The bottom line is money now—not people or principles or love. And that bottom line is apparently not to be questioned. Fear argues that we’re not here to love each other and that we owe each other nothing. We’re here to get more stuff, though whatever the stuff is rarely satiates our hunger. Once we get the stuff, we’re supposed to be happy; and if we’re not, then there must be something wrong with us. And there are many, many options for things we can do to assuage our existential pain. Aren’t we glad, the ego asks, to have so many choices? But the truth is, our choices are expanded among consumer products while diminished among things that matter most. The ego is a stern emotional dictator, and there is to be no coloring outside the lines.
Yet where is the passion in always living inside the lines? Depression means something is depressed—as in our joy, our creativity, and sometimes, our ability to raise hell when hell needs to be raised. Depression is a lack of passion. Passion emerges when we’ve placed ourselves in service to that which is good, true, and beautiful—something important, something bigger than ourselves.
The passion-bearer’s role is to recognize what’s wrong in the world and invoke most passionately what could be made right. This role is not always easy, or smooth, or guaranteed to win universal applause. It’s the heroic call of every age to smash old bottles and create new wine.
We can’t put the wine of holiness inside a bottle of greed. We have financialized almost everything, disrupting the tender ecosystem of human relationships with a transactional mentality of “How can I get what I want from you?” that turns normal human encounters into sales calls. We are taught how to sell to one another—even to the point of gross manipulation and exploitation—more than we are taught how to love one another.
When “What do I want to get from you?” replaces “What am I here to share with you?”—when mutual beneficence and goodwill are no longer the basis of human relationships—the world begins to fall apart. Normal human interactions become skewed, and huge socioeconomic forces become unjust.
People in some of the richest nations in the world are among the most depressed, not because they lack material goods, but because they lack a sense of community. During the past few decades, we’ve sacrificed social elements essential to the cultivation of community, family, and inner peace at the altar of a new economic order.
The god of profit has overrun a God of righteousness as never before, with human suffering far too often viewed as acceptable collateral damage. Whatever it is, if it pays it stays—even when serious ethical concerns would argue that it should not. This is not just a call for correction; it’s a call for spiritual and political revolution.
It is indeed a revolutionary act today to stand firm for compassionate principles in the face of an unfettered economic behemoth.
Righteous relationships with other human beings are essential to our peace and happiness, both among individuals and among nations, because we were not created as isolated creatures. We are interdependent by nature. We are born to be brothers and sisters, and in the absence of kinship we slowly die.
Thinking ourselves separate and alone within our isolated lives, we lose all sense of responsibility to each other, compassion for each other, and forgiveness of each other. This is the ego mind’s death trap, both for individuals and for society; and the fact that we are very, very sad about it is one of the healthiest things that can be said about us. Without love we are without life, and deep in our hearts we know this.
NATURE’S EARLY WARNING SYSTEM
I heard a story once about a chimpanzee troop in which a portion of the population displayed depressed behavior. They didn’t eat with the rest of the chimps, play with the rest of the chimps, or sleep with the rest of the chimps. A group of anthropologists wondered what effect the absence of these depressed chimps would have on the rest of the troop and removed them for six months. When they returned, they found that all of the other chimps, those who remained in the troop, had died! Why? According to one analysis, the chimps perished because the so-called depressed chimps among them had been their early warning system. The depressed chimps had been depressed for a reason: they registered that a storm was coming, or snakes, or elephants, or disease. The presence of the depressed chimps had been an evolutionary aid to the survival of the entire population; in their absence, the other chimps did not notice the dangers that lurked.
Nothing could be more functional than an internal warning system, among people or among any other species. And nothing could be more dysfunctional than to ignore the warning or to take the edge off. And we do this in so many ways.
Our contemporary popular culture is itself a numbing agent, making us inappropriately comfortable when we should instead be appropriately uncomfortable. There is even an ersatz spirituality now cultivating the belief that since the world is an illusion anyway, why bother to try to fix things? What a convenient excuse for not helping. In fact, no serious spiritual path gives anyone a pass on addressing the suffering of other sentient beings. We’re not here to ignore the darkness of the world, but to transform it. And in order to transform the darkness, we must at times engage it.
Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t just urge people to love their oppressors; he also urged them to boycott the bus company. Outrage at social injustice is hardly a dysfunctional reaction to it; moral outrage is born not of anger, but of love. There is no mammalian species in which the fierce protectiveness of a mother toward her young is not requisite for the survival of that species. It’s not negative to yell “Fire!” if indeed a house is burning; what’s negative is to sit there and do nothing.
Only the ego believes we have no moral responsibility to address the pain of others, or that there will be no bitter consequences if we do not. But the Law of Cause and Effect is real; or, to put it another way, karma is a bitch. Of course it hurts to register the unnecessary suffering of others, but it will ultimately hurt much more if we deny it. A ribbon of love runs through our veins, like electric impulses connecting us to every other living thing. Acting out of accordance with this reality puts us out of our center and out of our joy. We give ourselves more emotional permission to party in the evening when we know we did all we could to be there for others during the day.
Many of us feel like we’re aliens in this world—because spiritually, we are. And feeling spiritually homeless, of course we feel sad. But we’re on the earth to make it our home, not to acquiesce to all the ways that it isn’t that now. The manifestations of fear have become so potent—yes, within a realm of illusion, but within that illusion people suffer and die—that it is time for a great revolution of consciousness. It is time to claim the earth for the forces of love.
Nothing is a greater antidote to depression than to join love’s revolution, taking even the tiniest step to contribute energy to the transformational wave of consciousness now rising up among us. This is not just a way to make a dent in the epidemic of depression; it is the way we will save the world.
We transform the world with every loving, forgiving thought. We transform it with every political, social, or economic act of resistance to a loveless order. We transform it with any act of creation that points to a new way of being on the planet. That transformation—both personally and societally—is the evolutionary next step for humanity.
We will take that step, or we will become extinct like any other species whose behavior becomes so maladaptive, so against the grain of its survival that it is literally cast off the earth. That is where we are headed now, and yet, we can choose another way. As with every other miracle, God shows His hand at the most amazing times, in the most mysterious ways. In the darkness of night there is a star of new hope, as there has always been and always shall be.
Dear God,
For me and all the world,
Please pave a path of light out of darkness
And show us how to walk it.
Open our eyes to see
And our minds to understand
Another way to be,
/>
Another path to follow,
That we might live
Another way.
Dear God,
Please use us
To make the world a better place.
Amen
SIX
Forgiveness
Without forgiveness, there is no love; and without love, there are no miracles. It is written in A Course in Miracles that we can have a grievance or we can have a miracle, but we cannot have both. Forgiveness, therefore, is the most essential key to happiness. Sometimes the challenge is to forgive others, and sometimes the challenge is to forgive ourselves. But suffering remains until we forgive.
Ego views forgiveness very differently from the way spirit does. The ego posits that someone is guilty and then deigns to forgive that person as an act of spiritual superiority. Obviously, this is not really forgiveness as much as judgment posing as something else. True forgiveness is the recognition that because only love is real, whatever needs forgiving exists only within the realm of illusion. We release our focus on someone’s guilt and instead embrace the knowledge of his or her eternal innocence. In doing so—by the power of this one mental shift in perception—we unleash the power of the miraculous universe.
Forgiveness resets the trajectory of probabilities that otherwise unfold wherever guilt and blame prevail. Where love is expressed, miracles occur naturally; where love is denied, miracles are deflected. Forgiveness frees miracles to intercede on behalf of our holiness and restore harmony where it had been blocked.
We seek to forgive not as a way of denying what has been done to us, but as a way of transforming our experience of what was done to us. As we shift our focus from the realm of the body to the realm of spirit, we move beyond our attachment to the thought of someone’s guilt. No longer according reality to that person’s transgression, the mind stops according reality to the pain it caused. This is not denial, but transcendence. It activates the self-correcting mechanism of the universe, altering the effects of any transgression against us. No one has the power to permanently defeat us as long as we are willing to forgive.
Forgiveness is a selective remembering of what someone did right, at a time when the ego mind is shrieking about what someone did wrong. We always have a choice about where to focus—whether to blame someone or to bless someone. I can concentrate my attention on what you did wrong, or I can seek to remember a moment when you tried to do right. Although the ego insists that you don’t deserve it, the spirit absolutely knows that you do. And my ego has an ulterior motive: in seeking to attack you, it is seeking secretly to attack me. Only when I remember who you really are (an innocent child of God, regardless of your mistakes) can I remember who I really am (an innocent child of God regardless of mine).
A Course in Miracles says that whenever we’re tempted to have an attack thought about another person, we should imagine a sword about to fall on their head—and then remember that because there’s only one of us here, the sword is falling on our own head. An idea doesn’t leave its source; therefore, whatever I think about you, I am thinking about myself. In attacking you, I am attacking myself. And in forgiving you, I am forgiving myself.
Condemning another person, then, while it might give us a few minutes of temporary relief, will always boomerang and make us feel worse. If I attack you, you will attack me back—or at least I’ll think you did. In terms of how consciousness operates, it doesn’t matter who attacked first: whoever attacks, feels attacked.
Forgiveness takes us off the wheel of suffering. It delivers us to quantum realms beyond time and space, where thoughts of guilt have marred neither your innocence nor mine. This is summed up in a line from the Persian poet Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” There, in that space of no-thing, the universe miraculously self-corrects. In the presence of love, things automatically return to divine right order. That which the ego has made imperfect is returned to the track of divine perfection, releasing possibilities for healing that would not otherwise exist.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry too.”
Simple words, and how much better those words are than the ego’s alternative. How often we have said things very different than that, which then for years we regret having said.
Few things are more emotionally painful than unwarranted distance between ourselves and others. The ego creates the distance through judgment and attack. Forgiveness is when we then stand up to the ego, commanding it to go back to the nothingness from whence it came. We choose instead to think as God thinks, and God does not condemn. God does not condemn because He sees us only as He created us. We will be at peace, and the world will be at peace, when we learn to see each other as God does. Learning to do this is the only reason we’re here.
THE HOLY INSTANT
The ego’s perception of time is linear, but linear time is an illusion. The only real time is God’s time, or eternity. The only place where eternity intersects linear time is in the present moment, called in A Course in Miracles the “Holy Instant.” That is where miracles happen.
One of the daily lessons in the Workbook of A Course in Miracles is, “The past is over. It can touch me not.” Since only love is real, only the love you were given and that which you gave others, was real in your past. Nothing else need be brought with you into the shining present. Leave behind what wasn’t real to begin with, and every moment can be a new beginning.
The future is programmed in the present. If we enter the present carrying thoughts of the past, we program the future to be just like the past. But when we enter the present without the past, we free the future to be unlike it. Miracles occur in the present, interrupting the linear sequence of time. Forgiveness is what happens when we choose to see someone not as they were before this moment, but as who they are right now. Entering into the Holy Instant, free of our focus on what happened in the past, we free a relationship to begin again. I give you a break, increasing the probability that you’ll give me one too.
God sees only our innocence because that is how He created us, and therefore only that is true. In training our minds to see people as He does, we allow miracles to heal our relationships and free us from our suffering over them. Only when we release someone from our condemnation of what they did do we free ourselves of the effects of what they did. By giving the gift of forgiveness, we receive the gift of forgiveness. It is not an act of sacrifice, but an act of self-interest.
Entering the Holy Instant, consciously focusing on the spiritual innocence that is the truth of someone’s being now, in this moment, I re-mind that person of their innocence and thus re-mind myself of mine. In that one miraculous instant, the veil of illusion is removed and an entire universe of otherwise unmanifest possibilities flows forth.
The ego, of course, sees all of this as nonsense. Given that separation is its goal, it deems all efforts to forgive as offensive. It specializes in comments like, “But you should be angry!”; “You’ll just be a doormat if you forgive this”; and “I’m really worried about you; you seem to have no boundaries.”
But the ego is a liar. That which restores us to our right minds does not guide us incorrectly. The fact that I forgive you doesn’t mean that I’ve lost my mind. It doesn’t mean that I can’t say no. It doesn’t mean that I can’t set healthy boundaries or leave unhealthy situations. If anything, it means that I can do so more quickly and effectively. Having been lifted above the emotional turmoil created by hurtful events, my ability to wisely navigate the material world is only improved. If it’s wise to leave a situation, to say no, to turn away from someone—it will only increase my effectiveness if I can do so kindly.
Being able to nonreactively and simply leave a situation is far more powerful than stomping my feet and screaming, “No one is going to treat me this way!” For with the latter comes the inevitability of the fact that, yes, someone will treat you that way. For when we are angry, there is still a gap between our present personali
ty and our enlightened self. The situation will reappear, with another person in another town perhaps, until we learn to close that gap. Who we have not forgiven remains in our head. As A Course in Miracles reminds us, the warden can’t leave the prison any more than the prisoner can.
Forgiveness is a process, and it doesn’t mean the person we forgive will necessarily be our friend—for a while, or ever. If you’ve done something awful to me or to someone I love, I don’t see myself hanging out and having lunch with you anytime soon. If a woman lives with an abuser, she needs to leave the relationship. Forgiveness does not mean there are no boundaries, accountability, laws, or healthy standards of behavior. It means merely that there’s a way for us to find peace in our hearts, regardless of someone else’s behavior. And that itself is a miracle.
A young man I knew with AIDS once said to me, “You mean, I have to forgive everybody?” I remember laughing and saying to him, “Well, I don’t know. What do you have, the flu, or AIDS? Because if you only have the flu, just forgive a few people! Otherwise, you might want to consider taking all of the medicine.”
If we think about all the people we have known, and the people we know now, it’s usually amazing how many judgments we hold. Tremendous weight is lifted from our shoulders when we forgive and let them go.
Dear God,
I am willing to see my brother differently,
Despite what he might have done to me.
Release him from the sword of my condemnation
That I too might be released.
Show me his innocence
That we might both be free.
Fill my mind with the spirit of forgiveness.
Open my eyes that I might see
Tears to Triumph Page 8