What you can hope for in someone else, you can see as a possibility for yourself.  And what you have found as a possibility for yourself is typically as much as you can hope for for someone else.  If you went through a period of suffering, and the most you discovered was that a lifetime of this intervention or that band-aid was the only solution, when you encounter someone who is suffering, that will seem to be the limit for them as well.  How could you possibly envision or fathom more for them if you yourself had not tread there?  Yet, watch someone move from suffering to healing, from suffering to bliss even, and you can taste that possibility for yourself.

It is all about possibility.  Opening to what could be, opening to the chance or even just the fantasy that things do not need to be like this, that freedom is possible.  Permanent healing is possible.  Transformation is possible.  Not surface transformation.  Deep, all encompassing transformation of the whole self.  Things you thought would stick to you forever, triggers and conditioning, can dissolve.

If you don’t believe in transformation, you cannot believe in forgiveness or grace.  Once a sinner, always a sinner.  Once broken, always broken.  Give someone a permanent label, and you are stuck with your own.  If you don’t believe in forgiveness or grace, you’ve condemned yourself forever.  That is how we end up in the hell realms.  We apply the same rules to ourselves.  Conversely, if you believe in forgiveness, or if you forgive, profoundly and without reason, you begin to see the power of transformation.  You suddenly notice it, and you can open to experiencing it.

More than a week ago, I found a book by Adyashanti called The End of Your World, which discusses the movement from non-abiding or transient periods of awakening to full awakening, the sort that marks a fundamental passing of delusion.  The book is a very comforting and encouraging outline of a common progression experienced by those in various meditation traditions.  Something struck me as I read it, a piercing insight that opened me and disappeared, leaving me dramatically different.

We are never estranged from others.  The only thing we are ever estranged from is our conceptual representations of each other, our seemingly right perspectives.  All of our mental imagery of others, the imaginary conversations and imaginary interactions, are not real.  The map is not the territory.  I knew that, but this time, it sank in.  I learned it in my body.  Ever since, the oddest thing has happened in my mind.  I can’t fantasize anymore.  I can’t hold imaginary conversations any more.  Even when I want to, they don’t stick.  They start up, but then I look at it, and all I can think is, “that isn’t happening,” and it drops.  I envision the face of a loved one and begin to feel an elated warmth, and suddenly all I can think is, “this is not you,” and it drops.  The “real” other is present, directly, living and breathing in me.  The moment I play out a scene in my conceptual representation of the relationship, I am lost in a dream, disconnected from everything as it is.  And there is nothing… NOTHING… so blissfully amazing as being directly connected to everything just as it is.  Nothing can pull me away from this.

I am thinking back on my time with my dear friend who is now in a recovery house on antipsychotic medication.  Just before her suicide attempt, she begged me to “hold  her hand” and stand by her.  After offering many long hours of help in the weeks before, I brushed her off, explaining that I was a single mother with little time to devote to her troubles.  Days later, she was wasting away in her room praying to spiritual guides for a painless passage.  Did I trigger her?  Probably, but I don’t feel an ounce of guilt.  I’m not sure why.  I just did whatever I could at every step of the way.

I fed the little bird until my bagel was gone, then held out my empty hands, totally full of faith.  There is a balance between acting with compassion in each moment and knowing that the universe is ultimately in control.  When she nearly died, I just responded.  Everyone kept telling me how fortunate it was for her to have my help, and if I hadn’t advocated for her care, she would not be where she is now.  Every time someone congratulated me, I wanted to smack them in the face.  What are you looking at me for?  Look!  Look at her!  But there is an insight.  No one else would have stepped in, at least not in the same way, not in the way that got her admitted.  Bystander apathy is what they call it in psychology.  People stand by while someone dies, because they all think someone else will act, they all think that the responsibility belongs more appropriately to someone else.  The responsibility is always on us, and yet, we are never responsible for more than what we can reasonably do.

Love what is in front of you, whatever is in front of you, in whatever way you can.  And don’t worry about anything else.  Even if you fail.  Forgive yourself.  That is all there is to it.  Nothing else is happening.

Know that everyone is human.  Not super human, but not sub-human either.  Not less than human.  The more delusional a person is (and it is only ever a matter of degree), the more “less than human” they seem to be.  My Buddhist friend mentioned on a concept coined by Ken Wilber known as “aperspectival madness,” which is the confusion that occurs when we first discover that all perspectives are relative.

Soon after receiving his message, I went down to my kitchen for tea where The Holographic Universe, by Michael Talbot, was sitting on my table.  I opened to a random page, to page 154, “Changing the Whole Picture,” in which Talbot says that although the mind can materialize or alter parts of reality, it also seems to be capable of altering the whole.  He relates this to perspective.  He describes a shaman in Indonesia who made a grove of trees blink in and out of existence, then he tells this story on page 155:

“I was having dinner with one of my professors at a local restaurant, and we were discussing the philosophical implications of Carlos Castaneda’s experiences.  In particular our conversation centered around an incident Castaneda relates in Journey to Ixtlan.  Don Juan and Castaneda are in the desert at night searching for a spirit when they come upon a creature that looks like a calf but has the ears of a wolf and the beak of a bird.  It is curled up and screaming as if in the throes of an agonizing death.  At first Castaneda is terrified, but after telling himself that what he is seeing can’t possibly be real, his vision changes and he sees that the dying spirit is actually a fallen tree branch trembling in the wind.

“Castaneda proudly points out the thing’s true identity, but as usual the old Yaqui shaman rebukes him.  He tells Castaneda that the branch was a dying spirit while it was alive with power, but that it had transformed into a tree branch when Castaneda doubted its existence.  However, he stresses, both realities were equally real.”

Choose your own adventure!  Talbot then writes:

“Moments after discussing this incident we left the restaurant and, because it was a clear summer night, we decided to stroll.  As we continued to converse I became aware of a small group of people walking ahead of us… One of the women was carrying a green umbrella…

“We dropped back a little, and as we did, the woman suddenly began swinging the umbrella in a wild and erratic manner.  She traced out huge arcs in the air, and several times as she spun around, the tip of the umbrella nearly grazed us.  We slowed our pace even more, but it became increasingly apparent that her performance was designed to attract our attention.

“Finally, after she had our gaze firmly fixed on what she was doing, she held the umbrella with both hands over her head and threw it dramatically at our feet.  We both stared at it dumbly, wondering why she had done such a thing, when suddenly something remarkable began to happen.  The umbrella did something that I can only describe as ‘flickering’ like a lantern flame about to go out.  It emitted an odd, crackling sound like the sound of cellophane being crumpled, and in a dazzling array of sparkling, multicolored light, its ends curled up, its color changed, and it reshaped itself into a gnarled, brown-gray stick.”

Once, I was talking about manifestation and the law of attraction over dinner one night with my Buddhist friend.  We decided to experiment and each made a wish.  I wished to be “showered with 100 dollar bills.”  I came home to a package from my mom with three 100 dollar bills and the Esther Hicks CD set.

On May 14, two or three days before my friend locked herself in her room, I had a dream that now makes me think of her.  I was traveling through a tunnel.  The tunnel was lined with curtains and the walls of tents, I think.  At the opening to the tunnel, I had to travel under an elephant, whose back end was facing me.  I was worried that the elephant would sit on me as I crawled under.  The further I got through the tunnel, the smaller it became, or the larger I became, as though I were Alice in Wonderland.

I reached the end of the tunnel and found a small room where a young girl was dying.  In the room was a grown man which I took to be her father (who I now realize was my Buddhist friend who got into the room before I arrived).  They told me the girl was suffering tremendously and had decided to move on to her next incarnation.  They were watching her lie on the floor crying and writhing in pain.  As I entered, I noticed that suddenly there was a doctor in the room.  The doctor told me that he was going to perform “an angel cut,” which involve incisions where angel wings would go, and these incisions would free her from earthly life.  They rolled the girl onto her back.  The girl was now a toddler.  As the dream went on, she just kept getting younger and younger.

The doctor began to cut into the crook of the girl’s arm.  (I watched them put an IV into my friend’s arm in the ER.)  The girl did not react at all, as though she felt nothing, as though she was “not all the way there.”  Then, the doctor took enormous forceps and went after the girl’s head.  She had become a baby, and now she was a fetus.  Her head was bulbous and gelatenous.  When the doctor placed the forceps on her head, she could feel it.  She tried to swim away.  She looked at me, directly into my eyes, in a panic, and suddenly all of her being swooshed into me, and I woke up with a jolt.

We are all pulled into delusion, which is to say, we discover a perspective on reality and take it as the only reality, and this becomes our living experience.  The deepest healing is the living experience we have when we open to the possibility that our perspective can change, that it can expand and encompass more than we ever imagined.  This is where you are going and where you will soon find yourself… very deeply, profoundly, and fundamentally healed.