resolution.
Being connected means literally that at any given moment of your life, you can ask that the love that surrounds you and connects you to everyone and everything else please guide you right now. Then you relinquish your negative self-talk images and observe everyone and everything that you see as your loving assistant. It is in these moments that the right person or event will materialize and assist you.
I try to remind myself in moments of despair of the beautiful affirmation from A Course in Miracles: “I can choose peace, rather than this.” It works. Or I use this affirmation often: “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing that is separate from me.”
7. Cheerfulness In terms of outward appearances there is something noticeable about people who have reached a high level of spiritual awareness. They seem to be in a constant state of bliss. In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to spirit.
Ask yourself this key question, “How do I feel most of the time?” If your answer is that you feel anxious, anguished, hurt, depressed, frustrated, and so on, then you have a spiritual disconnect. This could mean you have allowed your personal energy field to become contaminated by the debilitating forces of those in your immediate life space. (You will read more about this, and how to keep your energy field uncontaminated, in chapter five.)
When you are spiritually connected you are not looking for occasions to be offended and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself.
I often ask myself, “How am I truly feeling inside myself these days?” If my answer is “Not so hot” or “Upset,” I meditate and go to the quiet place where I can plug my cord into the spiritual outlet. The state of cheerfulness returns quickly. Every teacher who has been truly significant in my life has demonstrated this wondrous quality of being able to laugh, to take life lightly, to be silly and giddy.
Use this measure to test your own level of spiritual awareness, and if you are not of good cheer remind yourself that you will never be fully satisfied but in God. I love Erich Fromm’s insight, “Man is the only animal that can be bored, who can be discontented, that can feel evicted from Paradise.” Only you can evict yourself from the garden of paradise.
These then are the seven ways I define spiritual: Surrender, Love, Infinite, Empty, Generous, Connectedness, Cheerful. You can see that spiritual is not restricted to any religion in my interpretation. Keep this list handy as you read on.
What I Mean by Problem
In one sense, in my heart, I feel that there is really only one problem for any of us. That is when we allow ourselves to be separate from God. But in a very real sense, we can never be separate from God, since there is no place that God is not. Thus the paradox. When we are connected to God we have no problems. We are always connected to God. Yet we still believe that we have problems.
The answer to this conundrum will be the focus of the major portion of this book. The problems of disease, disharmony, discord, fear, anxiety, scarcity, displeasure, disappointments in others, and so on are in our minds. When we have these problems we find ourselves feeling alone, alienated, isolated, angry, hurt, depressed, afraid, and more and more anguished. Yet when we truly reconnect to our source these feelings disappear.
This is why I use the word problem as if it truly exists; yet I know every time I use it that it is an illusion. So every time you see the word throughout this book, know that I perceive it as an illusion created by ourselves because we have separated ourselves, in that moment, from God.
There is a powerful line in A Course in Miracles which reminds me of this lesson: “It takes great learning to understand that all things, events, encounters, and circumstances are helpful.” Great learning is an understatement! It takes great faith and courage to begin to view our lives in this way.
How strongly do you desire to truly know, beyond a doubt, that every problem you experience including the very worst thing in your life, actually contains the seeds of the best thing? We can learn to view every crisis as an opportunity, which wouldn’t necessarily make life easier, but would make it more satisfying. We would never be able to view anything as a negative occurrence, because we’d see everything as useful information.
This may sound oversimplified if you face seemingly unsolvable problems every day. I implore you to have an open mind and also some logic rooted in your past religious conditioning as illustrated in “Problems Are Illusions” below. The logic will create a space where you can call on your spiritual connection for the resolution of your problems. It will also give you a base for the problem-solving tools I am offering you in the last seven chapters of this book.
Problems Are Illusions
Give some thought to the following three quotes from the scriptures.
• “God is too pure to behold iniquity.”
• “God made all that was made and all that God made was good.”
• “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil, you cannot tolerate wrong.”
Almost identical observations have been made in all religions. The Holy Koran puts it this way, “Whatever good you have is all from God, whatever evil, all is from yourself.”
If God is good and God made everything, then everything is good. God cannot behold iniquity. So where does all of this stuff that we lump into the category of problems come from? The answer is obvious. When we come to believe that we are separate from God we experience this feeling of separation in our mind, and our mind tells us that we have a problem. The problem, created by our beliefs and existing in our mind, causes us to feel an absence of peace or love. Those beliefs can manifest as disease in our bodies. We begin searching for a solution.
But in reality, since God is only about good, and God is everywhere, what we have done is separate ourselves in our mind from God. Though we find ourselves suffering with these problems, everything that we label a problem is an illusion.
You can see why it is so important to see any and all problems as things that we create in our mind. If we can create non-good or non-God in our mind, then we can also not create them in our mind even though we may have no idea how to do that. Our conditioning is so strong that we often have far greater faith in our problems than we do in our ability to no longer have them.
We often display a much greater faith in the power of cancer, heart disease, or AIDS than we do in the power to heal them. We do this in a multitude of ways. We become enamored of the problem and its damaging effect. We live out the illusion while ignoring the fact that nothing iniquitous can be of God, and God made everything. The evil, the pain, the anguish are of our own creation and they represent opportunities to gain that greater learning that A Course in Miracles describes.
I know that some of these ideas sound strangely impossible to implement. I ask you to keep an open mind as we travel this path of healing to bring peace back into your life on a permanent basis.
The Eastern gurus use the term maya (illusion) to describe the existence of problems that really do not exist. The universe is good. God is good. God is everywhere. God is invisible spirit. Anything that is not good cannot
