Contents

Copyright Information and Other Books by Mark Mills

From the Back Cover

Dedication

Introduction: Before We Begin

Section One: Being Authentic with God

1: Who is God?

2: Our Source of Spiritual Health

3: Being Authentic with God

4: Bearing Real Fruit, Fruit that Will Last

Section Two: Being Authentic with One’s Self

5: Who Are We to God?

6: Choices for Growth and Change

7: Nourishing the Soul

8: Attachments and the Rise of Anxiousness

9: Pain, Loss, and Our Struggle to Be Saved

Section Three: Being Authentic with Each Other

10: Who Is My Neighbor?

11: The Energy of Anxiousness

12: Ripples in the Pond

13: The Playfulness of Paradox and the Paradox of Playfulness

14: Walking as a Non-Anxious Disciple

15: Bearing Real Fruit, Fruit that Will Last, Part 2

Notes

Introduction: Before We Begin

One is restrained only by the self-imposed limitations of their own mind

Shannon Mills

I began writing this book several years ago. Much of it found inspiration in newsletter columns I wrote for my churches I served as pastor. While in seminary, I was intrigued by the writings of Ed Friedman and his work on Murray Bowen’s family systems theory. I also do organic gardening as a hobby, and have been on my own, unique spiritual journey for about the last 25 years. While all this may seem unrelated, I found some fascinating connections between all of this mish-mash of personal interests. This book is the result of my reflections and integrations merging the work of scholars, psychologists, theologians, and gardeners. These are not views that I have put together to attempt to tell others how to live. This book is a labor of love, one that reflects my own journey and what seems to work for me throughout the trials, pain, joys, and deep spiritual connection with God I’ve experienced in my life. While writing this book, I endured the painful process of divorce, and wrestled with the rupture of a major relationship while writing a book about relationships. I found that pain provides opportunity for clarity in one’s life and growth. We will all find in our lives that there are times when pain is unavoidable, so what do we do then? We have to rely on the foundation we have formed spiritually and emotionally to see us through these most difficult times. Even if you don’t have that foundation, this book will provide the tools to help build it. While we strive to make our best decisions, we also find that we are human and can only do the best we can do. I offer this at the beginning of this writing to say that no matter who you are and where you are in your journey, you can begin. We can learn from the Zen concept that the journey is all about getting back to the beginning. We who are seekers are seeking that beginning, that cradle of life from which all creation springs forth, which we will find in the now moment we experience with our Creator.

Why is it that we seek something? Are we born with an innate concept that there is a God? Is it naturally, genetically part of who we are to seek spiritual fulfillment? What happens to some of us that we can refuse to believe in any sort of higher power? What is it that drives some of us with great passion to delve deeper and deeper into spiritual understanding while others seem to blissfully exist in the world ignoring any concept that God is present with them? If we consider the major spiritual writings developed throughout history along with the reflections of philosophers, religious leaders, and other deeply spiritual people, we see a common awareness. It is apparent that we are a piece of a creation engineered to be connected to, in relationship with, the creative power that has given and continues to give life to all that is. Something in our consciousness knows that and is aware of it. As we attune to it, we manifest it. It lies dormant in others of us and is engaged when something in life brings it into consciousness in the moment of here and now. There are others who will live their entire lives unaware of the image of God that lies within them, completely unrealized, and it will die with them like a seed that was never planted. I don’t want that to happen to you.

I used to work in a bookstore. We had a regular who came into the coffee shop, brought his briefcase, sometimes his girlfriend, and treated the space like a personal library or office. The bookstore management didn’t mind; lots of people would come in and just sit to read and drink coffee. He was usually nice, and became sort of a fixture in the store. Although this man was always tolerated, he sometimes pushed the limit of being welcome. He could be obnoxious and loud. What he talked about most, next to politics, was the Bible. He seemed to believe that he knew everything about it. It was amazing what he knew about archaeological digs, the development of Semitic languages, and history recorded in other sources that either corroborated or disagreed with biblical accounts. Yes, he knew a lot about the Bible. One thing that became apparent to me, though, was that he never shared knowledge of God or shared about his experience of God. He seldom seemed to be with the person talking to him, and seemed to be more concerned with how impressed that person was with him. In fact, it became quite apparent over time that if he believed in God, he held only a marginal, agnostic acknowledgement of a higher power. For him, God seemed to be a concept that was to be learned in one’s thoughts.

We won’t find what we’re all innately seeking if we only concern ourselves with knowledge about God but never actually experience God. We won’t find it if we never develop connection with God, never grow personally and spiritually, and never work to have relationships as experiences of God’s presence. Intentionally seeking what we are all innately wanting is the path of a disciple. To not be intentionally on that journey allows the natural anxiousness we experience in life to have control over us. To be intentionally on that journey increases anxiousness because it requires changing one’s personal concept of God, one’s self, and what it means to be in relationship. However, that intent gives one mastery over the anxiousness. Thus, the journey is that of an anxious disciple, and I hope, my friend, that you grasp your anxious discipleship with all you are worth.

To get the most out of this book, you will need at a minimum a journal and a really good pen. I’ve found when journaling that it makes a huge difference to have a pen that writes well and produces writing that makes journaling enjoyable. I have also included several questions and exercises to make the most of all these concepts. Even better, if you are know someone that you can talk with about spiritual growth, work through these ideas with them. At times in this book you may notice an inserted “Recommended Journal Opportunity.” Those are places in the thought process where you can get more out of the book. Blessings on your journey, and thank you for reading.

1: Who is God?

Before we can begin to work on our relationships with others, we need to know who we are in those relationships. Before we can begin to know who we are in our relationships with others, we need to be clear on identity, purpose, and sense of self. But before we can be clear on a sense of purpose, we need to be clear about the creative power behind our creation and our purpose, and so we seek to answer the question, “Who/what is God?” You have opportunity here to reflect on that question in a variety of ways, to begin gaining clarity in your consciousness of what/who has created you and seeks to manifest through you. We will explore your answers as this study progresses. Using a piece of paper or your journal, reflect on your responses to these questions:

> Who, or what, is God to me?

> Who, or what, is God in the Bible? (Examples are Exodus 3:6,13-14; Psalm 9:7-10; Psalm 18:46-50; Psalm 27; Ecclesiastes 5:1-7; John 1:1-5)

> Who, or what, is God in other religious traditions?

> How is God involved in the world right now?

> How is it that I’ve come to have my concept(s) of God?

> How do I experience God?

Now that you have reflected on your responses let me guide you through my responses to these questions and you can decide within yourself how we might agree or disagree.

My sense is that we don’t get it. Plainly and simply spoken, that’s the nut of it. Not to be negative about humanity, but if we look around us we will see that it is true. We humans struggle to grasp the depth and the love of God’s creative power that dwells among us, in us, and runs through us. We ignore it, we box it up into pat little expressions on bumper stickers, we slander it, we abuse it, and we wield it like power for personal gain. When trouble comes, however, we run and hide or we desperately cry out for God to make it go away, thinking that God has abandoned us when it is precisely in those darkest of times that we can finally begin to get it and understand this creative power for what it really is. In the midst of our darkest pain, we can finally give up all our preconceived notions and be very real with the Divine Presence.

We seek God outside ourselves, looking for some sort of grace in a graceless world, taking for ourselves what meager portions we can find of experiences that feel good only to find that we still hunger for something deeper, something more. We look to other people, substances, circumstances, careers, money, and even churches to fulfill this void we have inside. Then we become frustrated at God that we feel abandoned because none of these have brought us the sense of peace and wholeness for which we yearn. There is a simple reason for that. We are seeking that which is eternal by clinging to that which is caught in space and time. God can only be experienced here and now. We are looking in the wrong places when we are looking outside for what can only be found inside. Even being part of a group that calls itself a church, synagogue, mosque, or temple is not all there is to finding fulfillment. There are plenty of people in those organizations who are just as hungry, bitter, and graceless as anyone who’s never stepped into one. You can be great at being part of the group and be completely bound by organizational things that are caught in space and time. By doing so you are rarely mindful of your present and God’s presence with you in your present. We come to know and understand what we seek only when our soul is attuned to the creative power within, around, and between us, an attuning process that begins with the self. It is an inside job focused in the here and now.

The reason I started this book with “Before We Begin” is that it establishes a grounding point of agreement that we are seeking something. I hope that we can mutually agree that what we are seeking comes from a source. What we are seeking doesn’t come from a “when,” meaning from some historical event or even from the future, or a momentary decision like “being saved.” What we are seeking is not a “where,” meaning a physical place like something that we might call heaven or other-worldly. What we are seeking comes from the eternal, meaning that time and space do not define this source. This source exists apart from time and space. The paradox is that the more this source is described, the more the understanding of it is limited. As we try to explain it less and simply embrace its existence more fully, the more we can comprehend it. We can finally begin to get it. The name of God is not a label. It is God’s nature. Humanity has named this source “God” as well as a myriad of other names, yet none of these names is all-inclusive of this source in and of itself. Those names are merely knobs on the door that opens to this source. The story in the book of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible tells of Moses encountering this source on the side of a mountain for the first time. When Moses asks the question, “Who are you?” the answer is very simple: “I am.” It is like the old adage that less is more and more is less. We do not come to understand who God is by learning more knowledge. We come to understand more of God by learning to just “be” in the eternal moment, apart from space and time, in which we can say simply, “I am.” It is in that state of being that God is experienced and in which we can encounter God. We cannot say that God is here, or God is there. God just is. So, if we are seeking something in a place, in an event, through some sort of contrived experience, or as a result of clinging to anything caught in space and time, we will never find what we seek. The irony is, though, if we think in terms of the childhood game of getting warmer or cooler, that we are always “hot.” We are always, our entire lives just that close to finding God.

I am wary when people tell me that they know who God is because the Bible tells them who God is, and that’s all they need to know. The reason I am wary is that they have head knowledge about God, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they know God. Knowing who God is has little to do with actually knowing God; with having an active, deep, intimate relationship with God. That’s why I think and write in terms of God as the source, the creative power of all that is instead of as a human-like being deciding the fate of people’s lives and hurling thunderbolts about the firmament. The Bible doesn’t tell us everything about God because God is too infinite to be contained within a million books, much less just one. Learning to just “be” and to experience God without having to have God in a box is the process that helps us to “get it.” You might then be wondering if we experience God this way, then am I saying there is no reason to read the scriptures of any religious tradition?

Let me answer that with an explanation. Over the last several years, as I continue to develop an intimate relationship with God, I have come to a personal understanding of what I believe the Bible is and what it doesn’t seem to be. I come to this point of view through seminary education, personal study, and a semi-scholarly approach to scripture. I am no expert, though. I do not feel that I am a complete biblical scholar because I lack the patience to meticulously document every piece of minutia. I stand in awe of those scholars, and cannot claim myself to be among their ranks. But I do have a personal view, as do most people, and I will share it here. The Bible and other sacred works are to me collections of writings by apparently faithful people who at some point in history related their faith experience of God. The Bible does not seem to be a complete work that was written to be a unified book as we now have it, authored by God through the hands of people to be written exactly word for word as God would have it. Therefore, it is not one book standing as God’s autobiography. It is also not translated directly from the original documents because humankind has not had any of the original documents since long before the development of the English language. The Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, was finally collected into the present form used to translate English Bibles around the year 1000, or about 1,000 years ago. As far as archaeologists have found, none of the original documents exist. The New Testament is translated from some 2,000 manuscripts, none of which are complete in and of themselves, and none of which date to be any older than about the year 250 C.E. (Common Era), or so. These manuscripts are various versions of biblical texts found in diverse locations such as northern Egypt, southern Europe, and archaeological sites in the Middle East. None of them are identical, and none of them appears to be the author’s original, and so scholars spend arduous hours poring over them to discern how to translate them into the best representation of what the author probably wrote. So, what we have is the best we have, but it is not an original, nor is it translated from anything original. I believe that it is a faith work, a collection of deeply devout faith experiences that relate to us the story of God at work and present among God’s people. It is a human work of real human hurts, hopes, joys, and experiences combined with humans’ encounter of the divine. It is their accounting of the creative power at work in the world and in their lives. It is their experience of how they came to understand that God is the only true source of life, and that there is one source rather than multiple, humanistic gods. It is their experience of how they developed deeper relationship with this source. So the value of reading scripture is to learn how others have developed deeper relationship with the divine, and thus made progress in the journey of the anxious disciple. By reading scripture, we gain insight and inspiration as food for our own journey. So yes, there is a good reason to read your religious tradition’s scripture.

The experience of God is written throughout the Hebrew Bible, or if you prefer, the Old Testament of the Bible. In the Psalms the psalmist writes of feeling so close to God that it is like an intimate relationship, yet in other psalms the psalmist reflects the very human experience of feeling abandoned by God. The first five books of the Bible recount the experience of the Hebrew people as it was passed down orally over centuries about their understanding of how the world was created, how they came to understand themselves as God’s people, how they ended up in slavery in Egypt, and how they were freed and came to settle in the “Promised Land” that became the nation of Israel. The Hebrew prophets scolded and admonished the people about having fallen away from relationship with God and why they needed to restore that relationship. The New Testament recounts an entirely new way of looking at relationship with, and experience of God. It tells of how the creative power of God was fully realized in the person of Jesus. Various books and letters relate the accounts of those who came to experience that creative power and how it changed their lives. It tells of how that creative power was perceived as being present in the world even though the person of Jesus was gone.

Whether we believe the literal, historical account of scripture as being inerrant, that is without error or contradiction, seems to be irrelevant. What is completely relevant, and perhaps most important in our understanding and knowing God, is whether we believe that these accounts are written from real encounters with God. Maybe it doesn’t matter so much whether we believe that the Bible is factual, but maybe what is most important is that we believe that it comes from the writers’ authentic experience of God. They were trying in the best way possible to give written account of what is indefinable, impossible to capture in the written or spoken word, and so vast that it cannot be bound by description. But the more we read of their accounts, we begin the process of learning who God is and of knowing God. The more we open ourselves to our own encounter with what is eternal, what is beyond space and time, and what is God’s creative power in our own here and now, we open ourselves to the journey of the Anxious Disciple.

Now, going back to the questions at the beginning of this chapter, what did you say your understanding is of God? How do you agree or disagree with what I’ve just written about that? Does it affirm what you believe? Does it make you angry? Own your feelings, and let them take you further along your path of spiritual and personal growth. Feeling anger or fear when confronted with contrary beliefs shows us how we cling to things caught in space and time. If you disagree with me to any degree, I applaud you. I encourage you to know without a doubt why you do. Your growing understanding of God is yours, whether it agrees with mine or not, and it is the central piece of your spirituality. Being rooted to that understanding and attuning to what you understand supplies you with the power to claim control over the anxiousness of your journey.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Write some of your thoughts about the differences between your initial answers to the questions at the first of this chapter and what I wrote in the chapter. How do we agree? How do we disagree? Did you hae any insights as you read? Can this help you to be closer to God?

2: Our Source of Spiritual Health

In our society, when we think of health we often think of doctors, nurses, and professionals who help us regain our health after we have become sick, as in health care. We might also think of things like health foods, health plans, health and fitness clubs, healthy living, healthy diets, healthy atmosphere, healthy appetites … the list can go on. What’s interesting is that we seldom think of health in terms of our spirits. The term spiritually healthy is becoming more frequently heard, but we probably do not share a common understanding of its meaning. What is perhaps even more elusive is the source of health for our spirits.

When we’re thinking of healthy eating, we know and generally agree that the source for health is quality food. We may have differing opinions about which foods are healthy, but we can probably agree that foods that are low in fat, high in fiber, and have little to no chemical additives are the healthiest for us to eat. Whether we actually eat what’s good for us is a different matter.

In terms of health and fitness we may generally agree that health comes from proper diet and adequate exercise. In terms of health care, we may agree that health comes from the proficiency of a trained and licensed professional diagnosing disorders and helping us make a plan for healthier living so that we have fewer visits to them.

In terms of our spirits, though, what would be the source of health? Is the source prayer, or spiritually-oriented study, or worship? These are methods, and the method is not the source. It is a way to the source. While methods help us grow spiritually, we need to understand that the source of spiritual health is the Source … the creative power of all that is … the I Am … God.

God. Creative power. Ultimate potential. These are terms we can use to try to expand our understanding of who God is to us. By and large, human concepts of God are limited and we need as many ways as possible to stretch and expand our understanding of God. The Taoists speak in terms of the “uncarved block,” or Pu.  If we go to the beginning of the Bible we read that before creation happened the “world was formless and void.” In God’s pureness lies the potential of being that exists even before that potential becomes an idea. God just is. The “is-ness” of God goes through a birthing process through the creative power of God into a need to be, then an idea, then a plan, and finally becomes a creation. The Gospel of John begins with a great description of this creative process. John wrote, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God. All that came into being was created through him.” John goes on to say that the person of Jesus was the incarnation of this Creative Power of God. We see this process in the first verses of the Bible. We experience this process in the miracle of childbirth. We see the evidence of this process throughout the entirety of creation.

Humans came into being out of that process. Whatever is birthed out of God carries with it the image of God, or the “spiritual DNA” of God. We are even told by scripture that we are created in the image of God. Several religions teach that we carry within us the seed of divinity, which is not to say that we are gods, but it is to say that we carry the DNA of the ultimate potential, the creative power, the source. From that we have been created, and only from that can we continue to be nourished. We get into trouble because it is in our spiritual DNA to be co-creators with the creative power, but we have deceived ourselves into thinking that we are creators by our own merits. We have created societies, technology, architecture, philosophies, religions, culinary delicacies, as well as perverse recreations of God’s creation. How did we get like this? It is simply the human condition. Here is how that happens.

It is because we believe that the sum-total of God is within the conscious thought we have of God that many people believe God is insufficient. Having a limited concept of the divine, people easily believe that God falls short in “running” the world, and so they discard any belief in the divine. Having discarded any belief in a higher power, an individual looks to the self, others, and the creation around us to attempt meeting the same need we meet through connection with God, and this leads us down the path of all our social ills in our world. We could live beautifully in harmony with one another if we were to simply understand that there is one creative, spiritual source for all that is, and we are created to manifest that creative source through the way we live. Unfortunately we move our attention to what we can see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and taste. We worship what we have created forgetting that God was involved and that the very potential for the ideas and desires for our creations have come from God. We worship our societies in the form of nation-states or ideologies. We worship technology by seeing the latest technological breakthrough as “savior.” We are even content to become the source of health to others in codependent relationships, actually taking God’s place.

We, being the created, have our own creations. The things to which we become addicted are other creations and/or creations of the created. We become addicted to other people in the form of dependent relationships, which will be addressed later, but for now let’s acknowledge that when we have a codependent relationship one or both parties is looking to the other as their source of spiritual health. Instead of attuning to the Creator, we attempt to attune to another creation. That is the distraction of the human condition.

The creations of the created to which many people become addicted are things like alcohol, drugs, tobacco, television, cosmetic surgery, money, career ladders, status, and any of a number of things that symbolize status and success. Did I catch you in that list? Everyone is addicted at some level to something. This is not to levy judgment against people. Having a beautiful home or a nice car can simply be a blessing. The point here is that we can allow a creation of the created to become a substitution for the real source of our spiritual health. Few of us reach the point that we are free of substitutions. You can attune to the Creator to fulfill and sustain your spirit, but how can you attune to something we have created? None of these can fulfill and sustain our spirits. None of these are the source. When we allow another person to become our source we are seeking sustenance from the image of God instead of from God, much like a baby trying to nurse from a mother’s reflection in a mirror. When we allow one or more of our own creations, or mankind’s creations, to become our source, we set up a bizarre perversion. Expecting something of our creation to sustain us is like us sustaining and fulfilling God. Spirit doesn’t flow that way. All things manifest FROM the source, and attunement is our focus back toward that source. It’s not the other way around. The natural flow of the divine is for our souls to be nourished. We can nourish and be nourished by others, but we are not one another’s sole source of nourishment.

We attempt all sorts of ways in our lives to nourish our souls. Even once we’ve begun a relationship with God we have difficulty letting go of the ways we used to seek nourishment. It is like the difference between eating junk food and eating healthy food. When a person is used to eating chips, popcorn, chili dogs covered in chemical cheese, sodas, candy, ice cream, and all sorts of things that are poor in nutrition, one’s palate is attuned to the intense flavor of junk food. Eating a raw carrot is such a bland experience by comparison that it is rejected as inferior. Such a person finds, though, that their body is showing the signs of having eaten this diet and sooner or later they will have to find a source of real health. Once you have a deeply spiritual experience, you develop a taste for something unique. Your palate has been tweaked by something that makes your want more.

Many of us come to a point in our lives when we realize that we have been pursuing a diet of spiritual junk food. As Ram Dass says, you come to a point in which the way you’ve organized the universe no longer works for you . Up to this point, we have been looking to creations of the created as sources of sustenance. We have all been looking to other humans, or another human, as our source as if we actually needed that person. The source, the unlimited potential, the I Am, the creative power is that which gave and continues to give us life. That is our source of spiritual health, nourishment, and sustenance. At the point of existential crisis we realize the most important priority is the health of the soul.

So, do you want your soul to be healthy? An ancient saying goes, “As within, so without.” If you are unsatisfied with your life, look around you, but then look within. The condition of your life is a manifestation of the condition of your soul. The condition of your soul is determined by your attunement to the divine source of spiritual health and sustenance. If you want your life to be better, you need to attune your soul to the true source of spiritual health.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Have you been consuming a diet of spiritual fast food? What specifically have you substituted as a false spiritual source? Can you stop clinging to those sources, like changing from fast food to a healthy diet, and become connected to the only True Source? What specific practices will you take on to begin this new diet of spiritual sustenance? Reflecting on these questions and others that come to you in your journal, you will find opportunity to further develop such a spiritual diet. This diet will help you attune your soul to the nature of God’s being.

3: Being Authentic with God

I am an expression of God’s creative power. I am loved. I am love. I am not all the shame, depression, guilt, or even successes that I carry with me. I am not the things to which I cling, and they do not own me or have power over me. I am not the myth that society seeks to impose upon me. I am a spiritual being seeking expression in this world. None of the other stuff really matters, except as things for me to enjoy or discard, people for me to be in relationship with or not, and barometers for whether I am really letting the creative power be expressed in this world through me. It is a matter of letting myself be spiritually “naked” with God, holding no pretense and letting go of all the garbage I have been carrying.

The above is a set of affirmations you can say on a regular basis, as in several times a day if necessary, to help you get more authentically attuned with your divine source. That’s what relationship with God is all about, and it is not between two separate beings like you and an untouchable, judgmental deity. It is between the Source of Creation and the creation itself (you); a connection that in truth cannot and never has been severed. It is about learning to be authentic with those in your life and with the creative power from which you are extending. Powerfully negative experiences rupture authenticity, but it can be healed.

The American Heritage Dictionary offers these definitions of the word authentic:

Conforming to fact and therefore worthy of trust, reliance, or belief;

Having a claimed and verifiable origin or authorship; not counterfeit or copied.[i]

The second part of the definition applies to what has already been written here about our relationship to God. Being created in the image of God, living as extensions of the creative power into the world, we have our claimed and verifiable origin. The things we create are what are counterfeit or copied, but no human fits that description. We are authentic.

The first part of the definition bears more fleshing out. There are really only two facts about our existence; things that can be scientifically proven. One is that we exist. The other, by logical extension, is that we must have come from somewhere, or from something. Beyond these two, the other things we can say, including all that I have written to this point and the majority of what is in the Bible and other scriptures are beliefs. Beliefs are not things that we can prove; that is why they are beliefs. If, however, a belief becomes validated through experience, then it becomes fact for the person who experienced the validation. It is authentic. Others who have not shared the experience see a belief and it is not fact for that other person. We can’t make another person have the same experiences that we have had and therefore force our beliefs as facts onto them. If we’re hung up on that, then we’re focused on a false idea of what it means to be a witness. A witness is a person who personally observes the experience, not for the purpose of convincing others of something, but to learn the lesson of the experience. A witness is authentic because they are worthy of trust, reliance and belief. Others believe their witness because they believe that their experience is authentic. At some point, these others may become authentic witnesses because of their own experiences.

Ram Dass has taught me through his books and audio about cultivating the heart of the witness. Rather than experiencing grief and saying that you are grieving, you cultivate the heart of the witness and come to the capacity of observing that you’re feeling grief, but it doesn’t define you. You come to be able to not let your feelings control you, but you experience them, acknowledge them, and even bless them. You witness your experience as something authentic in your journey, and you are also able to let it pass on when it is no longer relevant to your journey. In addition, you experience the presence of the divine by acknowledging the authentic experience, witnessing it, blessing it, and being grateful for it. Cultivating the heart of the witness empowers you to own the experience as authentic Truth, rather than clinging to knowledge about the experience as being some sort of truth.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Witness Exercises:

> In a few words, name the most painful, difficult, or uncomfortable circumstance in your life at this moment.

> How has this affected you up to this point?

> Close your eyes long enough to use your imagination and imagine that another person is going through this very circumstance. In this visualization, you are witnessing that person in this circumstance and being affected in the same way you just described. Come back to the last step after you’ve had time to fully experience this step.

> Finally, close your eyes again and do the same visualization, but this time know that you are the other person and you are witnessing that you are experiencing the circumstance you named above, but without the affect you described. For example, if you are experiencing long term grief, witness that you are experiencing it, but it is not defining you; you are not the grief and you are not at its mercy. As Ram Dass says, as you experience it you can come to say, “Ah, there’s grief, or ah, there’s loss.”[ii]

When we abuse authenticity by forcing our beliefs onto others, we are not being true to authenticity, nor are we allowing others to grow through their own process of authenticity. Each expression of God in this world must carry his/her own authenticity. We cannot coerce or cajole people to become like us so that we are more comfortable. In truth, if we’re spending all our time doing that, then we must question whether we have actually experienced our beliefs, or if we’re just repeating someone else’s experience in efforts to verify their beliefs as fact because masses of others are accepting them as well. You become caught in the “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome. Beliefs are not authentic, nor Truth, simply because other people buy into them. It just means we have found someone to believe us. Authenticity comes through our own experience of our connection with the creative power and knowing that we are not counterfeit or copied. We are each a unique expression of God’s presence in this world, and that becomes our claimed and verifiable origin of authorship when we let that expression become our experience.

Coming back to earlier points, the tremendously difficult thing for us to get is that our authenticity is not merely for our own personal use. A person cannot claim their authenticity like papers of pedigree and then run about the planet like a little demigod. We are not authentic for our own personal purposes. We are also not authentic so that a judging, harsh, untouchable god can utilize us like little soldiers for some secret divine purpose. Authenticity is the beginning of recognizing who we are and whose we are, recognizing relationship with the divine creative power. The creative power continues to be expressed through us because of the very nature of our existence. There is nothing we have to do to make that happen. We just have to be aware that it is already going on.

When we can begin to grasp the depth of what this means, is it not silly for us to think that there is anything we have done that is so shameful we would hide it in this relationship? Shame is a block to our authenticity, because shame causes us to be deceitful, carrying illusions and smoke screens so that no one knows what dark secret or secrets we keep imprisoned within our souls. The last section of this study is about being authentic with others, so we won’t go in depth on that here. The first step in our growth, though, if we are carrying something like shame, is to trust the authenticity we have with the creative power.

I don’t think it is very helpful to look at this as saying that my shame comes from some dark deed that I call a sin, and that I have to confess this sin to a judging God sort of like going to a parent and confessing that the dog didn’t break the lamp; I did. When I do that, I then wait for approval and for that authority figure to say, “Thank you for being truthful, you are forgiven.” The divine process of forgiveness is more organic than this. Experience in life is rarely filled with such grace from others, and instead we are often punished by others even though we are truthful. Besides, as we have already explored, the creative power is not separate from us, and so to experience forgiveness we must find a way to release our shame, regrets, and unresolved pain into this permanent connection with the creative power. The traditional view of forgiveness views God and man as two separate beings. The way that it really is, the way that Jesus taught, is that we are not separate, but that man organically extends from God. When we are aware of this oneness with God and not separate, how can we need to grovel for forgiveness from that which we are already a part? Thus, it is critical for us to have a personal concept of the creative power, for us to realize that we are authentic representations of God’s presence, and for this connection to be an actual flow of trust. Forgiveness is the rectification of the flow when it has become blocked.

Again, with the practice of the witness, we can feel the heaviness of shame and say, “Ah, I am feeling shame,” and then eventually say, “I am experiencing God, and here, too, is shame. It is not my shame, I do not own it, but I am feeling it. I bless it and let it go.” Abundant forgiveness is already around you, and you can visualize forgiveness absorbing shame until there is only grace. Do this in the practice of the witness. Eventually, we no longer cling to that shame, it no longer has power over us, we no longer own it, and it leaves us. It is a lifelong process and is at the heart of the journey of the anxious disciple.

Doing this may feel unnatural because we aren’t accustomed to being conscious of this connection. We also might feel that it is unnatural to not be defined by our baggage. Most people have often said, “That’s just the way I am,” meaning that the baggage of their experiences defines who they are. Even if we are aware of our connection and our authenticity, we may still cling to our dysfunctional and self-destructive stuff because it is comfortable to keep it. We carry burdens, but they’re our burdens and we know them well. To give them up would be to release what was familiar, but that is what we must do if we are to travel lightly as the Light and become more purely the expression of God in this world.

A burden, whether it is a sense of shame about something, resentment for another person, a regret of a missed opportunity, or any of a host of other unresolved issues is a block in the flow. Thinking of spirit being like water, we might think of ourselves as existing in a spiritual flow, that we are made of water, and that this water flows from a source to renew us. Imagine that mud forms in this stream and begins to form a dam, limiting the flow. If we are not aware of the blockage, all we know is that we are receiving less water; we do not realize that something is blocking the flow. When spiritual flow is blocked by shame, we only realize that there is this thing about us that we wish weren’t there, and feel that we can’t possibly tell anyone else about it. This therefore causes us to increase the sense of separation from the Source. If the connection remains blocked, it will continue to gather up more mud and continue to constrict the flow until finally it is stopped. Here again, the way of the witness is a powerful process of allowing spirit to free up such a blockage. We focus consciousness on the flow and release attachment to the blockage. We don’t own our blockages, but just acknowledge that they are present and witness their presence. The flow of spirit will eventually remove destructive stuff that we don’t let own us.

Serious health problems develop from unresolved issues. When we limit the flow of spirit through our souls and diminish the connection we have with the divine, we limit our spiritual sustenance. Our souls begin to stagnate and our bodies begin to decay. It is literal that our souls are expressions of the divine, and our bodies are expressions of our souls in the same way that icing is expressed onto a cake. Physical health is a physical manifestation of spiritual health. There are many people who carry significant, chronic pain because they also carry unresolved pain gathered over a lifetime. There are many other people, physicians and health professionals, who have already conducted studies into this, and the results of their work is widely available. What is not scientifically verifiable, though, is the spiritual aspect. There are many people who are ill, others pray for them, and yet they do not get any better. Spiritual health manifest as physical health goes beyond the appearance of someone seeming “well.” When we pray, we’ve got to go deeper than simply praying for someone to be symptom-free. If we are focused on the physical manifestation of dis-ease, meaning that our souls are not at ease, we are often focused on the symptom and not the source. Surgery to remove an infected body part is not always effective long term because the unresolved issue that may have been the underlying cause is not resolved. We will explore the nature of prayer and manifestation later, but here in this section about God I need to simply say that prayer is a process of God manifesting in the world about you, through you, and as a manifestation of the condition of your soul. If you want to pray for someone and see them get better in some way, attune yourself more purely and authentically to the nature of God so that you can manifest God’s perfect, divine presence. This requires letting God’s spirit flow limitlessly through one’s being and focusing on the flow, not the symptom of dis-ease. You can then begin to learn to attune to the deeper issues involved within those you care about and know how to better focus your prayer work.

Clearing up unresolved blockages is often where we need the work of a spiritual director. There are trained spiritual directors, counselors, and other helpers who can help us with something like this. There are also just good friends who offer significant wisdom in dealing with our issues. Therapy is a process of working out the blockages we are experiencing in our connection with the divine and should be embraced when needed. Going back to the illustration of the dam, we will find that sometimes personal, individual visualization of the water eroding the blockage is effective because we are allowing creative power to dissolve the issue and replace it with spiritual health. More may be required, though, and so we might combine such visualization with therapy so that as a competent, trustworthy person helps us to work through issues in conversation, we also visualize that our connection with the divine becomes stronger and that attunement to the flow of spirit increases.

This process is a significant aspect of being authentic with God. If God is truly the creative power, if we are expressions in this world of that creative power, and if that creative power nourishes us and continues to recreate us, then what is there about us that cannot be recreated? We each have the potential at any point in time to become transformed through our attunement to the divine. That transformation can only occur through one’s authentic relationship with God. We must not only be authentic with God, but also with ourselves. We must admit what we believe, what we experience, and what we find to be factual about our own lives. We must also be brave enough to discard what we can no longer hold as Truth when our beliefs become dissonant with experience and reason. Often we cling to negative things that we claim are truth, but they stem from the unresolved blockages that need to be resolved.

It is important to not be lone rangers, but to find a person that we can trust when we find ourselves seriously blocked or stuck, and to not be held back by fear of this person knowing what evil lurks in our hearts. Professional helpers, whether they are pastors, licensed counselors, psychologists, social workers, and even spiritual directors are bound by laws governing confidentiality. If you find yourself seriously stuck and have no one in your life that you would trust with your “core of rot” (if you’ll pardon the expression), interview counselors until you find the person you believe will be able to help you. You owe it to yourself so that you can experience the authenticity that you were created to experience, and so that you can begin to bear fruit; the fruit that will last.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Name the stuff that brings up feelings of shame, sorrow, fear, or regret. Write those in your journal. One by one, do the previous experience of cultivating the heart of the witness with each of these. Journal about your experience of finally releasing the attachment you have maintained with these feelings.

4: Bearing Real Fruit, Fruit that Will Last

In the New Testament of the Bible, in the 15th chapter of John, we find one of the places in scripture where we can get a very clear look into the way of “being” that Jesus was trying to teach his disciples. This is where we can clearly see a parable of what it means to be connected to God as source, and to manifest God into the world.

Let me include here words from this passage  in the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vine grower. He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit. You have already been cleansed by the word that I have spoken to you. Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit and become my disciples. As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.

Jesus refers to himself in this text as the True Vine. Most of us have heard this in a variety of ways. We’ve seen it on signs or seen it on advertisements for churches. We might wonder, then, if Jesus was cautioning his disciples to not be attached to a false vine. He is also quoted as saying that his disciples are branches attached to him. Do you think we could still be branches if we were attached to a false vine? As branches, do we have the capacity to choose to attach ourselves to a false vine instead of to the True Vine? Sure we do, but when we do we might be deluded into thinking that we’re attaching ourselves to something worthwhile. Consider the seduction of power and wealth to the extent that their pursuit consumes your every thought and ambition. These false vines aren’t obviously so to people who are susceptible to the lure of power and wealth, yet if we attach ourselves as branches of those vines, then we are setting ourselves up to be dead branches that will bear no real fruit. Thinking that anything we create can actually sustain and nourish the spirit will in the end leave us hollow.

Even less obvious and more seductive is something like the need to be needed. That pursuit is also a false vine, because if we have a need to be needed then we attach ourselves to people who need someone and need to be codependent on someone. Then we are also making a false vine of ourselves to them, and making them our source and a false vine as well. That sort of codependency where we want someone else to be our savior or where we serve as their savior is something that moves the True Vine out of the picture, replaced with a false vine. Anything in creation is a false vine. People attach themselves to substance abuse, other dysfunctional and self-destructive emotional relationships, or even maintaining an appearance of righteousness without actually attuning to God.

My perception is that Jesus referred to himself as a vine to convey an image of being a connector. It seems appropriate in the midst of this discussion about being connected to God through the Christ to include a perspective on who Jesus was and what Christ continues to be. As mentioned earlier, Jesus was a purely connected expression of God as fully as God can be expressed in the form of a human being. When he was killed, the connection with God continued to live, and that connection is what is available to us. That very connection is what Charles Filmore, founder of the Unity School of Christianity called “Christ Consciousness.” We move into Christ Consciousness when we live in connection with the divine and allow the creative power to be expressed through us as fully as possible. Accepting Christ is not a matter of allowing ourselves to believe something, it is the process of transforming one’s individual consciousness to Christ Consciousness by attuning to divine spirit. A person who purifies connection with what Taoists call “the Tao” through meditation is as connected to God as any Christian. It is not about semantics, it is about attunement and the nature of that attunement. The True Vine is not about something exclusive to Christianity; it is about something exclusively spiritual that was the basis of Christianity. It is about true connection with God as opposed to seeking something else as one’s source.

Jesus’ commandment to love is often misunderstood by people as allowing others to just walk all over us, and that to love is to always be nice. But that’s not the case at all. Sometimes the most loving thing we can do is to let another person experience a painful process while we continue to be connected with them. Sometimes it means telling a painful truth in a loving way. We are fulfilled when we can be with each other as a means of letting God move in and fill the space between and among us and we are all equally blessed. We can only “be” like this when we are branches of the True Vine and are learning to love unconditionally. As we learn to be fully part of the True Vine then we can begin to learn about bearing fruit.

We need to look at the part of this scripture in which Jesus says that every branch is removed that does not bear fruit. So now you’re thinking, “Oh, great, you just got through talking about how we need to learn to become branches of the True Vine, but what if I do not figure out how to bear fruit? Does this mean that I will be removed from the Vine and cast into some fire, i.e., hell?” Okay, well, now that’s a fair question. Do Jesus’ words seem like a judgmental threat? It reminds me of things I’ve heard some Christians say; as if you’d better bear fruit or God will cast you away. Usually it is said more like, “You better straighten up or God will punish you.” That negative message is not implied in any of this section. Yes, those fruitless branches would be removed, but have you ever noticed how easy it is just to snap off a branch that is dead? That is what a branch would be like if it failed to bear fruit. It is already dead because it is cut off from the flow of life in the vine. Refer back to what we covered about being attached to a false vine, or the words about spiritual fast food, and look at that as being involved in “fruitless pursuits.”

It is in our human nature when attuned to God to bear fruit, but this fruit that Jesus is talking about has nothing to do with works righteousness. Even though one may practice attunement to God through these things, bearing fruit is not a resume of positions, the number of lunches served at the homeless shelter, the number of souls saved, or any of those things to which we can attach numbers and measurements. This concept of bearing fruit is in conflict with all the things we have always observed as barometers for how we’re doing. A person may be considered great because of personal contributions and hard work. The trap here is that the work that may be so beneficial to others and rewarding for one’s self can become something that we let identify how spiritual we are. Within some groups, this person can easily begin to wield significant influence because they might do more than anyone else. Others in the group never want to hurt this person’s feelings because all this contributing might stop, though he or she might also be the worst at judging other people and sowing seeds of disharmony. Being a really good worker is not the same as bearing fruit. Giving lots of money to a church or benevolent organization is not the same as bearing fruit. Serving on lots of committees or foundations and chairing everything in sight because we can’t say no is not the same as bearing fruit. Those don’t increase our connection with God. Maybe we get all nutted up about trying to do all these things as if this is what a faith process is about. We then get worried because we do not feel like we’re growing and we fear that maybe we’re just not doing enough. If you are relating to this, these words of Jesus can be a comfort, reminding us what it means to truly bear fruit. In other words relax, because if each of us is genuinely learning to bear the kind of fruit Jesus really is talking about, then we are like the tender shoot just coming off the vine, and a gardener doesn’t remove new growth; just dead branches. The key that unlocks the secret of this fruit is hidden in verse 10.

Jesus says to his disciples that they are bearing fruit if they keep his commandments. He does not mean the Ten Commandments, nor other commandments across the Bible. He means his commandments, which is specifically what is written here. So what did he command? The word “command” comes from the Greek word entole, which appears ten times in nine verses of the Gospel of John. In three of those verses Jesus is talking about doing what his Father commanded him to do, so those will not count. In another of these nine verses the writer is describing how the priests and Pharisees gave orders for anyone knowing where Jesus was to tell them, so that will not count, either. That leaves five of the nine verses where the word entole appears and actually has to do with a commandment that Jesus is giving to his disciples, and here they are.

> In John 13:34 Jesus says, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

> In John 14:15 Jesus says, “If you love me, you will obey my commands.”

> In John 14:21 Jesus says, “Those who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

> In John 15:10 (which was included above) Jesus says, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love.

> Two verses later Jesus says, “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you.”

That is it. Those are all the times in John where commandment or command appears in the context of Jesus giving a commandment to his followers. In each of those occasions, he is also talking about love. He is not talking about mushy, gushy, nice love, either. He is saying that the way he loved his disciples is the way they should love each other. Love holds people accountable. Love does not judge, and love says, “You are my friend and there is nothing you can do about it. You do not have the power to change the fact that I am your friend. I am not merely concerned with how you feel about me, and I love you without conditions. You can let me down and I will love you. You can say the wrong thing to me and I will love you. You CANNOT change the fact that I am your friend and I love you.” This is what it means to practice unconditional love, and that is the love that Jesus commanded his disciples to obey. The fruit that we bear is for us to be learning to live in unconditional love in the pursuit of Truth, which is the complete understanding of love.

Imagine what a world it might be if people in churches  and synagogues, mosques and temples, actually bore fruit among every other person in their faith community. Imagine what change may take place if faith communities bore fruit among all other faith communities. Imagine what a world it might be if all the heated, political, emotionally-charged issues in our society became infused with this fruit, the dissolution of polarization, the sense of simply being with one another in divine connection.

When we come to live in the complete understanding of love, then we are living in Truth, because Truth is experience of God’s full presence. As we come to trust in, and be connected with, the creative power that God has placed within us, we can learn to rely upon our own capabilities for being in relationship, rather than basing relationship on what other people do to us or for us. We would not be let down by how others behave in a relationship. We would not cling to any other in relationship. We would be free. Love liberates us from the bindings of expectations. Love can be shared unconditionally and expressed in pure freedom of spirit. As we live more fully in this freedom we come to live what God wants us to live, and what we live is Truth. We can become capable of telling others the truth in a loving, compassionate way that also serves to liberate them; i.e., we are authentic with them. The Truth we live is our experience of, and manifestation of, God’s presence in creation.

Truthfully, I am still working on this and I will probably be working on it for the rest of my life without ever having completely “gotten it.” This is why it’s called a spiritual path, not a destination. It is a process, a journey, and an unfolding of one’s soul through increasing connection with the divine.

We don’t normally live in that state of consciousness. Activities of not bearing fruit seem to occupy most of our attention. Does that mean that if we are preoccupied with doing things that have nothing to do with practicing unconditional love, then we are involved in fruitless efforts? Is Jesus saying that God would take an entire human being and cast that soul away? Is God so harsh as to take well-meaning people who are simply off the mark and unfocused and permanently cast them away? Is that what this means? If not, then what else could Jesus mean by pruning?

Think about it. Haven’t you been pruned? Haven’t you had experiences in your life when you thought things were going along really well, suddenly to find that you had lost your only source of income or, maybe more tragically, lost a loved one? Maybe your experience of life was in some way drastically changed and you had to change the direction and scope of your life in order to move on. I do not mean to imply that God causes these things to happen, but we experience a pruning of sorts when these things happen to us. We have to cut off an outmoded aspect of ourselves in order to grow through the experience and become more of who we are created to be. That is what pruning is all about. Through the experience of pain and suffering we learn to love deeply, and we develop a greater capacity for living in unconditional love. Pain and suffering can open us to deeper Truth. We make a decision to live and not just exist. The word decision comes from the same root word as incision. We actually cut away what is outmoded and choose healthier ways of meeting our spiritual, physical, and emotional needs. God does not cast away a whole person. As we attune to divine consciousness, our experiences serve to prune us so that we can become fruitful branches of the True Vine and learn to love unconditionally. To do so, we have to work through these experiences so that we grow from them. If we don’t, they may instead block connection with the divine. The irony is that through this pruning and letting go part of who we used to be, we actually become more whole, more authentic, and thus more purely in relationship with God.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Consider at least one time in your life when you experienced loss and write that down in your journal. Now contemplate all the negative circumstances that may have surrounded that event and write those in your journal. With these in mind, consider when these negative circumstances dwindled or ceased and write down the positive circumstances and feelings you also felt at that time of your life. Finally, journal about whether these positive things could have been experienced or appreciated if the universe had not “pruned” you.

The apostle Paul wrote to the church in Galatia about this kind of fruit. He wrote in Galatians 5:22-23, “But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (nrsv)” These are the dimensions of unconditional love. These are descriptors of learning to “be” in the way that was the only commandment that Jesus gave.

From what Jesus says in verse 4 of the John scripture quoted at the beginning of this chapter, we see that we can only learn to actually “be” unconditional love when we abide in Christ and Christ abides in us. It’s not about praising the personhood of Jesus. It doesn’t mean spending a little time with Jesus on Sunday, wearing a WWJD bracelet, listening to Christian music, or becoming so knowledgeable that we can say and believe all the things that make us sound genuinely faithful. The word “abide” conveys a sense of permanence. None of us abides in a church building; we abide in our homes. The places where we abide are places of comfort, places that we take great care to make into living spaces that have memories and keepsakes. They contain all of our tools and the things we need for sustaining life. Abiding means much more than just spending time in a place. It means to become fully fitted into a place as a way of being. The way of being in this context is “in Christ,” i.e., in the consciousness of being attuned to God.

Now here is the paradox: you can abide in your home but does it abide in you? Not really. That just is not possible. But when it comes to relationships it is altogether different. One person can abide in another person’s heart, AND that person can abide in the other person’s heart. Unfortunately, people can abide in one another and still carry a sense of ownership, or entitlement, or dependence. The abiding exists on a scale. On one end of the scale are those who see another person as one’s source. On the other end of the scale are those who choose to abide in one another unconditionally. That is the higher path of relationship. This is how we are created to be in relationship with God and with others: completely unconditional, completely accepting and trusting, completely abiding and permanent … completely authentic with God and with each other. We have many issues that prevent that, but it is the goal. Most of us float between the ends of the scale depending on who we are with. That then leads us into the next section, which is about being authentic with ourselves. The last section of this book is about us learning to be more authentic with others, and we have a lot to cover in between. Neither of these is possible unless we are first and primarily authentic with the creative power that we call “God.”

5: Who Are We to God?

In this whole scheme, who are you to God? You may have been wondering what you would do with an understanding of what it means to be authentic. So what? What good does it do to be able to claim that we are authentic as an expression of God in creation? If we can agree that God is the creative power and source behind all that is, meaning all of creation, then maybe we can also agree that we are created in the image of that creative power. That is what it means to be the ‘children of God.” We are literally the offspring, the expression of God in creation, though we are only born with something like a seed of that expression within us. The spiritual DNA of the divine spirit that comprises God is also our spiritual DNA. As we grow and live in this world, what usually grows is the part of us that finds definition through outer interaction. What lies dormant is that spiritual DNA, that part of us that can only find definition by attunement with the creative power from which it is extended. I say “extended” instead of “came” because the connection has never been severed. Each human being has an inner, spiritual aspect that was and is an extension of God, whether or not we are conscious of it, no matter how dormant. The divine is continually pressing to seek expression in each and every one of us, but most humans leave God’s expression to remain mute, stifled by our own creation.

What God seeks to do now is what God has sought to do since the dawn of creation. The ancient Hebrews developed a myth, or rabbinical teaching, that gave meaning to the dawn of creation and our place in it. Everything that has substance came into being because the creative power sought expression much as an artist seeks expression through his/her work, or as a tree seeks to grow new buds in the spring and summer. As things came into being it was not with a sense of finality, but rather with a sense of continuation and even more beginnings. Humans came into being as not only more expression of the creative power but also to be in a partnership of continuing creativity. The ancient Hebrews expressed their belief in this as mankind being given dominion over the earth and all that is in it, which can also be conceived as our being invited into co-creation with God to have dominion over what God manifests through us. What is often overlooked in all this is that in order to be co-creators we have to do so as extensions of the creative power, meaning that God creates through us. The whole myth structure of the Garden of Eden is about humans establishing separation from God, seeing themselves as “other” rather than “part of,” and trying to create and exist as separate beings from God. We can call that the fall from grace, we can call that original sin, or we can call that whatever we want, but it boils down to the same thing. Humans started the path of trying to be their own power and thus lost the awareness of there being an existence beyond what they could see, hear, smell, and touch. God, however, has always sought manifestation in God’s creation, including us.

It is like the water pipes or the electrical wiring in our homes. We can leave the main switch off where the supply comes into the house and ignore that it exists. None of the utilities in the home function, and we can say that there is no water and there is no electricity. It just doesn’t exist, and to the person who can only see the fixtures this may appear to be true. He or she might even deny the existence of water or electricity. The main point to understand here is that even though nothing in the home is functioning, the water and the electricity are still being supplied to the home. They lie dormant and unexpressed at the home, continually expressed from the source, but never being fully expressed into visible and usable light and water. If someone would simply realize that electricity and water are there to be expressed into the home, a switch or valve could be turned and everything would be different. What was a dismal, stuffy, dark dwelling would become filled with light, functionality, fresh water, and life.

We are like the home. The expression of the creative power is supplying life to our spirits, but that expression stops at the “switch,” or one’s consciousness. Many of us continue to be dark, stuffy, and spiritually dead. When we learn to allow divine, creative power to be expressed through the “wiring and plumbing” of our being, then we begin to live as co-creators with God. Our lives have the potential of being filled with Light and the water of spirit. We become but one expression of God among many in the world.

The Hebrew story tells us that since the dawn of creation the divine has sought to be expressed through humans into the rest of creation. People did not get it. They became lost into their own lack and limitation and, as reflected in the accounts of the Hebrews, eventually became enslaved in Egypt. Their faith story tells us how they forgot about their spirituality, but how many of them prayed for a deliverer. When we are unconscious of the spiritual truth about ourselves we are enslaved to whatever we recognize as “source.” We unconsciously look for another to lead us to the Light, or to be delivered. That’s what happened with the Hebrews. God was expressed among them in the form of Moses and the Hebrew slaves were freed. The creative power was expressed through Moses as rules for how to be in relationship with the divine that dwelled among them and rules for how to be in relationship with the spiritual DNA they could find in each other. This worked for a while, but they focused on the rules rather than the spirituality behind the rules and over time things became backward again. They forgot that the rules were actually symptoms of what it looks like to be spiritually attuned, and so they looked for loopholes in the rules. They took ten rules and turned them into hundreds.

God also became expressed in the world in the form of prophets who led people back into relationship with the creative power, but people wanted to place their trust in what they could see, touch, feel, and smell. The prophets were treated badly because evil is the result of seeing creation as “source,” often meaning that we see ourselves as our source, and such evil then seeks to destroy real connection with the real Source. Because the ancient Hebrews lost attunement with the divine, things went from bad to worse for them until eventually there was one who was fully attuned to God’s creative power in the world. This one person tried in many different ways to help people understand their real source. He taught that they had the creative power of God within them if they would only attune their consciousness to it, and that manifesting this creative power is all there is to life. Lots and lots of people were hungry for this message, but when they realized that it meant letting go of their attachment to the things they’ve always viewed as their source, they abandoned this new teaching. They let the powers that be take this expression of God’s creative power and kill it, nailing it to a cross. But while physical death might kill a human it can’t destroy the manifestation of divine love. Love is creative, it creates, and the creative power, which is love, cannot be destroyed. It overcomes even death. It is eternal.

So who are you to God? You are what God seeks to be in one human expression among billions. You are a critical piece in the continuation of the creative process that has unfolded since the dawn of creation. You are very important, and there are important things for you to consider. My hope is that this book is helping you to consider at least a few of them.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Can each of us be something different to God? Can each of us have a different view of what God is up to in this world and still be right? Does it matter if we’re right or wrong about that? If you disagree with the view that we are each expressions of God into this world, what do you believe that it means to be created in God’s image? If you disagree that we are each co-creators with God in this world, what do you believe about why we’re here and why we are created? How are your beliefs actually working for you? Take a moment to write in your journal, immersing yourself into becoming clearer about who you are to God.

6: Choices for Growth and Change

26 You’ll take delight in God, the Mighty One,

and look to him joyfully, boldly.

27 You’ll pray to him and he’ll listen;

he’ll help you do what you’ve promised.

28 You’ll decide what you want and it will happen;

your life will be bathed in light.

29 To those who feel low you’ll say, “Chin up! Be brave!’

and God will save them.

30 Yes, even the guilty will escape,

escape through God’s grace in your life.

Job 22:26-30

You may remember the scene from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where Indiana finally found the Holy Grail, the cup of Christ. There was an old knight who had been guarding the grail since the Crusades and had survived by drinking from it, as the grail rejuvenated the drinker with new life. The villain in the movie followed Indiana into the chamber where the grail had been kept, and held the others at gunpoint while he searched among the many cups for the real grail. The old knight that was guarding the chamber said to the villain, “If you must choose, choose wisely.” The villain decided on the most glorious chalice in the collection, thinking that surely this magnificent cup would be the one used by the Son of God. He dipped it into a well in the cave, drank, and immediately aged into dust. The old knight said with great understatement, “He chose ... poorly.” Indiana then searched through the cups and selected the simplest chalice, one of mundane pottery, saying, “This looks like the cup of a carpenter.” He drank from it, and the old knight said, “You have chosen wisely.”

This scene gives us a great approach for looking at choices that we make in our lives. Every one of us has said at one time or another, “I had no other choice.” We have all felt at times that we had no options, and that our lives were determined and controlled by someone else or by extremely limited circumstances. The truth is that other than the few years of infancy in which we were under the direct care of our parents, absolutely no one else has been in total control of our lives unless we have given them that control. Just like Indiana Jones looking through the many chalices in a cave, each of us at any point in our lives has before us a variety of choices. The key issue is that we must choose wisely. Certainly, not many of our choices will cause us certain doom like the villain in the movie, but there are wise (effective) choices and foolish (ineffective) choices that we can make. The great news is that if we make a foolish choice bringing negative circumstances, we can then make a wiser choice producing more positive results. We are never without options. The most important thing that any of us can realize is that what is permanent and pervasive is our capacity to make a new, wiser (more effective) choice; what is temporary and superficial are the negative circumstances in our lives. It is never the other way around. We are not determined by our circumstances, and we are where we are, who we are, and what we are because of choices we have made.

Dr. William Glasser is known world-wide as the developer of a psychology known as “Choice Theory.”[iii]   Many motivational speakers, preachers, writers, and even talk show hosts have adopted the precepts of this theory. Glasser’s metaphor for this theory is that of a car, the different parts of which correspond to the dynamics of being in control of one’s choices.

Imagine that the wheels of a car represent four aspects of your functioning. Glasser calls it “total behavior.” The two rear wheels are “physiology” and “feeling,” while the two front wheels are “thinking” and “doing.” The reasoning is that there are only two aspects of your functioning over which you have direct, arbitrary control; thinking and doing. You might be able to sit or lie still and gradually relax your body, however you can’t say to your heart, “Slow down,” and actually slow down its pace. You can’t just change your body temperature by sending a thought message to your body. Likewise you can’t just change from feeling sad to happy by telling yourself to feel happy. We can indirectly change physiology and feeling, however, by controlling doing and thinking, much like the stationary wheels at the back of your car follow where the front wheels are steered. You can speed your heart rate by perhaps thinking of a person of the opposite gender, or by working out. Exercising will also change your body temperature. You can change from feeling sad to happy by thinking about a memory that was pleasant, or you can start an activity that helps you feel better. So, even though we do not have direct control over physiology or feelings, we can indirectly control them by controlling thinking and doing and thereby have control over the entirety of our functioning.

Another piece of your metaphorical car is your steering wheel. The choices you make steer your functioning, changing the direction of your thinking and doing to achieve certain results. You are at the wheel of your car and no one else is driving it unless you let them. In other words, you drive your thinking and you drive your doing unless you think and do whatever someone tells you to think and do, but that is also a choice you make. Unfortunately, many people allow someone else to “drive their car.” We can give up the power and authority to make decisions and hand it over to someone else. We can also make the choice to take it back. If you choose to take back control of your car, while it may sever or change the relationship with the person you’ve let have control, you really do have the power to take control of your own decisions. Doing that will improve your significant relationships. You can take responsibility for your choices and the results of those choices. You can be at the point in your life where you live by the truth that although you can’t control everything that happens to you, you can control 100% of what you choose to do about it. You are the driver of your car.

There are other parts of your total behavior car that are important. For instance, you have a windshield, which represents your perception of where you are driving your total behavior car. The world around us contains all its events and circumstances, most of which we do not see; however we do see what is visible through the windshield, or one’s field of perception. The accuracy of perception depends on how fast you are moving through your life, how well you are paying attention, and how clear or distorted your field of perception is. You have been driving through your life, sometimes driving your own thinking/doing, and sometimes letting someone else drive your thinking/doing, gathering up the mud and bugs that splat into you along the way. If someone was driving you, you probably gathered up a lot more mud and bugs. From time to time you have to clean off your windshield, or in other words, you have to clean up your field of perception by letting go the residue from past experiences that distort how you perceive things now. This is what I meant earlier by saying that you come to the point in which your beliefs become dissonant with your experiences. You can spend a great deal of time exploring old painful experiences, and trying to figure out why these things have happened to you, but in the meantime the pain from those experiences distorts how you perceive where you’re going. If you were cleaning off the windshield of your real car, you wouldn’t analyze each bug and wonder where it came from, what species it used to be, or where you were on the road when you hit it. You would simply clean them off so you could see well. It can be unproductive for us to spend time analyzing all the baggage we carry. If a painful memory keeps you from experiencing life as an authentic manifestation of God’s presence, let it go the best you can and get on with your journey.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

If you try to clean off your windshield, or in other words, wipe the slate clean and release any attachment to your past, are there any stubborn bugs? Are there things in your past that you just have a difficult or impossible time letting go? Write those in your journal. It’s those stubborn things that stick to your perception that make it difficult to have clear vision about where you’re going in life. Have you been in therapy about any of these? Write down how many sessions you’ve had with a therapist and for how long, i.e., weeks, months, years. Write down what kind of progress you feel you’ve made. If you’ve made significant progress, by all means continue with what you’re doing. If you are stuck and haven’t made progress, ask yourself how long you will continue to do something that may not be working. Ask yourself if you can simply let that bug or those bugs go. Try it. Try saying, “I’m not going to let those things influence my thinking/doing and I’m going to be driving my thoughts and actions from now on. Those things of my past may have taught me valuable lessons for making wise choices, but beyond that I’m not going to let them drive unhealthy choices that I have been making. Try that. Write down what you’re telling yourself. Continue to journal about how well this is working and if you’re seeing a therapist, share that with that person before you discontinue therapy. This may be the work that helps you get off square one.

There are also times when your windshield gradually gets dirty and you do not realize it is dirty until you can’t see through it very well. The way we perceive the world around us is like that because we always see the world through the filter of our values and our judgments of what is good for us. If your windshield were always dirty, you wouldn’t know it was dirty because you wouldn’t know what it was like to look through a clean one. Likewise, if you’ve always assumed that destructive ways of functioning were the only options  for you and you never experienced what it was like to function in a way that was actually spiritually attuned, you wouldn’t realize that you needed to change. It has been said that you will remain the same until the pain of remaining the same becomes greater than the pain it takes to change. Once you realize that your windshield is dirty and you start cleaning it off, you will discover new ways of perceiving the world, and you will then make new realizations about how to fulfill your needs. This is the journey of the anxious disciple because making this kind of change creates anxiety. Managing unhealthy anxiety into usable energy for growth involves cleaning off your windshield so that you can steer yourself toward being a non-anxious presence.

Another thing that people do, continuing the metaphor of the car, is to try driving forward while focusing on the image in the rearview mirror. Some people turn the mirror and use it to focus on the self while driving, and in clinical psychology that is called narcissism. If you are on the path of the anxious disciple, this probably won’t apply to you. If it does apply to you, then it still won’t matter what I write here because you will assume that I am not talking about you, so we will press onward without exploring narcissism. To borrow a concept of our friend, Jeff Foxworthy, you might be a narcissist if you think that all your problems are the fault of someone else.

To be sure, most of us have at many points in our lives been focused on the rearview mirror because we are focused on the past. Earlier we touched on shame and being bound by one’s past. In this metaphor of the car, we can easily see that if we are focused on events in our past, we cannot live long without crashing. We have to remember that the divine is present in the present, not the past, and not the future. To attune to the divine means we must be here now, as Ram Dass (aka, Richard Alpert) so succinctly expressed in his book by the same name forty years ago.[iv]

Here is a really heavy thought for you as you consider this metaphor of the car. Focusing on the past will cause you to crash. Focusing way into the future will make you miss your next exit or have an accident with something in your immediate path. The only space and time in which you have real control over your car is right here and right now. The only time and space in which you have control over your choices is right here and right now. To experience the eternal, attune to the divine, is to be completely present right here and right now. Not just between a few hours or minutes, but “now” in the moment that is absent of time and space existing between “then” and “not yet.” Control over your choices = attunement to the divine = dominion over the “earth” (i.e., what you manifest) = focused consciousness in the “now” moment. Chew on that one for a while.

Lastly, we come to the most critical part of your car: your engine. All of us are driven and motivated by something, and all of us are driven and motivated by different things in differing combinations. Regardless of whether you are driven and motivated by the same things as someone else, the truth is that you are driven and motivated by your own needs. We all are. Just as we are not always conscious of the engine under the hood of the car, we are seldom conscious of what truly motivates us in life. All of us are finding some way to fulfill our five basic needs, and the ways in which we are trying to fulfill them determine the effectiveness of choices we make.

Survival is a basic need that we often do not consider. You do not have to think about breathing or pumping blood through your body. You do not have to think about eating and drinking once something goes past your mouth. You make some decisions oriented toward your own survival, but they are few compared to the decisions we make to fulfill our other needs. Decisions that encompass food, shelter, and safety are choices that require consciousness and indeed presence of mind if we are to make effective choices. We don’t need to spend time here on the unconscious fulfillment of the basic need for survival. We do, however, make conscious choices about our other needs, so we will give conscious attention to our four other basic needs, how they drive us, and how we try to meet them.

> The need for love/belonging drives attraction to the opposite gender, being with someone who appreciates you, or feeling connected to a group such as one’s family.

> The need for power/control drives personal responsibility, accomplishment of goals and dreams, or setting healthy boundaries in relationships.

> The need for freedom drives a sense of independence, your desire to get away from the rat race from time to time, or your hunger to not have someone else tell you what to do.

> The need for fun drives your creativity and all the things you do to simply feel good and enjoy life.

All of these needs blend into one another. Not wanting someone else to tell you what to do might meet your need for freedom as well as your need for power/control. Also, if these needs are out of balance, or if your belief in being able to fulfill them is low, your decisions may be more destructive as you attempt to meet your needs. A person who tries to control others and is domineering is trying to fulfill their need for power/control; however their need for belonging/love suffers because they violate the needs of other people in the process. What is extremely important in all this is to consider whether we are looking outside ourselves for our source of supply, or within. Our needs are best met by internal motivation arising from our connection with Source. All these needs are met in accordance with the condition of one’s soul, and in meeting them we must again remember: as within, so without.

This then leads us to my idea of a “Capability Meter”. Assume that all together your needs have a cumulative level. Also, assume that your personal sense of capability can be measured in some way. To be meeting your needs in healthy ways, your sense of capability has to exceed the level required by your needs. If not, you are likely to be trying to meet your needs in unhealthy or destructive ways. For example, let’s assume that your need for power exceeds your sense of capability in that you need to have control over your finances but you don’t have a personal sense of capability to be financially responsible. Because you perceive that you can’t fulfill your need for power you replace it with another need that you do feel you can meet; fun, for example. So, instead of following a budget and balancing your checkbook you take your paycheck and go have a great time. However, because one need is not being met and you are trying to compensate by over-filling another need, you end up having so much fun that it has a negative impact on your need for power. In fact, attempting to meet your need for power (which you feel you can’t meet) by replacing it with more fun (which you feel you can meet), you find that you have even less power in your life, and you have therefore brought your sense of capability for power even lower. Being in control of your financial obligations meets your need for power, however if you do not feel capable of completely meeting that need and you overcompensate your need for fun by going out and spending money you do not have, you will have less capability of meeting your need for power. You would also be letting fun assume a role of spiritual fast food, and you would be attempting to treat all that fun as being the source of your supply. It doesn’t really meet your needs, your soul becomes malnourished, and so you are far from being spiritually attuned. You become a more anxious disciple instead of effectively using your anxiousness.

We need to touch here on self-fulfilling prophecies. We can choose ways of meeting our needs in healthy ways and bring into our lives a greater sense of peace, wholeness, and abiding with God. In a sense, that intent is a prophecy that we fulfill. It is not, however, self-fulfilling. You have to focus your intent for those prophecies to become fulfilled. If you do not make conscious choices in meeting your needs, you will make unconscious choices based on the bugs on your windshield. Your sense of capability in meeting your needs will run your subconscious choices, or your automatic behavior. Martin Seligman wrote that negative prophecies are always self-fulfilling.[v]  No matter where you gathered your bugs, if you focus on them they will cause you to unconsciously steer your car where you do not really wish to go. You will unconsciously seek unhealthy ways of meeting your needs. Exchange your negative self-fulfilling prophecies for positive choices., thus creating intent-fulfilling prophecies.

Don’t beat yourself up, though. After all, you are with me on this journey to be a less-anxious disciple, right? All of us make decisions to meet our needs in the best way we know how. Consider the objects and/or pictures you found at the beginning of this chapter. All of these are part of the pictures you have in your “quality world.”[vi] Your quality world is the sum of the pictures in your mind that represent the relationships, places, values, and activities that fulfill your needs. Many of us have pictures in our quality world that we have placed in the role of source, rather than as companions on our journey or creations for our enjoyment. Regardless of judging your pictures in your quality world, you need to know that you have always made choices based on those pictures. The choices you make are the best you know how to make. If your choices are not leading you into growth and change, then perhaps it is because your needs are being met well enough that you have no motivation for growth and change. Dr. Pat Andersen, counseling professor at Midwestern State University, says that we are not motivated to change because of trauma, grief, or some cataclysmic event in our lives. Rather, she says, we are motivated to change by boredom. If you are bored with your life, that is an indication that some need is not being met. It is time for you to bring new pictures into your quality world.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Is there at least one cycle that has been going on in your life that you want to change? Have you felt helpless to change it? That would either be because you don’t feel you are capable to change it or you feel someone else is control of that cycle and you can’t change it. Why would that be? What are the thoughts and actions you do that continue keeping this cycle going? What thoughts can you adopt that might change this cycle? What actions can you do that would change this cycle? How does this cycle meet your needs in unhealthy ways? What healthy ways would you prefer for your needs to be met? All of these are important things to consider in changing a cycle that feels like your total behavior car is going in circles so that you can set out on an intentional direction. Reflect on these questions and considerations in your journal and then explore the same things for any other cycles you may want to change in your life.

The realm in which Glasser’s theory works is your quality world. You have in your mind pictures of the places, people, and activities through which your needs are met. If the new pictures you bring into your quality world conflict with pictures you already have, then you will be in inner conflict until you resolve it by removing the picture that does not meet your needs. We can add pictures fairly easily; however removing a picture already in your quality world is very difficult. The Apostle Paul struggled with this very issue, and wrote about it in his letter to the church in Rome:

15 I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. 16 And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. 17 As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. 18 I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. 19 For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in me that does it. 21 So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. 22 For in my inner being I delight in God’s law; 23 but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. 24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!  (Romans 7:15-25, NIV)

It is clear that all of us will have an inner struggle from time to time if we want to grow and change, to become more Christ-like in our spiritual journeys. As you become more attuned to the divine, you will become conflicted through your transformation. This inner conflict creates anxiety. Be patient. What we need to know is that there is only one person’s behavior we can change, and that we are each responsible for the choices we make.  Unfortunately, Paul’s dialogue here can give people a “the devil made me do it” way of thinking and doing. Paul evidently did not understand that we always do what we choose to do. We need to know that our choices are the best we know how to make given the pictures in our quality world. And we need to know that if we want to change how we feel emotionally and physically, we can usually change what we are thinking and doing and help ourselves to feel better and thus more in tune spiritually. We also need to know that if we keep on doing what we have been doing, then we will continue getting what we have always been getting. If that’s not satisfactory, then we can choose to change how we function. There are four basic steps to making quality choices for growth and change. Glasser calls it WDEP:

> WANT: Clarify what it is that you want, what will be ultimately satisfying to the pictures in your quality world. Make sure it is not an expectation for someone else to do something. This has to be something that can happen because of what you think and do.

> DOING: Recognize what it is that you are already doing and thinking in your life to get what you want.

> EVALUATE: Do a personal evaluation of whether what you are doing is getting you what you want, and whether or not it is destructive to relationships or unhealthy to you.

> PLAN: Make a plan for changing your functioning to thinking and doing what will get you what you want, that will fulfill your needs.

Now, while this sounds simple, you may need some help. Find a person you can trust, perhaps a person who is in the pictures in your quality world, who will objectively and lovingly help you with your evaluation and your plan. Do not share it with anyone who has a track record of shooting down your dreams. Each of the choices in your WDEP are made “right here, right now.” For more details on that, refer back to the chapter on being authentic with God. If you attune to the divine while following the WDEP steps, you will find that you have more control over your choices. You will also find that you are living further into manifesting God’s presence into your life.

7: Nourishing the Soul

Before beginning a discussion about nourishing one’s soul, it may be helpful to cover what a soul is. You may agree or disagree with the view presented here, but this will again give you opportunity to journal and own your belief about it. I have recently read and heard other people define the soul differently, but I still hold with what I believe to be divine inspiration and insight. Take issue with it if you will, but as I wrote in the first chapter, own what you believe. In Christianity there is a great deal of concern over “saving souls,” but there is not much attention paid to the nature of the soul. In fact, even in the conversations I hear in the media today in New Age and Pagan spirituality, I hear very little description of what a soul is. I’ve wondered about it myself for a long time, and I’ve finally come to a definitive concept that works for me.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Before reading my understanding of the soul, why not write your own thoughts and your own belief about it in your journal? Where did you soul originate? When did your soul begin to exist? What does your soul have to do with your physical body? What does your soul have to do with who you are at this very moment? How does your soul interact with your daily decisions?

Let’s remember back to the discussion in Chapter One about who/what God is. God, the creative power, is the Source of all that is. That incredible, ultimate potential is naturally manifest in many, many ways, which are infinite images of God. Genesis, the first book in the Bible, describes humans as being created in God’s image. I mentioned earlier that this image of God in which we are created is actually the spiritual DNA of God. You can ignore it or you can acknowledge it and attune your spiritual DNA to the divine to nourish your soul. All the physical manifestation in your life is manifest by the condition of your soul. Your physical body is a manifestation of the condition of your soul. Your soul is a manifestation of the divine in creation. Your soul also has all the baggage it has collected that muddies up the pure manifestation of the divine. In other words, the bugs on your windshield are also imprinted on your soul in a spiritual sense. Hindus and Buddhists call this karma. It’s like a dirty and scratched lens of glass over a light. Your soul is the image on the lens along with all the dirt and scratches, as well. Your mission on the journey of an anxious disciple, should you choose to accept it, is to attune more purely to the Light and thus clean off the scratches and dirt so that your soul will become a pure manifestation of the Light. Then, what is manifest in your life would resemble the Light as closely as creation can possibly resemble it. That’s what your soul is all about; purely manifesting you through your divine connection.

The problem is, we’re not accustomed to being focused on our souls, and we’re certainly not accustomed to all this talk about manifesting the divine. After all, who do we think we are, Jesus? The Buddha? Well, as a matter of fact, we’re created to be as much like them as is humanly possible. Why else would Jesus have told people to be perfect, just as their Father in heaven is perfect (Matt 5:48)? Actually, we tend to be more focused on what goes on around us, our circumstances, than on the condition of our souls. To use another illustration, we might turn to the lessons of the garden.

One of my hobbies is organic gardening. As a beginning gardener I used whatever seemed like a good idea, or what was well-advertised to fertilize and kill pests. I experienced mediocre results at best. Over the years I read, watched gardening shows on TV, experimented, and learned from a couple of high school biology teachers. Incidentally, Howard Garett at www.dirtdoctor.com has some great info. I discovered the practice of organic gardening, and consequently found many spiritual parallels between organic gardening and spiritual growth.

Organic gardening begins with the soil. Soil is fundamental to the entire practice. If there is a problem with fruits or vegetables, the gardener treats the soil. If there is a problem with the leaves, the gardener treats the soil. If there is a problem with bugs, the gardener treats the soil. The whole premise is that if the soil is healthy, then the whole garden will be in balance, plants will be healthy, and pests won’t be a problem.

Spiritual health operates on a similar premise, except instead of conditioning healthy soil a person conditions a healthy soul. One might call it the “soil of the soul.” Organic gardening is appropriate for comparison because in cultivating one’s soul, a person will discover that only natural and organic practices will yield spiritual growth. In Chapter Two, we covered our source of spiritual health, meaning God, the creative power. I used the analogy of spiritual fast food as opposed to deriving one’s spiritual health from the True Source. That was in the section of this study about God, and now we are looking specifically at the self, so I will change the analogy from fast food to something more appropriate for gardening: fertilizer.

In the days before I went organic, I used chemically produced fertilizer. What I did not realize was that this kind of fertilizer actually kills the soil and while it produces immediate, short term, satisfactory results, over the long term it makes a gardener’s work much more difficult. Chemical fertilizer is initially cheaper, and appears to make plants healthy.  But if the short term benefit kills the soil, then the long term effect is destructive.  Chemical fertilizer was initially made following World War II from chemical weapons agents that were left over from the war. Ammonium nitrate, when processed correctly, becomes nitrogen in fertilizer and makes the grass look really green. However, the gardener has unwittingly just waged chemical warfare on the microscopic organisms, earthworms, and beneficial insects within the soil. Destructive insects move in when the poison wears off, diseases and fungi begin to develop, and the unhealthy soil no longer has any means of fighting them off or keeping them in balance.

Now, consider that a person makes short term decisions to achieve good results in his or her life.  If these decisions are exclusively to achieve the results, then your needs may or may not be met through making the decisions. If you make a choice to pursue activity that puts money in the bank, but you damage relationships in the process, then you may have met your need for power and control, but you’ve sacrificed belonging and love. You may sacrifice freedom by meeting someone else’s expectations and in the short term receive their praise and appreciation, however long term you also lose your sense of power and control. Making choices that bring about the appearance of having your needs met only short-circuits the process. Throwing insincere, ill-conceived choices into your soul to derive superficial benefit and having to live through the results is like throwing chemical fertilizer onto soil. Trying to meet your needs in unhealthy ways eventually produces a barren soul that can no longer produce quality relationships and meet one’s needs. In other words, attuning your soul to the chaos of life creates an unhealthy soul. Attuning your soul to the divine cultivates a rich and fertile soul that can manifest a beautiful garden/life.

Just like tilling cultivates the soil of a garden and adding compost fertilizes the soil, meeting one’s needs in healthy ways cultivates and fertilizes the soul organically. There is one place in the New Testament where Jesus talks about cultivating the soul:

A farmer planted seed. As he scattered the seed, some of it fell on the road and birds ate it. Some fell in the gravel; it sprouted quickly but didn’t put down roots, so when the sun came up it withered just as quickly. Some fell in the weeds; as it came up, it was strangled among the weeds and nothing came of it. Some fell on good earth and came up with a flourish, producing a harvest exceeding his wildest dreams. (Mark 4:3-8, The Message)

If we look at the soil in this parable as representing the soul, then we can see that it is within a fertile soul that seeds of growth can be sown. Seeds of growth come from doing things that meet our needs in healthy ways. While writing this book I’ve been asked how one can still have something to live for if all of one’s needs have been met. That question has had a profound impact on me and my perception of what it means to meet one’s needs. It goes part and parcel with this concept of cultivating the soul. In a garden, the soil is cultivated regularly because if it is not, it becomes packed and hardened, and as this parable reminds us, seeds of growth cannot grow in such soil. Regularly cultivating the soul means meeting one’s needs on a regular basis, which requires connection with the divine as well as others.

Contemplating this concept of whether a person’s needs can be met and give a person nothing to live for leads me to wonder if that assumes a person’s needs can be met once and for all. I do not think that’s possible, because I work at meeting my needs by manifesting the divine, which in turn leads me to fulfillment by resonating with my quality world. If I do something that resonates with something in my quality world, then that activity becomes part of my quality world. Another way of looking at your quality world is to consider it to be the array of manifestations created by the condition of your soul through which you have managed to meet your needs. Memories do not meet one’s needs, but they are reflections of that array. Think about that lens we talked about. Imagine the Light of the Source (God) manifesting through the lens (your soul) with all its blemishes as well as the true nature of your soul. That Light shines through your soul and manifests into the world, much as light shining through a lens onto a wall or a theatrical stage. The array that is cast by that Light is your life around you as manifest by all your choices, which are imprinted on your soul. If you are not satisfied with your quality world, you have to change what you are manifesting, which means you have to cultivate a healthier soul. We don’t simply decide to start manifesting a different quality of life. If you could do that, you wouldn’t be reading this book. What truly meets our needs is actively expressing, or manifesting the divine, which means that the process is dynamic and active; not stationary or having the potential to become permanent. Rather than considering that a person can have finally met all of one’s needs, we might consider instead that a person can be in the process of continuing to meet one’s needs with constant effectiveness. It is like the line in the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Imagine that every day you do things that meet your needs, but that the following day you will have to behave in ways that will again meet your needs. Every day you do the disciplines of your discipleship that attune you to God and empower you to manifest the divine in your life. This kind of discipleship is a lifelong process of becoming enlightened, free, and Christ-like.

On the converse, if you have met all of your needs and you aren’t yet dead, you will still have to behave in some manner; you’ll have to do something in the next few moments, hours, days, weeks, etc. You will have to put this book down and eventually do something. Your behaviors will either meet your needs or betray them, but you cannot be alive without functioning in some manner. Even if you just determine that you will lie in bed for the rest of your life because you do not want to behave in any kind of destructive way, you have ironically chosen a behavior that does not meet your needs in a healthy way. How can you manifest the divine simply by lying in bed? Therefore, what you might consider is that even if you’re meeting your needs effectively now, there may well be ways to meet your needs even more effectively tomorrow. Plus, since you’ll have to go places, meet people, and do things, you’ll be making choices and you’ll be choosing whether to meet your needs in healthy or unhealthy ways in those situations. You will also be adding images into your quality world, healthy or unhealthy. If I am meeting my needs effectively now, then I am at peace, but my needs continue and so do I. If you remember the concept of the capability meter in the preceding chapter, you might consider that there is always room to raise one’s “needs meeting capability” and therefore meet one’s needs even more effectively. If you are not yet fully Christ-like today, i.e., fully manifesting God’s power, you might assume there is more attunement to do. Can you imagine saying, “Okay, I am now completely satisfied with my life and my connection to God forever?” Of course not. Tomorrow brings new opportunities for us all. If you pray the Lord’s Prayer, you pray, “give us this day our daily bread,” not “give me today all the bread I’ll need for the rest of my life.”

So the question might well arise as to whether this is scriptural, or even spiritual to be in pursuit of ways to meet one’s needs. I sometimes hear the argument that all of this sounds selfish, or even narcissistic. Well, you can’t meet your needs all by yourself. I believe that meeting one’s needs is what the journey of discipleship is all about. The third section of this study is about how we relate to others, and to be able to relate to others in healthy ways means we have to be in a process of becoming clearer on who we are, or one’s sense of self. Meeting your needs in healthy ways means to become clearer on what does and does not meet your needs, which in turn indicates to you the condition of your soul. It is not about being narcissistic and being selfish. In fact, being selfish doesn’t really meet your needs because selfish people find they have little love and belonging in their lives. When Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and that the second was similar to it, to love your neighbor as you love yourself, he was saying that the most important thing we can do is to meet our need for love and belonging spiritually (Mark 12:39-31). You love God by attuning your spirit to God’s spirit, and you love others by manifesting divine grace and love into each relationship of your life. When Jesus went to the wedding feast at Cana and turned the water into wine, he was meeting his need for fun by manifesting God’s creative power (John 2:1-11). He also partied with sinners and did not worry about following rabbinical laws about cleanliness because he was helping others meet their needs. (Matthew 9:10-13). When he pointed out how well-clothed the flowers of the field are, and how well-fed the birds of the air are, and that since people mean so much more to God that they will be taken care of and to not worry about tomorrow, he was saying that as we attune to God’s spirit we will manifest what we need and thus experience freedom (Matt 6:25-33). When he said that a person cannot be his disciple unless they take up their own cross and follow him, he was saying that each disciple must be responsible for his or her own journey and has power and control over their choices they make in their process (Luke 14:27). This, by the way, is what it means to have dominion over the earth. Discipleship is all about meeting one’s needs.

We need to know that even when things appear to be going well, we have all the capability we need to continue to meet our needs more effectively. You nourish your soul by learning how your functioning is actually not meeting your needs and so you seek new ways to attune to the divine. You nourish your soul by manifesting what meets your needs and learning to do it more effectively. You nourish your soul by learning what is in your quality world that resonates with your connection with God, adding new and healthy images into your quality world, and cultivating relationships that resonate with your soul. You also nourish your soul by discovering what places resonate with your quality world and finding the time to spend in them. You can and should meet your needs, but you will never meet them completely or finally. Nourishing your soul is all about cleaning off that lens for the Light to be more purely manifest in your life, which is all about the journey of discipleship, which is all about meeting your needs, which is all about clarity of self.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Let me encourage you, then, to go back to your list of things you do to meet your needs. Consider what your reflections say about your quality world. Take steps to help clarify the ways you can cultivate a more healthy soul. You can do this by noting new places where you can spend time to be more spiritually grounded. Form new relationships with people who help you meet your need for love and belonging on a healthy level. Don’t take on more than your sense of power and control will let you accomplish. Find fun things to do, either alone or with people you love, that also feed your spirit. Journal about what those are and then start doing them. Let me encourage you to consider what you want to add into your quality world out of conscious choice, and what things you can do that will resonate with what you would add. You might then spend time in meditation to attune yourself to God’s spirit and seek to manifest those conscious choices in your life in accordance with divine will. Finally, I want to encourage you to spend considerable reflection on who you are, what makes you tick, what meets your needs and what does not, and what your values/dreams/goals are. Then be more you.

8: Attachments and the Rise of Anxiousness

The principle of non-attachment is about as difficult to explain as it is to actually practice it. Most of us have grown up and learned to function in systems of attachment. Learning to practice non-attachment runs counter to what people find normal. In trying to get our minds around this concept, it might be more effective to process attachment and what it looks like.

To many people, being attached is the same as being in relationship, as in being married, engaged, or deeply committed in a relationship. Attachment is generally agreed by most people to be a healthy thing. We often hear people say that they are attached to a thing that has sentimental value. Some people practice attachment to the degree that they would lose their sense of who they are if they were to lose all of their possessions.

Even after seven years, the United States is still greatly affected by the aftermath of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. More recently, nearly all of Galveston Island was erased by hurricane Ike in 2008 and the Northeastern Seaboard was severely impacted by “Superstorm” Sandy. In each of these storms, thousands and thousands of people lost everything they had in a matter of hours, and no matter how much they rebuild they will never have back the things they used to have. I have been witness to people levying moral judgments about loving material things and that’s not where I’m going with this. No judgments, no black & white issues here. It is about something higher than whether it is right or wrong to love things. In fact, that’s part of human development. Finding security in the things we have is similar to a baby finding security in a blanket and being held in a parent’s arms. We all need to feel grounded in ways that help us have a sense of who we are. However, if we lose everything, can we still feel grounded? Can we still have a sense of security? Would we still have a sense of self?

Certainly if you were to lose all your possessions, you would not cease to exist. Your heart would still beat and you would still be alive. Would you still feel alive, though? Would you be so devastated that you would just feel numb, as if you were dead? Two chapters back you found pictures and/or objects that are part of your quality world. When you lose something from your quality world, you lose one of the means by which you meet your needs. That’s why it feels so bad. In the next session we’ll cover loss more in-depth, so for now let’s just understand that loss creates a vacuum, which comes from having lost a means of meeting your needs, however it is not a loss of your complete identity.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

In your journal, make a list of the people to whom you feel attached. This will probably be very close to a list of people who belong in your quality world regarding your need for love and belonging. Attachment, though, isn’t always about love and positive energy. If there is a person you vehemently hate, regard as an enemy, or intentionally avoid at all costs, you are attached to that person, as well. Include in this list any person who triggers emotional feelings of any kind, regardless of whether they are positive or negative. Next, make a list of objects with the same criteria, then places, and finally events. Your list may have gotten rather big, but that’s okay. Regarding the events, do your best to include negative events, even from your past, and even those that will never occur again. For instance, a house fire fifteen years ago that still triggers significant emotion is an even to which you are still attached. Having done this journal work, we will continue on.

What about relationships? That is where things become more difficult, because as I continue to bring to light in this book, we are created to be in relationship with the Creative Power that gives us life, as well as with other people. We can’t be in isolation and do what we’re here to do. The trick is when we place other people in the role of the creative power as our source and supply. Is it possible to be in relationship with others without clinging to them? If you are non-attached, would it still feel like relationship? To most of us, relationship is all about being attached, and to think of not being attached would be like not being in relationship. Perhaps it will be easier for you to think of attachment as clinging, and non-attachment as not clinging. This is different from being detached. You can still be in relationship while also being non-attached. But, you see, that’s the whole point of differentiation, as we are exploring in this section of the book. It is possible and even part of the required path of a disciple to become very clear on who you are and to be in relationship with others yet still not cling to those relationships.

Let’s go back to something we covered in Chapter Two. We covered that God is our true source and that we can only find what we seek through connection with God. Clinging to others takes away from connection with God. Being attached to another creation to the extent of clinging to them makes a soul dissonant to the Creator. It diffuses the connection we would have with God.

This brings up the issue of romantic relationship, where both people seem to want to be attached to the other. If I am attached to another person to the extent of clinging to them, then I have the perspective of having no choice about being in the relationship. I would feel that I could not survive without the relationship. However, if I am in the relationship because I choose to be, replacing attachment with choice, then I am free, and one cannot be free and cling at the same time.

Being connected to the True Vine as our only source means not clinging to other people and having healthy boundaries that keep others from clinging to us. All my life I’ve heard and understood that the phrase, “I don’t need you,” was something said in anger at the end of a relationship, usually meant to spite and be hateful. I understand now, though, that when spoken in love it is one of the most unconditionally loving things one can say. In fact, the best way of saying it might be, “I don’t need you, but I need what I experience with only you.” To need a person is to place that person in a role that only God can fill. To not need someone is to release them, and to let them be free to remain in the relationship simply out of choice. Rather than one person needing the other and making the relationship an obligation to fill, one is free to love as a gift. It means to replace clinging to someone with choosing to be with them. It means that neither controls the other. This is the height of the relationship, or connection, with God. You might feel that attachment is the same as connection, but consider the difference between an electrical plug and two electrically charged pieces of metal. The plug has to be attached to an outlet to be connected. The two pieces of metal need only to be close enough to each other for a spark, electrical current, to cross over. The two pieces of metal do not have to be attached for them to be connected and for energy to flow. The “choice” has already been made because of the nature of the divine connection inborn in our existence. We must then make a conscious choice to deepen and cultivate that connection by attuning to divine spirit, and thus be purer manifestations of the divine, or God’s presence in this world. This conscious choice becomes the ultimate expression of love.

We can be attached in all sorts of ways. We can be attached to physical objects. We can be attached to experiences in the past. We can be attached to the pain and shame of those experiences. Any of those attachments keep us from full relationship with God, and they also keep us from fully knowing and being ourselves as expressions of God. The way of the witness gives us witness to our experiences without being attached to them. A great many negative things happen to me in one day and if I am attached to those experiences then they define me to the extent that I then believe I am having a terrible day. On the other hand, I can be capable of being non-attached and the witness acknowledges each negative circumstance without my letting it define my experience of the divine. Then I have the quality of day I choose to have while still making choices that have to be made in reality. Ram Dass says that anything to which you cling that is caught in space and time will result in suffering. That is because if you are attached to it, you are placing it in the role of God. Jesus taught to not lay up one’s treasures where moth and dust corrupt, which is the same as being attached to something caught in space and time.

We cannot ever get rid of our experiences. All the things we have done in our lives are experiences, including joys, grief, and sin (dissonance with God). We cannot ever get rid of the experiences that have kept us in dissonant relationship with God. When we grasp the concept of divine forgiveness, the “sinfulness” is gone, but the experiences are still part of who we are, for it is our experiences that have created us, formed us into who and where we are now. Remember that the sense of forgiveness is already surrounding you. You just have to realize it. Our experiences, without the shame, guilt, and remorse, are blessings in gaining greater understanding of ourselves. Accepting that we are the sum total of our experiences without bearing guilt and shame for them is part of meeting our needs to nourish the soul and become more differentiated. We are capable of not clinging to those experiences. Your “needs meeting capability” determines whether you perceive those experiences as either feeding you, or as things that you can release and meet your needs through your connection with the divine.

Differentiation is an unfamiliar word to most of us. Its synonyms are separation, demarcation, delineation, discrimination, segregation, and isolation. If these do not sound negative enough, my thesaurus tells me that its antonym is unity. All of this sounds terrible, and a person could understandably wonder why in the world they would want to be differentiated. Several of these words might make us feel that differentiation is against all the work of the civil rights movement and social justice work that seeks unity among all people. The paradox, however, is that the more differentiated a person is, the more effective one can be at being attuned to God and in relationship with others. The more differentiated you are, the more you can be connected with others in healthy ways.

To be a differentiated person doesn’t mean becoming a loner and discriminating against other people. It doesn’t mean that a differentiated person pushes other people away. However, those synonyms can be helpful in understanding the work we need to do. It is what we explored earlier about being pruned. A differentiated person does learn to separate what is helpful from what is not helpful. We delineate what is part of who we are from what is not. We isolate what we are created to do from what we are not. We segregate our values from the myriad of values espoused by others. We use personal discrimination in judging what possibilities fit within the goals, dreams, and values that we hold. In separating, segregating, etc., we find a process of letting go, thus decreasing attachment to things and people in our lives. Prune, prune, prune. Snip away what is not you. When Michelangelo was asked how he managed to carve such beautiful statues, he replied that he simply chipped away what was not the statue. These words can appear negative at first, but they can also carry very positive meaning when it comes to defining one’s self.

Work regarding “self” has been the subject of major marketing in self-help literature, videos, audio cassettes, motivational seminars, and daytime television talk shows for the past several years. It has become a hot topic in churches, and it has been a huge subject in New Age spirituality movements and Eastern spiritual traditions. There is a widespread ethic in our culture that to work on one’s self for personal growth is selfish. To put it bluntly in terms of some circles in Christianity, working on one’s self is even considered sinful, putting one’s person before God. We have already explored, though, the ways we can nourish the soul by meeting our needs. That is work on the self, and it is part of the process of becoming more differentiated.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was a very popular book in the 1970s. It is about a seagull that outgrows his place in his flock and begins a journey along a path of transformation. He lets go his attachment to the flock by no longer being concerned with what they think of him, and no longer feeling a need to change them. He becomes primarily concerned with his own journey, and then through his personal growth he is ultimately able to lead others who want to grow on their journeys. He could not have become such a teacher and mentor (yes, we’re talking about a seagull here) if he had not been primarily concerned with becoming more differentiated. He learns to soar, to fly at his own speed, break his own barriers, and to press beyond what he had ever thought himself capable of doing. He only succeeds in doing that by letting go attachments to his old way of life in order to pursue what makes his heart sing.

Nearly everyone becomes frustrated at the beginning of a spiritual journey. We have our eyes opened to new possibilities, yet no matter where we go, there we are. We can’t get out of our own way. We want to grow toward these new possibilities, and yet we are still the same people we were before we began this conscious process. This goes back to Paul’s frustration that we explored earlier where we try to do the new thing we want to do, but find we keep doing our old behaviors. We have old habits, we have all the effective and ineffective ways that we have used to meet our needs, and we have all the inner-dialogue (or self-talk) that we have carried around for a lifetime. Those things won’t change overnight and they will never change if we continue to cling to them. It is as if we are chained to a concrete foundation and are striving to fly. We can’t fly until we become free of the chains. That, then, is the hard part, because all our lives we have tried to become free from something by pushing it away. Gurdjieff once said that we can never become free until we first realize that we are in prison. We have to stop trying to find freedom by attuning to the world around us, realize that we are prisoners of our attachments, and attune instead to the divine.

The irony about attachments is that the more we try to push them away, the more we are attached to them. Then we begin expending tremendous amounts of energy trying to become free of something, all the while never realizing that we are giving it the very energy that binds it to us. Rather than pushing our attachments away, it is more of a process of letting go. Releasing something is very different from pushing it away. Certainly we wouldn’t want to imagine pushing away a spouse when we still love them and want to remain married to them. You wouldn’t want to push away anyone who is in your quality world. However, gaining the ability to no longer cling to that person, and she or he no longer clings to you, and then the two of you remain together because you choose to do so is the ultimate example of living in non-attachment. There is trust that the relationship is there, and that trust is all about each person nourishing his or her soul through the relationship. Clinging to another person is clinging to another creation in place of the Creator. However, to cling to the flow of divine love between you as it manifests through your attunement to the divine is to cling to something eternal.

Look at your journal list of people to whom you feel attached. Think of one person on that list that you love very deeply. You may feel very attached to that person. Imagine what it would be like to mentally, emotionally, and spiritually let that person go. Just such an imaginary thing might cause a twinge or even spike of anxiousness in you. It might raise all kinds of feelings of loss. It might be very scary to even consider it. If that is so, ask yourself where they would go if you were to release them yet still love them. If you were to continue to pour into the relationship the divine love that flows through you because of your attunement to God, wouldn’t this other person genuinely continue to choose to stay in the relationship? It becomes the ultimate expression of trust.

Rather than having feelings of attachment for all the significant people and places in our lives, we can feed our needs for freedom, control, fun as well as belonging by learning to just “be.” In the first portion of this study, we looked at God, the creative power, as being “I Am.” We can grow toward being able to say the same of ourselves, we who are created in the image of the “I Am.” In learning who and what we are, we can simply say, “I am.” As we work on our relationships, we can say, “I am … with you.” It would hold us back to say that we exist because of someone else, or that we would cease to exist if we lost a relationship with someone else, or that we would lose identity if we lost one or more possessions or relationships. More profoundly, we can hardly even fathom releasing the attachment we have for the shame, nostalgia, and mandates we tie to memories of our past. We are … period. We are nourished and fed because of relationship, but not attachment. Attachment actually works against relationship because it develops within us a sense of being externally controlled. When we feel externally controlled, we lose the sense of capability in meeting our needs. Yet the more we can be non-attached in the midst of all our relationships, then the more we grow toward differentiation. The more you can be non-attached amid the things, places, and significant relationships in your life, then the more you learn to derive your identity from what goes on in your personal process. You learn to be simultaneously non-attached and yet in full connection. That’s differentiation.

This is the process of developing boundaries, which help us become more differentiated. A person with no boundaries develops significant codependency with little sense of self and finds that they are sapped of energy. When we lack well-defined boundaries, we find that we can’t say no when asked to do things. We end up being in charge of this and that, serving in too many different capacities, catering to our children’s every whim, or letting other people run our lives. If we find ourselves saying that we would love to have a more active prayer devotional life, or would like to actually have time to meditate, but just do not have the time, then it may be because we lack sufficient boundaries to make this happen.

Boundaries are not the same as barriers. Barriers are walls, things that separate and cut us off from people, which works against relationship and actually deprives us of our needs. Think of a boundary as being like a window screen but a barrier is like a wall of concrete. Boundaries are what separate and delineate us from others, but still allow us to be in relationship with others. A person who has always lived without boundaries might feel that it is harsh to tell others “no,” or that it is arrogant to decide what is and is not acceptable in a relationship. Imagine, though, if a painter were to assemble a beautiful collection of colors and had a vision of a landscape painting that would bring a country scene to life, yet this painter mixed all the colors together and spread them all over the canvas. The shapes of the trees, rocks, hills, blades of grass, clouds and birds would not exist because they were not expressed in a defined way. There would be no color because the colors had not maintained their distinctions, and so it would just be a mass of gray/brown. It would be a mess just like people without boundaries are a mess. The creative power is being expressed through each of us in unique and specific ways, and for us to be refined expressions of God in this world, we must allow our boundaries to be in place. We honor a relationship with another person by expecting that person to be all that they are created to be, instead of allowing ourselves to be that person’s source of spiritual food. We honor a relationship with another person by adhering to our boundaries, or definition, and not allowing ourselves to blur into that person. Establishing and maintaining boundaries are the means of creating a beautiful and colorful system of relationships. To do that, we must learn where and how our boundaries should be in place. In marriages and other significant relationships, we will find that the relationship is continually deepened by developing common boundaries and a combined definition of “who we are together.”

In the last portion of this study, we will explore many ways in which this principal of non-attachment and differentiation plays out in our relationships with others. For now, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, you might feel a deep desire to fly, and so you might be completely focused on the fact that you’re stuck. Take an opportunity toward freedom by releasing what belongs to others.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Refer back to your lists you made at the beginning of this chapter. Pick one item/person from any one list that you will begin to release. You might pick whatever your feel causes you the most strife, however as we learned previously, no one causes you strife. Your thoughts about that person, event, place, or thing are what cause you strife. Journal about releasing that item, not pushing it away, but just releasing it/him/her. Consider your worst enemy, to whom you would therefore be attached because of the nature of the relationship, is standing next to you at a bus stop. What kinds of feelings does that stir in you? Directing your attention elsewhere, imagine that they are instead a rock, a tree, or a babbling brook. They can be there but they don’t affect you because you release the attachment. Do the same with whatever you chose from your lists. Instead of seeing it as you’ve always seen it, see it as something else that has no attachment to you. With people you love, it is a little different. See them as a beautiful being of light hovering next to you and you regard them with awe and wonder, loving every moment you are in their presence. They can come and go as they please but when they are near you feel joy. Practice the way of the witness with each item/person on your lists. With part of your list, it is like you take your pruners and snip, letting it fall away. With other parts of your list, relationships for example, you snip with your pruners but place the shoot in water and nurture it to grow roots of its own. Two separate branches that will be attached to the same vine.

9: Pain, Loss, and Our Struggle to Be Saved

When a person experiences loss, it hurts. A lot. Now, while it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out, the sister question to it is much more perplexing. Why does loss hurt? We understand the principle of cause and effect, knowing that if a person cuts a finger, it is going to cause pain. Cells and nerve endings have been separated and the nervous system sends a crisis message to the brain. However, the cause and effect process is not so tangible in the case of emotional loss.  Anyone who has lost a close loved one might be asked why they are grieving, to which they easily reply that it is because of the loss. There are deeper questions around why that loss hurts. Why do we grieve? What do we do to get over it, or do we really get over it? What is emotional pain all about? Why do people get involved so quickly in a “replacement relationship?”

To begin exploring these questions, let’s first go back to the discussion in chapter six, when we explored the concept of one’s quality world. When you compile the pictures of people and places where you feel safe, have fun, experience love and belonging, feel free, and feel a sense of achievement, you are looking at pictures in your quality world. These are the relationships through which your needs are met and when you experience a loss of any of these relationships, you have lost a part of your quality world. This is the fundamental reason why it hurts. Your needs are met through these relationships, or at least you perceive that they are. The degree to which your soul is nourished by God is dependent on the extent that you are differentiated in these relationships. Also, the degree of your perception that a relationship, or even another person, nourishes you is directly connected to the extent that you cling to these relationships. If you lose a relationship through which your needs are met, yet you have developed a high sense of differentiation, then while you feel pain and loss, you are not incapacitated or helpless because of the loss. You are attuned to the divine as your source, not the relationship, and you are aware that you have lost a beautiful means of resonating with a very special person. However, if you lose a relationship in which you are deeply enmeshed, from which you derive a sense of identity, one that you have placed in the role of source, then the pain and loss you will feel will be nearly catastrophic. The pain one feels when experiencing loss is created by the hole in the soul that is left when one loses a significant piece of one’s quality world. That is true regardless of whether we have a high capacity of living in non-attachment or we cling to others as if they are God. Your quality world is like an emotional network similar to your nervous system and when part of that network is cut away, it sends a distress signal to your mind. This is why differentiation is so important to being spiritually healthy. You can practice the way of the witness and work through your pain without it completely incapacitating you.

It is like a spiritual hunger pang. When we are connected to the divine, the Source, God, the creative power, then we are being spiritually fed. When we have developed relationships through which we experience further nourishment from the divine, because our needs are being met and our souls sing because of how we resonate with those people, then we have added new pictures into our quality worlds. Dr. William Glasser says correctly that it is very easy to add a relationship into your quality world, but extremely difficult to remove it. You can do so through a process of conscious choice, but having it removed because of a loss such as death, divorce, or some other permanent and immediate disconnection is very painful. It also leaves something like a “ghost” of that quality world image, which we will cover later in this chapter.

When we feel lonely, we recall the “picture” of the person who met our need for love and belonging. But, even though the “picture” is in our quality world, the person is no longer available to meet our needs.

Now, before you, the reader, suspect that I live in this fantasy world where I think that everyone has only healthy, differentiated relationships in their quality worlds, let me address the reality of this point. Most of us don’t. Also, most people do not have nearly as many quality world relationships as they could have. Consider the extreme loss and subsequent pain of a person who perceives that all needs are met through relationship with only one person, considers that person to be their only source of spiritual and emotional sustenance, and then loses that person either through death or rejection. Such tragic loss leaves that individual with absolutely no quality world. If this loss has been through rejection, then it is no wonder that he or she might become a stalker, trying anything possible to reclaim the quality world that has been lost. Such a person might end up in a mental institution, or at best be on psychoactive medications while going through years of therapy. This person could well claim that God is dead and has abandoned him or her because to them this person that has been lost was God. This is why it is so critical for a disciple on the journey to have a clear, personal understanding of who/what God is, and how to be in deepening connection with God as source, nourishment, and sustaining presence. This is why it is so critically important to realize that the creative power is that from which we draw spiritual and emotional nourishment, not other creations or even worse, creations of the created. If losing a part of your quality world means that you lose connection with God, then consider this: maybe you never had real attunement to God. Maybe. Instead, you perceived that part of your quality world to be God, or in other words, you perceived that another creation, or a creation of the creation was the creative power, and that is backward. Maybe you had/have belief in a concept of God, someone else’s belief in God, but you never intentionally cultivated that connection with the Source. We have a need to feel “saved,” meaning that we do not feel alone, abandoned, isolated, or disconnected. The difference is whether you seek that from something or someone outside yourself, or you seek it in your attunement to God.

Most of us aren’t described by either of these extremes, neither having only healthy, differentiated relationships, or being completely enmeshed with only one quality world image. Most of us have a variety of quality world images and have some degree of connection with the creative power with some degree of enmeshment as well as differentiation with our quality world images. Such is life, and such is the terrain for the journey of an anxious disciple. We are disciples because we are learning the discipline of true connection with the creative power. We are anxious because we haven’t yet learned all the ways of the connection, and so we still let our quality world images have too much control over whether our needs are being met. Also, we spike anxiety with each positive change we make because our quality worlds are temporarily out of balance. Each step toward greater differentiation spikes anxiety. Most people experiencing loss aren’t completely devastated long term; however we feel deep pain that takes months if not years to heal.

It is in this liminal period of grief in which we are the most vulnerable. If you burn yourself and experience pain, you grab a piece of ice or something that will make the pain subside as much as possible. If you cut yourself, you might apply a local anesthetic to make it stop hurting. If you have a headache, you might take pain reliever so you can function. The same is true for emotional and spiritual pain. When we experience it, the natural response is to try to do something to make the pain go away. Often, the human response is to look to creations of the creation to relieve the pain, such as drugs, alcohol, food, sleep, or any of a number of things to which we might turn as a quick fix, i.e., spiritual fast food. We can choose a different response, however, if we allow the witness within to observe that we are experiencing pain and loss, acknowledge that it is real, and attune to the divine to fill the loss and ease the pain. The divine then works with us through other relationships to heal the void of the loss. This is why so many people praise a church family as seeing them through their darkest days.

Going back to the analogy of the car, let’s remember that the rear wheels of the car are physiology and feeling. You can steer with the two front wheels of doing and thinking, but you have to change your doing and thinking to change your physiology and feeling. If your body is wracked with pain because you are grieving, you can’t just simply decide to not grieve. You will grieve either consciously or subconsciously and stuffing the grief will cause other problems. People who stuff their grief may explode with angry outbursts for seemingly no reason. They may also develop heart problems or other physical illnesses with little to no history of such conditions. While you can choose to think and do things that will ease your grief, we are also not robots who can simply choose to do things that eliminate any grief at all. Part of the human journey is that when a loved one dies, we grieve. We hurt. It is a natural process and one that gives you opportunity to honor the ways in which that person may have profoundly affected your life. While you are not a robot, you are also not subject to the things that happen to you in your life. We cannot change the things that happen to us, but we can always choose our responses to what happens to us. When you feel the pain and grief from such a deep loss, you can greatly ease your burden by acknowledging that this one person was not the only part of your quality world. You work to attune more deeply to the divine as much as you are able, and you acknowledge that you will no longer have your needs met through that relationship. You begin to let that relationship go, also realizing that the memory of that relationship may always have something to teach you and bless you. Be careful to not let the pain influence you to no longer have other healthy, loving relationships as an attempt to never feel such pain again. People who give up on being able to meet their needs in life through relationships with other healthy, happy people turn to destructive behaviors like drugs (even those prescribed by a doctor), alcohol, and unloving sex.[vii]  We can choose, but we must choose wisely.

Many people understand that creations of the created aren’t the answer, however they do not realize that other creations aren’t the answer, either, and so they turn to other people as being their emotional/spiritual pain reliever. This is what has happened when someone loses a spouse after decades of marriage and then remarries only weeks after the funeral. After so many years of marriage, everything in a person’s quality world is related to this relationship in some form or another, so the pain from the loss is extremely deep. This, then, leads to a “replacement relationship,” the purpose of which is to fill the void in the quality world, to cover up the “ghost image” in the quality world, and thus make the pain go away.

These two paths for seeking spiritual fast food, or even junk food, come from a person’s struggle to feel saved. This language has become widely used in the Christian tradition to mean whether a person is connected to the divine through the path of Christ. It has become misused as a way of discerning whether a person has performed the physical task of making a confession of faith in Jesus, and begun to focus on the person of Jesus as one’s source of salvation. We touched on this back in chapters one and two. It is not so simple. You do not just say something and bingo, you’re “saved.” None of us want to be isolated, disconnected, alone, hopeless, helpless, or pessimistic, and we weren’t created to be that way. The attraction of trying to meet our needs in expedient ways by using the creations we have created, or by using other humans without being in relationship, leads us down this path that none of us really wants.

So, if a person doesn’t seek to immediately fill the quality world void, but instead chooses to leave it open and experience the pain created by the loss, what then? It almost seems masochistic to say that one would choose pain over expedient relief. What we will find, though, is that nature abhors a vacuum and divine creative power is all about recreating as well as creating. To be “saved” is the divine process of filling this vacuum. The creative power replaces isolation with closeness, disconnection with connection, loneliness with relationship, hopelessness with hopefulness, helplessness with capability, and pessimism with optimism. Then we might well begin to understand that the creative power is at work in our lives through each person’s quality world. The more images a person has in his or her quality world, the more that person can knit together those images that remain after a loss to maintain connection with the divine and others, and continue to meet one’s basic needs. If a person has few quality world images, or even if the loss was the only quality world image for a person, then that person can still make choices, however hard it may feel, to add new quality world images.

Adding new quality world images is not the same as seeking a replacement relationship. The latter is a means of seeking a new person to fill the void left by the person who was lost. Now we come back to the concept of a “ghost image” in the quality world. People have most likely come into your quality world because they’ve earned their way there by developing relationship with you. As they have been part of your quality world, you have solidified their significance in your life through experiences. Those experiences become memories of joy, sorrow, satisfaction, disappointment, and any of a variety of positive and/or negative emotions that are nonetheless meaningful. When you lose that relationship out of your quality world, none of these experiences go away, and you are still blessed with their memory, leaving the ghost image in your quality world. It is a ghost image because after the loss there will be no more new memories to add to this image, this relationship, but all the memories up to the loss are still there. It becomes much like a recorded video that can be played over and over, but you will never add any more to the recording. Over time, some memories may lose their clarity, and this image in your quality world may begin to fade, but it will never completely go away. That is the process of grieving, and it is why the pain subsides over time, because the pain is created by the freshness and clarity of this image. It is your desire to bring this ghost image back into your quality world in its fullness that makes you so vulnerable during your grieving, and why you must be very careful as you add new images into your quality world. How you experience this grief will also tell you whether you expect your needs to be met from without or from within. Remember: as within, so without; not vice versa.

If you immediately put another person into the same role in your quality world, then it is like trying to make this replacement relationship generate new experiences and memories on top of the previous image. It neither honors that previous relationship, nor does it actually help you heal in any way. It short-circuits your grieving process and covers up the ghost image left by the loss. In order to grieve and begin to heal, one must allow the ghost image to remain, replaying the memories that accompany it, while at the same time knitting together the remaining quality images with new ones that come into one’s quality world by their own right. The loss never goes away, but as the image fades the pain is recycled into new energy for experiencing the sustenance of the divine through the other images in one’s quality world. You experience the sustenance of the divine through manifesting your attunement with God into your relationships, loving those who are still with you, and adding new relationships into your quality world. You find through this process that you are indeed saved.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

This one may take some time but is well worth it. Be as objective as you can. Reflect on times of loss in your life. How did  that affect you? Were you completely incapacitated by the experience? How long did your initial pain last? How many other relationships in your quality world helped you through your healing process? Did you seek a replacement relationship? How did that work out? You may still be in relationship with that person and it may be working out very well. What happened to your grief process when you began a new relationship? How has your loss affected or not affected the other relationships in your life? Do you need to forgive either the person you lost, yourself, or someone else who may have caused the loss?

10: Who Is My Neighbor?

Nearly everyone in our society has a neighbor. You would have to live in a very isolated situation, such as having a cabin in the Alaskan tundra, or living in a cave in the middle of a desert to have no neighbors. We drive past them, walk past them, live next door to them, but most of us these days do not take the time to get to know our neighbors. Some of the most intimate friendships I have are with people who do not live anywhere close to me, and yet I consider them to be my neighbors. Your neighbor is not just the person living next door to you, and it is not just a person with whom you feel comfortable. There is a great example of neighbor in the Gospel of Luke in the New Testament:

Just then a religion scholar stood up with a question to test Jesus. “Teacher, what do I need to do to get eternal life?” He answered, “What’s written in God’s Law? How do you interpret it?” He said, “That you love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence -- and that you love your neighbor as well as you do yourself.” “Good answer!” said Jesus. “Do it and you’ll live.” Looking for a loophole, he asked, “And just how would you define “neighbor’?” Jesus answered by telling a story. “There was once a man traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho. On the way he was attacked by robbers. They took his clothes, beat him up, and went off leaving him half-dead. Luckily, a priest was on his way down the same road, but when he saw him he angled across to the other side. Then a Levite religious man showed up; he also avoided the injured man. “A Samaritan traveling the road came on him. When he saw the man’s condition, his heart went out to him. He gave him first aid, disinfecting and bandaging his wounds. Then he lifted him onto his donkey, led him to an inn, and made him comfortable. In the morning he took out two silver coins and gave them to the innkeeper, saying, “Take good care of him. If it costs any more, put it on my bill -- I’ll pay you on my way back.’ “What do you think? Which of the three became a neighbor to the man attacked by robbers?” “The one who treated him kindly,” the religion scholar responded. Jesus said, “Go and do the same.” (10:25-37, The Message)

It was hard in the first century to understand the concept of “neighbor,” and it seems that it is just as hard for us today. We tend to think of a neighbor as being someone who is near geographically, like right next door, but this story helps us get a picture in our minds that a neighbor is anyone who comes near on one’s journey, one’s spiritual journey. The first two who passed by the injured man carried ethical and professional obligations to minister to others, and yet they used their religious tenets of cleanliness as an excuse to ignore him. The third man to pass by, one who was considered to be the lowest of all humans by the first two men, was the one who responded to the injured man’s needs. There are all kinds of lessons in this story about preconceived notions, prejudice, compassion, selflessness, and other moral teachings, however the one lesson that the teller of the story, Jesus, makes prevalent is that this is a story of recognizing who one’s neighbor is.

This concept of neighbor is different from just looking out for those who need your help. In fact, that can skew your vision, and you can find yourself walking down self-destructive paths. If you have a tendency to be a “fixer,” like me, then you would be on the lookout for only those who will be complicit with you and let you fix the things in their lives that they should be fixing. Thus, you would be robbing them of their growth opportunities, and in the context of the aforementioned story, you would be playing the role of the robbers. Yes, you would, because when you moved on, you would be leaving this person helpless at the side of the road, waiting for another person to become their fixer.

Let’s go back to what we have already covered about one’s quality world. We find that one’s needs are met by having images in one’s quality world through which one can manifest one’s attunement with God. Part of this concept of neighbor is about those people you have put into your quality world. Let’s note the other dimension of neighbor, though. Note that the story says that the Samaritan man became a neighbor to the injured man. In other words, we might say that he allowed himself to become part of this injured man’s quality world, and the injured man became part of his. You can do something nice for someone and pat yourself on the back as if you’ve performed the role of the Good Samaritan. However, what happens inside you when you embrace the idea of actually becoming part of that other person’s quality world? Imagine yourself working at your local homeless shelter serving food and you’re doing it because you feel like you’re doing a good thing. You leave feeling good about yourself. What happens if you allow yourself to form a relationship through which that homeless person meets a need of love and belonging? Hmmm? It is not quite so clean and simple at that point, is it?

This neighbor story also comes after an exchange about eternal life. We have already touched on the theology of eternity in the first section of this book; however let’s touch a little bit more. Eternity is not just what exists for you after your soul leaves this world. Eternity existed before you came into this world and it exists right now. Eternity is going on, even though it doesn’t have a past or a future … it just is. Eternity is not what is going to happen, and it is not what has already happened. It is right now. It is right here. It always was and will be right now and it always was and will be right here. It is “is-ness” and it is simply a state of being right here, right now. That state of being right here, right now is the state in which one finds connection with God, the creative power, which is the state in which one loves God with all one’s “passion and prayer and muscle and intelligence.”

It is in this eternal mind in which one finds oneself, one’s concept of self. You are not the sum total of your experiences, though those have shaped who you have become. You are also not all the dreams and goals you have. You are not all the stuff you’ve accumulated. In chapter five we covered the concept of self, so I won’t belabor the point. Let’s build on that here by saying that by knowing who you are, you find the reflection of yourself in those who fill the role of neighbor along your journey. That reflection resonates with your intuitive heart to know who your neighbor is.

Not everyone in this world is a mirror to what you need to learn, but your neighbor always is. The ways that you must make yourself a neighbor to a person mirrors what you need to learn; those ways present themselves to you along your journey.

So let us have a working definition of neighbor. It is a person with whom you become connected, allowing him or her to become a part of your quality world to some extent while you become part of his or her quality world, and through this connection you become aware of the growth you must embrace to continue your spiritual journey. Clearly, most people do not realize they are neighbors, or that they have neighbors, by using this definition. The main trouble is this issue of connection and trust.

It is your relationship with each neighbor in your life that empowers you to process what you need to learn in order to grow. So often, when a person comes to a growth opportunity with another person, they shut off the relationship, go their own way, and rarely if ever see each other again. That is because growth opportunities are often veiled in the form of an argument. Keeping in mind our working definition of a neighbor, you might already feel uncomfortable because you might have trouble with this concept of allowing others to become part of your quality world. It is not such a big deal to think of becoming part of someone else’s quality world, but many of us are very careful who we let in because we have encountered so much emotional pain by letting others get close to us. As we discussed pain and loss, you might be a person who realized that there are more ghost images in your quality world than there are relationships, meaning that you’ve endured a lot of loss, a lot of pain, and you bear the scars. It is difficult to then consider letting more people into your quality world, because past experience has shown you that the simplest way to keep from being hurt is to not add images to your quality world, or to only let new images remain superficial. The neighbors that come to you on your journey simply continue on their own way because you do not let them match step with you and get to know you at an intimate level. You don’t trust. If this describes you or someone you know, which character of the Samaritan story does this match? Are you the injured and robbed man by the side of the road, or have you become one of the two who passed him by? Perhaps regarding how you do relationships, you may even have become like one of the robbers, taking what feels good from other people and then leaving them wounded for someone else to nurture.

Quite often it is our need for control in our lives that leads us to not connect with others. If we misunderstand healthy power/control, then our desire for it may conflict with our need for love and belonging, thus making it difficult for us to connect with others. Past experience may have shown us that connection = pain, and therefore loss of control. People meet their need for control by cutting down the possibilities of risk. In relationship that means either superficial relationship or no relationship at all. We cannot be someone’s neighbor if we only allow ourselves to be in relationship superficially. The reason that I covered several sessions about self before these sessions about others is that we cannot control others, but we can control our responses and choices regarding others. What Jesus said to the Pharisee was to love one’s neighbor as one loves one’s self. All that we covered about the self now informs what we are saying about our relationships with others. Again, as within so without. Having few or no relationships in which we discover a depth of intimacy does not give us control, and it does not keep us from experiencing more emotional pain. We have control by knowing who we are and being in control of our choices. Because we are living humans, we will always be subject to emotional pain. What we have to do is to learn to remain connected in the midst of the pain so that we do not miss the curriculum for the journey. We have to learn to love through the pain instead of walking away from it.

Henri Nouwen once wrote in his book, The Inner Voice of Love:

Love deeply.

Do not hesitate to love and to love deeply. You might be afraid of the pain that deep love can cause. When those you love deeply reject you, leave you or die, your heart will be broken. But that should not hold you back from loving deeply. The pain that comes from deep love makes your love ever more fruitful. It is like a plow that breaks the ground to allow the seed to take root and grow into a strong plant. Every time you experience the pain of rejection, absence or death, you are faced with a choice. You can become bitter and decide not to love again, or you can stand straight in your pain and let the soil on which you stand become richer and more able to give life to new seeds.

The more you have loved and have allowed yourself to suffer because of your love, the more you will be able to let your heart grow wider and deeper. When your love is truly giving and receiving, those whom you love will not leave your heart, even when they depart from you. They will become part of your self and thus gradually build a community within you. Those you have loved deeply become a part of you. As you live, you will have more opportunity to love more people and to include them into your inner community. The wider your inner community becomes, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you. The “community within you” is another way of talking about your quality world.

Those who are alive within you will recognize those who are alive around you. The wider the community of your heart, the wider the community around you. Thus the pain of rejection, absence and death can become fruitful. Yes, as you love deeply, the ground of your heart will be broken more and more, but you will rejoice in the abundance of the fruit it will bear.[viii]

So you see, it is about connection. This is what it means to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” You carry the dedication to remain connected to your inner process, your attunement with the divine, and that is what it means to love yourself. To love your neighbor as you love yourself would then mean that you must remain connected to the inner process of your relationship with that person. Notice here that the focus of the connection is the inner process of the relationship. To love another person doesn’t mean that you have to endure their abuses, unless you are learning something through the connection. It doesn’t mean that you have to stay with that person because without you they feel they wouldn’t survive – refer above to the comment about being a fixer. It is not your responsibility if they choose to cling to you and put you in the place of the divine. Also, you can only maintain this connection to the degree there is trust in the relationship. Violation of trust rapidly erodes the capacity to maintain connection with the other person. To love your neighbor means you have freedom in the connection to be differentiated while at the same time letting your neighbor have the freedom to be differentiated. Your neighbor is your teacher for learning to be more differentiated: non-attached yet fully connected to others.

We spent an entire chapter about attachments and the rise of anxiousness. One of the most difficult life lessons some of us will ever learn is that loving another person is not the same as being attached to them, and so that’s why I write about that issue from different perspectives. If we are attached to other people, then that attachment stunts the growth that is possible from the connection on both ends.  Henri Nouwen’s concept of loving deeply is not possible in a relationship of attachment, because to love deeply and love through pain is to allow others the freedom to hurt us. A relationship of attachment is one in which we try to control the other person, and most often that control is to prevent us from being hurt or feeling out of control ourselves. If we can release that, release the other person, release our attempt to cling to the other person, then we will experience the freedom that is necessary for our process to begin.

I have used the term “process” several times here. Process is different from “data.” When a neighbor seems upset and we begin to talk about why they are upset, we nearly always focus on the data of who said something, or what circumstances have befallen this person, or what this person said to their neighbor. All of that helps us get a sense of what is going on, but process is deeper than the data. Process is about what is going on inside the neighbor. Superficially, people want their issues fixed, but being a neighbor to someone is not about fixing their stuff. This is why fixing someone’s problems for them robs them of their growth. In the parable above of the Good Samaritan, the stranger did not fix all the man’s problems. He did not hunt down the robbers, and he did not give this man everything he had lost. He cared for him, took him to where he could get help, and he gave him loving acceptance. He loved him through his pain so that he could heal, and connected him with someone else who could do the same. Process is not about what is going on; process is about who we are in the midst of what is going on. If you can differentiate between the process and data of your connections with the neighbors in your quality world, then you can learn the lessons of growth that are part of your journey. Those lessons will always involve your attunement with the divine and/or another person’s attunement with the divine, as well as your capacity to let the divine fill the intimacy between you and the other person.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Write as many names as come to you of people whom you consider to be neighbors along your journey. Don’t include a spouse, sibling, or other family member unless they are a more distant relative that came into your life along the way. Why did those people come into your life? What were the circumstances? How long did they stay in your life? Are they still in your life? Are they there because you continue to have something to learn? If you practice non-attachment with any of those neighbors, will they possibly fall away? Do they look to you to be their “fixer?” Journal about each of these people and how you can make choices that will establish clear, loving boundaries, teach you what you need for your own growth, and also help them heal as the Good Samaritan found healing for his neighbor.

11: The Energy of Anxiousness

It seems that a person cannot watch television very long without seeing a commercial for anxiety medication. I’m wondering how we managed to reach the point in our society that anxiety became viewed as something that we must eliminate; something over which we have no control. Perhaps it is because when people feel anxious, we also feel out of control. If we allow our behavior to be anxiety-driven, we know we’re not completely in control, and yet we watch ourselves do things that we wish we weren’t doing. It is almost like being possessed by some sort of spirit. Again, it is like the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans where we are doing the things we do not wish to do. Anxiety also keeps people from functioning at all and they just shut down, do not leave home, and become isolated as if that will keep them from experiencing any more anxiety.

Granted there are emotional disturbances that people experience, such as anxiety attacks, and these require some interaction with a trained professional as well as medication at times. While that’s not the level of anxiety that we’re covering in this chapter, our approach to working with anxiety can have positive effects with all experiences of anxiety. We live in an over-medicated society in which people take pills just to feel “normal,” whatever that is. Apart from the extremes where medication keeps people from hurting others or themselves, perhaps we are seeing a widespread phenomenon of people robbing themselves of opportunity for growth and change. spirit drives us along our individual journeys, and when we come to a standstill, a blockage, a place in the journey where we are simply stuck, the energy of spirit continues to drive us and it is like a dammed up river. That energy has to go somewhere, and if not channeled into a person’s creative process, then it manifests itself in other ways. Most often, that energy becomes manifest as anxiousness. I use the term “anxiousness” instead of “anxiety,” because the first conveys a sense of emotion that one might influence, and the latter carries with it its own baggage of being a medical condition that one cannot control. Anxiety might be perceived as threatening or overwhelming, but anxiousness is energy with potential and opportunity.

We touched on the concept of anxiousness back in the chapter on attachments. To be sure, it is at the root of difficulty in one’s spiritual journey. One cannot be a disciple without eventually becoming an anxious disciple. As we are looking at the ways we interact with others and participate in relationships, we can expand the understanding of anxiousness. In our first look, I wrote that it is our attachment to having control over things and people that gives rise to anxiousness, because things and people in this world pass away. Another way of saying it was to say that clinging to something that is caught in space and time causes anxiousness. That’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, however. Anxiousness develops for a variety of reasons, and anxiousness in itself is not a bad thing. It is not necessarily a good thing, either. It just is. Anxiousness is like fire. A fire in a fireplace, outdoor cooker, or a piston of an engine is very useful. A fire in a forest, or grassland, or in your home (not your fireplace) is very destructive. Anxiousness is like that. Anxiousness arises simultaneously with opportunity for change and growth. Choices you make to grow and change will create more anxiousness in your life, which is why we have to learn to differentiate the growth from the anxiety that is caused by our attachments that are also having to change. Similarly, if you have become stagnant and the universe is conspiring to help you make choices for growth and change, you may be surrounded by anxiousness and not understand why. Unchecked, unchanneled, and unrecognized it spreads wildly and begins to wreak havoc.

The reason that this book contains all the individual work on differentiation ahead of this work on our relationships is that the degree to which anxiousness controls us or we creatively use it is directly dependent on an individual’s degree of attunement to the divine, which is directly dependent on an individual’s degree of differentiation.

The above statement is probably the single most important concept in this entire book. It is also possibly the least understood concept in humanity. Remember that we said many chapters earlier the words of Alfred Adler, “It is not what happens to you, it is what you tell yourself about what happens to you.” In other words, it is not about the anxiousness going on around you, it is what you do with the anxiousness around you. The most important, key issue to learn, remember, and drill into one’s consciousness is that the anxiousness going on around you does not belong to you. It just is. Increased anxiousness around you also does not mean that choices you made for growth and change were bad choices. In fact, if there heightened anxiousness, you have probably made better choices.

That’s why medicating one’s self to reduce one’s sense of anxiousness may rob one of opportunity for growth. You might feel anxious, but the anxiousness doesn’t belong to you. The anxiousness you feel is an indicator that you are somehow attached to a situation, a relationship, a circumstance, a memory, a desired outcome, guilt/shame, fear, or any of a number of things, and that you must either work on letting go or use the energy of the anxiousness to facilitate change in your own functioning. That whole concept is way out of the paradigm park for most of us, so let’s spend a little time working it out.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

This is a quick one. Write down any situations or people where you feel anxious while in the midst of them. Describe the situations. Describe who it is. Maybe you don’t feel anxious with a person in one situation but you do when you’re with them in a different situation. Write what you think that may be all about.

Let’s look into the lives of an imaginary couple named Bob and Emily. Every time Bob has a conversation with Emily, he feels anxious. He’s not sure why, but his conversations with her are filled with this anxious feeling, they are very brief, and they seem to never be completely open. He continues to feel anxious day after day when talking with her, and over a few weeks he realizes that he has no idea what she really thinks or feels about their marriage. In fact, he’s not sure what he thinks or feels about their marriage. All he knows is that he feels like something is unaddressed. His anxiety, as he has come to think of it, is becoming a big concern for him, and it is no longer just when he talks with his wife. He feels anxious any time he makes any kind of decision. This example is so simple that most people reading it already see the solution. If Bob will just open up a real conversation with his wife, tell her his concerns and ask her about hers, and not let the conversation end until they have honestly shared with each other, he won’t feel as anxious. Something less obvious lies in the midst of the simplicity of this example. Bob is taking the anxiousness personally, feeling as if HE is anxious, but the anxiousness belongs to the relationship. Making a change in the behavior in the relationship changes the anxiousness.

A more differentiated Bob would realize that the anxiousness is about his attachment to something, and that his attachment is interfering with his connection to spirit, to the creative power. His attachment is perhaps to a fear of criticism, and so any potential or real conversation with Emily engages his attachment and gives rise to anxiousness. Connection with the divine is about abundance and grace. His fear of criticism creates a limitation around divine grace, and thus blocks his capacity to manifest divine grace in his own life. Believing that conversation with his wife can in any way diminish who he is as a person is a false concept. The degree to which Bob is differentiated is the degree to which Bob has control over the anxiousness. Opening up to her and trusting the spirit within gives him the freedom to extend grace to his wife, and thus allow spirit to fill the relationship.

We, as humans, can have control over the anxiousness that exists around us, and most of us do most of the time. A teenager comes to you very upset over something that someone else said at school, and the tears just flow. The anxiousness bottled up in this young person is intense, and yet you aren’t feeling anxious at all. You aren’t feeling anxious because you haven’t assumed ownership of it, and you aren’t attached to anything related to this situation. You might love this young person, and you might begin to feel anxious as you think of what you need to do, but if you aren’t attached to a need to be a fixer then you probably won’t even feel anxious about that. You are differentiated in this situation. Your connection with the creative power can give you creative power to work with this teenager, and you can use the anxiousness that is being generated as the energy for creative change. Your differentiation and creativity is conveyed to the teenager, and you help this young person see that the anxiousness belongs to the situation, not to them personally, and he or she gets involved in the creative process. What was a distraught teenager becomes a hopeful and capable person because of your spiritual connection with God and your degree of differentiation.

One other analogy that was given to me by my friend, Dr. Emerson Capps, refers back to our image of the “total behavior car.” If you are driving in a strange city and become lost, you can ask someone for directions, use a map or GPS, and thus find your way. Or, you can medicate yourself with alcohol or some sort of drug and, although you will still be lost, you simply won’t care. You will no longer be anxious. You will no longer have any awareness of what is going on with the “wheels” of your total behavior, either.

Does it make sense now how we are limiting our growth, spiritual development, and experience of the Great Spirit, by becoming enmeshed with each other and commiserating over each other’s problems? If we simply medicate out the anxiousness people are feeling, quite often we are eliminating the catalyst for creativity and growth. We might not medicate, but we might shy away from any situation where we feel anxious, and thus achieve the same result. If we are always enmeshed with other people, then we never connect completely with spirit and we cannot become more differentiated. If we are not in a process of becoming more differentiated, then we maintain a static degree of attachment to the creation or creations of the creation, which means we have stopped at a limited connection with the source of all that is: God.

We can believe in God, or a higher power, and be involved in a religious tradition of some sort, but we might not be connected with that higher power. In order to journey as a non-anxious disciple, one must have a personally clear concept of this source, be in a process of continually clearer connection with it, be releasing attachments to the creation and creations of the creation, and be growing increasingly more differentiated. An anxious disciple then has the capability to participate in relationships with others freely, loving unconditionally, trusting, and developing intimacy. An anxious disciple uses the way of the witness to recognize the anxiousness, but not be controlled or defined by it, and thus to not be blocked. An anxious disciple has great power to influence change in this world, one relationship at a time, by having creative control in the midst of the energy of anxiousness.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Refer back to your notes on where, when, and with whom you feel most anxious. Make some notes now on how you can imagine being in those same situations as an anxious disciple to use the anxiousness as energy for positive growth and change.

12: Ripples in the Pond

Imagine a billiard table. The balls have just been set, the rack removed, and one player is about to shoot the breaking shot with great skill. What do you think is about to happen to all those billiard balls? What if each of those balls had a consciousness about it, if they were sentient and thinking objects … would any of them have a choice to do anything other than to scatter? We know the laws of physics, that when objects are struck they react. In this situation, with all these balls being packed together tightly, each ball in that system is going to react with a lot of activity. The cue ball, the one being shot, is only going to initially strike one or two balls. There will be 13-14 other balls that have no choice other than to react and scatter.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Write in your journal the names of your family members. Include anyone with whom you have association at any time during the year. Make note of which family members seem to be labeled as “troublemakers.” Also, circle or make note of any family members that may have been on your previous list of people around whom you feel anxious. Next, make note in some way of any of these family members who seem to generate their own anxiety even without any significant event. If you want, you can do this same exercise with your work environment, softball or bowling team, or church group. Any system of relationships in which you participate regularly is opportunity for you to grow through reflection on the dynamics of that system and your place in it. Finally, make note of any specific type of event that seems to spike anxiety as if it is a cue ball plowing into the midst of that family or group.

Now, imagine a group of people that is so extremely enmeshed into one another that no one has a concept of self apart from the group. Let me help your imagination. Consider this to be a family. Every time a family member has to go somewhere, other than going to work, they all go. When it is time to go to the grocery store, they all go. If one person wants to go see a movie, either they all go or no one goes. They all watch television together as a group, eat as a group, and do everything else as a group with the exception of work and those necessary things that require privacy. The only way that they are in relationship with one another is as a unit, like a single-celled animal. This is enmeshment to the extreme, and it exists almost to this degree not only in family units, but in churches, work environments, civic organizations, and friendship circles. Enmeshment like this is the glue for gangs. It is what causes people in various social strata to stay in their social strata, even without an imposed caste system in the society. It also results in traumatic situations when anxiousness spikes.

Like the billiard table example, an enmeshed system of relationships is emotionally packed, and it only takes one, strong impetus like unemployment, a disaster of some sort, an emotional outburst, or even an independent decision on the part of one member of the system to become more differentiated, to send that system into chaos. Everyone in the system takes the anxiousness personally because if it is being felt, it must be about the group, and if it is about the group, then it must be about each individual member. There is little to no sense of personal, individual identity within the group. Each member of the group derives his or her sense of identity from the group, which means that the group must always remain the same in order for each group member to maintain that sense of identity. There is no “me and you together,” there is only “us.” As this system of relationships is thrown into chaos, the fear of losing identity within the group triggers a reaction to the anxiousness, and every person in the system does whatever it will take to bring the system back into balance and get rid of the anxiousness so that everything will be okay. It is as if the billiard balls, immediately after the break, rolled as quickly as possible right back into the triangle formation they had before the chaos.

Now to the other extreme. Imagine that all the billiard balls have been placed in 15 locations around the table, and the shooter is assigned the task of taking one shot to make all of them react. It is not going to happen, is it? The cue ball can streak across the table at maximum velocity, bounce around as long as it has energy, and it is going to come to a stop before touching every one of the 15 balls. The system is so spread out that it is barely reactive to a mild impetus, and only moderately reactive to an extreme impetus. In fact, the entire table would have to be turned over for the balls to react as actively as they did in the first example.

Carrying this analogy to a system of relationships, we have a term for the space that exists between the members of the group. Dr. Ed Friedman uses the term “emotional space.”[ix] It is not a geographical space like you might have when one person moves across the room or even across the country. It is a space that exists on the emotional and spiritual level. It is present when members of the system have a greater sense of differentiation, and therefore have a sense of individuality while remaining connected in the system. People have a concept of who they are as individuals, who they are with each other, and also who they are as a group. There is still a group identity, but each member of the group has the “space” to have a distinct sense of self. If an impetus, like unemployment, a disaster, etc., occurred within this kind of system, every individual might be affected, and those that actually experienced it would be the most reactive, but it wouldn’t throw the whole system into chaos. Each person, having a sense of self, would have the capacity of being with the others without taking it on personally and owning the crisis. Each person would be more capable of using the energy of the anxiousness to create new possibilities for working through the crisis. Each person would rely on his or her attunement with the divine to intuitively respond to the crisis. The group as a whole might even go through change and evolve into something new, but each member of the system would not lose a sense of identity through these changes; rather each would strengthen their sense of identity.

This reactivity that happens in emotional systems can be a difficult concept at first, because like the concept of anxiousness, it is outside the paradigm in which most of our society functions. Our current paradigm actually encourages, if not requires, group think, emotional triangles, hostage taking, and scapegoating (did they not know I was just trying to help?), all as efforts to bring homeostasis (balance). As we work through these concepts in the following paragraphs, it is important to note that this book began with concepts of the divine, then concepts of self, and finally these concepts of others. The work that we’ve done up to this point is critical to the spiritual growth that is gained through what follows.

Since homeostasis is the common thread among these concepts, it deserves definition first. It can be thought of as balance; however there is a difference between balance in a system and balance within an individual. Balance is actually what a person works toward as one becomes more differentiated. One’s spirit, mind, body, and life circumstances become more balanced as a person becomes clearer on his or her goals, values, beliefs, and connection with the divine. When we talk about homeostasis in a group or system, on the other hand, we are actually talking about the opposite of balance, though initially they appear to be the same. Homeostasis, according to the American Heritage Online Dictionary, is “The ability or tendency of an organism or cell to maintain internal equilibrium by adjusting its physiological processes .”[x] That is a mouthful. In other words, homeostasis in an emotional system relies on the system always staying the same, all the relationships within it staying the same, everyone always having the same values as everyone else, everyone having no goals but for the system to stay the same, and for everyone to work to bring the system back into balance as quickly as possible when anything forces a state of change. There are no individual choices for change and growth in a system that seeks to maintain homeostasis. Homeostasis gives everyone a sense of stability when they are not stable enough in their connection with the divine. It also works against the truth that the only thing that stays the same is that everything must eventually change.

Group-think is a phenomenon that occurs when members of a group buy into what they believe is the status quo even though they each have their own opinions. None of the group members share a personal opinion with the rest of the group. While there may be some fear of embarrassment, the principle driving factor is homeostasis. If someone is encouraged, or even allowed, to publicly voice his or her opinion, then this would lead to that person having a sense of identity that is not dependent on the group, at which point none of the other group members would recognize them as a member of the group. That sounds ridiculous, but consider the youth who graduates high school in an extremely small town and goes to college in a city far away. This person returns as a changed individual, someone with their own ideas, dreams, and sense of self, and folks in the town have difficulty accepting that this person has changed. Or if they do accept that this person has changed, they might see  him or her as no longer being “from around here.” A wonderful movie that fully illustrates how group-think plays out in the family is “My Big Fat Greek Wedding.”

Another great example of group-think is the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. No one in the town actually sees clothes on the emperor, but no one wants to be the one person who can’t see them. Everyone assumes that everyone else can see clothes on the emperor as they pretend to go along so they’re not the “odd man out.” It is only the honesty of a small boy that breaks the group-think and allows everyone to freely express what they can and cannot see. That ruptures homeostasis, but when it is allowed to happen and people bravely face the crisis, a new balance forms in a more highly evolved system.

Group-think also occurs in a group when decisions are being made. Everyone in the group makes safe suggestions, ideas that have either been discussed before, or ideas that are very similar to how the group has always functioned. As the decision-making process goes on, each group member continues to assert what he or she perceives to be the consensus of the entire group, but since no one is actually stating a personal opinion, this consensus is based on fiction. This is the concept of no one being able to see the proverbial elephant in the room. There is a factual truth to a specific situation, but the truth and the solutions regarding the truth are so inconsistent with the homeostasis of the group, that the truth remains invisible. Thus, what becomes the group’s decision is something that doesn’t upset homeostasis and is widely accepted as “the best we can do.” That kind of group decision is usually a poor decision. These decisions also contribute to frustration and an eventual rise in anxiousness because the group isn’t coming up with any real solutions.

Emotional triangles develop within a system as a means of channeling anxiousness and maintaining homeostasis. If one person offends another, it might upset everyone if the offended person confronts the offender. Conflict might elevate, and the offended person might be seen as the cause of the conflict, and so the offended person vents to a third party. The third party is drawn into the situation and because the anxiousness within the situation is not being resolved the third party tries to resolve the issue by going to the offender and being the voice of each party. However, no resolution will occur until the offender and the offended come together and air their differences. Since an enmeshed system has difficulty dealing with a spike in anxiousness, people instead function in triangles, never actually finding resolution, always striving to maintain homeostasis, and yet all the while creating more and more anxiousness. It’s as if the balls on the pool table are packed together with increasing pressure. This is why some families have a family member who finally throws a fit of rage and moves away, never to be heard from by the rest of the family. Our nature and what we are created to be and do is to be involved in the creation process. We’re not created to become stagnant in homeostasis, and when we become caught into such a system we feel the rise in anxiousness. Conflict is best served by one person going to the other and being direct about their feelings. They work it out and the rest of the system develops more emotional space as a result.

There are also people who feed their need for power, control, and importance by developing triangles and manipulating systems without direct conflict. The people who do this are typically known as “passive-aggressive,” however there are also people who are just plain manipulative. There are more people in our society who are true sociopaths that we have evidence to document, but many of these manipulative people are sociopathic in the true definition of the term. Referring back to the concept of discipleship, manipulating others, using one person to manipulate another, and manipulating systems for the sake of one’s own sense of homeostasis are not ways of being connected to others. Also, when we create disconnection and disorder in a relational system, we also create dissonance with God. When a person becomes part of a triangle, the connection is to something created by humans, or a creation of the created, and when we are connected to a creation of the created we cannot be connected to the creative power. Manipulating others is not a way of meeting one’s needs, because while it may appear to meet a need for control, it depends on being able to control others, which only works as long as the other person chooses for it to work. We do not really control others, we do not really meet our needs through triangles, and triangles create greater, unaddressed anxiousness in the system.

If you are involved in a family or other system that is manipulated by a sociopath, do not attempt to take them on at their own game. You will lose. That person will be so effective at lies, deceit, secrecy, and manipulation that they do it without even thinking about it. You may see what they are up to, but you will look like the aggressor or troublemaker if you take them on on their own turf. If you do not have the luxury of walking away from that system, document everything they do that you see as a manipulation. Carefully note what they say, when they say it, and keep all records of communication such as voicemails, emails, and text messages. Do not attach to any fear or anxiety of this person and don’t let them have control. Don’t back down when you are talking to them but don’t antagonize them, either. Simply pruning away the attachments they form for the purpose of manipulation will be your most effective tool as they will eventually self-destruct and move on. You do that by forming positive, loving relationships with others in the system and being non-attached with the sociopath. In other words, don’t see that person as your enemy. See them as a non-entity, a force generating anxiety, and someone whose truth you expose when appropriate and necessary.

I should also note here that a huge piece of triangles and manipulation is secrecy. Secrecy kills. It is that simple. Secrecy is not to be confused with another person’s need to know, and we must also use good judgment regarding whether other people have betrayed our trust. Secrecy is destructive when it is occurring among those who are in one’s quality world. Consider a family in which one of the parents is having an affair. The secret creates disconnection, and the disconnection fosters a triangle, or triangles. The person having the affair has turned to another individual to meet his or her needs, and thus created internal dissonance with the divine. That dissonance is then manifest in one’s life instead of one manifesting creative power, and the evidence of manifest dissonance is anxiousness. No one is aware of this, though, and so no one knows what to do with the anxiousness. It is all working on a subconscious level. The parents use triangles to attempt to manipulate each other through the children or friends outside the marriage. If there is any healing possible, it can only occur when the secrecy is released and communication can begin.

Or, consider a network of friends in which one person disagrees with decisions made by another, but doesn’t voice disagreement with that person. These two people talk less and less, and others are triangled in, yet each person says to people in the triangles, “Now, you can’t say anything to so-and-so, but …” It becomes no longer a network of friends, but a system of mistrusting enemies because of the secrecy, and the ironic thing is that no offense was created until the secrecy began.

A more differentiated person in an emotional system is focused on his or her own functioning, and so in meeting his or her needs this person will see differences with others as being curriculum for deepening relationships and manifesting divine will. This person will work through differences and grow because of the experience. This is why it was so important in this book to explore aspects of attuning more deeply to the divine on one’s spiritual path, and different ways of meeting one’s needs in healthy ways before coming to all this about relationships. As you become more differentiated, you can become more highly attuned to God’s divine spirit. You can function in the middle of situations like those we’re discussing and not become addicted to the drama. You can actually function in healthy ways to work with the anxiousness being created like a potter works with clay. You can work to alleviate the dysfunctional efforts of those who might be completely enmeshed into the system. It starts with you being you and being attuned to what creates you. This is the curriculum of the anxious disciple.

The last big piece of this is the topic of “hostage-taking.” This sounds similar to hijacking, or terrorism, which are also very appropriate references. A person who is completely enmeshed into the system will function in one of two ways; either he or she will always work to maintain homeostasis, or create chaos so that he or she can feed an unbalanced need for power. I call these latter types of people “anxiety factories,” but we’ll come back to them later. First, let’s deal with the type of person who is more common in relationship systems. When a person is very enmeshed in a system, and thus has little self-awareness, he or she will also not feel a great sense of personal power. Such a person might even state that having personal power is wrong or evil. However, if this person perceives that the system is changing, his or her degree of enmeshment will trigger an internal alarm that homeostasis is in danger. They will pinpoint the person(s) in the system appearing to be causing the “problem,” and then begin talking to others in the system about what they have discovered and all their evidence that supports it. This person becomes a hostage-taker. Those within the system that they talk with often don’t perceive a problem, or they’re willing to adapt to changes to the system to a certain degree, but in hearing the hostage-taker’s evidence and strong point of view, they nod their heads and become part of a growing system of triangles. The successful hostage-taker garners enough of the system to finally oppose the person(s) he or she has vilified. Often it is not even the hostage-taker who finally voices the opposition.

The more differentiated the vilified person is, the less he or she will take this opposition personally. This entire process is about the hostage-taker’s attempt to meet an unbalanced need for power and importance in unhealthy ways, and the hostages’ needs for acceptance, but seldom is it about the vilified person. Those who are engaged in this process are attempting to meet their needs through connection with others, and through creating anxiousness. As long as the differentiated person meets his or her needs through attunement to God and through his or her quality world of relationships, he or she can maintain some level of effectiveness with this hostage-taking process. It may become necessary for the vilified person to leave the system because the hostage-taking has eroded the system to the point that it is no longer part of one’s quality world, but it will not erode one’s spiritual process unless you let it. Anxiety is just energy and all the data and drama surrounding it are illusion to the point that it wouldn’t exist without people creating it. As soon as they would stop, it would cease to exist.

Hostage-taking can also be something instigated by people who seem to carry their own anxiousness with them. These are what I’ve come to refer to as “anxiety factories.” There are people who can come into a seemingly well-functioning system and wreak havoc. A well-respected person in the system will quickly become labeled as a problem, and the new instigator poses as the savior. People who are anxiety factories are also quite often bullies. It is extremely easy for a struggling church, civic organization, non-profit agency, or even a group of friends to initially see one of these people as a great helper and immediately give him or her lots of responsibilities and attention. What is quickly found, though, is that this person only knows how to function as a hostage-taker and triangle creator. This person attempts to meet his or her needs of control/importance and belonging by being the only person that others can depend on, or in other words, putting himself or herself in the role of Creator. In a church, this person will likely villify the pastor or senior minister first and foremost. It is narcissism, and it destroys emotional systems. These are people who need professional help because the anxiety they bring with them stems from unresolved issues in that person’s soul. As I mentioned earlier, this bully might even be a sociopath. The more differentiated people are in a system, the more apparent are the motives and functioning of an “anxiety factory,” and the less that person can have a negative impact on the group. When a new person first enters into a system, that person will either integrate smoothly into it, be changed by it, change it so that it adapts to them, or leave. A system comprised of more highly differentiated people will not allow a person to enter into the system and wreak havoc in it because there is sufficient emotional space in the system to keep the anxiety factory from influencing it as a unit. Remember the examples of the billiard balls.

In the process of hostage-taking, there is almost always a scapegoat. This is the person who becomes vilified by the hostage-taker. The term is biblical in its origin, coming from Leviticus 16.

8 He is to cast lots for the two goats — one lot for the LORD and the other for the scapegoat. 20 “When Aaron has finished making atonement for the Most Holy Place, the Tent of Meeting and the altar, he shall bring forward the live goat. 21 He is to lay both hands on the head of the live goat and confess over it all the wickedness and rebellion of the Israelites — all their sins — and put them on the goat’s head. He shall send the goat away into the desert in the care of a man appointed for the task. 22 The goat will carry on itself all their sins to a solitary place; and the man shall release it in the desert.

What is not mentioned in the scripture is that once the goat was alone in the wilderness, it would not have lasted long before being devoured by beasts. We do the same thing with people in our society today. Whenever we perceive that a person is responsible for the ills of the day, we blame that person and heap accountability upon him or her. Our scapegoat is sent away, and those within the system believe that all is now good, that the cause of the anxiety is now gone. A scapegoat is just a short-term excuse, however, for not dealing constructively with the anxiousness in a system. A scapegoat becomes responsible for chaos represented by the billiard balls at the beginning of this chapter, but even if the scapegoat and the first ball hit are the same, he or she is not responsible for the fact that the rest of the system was so tightly enmeshed that one triggering event sent the system into chaos. Enmeshment doesn’t occur overnight, and the issues that lead to enmeshment are not only very old, they are also the issues that each person brings into the system.

No one person can be responsible for an individual deriving a sense of self from the homeostasis of the system, nor can any one person be responsible for the fact that individuals in the system keep secrets, or create triangles instead of dealing directly with conflict, or allow themselves to become deceived by group-think. Those are all issues of enmeshment, and the solution is for individuals within the system to be involved in a spiritual process of attuning to God’s spirit. There is no blame to place on members of the system. It is what it is and one differentiated person can begin to effect change within the system by creating emotional space. As we have already explored, that process is one of personal self-exploration and clarity, and deepening connection with the divine.

One final metaphor. You are on a boat in a pond amid other boats in the pond. The movement of your boat affects the other boats because of the waves created by your movement. The more tightly enmeshed the boats are, the more difficult it is for you to move about. You experience freedom on the pond when there is sufficient space for you to navigate your boat. Your ripples affect the others, but you do not upset the pond simply with your movement. A huge, precipitating event, such as something large dropping into the pond, has an effect on every boat in the pond, perhaps even creating disruption. It does no good to blame the event or to try to prevent it. The most effective thing you can do is to maintain the course of your boat and keep yourself from sinking. The ripple effect from the event goes to the shore, and then back out into the pond, and so on until the pond once again reaches homeostasis. No boat in the pond brought about homeostasis. It just naturally occurred; just as the event causing disruption might have been a natural occurrence. All the while, the spiritually-focused boat pilot simply remained concerned with the destination of his or her boat. If someone else had fallen out of a boat, there would have been a rescue. No need to curse the pond or the event; just navigate through the ripples in the pond.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Actually, this is more of a meditation, but it begins with journaling. Look at your journal and identify one event that caused significant anxiety and disruption in one of the systems that is part of your quality world. If you didn’t write it down yet and it is just now coming to you, take a moment to write that event in your journal. Briefly mention who was involved, who seems to have caused it, or whether it was a naturally-occurring thing that just happened. Also make brief mention of any arguments or tension that came from this event disrupting relationships within your quality world. You cannot fix those. Now comes the meditation part. Find a meditative space, play some appropriate music if you wish or something like wave sounds, and get comfortable. Preferably this would be in a sitting position. Close your eyes and let your mind replay this event from the beginning as if you are watching a video. Each time you feel anxious as you replay this memory, envision that anxiousness separates itself from you in the image of a leaf, floats away from you, and is carried away on a stream of water. Do this until you have replayed the event as often as you need, then open your eyes. Remember how this feels and the next time you are in a similar event, let the anxiousness you feel become the leaf again while you are in the midst of what is actually happening. Keep a clear head by being non-attached to the situation and remember that you are among images in your quality world. Let that direct you in being a non-anxious presence in the midst of an anxious situation. Do not beat yourself up if you feel like you failed miserably. Being an anxious disciple is a life-long process and you will not master it the first time.

13: The Playfulness of Paradox and the Paradox of Playfulness

Simply put, playfulness diffuses anxiousness, and seriousness elevates anxiousness. Over time, playfulness gives energy to greater differentiation of the persons involved in the system, and seriousness kills, so to speak. Keep in mind that playfulness is not the same as silliness or immaturity. It is a sense of being light-hearted that can only come from a degree of non-attachment to one’s circumstances.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Write in your journal the most recent event you can remember in which you felt down, extremely sad, maybe even depressed. Briefly reflect on how serious this event felt, what you may have tried to do about it, and how it affected you and others. You will come back to this in a little while.

Imagine this scenario that happens all too often in families. A father comes home early in the day after being laid off from work. The mother, who also works but is off that day, is there when he comes home. The two kids in the family come home after school to find both parents home, which never happens, and learn of what has happened to their father’s job and the greater avenue of income for the family. What do you imagine that life is like for that family on that particular day?

Let’s imagine this scenario first from the perspective of seriousness. Dad comes home feeling very gloomy, dejected, rejected, and hopeless. His vehicle for income is gone, and also a great part of his identity is gone. His job is a creation of the created, his income is a creation of the created, and the identity derived from a job is a creation of the created. None of these are actually a source of anything, but rather are created by what the divine source has created, which are the dad and his employer. What goes on in our lives is what we manifest by the condition of our souls. It does not define us. When we cannot see that reality, we lose the capability for playfulness and the alternative is seriousness. This dad is faced with his own reality; his experience of that reality is his own creation. As we have already explored, it is not what happens to you, but what you tell yourself about what happens to you, and this dad can only tell himself something that fits within the reality in which he’s lived.

Let’s imagine that he’s saying to himself, “What am I going to do? I’m not going be able to support my family. We’re going to lose everything. I’ve been rejected. There must be something wrong with me.” Not all of the things we tell ourselves about what we experience are conscious thoughts, but they are a resident “self talk” that we play just beneath our conscious thoughts. This constant dialogue is always in sync with the condition of one’s soul and whether we have chosen to be attuned with the divine or more connected with the creation around us.

So, this dad comes home with this dialogue going on in his head and this air of seriousness has bred and grown on his journey home. He is met at home by a wife who asks what is wrong and why he is home so early in the day. As he tells her what has happened, his seriousness grows, and the tension grows between them. The anxiousness is amplified because of his seriousness. Expectations are raised for her employment, desperation immediately blooms, and the two of them hardly speak while he begins searching through the newspaper want ads and she continues with her day’s activities of laundry, paying immediate bills, etc. She has also begun her inner dialogue of wondering what they’re going to do, and wondering if they’re going to lose everything. Fear, lack, limitation, scarcity, and hopelessness develop because they’ve placed something that is not source into the role of source and supply.

The children come home from school into this cesspool of gloom. The seriousness has elevated to the point of isolation, not yelling, but just a complete shutdown of relationship. The kids ask what is wrong and they are told that it is grown up business. Sensing the high tension in the house, and not wanting to spark hostility, they ask no more questions and go to their rooms, furthering the disconnection. Although divine spirit is present in the household, it is not felt and no one is connecting with it. No one is connecting with each other, either. This is as close as we experience hell. Complete disconnection and isolation. Over time, if things go on as they are and the dad does not become employed within a few days or weeks, this complete disconnection can fuel responses such as alcoholism, depression, divorce, kids’ behavior problems, and even infidelity. It might set up triangles like we talked about last chapter in which the mother tells a child, “Go tell your father …” and the father replies by saying to the child, “Go tell your mother …” We are not created to live in isolation, and when we are disconnected we innately make choices that follow the path of least resistance; however these choices inevitably lead to further isolation. The entire scenario is drastically different if the parents adopt an attitude of playfulness.

Let’s start the scenario over, but from a more differentiated perspective. The father is told at work that he’s being laid off due to budget issues and changes in his company’s strategy for dealing with market changes. Being a more differentiated person, dad realizes immediately that this decision is not about him or his capability. Things have changed, and his path is being diverted another direction. Certainly there are feelings of pain, loss, and rejection, but he realizes that what he is feeling is due to the loss of something he has found meaningful for several years. He is losing a piece of his quality world, and he will now have to rely on the other images in his quality world to heal his pain while he becomes clear on the next steps in his journey. See how what we’ve talked about previously all ties together?

On his way home he begins reformulating his future story, which has been irreversibly changed for him and there is nothing he can do to make things as they were. He realizes that while he cannot control what happens to him, he can control his response to his experiences. He begins to think of all the things that he hasn’t had time to do that he can do in the next few days. He considers how long his severance pay will help him take care of his responsibilities while he shifts his career gears. He has a fairly clear sense of the divine and he understands that his job was a vehicle, a means of meeting some of his needs. He was what made the job work, and not vice versa. Because he is a creative expression of the divine in this world, his job was a creative extension of himself. The simple loss of that job has not also meant the loss of his identity or the loss of his being able to be a creative expression in this world in other ways. His drive home becomes a creative exercise in possibilities in which he has an air of playfulness. Recreating your future is serious business, but so is creating a sculpture. Creativity requires a sense of playfulness, not irresponsible wackiness, but a sense of playing with the pieces that are available to create something new. It’s a sense of “hey, I can do this, or I could do that, or I can …”

He comes home and is asked the same questions we imagined the wife posing earlier. His response, rather than replying in dour seriousness and self-pity, is to ask her to guess. She guesses right the first time, since it is a very logical guess, and before she can begin getting caught up into seriousness he asks her to guess what he’s going to do now. On his way home he’s created several possibilities, and has a couple of top priorities, and he leads her in a guessing game, which serves to diffuse her anxiousness about their immediate situation.

If the wife is less differentiated and takes his job loss personally, he can exercise more playfulness by suggesting that she quit so that they can be on the same level. He can’t make this suggestion out of cynicism, or as a spiteful thing to say. That’s not playfulness, but a variation of seriousness. He has to be non-attached to her responses, and be willing to let her go about her journey her own way. By being non-attached but still engaged in the relationship, he can offer paradoxical, playful interjections. He doesn’t seriously mean for her to quit her job, but suggesting it in a non-attached way helps her to release some attachment to their circumstance and perhaps connect with each other more. They can deal with their circumstance much in the same way a family deals with the loss of a family member, because in truth a death has occurred. However, it is also an enormous opportunity for creativity and the couple can look at the situation as if they are looking a blank canvas, preparing to create a new masterpiece together.

When my first wife’s grandmother passed away many years ago, I was amazed at how her aunts and uncles dealt with the loss of their mother. There was more laughter in the viewing room at the funeral home than I’ve heard at many social functions. They told stories of all the things they thought they got away with as children fifty years earlier, and they remembered the stories of their mother’s most endearing and menacing moments. Some of them laughed so hard that they had tears in their eyes. While they were grieving, they also had the capacity to work through their grief in a spirit of playfulness.

Back to our imagined scenario, the loss of a job is as traumatic as the loss of a loved one because it also means the loss of an open-ended, hoped-for future, the loss of functioning to which family members have grown accustomed, and the loss of relationships that had been gained through the job. I am picking on this one source of anxiousness because it is perhaps one of the most common in our culture as well as being one that causes great destruction in families, relationships, and self. There are many other sources of anxiousness and any of those can be plugged into an imagined scenario as we have done in which it is dealt with in seriousness and then in playfulness.

Let’s return to our scenario to finish it out when the kids come home from school. Regardless of the age we imagine them, they can still be included in the guessing game, “Guess what happened to Dad today?” They make their guesses and finally they are told what happened. During the day, both parents have managed to brainstorm possibilities and so at this point they are capable of being a team that leads their children in a process of imagining possibilities. The kids sit down with their parents, they are told the realities of their present situation, and then asked what ideas they can develop about what to do. The parents offer affirmations for their creativity, and the whole family develops not only a sense of positive expectancy for the future, but they also have connected and bonded, whereas the family in the first scenario had completely disconnected. In this particular scenario, I am imagining that this family also has a strong sense of spiritual awareness and they acknowledge that God, the divine, the source, however they express it, is active in their midst and leading them in an exciting process of change.

Remember that choices for change and growth involve more anxiousness, but dealing with that anxiousness in creative, playful, and non-attached ways transforms the anxiousness into the energy required for the change and growth.

Ed Friedman writes about playfulness by also including the concept of paradox. We can see paradox in the above scenario, because it seems paradoxical to imagine creativity and positive expectancy on the day that a family member has lost a job. Friedman’s example is much more serious in which he presents a wife who has been getting closer and closer to another man who lives in another state and has plans to find a way to fly there and meet him. She makes the mistake of leaving a letter where the husband can see it, and he happens to find it. The response in a state of seriousness would be to confront her, a fight would ensue, and then the anxiousness would be elevated to the point of destruction. Friedman instead describes the husband as going to a travel agent, getting posters and brochures on the area where this man lives, and leaving them where his wife can find them.[xi]

We have to have a very clear understanding that playfulness is not cynicism. The husband is not leaving the travel information as a way of letting his wife know that he knows, and thus making her feel guilty. For this to truly be playfulness the husband has to be completely non-attached to an outcome, completely releasing his wife to do what she feels she needs to do, and not being attached to the circumstances regardless of how painful the possibilities may be. This husband truly left the brochures so that she could make a decision about whether to meet this man and he was completely willing to let her go and explore what she needed to do. By leaving the travel information he was communicating that she was completely free to follow her inner guidance. Friedman states that this scenario actually happened. The man had come to see him after reading his wife’s mail, and in his visit with Friedman developed this way of exercising playfulness and paradox. The wife found the travel information and asked her husband about it. He told her that she was free to do what she felt she needed to do. She considered it for days, and finally decided to not go, to discontinue the relationship, and to deepen her connection with her husband by going to counseling together. That wouldn’t have happened if the husband had responded out of seriousness, or at least it wouldn’t have happened as fluidly and as quickly.

Playfulness can only happen out of a sense of differentiation. It can only be exercised through non-attachment while still remaining engaged in relationship. It happens because we care, but can only exist when we release control. Playfulness and paradox require practice, and they require that we are focused on an internal acknowledgment of our real source rather than on a relationship, circumstance, or outcome as being our source. We have to be truly clear on how to meet our needs in healthy ways and understand that one can only control oneself, rather than others. Exercising playfulness and paradox is the most loving response we can make toward others, and we can help them on their journeys by being creatively involved in relationship with them. Seriousness kills because it leads to the hell of disconnection and isolation.

Recommended Journal Opportunity

Refer back to the event you last wrote in your journal. After seeing something about playfulness and paradox, reflect in your journal about how you might exhibit these if it were to happen again. If you feel any negative feelings as you imagine what you might do, it isn’t playfulness. For it to be an exercise of an anxious disciple, you practice what you would do without attachment to an outcome or feelings of resentment, guilt, or vengeance. The purpose of playfulness and paradox are to navigate through such an event with differentiation.

14: Walking as a Non-Anxious Disciple

We have covered a great deal in this book, and it all has to do with seeing oneself as an anxious disciple who is becoming non-anxious. It is critical for anyone involved in a spiritual process to first have a personal concept of the source of all that is spiritual. I hear many people say that they are not religious, but they are spiritual, and I’m not going to criticize that perspective. What I hear in that statement is that they have become disgusted or disenchanted with religious institutions, and therefore want nothing to do with a particular religion. The concepts we have explored throughout this book work for a person who is deeply entrenched in a religious tradition as well for as someone who wants nothing to do with a religious tradition. To be a spiritual person means an inherent requirement of focusing on something spiritual. That is why this book begins with the concepts of spirit, where spirit originates, and what we believe about spirit as source. Being able to clearly and distinctly verbalize what we believe about God goes beyond being vaguely agnostic. For one to say that he or she acknowledges that there must be something spiritual behind all creation and leave it at that leaves a person without a foundation for spiritual practice. Whatever it is that you believe, in order to follow a spiritual path you must develop a clear understanding of what this greater spiritual presence is, where it is, how it is, and what it has to do with you.

That leads us to the second part of this book, which has to do with who you are. One of the things we lack most in our culture is personal self-awareness. There has been a growing surge toward self-help and being aware of one’s personality, traits, tendencies, behaviors, and many physical things we can know about ourselves. All of that, however, focuses on the creation, but not the source creating the creation. To be on a spiritual path you must claim who and what you are in a spiritual sense and be able to clearly verbalize what you believe. What is your connection with the greater spiritual presence behind your existence? What makes up who and what you are? Why are you here? How are you creatively manifesting the divine in your life? All in all, this means that to be on a spiritual path you must be clear on your sense of self apart from what anyone else may have to do with you.

So then, being clear on the spiritual dimensions of what is behind all of creation and our sense of self as part of the creation, we can look at our functioning in the midst of creation. That functioning has to do with our connection with creation, while understanding that whatever the creation has created becomes tools for us to use or not use in our functioning. We use things not people, and we love people not things. We function in ways that deepen connection with others and the spiritual presence around us, rather than fueling disconnection and isolation. All of the ways of functioning that we have covered and all of the things we have covered about who we are as individuals, are all about helping us to be non-anxious. That can be very difficult, though it is easily stated, because being non-anxious in the midst of high anxiety can feel nearly impossible. We will live the rest of our lives and all of our discipleship learning the discipline of the dance in which we step from colluding with anxiousness to disengaging from it. We will discover that we have also disconnected from others while trying to disengage from the anxiousness. So in attempting to reconnect with others we find ourselves enmeshed into a system and thus colluding with anxiousness again, and on and on. To work only with our functioning in relationships without being clear on God and self is pointless. What we clearly understand about the divine and ourselves absolutely must feed into how we function with others. Working toward the discipline of being a differentiated person is what leads us toward walking as a non-anxious disciple.

Knowing what is my “stuff” and what is not empowers me to let you keep your “stuff” and still love you while letting you work with it. That is being non-anxious. Clearly knowing what I understand the divine to be empowers me to know that others are not the divine. Therefore my primary connection is through an internal process, not through others being happy with me, and thus empowers me to be non-anxious with others. Understanding how anxiousness works in a system and that anxiousness doesn’t necessarily belong to any particular person, empowers me to be a non-anxious presence in the midst of that system and remain connected with the others in it. Understanding the pain and loss in my life as being my own responsibility helps me to work through it on my own while remaining non-anxiously connected.

Perhaps the most critical piece of our behavior with others is to understand the manipulations and dysfunctional practices of anxious people, or people who collude with high anxiety. There are two dimensions to where we stand in the midst of such activity. One is the dimension of our attunement with the divine, and the other is the dimension of seeing clearly what anxious people are doing. We can’t forsake one for the other, meaning that we can fool ourselves into believing that having one’s proverbial thumb on the pulse of the triangles, hostage-taking, and other dysfunctional practices means that we are being differentiated. Also, we can’t believe that being completely spiritual with no regard to the relationships around us means we’re being differentiated, either, because then we aren’t grounded. However, we can just as easily lose our non-attachment and differentiation by attaching ourselves to the knowledge of what is going on, and thus becoming the charismatic hero, or savior of the system. The paradox is that this is exactly what the system is pulling you into doing, and therefore dislodges a person from the discipline of non-anxiousness. Seeing clearly how people function in a system is simply a tool, because that perspective is something we create, making it a creation of the created, and nothing else. We have a tendency to worship our “aha!” moments, but they are only moments, experiences, new images for one’s quality world, and are not source. Those experiences are caught in time, and so to cling to them will increase anxiousness and be a cause of suffering. Do you see how interconnected it all is? But do you also see that when all three dimensions are in place, clarity of God, self, and others, that it does all work beautifully?

Being a non-anxious presence in the world empowers you to be an agent of change, to bring about effective, positive, results. The paradox is that you must remain non-anxious and not become attached to the results and to the change. You must instead be attached to your attunement to the divine and practice the way of the witness to your success and results. You must let anxiousness exist around you and just let it be. It is a rather Zen concept, just “being,” but it is also Judeo-Christian. The Divine Presence is the “I Am” … a non-anxious disciple can say, “I am” … non-anxious people together can say “we are.” Learning to do this, our path will reflect the way of being that Rudyard Kipling wrote about in his poem, If.

IF

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you

But make allowance for their doubting too,

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master,

If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings -- nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much,

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,

And -- which is more -- you’ll be a Man, my son!

--Rudyard Kipling

15: Bearing Real Fruit, Fruit that Will Last, Part 2

Bearing real fruit is the whole purpose of being spiritual. To be on a spiritual path simply for the purpose of feeling enlightened, or to be more aware, or more conscious, or to be more in tune with the divine is narcissistic. To quote John Donne (included here in the English as he wrote it), “No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine …”

In the fourth chapter, I quoted the 15th chapter of the Gospel of John, and then I went through a great deal of explanation about how bearing fruit is the primary task of being a disciple. What we produce is not as important as whom we love and how we love them. After now going through the chapters dealing with who we are as individuals and our functioning in relationship with others, we might pause and reflect on what it means to live in unconditional love. To me it is the nature of Truth, with a capital “T” because it is THE over arching, fundamental experience of the divine.

Truth is the complete understanding of unconditional love. When we come to live in the complete understanding of unconditional love then we are living in Truth.

Love doesn’t create closeness – it liberates us from it. Attachment is what creates closeness. Closeness is a paradoxical trap because it begins with being in relationship with others, but without differentiation it eventually enslaves us into being owned by the relationship. Remember how we looked in “Ripples in the Pond” at how undifferentiated closeness can create enmeshment and become debilitating. As we come to trust in the creative power within us, we learn to rely upon our own capabilities for being in relationship. We are not let down or empowered by others’ behavior in relationship. We do not belong to any other in a relationship. We are free and make the choice to remain in a relationship. Love liberates us from the bindings of well-intentioned but unreasonable promises and expectations. Love empowers us to be fully present with others. Love can be shared unconditionally and expressed in pure freedom of spirit. With great freedom comes great responsibility. As we live more fully in this freedom we come to identify the curriculum of life wherein lies our learning. What we learn is Truth.

We approach our learning by being willing to let Truth illuminate our attachments; those behaviors, addictions, unresolved pain, and unfilled losses to which we cling that cause us to dysfunction in relationships and manipulate closeness. When we are spiritually immature we require great closeness, like a baby at a mother’s breast. As we grow in love, we become more capable of looking at our own stuff and taking responsibility for it, thus becoming able to transcend to a greater degree of emotional distance. We then have a need to work on independence, and an individual relationship with the divine. As we become mature in the spiritual path we are able to live in the freedom that the love surrounding us is enough, that in it we are not alone, and that its energy flows from us, around us, through us, and between us. We share the energy in lots of different ways. When we fully understand it and live in it, we share it without expectation or give and take; we can be with one another in authentic ways. We can be independent and connected simultaneously, which is differentiation. Living fully in love and being able to share it fully brings us into Truth, which is the object of our learning.

Truth is the reality of how you are in the midst of connection, who you are in the midst of connection, and why you are in the midst of connection. You become Truth. Truth becomes you. You not only learn to love unconditionally, you become unconditional love.  By becoming a non-anxious disciple, you become the expression of God’s unconditional love in this world. You become truly Christ-like. You become Truth. You become the fruit that will last. Peace to you on your journey and thank you for joining me as an anxious disciple.

Recommended Journal Opportunity – last one

Reflect in your journal about your experience of working through this book. Has the information here affected or changed you in some way? Do you feel as if this book has helped you to grow? What has come to you in your journaling to teach you where you may be stuck? What is most challenging to you in walking the path of an anxious disciple? Have you gained new insights into your concept of God, who God is to you, who you are to God, and who you are with other people? Do you feel like you gained insight into being more effective in relationships? Finally, where do you go from here?

If you want to continue the conversation with others who are embarking on the path of the anxious disciple, go to www.anxiousdisciple.com. Here you might find ample opportunity to increase your quality world.

ANXIOUS DISCIPLE

By Mark Mills

Copyright © 2008 by The Spiritual

Wellness Institute

Published and Distributed by

The Spiritual Wellness

Institute

All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or any other — except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations in this book are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and are used by permission. All rights reserved.

Cover Design by Shannon Mills

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Other Books by Mark Mills

On Earth as It Is in Heaven

To the Point: concise couples counseling for pastors

Uncharted (short story)

Waltz across Texas with a Shoe and a Fart (coming soon)

Mr. Boyer (short story)

From the Back Cover:

Do you want to have healthier relationships? Do you strive to live with less anxiety and stress? Do you struggle with the eternal questions about God and where or how we originated? We all want to live an anxiety free life. We want all of our relationships to be healthy and we don't want to feel a loss of control in any of them. We also struggle in infinite ways to have God all figured out. This book is for those who identify with these basic human hurts, hopes, and questions.  Anxious Disciple makes connections between psychological theory and various spiritual paths in understanding why life seems to work the way it does. This book is divided into three sections: 1) exploring the nature of God and who God is to us, 2) the nature of being human and who we are to God, and 3) the nature of relationships and who we are to each other.  Regardless of the spiritual path a person may have chosen, the principles covered in Anxious Disciple will be applicable. People feeling anxious in relationships, business or personal, or feeling that there is a dimension missing in life and there must be something more, may find that they are an anxious disciple. Through this book, you are welcome to join in learning how to become a non-anxious disciple.

Mark Mills is a fun-loving husband and father who enjoys golfing, singing, playing his guitar, and learning new things. He also enjoys nature and animal rescue in his spare time with his wonderful wife.

Mark has a Masters of Divinity and a Masters of Arts in Counseling. His life’s work is engaging in spiritual work with people and helping them find their way. His key focus in this work is to help people live out the principles that are basic to our connection with God.  This means living out of that connection instead of living to meet the expectations of other people. Mental illness, emotional struggles, and personal development are all improved by making one's self a vehicle for God's power and creativity.  He is also the author of "On Earth as It Is in Heaven" a book that brings a refreshing illumination to the Lord’s Prayer.

Dedication

This book is the result of accumulated reflections and education, but most importantly, the positive influence of significant people on my self-awareness. My parents, provided for my sisters and me a spiritual, safe, secure, and relatively happy environment in an era that was very tumultuous throughout the rest of the world. I never realized how difficult that must have been for them until I began trying to create a similar environment for my own children. My parents have become heroes to me in my adult life for the very things that my adolescent arrogance disliked about them. They have remained steadfast and unshaken in their beliefs, habits, and unconditional love toward their children. My mother’s passing early this year impacted all of us deeply, but as we care for our father, we strive to live out the legacy left by her example. Also, there was one English teacher in my entire high school and college life who told me that I could write well. Portia Gaines, a teacher at Center High School in Center, Texas, touted my writing ability in front of the rest of the class. That experience opened to me the possibility of being a writer. I also extend gratitude to those who read my rough draft and provided meaningful feedback: Dr. Emerson Capps, now retired from Midwestern State University, and my father. My children cannot be excluded from this list of those who have influenced my creation of this book. They have shown me my place in an entire stream of unresolved issues and life curriculum. My prayer for them is that they learn the walk of an anxious disciple, becoming less anxious as the years go by. Most importantly, my wife has helped me formulate a cohesiveness through her love, support, and wizened eye for excellence after I thought this book was complete. Her unconditional support and love have helped me recreate a rough draft into the best that this work can be.

I also want to thank Jim and Rita Goodwin, Steve and Roggie Kundert, Dale and Mary Thompson, the late Jean Caudle, the late Barbara Eldridge, and Tamara Dickerson, who made up the initial class wherein I presented the core of this information over 13 weeks. Your input and reflections were invaluable and very much appreciated.

To all of you, I offer my sincere gratitude. You have either made me who I am, or helped this book become what it is, or a bit of both. Thank you.

Notes

[i] “Authentic.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. www.bartleby.com/61/. August 10, 2008.

[ii] Dass, Ram. Journey of Awakening: a meditator’s guidebook. (Bantam: New York), 1990.

[iii] Glasser, William, M.D. Choice Theory: a new psychology of personal freedom. (Harper Collins: New York), 1998.

[iv] Dass, Ram. Be Here Now. (Lama Foundation: San Cristobal, NM), 1971.

[v] Seligman, Martin. Learned Optimism: how to change your mind and your life. (Vintage: New York), 2006.

[vi] Glasser, ibid.

[vii] Glasser, William, M.D. Choice Theory: a new psychology of personal freedom. (Harper Collins: New York), 1998.

[viii] Nouwen, Henri J.M. The Inner Voice of Love: a journey through anguish to freedom. (Doubleday: New York), 1996.

[ix] Friedman, Edwin H. Generation to Generation: Family process in church and synagogue. (Guilford: New York), 1985.

[x] American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, (Houghton-Mifflin: New York), 2000, http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/homeostasis

[xi] Friedman, Edwin H. Generation to Generation: Family process in church and synagogue. (Guilford: New York), 1985.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Before We Begin

1: Who is God?

2: Our Source of Spiritual Health

3: Being Authentic with God

4: Bearing Real Fruit, Fruit that Will Last

5: Who Are We to God?

6: Choices for Growth and Change

7: Nourishing the Soul

8: Attachments and the Rise of Anxiousness

9: Pain, Loss, and Our Struggle to Be Saved

10: Who Is My Neighbor?

11: The Energy of Anxiousness

12: Ripples in the Pond

13: The Playfulness of Paradox and the Paradox of Playfulness

14: Walking as a Non-Anxious Disciple

15: Bearing Real Fruit, Fruit that Will Last, Part 2

Copyright

Other Books by Mark Mills

From the Back Cover:

Dedication

Notes