This

  Most of us don’t pay attention to how closely our identity is tied to the stories we tell of the universe. Westerners are often notoriously bad about this, thinking of themselves as objective arbiters of rationality and truth. But this isn’t how human beings work.

  Puerto Rico is 0.13 percent Muslim while 99.8 percent of Afghanistan is Muslim. This is not because every individual in these countries just coincidentally happened to come to the exact same fact-based, rational conclusions about the doctrines of Islam, but because they, like all of us, just want to be loved. We want our friends and family to like us. We want to be safe, to belong, and our beliefs are part of that. Or as Sartre said, “If I became a philosopher, if I have so keenly sought this fame for which I’m still waiting, it’s all been to seduce women basically.”

  Our meaning-making stories are fundamentally and intrinsically tied to our sense of identity, and as such, we have all sorts of evolutionary mechanisms in play in our brains and society that reward us for friendly acquiescence within the tribe and punish us for going against the grain. We may love our saviors and revolutionaries in the rearview mirror, but tend to nail them to crosses when they dare to actually show up in the present because messing with our stories is messing with us. As the spiritual teacher A. H. Almaas wrote, “Becoming free of the fixation of any perspective is the same as becoming free of the self.”14

  In saying all of this, I’m not trying to put all stories on equal footing. Recognizing that the Apple technician’s view of the iPhone is every bit as steeped in the mythic stories of her culture as the ancient Greek person’s or anyone else’s interpretation and experience of the iPhone would be is not to say that all myths are equally valid or useful, but simply that there is no such thing as an objective point of view. The perspectives that feel objective to us feel that way because that’s the mythic framework from which we are seeing. The Apple technician’s perspective may feel more objective to us than those myths of distant cultures, but that is only because we are so thoroughly entrenched in the worlds that our own stories have created.

  Every day that the earth spins around the sun is experienced in billions of different ways. Today is both heaven and hell on earth, depending on which stories you are inhabiting. One person’s delicacy is another’s reality TV–show dare. One person’s god is another person’s devil. One person’s Trump is another person’s . . . Trump. All human language, beliefs, traditions, religions, myths, and stories are simply different perspectives and experiences within the same one reality. The mystic Baba Ram Dass said, “All of us are on the same journey; we just have different metaphors.”

  We may all be ultimately part of the same Oneness and on the same journey, but our differing viewpoints and metaphors make for very different individual experiences of that Oneness and journey. Everything that you think imprisons you—it’s just a story. And when you can see that, you are free.

  This is the reason why I could feel so liberated after both my mystical experience in Assisi and my donned atheism of the luxury spa. The freedom and spiritual awakening had very little to do with the specific contents of my theological or metaphysical assumptions about reality (which, as an atheist, was that everything is essentially random, pointless chaos). In fact, atheism as a story that made sense of the universe would be something I would also find the need to let go of eventually, but that wasn’t nearly as difficult or painful because I wasn’t emotionally attached to it in the way that I was to my belief in God. For this reason, I usually have very little concern about the specifics of people’s belief systems.

  The stories that THIS is experienced through are different for everyone. A person can be free whether she is an atheist, agnostic, spiritual but not religious, religious but not spiritual, Catholic, Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or anything else, as long as the stories that she inhabits do not become her prison. Sometimes, for some people, THIS is named Christ, Allah, or Krishna. Other times, THIS is thought of as matter, reality, or the universe. Any name we give it is a story, and all stories have shelf lives. Some can go a whole lifetime being best friends with a bearded man in the sky. Good for them! Others need a change of scenery. That is perfectly fine, too.

  I met a girl recently whose deconstruction story was nearly the opposite of mine. Her parents were atheists and had raised her to be a good secular humanist who didn’t believe in those silly fairy tales and superstitions that religion had fooled and brainwashed so many into believing. Being an atheist was an integral part of her tribal identity, and in her journey, she had found great freedom in letting go of that identity-forming myth and opening herself up to the mystery beyond the scientific method.

  It seems to me that how we inhabit our myths is generally more important than the specific dogmas, language, and metaphors that these myths use. For instance, I’d much rather attend a service at a church that preached that sacrificing goats was an acceptable act of worship but didn’t actually sacrifice any goats themselves than attend the service of a church whose belief statement included the phrase “all goat sacrifice is sin,” but who just went ahead and whopped a few billies and nannies on the head during the offertory announcements. This is because how we live through our stories is more important than the words we use to describe those stories.

  The words we use are rarely accurate or truthful in describing what we really believe anyway. Most people who say they believe in a literal hell spend an awful lot of time not running through the streets in a panic warning everyone that they need to repent or they will burn alive for eternity. They spend a lot of money on things that are not evangelistic outreaches that could possibly spare people from an endless existence of conscious torment. So are those people really bad people with no compassion for humanity, or is it that deep down, they know that their beliefs about hell couldn’t possibly be true?

  In saying that the way we inhabit our myths is more important than the specific contents of those myths, I’m not saying that the contents don’t matter. They do because they have an influence on how we live. If our orthodoxy (correct belief) is sexist, our orthopraxy (correct practice) is likely to be as well.

  But as much as the contents of one’s beliefs do matter, it’s far more important that you avoid actually believing in your beliefs.

  I say that playfully,15 but in my experience and perspective, the most destructive acts of religion come from the fundamentalism of people taking their beliefs too seriously, especially when those beliefs can lead to the harm of others. Every biblical literalist has the verse in Leviticus in their Bible that says that gay people should be put to death, but very few of them take it seriously. Every atheistic scientific materialist believes that human life is a product of a natural universe and is no more intrinsically meaningful or valuable than the meaning or value one projects into it, but I’ve never met an atheist who treats human life as though it is actually inherently worthless. When we forget that our beliefs (or lack thereof) are just combinations of words, and our conceptual positions concretize into absolute and literal Truth, we get in trouble.

  It’s one thing to think that your kid is the best kid in the whole world. It’s another thing to believe that your kid is the best kid in the whole world. Putting drawings on refrigerators is one thing, but if someone is writing daily, exasperated letters to news outlets, bewildered as to why little Johnny’s finger paintings aren’t yet in art museums is another.

  It’s easy to recognize and condemn the fundamentalism of the extremists we disagree with—those who fly planes into buildings, strap bombs to their chests, or hold up signs with hate speech printed on them. It’s not so easy to recognize our own attachments to our own myths. And while not all myths are equal—all attachment to any myth creates suffering. We need stories, but when an open faith devolves into a closed fundamentalism, we become even more imprisoned by that which we hoped could set us free.

  Regardless of how beautiful the story or belief may be that you are clinging to, the truth
is that as soon as your fingernails are burrowed into it with attachment, the story becomes only about your own ego. “Love is patient, love is kind,” when believed with a tight fist rather than an open hand, becomes “I am a loving person, and therefore better than all of you.” When God is a noun, God is an idol. Even a huge and all-inclusive story about Oneness or nondual realization can become a way of trying to extend the ego out to infinity when one gets attached to those words or stories as though they were something more than words or stories. It is even possible to get attached to the idea of nonattachment! I once read of a monk who experienced that and consequently shifted his spiritual practice to working on becoming more attached to the world. Regardless of how cleverly the ego attaches to these stories or how good or true the stories may be, that attachment will always result in suffering, and letting go of that attachment will always result in freedom. Freedom is not some other place for one to someday finally arrive at or achieve, but simply the full reality of here and now, of THIS, without the clinging to our attachment of trying to be somewhere or someone else. For most of us on a spiritual path, we will move in and out of these states and feelings of okayness and not-okayness. For me, I experienced tremendous freedom and breakthrough in both Assisi and the spa, but then as time went on, a new challenge or life circumstance would present yet another opportunity to let go of something. Like the layers of an onion, our attachments to our desires and aversions go deep into our very sense of self, and it is only by the grace of the river herself, often in the form of suffering, that we can peel those layers away until the true, undivided self of THIS is experienced in its fullness.

  Let There Be

  In the Hebrew Scriptures, the universe begins with speech.

  “Let there be light.”

  That’s how it goes.

  Nothing exists until something is said.

  Light (2014)

  The has physical characteristics consistent with Down syndrome.”

  The nurse’s voice trembled as if she were handing us a death sentence. Had I known then what I know now, I could have smiled at the melodrama of someone delivering the news of our newborn daughter Lucette’s twenty-first chromosome with the emotional timbre one might use to deliver news of an imminent, species-annihilating asteroid collision with Earth. If I had known then how much joy my Lulu would bring to our lives; if I had known how precious every moment of life is, regardless of the number of chromosomes it builds its tissue with; if I had known that nurse’s dire-sounding pronouncement was simply a limited description of one aspect of the unique and marvelous attributes of our new little princess, I could have responded to the nurse by saying something like, “That’s fantastic news! Thank you. We are so lucky.”

  But I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything at all. The most I could do at that time was nod helplessly, tears flowing down my cheeks.

  As we received the news of my daughter’s diagnosis in that hospital room, I was not okay with the THIS that had suddenly and unexpectedly presented itself. The bottom of the world dropped out, and I was in a free fall. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This couldn’t really be happening. Not to us. We weren’t responsible enough to handle something like this. Lisa and I were flighty, bohemian musicians who had a hard-enough time keeping our lawn and our firstborn alive! Trying to effectively parent one child in our chaotic world of airports, buses, vans, and grimy, phallically adorned green rooms was already a stretch for us, and I was already worried about trying to add a second kid into our mess. A second kid with special needs? Nope. I knew I couldn’t do that. I was already at my limit. So as I took in the news of Lucette’s Down syndrome, I watched an entire world of that crumble before my eyes.

  I looked at my wife Lisa. She looked stronger than I felt. Of course, I could have figured as much. Unlike myself, Lisa’s first thoughts in life are not always about her own needs and convenience. For instance, when we went to Africa together once with a nonprofit organization that helped children, Lisa cut her ankle on a rock one day while playing in the forest with some of the children. Had that happened to me, I would have immediately put everything and everyone out of my head except what would have been my new and single-pointed life mission—retreat to a clean environment in order to sterilize and secure the wound. Lisa, however, barely noticed. When I, aghast, pointed out the blood trickling down her foot, she shrugged it off and grabbed a nearby stick to wipe the blood off with. A stick? In a Ugandan forest? We had to get a bunch of shots just to fly there, and I’m pretty sure none of those immunizations were intended for cleaning open wounds with random detritus from the forest. I mean, I know a stick in Uganda probably doesn’t have more bacteria on it than a stick in Los Angeles, but as a bit of a germaphobe, I knew that stick was most likely covered in parasitic, flesh-eating bacteria with AIDS.

  I yelled at her as though she were about to step off of a cliff, “Stop! What are you doing?!”

  At that point, she realized that it probably wasn’t the most sanitary way of attending to her cut and laughed and moved her attention right back to the children. You see, Lisa isn’t a person who tends to think so much or so quickly of her own needs as I do. And so, yes, she looked sad after the nurse delivered the news of our new baby having Down syndrome, but I’m pretty sure it was mostly because she was worried about the health of the baby. I was mostly worried about myself.

  And then the soul-crushing thought entered my mind, “Is this my fault?”

  My heart sank further into despair. I searched my memory and recalled a night, around the time the baby had been conceived, that I had taken a couple “Colorado gummy bears.” Did I do this?

  Time became a blur. People coming and going. Talk of surgery. All I wanted to do was Google “Can marijuana consumption cause Down syndrome pregnancy?” I eventually got the opportunity to leave the room. I pulled out my phone. No, there was no correlation between marijuana usage and higher rates of Down syndrome pregnancies. Thank the gods. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this all was somehow my fault. My world was collapsing. The hospital walls were closing in around me, and I was suffocating. I escaped outside to get some fresh air and walked around the block for a while. The thoughts were relentless.

  Why is this happening?

  What are our options here?

  I don’t want a baby with special needs.

  I didn’t sign up for this. I can’t handle this. We can’t handle this.

  I called my sister, Lissa, who is a Christian. She told me that God knit this baby in her mother’s womb and that it’s going to be okay. While my atheism had gradually morphed into more of an evolved version of my earlier mysticism in the couple years that had passed since my experience at the spa (my experience in Assisi ended up being too significant to completely dismiss), I still didn’t believe in any sort of divine being that knits babies together in wombs.

  Eventually, I walked my collapsing self back into the flame-engulfed world of the hospital room. I was told the baby needed two heart surgeries, one of which would have to happen immediately. They would go in through her back and somehow fix part of this tiny, fragile baby’s heart.

  “Maybe that will be the end of it,” I thought, and immediately hated myself for it. Lisa was crying. She was terrified that the surgery wouldn’t work. I was terrified that it would. What was wrong with me? I felt ashamed.

  I looked at Lisa—the warrior queen who had now survived two human beings growing in, then coming out of her own body like an Aliens movie. She was scared but strong. Seeing her made me wonder if maybe it was somehow going to be okay. Something in me knew that we would end up loving this baby girl just as much as our first, but I was so afraid. Afraid she would die. Afraid she wouldn’t, and that I would. Afraid that this would ruin our marriage. Our family. Our career. I was a man who had dreams. I had a vision for my future. I had all of these thoughts and feelings about what my life was supposed to look like, and certainly none of them resembled anything like this! But where had those th
oughts come from? Was our yet unnamed, hours-old baby girl, who was whisked away and still off being poked and prodded by the doctors, really any intrinsically less valuable than any other life? Almond-shaped eyes are still eyes, aren’t they? Crooked pinky fingers are still pinky fingers. Hell, my pinky fingers are crooked, too.

  I walked over to Lisa and looked deeply into those brilliant blue eyes I fell in love with when I first saw them fifteen years before. I never would have imagined being in this moment with that girl with the cute gray skirt and the magical blue eyes. Now those eyes were full of tears. So were mine. Both of us were absolutely terrified. But I wanted her to know that I saw her, was with her. I couldn’t do this, but maybe we could. I didn’t know who or what “God” may be, but in that moment at the hospital bed, I could once again feel how whatever the creative force behind and within it all—that knits babies together in wombs—was present. This baby was still a baby. Not just a baby. Our baby. I gently laid my hands on Lisa’s belly, and those old words, that psalm I had memorized as a child, began to flow out of my mouth as a sort of prayer for this new baby girl of ours.

  “For you created her inmost being; you knit her together in her mother’s womb. I praise you because she is fearfully and wonderfully made.”

  Afterwards, we held each other and cried. We cried for the pain of it all. For the beauty of it all. And in that moment, something in our hearts opened and we began to let go into that timeless, inconceivable, ineffable THIS that knits together galaxies and spinning blue planets and mothers’ wombs and almond eyes. Similarly to what happened in Assisi, and at the spa, something significant inside of me broke out of its chains and became free. From that moment, our stories about Down syndrome, about what a “good” or “healthy” life looks like, about our baby girl, all began to shift radically. What I thought was a wound became my healing. And not just mine.