Chapter Two
A few weeks after I dedicated my life to God, I went back to classes at Dartmouth College. Like always, it was easy for me to do well in classes. In my favorite class that term, I studied Gandhi who was led by God or his Inner voice to do his political campaigns.
Not long after this a friend of mine invited me to go to a worship service of the college’s charismatic Christians. At this time charismatic Christians were far outside the mainstream of American culture so all I knew about them was they practiced faith healing. As I had spent years looking at other spiritual groups, it seemed perfectly reasonable to visit their services. At the service, they sang beautiful hymns, and it felt like the grace of the Holy Spirit was wonderfully present in the group; I happily joined in. In other groups, I had often sung devotional songs of praise to Krishna, and I loved opening my heart to God; it did not seem important to me what name people used when singing devoutly to God.
I was very surprised when the charismatic Christians discussed spirituality in much the same terms as Socrates, the Alice Bailey meditational groups, and the Findhorn community. The charismatic Christians said that if we surrendered our will to God’s will, then our lives would have God’s joy and energy in them. Individuals in the church also told of receiving divine messages to do things and the many miracles and blessings God had performed in their lives once they did them. By this time, I knew a lot of spiritual people who were interested in Ram Dass and modern forms of Indian spirituality. But I felt much closer to these Christians because they felt called by God to accomplish something in the world.
It did not seem significant to me that the Christians thought of God as a personal being who had the three names of God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, and I did not think of God in those terms.
To me, these terminological differences did not seem as important as the similarities to the Christians: we both were talking of serving the Divine and being helped by synchronicities or blessings as we did God’s work.
Unfortunately for me, the Christians had a much different outlook: they considered it very important what name a person called God. After spending a couple months worshipping with these people and feeling very close to them, I casually mentioned to one of their leaders about how people who sang songs of praise to Krishna or Rama seemed similar to the Christians as both of them were worshipping God, just with different names. The Christian leader was utterly horrified and said these Hindus were worshipping the devil. My heart literally ached after he said this as I knew I could no longer sing with the Christian group.
A month later, the sense of being guided by God left me. I no longer had that special energy, nor did I know what the Divine Will wanted me to do next. So I thought I might as well finish my degree at Dartmouth College. I wasn’t sure that was what the Universe wanted me to do, but it was the spring of my fourth year of college and I did not know what else to do. (I was on what Dartmouth called a five year plan, meaning that I, like about twenty percent of my classmates, was planning to take five years to graduate.)
After the term started, my life went much further downhill. Previously, intellectual activity had always been extremely easy and natural for me. Other people at Dartmouth often seemed frazzled by all the studying they had to do, but it had always been a breeze for me, even though I often took hard classes. Now I was coming out of my classes feeling totally spaced out. It was so bad, I could not even walk back to my room; instead, I needed to lie down outside the classroom on a bench for ten minutes to recover my senses. Also my sense of being guided by the Spirit, and the joy and excitement of being in the Flow, had totally left me.
Somehow I had missed a connection with the Flow and I had absolutely no idea why. I knew it was not some simple answer; such as, intellectuality inherently interferes with being spiritual, because I was taking classes a few months earlier and it had been a breeze. Once I had experienced the energy of being attuned to God, I wanted nothing but to get that energy back and re-attune myself to the Divine Will. The vast majority of my classmates were going to graduate in a month, and they were concerned about what job they were going to get. But none of that mattered to me; I was only concerned about how I could get that energy back into my life.
If I had been told to do something by God and had not done it, I could understand the situation I was in, and I would have felt that I deserved it. I would have been like Jonah in the Bible. Jonah did not obey God’s commands, and for this reason encountered bad situations, eventually ending up in the belly of a whale. But I had gotten no messages that I had ignored.
As I wondered about what was wrong, and meditated and focused on wanting to change, the feeling grew on me that my problem involved my paradigm about the nature of reality: my intellectual preconceptions of how the Universe worked stopped the higher energy from coming back into my life. Until these mistaken thoughts were removed, and I started to see the world in a way that let God’s energy pour through me, I knew I would not be able to connect with the Flow.
Nothing mattered to me other than the presence of the Flow in my life. I was totally committed to clearing away all the mistaken views which blocked God from guiding my life. So I prayed intensely for the Spirit to clear away the channels that were hindering me from being of use in the world. For four days I totally centered on how I wanted the Spirit to be back in my life, and how I would give up anything to get it back.
The next day I met my former Psychosynthesis teacher. He had just gotten a job in California for the next fall and was visiting Hanover. We were discussing spirituality and he casually asked me if the Higher Self was practical. The phrase “Higher Self” was Psychosynthesis’s way of describing our connection to the divine or God. So he was asking if a person could follow her spiritual guidance and have things work out on the practical, daily level. This was a totally new insight to me, and combined with the spiritual energy I had been accumulating in the last weeks, it threw me into a state of higher awareness. I now saw that I had been assuming that my Higher Self or my spiritual guidance could not possibly be practical, and so I felt I had to make concessions to the realities of daily life, even though that meant I had to give up being in tune with the Flow.
I realized that society’s conventional paradigm maintained that there is a large gulf or disconnection between the spiritual realm and the practical world. Thus one couldn’t get by in the practical world by paying attention to one’s spiritual guidance. But now in my illumined state, I realized that the conventional paradigm was wrong. There was such a deep connection between the two realms that my highest spiritual guidance, my Higher Self, knew what was going on in the practical daily world and could lead me to my right place in it. There I would not only be doing God’s work and have the energy and joy of being connected with the Spirit, but I would also be getting by in the practical world.
I realized the reason I had not been able to follow my divine guidance, and had thereby lost my energy, is because my Higher Self wanted me to do something that I considered totally impractical: quit Dartmouth College. I had finished almost four years of college, and what would I do if I quit? I had no skills and almost no money. I realized I would not even let such an impractical message enter my conscious awareness because I did not feel that my spiritual guidance was practical.
I saw that my idea of what was practical was based on my paradigm of how the world operated. Because I had been taught all my life that there was no connection between my spiritual guidance and the daily material world, I did not think, and hence did not feel, that my spiritual guidance was able to help me live practically in the world. Instead, I believed in society’s attitude that I had to be practical because spiritual guidance could not be trusted with life’s most important decisions. If, however, I had been programmed with the correct paradigm that our spiritual guidance is practical, then I would have felt that following my guidance was practical. And so I would have felt comfortable following my Higher Self even if it told me to quit college.
As soon as I realized these things, I knew I could follow my divine guidance and quit Dartmouth College. Because my Higher Self was practical and could lead me to what I needed in the daily world, as long as I followed the guidance of my Higher Self I would get by in the daily world. Only my cultural conditioning had prevented me from following my divine guidance and quitting school earlier.
If my situation had been different, there might have been other considerations that would have made me think twice about following this message. But, unlike most of my classmates, my parents had never spent a cent on my college education, and so I did not have any responsibility to them to finish. Moreover, I had left high school without ever graduating to go to college, so leaving college without graduating did not seem strange; it felt in character with the way my life progressed. Nor did I feel I was harming Dartmouth (who gave me the scholarship) as I was not quitting for selfish reasons but to help others; the college also had a long tradition of celebrating its dropouts.
The next day I felt the energy of being divinely guided as I went to the Dartmouth registrar to tell them I wanted to drop out of school. There was not a single doubt about whether I was doing the right thing, and I felt so joyous. The registrar seemed accustomed to first year students wanting to drop out, but he seemed to think it was unusual for students with only a year left to do it. The registrar tried to convince me that it made more sense to finish the term, even if I stopped working and just failed all my classes – because if I dropped out in the middle of term, I would have to pay for the next term on my own if I ever wanted to come back to college. I politely listened to what he said, but I ignored it: I had been told by God to quit, and I was going to follow that message.
The registrar said he could not force me to go to a psychologist, but he asked me nicely to go, and I shrugged my shoulders and said sure. It turned out I knew the school psychologist: he led what in the seventies were called encounter sessions for normal students to explore their feelings and relationships. I had been in one of these groups before I made the major outer changes that accompanied the spiritual changes I had made. He was amazed by the changes in me, and he said he could believe that God had told me to quit college.
People in our culture have a spectrum of reactions when they hear someone claim to have gotten divine messages: some find the idea scary; many say anyone who claims to get these messages is schizophrenic or crazy, and some spiritually oriented people even find it glamorous.
Some spiritually oriented people react very positively, and even enviously, when they hear of other people getting divine messages. These spiritual people think people who get divine messages are special in some way and wished they received these messages too. By the time I got my first divine message, I did not feel getting them was anything special. I had been working with many people who got them quite often and based many of their major decisions on them. I had also spent years focusing my awareness on becoming more spiritual and becoming receptive to spiritual guidance.
The other thing for these spiritual people to keep in mind is that the way you deal with your day to day relationships is much more important than any divine guidance. Dealing with your continuing relationships in a way that sees them as an integral part of your spiritual path and guidance in following your flow will have a much more lasting impact on your life than divine guidance. (I talk about this in the last two chapters of this book.) Making these day to day connections is so important, and less spooky in a way, that if you never get messages from God, you should not feel you are missing anything. In fact, getting these messages is often disruptive to one’s normal life, and you have reason to feel lucky if you never get them.
On the other side of the spectrum are people who think anyone who claims to get these voices is certifiably crazy. If you think that the naturalistic worldview explains everything, then obviously you will believe there is no way people are actually getting voices from God. Some spiritual people say scientists are close-minded, but scientists have studied vast amounts of spiritual claims over time, and they just do not see any evidence to support them. The scientists would be stupid to listen to people like me when the basic scientific program of explaining everything in terms of the movement of matter and energy has worked so well from their point of view for the last three hundred and fifty years.
Obviously anyone who thinks that this higher energy does not exist would say that I am fooling myself. It is legitimate to worry about the tendency of people to fool themselves as so many people do that and recent evidence seems to show this is built into our physiological nature and the way we process information. If a scientist fools himself into thinking something is true, there are other scientists in the community who will eventually point out what is wrong with his ideas. There is no such good mechanism from keeping spiritual people from fooling themselves.
On the other hand, I had very good incentive not to fool myself: I was not engaged in some academic exercise, I was putting my life on the line. It might help to know that I came from a poor family. After I started doing paper routes in the seventh grade, my father often borrowed money from me, and he ended up owing me thousands when I left for college. I was a very good intellectual, but other than that, I had absolutely no job skills. And in 1977, it was long before banks started giving everyone credit cards, and I did not have one. So I had no safety net; if this higher energy was not really there, or I did not follow its messages correctly, I was screwed. If the scientists were right and these messages were delusional, it was better for me to figure that out as soon as possible.
A week after quitting college, I didn’t know what I should do next. I only had the guidance to quit college; I didn’t have any message of what to do afterwards. To make matters worse, I didn’t even know how to tell what I should do. It didn’t seem smart to listen to what society said was practical, after all it would never have allowed me to quit college. So there had to be a different way of discovering my next move. But what was this different way and how come it hadn’t already told me what I should be doing now? During one of my meditations, a line from the Tao Te Ching bubbled up from a deeper part of my consciousness: “Muddy water, let it settle.” This line from the Taoist classic meant that if I stopped worrying, then my mind would settle and a clear intuition about my next move could be seen in the depths of my spiritual consciousness. While my spiritual guidance had a direct grasp of what was right for me to do, all my thinking and worrying was not allowing me to be receptive to it. Instead, like mud in agitated waters, the worrying made it impossible to perceive the intuitive depths. So I had to stop worrying and instead get calm and receptive so that I could be sensitive to my spiritual guidance.
After I understood this, I immediately felt better. Even though I didn’t know what I should do next, at least I understood the process to become aware of it. I stopped worrying about the future and cleared my mind, thus becoming receptive to my spiritual guidance.
A few days later a clear message came to me: “Go to California.” I trusted this message as it had such a deep stillness and purity to it that it could only have come from my Higher Self which intuitively knew my right place.
I had discovered what I should do next, but how could I get to California? I was in Vermont; I had no car, no money, and I was on crutches because my knee was injured. While getting a job would have been the obvious thing to do, I didn’t feel it was the right thing to do. I was so tired from the intense fasting and praying I had been doing in the past several months that I needed to recover. For this reason I felt getting a job would injure me on some deep level.
I had quit college inspired by the insight that if I listened to my spiritual guidance, I could also get by in my practical daily life. Thus, I did not have to do things which destroyed my connection to the Flow in order to make it in the world. If I got a job now I would be giving up on my insight that a person could follow her spiritual guidance and still make it in the practical world.
Yet a large part of me wanted to forget all this flowing stuff and just get a job. If I had a job, I would be assured of earning money and getting to California. While I was sure my insight was correct and the spiritual realm was intimately connected to the practical world, I still had not seen this insight work out in my daily life. So parts of me were understandably nervous about it. How could I be positively sure it would all work out in my daily life if I hadn’t experienced it yet? I couldn’t. But as much as I wanted to go back to the old ways and comfortably sink into practical mindedness, I wasn’t going to let my worries get the better of me.
Instead I just rested and recovered. Moreover, as I had received the message that I was supposed to go to California and it didn’t seem right to get a job, I assumed that the universe was going to arrange a way for me to get there. That meant that I should be ready to travel when the time came. Therefore I mailed all my books to my parents’ house and disposed of everything else that I couldn’t easily take with me.
In the month since I received the message to go to California, I had gotten ready for my trip by disposing of all of my non-essential possessions. Now all I had left was my tent and a few personal belongings. One morning I had an overwhelming feeling that it was time to take my tent down and pack everything up so that I would be ready to go that very day. As I had no way of getting to California though, I didn’t trust this very intense feeling. I felt I would look foolish if I got all ready and nothing happened. So even though I felt an extremely intense feeling to do all the final preparations for the trip to California, I didn’t do them.
An hour later, my former Psychosynthesis teacher drove up and told me that he had been offered a job teaching at a college in California. He was flying there, and he needed his car driven to the college where he was going to teach. Since I was the only person he trusted with his car, he asked me to drive it there for him. Of course I agreed as this was my way to get to California.
My former teacher needed to leave right away. As I hurried to take down my tent, I understood why I had felt so strongly that I should get all ready to leave. My deep feelings were more sensitive to the Flow than I thought possible.
I was elated as I drove away. I had followed the Flow totally and it had really worked. Now I had a much better way of getting to California than if I had gotten a job and made money.
The idea I could listen to my spiritual guidance and succeed in the practical world was now more than an insight; it was something that had showed itself to be wonderfully true.
The trip to California turned out much better than I could possibly have imagined. Not only was I provided with a car, but my former teacher also gave me more expense money than I needed. Furthermore, after I stopped to visit my family in Detroit, my brother and sister decided to come to California with me. Once I arrived at my destination, I started talking to the first person I met. It turned out this person was a dorm supervisor, and he offered to let me stay in a dorm room until my former Psychosynthesis teacher showed up. Finally, as I walked into the dorm, I saw a very beautiful woman. I was immediately attracted to her, and more importantly, she was attracted to me. In the next week we had a very fun time. My whole trip had turned out much better than I could possibly have planned with my practical mind.
My trip to California had been a very nice vacation, but I was ready to get back to work and do something to help the world. However, I didn’t know what the universe wanted me to do. Instead of worrying and using my practical mind, I knew I should be receptive to my spiritual guidance. So I prayed, asking the universe to tell me what to do next. I had earlier discovered that one of the most important rules of being receptive to one’s spiritual guidance is to put everything else aside when it is time to receive a spiritual message. So a few nights later when I was at a party, and I felt it was my time to receive a message, I left the party right away. I went to my room and became calm and quiet.
The message said that many spiritual leaders have personality flaws and emotional problems which cause them to misinterpret and distort true spirituality. These distorted teachings then make spirituality look silly and self-absorbed, and so most people in our culture justifiably treat alternative spirituality as a joke. The message said my job was make this spiritual message understandable and compelling by clearing away my personality flaws so that I could present it purely and cleanly.
I had gotten a message saying I should be a spiritual teacher, but this message said nothing about what I should do next in my life. A few days later I traveled to Santa Barbara. The next morning I woke up with a dream saying I should hurry back to Hanover, New Hampshire, where I had gone to college. This dream felt like it was scooped out from a deeper, more aware part of me, so I trusted it immediately.
I didn’t have any reason to go back East, but the dream was very clear that I should go back as quickly as possible, which meant flying there. I didn’t have enough money for a plane ticket, but I remembered that five years ago I had lent my father money from my paper routes, and the last of that money was just enough to fly back to New York and take a bus to New Hampshire. This was the final remnant of my money and while I had never felt right asking for it before, this time it seemed the right thing to do.
I was somewhat reluctant to fly back when I couldn’t figure out any reason to hurry, and I could easily hitchhike or get a drive-away car, but the dream was clear that I should go back as quickly as possible. Furthermore, whenever I would stop and tell myself to be reasonable, the energy abandoned me and I felt adrift. So I spent the last of my money and quickly arrived in New Hampshire, wondering what the hurry was, but also knowing from my California trip that the universe arranged things better than I could when following society’s ideas of how I should run my life.
The next chapter will discuss the person I met within an hour of arriving in New Hampshire and why I had to hurry there to meet her. In the rest of this chapter I will discuss some basic principles of dealing with the question of whether some message is from God or not. These principles come from my thirty-five years of experience with following divine messages plus a book I am writing on the history of spiritual discernment in the Western world. (There was very little on the subject in Indian philosophy because most of Indian spirituality does not emphasize doing the Universe’s work in this world; instead, it emphasizes the experience of Oneness with the divine. I found little on the topic in Chinese spirituality. Most non-literate cultures emphasize following spiritual messages, but there is almost nothing written from these cultures on spiritual discernment.) To write this book, I read hundreds of writings of the greatest thinkers from the Eastern Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, and modern alternative spiritual traditions.
The most striking thing on reading experts on spiritual discernment is that some of these experts on the subject advocated simple rules of discernment that other people who got divine messages had to ignore. For example, it was common for Protestant experts to say that God would never command anything that contradicted something in the Bible. This rule seems very sensible, but some women in the nineteenth century felt called by God to be preachers even though the Bible is explicit that women should not do that. Julia Foote and Jarena Lee both believed the Bible did not allow for women to be preachers but also felt called by God to preach.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and one of the most sophisticated of the thinkers on spiritual discernment, said a person should never follow a message if it meant breaking an irrevocable commitment. So if you were married with young children, and felt God was telling you to leave your family and spend the rest of your live meditating alone, you should not take the message as from God. This principle seemed reasonable, but it too was violated by other people. The most interesting case was Blessed Marie of the Incarnation. She lived in seventeenth century in France, and felt called from an early age to be a nun. But her parents forced her to marry someone. She had a baby and then her husband died. When her son was felt eleven years old, she left him with her sister and entered a nunnery. Her son would scream outside the gates of the nunnery, saying “I want my momma back, I want my momma back.” Blessed Marie saw this screaming as a temptation and persevered in her calling. Later the son became a priest and agreed with her that it was a good thing she left him.
Another simple rule experts say was to not do anything immoral. The founders of Findhorn community, one of the most important New Age communities, violated this rule. Peter Caddy was told by a divine voice that a woman married to another man was his soulmate. He pursued this woman and broke up her marriage. For a long time she was not allowed to see her children, but also from that came the important community of Findhorn. I learnt many things from them, as did many other people.