Introduction
Chapter 101: All You See Is Yourself
Chapter 102: Man Was Created in God’s Image — But What Does That Mean?
Chapter 103: He Is Having an Experience with God
Chapter 104: The Teaching
Chapter 105: The Three Levels of Thought — Charting a Course Through Reality
Chapter 106: Insights on Consciousness
Chapter 107: Creating a Consciousness of the Divine
Chapter 108: The Illusion of Divinity — Is God Just a Concept?
Chapter 109: All That You See Is Yourself
Chapter 110: Empathy-The Mystery of the Path Between You and Me
Section Six: Larch Mountain and the Grammar of Awakening
Introduction
where is it?
Chapter 101: All You See Is Yourself
I used to believe that the world outside my window was simply there—fixed, objective, waiting patiently for me to notice it. It took decades of unraveling, and a mountain besides, to understand that this was never true. What I call “the world” is not a thing I encounter. It is a thing I construct, moment by moment, out of the raw material of sensation, memory, and fear.
The realization did not arrive all at once. It began, as these things often do, with something small: a startled glimpse of my own reflection in a window, a mirror, a fleeting pane of glass. That flicker of unexpected recognition always stirred something deeper than surprise—a discomfort, a curiosity, a question I couldn’t quite shake.
Who is it that I am seeing?
Is it merely my body, my image, or something entirely internal and imagined?
This mundane interaction with my own reflection, I would come to learn, mirrors a much larger truth about how we perceive not only ourselves but the entire world around us. At every moment, what we see, feel, and believe isn’t the external world or reality itself—it’s the mind’s exquisite, personalized reconstruction of it.
Immanuel Kant understood this centuries before I stumbled onto it in my own broken way. He argued that we never encounter the world as it truly is—the noumenon, the thing-in-itself. We only ever encounter the phenomenon: the world as filtered through the categories our minds impose upon it—time, space, causality. We do not see reality. We see our mind’s rendering of it, projected outward and mistaken for the original.
Plato told the same truth in the language of fire and shadow. Chained inside his cave, humanity watches shapes flicker against stone and calls them real, never suspecting that what dances before their eyes is only a projection—light bent around shapes they cannot see directly. I lived inside that cave for the better part of sixteen years, addicted and afraid, watching shadows of my own making and calling them enemies, calling them fate, calling them the world.
Neuroscience arrives at a similar threshold from a different direction. Perception, we now know, is not direct input; it is interpretation. The eyes take in light, but the brain processes and reconstructs that light into coherent images to make sense of what surrounds us. As Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Gerald Edelman argued, this process is inherently interpretive—which means each of us, quite literally, inhabits a slightly different inner reality. Extend this understanding to other people, and something unsettling comes into focus: no one sees us as we see ourselves. Their brains, informed by their own histories and imaginations, construct an entirely different “you” than the one you carry within your own mind.
There is a simpler way to say what Kant and Plato and Edelman took volumes to argue: the environment is a mirror. A cluttered mind perceives a chaotic world. A focused mind perceives order and opportunity where the untrained eye sees only obstacles. Change the internal landscape, and the reflection in the external world changes with it—not because the granite has moved, but because the eyes doing the looking have.
The poet James Allen put this more elegantly than I ever could:
“Mind, the master power that molds and makes, and man is mind. Evermore he takes the tools of thought, and thinking what he wills, creates a thousand joys, a thousand ills. He thinks in secret, yet it comes to pass. Environment is but his looking glass.”
I did not have this language in the years I am describing. I only had the ache of a life that seemed to conspire against me, without once suspecting that I was holding the tool doing the conspiring.
What both the philosopher and the mystic eventually discover is unsettling and liberating in equal measure: there is no clean separation between the observer and the observed. Even physics has arrived at this threshold. In the quantum world, the act of observation is not passive—it participates in determining what is observed. The observer does not stand outside the experiment, taking notes from a safe distance. The observer is inside it, woven into the outcome.
I did not need a physics degree to eventually feel this in my body. Long before I had language for it, I sensed that the people who frightened me, the situations that wounded me, the God I could not find—all of it bore my fingerprints. I was not merely encountering a hostile world. I was co-authoring one, using the only pen I had: my perception, shaped by trauma, colored by longing, narrated by a fractured self that had not yet learned to say “I.”
Consider something as ordinary as watching the sun rise. If my mood is good, the sun is a welcome friend, casting a warm and comforting glow over the day ahead. If I greet it with a bad attitude, the sun itself remains unchanged—indifferent, constant—yet my perception of it colors the entire day with a negativity that was never in the light itself, only in me. The sun is a mirror. So is everything else.
This same principle governs the quieter, more difficult work of forgiveness. When I think of an estranged friend and choose to forgive them, I have not changed the friend. I have changed my internal atmosphere. Forgiveness is an alchemical process—it transforms the emotional landscape and offers a sense of relief that has nothing to do with whether the other person ever learns of it. The friend might never know the forgiveness was extended. The profound change occurs entirely within me. This is the gift forgiveness gives: not to the other, but to the self doing the forgiving.
This is the quiet, almost unbearable truth beneath the teaching that would later arrive on Larch Mountain, fully formed, in a single unmediated instant: all that I see, and will ever see, unto eternity, is myself. Not because nothing else exists—other people are real, granite is real, rivers are real. But what I make of them, the meaning I assign, the story I tell about their significance in my life, is always, without exception, mine. I am both the painter and the canvas believing itself to be looking at someone else’s painting.
To understand this is not to retreat into solipsism, congratulating oneself on being the only mind in the universe. It is closer to the opposite. When I recognize that my perception of you is shaped by my own history, my own wounds, my own hunger for meaning, I am finally free to ask a better question than “What is wrong with the world?” I can ask instead: “What am I bringing to this moment that I have mistaken for the moment itself?”
That single reorientation—small on paper, seismic in practice—is the foundation stone for everything that follows in this book.
I remember one evening, sitting in meditation, whispering a mantra born of a deep desire for truth. “Master teacher of the light,” I repeated slowly, seeking focus, seeking surrender. What followed was a shift of breathtaking magnitude. I had a choice in that moment: continue steering my mind along its usual grooves, or release control entirely.
I chose release.
What unfolded was an exhilarating rush that moved me beyond myself, beyond identity, into a space of infinite silence. I was home in emptiness, my essence merging with something vast and unnamable. A joyous “voice” emerged through me, affirming truths I had never understood before—how perception binds us, and how freedom comes only in its mastery. One statement echoed in my mind for years afterward: “You can’t be real.” It was not a threat. It was an invitation, reminding me that the ego is not the truth, only a structure obscuring the vast reality of interconnectedness beneath it.
Before I could understand what it meant to be made in the image of something larger than myself, before I could make sense of the voices that once narrated my life in the third person, before I could stand on a mountain and watch the walls of the self dissolve, I first had to accept this: the world I feared, the world I fled from, the world I nearly died trying to escape, was never simply out there. It was, in more ways than my younger self could bear to know, a mirror.
And mirrors, as I would come to learn, can be healed.
What follows in these pages is the story of how that healing began—and how one ordinary man, chained to his own shadows for the better part of sixteen years, came to stand in the light long enough to recognize it as his own.
Chapter 102: Man Was Created in God’s Image — But What Does That Mean?
“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.”
— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
If perception is a mirror, then the oldest sentence in the Western spiritual tradition takes on a different weight: man was created in God’s image. For most of my life, I understood this as a claim about anatomy—a God with hands, eyes, a face somewhere behind the clouds, and myself a diminished copy of that face. It is a comforting idea for a child. It is an inadequate one for an adult standing in the wreckage of his own choices, wondering where the resemblance went.
The image spoken of in scripture was never physical. It could not have been, since the God being described has no body to copy. The image is something subtler, and I would eventually learn, something far more demanding: an essence of pure, unconditional love, compassion, and oneness. To be made in that image is not to look like God. It is to carry, buried somewhere beneath the noise of ego and injury, the capacity to love without condition, to extend compassion without calculation, to recognize unity where the untrained eye sees only separation.
This is easy to write and hard to live. We all view the world through a personal lens carved out by our experiences, beliefs, and wounds. This is as true for the devout theologian as it is for the casual seeker. When you look at a friend, a lover, or someone at odds with you, are you truly seeing them for who they are? Or are you crafting a version of them “in your image”—shaped by judgment, assumption, fear? To gaze upon another unconditionally, without judgment, is to break free of the shackles of ordinary perception and glimpse what might fairly be called God’s image: unfiltered love.
I caught my first unmistakable trace of what this meant not in a church pew but on a mountain peak, years before I could have named what was happening to me. Standing at that elevation, the wind carried the scent of pine, and every ordinary sound of the world below was muffled by a canopy of solitude I had not asked for and did not know how to refuse. A sudden stillness descended, and everything I thought I knew about myself fell away with it. In that stillness there was no separation between the one observing and the world being observed—every curve of stone, every stream, every boulder was not “out there” at all, but somehow, inexplicably, a part of me.
I will not pretend to have understood, in that moment, what I was being shown. It was brief, disorienting, and gone almost as quickly as it arrived—a rehearsal, I now recognize, for a far more complete unraveling that was still waiting for me, one I did not fully step into until I stood on Larch Mountain years later. That day belongs to a later chapter of this book, because it deserves to be told in full and not smuggled in as a footnote here. For now, it is enough to say that the peak taught me something I would spend years trying to earn back: that knowing oneself means shedding the layers of identity and judgment we mistake for selfhood, until what remains is the unity that was underneath all along.
The trouble is that this image does not arrive to us clean. It arrives filtered—through the same perceptual apparatus that colors every interaction, every glance we throw at another person, at the world, at God. If my mind is a mirror, and if that mirror is cracked by trauma, fear, and self-loathing, then the divine image I am supposedly reflecting will show up distorted, fragmented, occasionally unrecognizable. I did not fail to see God’s image in others because it was absent from them. I failed to see it because the mirror I was looking through—my own wounded perception—could not yet hold that much light without shattering further.
This is why purifying perception is not a metaphor. It is the actual, mechanical work of spiritual life. Before I could see my ex-wife with anything resembling grace, before I could look at the men who once supervised my failures at the Postal Service and feel anything but shame, I had to do the unglamorous work of healing the internal filters through which I viewed them—judgment, fear, the low hum of self-loathing that had narrated my life in the third person for sixteen years. Only once those filters were addressed did the people around me begin to look, astonishingly, like something worth calling holy.
I think this is what is actually meant by loving one’s neighbor as oneself. It is not a moral instruction so much as a description of how perception works once it has been cleaned. You cannot see the divine image in another person while refusing to acknowledge it in yourself, because you are looking through the same instrument in both directions. The self-loathing man cannot perceive glory in his neighbor any more than a scratched lens can produce a clear photograph. And the reverse holds too: heal the lens, and glory becomes difficult to avoid, showing up in the faces of people you had previously written off as enemies, strangers, or simply “them.”
I do not offer this as abstract theology. I offer it as something I have tested against the specific gravity of my own life. When I finally walked through the doors of the Postal Service’s Employee Assistance Program after years of shameful absence, Mike and Larry did not see the ghost of the addict who had once vanished without a word. They said I looked radiant. I had not changed my face. I had changed the filter through which I met the world, and in doing so, I had allowed something closer to the actual image—theirs and mine both—to come through.
What if you saw everyone this way—friends, enemies, strangers alike—as extensions of that same unconditioned love? What kind of world would you experience? What kind of person would you become? To see someone in love’s image is to accept every facet of their being, their beauty and their flaws, with grace. And when we remain in that consciousness, however briefly, the barriers between self and world begin to dissolve. You are no longer standing apart from what you observe. You become, again, a living reflection of it—the same recognition that found me once on a mountainside and would find me again, more completely, in a place I have not yet told you about.
To be made in God’s image, then, is not a static fact about human origin. It is a standing invitation, renewed each morning, to clear the mirror one more degree, so that a little more of what was always there might finally be seen. That clearing is the work of this book. And it begins, as it began for me, with a willingness to ask a single, unglamorous question each day: how will I see the world today?
Chapter 103: He Is Having an Experience with God
The Architecture of an Awakening
By the spring of 1987, I had spent sixteen years constructing an elaborate architecture of self-destruction, and I knew its blueprints by heart. Friends often remark that I have built a life of my own design—a path less traveled, winding through wild terrain rather than following the paved road. It was not a life of flashing headlines or tidy, cinematic resolutions, but a composition of change and quiet growth, a patchwork quilt of personal metamorphosis stitched together around the fulcrum of a single, seismic year: 1987, when I first encountered humanity’s, and my own, profound capacity for healing.
To grasp the magnitude of that year, I have to act as an archaeologist of my own history, unearthing the artifacts of the era before the awakening. My aim is not a polished, linear memoir gleaming with the false perfection of hindsight, but a raw, unguarded reflection—one that honors the sharp turns and deep valleys of a life often lived without skill or awareness.
The Era Before Awakening
My childhood resembled a bookshelf framed by brief daytime moments of quiet joy and countless nighttime fears, with vast, stretching silences of loneliness filling the space between. Before 1965, I felt persistently out of step with the world beyond my family’s front door. I was a small boy—precocious in some respects, behind in others, wounded and emotionally adrift—placed into social settings that felt less like communities than like battlegrounds. The playgrounds I navigated seemed built not for connection, but for survival.
When my social circle finally widened, it filled with those the world had largely overlooked: the outcasts, the dreamers, the rebels, the misunderstood souls living on the periphery. Few in number, they became my first teachers in loyalty and radical acceptance—proof that worth isn’t always visible to the naked eye.
Books became my sanctuary, particularly the boundless worlds of science fiction. In the pages of distant places, I found a comfort this world could not offer. Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land proved especially alchemic. Its protagonist, Michael Valentine Smith—an infant survivor of a failed Mars mission, raised by Martians—arrives at a profound realization: “Thou art God.”
That declaration planted a quiet, subversive seed of hope in me. It suggested that perhaps life—and even I, in my brokenness—might hold a spark of the divine. It became a psychic anchor as I navigated the treacherous waters of early life, even as I dreamed, in my own words, of escaping “this fucking rock” altogether—whether as an astronaut, an alien abductee, or through some metaphysical breach of reality.
Adolescence marked a sharp turn toward the dark. By fifteen, I had fallen into the grip of drug and alcohol abuse—a chemical numbing agent against anxiety and self-doubt that promised relief but delivered only distance. Despite the chaos within, I maintained a façade of academic excellence, hoping achievement might rescue me from my own discontent. I crushed standardized tests and secured scholarships from the University of Portland, the Oregon Scholarship Commission, and the U.S. Air Force, along with a coveted spot in the Air Force ROTC program. But the architecture of my life was built on sand. A broken relationship, mirroring the turbulence inside me, derailed everything. I abandoned my dreams of reaching the stars and plummeted back to a hard, unforgiving reality. The pharmaceutical industry held my mentally ill wife together long enough for us to marry on September 17, 1979. Eight months later, those supports failed, and she was institutionalized at the Oregon State Hospital, formerly known as Dammasch State Hospital until 1995.
The Grammar of Separation
I had been addicted since 1971, and I lived under a grim, specific fatalism: I would die an active addict, or take my own life, before turning thirty—assuming the disease didn’t finish the job first. What I could not conceive of, what no part of my imagination had been trained to hold, was survival. I had prepared meticulously for dying. I had made no preparations whatsoever for living.
The mind I carried into that final stretch of addiction was deeply divided, and the fracture matters more than it might first appear. We tend to assume our inner monologue is mere commentary, a passive ticker tape running in the background of consciousness. It isn’t. The language we use within the quiet chambers of our skulls does not merely describe reality—it constructs it. And I had built a reality of fragmentation through the grammar of my own existence.
I rarely spoke to myself as “I.” A cold, third-person narrator described my life from a safe distance—he needs to stop, he is a failure, he is dying—and in doing so kept me from ever fully inhabiting the body that was slowly killing itself.
This was not eccentricity. It was the architecture of dissociation, built board by board out of shame. By referring to myself as an object rather than a subject, I created a critical distance from the raw vulnerability of my own existence. I had severed the spiritual tendon that binds soul to body, watching my own life not as something to be inhabited, but as a tragic character observed from the shore as the ship drifted away.
Even as I spiraled, some part of me—perhaps that seed Heinlein had planted—searched for meaning. My relationship with American Christianity was rocky terrain of jagged peaks and deep valleys. Sunday school had left me spiritually unsatisfied; its premise of inherent sinfulness never resonated with my soul’s deeper, ancient longing for unity. Each time I cobbled together a few weeks of sobriety—which happened perhaps four times across sixteen years—I revisited the faith, hoping to find what I’d missed. Each time, I left spiritually malnourished, chewing on dry dogma when I craved living water.
I found my living water in 1987.
The Climb to Larch Mountain
The year stands as the monolith in my timeline. After years of addiction and turmoil, I reached a fracture point that forced a reckoning with my own existence. On May 24th, I had a spiritual insight that brought a brief, startling relief from my suffering—a glimpse of something I desperately wanted more of. It did not heal the tremors or silence the voices, but for about a week its love-energy permeated my being. I wanted more.
Nearly a month later, on June 22, 1987—three months sober, still carrying the tremors and mental static of early recovery—I drove to Larch Mountain: a peak sacred long before I arrived, steeped in the reverence of my Native American ancestors, overlooking a valley crowned by Rainier, Adams, St. Helens, Hood, and Jefferson.
I climbed past the observation deck’s guardrail, found a quiet place away from other hikers, and let the beauty wash over me, the light breeze carrying the scent of countless pines like a cleansing ritual. Then I turned inward and did the only thing I knew how to do by then: I sat down and tried, with every ounce of hard-won discipline, to make the noise stop.
At first, the noise did what it always did—it argued, resisted, insisted on its own importance. Then, in that particular quiet, it began, mysteriously, to fade.
What happened next defies the vocabulary I have spent my whole life trying to build around it. The boundaries I had always assumed were fixed—between myself and the granite, between myself and the river below, between myself and the sky—simply stopped holding. I did not think my way into unity. I felt myself physically dissolve into it. The agonizing separation I had always known—from life, from others, from God—began to vanish like mist in morning sun. An unbroken field of existence, warm and startlingly intimate, replaced the fractured, third-person self that had narrated my life for sixteen years.
Then came the voice—not the old accusing commentary, but a calm and total certainty rising from beneath thought, using the third person one final time, not to distance me from my life but to name what was actually happening:
“He is having an experience with God.”
With that sentence, something completed itself. The stubborn “he” of my addiction and dissociation was not corrected—it was fulfilled, transformed in an instant into something closer to the capital-H “He” of Spirit. The veil lifted. The tremors that had made it impossible to hold a spoon simply stopped. The voices that had narrated my collapse fell permanently silent. The mountain was no longer scenery; it was, in some manner I still cannot fully explain, my own body, and I was its. The river did not wind away from me; it flowed through me.
Peace enveloped me completely.
For those timeless moments, I touched eternity. It was apocalyptic in the purest sense—an unveiling—and for a fleeting instant I imagined Jesus himself stepping into my mind, pushing aside the old Bruce and replacing him with something far beyond human experience. The artificial boundaries of “self” and “other” dissolved, and I saw with startling clarity that all of humanity was my family—each person a thread in a tapestry I was also woven into. Love, which had always felt conditional, now radiated freely, even toward those I thought I could never forgive. That vision later translated into a teaching few could immediately grasp: all that I see, and will ever see, unto eternity, is myself.
Recovery was no longer confined to abstinence; it was the radical act of learning to live without the mental constructs that separate us from the divine—of finally allowing my “I” to merge with the “We” of the universe.
The Return to the Valley
Awakening, I would learn, is only the doorway; what matters is what you do once you’ve walked through it. I drove back toward Portland pulled by a single, insistent question—where are my people?—and found myself, without quite deciding to, at the NE Glisan office of the U.S. Postal Service’s Employee Assistance Program. I had worked at the Postal Service from 1975 through 1985, and the EAP staff there knew well the chemically distracted nature and poor attendance that had defined those years. Mike and Larry had both escorted me to mandatory AA meetings in 1981 and again in 1984. After yet another relapse, I had called in sick the day after the Fourth of July in 1985 and never returned—never even called to explain. I had left in shame, a ghost of an employee.
Now I walked through the door and greeted them by name. Neither recognized me. When I told them who I was, they were stunned. Mike said, simply, that I looked radiant.
I then visited the Personnel Department of the Main Post Office, where Eleanor Workman acknowledged that I may have been let go inappropriately and offered to help me reapply for my old job. I declined, asking instead for a meeting with John Zimpleman, the head of Plant Maintenance, so I could make amends for my poor performance years earlier as an electrician and electronic technician trainee. He listened, visibly moved, and confessed he wished his own son could find what I had found.
Two days later, at Powell’s Books, I ran into my former psychiatrist, Dr. Dan Beavers, in the metaphysical section of all places. He did not recognize me until I spoke my name.
“Bruce, this can’t be you,” he stammered. “Last time I saw you, I was wondering how much longer you could survive if the medication didn’t turn your life around.”
“Dan, the medication worked fine,” I replied. “I just never used it the way you intended. I found a new way to live—without medication, drugs, or alcohol. I accept full responsibility now for my thoughts, my feelings, my behavior. The schism in my mind appears to have healed.” I also owed him an apology for the years I’d spent trying to manage and manipulate him during our sessions rather than letting him help me.
“Bruce,” he said, “that is the outcome I want for every patient. Congratulations.”
I never saw him again. When I read his obituary in 2015, I wept for the man who had tried to help the lost soul I used to be.
I also drove to my ex-wife’s home near Camas, Washington, to make further amends—an exchange I will return to later in this book.
That August, still searching for a community that could hold what had happened to me, I attended the International New Thought Alliance Conference in Portland. I had gone mainly to hear Jack Boland, whose recovery tapes—12 Steps to a Spiritual Experience—had accompanied me through early sobriety and through the vision of May 24th. But I found far more than that, including the captivating Barbara Marx Hubbard, who held my attention completely. I left having witnessed something else entirely: a thousand people offering open, unguarded acceptance to Alliance, a musical group of four gay men living with HIV/AIDS, led by Jerry Florence, at a moment in history when most churches offered them only condemnation. Having just left a tradition that taught me to see such men as “they,” I felt, for the first time in years, permitted to feel nothing but tenderness. That tenderness lives in me still.
Navigating the New Self
With my exit from Portland’s underworld community and my departure from drug-induced insanity, a new world waited to reveal itself—but it did not simply reach out and lead me down the path. Only in retrospect can a rational narrative be built from what was, at the time, a bewildering unfolding.
Beginning in April 1987, I developed a rigorous meditation practice, setting aside committed relationships to deepen my focus. Then, on June 22nd, everything shifted permanently. I could still describe the world I had left behind, but I had no language yet for the world I was entering. It wasn’t until I began practicing the Twelve Steps that May—prayer, meditation, honest inventory—that I created the conditions for a more peaceful mind. After the contact on the mountain, that spiritual insight seemed to release the controls of my wounded ego. At times I felt like a guided missile—never knowing the destination, but trusting that whatever had launched this new life would carry me to the right place at the right time.
Before 1987, my mind had been a crowded room of other people’s ideas about me and my own miscreations—a cacophony of “yous,” “theys,” and “hims.” By that June, the committee had permanently adjourned. There was only one presence: the I Am.
This new story didn’t always meet a friendly reception. I was often met with silent stares, quick subject changes, suggestions that I attend more religious training to fall back in line with established dogma, or simple polite disinterest. My family still viewed me through the lens of the past, but they could appreciate that I no longer required their worry. I was learning the ropes again—making healthier choices, building a career, sipping from inner springs of a miracle I hadn’t earned but had somehow been given.
For two years—from that June on the mountain until I met my wife Sharon in July 1989 at an A Course in Miracles discussion group—I spent more than six hours a day in prayer and meditation, learning on inner planes about an awareness and energy from which I had been exiled my entire life. This was not a Christian God or a Jewish God or the Buddha Mind, exactly—but those names all pointed toward the same energy I had accessed.
Slowly, the new life sent me back into the old world to live it rather than escape it. I began a new career as a union electrical construction worker in 1988, and I returned to the outdoors—hiking, cycling with Cycle Oregon, tennis, masters-level trail racing, even winning ultramarathon events and competing on championship relay teams, this same trembling body that had once shaken too violently to hold a spoon. Life became fertile ground for a genuine redo, built on my own decisions rather than self-hatred for past mistakes.
What Larch Mountain gave me, in the end, was not language for the light itself, but language for the architecture of separation that keeps us from it. I have no wish to describe that light as the mystics and poets do; that path, the via positiva, was never mine. My path was the via negativa—witnessed only after the debris field of human consciousness is perceived, healed, and cleared.
And yet I must begin with a warning drawn from the very heart of that day, for it is the seed from which everything that follows grows. When the boundaries dissolved and the voices fell silent, a vision arrived and translated itself into a teaching few could immediately grasp: all that I see, and will ever see, unto eternity, is myself. In those timeless moments I brushed against eternity—apocalyptic in the purest sense, an unveiling—and for a fleeting instant I imagined Jesus himself stepping into my mind, pushing the old Bruce aside. But notice what happened next, for this is the crux of everything that follows: my stubborn theology training almost managed to pin a name and its familiar ideas onto what was a unique and conceptually naked, indescribable experience.
This is the original temptation, and it is a temptation of grammar. The experience arrived without a vocabulary—conceptually naked, unmediated, free of category. My conditioned mind rushed in immediately to clothe it, to file it under a known name, to translate “all that I see is myself” back into the borrowed pronouns of an inherited religion. The unveiling revealed a reality with no “other” in it—a continuous, unbroken field in which the he and the they had no place to stand. Yet the moment I tried to speak of it, the old language reached for its old walls.
So understand this before we go further: the teaching about language is not a clever metaphor laid over a spiritual event. It is the spiritual event, examined in slow motion. The vision showed me a world without separation; my grammar tried to rebuild that separation the very next instant. Everything that follows is the discipline of catching that reflex—of learning to keep the experience naked rather than dressing it in the pronouns of exile.
Chapter 104: The Teaching
Here, then, is the teaching at the heart of June 22, 1987.
The words we use are not neutral tools. They are the architects of our isolation or our union. Perception builds reality, and the pronouns we choose—the I‘s, the you‘s, the they‘s—are the bricks with which we construct either bridges to one another or walls that guarantee our exile.
Before we go further, one crucial distinction must be drawn—the kind a careless eye will miss. The same pronoun can perform two entirely different kinds of work.
There is the pronoun turned inward: the grammar of self-talk, where you or he or she becomes a name I give my own self in the privacy of my mind. And there is the pronoun turned outward, where he, she, and they point to other living beings—distinct biological identities who breathe and suffer beyond the borders of my skin.
These two uses are easily confused, yet they wound us differently. The first is a fracture within the self. The second is a severance between selves. To heal the grammar of existence, we must first learn to tell them apart.
Let us begin with the pronoun turned outward.
Consider the third person used of others—they, them, he, she—when these words name actual people. This is the language of the observer. It places its subject at a distance, and applied to other human beings, it often reduces living people to stick figures, fleshed out only by our opinions or our ignorance:
They need to fix this.
He is difficult.
It is a linguistic push, a subtle dissociation that keeps the speaker safely on the sidelines while everyone else plays out the great mystery of life. The danger is not that the pronoun is grammatically wrong—another person is, of course, biologically a he or a she. The danger is that the distancing pronoun lets me substitute my projection for the actual person. The he I condemn is rarely the man himself; he is the caricature I have built in his place. I mistake my map of him for the territory of who he truly is. This is precisely the reflex I watched in myself on the mountain—the rush to clothe a naked reality in a name—turned now upon other people instead of upon God.
Now turn that same third person inward, against the self—
She needs to do better.
He always messes this up.
—and it becomes something darker: an alienation from one’s own soul, a way of viewing oneself as an object to be critiqued rather than a subject to be inhabited. Here there is no other person at all. There is only me, split from myself, narrating my own life as though I were a stranger watching from across the room. I know this intimately. I lived inside that he for sixteen years.
The self-referential second person—you—is more intimate, but still divided.
You can do this.
Why did you say that?
This, too, is the pronoun turned inward. Note the difference carefully: it is not the you I address to another person standing before me, but the you I aim at myself. It splits the self in two—actor and critic, coach and player. Occasionally useful for motivation, a steady diet of this inward you nonetheless presupposes a fracture in the psyche. To refuse the I is to refuse full ownership of our experience.
So we now have two distinct ailments. Inwardly, the self-referential you, he, and she exile me from myself. Outwardly, the other-referential they, him, and her exile me from my fellow beings—not because those people are not genuinely other, but because the distancing pronoun tempts me to replace them with my own fearful inventions.
Both are failures of inhabitation. In the first, I fail to inhabit myself. In the second, I fail to grant others the dignity of being inhabited subjects in their own right—becoming instead an internal gatekeeper, controlling their image to fit my narrative.
If perception creates reality, then the outward third person, wielded carelessly, creates a reality of fragmentation. When I regard my family, my neighbors, and my colleagues as a mere collection of theys—as objects rather than subjects—I sever the spiritual tendon that binds the collective body. Life will return evidence of this to me in plain, measurable terms.
And here the grammar reveals its most dangerous architecture: the division of the world into us and them. This is the outward third person weaponized, the wall raised to its full and terrible height. Once a portion of humanity has been relegated to them, they cease to be subjects worthy of inhabiting and become objects to be feared, blamed, or conquered. The peculiar cruelty of this construction is that it always travels in pairs: there is no them without a corresponding us, no exile without a fortress. We imagine ourselves whole, bounded, separate—sealed within the rigid citadel of I, me, mine—and from that fortress we cast outward whatever we cannot bear to see in ourselves.
This is the origin of projection, and here the two ailments converge. The shadow I refuse to own within myself—the inward fracture—does not simply vanish. The disowned material must land somewhere, and so it lands upon them—the outward severance. The failure to inhabit my own self becomes the failure to grant others their full reality.
But this entire architecture rests on a misperception—the same misperception the mountain dissolved when it showed me that all I would ever see, unto eternity, is myself. We are not the sealed, solitary objects our grammar implies. We are porous—permeable to one another, made of the same breath and the same wound, more deeply interconnected than language can easily confess. The them we condemn is, at a level beneath the reach of pronouns, already part of the we. To forget this is to mistake the map of our isolation for the territory of our shared being.
When I practice the first-person pronoun in self-talk, I find greater self-awareness and emotional balance. The I grounds me in the self; the we grounds me in the collective. The unexamined inward he, she, and you leave me floating in a void. The unexamined outward they leaves me marooned behind a wall.
Some insist the outward third person is necessary for objectivity—that to assess fairly, one must detach. Across business, politics, and even therapy, there persists a stubborn belief that emotional distance equals competence. But this confuses clarity with detachment. One can see another person clearly—can even, in plain truth, call them he or she—without severing the heartstring of empathy, without collapsing a living subject into a manageable object. The most damaged institutions are often led by those who treat their people as they rather than we, elevating ego and self-interest above the shared body. True resilience is found not in detachment, but in the radical embrace of the collective.
So the discipline is twofold.
Inwardly: let us move our self-references from the alienating third and second person toward the integrated first person. Let us catch ourselves when we call ourselves you or him, and ask why we are afraid to say I.
Outwardly: when we speak of the human family, catch ourselves when we say they, and ask whether we can honestly say we. And when we must speak of another as he or she, ask whether we are seeing the person—or only our projection of them.
And beneath both disciplines lies the deepest one of all, the one the mountain taught in a single naked instant: resist the rush to name. When something true and unmediated arrives, do not clothe it too quickly in the old vocabulary. Let it remain conceptually naked long enough to be known on its own terms, before the conditioned mind reaches for its familiar walls.
In doing all of this, we do not merely change our sentences. We change our soul, and by extension the reality we inhabit.
I will not pretend this is easy. After thirty-nine years, I am still learning to live by it. Our present era has tested me with a strong urge to distance my identity from those whose values appall me—to file them under them and be done with it. And yet: I am, and we are—even when what we have become under the Trump administration unsettles my peace.
I suspect you feel the same about the times we share.
We all must continue the work of rehabilitating the spiritual damage within the we.
Living Within the Unlimited Bandwidth
The invisible shield in the crucible. In the midst of chaos, you may sense an unseen architecture deflecting the heaviest blows—not mere luck, but the universe quietly redirecting harm, guiding you toward sanctuary when logic promised only ruin.
The symphony of synchronicity. What the uninitiated dismiss as coincidence, you recognize as the dialogue of the cosmos: the exact wisdom arriving the moment you need it, the chance encounter that bends the whole arc of your life.
The quiet oracle within. Beneath the clamor of the ego lies a tranquil, unwavering knowing. It does not shout with anxiety. It waits, and patiently invites you to surrender to a deeper intuition.
The alchemy of empathy. You are drawn to ease the suffering of others—not from obligation, but from the bone-deep recognition of shared existence. It is the Infinite expressing itself through your hands.
The crucible of transformation. You no longer merely endure hardship; you transmute it into wisdom, understanding at last that life is not punishing you. It is sculpting you.
The anchor in the void. Where uncertainty breeds terror in the ego, you carry a paradoxical calm—trusting that you need not control the currents of the cosmos in order to be carried safely by them.
The reverence for the ordinary. You feel an unprompted gratitude that requires no grand catalyst, finding beauty in the quiet poetry of an ordinary hour—evidence of a loving force that holds you regardless of circumstance.
Stranger In A Strange Land
What remains, after the wounds are healed, the emotional debris cleared, and the linguistic fractures mended?
What remains is the metamorphosis itself—the quiet miracle that carries the butterfly out of the caterpillar. If the butterfly could speak, it would tell of flight and open sky, not of the slow crawl through dirt. Yet it arose from a world of ground-dwellers, and that is where all its old stories were written.
Imagine that butterfly returning to its caterpillar friends, eager to describe the life waiting just beyond their reach. Imagine what the response from the caterpillars might be.
Get lost. You were never one of us.
Nice for you to fly, but that’s not for me.
Have you heard about the tasty leaves on that parsley plant?
These are the replies of those who find change threatening, unnecessary, or impossible. But spiritual freedom is precisely this: the release of limitation, and the patient relearning of how to communicate—with one another, and within ourselves. The new life is never reserved for the chosen few. It is available to all.
Each of us carries the inner wisdom of a master teacher, yet that master sits mostly ignored in the unvisited recesses of the heart. On Larch Mountain, I was handed a blank slate and invited to write a new self upon it. The world I had once longed to flee became paradise. Heaven was no longer a distant promise but a living present—a breath, a heartbeat, a now. But I could not drag the old me into that world. I had to leave my baggage at the trailhead—both the words I spoke and the silences I hid behind—in order to stay in tune with the new music.
The Infinite is difficult to relay. It defies the rational mind, though it will eventually speak through a healed one—but only if that mind has first been prepared and made willing, no matter the cost. This is why those who undergo dramatic spiritual experiences so often become poor communicators in the years that follow. I was mute in this way for a long time. I learned, eventually, to let people know me for who I was, not who I had been. Yet I could not articulate the message without tripping up over my words. My hope was by showing what truth wasn’t, it would be possible to have the truth reveal what it really was to any interested seeker, friend or reader. I can’t give anyone God, truth, or the infinite, but I can show how our language leads us astray from the Universe’s magnificence, mystery, and profound healing capacity.
When I tell my story now, I have learned to turn the volume up—especially in the places where I most need to hear myself. Listening to my own voice does not guarantee that others, long conditioned to ignore me or to obfuscate the truth, will listen too. But sometimes a bird sings in the forest even when no other birds are listening. The real miracle was never that others would finally hear me.
The miracle is that I am finally singing—and finally hearing myself.
Can you hear me now?
Can I hear me now?
It has been a great adventure, this life—and it is a quiet fulfillment to have lived long enough, and grown articulate enough, to set a verbal framework around the whole of it. The “whole” will always elude description, our language just cannot describe that which underlies all of existence.
I am what I am, but I am not only what I seem to be.
You are what you are, but you are not only what you seem to be.
We all need a bigger story. We all need more heart, and more healing. And we all need each other to make our stories complete.
So I will ask you what an unhappy childhood once encouraged me to pursue.
Are you ready, at last, to “get off of this fucking rock”?
Not to flee the world—I tried that for sixteen years—but to step into the one that was always here, waiting beneath the noise.
Robert Heinlein said it through Michael Valentine Smith, the Stranger in a Strange Land who looked upon his world and understood:
Thou Art God.
So are you.
So am I.
So are we.
This is the life on the Universe’s unlimited bandwidth.
The door to the infinite is open.
Let us walk through it together.
Namaste.
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.” —William Blake
Chapter 105: The Three Levels of Thought — Charting a Course Through Reality
There is a peculiar comfort in believing we perceive one continuous, seamless reality. It is far more accurate—and far more useful—to recognize that consciousness moves through three distinct territories, each with its own laws, its own vocabulary, and its own capacity for illusion. I have come to call these the three levels of thought: the “I,” the “You,” and the “Them.” Understanding where we stand within this map, at any given moment, is the first step toward reclaiming the sovereignty that separation so quietly steals from us.
Every thought is an echo of a thinker, a ripple in the vast ocean of consciousness. We often assume the “I” we identify with is the sole architect of these thoughts, yet neuroscience reminds us that the origin of consciousness remains one of science’s most profound mysteries. This exploration will guide us through the three fundamental levels of thought—journeying from the intimate landscape of self-perception, to the shared space of interaction, and finally into the abstract realms of theory and speculation. By understanding the “I,” the “You,” and the “Them,” we can begin to appreciate the intricate relationship between our thoughts, our perceptions, and the very nature of reality itself.
Level 1: The “I” — The Seed of Personal Reality
Everything begins here, in the quiet chamber of self-perception. This is the domain where personal reality first takes root—the thinker contemplating itself, a consciousness looking inward and asking, however wordlessly, who am I?
Within this level live our deepest convictions about identity: our strengths, our wounds, our longings, our fears. Every thought that begins with “I am,” “I feel,” or “I believe” is born here. Imagine standing before a mirror—the reflection you see is not merely a physical image but a complex collage of self-assessments, memories, and aspirations. This is the anchor point of existence, the seed from which all other perception eventually extends.
But it is also, by its very nature, limited. The “I” is a single viewpoint suspended within the vastness of existence—vivid, undeniable, and yet inherently partial. To mistake this seed for the whole tree is the first quiet error of the separated mind. It is a subjective reality, built entirely from the raw material of personal experience, and it will remain incomplete for as long as it insists on standing alone.
Level 2: The “You” — The Growth of Interactive Reality
From the seed, a shoot emerges—and with it, engagement. The second level of thought represents our encounter with the world beyond the boundaries of private consciousness. It is the bridge connecting the subjective interior of the “I” to everything outside it.
This is the level where we meet another person in conversation, hold a book in our hands, or press our palm against the bark of a tree. It is not a solitary reality but a negotiated one—shaped and reshaped through the constant, dynamic exchange of perspectives. Picture a conversation with a friend: as words, ideas, and emotions pass between you, your personal reality intersects with another’s, creating a shared space. Your thoughts influence your friend, and theirs, in turn, influence you. This is how we build relationships, form communities, and create a shared understanding of the world.
This interactive reality extends beyond people to any object or entity we can perceive and engage with directly. Our senses provide data, and our thoughts interpret that data, creating a consensual reality that feels objective and stable—the tangible plane we navigate daily, built on direct experience and mutual understanding.
This is sacred ground, and dangerous ground in equal measure. Handled with reverence, the “You” becomes the very place where love is practiced. Handled carelessly—reduced to mere utility, to a means of confirming what the “I” already believes—it becomes another mirror for the ego’s isolation, dressed up as connection.
Level 3: The “Them” — The Forest of Abstracted Reality
Beyond direct experience lies a vast and shadowed forest: the realm of abstraction, speculation, and theory. This third level deals with concepts and entities that exist entirely outside the reach of the senses—scientific theories, historical narratives, philosophical systems, spiritual doctrines. None of it can be touched, tasted, or held. All of it is built from logic, intuition, and speculation stacked one upon another.
Consider a scientist formulating a theory about a distant galaxy. That galaxy is not something they can touch or interact with directly; it exists for them as a collection of data points, mathematical models, and imaginative leaps. This is the essence of the “Them”—a reality constructed entirely in the mind, populated by thoughts about what might be, what could have been, or what exists in places we cannot reach.
Because the “Them” has no direct experience to anchor it, it is also the level most vulnerable to illusion. Grand narratives take root here. So does fantasy. So does the particular delusion of believing we understand something simply because we have given it a name. And yet this same forest holds tremendous potential—it is here that we glimpse the possibility of a cosmic consciousness, a unity of understanding that stretches beyond the boundaries of any single life.
The danger of the “Them” is not that abstraction is worthless. It is that abstraction, left unexamined, quietly hardens into certainty. A theory about a person becomes a verdict on that person. A doctrine about God becomes a cage built around the very mystery it was meant to illuminate. What began as a tool for understanding becomes a wall against experience itself.
Navigating the Territory
This threefold map is not an academic exercise—it is a practical instrument for self-awareness. It exists to help us discern where our personal reality ends, where the shared reality of genuine interaction begins, and where we have wandered into the speculative forest without realizing we ever left solid ground.
Most of our suffering, I have come to believe, arises from confusing these levels. We take the abstract “Them”—a theory, a label, a doctrine—and mistake it for direct experience of the “You.” We take the wounded stories of the “I” and project them outward, populating the world with characters who exist mostly in our own imagination. Each confusion is a small act of separation, a brick added to a wall we did not consciously choose to build.
The three levels are not separate silos but interconnected dimensions of consciousness. Our personal reality shapes how we interact with the world; our interactions inform our abstract thinking; and our abstract ideas, in turn, can reshape our sense of self. To move with wisdom through these three territories is to hold each one honestly: to know when we are speaking from the raw, limited seed of the self; to know when we are truly meeting another in the shared soil of interaction; and to know when we have drifted into the forest of abstraction, where our certainty may be nothing more than an elegant guess.
This discernment, practiced patiently, is what eventually clears the ground for the deeper teaching that follows—the recognition that beneath all three levels, correctly seen, there was never any true separation at all.
Chapter 106: Insights on Consciousness
Voices, Silence, and the Evolution of Inner Awareness
Before I understood any of this—before Kant, before mirrors, before mountains—I was a small boy with an imaginary friend. Her name was Perci, a doll I had convinced myself could speak. I remember believing, with the total conviction only childhood affords, that she answered me over the telephone. No one thought much of it. Children do this; we call it imagination, and we are taught to grow out of it politely, folding the voice back into silence somewhere around the time we learn to read. But this early phenomenon speaks to something more universal and primal within the human mind, reminiscent of the way young children sometimes claim to hear the voice of God. Is this the byproduct of an evolving consciousness? Or is it unfiltered access to an imagination and intuition that adulthood slowly numbs as the rational mind takes precedence?
I did not grow out of it politely. By 1986, the voice—or rather, the chorus of voices—had returned, no longer playful, no longer contained to a doll’s plastic mouth. Years of chemical abuse had worn a groove into my mind deep enough for something like a drug-induced schizophrenic break to occur. My inner monologue calcified into the very fracture already named—delivering verdicts on my worth with the flat authority of a judge who never left the bench, only now sharpened by pathology rather than mere habit. At times, these voices were not malevolent but observers of my reality, narrating my environment; occasionally, I even convinced myself I could hear others’ thoughts. For anyone who has faced something similar, such moments of perception blur the line between reality and distortion, creating a crack through which profound insight or crushing fear might emerge.
That was not, I would later understand, an isolated personal pathology. It echoed something far older than my own biography.
Julian Jaynes, in his theory of the bicameral mind, suggested that early human consciousness lacked the introspective, self-aware qualities we now possess. Instead, humans heard “voices”—commands attributed to gods or ancestors—as auditory hallucinations stemming from the brain’s right hemisphere, arriving before the evolution of a more unified, modern self-awareness. Over time, as societal complexity demanded a more flexible and cohesive selfhood, this “bicameral mind” evolved into our modern configuration of introspection and independent thought.
Whether or not one accepts Jaynes’s theory as literal history, it offered me something valuable: a frame large enough to hold my own experience without simply pathologizing it. My childhood conversations with Perci, my schizophrenic break filled with narrated observations, and the silence that eventually replaced them all trace a single arc through that same evolutionary architecture. Perhaps what I endured was not merely a personal collapse but a kind of regression through the mind’s deep history—a consciousness briefly returned to a more primitive, divided state, hearing its own fragments as though they belonged to someone, or something, else.
What is remarkable, looking back, is not that the voices arrived. Trauma and chemistry are more than sufficient explanation for that. What is remarkable is what eventually replaced them: not new voices, not a louder narrator drowning out the old one, but silence. Real silence—the kind I had never experienced in my adult life, in which the committee inside my skull simply stopped convening. This silence was not an absence or a void. It became a source of clarity, the place where intuition and spontaneous insight arise.
I want to be careful here, because silence of this kind is easy to romanticize and difficult to earn. It did not arrive through willpower. It arrived only after months of unglamorous groundwork: sobriety measured in single days, a meditation practice built one clumsy sitting at a time, and the slow, humiliating labor of reclaiming the first person. The voices did not so much depart as lose their audience. Once I stopped needing them to explain me to myself, they had nowhere left to stand.
This is, I think, the largest lesson consciousness has to teach: that awareness evolves not by adding more thought, more narration, more clever internal commentary, but by clearing enough space for something quieter and truer to be heard underneath it. The child who believed her doll could speak, and the addict who could not silence his inner judge, were not two different problems. They were the same mind, at different stages of a single, halting evolution—reaching, however clumsily, toward the day it would finally learn to listen instead of narrate.
Stepping into this nexus of spirituality, neuroscience, and mental health demands a surrender of the binaries we often lean on—the dichotomy, for instance, of “symptom” versus “spiritual experience.” What if hearing voices, while disruptive, isn’t merely a malfunction of the brain? What if it is also an invitation—though perhaps not a welcome one—into the landscape of the mind, an unmasking of layers of thought and perception ordinarily hidden from view? Therapists, clinicians, and spiritual seekers alike might benefit from questioning these boundaries, exploring how individuals move through moments of neural or psychological disruption toward healing. My own inner silence may symbolize what healing looks like for some—a restoration of balance that creates space for intuition and insight to thrive. But each person’s evolution is unique; not every path leads to silence. Some may find their healing in active dialogue with these inner voices, just as others find peace within solitude.
That day, when my own silence finally came, did not arrive on a therapist’s couch or in a book of theory. It arrived on a mountain. But before I take you there, I want you to hold onto this: silence is not the absence of consciousness. It is very often the sound of consciousness finally arriving home
Chapter 107: Creating a Consciousness of the Divine
A Journey of Spiritual Programming
Waking up on Larch Mountain was not the end of the work. It was, if anything, the beginning of a far more deliberate project: the conscious construction of a mind capable of sustaining what had briefly been revealed to it. I did not walk down that mountain permanently transformed. I walked down carrying a glimpse, and glimpses fade unless something is built to hold them in place.
What if reaching for the divine—whether God, Jesus, or a spiritual essence to emulate—is not a matter of blind faith or religious doctrine, but a deliberate act of mental programming? I found an unexpected ally in a discipline that, on its surface, has nothing to do with spirituality at all: Neuro-Linguistic Programming. NLP treats the mind as programmable—not in a cold, mechanical sense, but in the recognition that repeated mental scripts, deliberately chosen, can reshape cognitive habit. It reframes perception, rewires mental habits, and, in a sense, creates the reality one chooses to see.
Prayer, mantra, and meditation had always done this work under different names. Every whispered “Our Father” or recited sutra is a script—an intentional formation of words meant to reshape the spirit, not for tradition’s sake alone, but to engrain belief and sculpt a consciousness that mirrors the ideal it aspires to. What NLP calls reframing, spirituality might call enlightenment, surrender, or attunement. Different vocabularies, the same path: a shift in perception to align closer to truth. This isn’t about reducing spirituality to psychological manipulation. It’s about naming, at last, what I had already been attempting instinctively—intentional mental scripting aimed not at self-improvement in the ordinary sense, but at aligning my daily consciousness with the transcendent thing I had touched on the mountain.
The Intersection of Voluntary and Involuntary Psychological Processes
There is a distinction worth making carefully here, because it separates spiritual practice from psychological illness in a way that matters enormously—especially to families and clinicians trying to tell the two apart.
Throughout history, spiritual traditions have made deliberate, voluntary use of internal multiplicity. Tibetan practitioners cultivate “tulpas”—thought-forms brought into being through sustained visualization. Christian mystics have described internalizing the persona of Christ so thoroughly that it began to act through them. These are chosen, structured, and ultimately governable practices, undertaken by a stable mind reaching toward the divine.
They stand in sharp contrast to Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID)—the involuntary, trauma-driven fragmentation I once suffered, an unbidden and uncontrollable multiplicity that clinicians rightly recognize as a wound, not a discipline. I have lived on both sides of that line, and I can tell you with certainty that they are not the same phenomenon wearing different names, though I understand why, from the outside, they can look confusingly similar. The parallels are real—multiplicity of identity, distinct “personas,” a tangible impact on behavior—but the difference lies in agency. Voluntary practices stem from healing intent and self-guided exploration; trauma-induced dissociation is involuntary and painful, marked by a loss of control over what emerges.
This is precisely why families and mental health professionals need better tools for open, non-judgmental dialogue about spiritual experience. Treating the first as though it were the second pathologizes genuine spiritual development. Treating the second as though it were the first can leave real suffering unaddressed. I think often of a visit to my first wife, Donelle, during a long-term psychological crisis, in which multiple personas surfaced—one embodying a six-year-old child echoing old trauma, another embodying “God,” dispensing profound and loving wisdom. The juxtaposition still raises questions I don’t think any of us can answer with certainty: Was the “God persona” an active coping mechanism, akin to a tulpa? Or did it emerge involuntarily, a byproduct of suffering reaching for its own relief? Perhaps the honest answer is that spirituality deserves a legitimate seat at the table in psychological care—not as a replacement for clinical rigor, but as a recognized dimension of resilience, in which internalized belief, disciplined visualization, and even a felt divine companion can function as active allies in healing rather than symptoms to be suppressed.
Voices, Silence, and the Evolution of Inner Awareness
What does it mean to hear a voice from within? To feel the presence of something greater—sometimes comforting, sometimes unsettling—emanating from the silent corners of the mind? My own experience moved from the softened threads of childhood imagination, through the overwhelming and fractured lens of psychosis, and finally into a profound silence that feels, paradoxically, alive with insight.
When I was a child, I believed my doll, Perci, spoke to me over the telephone. It wasn’t so outlandish at the time—children often assign personalities and voices to their cherished objects—but the phenomenon speaks to something more universal and primal in the human mind, reminiscent of the many children throughout history who claim to hear the voice of God. Is this the unfiltered access to imagination and intuition that adulthood slowly numbs as the rational mind takes precedence?
Years later, in 1986, after using toxic street drugs, I experienced a schizophrenic break. The voices I heard during that time weren’t malevolent; they were observers of my reality, narrating my environment. Occasionally I even convinced myself I could hear others’ thoughts. Such moments blur the line between reality and distortion, cracking open a space through which profound insight or crushing fear might emerge.
Later still, I experienced something closer to both spiritual awakening and neurological healing. The voices softened, then dissolved into something else entirely—an internal silence that was not an absence or a void, but a source of clarity, the place where intuition and spontaneous insight arise. It took me years to understand that this personal evolution mirrored aspects of Julian Jaynes’s theory of the bicameral mind, which proposed that early human consciousness lacked the introspective, self-aware qualities we now possess—that humans once heard the “voices” of gods or ancestors as auditory hallucinations originating in the brain’s right hemisphere, until rising social complexity demanded the more flexible, integrated self-awareness we now call the modern mind.
Whether spiritual or neurological in origin, my childhood voice through Perci, the narrated observations of my break, and the eventual arrival at inner silence offer a deeply personal lens on that theory—and a reason to question the binary we so often lean on: “symptom” versus “spiritual experience.” What if hearing voices, while disruptive, isn’t merely a malfunction, but also an invitation—unwelcome, perhaps—into a landscape of mind and perception usually hidden from ordinary consciousness? Not every path leads to silence; some may find their healing in active dialogue with these inner voices, just as others find peace in solitude. Consciousness, I’ve found, is more layered and self-organizing than I once imagined, shifting and reconfiguring to meet the unfolding needs of mind and spirit. Even when it wanders too close to chaos, it remains a resilient explorer, always carrying the potential to return bearing treasures of insight.
The Power of the Word
None of this reprogramming happens without language. Words are not incidental to spiritual life; they are its primary mediators, bridges between our subjective and objective worlds. In the total absence of language, there is only raw, undifferentiated awareness—sensory and bodily feedback vast enough, perhaps, but formless, and largely unusable by a mind still living inside a body, a job, a family. Words give that awareness handles.
Imagine standing on the shore of a vast ocean. Your senses take in the sights, sounds, and smells, but it is the word “ocean” that gathers the experience and connects it to conscious understanding. So too with emotion and spirit: words like “love,” “fear,” and “enlightenment” give shape to complex internal experiences that would otherwise remain wordless and unusable.
This is, I have come to believe, part of what religious traditions mean by “the Word of God.” If the Divine is best understood as the nameless silence underlying all creation, human naming and categorization are not corruptions of that silence but the bridge that allows a wounded, embodied mind to carry a little of it back down the mountain and into daily life. The words of scripture are not merely commandments; they are symbolic markers pointing back toward the source within. The Kabbalistic tradition names this bridging function Hod—splendor, the power of the word to link divine attributes to ordinary human perception, translating the ineffable into something a person can actually use on a Tuesday afternoon at the Postal Service.
Toward a More Holistic Approach to Mental Health and Spirituality
The convergence of spirituality and psychology is not an anomaly but a testament to the holistic complexity of human existence. Mental health professionals and spiritual guides share an incredible task: to honor mind and spirit in tandem, learning from and with the individuals they seek to help. A few principles seem essential to that work:
- Distinction through dialogue. Families, friends, and clinicians must learn to differentiate voluntary spiritual practice from symptoms of psychological illness. Open, non-judgmental dialogue is essential to understanding the intent and context behind these experiences.
- Cultural competence. The intersection of mental health and spirituality demands cultural literacy—practitioners and loved ones alike must educate themselves on the traditions they encounter rather than reducing them to diagnostic shorthand.
- Collaborative inquiry. Dialogue between theologians, spiritual leaders, and mental health experts—through joint case studies and interdisciplinary seminars—can deepen our understanding of how belief and psychology interact.
- Reimagining spirituality in therapy. Spirituality should not be classified as mere coping but as a legitimate aspect of psychological resilience and growth. Tulpas, internalized beliefs, and even a felt divine presence can serve as allies in therapeutic settings rather than symptoms to be suppressed.
To dismiss a devout individual’s connection to Christ as “neurosis” or “religious fanaticism,” or to reduce a tulpa to mere “hallucination,” is to stifle the profound richness of human consciousness. By bridging the gap between spirituality, religion, and psychology, mental health care can evolve into a discipline that truly honors the whole of the human condition—one in which families of those who practice tulpamancy, those who internalize Christ as a living presence, and those who suffer from dissociative disorders can all find understanding rather than threat in these expressions of the mind’s multiplicity.
Who Are We Created In Whose Image?
What does it truly mean to follow a teacher, and to hold onto their words, their guidance, their image, as we seek clarity on our own path? For centuries, the seeker-guide relationship—whether in therapy, spiritual teaching, or religion—has been a double-edged sword: a bridge to liberation, and at times a shackle that binds.
Therapy, at its best, relies on the creation of internal bridges. An effective therapist acts as both mirror and guide, forming what some might call a tulpa—an inner representation of the therapist’s teaching that the client internalizes and can call upon long after the session ends. Yet these relationships are not without risk. A therapist who has not addressed their own wounds, or who is swayed by financial or emotional need, can create a bond that hinders growth rather than fostering it, leaving the patient tangled in dependency rather than moving toward independence.
The same dynamic plays out in the guru-student relationship. A teacher’s image—reinforced through photographs, ritual, and repetition—can comfort and even trigger genuine moments of awakening. But that same image can just as easily become a psychological crutch rather than a gateway to self-realization, and some teachers cultivate the attachment deliberately, trading followers’ devotion for money and power. Christian devotional imagery works the same way: statues of Mary, stained glass depictions of Jesus, reverence for the crucifix, are meant as conduits to the divine, yet risk becoming barriers—fragmented interpretations reshaped by time, culture, and institution. Tithing, prosperity theology, and fear-based doctrine too often convert faith into currency, twisting “What would Jesus do?” into “What can I get away with?”
This is not a problem unique to Christianity; it is the universal human tendency to idolize images—teachers, symbols, beliefs—rather than embody the essence behind them. The human mind thrives on duality: me and you, good and bad, teacher and student, God and man. It fractures our wholeness into countless internal selves—the inner child, the rebel, the wounded protector, even Buddha or God within—each speaking to us in whispers that color our relationships, thoughts, and actions. True healing requires acknowledging and integrating these fragments rather than perpetually looking outward for someone else to save us. When you internalize the teaching rather than the teacher, you are no longer bound by external figures or institutions; the wisdom you seek resides fully within you.
When the Divine Disappears
The deeper work, then, is not simply to program the mind toward the divine, but eventually to dismantle the very duality that made programming necessary in the first place. What happens when every concept you’ve clung to—every image, every practice, every notion of the Divine—vanishes? What is left when even your most profound understanding of God dissolves into silence?
This is not the endpoint of spiritual exploration but its ultimate beginning: the moment duality ceases and you stand face to face with the unfiltered reality of Oneness. Practices like “Practicing the Presence,” as Joel Goldsmith described it, guide us toward alignment with an unseen truth, but they inherently rely on constructs—carefully shaped conceptions of what the Divine might be. Powerful as such tools are, they remain tools. Any image we hold of the Divine is, in its essence, a reflection of the dualistic mind—a separation of the knower from the known—and a mind layered with imagery cannot fully behold truth.
Mystics have long warned against attachment to even the most sacred of images. One exclaimed upon realization, “Thou hast taken my Lord away from me”—a lament and an awakening at once, grieving a perceived loss while reframing reality. What disappears is comforting. What remains is unfiltered Oneness. In John 16:7, Jesus states plainly, “If I go not away, the Comforter will not come to you.” For those with ears to hear, the process he describes is exactly this one.
The transition often feels like abandonment. Without the concept of God to lean on, there is no reassuring duality of “I and Thou” to steady oneself against. But mystics and poets remind us this is not abandonment; it is union. The pain arises from relinquishing the illusion of duality, and with that relinquishment comes the recognition that being “all alone” is the same as being “all-one.” As Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” Meister Eckhart spoke of the “God beyond God,” urging his followers to “be silent and quiet before the Lord and content your minds with Him alone.” Rumi wrote, “I have put duality away. I have seen the two worlds as one; one I seek, one I know, one I see, one I call.”
True alignment does not end with a well-trained mind reciting the right affirmations. It ends with the conceptual scaffolding itself falling away, so that what remains is no longer I and Thou engaged in careful negotiation, but something closer to what I felt, however briefly, on that mountain: an unfiltered, interconnected Oneness that never actually required a program to reach it. The programming was only ever meant to get me to the trailhead. The mountain itself required no instructions at all.
What does your concept of the Divine look like? And who might you become if it disappeared?
Chapter 108: The Illusion of Divinity — Is God Just a Concept?
Before I could stand on Larch Mountain and feel the boundaries of my life dissolve, I had to first confront a question that had stalked me since childhood: was God real, or was God simply a word we invented to organize our fear?
I did not arrive at this question casually. I inherited it, the way a child inherits a family’s silences as much as its stories. And like most inheritances, it came wrapped in a framework I never chose—the framework of language itself.
The Trap Built Into the Question
Human beings perceive the world through binaries. Light and dark. Silence and noise. Self and other. We build these dualities into the very architecture of our thought, and then, without noticing, we drag that architecture into the spiritual realm. We ask, “Does God exist?” as though existence itself could be forced into a box marked is or isn’t—as though the infinite could be filed alongside the finite, sorted and labeled like everything else in a life built on categories.
I spent years asking the question this way, and I found only what the question allowed me to find: a series of dead ends dressed up as answers.
The God I Was Handed
For most of the people I grew up around, God was not a question at all. God was a concrete reality—a being with moods, preferences, and a long memory for grievances. But looked at through a colder, more philosophical light, this version of God begins to look less like a discovery and more like a mirror. We take our own anger, our own jealousy, our own capacity for love, and we project it onto a cosmic scale. We build a being large enough to explain what we cannot explain and comforting enough to soften what we cannot bear—namely, that we will die, and we do not know what happens next.
This is not blasphemy to say. It is simply an honest look at how frightened minds do their work.
The Other Side of the Same Coin
I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to assume that rejecting this anthropomorphic God is the same as achieving clarity. It isn’t. Atheism, for all its confidence, remains tethered to the same cognitive trap it claims to have escaped. To spend one’s energy denying a human-made concept of God is still to operate inside the linguistic rules that concept created. You cannot argue your way out of a box by staying inside the box and shouting that it’s empty. The atheist and the believer are, in this narrow sense, playing the same game with different scorecards. Neither has stepped outside the duality long enough to see what waits beyond it.
Agnosticism, the position I flirted with longer than I care to admit, offers something that looks like wisdom but functions more like a resignation. To say the divine is unknown or unknowable is a safe intellectual harbor—a place to drop anchor and avoid a debate with no clean winner. But safety is not the same as freedom. I found that agnosticism left me paralyzed at exactly the threshold where I most needed to move. It did not quiet my mind. It only postponed the reckoning.
Eden, Revisited
I have often returned to the story of Eden, not as a historical account but as a diagnosis. The myth captures something true about the birth of human self-awareness. Eating from the Tree of Knowledge is not simply a fall from innocence—it is the moment the conceptual mind switches on. Good and evil. Self and other. Once that switch is thrown, we cannot easily unthrow it. In that state of divided awareness, humanity did what divided minds do: we manufactured a separate God, placed Him in the sky, at a comfortable and controllable distance, and in doing so we lost the sense of oneness that had never actually left us—we had simply talked ourselves out of feeling it.
Thought as the Wall, Not the Window
The conceptual mind is, at its core, a sorting machine. Its entire purpose is to categorize, label, and solve. This works well enough for building a house or filing taxes. It works terribly when applied to the silence at the center of existence. Faced with that silence, the mind panics. It cannot tolerate the absence of a label, so it fills the void with theories, doctrines, and arguments—anything to avoid sitting inside the unknowing. And here is the part that took me sixteen years of addiction and false starts to understand: thought itself, however brilliant, is often the very barrier keeping us from what we are trying to think our way toward.
Real transformation, I came to believe, cannot happen inside an argument. It cannot be won in a debate between believer, atheist, and agnostic, however sharp the language on either side. It requires something none of those positions demand: the courage to sit in absolute silence, to watch the mind’s chatter without becoming it, and to let the illusion of separation reveal itself, layer by layer, for exactly what it is.
What Was Left, Once the Names Fell Away
I did not know it yet, standing at the edge of this question, but I was circling something I would not be able to name for a few more years—not because the thing itself was elusive, but because every name I reached for came pre-loaded with someone else’s argument. God. Christ. The Infinite. Each word arrived wearing borrowed clothes, and each time I put one on, I felt the old walls of duality rise up again around whatever I had almost touched.
It would take a mountain, a June morning, and the collapse of my own inner narrator before I stopped reaching for the name and simply let the thing be. But the groundwork for that collapse was being laid here, in this quieter, more stubborn confrontation with the question itself—the slow, humbling realization that perhaps the divine was never absent from my life. Perhaps it was only ever obscured by my own insistence on using the wrong tools to look for it.
Chapter 109: All That You See Is Yourself
In the weeks following my experience on Mt. Tabor, I found myself returning again and again to a single, unsettling truth: everything I perceive is filtered through the lens of my own making. That mountaintop encounter had cracked something open in me, and now, in its aftermath, I began to see how much of what I called “reality” was actually a reflection of my own unexamined self.
Every reaction I had to another person, every judgment I cast on what was “good” or “evil,” became a mirror I could no longer ignore. The Mt. Tabor experience had shown me glimpses of something vast and undivided, but returning to ordinary life meant confronting how narrow my perception had become—clouded by fear, by old wounds, by projections I didn’t even know I was making. What I feared most in others, I began to realize, was often the unrecognized shadow of my own being.
This realization sent me searching for understanding. I turned to psychology, to Piaget’s theory of cognitive development, which explains how we build our internal models of reality from childhood, assembling frameworks stage by stage through sensory experience. These models aren’t neutral recordings—they’re active, creative interpretations that harden into the schemas we carry as adults. Without self-awareness, I saw, that lens stays fixed, distorting everything we look at.
I thought about how a child who associates discipline with rejection might spend a lifetime projecting fears of abandonment onto every authority figure they meet. I thought about my own unresolved narratives, the ones I’d carried since long before Tabor, and how they had shaped what I saw when I looked out at the world.
The Solipsistic Trap
I began to notice this pattern most clearly in people—myself included—who carried deep wounds. Unresolved trauma creates what I came to think of as “judgmental eyeglasses,” perceptual filters that stay remarkably consistent no matter how much the external world changes. The betrayed person sees betrayal everywhere. The abandoned person finds abandonment in every relationship. The mind, trying to protect itself, builds a reality that confirms its own defenses.
Here was the paradox I couldn’t escape: while I believed I was observing an objective world, I was often just witnessing my own psychological landscape projected outward. But if wounds could color perception this dramatically, I wondered, what might happen when those wounds began to heal? What reality might emerge if I transformed the landscape within?
A Childhood Dream Returns
It was during this period that an old dream resurfaced—one I’d had as a child, and one that now felt strangely connected to what I’d experienced on the mountain. In the dream, I stood in a high village by a still lake, the kind of place that could have existed anywhere between the Andes and eternity. The village priest received a command from God: cast every golden figurine, every sacred symbol, into the lake. The very objects meant to protect the villagers were to be surrendered. Then each person was told to face the “evil one” living in their home—without any symbol of comfort or protection left to shield them.
The priest didn’t spare himself. He returned home, stripped away his garments, and prepared to summon the darkness. Fog rolled in around him. Sparks fell from his fingertips toward whatever waited in the mist. His pulse quickened. Dread nearly overtook him. He pushed forward anyway.
A face began to form through the fog. And in his last moment of clarity before he collapsed, the priest understood something that shattered everything he thought he knew about fear and evil: the face staring back at him was his own.
I’ve carried that dream with me for decades, but only after Tabor did I understand its full weight. By discarding their idols, the villagers gave up their dependence on external symbols of safety, opening the door to real self-discovery. The priest, going further still, found his own reflection in the very adversary he thought he was fighting. True peace, I now believe, doesn’t come from suppressing what we fear—it comes from meeting it directly, even when what we find there is a fragment of ourselves.
Projection, Trauma, and the Search for Forgiveness
Carl Jung gave us the language for this: projection, the act of placing our own unconscious feelings onto others as a way of avoiding the discomfort of confronting them directly. Trauma—personal and inherited—shapes this process profoundly, embedding itself in how we assess danger, extend trust, and interpret ambiguity. A parent scarred by their own upbringing projects those fears onto a child. A community burdened by historical wounds finds scapegoats in outsiders. Left unaddressed, these patterns echo across generations.
I began to see forgiveness as the only real interruption to this cycle. Unresolved resentment distorts perception, pushing us to externalize blame rather than sit with our own hurt. Choosing to forgive isn’t about excusing what happened—it’s about tearing down the wall between projection, judgment, and the truth waiting underneath.
From Sympathy to Empathy
Slowly, something in me began to shift. I noticed the first crack in what I’d come to think of as my own perceptual prison: sympathy. When I let myself genuinely grieve another’s loss, I briefly stepped outside the boundaries of my isolated experience.
Empathy went further still. To truly see through someone else’s eyes, to feel through their heart, began to change my understanding of that unsettling phrase—all that we see is ourselves. The boundary between self and other started to dissolve. I began to sense, faintly at first, what Jesus meant when he said that where two or more gather in his name, he is present—that in moments of genuine connection, individual consciousness merges into something larger.
What Larch Mountain Prepared Me to See
Looking back now, I understand that the mountain hadn’t given me a finished revelation—it had given me a starting point. It cracked open the door to a way of seeing I’d only begin to walk through in the months that followed. I came to recognize three broad stages of awareness on this path: the unconscious, where life is dictated by reaction and fear; the aware, where we begin to consciously choose growth and connection; and the self-aware, where ego limitations begin to fall away and love becomes the source of every impulse.
Beyond even that, I sensed something larger still—a cosmic self, rarely glimpsed and never fully sustained, in which I might recognize myself not as separate from the universe but as one of its conscious expressions. Krishnamurti once said, “You are not an individual; you are part of the vast mind of man. When you realize this fact, you enter into an extraordinary world. You are the entire humanity.” I didn’t yet understand that statement in my bones. But Tabor had planted the seed.
Ten Reminders I Carried Forward
In the days after that mountain experience, I found myself returning to ten quiet truths, reminders that something larger than myself had touched my life:
- The unseen architecture of protection—sensing, in the midst of chaos, a subtle hand redirecting harm and guiding me toward safety I hadn’t logically earned.
- The dialogue of synchronicity—recognizing that what looks like coincidence is often the cosmos speaking, offering wisdom and connection at precisely the right moment.
- The quiet voice beneath the noise—a calm, unwavering knowing that doesn’t shout, but patiently waits to be heard.
- Compassion as instinct, not obligation—feeling drawn to ease another’s suffering not from duty, but from a recognition of shared existence.
- Hardship transmuted into wisdom—understanding pain as something with hidden purpose, shaping rather than punishing.
- A strange calm in uncertainty—a faith that I didn’t need to control every current to be safely carried by them.
- Dreams and symbols as gentle invitations—not commands to obey, but signs inviting reflection.
- A hunger for meaning over accolades—measuring my path by alignment with purpose rather than status.
- Closed doors as course corrections—learning to see rejection and delay as protection rather than punishment.
- Gratitude for the ordinary—finding, without any grand catalyst, a quiet reverence for the timing and poetry of everyday life.
These ten reminders became a kind of compass. They didn’t answer every question the mountain had raised, but they gave me somewhere to stand while I waited for what came next.
What Waited Ahead
I didn’t know it then, but Mt. Tabor was only the beginning of a much longer unraveling and reweaving. Within a month, I would find myself in the midst of another spiritual experience entirely—one that would deepen everything I’d started to understand about perception, projection, and the self I saw reflected in the world around me. That experience, and the teachings that came with it, would carry me even further from the narrow, fear-bound seeing of my old life and closer to something I could only describe as boundless.
But that story belongs to what follows.
Chapter 110: Empathy-The Mystery of the Path Between You and Me
Prelude: The Territory We Are Entering
The commentary on the common knowledge game, and the lemming effect, should have given the reader a substantial window through which to view humanity’s extraordinary potential for both corruption and healing within our social connections. Another facet of the most fundamental truths of our existence is the extraordinary depth of our capacity for connection to one another—and how powerfully that connection influences all of us, for good and for ill. If we learn to collectively embrace this universal fact, we will have a crucial clue as to how to reduce the incidences of disease and distress in our world without simply tattooing more medical technology upon our bodies, minds, and souls.
We are not separate beings navigating a neutral universe. We are nodes in a living, breathing network of consciousness—porous, permeable, and profoundly interdependent. Every thought we think, every emotion we carry unexamined, every wound we refuse to acknowledge, radiates outward into the field of shared human experience. And every act of genuine connection, every moment of true understanding between one soul and another, sends a healing frequency through that same field.
This chapter is a meditation. It is also a diagnosis, a cartography, and, ultimately, an invitation. It is an attempt to map the mysterious territory that exists between you and me—between any two souls who dare to meet one another honestly across the chasm of their individual histories and the accumulated wounds of civilization. It asks what empathy truly is, what it costs, what it heals, and what it demands of those courageous enough to practice it in its fullest and most dangerous forms.
It is also a chapter about the path that extends beyond the human—beyond the personal, beyond the social, and into something that the mystics have always pointed toward, but that language has always struggled to contain: the path between the individual and the cosmos itself. Between the finite and the infinite. Between the suffering self and the vast, unconditional intelligence that some call God, some call the Universe, and some have no name for at all.
Let us begin where we must always begin—in the middle of the mess.
“No mud, no lotus.”—Thich Nhat Hanh
Part One: The Pandemics of Disconnection — America’s Open Wounds and the Failure of Mere Medicine
America is facing multiple pandemics at once, and not all are biological. There’s the pandemic of collective uncritical thinking, fueled by Christian nationalist propagandists spreading harmful lies through influential political channels. There’s the pandemic of cultural division, turning neighbors into rivals and pressuring us to choose sides before choosing our shared humanity. And there are the pandemics of loneliness, isolation, depression, addiction, obesity, cancer, and other traumatic forces—including what some call MAD, or mutually assured death, a grim nod to the gun lobby, Second Amendment extremists, and the unchecked spread of firearms used in tragic murders and suicides of the most innocent.
These pandemics are not separate phenomena occurring in parallel. They are interconnected manifestations of a singular underlying disease: the disease of disconnection. They create more opportunities for eruptions of drama and anxiety, which interbreeds with any potentially unhealed pain and suffering already inherent within our lives. They amplify loneliness. They mutate trauma. They make it harder for any of us to find the thread that connects us to one another and to the larger body of life of which we are all a part.
We must become more conscious of how the unconscious actions of others—and our own unfulfilled healing response—introduce more traumatic influences into our lives. Those on the healing path will attempt to be spiritually present for others while recognizing and transforming, both individually and collectively, all internalized trauma dramas. The first step is to acknowledge what we are dealing with. The second is to understand the tools available to us.
And the most profound of those tools—the one least understood, least valued, and most urgently needed—is empathy.
But before we can understand empathy, we must understand the three fundamental qualities of energy exchange that govern all human relationships. We must understand love, hatred, and indifference.
Part Two: The Trinity of Energy Exchange — Love, Hatred, and the Dangerous Seduction of Indifference
Love, hate, and indifference are three terms we use to describe the quality of our relationships with each other. In various proportions, all of us employ these three qualities of energy exchange in our lives, depending on the person and the situation involved. As human beings, we experience love and hatred as powerful forces that guide all subsequent feelings and perceptions in predefined directions.
Love is an open system of friction-free energy exchange. It binds us to each other in easily identifiable ways. Love is the open channel through which compassion flows freely. It is the condition in which the self expands—where the boundaries of the individual ego become permeable and the wellbeing of another becomes as real and as urgent as one’s own. To love another is to be enlarged by them.
Hatred is its opposite in structure, if not in intensity. It is a closed, attenuated system of energy exchange that also binds us to its object—but in a very different manner. Hatred blocks positive energy exchange and seals the channel between the hater and the hated. It unfairly and illogically separates the hater from its object, traumatizing both the receiver and the giver of that dark energy. What is less commonly understood is the physiological reality of this dynamic: extreme emotions trigger the release of stress hormones in the brain, and over time, these hormones lead to increased inflammation throughout the body, resulting in significant health consequences. To hate another is, quite literally, to poison oneself. The one who drinks the poison of hatred and hopes the other person will suffer through it is often operating under a profound self-destructive delusion.
Indifference is the most deceptive of the three. It is a quality of attention that attempts to keep everybody and everything separate from the observer. The emotionally detached individual is choosing to live in a closed system—a spiritual vacuum. Those practicing total indifference live in an isolated world, with little real emotional connection with anybody or anything other than their own thoughts and feelings. Indifference is often the residue of traumatic experience, and it results in the emotional and spiritual oppression of others, as well as the repression of the personal spirit. For most people, indifference is applied only in specific situations rather than as a complete life orientation. Yet even in its partial applications, it gives the practitioner the illusory sense of having no personal accountability to that which is being witnessed. Personal responsibility for a collectively shared error of the heart is denied, and the potential for a shared healing experience is negated.
Fred Rogers, one of the more genuinely spiritual beings to have graced American public life in the last century, said it plainly:
“We live in a world in which we need to share responsibility. It’s easy to say, ‘It’s not my child, not my community, not my world, not my problem.’ Then there are those who see the need and respond. I consider those people my heroes.”
The person who practices indifference does not consider themselves a villain. They consider themselves rational, protected, safe. They have learned, often through repeated disappointments and betrayals, that caring is dangerous—that love exposes you, that empathy is a wound waiting to happen. And so they seal themselves away behind the transparent wall of emotional neutrality and call it wisdom.
But it is not wisdom. It is a survival strategy that has outlived its usefulness and become its own form of imprisonment.
To choose indifference is to choose a kind of living death. And the world, which so desperately needs our conscious engagement, cannot afford for any more of us to make that choice.
Part Three: The Architecture of Empathy — Decoding the Path Hidden Within the Word
The word empathy has a secret message built into it, revealed through creative interpretation. Let us take the word apart into three components: em—path—y(ou). Empathy is now seen to be the healing path between the mirror image of me (em) and y(ou). When the concepts of “you” and the “mirror image of me” are realized to be identically ONE, me and y(ou) disappear—and our empathy becomes simply the path.
This is not a mere linguistic trick. It is a structural truth about what empathy actually does at its deepest level. Empathy, in both its positive and negative expressions, is the mechanism for transporting emotional energy to create a form of resonance or attunement between sentient beings. It is always in play in both love and hate relationships.
In positive empathy, energy flows freely in both directions, between the “giver” and the “receiver.” There is a shared sense of the expansion of the self—a feeling of becoming larger, more real, more alive, precisely because you have allowed someone else’s reality to become real to you. In its most radical expression, positive empathy can produce shared mental images—what some traditions call telepathy—and genuine spiritual healing. But those are subjects for a deeper exploration than we can fully undertake here.
In negative empathy, energy flow is uneven and dominated by one party, potentially resulting in the oppression of the other and the repression of aspects of the self in both. There is a strong sense of the contraction of the self by at least one party in this exchange. One person’s unhealed darkness seeps into the field of another’s consciousness, and what was meant to be a connection becomes a contamination.
Contemporary research in neuroscience tells us that our brains, like those of other primates, contain mirror neurons. These neurons are triggered in our brains when someone else is sad, angry, or happy, and they—in coordination with other pre-cognitive and cognitive functions—help us feel what that other person is feeling. They help us inhabit, however briefly, the experiential reality of another. When our experiences are similar enough, we can empathize in a way that is genuinely soothing to the other person.
The effort to understand someone else, when made in good faith, can go a long way toward helping them feel better and, sometimes, even toward shifting their behaviors. This can be considered a collaboration between the spirits of the individuals in communication. Though the changing of another’s behavior is not the conscious intention of empathy, most find that through the empathetic connection, each participant is taken beyond the former boundaries of their understanding of self and others.
Anaïs Nin, who understood human connection with rare and luminous precision, wrote:
“Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.”
This is the nature of genuine empathetic exchange. It is not commonplace. It is not the cursory acknowledgment we offer one another across the surface of our busy lives. It is a rare and precious phenomenon—a moment when two souls actually meet, when the usual defenses drop and something real passes between them. These moments are the jewels of human existence. They are also the primary vectors through which healing propagates through the collective field of human consciousness.
Part Four: The Neurological Foundations of Our Interconnection — Science Confirms What the Mystics Always Knew
Human beings are, by nature, profoundly empathetic. Studies consistently show that all animals—especially those mammalian in nature—share in this often sublime characteristic. It is genuinely difficult to harm another person when we can sense the suffering they are experiencing or that we may be causing. The exceptions arise when one is in an extremely hateful state, or when indifference arises from sociopathic or psychopathic natures—conditions in which the mirror neuron system has been fundamentally disrupted or never properly formed.
A conscious person would never abuse any person or animal of any species—including consuming it, unless there were no other choices available for food—after recognizing the unity of sentience that exists in our natural world. Of course, much of humanity is unconscious, and we struggle to even refrain from harming each other, let alone protecting the whole of the animal kingdom. Humankind has systematically “dehumanized” and “de-sentienced” both humans and animals to justify cruel and destructive relationships, as well as its devastatingly extractive relationship with the natural world that sustains us all.
The Judeo-Christian Western religious tradition—and its profound misunderstanding of the wholeness and unity of life—along with its subsequent influence on thinkers throughout the ages, has been at the forefront of this travesty for millennia. The notion that the human being stands apart from and above the natural world, charged to “subdue” and “have dominion over” every living creature, has licensed incalculable violence against the web of life upon which we utterly depend. This is not a theological argument. It is an ecological emergency. And it begins, as all such emergencies begin, in the architecture of perception—in how we see ourselves in relation to everything that is not us.
Neuroscience, quantum theory, and indigenous wisdom are now converging on a single, startling conclusion: the self is not what we think it is. The bounded, isolated, autonomous self of the Western philosophical tradition is a construction—a useful fiction that the brain assembles to navigate the practical demands of physical existence. Beneath this construction, at the level of field physics and neural resonance, the boundaries between organisms are far more porous and permeable than our everyday experience suggests.
This has been verified by mystics, sages, and now quantum theorists. It should not be passed over lightly, like an unpopular dish at dinner. The human race has historically become addicted to the religious and philosophical junk food continuously processed from the limitations of our distant past, rather than feasting at the table of the infinite Spirit of the Now.
Research is also converging on another uncomfortable truth: indifference and hatred have been normalized in modern society, and this normalization carries a profound impact on our collective mental and physical health. Mental health professionals consistently emphasize that unresolved personal traumas hinder our capacity for empathy, leading to a cycle of apathy and detachment. To break free, we must look within ourselves and address these wounds. Therapeutic approaches—including cognitive behavioral therapy, somatic experiencing, mindfulness practices, and the kind of deep, radical self-examination that this book has been attempting to model—are effective instruments in this healing process.
The challenge lies in fostering empathy and compassion in environments that prioritize individual success over collective flourishing. But change is possible. And it begins, as all transformations begin, in the consciousness of the individual.
The Architecture of Empathy and the Alchemy of Listening
Empathy is the mechanism that transports emotional energy, creating attunement between sentient beings. Neuroscience confirms this through the discovery of mirror neurons, affirming what mystics have long known: the bounded, autonomous self is a useful fiction.
To navigate this energetic exchange, we must master the alchemy of the ear. Listening is a profound spiritual technology that spans five distinct levels, each capable of healing or destroying:
- The Floor of Indifference (Waiting to Talk): The ego remains trapped in its own predictive coding, simulating connection while mentally formulating a rebuttal.
- The Theater of Hatred (Listening to Win): Words are tracked solely to defeat the speaker, weaponizing vulnerabilities to construct a prison for the other.
- The Gateway of Resonance (Listening for Meaning): The dawn of empathy, where one hears the unmet need beneath the words. When weaponized, however, it becomes the tool of the savior complex, creating dependency.
- The Shadow Cartography (Listening for the Unsaid): Radical empathy begins here. The listener tracks the gaps and the hidden wounds. The compassionate witness helps tend the trauma, while the predator exploits it for leverage.
- The Compassionate Witness (Listening for the Inner Healer): The highest discipline. The listener provides a sanctuary of silence, allowing the speaker’s own inner healer to emerge. Its dark counterfeit is the predator who cultivates this quiet only to gather emotional ammunition.
The Alchemy of the Ear
Most people never leave the floor of reloading and rebutting, trapped in the predictive coding of their own unhealed trauma. But the ladder of listening is not optional; others are already on it. Some are utilizing this profound spiritual technology to be architects of healing, extending a friction-free energy exchange of love. Others are measuring you for parts.
The only protection, and the only path forward for our collective consciousness, is to climb the ladder yourself. We must cultivate our spiritual bravery, refining our inner sight so that we may accurately see the world. We must learn to listen—not as saviors rushing to merge with the suffering of the world, nor as indifferent bystanders, but as Compassionate Witnesses. The healer is already within us, and the path to awakening has always lived in the spaces between our words.
Part Five: The Dangerous Practice — Radical Empathy and the Technology of the Soul
There is empathy, as we commonly understand it—the capacity to feel for another, to acknowledge their suffering without being destroyed by it, to stand on the shore and throw a rope to someone who is drowning. This is valuable. This is necessary. For most of us, this is the appropriate and sustainable form of empathetic engagement.
And then there is what might be called Radical Empathy.
Radical Empathy is not standing on the shore. Radical Empathy is jumping into the water. It is the dissolution of the egoic boundary. It is the mechanism by which Jesus is reported to have healed. When he touched the leper, in the metaphysical sense, he did not merely transmit divine energy from a safe distance. He became the leprosy. He opened his own energetic field so completely that he resonated with the suffering of the other, took it into his own vast consciousness, and transmuted it through the power of unconditional love.
This is one of the true meanings of the Cross—not as a transaction with an angry deity, but as a somatic reality.
“He took up our pain and bore our suffering.”
This is Radical Empathy. It is the willingness to let the suffering of the world vibrate within your own bones. To let the tumor of another manifest within your own proprioception. To let the grief of a stranger tear at your own heart with the same ferocity with which it tears at theirs.
I speak of this not as a theologian theorizing from a safe distance, but as a witness. I intend to speak to three specific relationships in which I have inadvertently or intentionally been a practitioner of Radical Empathy—and to what that practice cost, and what it ultimately revealed.
Part Six: Donelle Mae Flick Paullin — My First Experience of Radical Empathy and Its Consequences
My first experience of a relationship that eventually blossomed into Radical Empathy revolved around my first wife, Donelle Mae Flick Paullin, who died on the date of my birth—November 20, 2022—at the age of 67. I first met Donelle in 1971, when my friend Randy Olson introduced me to his girlfriend’s stepsister. She was a sensitive, caring, beautiful, and extraordinarily intelligent young woman, beloved by all of her classmates. I, by contrast, was an immature and often insecure young man—a high IQ paired with a low emotional one—chasing dreams of the Air Force and, eventually, NASA. Eight years later, Donelle would become my wife. But between that first meeting and our wedding, and in all the years that followed, there is a vast story to tell: a story of suffering, of the hope for healing, of disillusionment, and, ultimately, of the slow and arduous growth into Radical Empathy.
To love Donelle was to be confronted, again and again, with the limits of my own capacity to understand. She had been wounded long before I knew her. Born into a family where her mother Marlene’s narcissism and neglect created the conditions for unspeakable harm, Donelle was sexually abused by a predator named Bud Barr when she was only six years old. The damage was rooted deep within the very fabric of her being, its tendrils inexorably entwining with every aspect of the path that followed. By the end of her senior year in high school, the disease that professionals would label paranoid schizophrenia had broken through. I did not yet have the eyes to see how a child’s terror could echo across a lifetime, how the secrets a family demands its children keep can become the very illness those children carry.
“We are only as sick as our secrets,”
I would later come to understand—and Donelle bore not only her own secrets, but the secrets of everyone who had failed to protect her.
In those early years, my empathy was conditional, transactional, and easily exhausted. When we married in September of 1979, Donelle was stable, studying to become a sous chef, managed by the latest “miracle” antipsychotics. I had delayed our marriage for six years precisely because I needed her to be well enough for me to feel safe. That, I now see, was the empathy of a frightened young man—love that required the beloved to first become manageable. When she suffered the most devastating breakdown of her life that following winter, crying out
“I am controlled! I am controlled!”
into the night, I moved across the street rather than remain beside her. I told myself it was for my own sanity. And perhaps it was. But bravado is easily worn threadbare by the caustic winds of reality, and the pain of her suffering remained a constant presence, an echo reverberating through the hollow chambers of my heart. We divorced in 1983, and Donelle drifted into homelessness on the streets of Portland, where she became the victim of atrocities I can scarcely bring myself to name.
I believed, in ending our marriage, that I was establishing a boundary that would protect me and grant her the space to heal. Instead, the mental healthcare system—or the absence of one—swallowed her whole. She was failed in every way imaginable: medicated into a stranger’s body, ostracized, marginalized, even subjected to a two-day “exorcism” by well-meaning fundamentalists who chained her to a wall and understood nothing of her plight. Watching this unfold, I began to grasp something I had been too immature to perceive before. Donelle, and the mentally ill in general, are society’s canaries in the mine. We will all eventually die of spiritual asphyxiation if we neglect to listen to the stories told by our most vulnerable and most damaged family members. My helplessness was teaching me, slowly and painfully, that to love someone I could not fix required a different kind of presence altogether—a willingness to bear witness rather than to repair.
The turning point came in 1987. I had recently gotten sober, and as part of working the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, I went to visit Donelle at her apartment near Camas, Washington, to make amends. We had been divorced for three years, but I still kept in touch out of concern for her. When I arrived, candles flickered throughout the apartment, casting an eerie, otherworldly glow, and Donelle was in the depths of a complete dissociative breakdown. As I sat down to speak with her, I was struck by the transformation in her appearance and countenance—she looked impossibly young and innocent. As she spoke, I felt with absolute certainty that I was witnessing a six- or seven-year-old girl, a persona that had taken residence within her and was now speaking through her.
Something inspired me to give voice to what I was seeing. I told the frightened child before me that she was not responsible for the abuse she had suffered at the hands of Bud, and perhaps others, during Marlene’s drunken soirees. I tried to extend all the forgiveness and compassion my heart could hold to that naive, innocent child making her presentation before me. We wept together, and my heart broke open in a way it never had before. I hurt as I had never hurt as a human being—and yet within that hurt, something essential was being born: the capacity to meet another’s suffering without flinching, without fixing, without fleeing.
Later in that same visit, a different persona emerged: calm, composed, mature. When I asked who I was speaking with, the voice answered, “God,” and offered me the wisest, most loving counsel I had ever received.
“I have many faces, but you have recognized mine, and you have reached the point of being able to accept beauty in your life. You have made peace with your past, but peace does not last forever. You have much work to do, but your work will have love guiding it, and protecting you.”
That a damaged human being could become the vessel for such grace remains, to me, a miracle. That is how God works sometimes.
In the years that followed, I came to see that Radical Empathy is not a destination one arrives at but a road one is broken open upon. Over the long arc of knowing Donelle, I tried to be the best support I could, but I was damaged goods myself—hobbled by my own selfishness, addiction, and sense of powerlessness. I failed her in countless ways, and she deserved far better than I was able to give. With mental illness, we tend to fail together—as families, as a culture, as a human race. The great gift we can offer is not a cure but a non-judgmental listening ear, a heart kept open to the stories that are told. Had Donelle been lovingly nurtured from birth through adulthood, I can only hope the disease might never have erupted at all. Traumatization of the innocent cannot lead to happy outcomes.
When she died on my birthday in 2022, the irony felt almost unbearable—a cruel jest from the fates, or perhaps God’s enigmatic humor. Her departure was at once a relief and a despair: relief that she was finally free from the agony that had defined so much of her adult life, and despair at all that the world had been denied by her suffering. In the end, Donelle taught me that love is not about possessing, but about bearing witness and extending grace. It is about loving through the chaos, the illness, and the loss. May her memory live on—not as a reminder of the sorrow that mental illness can sow, but as a beacon illuminating the path toward Radical Empathy: the hard-won understanding that to truly see another soul, especially the most broken among us, is the closest we may ever come to the divine.
Part Seven: Marty — Another Journey Into the Depths of Radical Empathy and Its Consequences
In 2017, I walked a friend named Marty to the threshold of death. We embarked on a journey that transcended the sterile confines of hospital rooms and clinical protocols. I committed to being a vessel for his transition. I stripped away the armor of self-protection and engaged in Radical Empathy with full knowledge of what that might cost.
The results were terrifyingly real.
For most of my life prior to the age of thirty-one, I preferred intoxication over speaking my truth. Trauma—both personal and intergenerational—had relegated my self-expression to the lower realms of consciousness, leaving me disconnected from any creative potential within. But a series of profound experiences convinced me that I must speak up and honor the calling of my own spirit. The story of how I discovered my creative voice is inseparable from the story of how I discovered, and was nearly destroyed by, Radical Empathy.
It began on an ordinary evening in November 2016 when our book club hosted Sheila Hamilton, an author and five-time Emmy-winning journalist who had written a memoir about her late husband’s struggle with bipolar disorder and his tragic suicide. As she spoke, her words struck chords deep in my soul. Her husband’s pain surfaced the submerged fragments of my own story. By the end of the night, I felt an urgent compulsion to write—to give voice to the unseen chains of oppression and repression that strangle human potential. I started a blog, posting unpolished reflections into a digital void. Most posts received no attention. Yet I pressed on.
Amid the silence, my friend of twenty years, Marty, emerged as a reader. He resonated with my posts on toxic masculinity and its insidious ripple effects on society. Our friendship, once casual, began to deepen. I had always observed an unspoken restraint in Marty—a quiet shadow who retreated in the presence of his more dominant wife, Eddy. I recognized this dynamic intimately. It mirrored how society often silences voices that challenge its rhythm, filling any void with its own loud narrative. But Marty heard me. Our dialogues became a safe harbor in a world that seemed increasingly disinterested in honest communication.
Through this process, I began to understand that oppression is not merely a social system inflicted by one group upon another. It is an infiltration of the spirit—a reinforced silence that dims our creative light. I saw this oppression not only in Marty but also in myself, where a lifetime of unacknowledged trauma had manifested as disease. Healing, I realized, requires taking radical responsibility for how we unconsciously perpetuate these systems. We are all simultaneously victim and perpetrator. Acknowledging this duality is essential for meaningful change.
My journey took an unexpected turn on January 11, 2017. I awoke at 2:45 in the morning with an inexplicable urgency. Sitting in my office, my body suddenly betrayed me. I lost all motor control, yet my awareness remained painfully sharp. Frozen, I became a silent witness to my own body’s rebellion. Within this state, I perceived a dark presence in the left hemisphere of my inner awareness—a black mass, the size of a golf ball. Fear took root, but I kept this unsettling discovery to myself.
Weeks later, on March 5th, my dear friend Marty—a survivor of malignant melanoma—suffered a major seizure and was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Golf ball-sized. In the left hemisphere of his brain.
I could not dismiss the parallels. Death had made itself known to me in a palpable, visceral form, and now it seemed our struggles were mirroring each other in a way that defied rational explanation. As Marty was prepped for surgery, I was pummeled by waves of anxiety. Lying on my couch, it felt as though my consciousness was slipping away. My wife, Sharon, found me pale and broken. I believed then—and believe now—that this was not a physical illness but a spiritual unraveling: an event unfolding within the soul.
For years, I had allowed myself to be silenced by judgmental voices and my own fear. Now, with my sense of identity dissolving at its edges, I begged Sharon to carry my message to the world for me. With steadfast love, she refused.
“Your message is your own to deliver,” she said.
“It must be spoken through you.”
Her refusal was an act of ultimate empowerment. In that pivotal moment, I turned inward and prayed. Compelled by an unseen force, I began to write.
Words poured through me—unfiltered and raw. For two days, I channeled fifteen pages of my story in a state of what I can only describe as divine flow. This was not merely writing. It was a resurrection of my creative spirit, long buried under the weight of oppression and fear and unacknowledged grief. And miraculously, the moment I completed my narrative—which coincided almost precisely with Marty’s successful tumor removal—the dark mass of energy that had lingered within me vanished entirely.
It was then I understood: to heed the counsel of so-called authorities can never replace the authority of one’s own spirit. For those of us blessed with the power of expression, silence is Death’s closest ally.
I speak of this not merely as a theologian, but as a witness. Two months before Marty physically experienced his tumor, I had felt it within myself. My interoceptive sense—the internal mapping of my own being—had screamed that the mass was in me. I could feel its weight, its pressure, its dark gravity. It was a proprioceptive illusion, yet it was ontologically true. I was carrying his burden. I was Simon of Cyrene carrying the cross—not metaphorically, but energetically.
This connection was no accident of imagination. Contemporary neuroscience tells us that our brains, like those of other primates, contain mirror neurons. These neurons are triggered when someone else is sad, angry, or happy, helping us to feel what that other person is feeling. What they help us feel is what we would experience if we were in that person’s place. In the case of my connection with Marty, this mechanism was not merely activated—it was amplified to its furthest extreme. The Radical Empathy created a genuine transmission of suffering from one field of consciousness to another, escalating into what mystics have called the stigmata syndrome. It is a profound state where the empath takes on so much of the suffering energy of a treasured person that they manifest in their own body the wounds and symptoms of the one they love.
This level of connection is so foreign to our modern, individualized sensibilities that it is often misinterpreted. Marty’s wife, witnessing the profound, wordless intimacy between us, suspected a romantic affair. She could not conceive of a love that transcends the romantic or the familial—a love that is purely, terrifyingly existential. She saw two men merging souls to facilitate a departure and could only categorize it through the lens of earthly attachment. But what was occurring between us was something older and stranger and more fundamental than romance. It was the soul’s recognition of itself in another.
Marty’s recovery was followed by setbacks. New treatments left him wheelchair-bound. His energy was now devoted entirely to navigating the chaos of his unraveling physical state. He confided in me how inarticulate he felt—unable to capture in words the disorienting transition from the vital man he had been to the person he was becoming. I shared a metaphor with him: his struggle was like a forest fire, consuming the layers of identity he had cultivated over decades, burning away illusions and attachments, leaving behind only the eternal, basic truth of who he essentially was. His pain was not a punishment. It was an invitation—the most severe and undeniable invitation of his life—to uncover the unshakable strength beneath all the constructed identities.
Slowly, Marty began to exist within the fire, allowing its searing heat to shape him into something freer. He was tormented by the thought of the cancer’s inevitable return and by the waking dreams that blurred his reality. He sought distance, even from his wife, whose constant presence—though loving—felt oppressive. He was waiting for a creative story to form in his mind: a container for his intention to move beyond all his knowns and into a new life, free from the fear of death.
On September 10, 2017, Marty exercised his right to Oregon’s Death with Dignity option. He chose to shield me and most others from this knowledge until it was accomplished. A party celebrating his life and marriage, held the night before, became a surreal, liminal space straddling joy and finality. My own spirit had sensed a healing in him—a renewed coherence and vitality—and I grappled with disbelief for weeks.
His primary fear had been that the cancer would steal his identity. He chose instead to meet death on his own terms. His final creative writing piece described watching a coyote—the timeless trickster—loping confidently through a cemetery. In that creature, Marty saw a part of himself: a spirit unafraid to walk the line between worlds.
Marty’s death shattered parts of me I thought were unbreakable. Yet in those broken places, something profound and resilient grew. His passing was not just an end but a transformation. His spirit persists—not in some otherworldly place, but in the transformational energy he inspired, and in the pages of this book, and in whoever these words reach and awaken.
Part Eight: The Stigmata Syndrome — When Empathy Becomes Perilous
The experience with Marty illuminated something that must be examined with great care: the perilous shadow side of empathy. Empathy has been found to carry not just a positive or “good” aspect. Empathy can also drag an unsuspecting and spiritually unprepared empath into the ditch alongside someone who may be of low consciousness.
This might be termed negative empathy—a state of being so sensitive to other people’s experiences that we become overwhelmed by their suffering, to the point where we begin to suffer ourselves. This has the opposite effect of the healing collaboration that occurs through positive empathy. Instead of expanding both parties, it becomes an alliance of shared mutual pain, which eventually results in new forms of emotional isolation for both.
The extreme form of this empathic vulnerability might be called the Stigmata Syndrome: a state in which the empath takes on so much of the suffering energy and experience of another person—whether loved or despised—that they begin to manifest in their own bodies and minds the wounds and symptoms of the person they have become attached to. Those who have read any of my earlier works will be well aware of my profound and terrifying experience with Marty, and of the extraordinary spiritual growth potential hidden within such dangerous territory.
Radical Empathy is not a hobby. It is rigorous, life-consuming, and inherently dangerous. When you open the door of your being fully to another’s suffering, you cannot filter what enters. The practitioner risks somatic transference. The disease being witnessed, the darkness being held, seeks a home. If the practitioner’s own vessel is not immaculately clear—if there is ego, fear, attachment, or unresolved trauma—the suffering can lodge itself within them and begin to grow.
This is why I have since resolved to exercise severe discernment about when and with whom I engage in Radical Empathy. There are those who are called to this practice—it is, essentially, the vocation of a healer, a shaman, a true spiritual director. But it is not a path to be wandered down casually. The aspiration to heal must be matched by an equal commitment to one’s own ongoing purification. You cannot transmit what you do not embody. And you cannot safely absorb what your own field cannot process and release.
The alternative—the path that most of us are called to most of the time—is what might be called the way of the Compassionate Witness. To practice Compassionate Witnessing is to offer the infinite listening ear: to hold space without merging. To say to another human being, with your entire presence:
I see your pain. I am not afraid of it. I will not run away, and I will not pretend it is not there. But I will also not climb into it with you and drown alongside you, because that helps no one.
This is not a failure of love. It is love’s intelligence—love mature enough to understand its own limits and wise enough to respect them.
Part Nine: The Architecture of Hatred — Institutionalized Darkness and Its Costs
Perhaps our knee-jerk reaction to certain people in our shared cultural life—people like Donald Trump, who represents a particular and particularly visible form of spiritual darkness—has been to hate and despise them. Much has been written by conscious, caring people about the necessity of not hating such figures, but of instead perceiving them as ill people, as poor people, as suffering people. This change of perception may open our personal doors to compassion, sympathy, and even love. It is permissible to be angry at abuses of power, past and present, as long as that anger does not become institutionalized within us—as long as it does not harden into something permanent, something that outlives its usefulness and becomes a prison.
By clinging to anger and resentment over a long period, we enhance our susceptibility to having those emotions transformed into hate-filled memories—into what might be called personally institutionalized hatred. We witness daily the collectively institutionalized hatred within our world culture, manifesting as religious persecution, patriarchy, xenophobia, misogyny, racism, bullying, homophobia, nationalism, ecological destruction, and other self-destroying energy exchanges. We do not wish to add to the suffering of others—or of ourselves—by creating new pathways of institutionalized hatred in our own consciousness.
The distinction between constructive anger and corrosive hatred is critical, and it is one that our culture rarely makes clearly enough.
Constructive anger is spontaneous. It arises from being an active, present witness to injustice in the moment. It is always relevant and productive. It wakes up the oppressed and repressed spirit. It generates extra motivational energy for constructive engagement with a world that needs to change. Constructive anger gives all parties involved an opportunity to share in the perception of a wrong or injustice and to share in a plan to right it.
Hatred, by contrast, carries much deliberation within it. It arises from the historical deposits of unresolved anger—from the sediment of repressed pain and suffering within our memories—and it looks to punishment and the destruction of others as its primary objective. Hatred develops from the collective deposits of darkness that our culture has handed down across generations, as well as from our own personal painful memories. Once established, hatred becomes entrenched as a mostly unconscious dark power broker within our minds, keeping us pilloried to the past and emotionally chained to the objects of our fixation. We are no longer free to respond to each new moment as it unfolds. Instead, we substitute old patterns of self-defeating and oppressive responses, while simultaneously repressing the desire within us to connect with peace and love.
What can be most difficult to consider is the truth that people who habitually hate others also hate themselves. Some attempt to hide from self-loathing through false narratives of their own greatness, while deriding and demeaning all who are unlike themselves. The multitude of lies, the compulsive need to manipulate others’ perceptions, and the relentless deceptive behavior reveal an absolute need to hide from the truth of a diminished and damaged sense of self. This is manifested through continuous projection—accusing the innocent and the guilty alike of one’s own personal shortcomings, deceptions, and criminality. This communication style is madness-inducing for any rational, intelligent human being. The witness to such expression can feel as though the very fabric of sanity is being ripped apart before their eyes.
For those not under a hypnotic trance, this spiritual depravity is easily perceived and felt. And the unwary watcher—in an involuntary and forced relationship with this disfigured being—can, through negative empathy, inadvertently share in the self-hatred being projected. This is another manifestation of the Stigmata Syndrome: the entrained observer inadvertently takes on the negative energy of the person under observation, and through the mirror neuron phenomenon—through negative empathy—shares in the disfigured spirit that this darkness continues to manifest.
This is a normal and natural response to proximity to darkness. Yet as we become more conscious, it becomes clear that we need no longer climb into the pigpen of another person’s self-hatred and unconsciously support them in it. We can observe without absorbing. We can witness without merging. We can remain in right relationship to the darkness of others without being captured by it.
The role of leadership in this dynamic deserves particular attention. Leadership is most profoundly tested during crises. A leader’s ability to respond with understanding, to connect with those who are suffering, and to make decisions informed by compassion defines their legacy in ways that nothing else can. When a leader demonstrates genuine empathy, they signal that the struggles of their people matter deeply. This creates trust, motivates collaboration, and strengthens communities. Conversely, the absence of empathy in positions of power can have devastating consequences—fostering division, neglect, and a corrosive alienation that eventually poisons the entire social body.
History offers instructive examples. Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the economic devastation of the Great Depression with urgency and compassion, spearheading programs that directly addressed the struggles of ordinary Americans. New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern demonstrated empathy in the face of terror; her response to the Christchurch mosque attacks empowered grieving communities and reinforced national unity. And Captain G.M. Gilbert, the psychologist who observed the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, noted that the defining characteristic of many of history’s most catastrophic leaders was their utter inability to empathize—a quality he equated with evil itself.
The question of how we respond to the empathy deficit in our leadership, and in our collective life, is not merely political. It is spiritual. It is a question about what kind of world we are choosing to create with every thought we think, every conversation we have, every vote we cast, and every moment of genuine connection—or tragic disconnection—we enact with another human being.
Part Ten: The Perils of the Savior — Empathy Without Boundaries and the Crucifixion of the Rescuer
The desire to rescue others frequently originates from a background of trauma or guilt. Individuals who have experienced significant emotional distress or traumatic events often develop a heightened sense of empathy and responsibility toward others. This can manifest as an almost compulsive need to “fix” the lives of those around them—a belief, deeply embedded and often entirely unconscious, that their worth is tied to the wellbeing of others.
While this drive can lead to genuine acts of kindness and support, it also sets the stage for potential heartache and betrayal. The savior complex—or what might be called the Rescuer’s Wound—is a condition in which the individual’s empathy has become distorted by ego needs and unhealed trauma into something that ultimately serves the helper more than the helped.
History provides a poignant and extreme example of the perils of this dynamic: the crucifixion of Jesus. Despite his efforts to bring truth and healing to his people, Jesus was ultimately betrayed by those he sought to help. This principle remains operative today. Those who feel compelled to intervene in the lives of others often find that their efforts are met with resistance, misunderstanding, or outright hostility. The very individuals they aim to support may reject their help—and those who project the most darkness require the most careful handling—leading to feelings of betrayal and what might be called an emotional crucifixion.
Recognizing this principle is crucial for anyone engaged in mental health advocacy, empathy practices, or social activism. Understanding that one’s efforts to help may not always be welcomed—may, in fact, be violently opposed—can prevent the disillusionment and emotional burnout that destroys so many sincere healers and helpers.
This does not mean withdrawal from service. It means service offered from a place of deep personal wholeness rather than from the anxious, hungry place of an unhealed wound that needs to be validated. It means respecting the autonomy and agency of those we seek to support. It involves listening without judgment, offering assistance without imposing, and understanding that our role is not to save but to empower. It means, in the end, trusting the other person’s own capacity for healing—because genuine empathy recognizes the divine potential in the other, even when—perhaps especially when—that other cannot yet recognize it in themselves.
True and sustainable help must stem from genuine empathy and understanding rather than a compulsion to validate one’s self-worth. By shifting our focus from being saviors to being empathetic allies, we can create a more realistic and sustainable approach to supporting others. This transition requires us to confront our own motivations, heal our past wounds, and develop a deeper sense of self-worth that is independent of the outcomes of our efforts.
Part Eleven: The Brain as Dreamer — Predictive Coding and the Mirrors of Our Perception
According to the latest research on the human brain and its capacity to form perceptions, the brain operates through a process called predictive coding. It integrates new information based on the beliefs provided by old information. A typical human being moving through the world is not passively perceiving sensory inputs and then assembling a picture of reality from them. Instead, the brain actively generates a model—a sophisticated, internally constructed prediction of what is likely to be present—and then checks this model against incoming sensory data to see what matches and what doesn’t.
This means we are all, at every moment, living primarily in a world of our own making. We see what we expect to see. We hear what we expect to hear. We encounter in others what we have already, at some level, decided is there. The brain has been found to have the capacity to over-predict—to expect something to be present that is not actually there. That expectation can create a self-hypnotic suggestion, and a non-existent thing can be perceived as though it were real and present.
Anaïs Nin, who understood the paradoxical architecture of perception far better than most professional psychologists, put it simply:
“We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
This is not a comforting truth. It is a deeply challenging one, because it places the full weight of responsibility for our experience of reality upon our own shoulders. It means that the world we inhabit—the world of our daily emotional experience, of our relationships, of our sense of what is possible and what is not—is, to a degree far larger than we typically acknowledge, a projection of our own internal state.
There is a difficult eternal truth that must be embraced:
All that we will ever see, unto eternity, is the extension of our consciousness. How we see ourselves determines the quality of our life experience and the integrity of our connection with our higher power.
This fact has been verified by mystics, sages, and now quantum theorists. It is not a poetic embellishment. It is a description of a functional reality. Our minds do not simply receive the world. They generate it. And what they generate is shaped, at every level, by the sum of our experiences, our beliefs, our wounds, and our healing—or the lack thereof.
This understanding is both humbling and empowering. Humbling, because it requires us to relinquish the comfortable illusion that the darkness we perceive “out there” is entirely separate from what is unresolved “in here.” Empowering, because it suggests that as we heal our inner sight—as we clear the fogged lenses of our own unprocessed trauma and unexamined belief—the world we perceive genuinely changes. Not just metaphorically, but functionally. The field of our experience expands. New possibilities become visible. New connections become possible.
“Remove that log stuck in your eye, so that you may more accurately see the sliver stuck in another’s eye.” — Jesus of Nazareth
The only way to permanently remove spiritual eyesores from our vision is to heal our inner sight. Profound changes in our own consciousness eventually and inevitably impact our world—because our minds are inextricably intertwined with the collective consciousness of the world. We are not separate radio stations broadcasting at each other across an empty void. We are nodes in a living network, and the frequency of our own signal affects the entire network.
Part Twelve: The Healer Within and the Alchemy of the Terminal Hour
We have traveled far together. We have stood at the edge of disconnection’s pandemics, mapped the trinity of love, hatred, and indifference, decoded the secret architecture hidden within the word empathy, and walked beside Donelle and Marty into the most dangerous waters a soul can enter. We have named the savior’s wound and gazed into the mirror of our own perception. Now, as this meditation draws toward its close, we must ask the question that has hovered beneath every word: What does all of this mean for the one who is dying? And since each of us is, in the slow arithmetic of biology, always dying—what does it mean for you?
There is a place where every theory of empathy meets its final examination, and that place is the bedside of the terminally ill. Here the mundane veils are stripped away. Here love, hatred, and indifference are no longer abstractions but the very substance of how we choose to spend our final exchanges of energy. It is here, at the precipice, that we discover whether the path between you and me was ever real at all.
Consider the case of Jim, a companion of three decades (deceased August 21, 2026), who has spent the last fourteen months wrestling with the hydra of multiple myeloma. The medical narrative is one of statistical failure. He traversed four of the five available treatment regimens—a “gold standard” of pharmacological intervention designed to eliminate the cancer before it eliminates the host. Yet for Jim, the cure became a second disease. The toxicity was so profound that it necessitated hospitalization after every cycle. His oncologist, a skilled technician of the body, deemed him a non-responder.
When the fifth option presented itself—a final, desperate volley known for its devastating impact on immediate quality of life—the decision was made to stop. The machinery of modern medicine had reached its limit. But this is precisely where the materialist narrative ends and the human narrative begins.
In the cessation of treatment, Jim found something he had not possessed for over a year: life. On palliative care, his narcotic needs subsided. His spinal fractures began to knit together—not because of a pharmaceutical agent, but perhaps because the body was at last permitted to rest from the assault of its own supposed cure. He abandoned the restrictive regimen that had banned dark chocolate in favor of the simple, hedonistic pleasure of milk chocolate. He chose the flavor of now over the probability of tomorrow. He reclaimed his sexuality—a vital life-force energy the disease had stolen—restoring a tender connection with his wife. He is planning to play golf with me in the Arizona desert.
He is dying, yes. But for the first time in months, he is genuinely living.
There is a lesson here that gathers up everything this chapter has tried to say. The choices we make about how to spend our dwindling time, about what brings us genuine joy, about where and with whom we direct our fading life-force energy, are not medically irrelevant. They are the primary architecture of our remaining days. And they are, at their root, choices about connection. To eat the chocolate is to say yes to the present. To reclaim intimacy is to reopen the channel of love that disease had sealed. Jim’s dying has become a teaching in the very thing we have been exploring: that the quality of our energy exchange determines the quality of our existence, even—perhaps especially—at the end.
Part Thirteen: The Temple and the Cathedral — Honoring the Body Without Worshiping It
While we have spoken at length of the spirit, we must not commit the opposite error of neglecting the temple. The body, though temporary, is the instrument through which all of this reality is experienced. The empathy we have praised, the love we have championed, the witnessing we have called sacred—all of it requires a vessel. And the vessel deserves care.
My own mother lived eight years beyond a sentence that should have claimed her swiftly, before MERSA finally took her. Her life in those years was not defined by her diagnosis but by her defiance of it. She volunteered. She traveled. She engaged the world with the open channel of love that this chapter has named as the highest form of energy exchange. Her resilience was not accidental, and it was often supported through medical technology.
Yet these supports are buttresses, not the cathedral itself. They keep the walls standing so that the real work—the spiritual work, the work of connection and healing—can take place within. We must use the science. We must take the herbs. But we must always remember that they are the servants, never the masters. To confuse the buttress with the cathedral is to mistake the scaffolding for the sacred edifice it protects—and it is a confusion our entire civilization has made, lavishing its faith upon the external while starving the inner healer who alone can make us whole.
For humanity remains obsessed with the external savior. We hunt the magic bullet, the perfect chemotherapy, the miracle worker in some distant jungle. And while phenomena such as remote healing and energy work have demonstrated genuine efficacy, they often distract us from a more terrifying truth: the true healer is within. The external healers are catalysts—hypnotists of the soul, skilled at coaxing the conscious mind to step aside so that the fragment of the Divine Spark within us may unleash its disregarded potential. We are the placebo and the cure. We are the disease and the remedy. Every external healer is finally a mirror, reflecting our own capacity for wholeness back at us.
This strips away the comfort of dependency. It demands that we stop outsourcing our salvation. The therapist, the guru, the prophet—each can construct a bridge to our innate healing possibilities. But the bridge must eventually be discarded, lest we carry the teacher in place of the teaching and erect one more idol within our already divided consciousness. To internalize the messenger rather than the message is to fracture ourselves further.
The light that healing reveals is not the healer’s light.
It is our own.
Part Fourteen: Why I Will Not Merge With Jim — The Final Discipline of the Witness
I have told you of Donelle, whom I loved across decades of illness and could not save. I have told you of Marty, into whose dying I poured myself so completely that his tumor took root in my own proprioception, that the dark mass lodged in my consciousness two months before it announced itself in his brain. I have shown you what Radical Empathy costs. And so you will understand why, with Jim, I have made a different choice.
I told Jim plainly that I would not engage in Radical Empathy with him. I have chosen, instead, the path of the Compassionate Witness. I will offer the infinite listening ear. I will hold space. I will see him without flinching. But I will not merge.
This is not a failure of love. It is love’s intelligence—love mature enough to recognize that the destruction of the vessel serves no one when another way remains. To practice Radical Empathy is to emulate the Christ, and to emulate the Christ in that ultimate sense is to accept the crucifixion. It is to accept that transmuting another’s suffering may require the dissolution of one’s own form. I have resolved that I may yet answer that call once or twice more in this life, when it becomes undeniable. But I prefer to die of my own biology, not the displaced biology of another.
And yet I must confess a humility here, for I have learned that Love is a trickster. Love sometimes obeys needs the ego cannot anticipate. We may resolve to stay on the shore, and then the wave arrives, and we discover we are already swimming. I once dreamed of a map bearing two kinds of paths—a single dark, solid line representing the well-worn ruts of family and society, and a complex web of intersecting dotted lines with no clear beginning or end, symbolizing the spirit-led journeys into the unknown. I was being called to integrate them both. The spiritual life is forever like that dotted-line pathway, and it is the quality of our connections with one another that fills in the space between the dots.
So my discipline with Jim is not a wall. It is a permeable boundary, held consciously, ready to yield if Love commands it. This, perhaps, is the highest skill the empath can cultivate: not the reckless merging of the wounded rescuer, nor the sealed indifference of the frightened heart, but the discerning openness that knows when to throw the rope and when, only when truly called, to jump.
Part Fifteen: The Final Mirror — Hatred, Forgiveness, and the Stranger We Despise
We cannot close this meditation without returning, one last time, to the darkest of the three energies—for indifference can be thawed and love can be cultivated, but hatred is the force that will follow us to the very bedside and poison even our dying if we let it.
We have already seen that hatred is a closed system that traumatizes the hater as surely as the hated, that it floods the body with the stress hormones of inflammation, that the one who drinks the poison and waits for another to suffer is operating under a fatal delusion. We have seen that those who habitually hate also hate themselves, hiding from their own diminishment behind false narratives of greatness and the ceaseless projection of their shortcomings onto the innocent and the guilty alike.
But here, at the chapter’s threshold, we must understand the deepest consequence of this dynamic, the one that joins it inseparably to everything we have learned about perception. When we direct our mental blows at the figures we despise, those blows land predominantly upon ourselves. For we are fighting the creations within our own minds rather than exchanging energy with the actual objects of our objection—and the actual object is the only place where any real change might occur. The “you” we hate can never be ultimately real. It exists as a conceptual image, assembled by a brain that, as predictive coding reveals, sees not what is but what it already expects. We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are. The hated other is a projection of a newly formed and disowned aspect of our own collectively shared negative self-image.
This is why forgiveness is not sentiment but survival. Forgiveness does not forget the offense. It does not excuse the abuser while he continues his abhorrent behavior. We must still speak truth to power. We must still act, consciously and decisively, against every force that imperils life. Forgiveness, rather, releases the practitioner from the corrosion of carrying negative perceptions of others—it unchains us from the past so that we may meet the unknown present with an open heart.
“Remove that log stuck in your eye,” said Jesus of Nazareth,
“so that you may more accurately see the sliver stuck in another’s eye.”
The only way to permanently remove spiritual eyesores from our vision is to heal our inner sight—and as we heal it, the world we perceive genuinely changes, because our minds are inextricably woven into the collective consciousness of the world.
Part Sixteen: What This Leaves for You
So where does this leave us? Where does it leave you?
We are not all called to be martyrs. We are not all equipped to be high-voltage conduits for the transmutation of another’s cancer. But every one of us is called to recognize the healing that lives in connection. The journey you are on—whether you stand at your own precipice or beside a beloved who stands at theirs—is a microcosm of the universal struggle: the decay of the form and the endurance of the essence.
Recognize the healer within. Stop searching for the magic pill. The magic is in the will to live, in the decision to eat the chocolate, in the choice to love the spouse, in the resolve to nourish the blood and the spirit at once. The external healer is only ever a mirror; the light is your own.
Embrace the power of witnessing. You need not take another’s suffering into your own body to be of profound service. To truly see another soul—without flinching, without fixing, without fleeing—is itself a healing act. To be a Compassionate Witness is to say, with your whole presence: I see your pain. I am not afraid of it. I will not run away.
Honor the biological support. Do not neglect the temple. Use the science. Honor the practitioners of the healing arts. Take the herbs. But never forget that they are buttresses, not the cathedral they protect.
Cultivate spiritual bravery. Understand that death is not a failure of medicine. It is a transition of energy. My mother’s death from MERSA was not a defeat; her eight years of living were the victory. And refuse, above all, to let hatred or indifference seal the channels through which love and witnessing flow. The contracted heart dies long before the body does.
Empathy is the great vehicle by which consciousness transcends our apparent separateness, allowing each of us to connect the dots in a mutually affirming manner. It is only through one another that we ever come to see who we are. I am you, and you are me, and together we are everything; apart, we are still chained together by whatever separates us. Love unifies. Hatred fragments and traumatizes. Indifference entombs.
Our world is in desperate need of hearts expanding through mutual positive empathy rather than contracting through negative empathy or indifference. We did not create the world as it now is. We cannot control it, nor can we cure it. But we can evolve. And collectively, we can begin to address the disease of the spirit that dominates our civilization—not with more technology tattooed upon our bodies, but with the ancient, dangerous, radical technology of the open heart.
My heart is with you. We are all walking each other home, stumbling in the dark, occasionally lighting a candle that flares up with the brightness of a miracle. Whether through the perilous unity of Radical Empathy or the steady hand of the Compassionate Witness, we are the architects of our own healing, and of each other’s.
Each day brings its unique confrontation with entropy. Yet with the support of your communities—medical, spiritual, and the unseen—you are entitled to a quality of life that defies the diagnosis. You are entitled to the miraculous.
Walk bravely.
The healer is already there.
The path was always between us.
