagonistic and cynical writer.

"I don't think anyone who knows me personally would say I'm a tough guy," counters Rauber. "I have my opinions and I lay them out. I see myself as someone ready to engage in political dialogue." The purpose of "Sticks & Stones," he reveals, is to be "instructive and entertaining. I hope to show people that local politics can be interesting, and I do that by the type of items I run. They're often pointed, taking some party to task for a deceit or fault."

Obviously Rauber's critics regard this fault-finding as anything but entertaining, and in fact his column engenders an almost regular flow of vehement opposition. Rauber characterizes all this response as "the hurly-burly of political discourse. When people are characterized negatively, especially in a small community like Berkeley, they will take offense. I'm sorry if they do, but it's not my business to worry about their personal pleasure."

In fact, Rauber asserts that journalism and public discourse need more adversarial hurly-burly. "American journalism actually shies away from conflict," he says. "It doesn't want to draw the real political lines between the haves and the have-nots. The fact is that politics is adversarial. There are different and competing interests, and it would be nice if everybody could be happy. But it ain't gonna happen."

Of course, some would say that while politics may indeed be adversarial in daily practice, nothing positive can be achieved without eventual reconciliation of differing interests. Rauber concedes that there may be some truth in that view, but that reconciliation is simply "not my job." When I ask how effective his adversarial style has proven, Rauber sounds subdued. "I don't know," he admits. "I think on occasion it's had some effect, but I can't really tell."

At any rate, Rauber's view of his job is simply to tell the facts as he sees them and let the chips fall where they may. "I think I'm fair. I believe myself to be ethical in my dealings with people. I take great care to see that the material I present is factually correct. And I'm ready to take my lumps if I'm wrong."

But does he ever admit that's wrong? Rauber allows that he's independently issued a few retractions in his time, but says that we'd have to get into particular cases for a more thorough discussion of his fairness and accuracy. When I suggest the Dona Spring controversy as an example, Rauber's summary is succinct: "I'm right and she's wrong. The facts were on my side." Without reprising the whole controversy here, it's safe to say that Dona Spring still sees the facts differently (as she confirmed to me recently).

Even Rauber admits that controversy often arises from different perceptions of established facts. When I suggest to him that it might be the job of a political journalist to present the range of views on an issue in a balanced manner, he gives one of his most passionate responses, using an issue close to his heart as an example.

"I have a concern about landlords taking advantage of tenants. People know where I'm coming from on that. I don't think it's my business to present the landlords' point of view — why it's important for them to get lots of money because they have large alimony payments or because they want to send their darling daughter to Harvard. I don't want to know. That's not my business! I'm not going into all that."

Little wonder then that Rauber doesn't extend to landlords — or anyone else he writes about — the courtesy of reading back quotes or previewing what he's written about them before publication. While these practices have been traditionally frowned upon in professional journalism, in recent years they have gained adherents (including this writer).

As the American Journalism Review reports, prominent practitioners of read-back and/or manuscript preview include Washington Post business reporter Jay Mathews and Rosemary Armao, executive director of the professional society of Investigative Reporters and Editors. At the University of Missouri School of Journalism, readbacks are part of a standard procedure for student reporters called Accuracy Check.

Another adherent of checking out stories with sources is Ken Metzler, a retired University of Oregon professor who authored Creative Interviewing, the first textbook written on the subject and a standard reference in many journalism schools. "All interviewers are inherently biased," observes Metzler, "and we're all a hell of a long way from objectivity." That's why he thinks it's a good idea for a reporter to let sources read and comment on what's being written about them — it may help the reporter moderate his or her inevitable bias.

The most common objection to read-backs and previews — that sources can't be trusted to read about themselves without wanting to "pretty up" their quotes, dictate a revision of the story, or even threaten to sue — is readily dismissed by Metzler. "Reporters would be a lot closer to the truth if they trusted everyone until individuals prove themselves not to be trustworthy. There's far too much of a 'me against the world' mindset in journalism, rooted in the tradition of adversarial reporting. It gets to be like a game these guys are playing. I think borderline paranoia is a good diagnosis for a few of them."

Nonsense, says Paul Rauber. He has never read back quotes because he's "confident of my note-taking skills," and he's philosophically opposed to the idea of manuscript preview. "My perception of journalism, and I believe it's widely shared, is that the point of the enterprise is not to make everybody happy. It's to let the community know what's happening in their community as mediated through the perspective of a particular journalist. That's why we have bylines."

As a magazine journalist who has consistently previewed manuscripts with my sources over the last decade, I've always preserved my particular perspective, and my byline, on the stories I cover. When I let sources read and comment on my work, I'm not trying to make them happy. I am trying to catch my inevitable errors and check my inherent bias against the input of my sources. My experience suggests that discussing my first drafts with my sources (as I did with Rauber for this article) results in reportage that is more fair, accurate, and constructive than it would be otherwise. (By the way, Rauber confirmed his quotes appearing in this story, but he's certainly not happy about it.)

According to opinion polls, reporters have a pretty bad reputation these days, and they deserve a lot of it. One reason is surely the chronic cynicism resulting from an adversarial outlook. To rehabilitate their reputation, I believe, journalists at every level need to adopt a new, more demanding vision of fairness. It's not just a matter of getting the facts straight and presenting them from your point of view. As I suggested to Paul Rauber, real fairness requires making a reasonable effort to survey and respectfully present differing perceptions of the facts.

"You're welcome to that view," Rauber responded, "but I would challenge you to try writing about local politics and see how far it gets you." While I'm as susceptible to a challenge of my journalistic machismo as the next reporter, I think I'll decline this dare. For I've already staked out a pretty mean territory in which to test my stuff. I interview journalists.

UPDATE: Jack Boulware continues to freelance and publish widely, and was a founding member of the San Francisco literary festival Litstock, which became the ongoing celebration of Bay area writing known as Litquake. His website is www.jackboulware.com. Paul Rauber is the Senior Editor of Sierra magazine. His Facebook address is www.facebook.com/paul.rauber.
- 13 -

Genesis Corrected  
Previously published in the online Elephant Journal

#

by The Serpent

(channeled by D. Patrick Miller)

When you've been swallowing your tail for as long as I have, not much gets under your skin anymore — and you can always slough the damn thing off anyway. But after eavesdropping on all the pop versions of the Genesis story that your amateur philosophers have been feeding you, I simply have to speak up. I've kept my snout out of earth-bound business for a long time now — for smart reasons that will soon be revealed — but enough is enough. It's time for my version of Genesis, which just happens to be the correct one. There's been a helluva lot of misinformation floating around for the last couple millennia, and there's no one in a better position than myself to set the record straight.

##   
A divine comedy of error

The first thing you should know is that God and I used to be a lot tighter, simply because He spent more time around here in the early eons. Earth was one of His first attempts at planet-making, and it seemed the apple of His Eye for a while. An amateur chemist not held in the highest regard by His Peers, our local God has never been quite sure what will result from His willy-nilly mixing of the elements.

So after He'd thrown together the solar system and set it spinning, He was rather pleased to see that He had one planet that could already support life without further fooling around in the lab. But God knew He would need a planet manager once He moved on to other projects. So He spritzed a little piece of earthstuff with super-consciousness, et voila, there I was: God's first lieutenant, the primeval Serpent. Hold the applause.

The problem is that our God doesn't know how to take advice. I told Him right off the bat that if He wanted a nice sweet planet that would add honor and prestige to His Reputation, He should populate it with a fixed number of simple, one-celled, blissfully unaware organisms. "Leave the awareness to me," I suggested. "I'll take care of the little guys and make sure they thrive and prosper. You can go on to the next planet and try something a little trickier, but You'll have Earth under Your Belt as a nifty little biosphere that runs smooth and looks good.

I'll stay out of Your Hair and run a tight ship with no mishaps. You can't lose."

But all the time I was talking, God was gazing off into the Void! When He came to, He gave me this silly grin and said, "I can make as many cells as I want, but what if I make cells that can make more of themselves? Wouldn't that be wild?"

I said, "I don't think that's such a good idea," but a nanosecond later I looked down into the primordial soup covering the Earth's surface at the time and in it I saw six or eight one-celled organisms already splitting themselves in half. I did the math; we were looking at a frightening rate of reproduction.

"Good Lord!" I exclaimed, hoping that a humble entreaty might make Him rethink this bit of improvisation. But when I looked up He was nowhere to be found. He had left me alone with this bubbling mass of multiplying little entities, and I had the sickening feeling that there was going to be some kind of accident sooner or later. And I would almost certainly have to take the rap for it.

##   
An invention called death

Well, I didn't have long to wait. Just as I suspected, the sheer profligacy of these organisms resulted in their having little mishaps (what your esteemed Mr. Darwin would eventually identify as "mutations"), that would alter their offspring in some of the most grotesque ways you could imagine. Pseudopods, flagella, endoplasmic reticuli... what a mess.

Then some of these messed-up organisms started reproducing in an incredibly inelegant manner, pairs mushing themselves together and exchanging fluids with the result that one member of each pair would swell up and spit out young'uns, and then the original pair would degenerate and become so much organic flotsam. I mean they would grow old and die, which was a terrible thing to see the first few times.

Thus was the simplicity of binary fission replaced by the slop and cruelty of sexual reproduction. I was mightily disturbed by this bizarre turn of events in God's experiment, particularly because these sexualized organisms had invented their own death. (And you thought sex only recently became deadly!)

You see, putting an end to life was supposed to be the exclusive privilege of Gods and planet managers, so I had a serious usurpation of cosmic powers on my hands. And for what? The only thing sexual reproduction seemed to accomplish was a nasty acceleration of the mutation problem. In a wink of the eye, eternally speaking, the planet's population evolved from a more-or-less manageable bouillabaisse of algae and plankton to an unholy circus of slippery fish, noisy birds, and the ugliest, ungainliest, most stupid and lumbering creatures I have yet to see in God's Reign.

##   
Dinosaurs

You think they're cute now, but you should have been around to actually smell the dinosaurs and watch them trampling the flowers. I tried to text God about what was going down with — and beneath — the dinosaurs, but I believe he was off to Mars, scratching canals and happy faces onto its surface. So the dinosaur problem was in my lap, and either I had to do something fast or become the laughingstock of the upcoming Planet Managers Convention.

Now I'll admit my solution was not the most surgical of interventions, but hey, it did the trick. I swung a deal with the foreman of the local asteroid belt, who tossed a couple of starchunks nobody would miss down my way. You should have seen the first one splash in the Pacific — we're talking a Himalayan tidal wave! Lots of those scaly buggers drowned right then and there. The few dinos who managed to surf through that inundation eventually bought the farm during the little spell of bad weather that ensued for the next forty thousand years. Don't worry — I wouldn't pull a stunt like that again without extreme provocation. I know you people are always expecting cataclysmic punishment because you feel guilty about your cold and callous behavior toward each other and your fellow species. But that sort of thing really doesn't bother me. Until you get as big, ugly, and cement-dumb as those God-forsaken (really!) dinosaurs, you're safe from my wrath.

##   
Peace and quiet

I had hoped that the tsunamis and belching volcanoes that killed the lizard-monsters might also wipe out everything but one-celled, asexual organisms, giving me a fresh start on planet management — but no such luck. Here and there some pink salmon and Asiatic rats and Venus flytraps made it through all the climatic upheavals, and eventually the processes of mutation, evolution, and differentiation of species resumed.

I had promised myself that I wouldn't make any more waves, so to speak, so I just let everything go on its merry way. To tell the truth, there was a measure of relative peace and quiet on Earth for hundreds, maybe thousands of millennia after that. I lost track of the time because nothing really seemed to require my attention, so I got in some long overdue reading. God certainly seemed long gone; the last I heard He'd been fooling around with some supernova at the western edge of our galaxy, like some damn fool kid with a cherry bomb. At least, I thought He was out of the neighborhood — because what happened next made me suspicious.

##   
A little garden music

It was on a Tuesday afternoon, as I recall, when I put down my copy of the Transunarian Apocrypha to give the Earth a little look-see. As a super-conscious being whose awareness encircles the globe, I usually take in the Gestalt of things without worrying over details, but on this particular day I noticed a little glint of light coming from the vicinity of what you now call St. Tropez.

I zeroed in on it, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a rather splendid, luminous little garden grove with a vine-rope fence enclosing its perimeter, say maybe a half-mile across and open on one side to some prime beachfront real estate. What struck me right away was how orderly and beatific the place was: no vicious predators, no disease-ridden swamps, just lots of colorful, melodious parrots flitting everywhere and a family of happy monkeys swinging from tree to tree. Somehow the messy process of evolution had resulted in a little piece of what you folks would call "heaven on earth." Or had it? There was almost something unnatural about the place.

Then it hit me. Happy monkeys don't make vine-rope fences. Now I had seen some pretty smart monkeys in recent years, but nothing beyond your basic Koko material. Nowhere had I seen an animal capable of this kind of environmental manipulation. The fence was clear evidence of something new under the sun, and it stirred in me the kind of foreboding I hadn't felt since the earliest days of sexual reproduction.

I decided to check out the situation firsthand. I shrunk myself down to my material form, with scaly arms and a human trunk (see the family portrait, below). In those days I looked more like a little version of you guys than what you think of now as a serpent. Just imagine a sleek, iridescent kind of weasel and you'll have a pretty good picture of my original incarnation. Not a bad-looking guy and, like the monkeys, a tree-lover.

##   
Shiny happy people holding hands

So I followed the monkeys on their rounds in the leafy canopy for a while, and it wasn't long until they led me to the nerve center of what became known in your religious history as the "Garden of Eden." The vine-rope fence wasn't the only piece of environmental engineering to be found. Nestled at the bottom of a gentle slope about a mile from the beach was a thatched-roof hut next to a lean-to utility shed. Both faced a stone-ringed campfire. Sitting on a couple of sawed-off stumps next to that campfire were the first two humans I ever laid eyes on: yes, your progenitors, Adam and Eve.

I didn't know what they were at first, as they resembled relatively hairless gorillas with wimpy musculature but incredibly articulated fingers and toes. Adam was underfed for his size, and didn't look too intellectual; Eve was quite sensual in a bucolic sort of a way. Kind of a pastoral Amy Adams, if you can relate.

I was transfixed. I could see right away that these peculiar beings were capable of altering their natural environment in such a way as to make themselves more comfortable, which I think is a virtuous pastime for any being stuck full-time on the coarse and gritty material plane. So I was beginning to have more respect for this evolution thing, if... if Somebody wasn't playing a trick on me. For if these folks were just late-model gorillas, there was sure as hell a missing link somewhere.

To investigate I jumped noiselessly onto the branch of an apple tree overhanging the smooth-skinned couple, and spied on them at close quarters for a while. Unfortunately my initial good impression of the pair lost some of its shine after a few hours. They did communicate orally at a level above the apes, but mostly they clicked, whistled, and burbled in such a way as to suggest they weren't talking about anything very important. Mostly they just held hands and sat around petting each other. There was a kissy thing going on that I hadn't seen in other species; oh, some lions and wolves showed a little familial devotion from time to time, but these people were having a regular mutual admiration society. Frankly, it made me jumpy.

So I was about to flee the joint and get back to my reading when Adam and Eve got into a hot and heavy clinch, rolled onto the ground, and started doing the sexual thing. I was horrified! This may sound dumb, but up until that point it had simply not occurred to me that they might be, well, that way. They acted like they were more or less self-aware, and the rule of thumb in the Cosmos is that Consciousness = Immortality. But if Adam and Eve had sex, that meant one of them was going to swell up and produce mutations — and then Adam and Eve would grow old and expire! Didn't they know they were signing their own death warrant with this sexual indulgence? What could they possibly be thinking?

Maybe I shouldn't have cared, but I was getting terribly confused and upset. I had kept my nose out of Earth goings-on for a long time, but it was time to make a difference. An asteroid didn't seem necessary at this point; besides, I kinda felt sorry for these silly beings who knew not what they were doing. It struck me that they might be educable.

##   
A fork in the cosmos

So I decided to stick around for a while, and learn Adam and Eve's click-and-whistle language so that I could inform them about the mortal dangers of sexual reproduction. I thought that if I could get them to "just say no," then they might not reproduce and decay — or at least their aging might be held off long enough for me to get God's attention and arrange a special dispensation of immortality. Maybe they had enough consciousness to qualify; it was worth a try. Plus, I wasn't absolutely sure God hadn't had a Hand in all this to start with. It was distinctly possible He was testing my managerial skills despite His apparent disinterest in the planet He had put in my care. He's a regular Trickster, our God.

But it didn't matter whether I was being tested or not; I was suddenly inspired to do the right thing for its own sake. The dinosaurs had merely bugged me; this was a moral decision, a fork in the cosmos as it were. That it would not turn out the way I expected is merely proof that the universe run by our God is capricious rather than orderly — and that's not my fault.

To make a long story short, I became friends with Eve because she was around the hearth most often. When they could pry themselves apart from each other, Adam went into the woods to make vine-rope and Eve tidied up at home. (Don't ask me how this division of labor came about because God only knows.) Anyway, they were both perpetually, nauseatingly happy and innocent, like some Norman Rockwell portrait of the good life in an arboretum. Nothing happened that was less than fine. And Eve accepted the friendship of a small greasy creature speaking to her from an apple-tree limb like it was the most natural thing in the world. She was classy that way.

As I had suspected, she talked about nothing much of interest: how good food was, how nice it felt to sleep, how funny Adam was, and so on. I got on her wavelength mostly by affirming everything she said — "Yes, mangoes are good... It's always nice to get some shut-eye... Yeah, that Adam's a card..." but whenever she started telling me how much she loved the sex stuff I remained icily silent. I was trying to bring her along gently to a terrible awareness, but to be honest, I didn't know exactly how to proceed.

##   
The facts of life

Finally one day Eve had prattled on so long about doing the wild thing with Adam that I lost my patience. "Look, dear," I interrupted, "I think it's time for you to know about sex and death."

"Death?" Eve replied in her dulcet tone. "What's that?"

I decided to affect a professorial tone to soften the shock. "Death is the exit of life from your physical body. At that point, all awareness of your individual existence ceases, and the body begins to rot. Before sexual reproduction, no individuals died except by an act of God. To reproduce, they split themselves in two, but they did not die. But if you and Adam keep doing... you know what, eventually one of you will swell up and spit out little mutated versions of yourselves, and then you will both eventually die."

Eve smiled broadly. "Die? Is that fun?"

Jesus, she could be dense. I cleared my throat and scanned the ground beneath me.

"No, dear, it is not fun. Hand me that rock over there."

Eve obeyed — she was the very embodiment of obedience back then — and handed me a rock lying near the hearth. I whistled to one of the monkeys swinging through the nearby trees, and it stupidly came to me as if my only possible reason for being was to give it a banana. Instead, I brained it with the stone, and it fell to the ground with a soft thud. Startled, Eve stepped back for a moment, then approached the lifeless body and picked it up.

"Death," I explained matter-of-factly. "The end of the line. Massive necrosis. Express train to Boneburg."

Eve turned the corpse over in her arms and looked at me blankly.

"Death," she muttered thoughtfully. "Death." Then her face inexplicably brightened as she saw blood trickling from the monkey's head. She dabbed at it with her finger, touched her tongue and barked gaily, "Dinner?!"

That's when it hit me like a ton of dark matter: Eve could see but she did not know what was going on around her. She was steeped in the amoral bliss of unselfconsciousness; despite her more powerful brain, she lived the instinctive life of all the other animals, without discrimination or contemplation. Adam was doubtlessly the same. He could build and repair that vine-rope fence forever without ever once realizing that he could walk beyond it if he wanted to, take a vacation, see the sights. The consciousness of these two was not up to snuff for immortal beings; they would screw themselves into oblivion and never know the difference! But I would, and only I could put a stop to it.

##   
An apple a day

In retrospect, I'll allow that it wasn't the smartest thing to do. After all, I was the one who had dissuaded God from giving the first beings on Earth any self-awareness whatsoever. Some part of me knew it would be big trouble, but at that moment in the garden my feelings overwhelmed me. I wanted to save Eve, I wanted her not to die, I wanted... oh hell, I know what you're thinking. Did I have a thing for Eve?

Well, I have a question for you: At this point in time, a couple of forevers down the road, what does it matter?

So I did it. I broke the Universal Rule, I transgressed the Prime Directive, I went out of bounds and gave Eve and Adam access to higher knowledge and deeper self-awareness. The doing of it was simple enough: I spritzed the apple tree with high-grade consciousness (assuring a few of its descendants plum roles in "The Wizard of Oz"), plucked a fruit newly heavy with gnosis, and proffered it to Eve. She dropped the dead monkey like a sack of charcoal briquettes and took the apple with her usual grin of ecstatic appreciation.

"Yumm," she said on first bite.

"Look, honey," I said quietly, "I want you and Adam to eat an apple a day from this tree for the next week or so. They taste good and they'll clear up a number of things for you, particularly this sex-and-death problem. After seven days we'll talk it over again. In the meantime, I'll try to get God on the line and see what can be done about a dispensation of immortality. I know you don't understand all this yet, but don't worry about it. I'm going to take good care of you, Eve. OK?" Eve was munching the fruit with a ferocious glee, and stopped only momentarily to nod her head. A couple minutes passed before the apple was reduced to its spindly core. When Eve next looked up to me she had a sultry, darkening look in her eyes that I had never seen before. A chill ran down my spine as I realized that the knowledge dose in the apple might have been a bit much for a human's slow-firing synapses. (You moderns could compare it to putting rocket fuel in a VW Bug.) Eve let loose a deep, throaty giggle and suddenly stepped back, then looked down at her nice little breasts like she had never seen them before.

"Ohh!" she yelped, and grabbed at the broad leaves of a nearby rubber tree, ripping them off to cover herself ineffectively. She looked at me again with deep embarrassment and yelped once more, then grabbed a low-hanging apple off my tree and ran into the woods screaming for Adam.

I stared after her in dumb shock. Suddenly alone under the turbulent skies of a gathering storm, I knew I had made the mistake of my career. I had hot-wired human history — and there was no turning back.

##   
Murder Incorporated

It's fair to say that within a week all hell had broken loose in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve stripped the tree clean of fruit in two days flat — eating nothing else in the meantime — and got royally sick for the first time in their previously unpolluted lives. Then they spent about a day clutching their bellies, moaning and bitching. "Why?! Why?!" they cried out, the first time I had ever heard them question anything that happened to them.

Then they wasted a few more days feverishly trying to knit clothes for themselves out of whatever raw materials they could find. In the process Adam discovered that watching Eve put on or take off her clumsy raiments was more sexually exciting than seeing her just naked, and so they spent another day running around the hearth cackling like banshees and wrestling each other into wild fits of intercourse.

I was sick at heart, of course, and kept yelling from my perch in the tree: "Stop! Stop! This is not higher consciousness, this is juvenile delinquency!"

But they would just laugh — at me! — and once after Eve whispered into his ear, Adam picked up the rock I had killed the monkey with and hurled it at me. I barely got out of the way in time to save my diminutive bodily form. Adam thought my reaction was hilarious and took to throwing rocks at every creature in the immediate vicinity, with the predictable result that he soon killed an unlucky parrot. Picking up the bloodied bird, he crushed its delicate frame in his broad hand and cried out to Eve, "Look!"

"Death," she sang breathily from her seat on the ground, coyly letting a banana leaf fall from her bosom to reveal one flushed and erect nipple.

"Death!" Adam shouted to the sky, and promptly went on a killing spree. A little too much consciousness is a dangerous thing.

##   
Hands off

I had glumly retreated to the highest branch of the apple tree to witness the mayhem I had sparked when I heard a familiar but long-absent Voice at my shoulder.

"What in My Name is going on here?" God inquired sternly.

"Oh God," was all I could say as a cold, stunned amazement at His awful timing sank into me. "Oh God."

I'll spare you the blow-by-blow of what followed. Suffice to say that The Big Guy stripped me of my hands, arms, ears, nose, and all other protuberances like they were mere sergeant stripes. To add insult to injury, he then littered the planet with millions of dumb little serpents in my amputated image, making most of them poisonous, swift, and scary.

Then, holding me in one Hand and a bunch of terrestrial snakes in the Other, God shook us right in Eve's face until she screamed and fainted. Adam snarled viciously and came at me with a stone hoe, God holding me just barely above the first man's murderous lunges.

Regarding me with an angry and infinite eye, God boomed, "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed." Tilting His Head toward Adam, God added, "He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel."

Not exactly a New Age CEO willing to forgive all trespasses, eh? At least God let me return to ethereality — and here I've been ever since, circling the Earth as an omniscient archetype, gagging on my tail while watching you folks bang away at your problems without offering you so much as a whispered tip on the Pick Six at Del Mar. It's a hands-off managerial style that I should have stuck to from the very beginning, seeing as how, like most managers, I was never told everything I needed to know while being expected to clean up the gaffes of my Superior...

Can you settle for the simple truth? Yes, there were some mistakes and a little bad judgment here and there, but given that I had nothing more than on-the-job training from a very busy God with His Fingers in a lot of pies, I don't deserve this evil rap I've been getting since time immemorial. To me you're all the children of lanky Adam and lovely Eve, and I did the best I could by them. I just threw a little more knowledge their way than they could handle, that's all.

If you need encouragement, I can tell you this: Because of my little managerial error a while back, you have within you what it takes to become as Gods. That applesauce is still in your blood, people. And They can't take that away from you, ever — even if you wanted Them to.

Triple Scorpio D. Patrick Miller briefly "opened to channeling" only to discover that he was taking dictation from wise guys in the interstellar mob.
Acknowledgments

It's impossible to recall all the individuals who had a hand, professionally or personally, in the improvement and editorial preparation of many pieces of my writing going back for decades, but I'll do the best I can. Chief among them are Sy Safransky, founder and editor of the remarkable literary journal known as THE SUN, published in Chapel Hill, N.C.; and two editors, Stephan Bodian and the late Rick Fields, of Yoga Journal, which I served as a Senior Writer during the decade of the 1990s. These magazines published about sixty of my articles between them, including some of the most prominent in this collection. More recently, I was assisted in the strange new world of blogging by the lyrical Bryonie Wise, formerly an editor at Elephant Journal. For encouragement, insight, and editorial input during the years in which I was focused on periodical writing, I am indebted to my literary agent Laurie Fox, who also had so much to do with launching my career in books before I became an independent publisher. Finally, for encouraging me to gather a retrospective of my work and get it out in the world, I owe a debt of gratitude to Sari Friedman, editor of the Fearless Poetry Series, and an exceptionally talented and courageous writer in her own right.

I'm also grateful to the following Supporting Readers who reserved their copies of this book at a special price to contribute toward its publication: Jeffery Beam, Erroll Lee Fullen, Sylvia Griego, Robert P. Schmidt, Jr., Susan Thesenga, Anil Viakara, and Brian Wark.

For more of the work of D. Patrick Miller, visit his website at http:://www.dpatrickmiller.com

For information on literary services provided to other writers by D. Patrick Miller, including professional representation and Assisted Publishing, see http://www.fearlessbooks.com

