(Reporting live from Santa Fe) – Ever feel like your life is filled with so many Heavenly blessings you’ve run out of fingers and toes to count them all? That might seem an odd way to begin a story that nearly ended up in the emergency room, but sometimes it goes that way.
Here’s how it started: Due to a whole other series of mind-blowing Heavenly blessings, I was offered the amazing opportunity to come to Santa Fe to be interviewed about my soon-to-be-released book (9 days & counting!) and to meet a couple of writer-heroes of mine, Nouk Sanchez and Tomas Viera, authors of Take Me To Truth. Their book lives permanently on my nightstand, along with A Course in Miracles.
The day before I was to leave for Santa Fe, my right eye started to hurt for no reason. So I took out my contacts, thinking that would fix the problem. Wrong. The eye grew more and more irritated as the day wore on; by nightfall it was red and swollen and streaming tears, and by bedtime it hurt like holy hell. In total darkness the pain was bad enough, but the faintest glimmer of light brought what felt like a parade of stiletto heels stomping on my eye.
Ooh baby, it was gonna be a long night.
Around midnight I started toying with the idea of the emergency room; by 2am I was starting to wonder whether I’d have to cancel my trip? That meant passing up a (literally) God-given opportunity; it also meant I’d be pissing away $1000 or so on nonrefundable travel arrangements.
On the other hand, I was now virtually blind in one eye, unable to function except in total darkness and nearly mad with pain. Perhaps it was not the best idea to drive myself to LA, get on a plane and go to another city for 5 days.
Well I had no friggin’ idea what to do.
One thing I did know: I want to wake up from the dream of 3-D existence more than anything else in this world. And sometimes the best way to help do that is when your back is to the wall and you’re completely out of options. So I let go of all my own opinions and fears about what I was supposed to do in that situation, and I started to pray.
But I was determined not to merely replace the dream of pain with a dream of healing. (After all, I want to wake up from all dreams.) I didn’t pray to feel better. I just handed the whole mess over to Spirit with no strings attached, and asked only for an unmistakable sign whether I should keep my date in Santa Fe or not.
Then something curious happened. Right away the pain sort of dissolved and I fell into a kind of interim state (it definitely wasn’t sleep). 2 hours later, just before the alarm went off at 4am, I snapped out of it and realized my eye felt at least 50% better. Definitely bearable now. Taking that as my unmistakable sign, I rolled out of bed and hit the road.
But as if surrender and spontaneous physical healing were not enough, there was actually another (and far deeper) healing connected to this event.
You know how sometimes you don’t realize how much you’ve changed or grown until all of a sudden you’re thrown into a situation that would’ve been your worst nightmare in the past but now isn’t?
To say I’ve always been deeply self conscious about my looks would be kind of a crazy understatement. I’ve caused myself needless decades of pain and shame over what Spirit has referred to as ‘my self-imposed prison of ugliness.’ And I know the whole thing is stupid, but have always been unable to get at the roots of those deeply held beliefs to be able to heal them.
But as I wandered the LA airport with a blood red eye, glasses and no makeup – not my best look, I assure you – I was surprised to realize my appearance didn’t matter to me at all. At all.
It was as if the door to my prison cell had been hanging wide open for ages, but only now did it occur to me it was ok to step outside (blinking in the unfamiliar and still somewhat painful light). That I was free at last.
Oh, the interview: Fabulous. And meeting all of those wonderful people: Even more fabulous. So fabulous, in fact, that in September Nouk, Tomas AND I will be putting on a 3 day seminar together here in California.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Holy crap, this spiritual journey is fun.
Past-life murder and present day forgiveness: The ultimate do-over
I remember bits and pieces of some of my more colorful past lives. I never get the full story, though – just quick, disconnected flashes lacking any kind of meaningful context.
I know I was once the leader of a secret religious order called Lamb of God. But I only see images of torchlight flickering on roughhewn walls; of long white tunics and heavy crosses worn around the neck. It would be nice to know a little more, but that’s all I have.
And then there’s a shamanic episode a couple of centuries later that took place on Navajo land: I see images of a black horse galloping at me, its rider silhouetted against the sun; I’m raising my arms, and wearing a long cape that seems to be made of shiny black feathers.
In general, I’m not all that fascinated by the idea of past lives, so I haven’t gone out of my way to find out more. I don’t know, maybe that’s because I tend to remember less about past lives and more about past deaths.
I’ve been burned at the stake. Shot in the back. But before I talk about past death, I want to go back a minute and tell you more about that shamanic memory. It took place at Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly, during an amazing 5 day InnerVision journey I did with Fran in 2008. (if you don’t know who Fran is, see any of the blog entries listed under ‘Sedona’s spiritual connection.’)
We toured a great big loop through Arizona and Utah. It was amazing – someday maybe I’ll write the whole story as an epic 5-parter. We hit lots of well known sacred spots on that trip: Valley of the Gods, Monument Valley etc., as well as some lesser known areas like Mexican Hat.
Fran had long been telling me about Mexican Hat. She was afraid of that place; she knew she had a deep connection to that very troubled land, and that she was supposed to do something powerful there but had never felt ready. She told me the land had been raped – mined for uranium which was then processed at nearby mills, leaving the area with permanently polluted groundwater.
InnerVision journeys are never planned ahead of time. Fran just goes wherever Spirit leads. As we approached Mexican Hat, her description of its painful history grew more heated and angry. I was expecting to see a ravaged landscape, but as we got out of the car the place struck me as astonishingly beautiful, a study in red rocks and green (don’t drink it) water.
Suddenly she stopped in mid-rant. She was remembering she’d been ‘told’ long ago that she would one day bring someone there who would heal the land. And she just now realized that someone was me.
Time stopped and I watched myself out-of-body as I said to her: “To heal the land, we need to love the rapists.”
I wasn’t entirely sure at the time what I meant by that. But the other night I realized that this episode actually connects to another one, a past-death memory. Here’s that past-death story as it’s told in my book:
…The next thing I knew, I was in three places at once. Part of me was reliving my own murder from a previous lifetime, a brutal rape and strangulation. Yet it wasn’t nearly as scary or disturbing as you’d expect, because a second part of me was peacefully watching it unfold from a detached bird’s-eye viewpoint and the third part of me knew I was safely lying in my own bed the whole time.
‘I’m being shown this for a reason.’ This was the thought that filled my mind, and I knew it was the truth. ‘I’m supposed to forgive this guy.’
Yet it didn’t seem to require forgiveness in the usual sense of the word. I didn’t get that I was supposed to be saying, “Oh, there, there, it’s ok that you’re murdering me.”
It seemed I was being asked to remain open-hearted and peacefully present while he did this awful thing. So I did. And as I made the choice to do it, I dimly sensed that this decision to stay loving in the face of hatred was having a big effect, shuffling the deck on my own past or future timeline, although I couldn’t begin to say how.
This past-death experience occurred shortly before I was introduced to A Course in Miracles. Now I recognize that it was asking me to practice forgiveness as defined by the Course: To completely overlook the imagined transgressions of this world – no matter how evil or terrifying they might seem – and to respond only with love.
And what’s the payoff, you ask, for responding with love instead of attack or defense? The payoff is huge. Probably more awesome than you or I can comprehend, in fact.
When I made the choice to offer only love and peace to that rapist-murderer (instead of responding with terror and rage as I had done the first time around), I felt a massive shift that I described at the time as ‘shuffling the deck.’ But it really felt as if time itself was collapsing, shortening my journey immeasurably. I had the strong impression, in fact, that it was rewriting my past or future to leave out certain painful portions because those lessons were learned now.
A Heavenly do-over, if you will. Pretty powerful stuff.
So, back to Mexican Hat. Could that ravaged land really be healed through the simple action of choosing to love its ‘rapists’? I’m thinking yes. If time and destiny fall like dominoes when love is chosen over fear, surely the Earth can be healed by that same gently loving choice.
After all, that’s another of the Course’s basic tenets: We’re all One with everything that is. Which presumably includes every rock and stream. Heal ourselves as we heal the rapists, and in that simple choice the land is automatically healed too. So can you imagine just how powerful love really is?
I don’t know; something to think about.
The Meaning of Christmas – random thoughts from a Jewish Buddhist Voice-Hearer
Let me state this right up front: My relationship with Christ has always been complicated.
Messed up, really.
I was born into an Orthodox Jewish family that was still very busy mourning the effects of World War II when I arrived on the scene in 1958. Christ was a complete stranger in our household, Christianity seen as nothing but a dark catalyst for terrifying world events.
My resulting relationship with Jesus is summed up in this story (from the book) called He Who Must Not Be Named:
…On the one hand He looked like a nice enough guy—His blond, blue-eyed portrait smiling down on my sleepovers at the neighbor kids’ house. And of course it was widely known that if you believed in Him, Santa brought you all kinds of magical swag on Christmas.
Yet He was also the reason I wasn’t allowed into some of the other kids’ houses. I was a dirty Jew, or so their mothers informed me, and Jesus wouldn’t like it if I spread those cooties around.
Meanwhile, school brought a whole different kind of challenge. I learned nothing at all about Christ or Christianity at home or in my Hebrew school studies, except that He was somehow associated with unspeakable evil, and so the name of Jesus was never to be uttered aloud.
“Why? What happens if you say it?” I figured it must be bad because nobody would ever tell me. Maybe saying Jesus’ name was what killed those six million Jews?
This was back in the day when public school kids were routinely made to sing religious songs, so for these occasions I was forced to adopt a weird sort of ventriloquist’s dummy approach:
Wag-wag(soundlessly my jaw moved up and down)
Loves me, yes I know
For the Bible tells me so.
…………………….Yeah.
Does it seem insane to you that anyone would teach a child to equate Jesus with Voldemort?
Well, you’re probably right about that. But cultural context is everything.
The Jews who taught these lessons were not the slightest bit nefarious in their intentions. Just scared. Traumatized. And deeply worried that their bacon cheeseburger-loving American offspring were in danger of forgetting recent cataclysmic history.
Now fast-forward several decades to our post 9-11 world, and that 2007 story about the Muslim Mickey Mouse with his own TV show. And we think: How could anyone be so evil? And are they insane, using Mickey to teach children to hate and murder?
Well, yeah. They’ve already proven they’re at least a little insane, if only by ignoring the global reach of Disney’s fearsome legal team.
But the very embodiment of evil? I’m gonna go out on a limb here to say: I don’t think so. I think maybe they’re just wounded citizens of a deeply damaged world, trying to pass their belief system on to their kids.
So. Back to the meaning of Christmas. (Or maybe it’s the meaning of Christ that I’m really after.) It’s taken me a half-century to undo all that well-intentioned cultural conditioning from my early years. But I don’t regret any of it, because that outsider status has allowed me to approach the subject with fresh eyesight.
For what it’s worth, here’s what I think:
There’s no such thing as pure evil. There are only degrees of damage and desperately misguided ways of coping with it.
And let’s face it, we’re all at least a little damaged and a little misguided.
So my personal practice – all year long, but especially now during the Christmas season – is to overlook the damage and the mistakes as best I can, and try to see only the Oneness and perfection that lie deep within each person. I’ve been told (and see no reason to disbelieve) that everybody who’s ever lived is equally perfect and worthy of unconditional love. So, what the hey, I’m giving it my best shot.
Do I slip and forget? Constantly. That’s why they call it a practice. But on the days when I manage it, I’m enveloped in peace and joy and a sense of…holiness, really, that feels like warm cocoa wrapped in a cashmere blanket. Or something like that. To be honest there are no words to describe the feeling, except to say it’s real good.
So I think that’s the meaning of Christmas. Joy. Oneness. Letting the world off the hook for its collective “sins.” From that guy in the SUV who steals my parking spot at the mall (dammit, he SAW me waiting), to the Muslim Mickey who teaches hatred to yet another generation of children.
I’m hoping to let a whole lot more people off the hook as the season progresses.
Because practice makes perfect, you know?
Forgiveness, Trust and YouTube
I hired this amazing video guy and last week we shot a really cool YouTube video promo for my book. He did a great job, I think. It’s fun, it’s atmospheric, and at the end it says ‘Available wherever books are sold’ and then lists my website, www.unlikelymessenger.com.
Beautiful. The only problem is, the book isn’t available wherever books are sold. In fact, it isn’t yet available, period.
And that website address isn’t even live yet, either. Oops.
But I wasn’t worried, because I figured I’d hold the video for a bit and release it when all systems were go. (Hopefully within another week or 2 the book will be available for preorder on Amazon, and the website will be up as well.)
But the video guy uploaded it to YouTube without telling me. And I found out because I saw it splashed across my Facebook page. And my Twitter page.
Then he needed to tweak the file format for best viewability. So he kept uploading new versions of the video – and Twitter and Facebook kept breathlessly notifying everybody about each one. So people kept going up there to view it.
The first video got 66 hits within just a couple of hours. Then the 2nd video got 29. Then the 3rd and 4th got a few each.
Then he put up a 5th video. And deleted videos 1 through 4, losing me over 100 page hits and some 5 star ratings in the process, and leaving a boneyard of broken links all over Twitter and Facebook.
So it was kind of exciting but mostly horrifying to watch this slow motion WTF train wreck taking place.
But I’ll tell you what, it was a prime forgiveness opportunity.
I’ve been practicing A Course in Miracles for a few years now, so usually a forgiveness situation like this is a no-brainer: Side with the person and not the circumstance. The Course says the person is in Oneness with God; eternally perfect and entirely innocent of whatever crime I think he’s committed. And the circumstance is nothing more than an imaginary fever dream.
All I know is, I feel deeply peaceful whenever I side with the holy innocence of the person. And I feel like hell whenever I don’t. So that’s why I’m usually so diligent about practicing forgiveness and overlooking the imaginary circumstances. I prefer to feel good.
Except here’s the thing: As you know, if you’ve been following this saga from the start, back in 2006 I was informed by Spirit that I was going to write books. Becoming an author was just about the furthest thing from my mind at that point, believe me.
But eventually I embraced the job offer, and have been engaged in this Blues Brothers-esque ‘Mission From God’ ever since.
So there’s a certain expectation of a little Heavenly help, here. And that YouTube debacle didn’t exactly qualify as helpful. So when I sat down to apply forgiveness to the video guy, I found I couldn’t get past the pointless mess created around the video’s release.
I had to stop right there and remind myself that I really have no friggin’ idea of what’s the best way to help my book find its audience. Or anything else, for that matter. I’m still caught up in the fever dream; how the hell do I know if 100 hits and some positive reviews make any difference at all to the effectiveness of that promo video? Or whether that video will make any difference to the success of the book?
So last night I just surrendered the whole thing to Spirit, and trusted that everything has been happening exactly as it’s meant to be. I had no other options, really.
And in the resulting ocean of peace that washed over me, I was able to connect with the divine Oneness of the video guy’s true nature and forget that whole Twitter/Facebook/YouTube mess.
And I discovered in the process that the video guy is holy, magnificent, radiant and totally perfect exactly as he is.
And I’m good with that.
POSTSCRIPT
This morning Video Guy informed me he could restore all my page hits and 5 star ratings to the remaining 5th version of the video. So I’m back up to 115 views, a half dozen 5 star ratings, and no lasting damage done.
I love it when I learn important lessons and it all works out happily ever after. Don’t you?
(to view the 5th and final version of the video in question, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3saOMax3xM )
The Philadelphia experiment – part 3 (The explosive conclusion)
So. My vow to ‘get on with it already’, (that whole Earthly role and purpose thing) newly made, I left Philadelphia and headed for home.
And within 36 hours was contacted by the first of those Guys on Twitter (see ‘The Grudge’ for more about Guys on Twitter). Perhaps ‘contacted’ is not really the word for it. He reached out through the Twitterverse, grabbed my full attention and became an unregulated, unfiltered spiritual conduit, pouring massive quantities of direct Heavenly communication my way.
It was beautiful beyond description.
Naturally he had no idea he was doing it; the supplier of that kind of spiritual linkup is usually the last to know. The whole thing went on for over 2 weeks; it was way too much of a good thing, unfortunately – something like being hit continuously with a Heavenly firehose.
I spent hours each day in anguished prayer, just to keep from drowning in it.
If I sound like I’m complaining…well I guess I sort of am. Although it was glorious in concept and sometimes wonderful in actual fact, the overall event was really, really painful.
(The Divine communication itself was perfect, pure, gentle and completely loving. How could it have been anything else? But I wasn’t able to absorb such overwhelming nonstop light, so I experienced the gap between my own human frailty and that limitless Heavenly perfection as intense emotional pain. I know. Bummer.)
After at least 10 days of letting me flail around in complete WTF confusion (and more than a little humiliation over this peculiar, one-sided ecstatic experience that I was/was not sharing with a total stranger), Twitter Guy finally admitted that this sort of thing happens with him all the time.
He is, in his own words, a ‘catalyst for other peoples’ explosive awakenings.’
The operative word here being ‘explosive.’
What was this explosive awakening like, you ask? Like somebody dropped a brick building on me.
And everything that was fragile got smashed.
After it was finally over I spent another month or so sorting through the rubble. Then one day I suddenly realized:
Hey, I’m not scared anymore. I don’t mind if people find out about me. And I don’t care about hiding in shadows, either.
I think I might even be ready for that Earthly role and purpose thing.
So I changed my Twitter username from @carrietriffet to @unlikelymesngr the same day, as a first step out of that spiritual closet.
And the rest, as they say, is history.
(The moral of the story, of course, my darlings, is this: Be careful what you ask for. You’ll very likely get it.)