Authentic culturing happens when self-aware and reflexive people engage together in honest and non-judgmental community building. It is life serving and cosmological because culture is humanity’s contribution to the world. We nurture things that grow and construct things that do not grow (Building, Dwelling, Thinking, Heidegger, 1951). Healthy culturing starts with individual choices of integrity and authenticity. A society that has forgotten its true nature will fear authenticity and foster mentalities of separation, scarcity, and unworthiness. A society that remembers that its collective purpose can be built on the value of every citizen’s uniqueness will plant seeds for mindsets and creative endeavours that nurture individual and collective flourishing.

How often does one stop to think whether they really want to see every human being as equal no matter the circumstances? How much is this answer influenced by a need to be a good person, whether that be internally, from the projected guilt of others, or externally, as a self-marketing device in a strategic world or a safety net to conform in a judgmental society?

Considering the tragedies in our human history, it would be hard to imagine that many of us (or all of us, for that matter) has the emotional capacity to honestly see this equality. There is only a fine line for the wounded ego between wanting equality for every person and wanting to be the one to control every person as equal subjects under its own authority. But the wounded ego does this only to protect itself from annihilation since true equality has no room for its existence.

So when someone says they want equality, check to see how much they know themselves: how much they know of the pain that they have held onto unknowingly; how much they know of the pain that they have already let go of; how aware they are of the immense difficulty of their fight for equality; and how aware they are of how much they need to surrender to actually find what they are looking for.

This is the second part of a write-up I did on A Course In Miracles in 2024. As much as I resonate with the Course's overall teachings, there are some explanations I prefer to deviate from. This post addresses my thoughts on the absence of the divine feminine figure, the relevance of the body, and the interpretation of magic.

When I first started A Course In Miracles (ACIM), I tried to ignore the fact that every (holy) figure, including the reader, was masculine. Like the language of the Bible, God is our father, we are all brothers, and the Holy Spirit is the He who knows. I searched online for explanations. The consensus I found was that during the time when Jesus was alive, women were not eligible for inheritances. So, to inherit the Kingdom of God, everyone, including women, was all one under the Son of God.

Supposedly, as a woman, I should be grateful for this level of inclusive thinking. But no, I'm not convinced. The book was scribed in the 1970s. By that time, Jesus would've been speaking to a world that had already gone through significant feminist movements. Moreover, there must be a spiritual reason why women have been subjugated in most cultures throughout history in the first place.

With a bit of mental gymnastics, a thought came to mind: Who is it to say that women are a subset of men (as some religious interpretations would have it)? If we take the words literally, we can also think that men are a subset of women since the word "man" is a part of the word "woman". Eventually, I asked myself if l would let my ego be triggered by a three-letter pronoun and denounce the truth of the text. So, I kept on reading.

Still, life has been teaching me to trust my intuition, honour my emotions, and return to my body. The lessons of reclaiming the sacred feminine in me were not going away and that training did not have to conflict with the teachings of the Course. Therefore, I’ve come to believe that the messages in ACIM are meant for the divine masculines within all of us, with Jesus as the teacher and prototype. The Course having been born in a university psychology department fits well with this idea. A place where the thinking mind is allowed to assume that it can know and solve everything, and where blind faith is seen as irrationally foolish, is a good place for a reminder of a greater power beyond the ego.

The Sacred Feminine and the Knowing That We Know

While ACIM teaches us that we first need to know that we don’t know, the sacred feminine in me has taught me that it’s also ok to know. This revelation first came to me after my PhD defence years ago. While the exam went smoothly for the most part, a bit of tension occurred when the Chair did not agree with the answer I gave to one of her questions. But instead of agreeing to disagree, I was subtly “put in my place” as the examinee (and not a peer). To add salt to injury, the external examiner reminded me in a motherly tone near the end that “it’s ok to not know.”

I passed the defence with an award nomination, but that seemingly small event of friction shook my soul. It was only after a few days of sitting with discomfort that I realized what my higher self was trying to tell me: It’s ok to know; it's ok to have my own interpretation of the world. In other words, my personal truth and the universal truths that I intuitively know, just because I know, are valid.

For me, the most disappointing thing from this story was that my truth was undermined by women. But this is not surprising. The voice of the sacred feminine has been discredited in many ways: in and beyond traditional social justice narratives, in events in my own life similar to this one that left me feeling patronized, in the depreciation of Mother Earth’s power through an environmental narrative that relegates her as a damsel who needs saving, and in how esoteric knowledge, which was historically practiced by women, have been witch-hunted and, in ways, continues to be dismissed in institutions. Yet, many of these forms of knowledge have found mass popularity in the New Age movement.

So, I have a feeling that in the 1970s, the rift between men and women, and the archetypal masculine and feminine, were too far apart that our collective spiritual growth had to remain polarized and separate. But something in the air feels different. The evolution of humanity has reached a point where the sacred feminine is ready to return to our consciousness.

The Body: Our Spiritual Home on Earth

While Mother Earth is the feminine embodiment of our planetary home, our bodies are the physical homes that give space to our life experiences. However, ACIM reminds us that we are not our bodies. Moreover, the body is what gives us the illusion that we are separate. Although this teaching is true because we are indeed consciousness, the body is also the only place where we can experience the oneness of our conscious presence.

Of course, you can always argue that because oneness is the natural state of the universe, the illusion of separation, and therefore, our bodies and our egos are fundamentally spiritual errors. But if that is so, and we can live peacefully in an unmanifested state of oneness, why would any spiritual entity want to incarnate as a human being? Why would we want to be here in a world of timelines, narratives, and bodies?

Perhaps, the opposition we see between our spiritual existence and our corporeality as living beings is the actual illusion of separation? Perhaps, this illusion is what has been causing our pathology of placelessness as a species? Perhaps, our inability to reconcile these two realities is what drives us (now and in the past) to settle for hastier routes to oneness through death, violence, and destruction? ACIM notes that the ego wants to kill us, but maybe the ego isn’t really a villain and is merely an ineffective advisor who tries to sell us lazy short-cuts to our goals?

Somewhere along the path of my healing, I realized that we are here to bring Heaven to Earth. We are here to learn to live with time and narratives, through our bodies, in a state of unity. At this time in history, this “we” may only include those who feel called to take on the role of a lightworker, but ultimately, this “we” will become our collective destiny and purpose as human beings.

But before we can feel the bliss of Heaven, whatever Hell on Earth that has been created so far, repressed and locked in our bodies must be freed and expressed, not through violence or projection, but through radical truth and acceptance. So, ultimately, we cannot deny the value of our bodies if we want to be awakened. Rather, the body is our key to returning to our spiritual home on Earth.

In Defence of Magic

ACIM states, “Miracles fall like drops healing rain from Heaven on a dry and dusty world, where starved and thirsty creatures come to die.” At first, I thought it was ironic that such miracles from the Kingdom of Heaven would come from a mind that would see our world as dry and dusty, that death is pitiful, and that our existence in physical form is pointless. But now I see another interpretation: those who see life on Earth in such ways are actually the ones in dire need of miracles. In the image of rain drops nourishing the earth, I can't help but think of the magic of a forest. So, the last topic I want to address is the interpretation of magic and miracles.

ACIM uses these two terms very specifically and differently from how we normally use them. Magic, as referenced in the Course, is related to the psychological condition of magical thinking—the error of a causal link between unrelated events. However, in ACIM, this magical thinking applies to all cause and effect between the world and the mind. A miracle is the realization that this cause and effect is just an illusion because the world is always a creation of the mind. The error in believing that the mind can go outside of itself to fix itself and to fix the world, and vice versa, that the external world has power over us, hinders our access to forgiveness (atonement) and universal love.

This all makes sense to me conceptually, but what I find tricky with ACIM and many other spiritual teachings is the challenge to get past the “mind’s” conditioning of language. Spiritual truth then often becomes a circular reference that many “minds” cannot decipher (e.g., "Form is emptiness; emptiness is form," from the Heart Sutra). So before we can even unravel our attachments to particular definitions of magic, we have to contend with the word “mind.”

The creative mind in ACIM (and the one used in the law of attraction) isn’t the thinking mind. The error in believing so, with the Cartesian foundation of “I think, therefore, I am,” has set us off on a destructive trajectory since The Age of (Philosophical) Enlightenment. Rather, this creative mind refers to the Dreamer—the mind that dreams the world into being through ethereally connected and separate bodies of spiritual existence. The physical laws, scientific conclusions, and social norms we operate from are the world-building rules we’ve set up for this dream.

While I can get behind ACIM’s description of the error in our universal magical thinking, the dreamer in me prefers to safeguard our Earthly definition of magic because it gives us room for the rules of our dream world (i.e., our perceptive reality) to change. We can say that surrendering to the Holy Instant and allowing miracles does exactly that, but my surrendering to the grace of miracles requires a certain kind of magic. This magic is the nourishment my Inner Child needs to remain innocent in the face of the ego’s temptations to persuade her that she is guilty.

The magic of the Innocent Child is grounded through Heaven on Earth. Nurtured by the Earth Mother, this magic is fertile. It reminds us that life is a miracle in itself. Contrarily, death also supports life. A dead tree is habitat for many organisms. Animals also sustain life by consuming what has already died. So, we don’t need to condemn anyone or start a war to return to oneness. We are complete in our existence exactly as we are, right here, right now. Because life and death already exist, oneness is already here.

I felt like this was a good time to bring back a couple of posts I wrote on A Course in Miracles in 2024 on my old blog. This is the first one, which summarizes a few of the key lessons.

A Course in Miracles (ACIM) had been on my radar ever since I first read listened to Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of ‘A Course in Miracles.’ At that time and the years after, I had no desire to check out the original source, but as the saying goes, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Perhaps I was desperate for miracles to happen because after I had watched one of Eckhart Tolle’s YouTube videos on ACIM, I was intuitively called to get a copy of the book and embark on the Course.

I would describe ACIM as a “New Age Bible.” Channelled and recorded word-by-word by Columbia University psychology professor Helen Schucman between 1965 and 1972, with the help of her colleague William Thetford, the Course is taught by a narrator Schucman recognized as Jesus. For me, knowing that this mystic information was born in an academic setting was already a miracle since I had been frustrated with academia’s reluctance to embrace spirituality. I had been increasingly intuiting the operations of guilt in institutions and I had started to use the term "the innocence of knowledge" without fully knowing why. But after reading ACIM, many of my obscure philosophies began to make more sense.

I have yet to master my miracle-working abilities, but I was surprised that many of the Course's teachings were lessons that I had been working through in such abstract forms that my mind didn’t even fully understand. In this post, I’ll share core lessons of the Course that resonated with me and in the next post, I'll write about some diversions I have with the material.

1. The authority problem and the source of all evil: to erroneously believe that we are the author of ourselves (i.e., to identify with the ego)

ACIM teaches us that souls are given authorship from God (or whatever name you want to call the ultimate divine power). To deny otherwise is to choose the ego as the authority which comes with all the errors in our perceptions of the world. This lesson certainly triggers my ego who wants to believe that I can change myself all by myself and change the world with me. Despite often forgetting the futility of this error, I have learned through experience to know the importance of this humbling lesson.

2. The foundation of the ego’s world is guilt

The ego is the result of the illusion of separation. The ego creates judgement and attacks others (or themselves) with it to maintain this separation. Those who do not attack are the ego’s enemies because they have a better chance of letting it go. Therefore, to release guilt is to release the ego. To the ego, the guiltless are guilty. If you pay attention, you may be surprised at how often you do something (or not do something) to avoid guilt. You'd also notice how much our society operates through guilt.

3. Forgiveness is to let go of the ego’s judgement and to allow for divine atonement

Forgiveness is to correct the ego’s errors. The power within forgiveness is that it requires divine intervention. We can’t will our way into forgiving. We can only allow it to happen by temporarily suspending the ego's stories. The Course calls this the Holy Instant when we surrender the projection of guilt to the Holy Spirit. In simple terms, it means surrendering our attachment to the pain caused by judgment to a larger universal power in a moment of complete presence.

In ACIM, the Last Judgment is God’s final verdict of our holiness, which is always a positive verdict when we surrender. However, the practical me likes to think of the Last Judgment as the last judgment that the ego gets to make before it dies! According to the Course, behind a person’s actions is only one of two operations: to love or to call for love. When we come against attacks, it means it’s time for less judgment, more surrendering, and more loving (even if the recipient is only ourselves).

As I’ve been tricked by my ego many times, I like to keep this reminder close at bay: if we are frustrated by someone else’s identification with their ego, that is, their attachment to guilt, fear, projection, and attack, then it is because we have not completely forgiven ourselves.

4. Knowledge is certainty; all else is perception

A while back, I wrote a blog article exploring why academia is a disempowering place despite the notion that knowledge is power. After studying ACIM, I have an even clearer understanding of why. It is because our guilt-based world has inverted the truth about knowledge.

We seek knowledge, usually through empirical means, to convince ourselves that what we know is certain. But the reality is all that we seek to know is just a matter of perception. According to ACIM, knowledge is always true and truth does not need to be proven. Since the opposite of guilt is innocence (in the rulings of the court), true knowledge that is ego-less (and therefore, guilt-free) is always innocent.

5. We learn what we teach

In ACIM, we are simultaneously students and teachers. Since our perception has not reached the level of truth, we come closer to knowledge through experience. We teach by example and simultaneously learn by living and teaching what we want to acquire. As the Course notes, “To have peace, teach peace to learn it.”

Another way I interpret this is through Heidegger's explanation of truth being a process of unconcealing. As human beings, we forget the spiritual truth we "know" when we are "thrown into" the world, so we embark on a journey of unconcealing the layers that veil the essence of our Being.

6. True empathy is not a joining of suffering

ACIM explains that to share suffering is to follow the ego’s path of separation. Joining another in suffering creates a special relationship that separates itself from the whole. This strengthens the ego and makes the past real as the shared unit attacks "others" in their weakness. True empathy, on the other hand, strengthens the empathizer and the collective whole (because we are one of the same). This empathy does not judge through the ego, and therefore, is an invitation made by Spirit to respond to a situation in a certain way.

As an empath, this lesson is encouraging but challenging. In a world of injustice, it's difficult to choose to stand in the awareness that "sovereignty" is more loving and empowering than "solidarity." Not only do we feel the pain, we are constantly asked to join in the suffering to prove our empathy or else risk being attacked with the sufferer's projected guilt. But this is the test of our knowledge: we know we are guilt-free and our act of service will manifest in our lives when we surrender.

7. There is no order of difficulty in miracles

On April 8, 2024, I had plans to see the Great North American Eclipse with a friend in the Hamilton area. Just as I was making my way onto the packed commuter train from Toronto, my friend texted me to ask if I wanted to abort mission because of the heavy clouds. I texted back to say that I wanted to take the chance. When I reached our meet up location, the sky was still completely overcast. Yet, something in me knew that we were going to see the eclipse (even if my mind couldn’t predict the future).

I didn’t tell my friend about my intuitive premonition, but I told her that I had recently finished reading ACIM and there was no order of difficulty in miracles. Low and behold, by the time we reached our destination, a place serendipitously called Groundhog Hill, the sky had completely cleared up and we were able to see our shadows under a sun that was beginning to be eclipsed by the moon.

I love the memory of this story because it is fuel for the dreamer in me. It reminds that there is really no miracle too large to witness. If the clouds can be moved out of the way for us to witness the miracle of a cosmic event, who is to say that a stubborn mind cannot be budged, or a locked-up heart cannot be freed? As ACIM says, “all expressions of love are maximal...There is no order of difficulty among miracles.”

Religion is the logos of our human society. They show us, through what we worship, judge, and maintain in our actions and systems, how we feel about ourselves.

Greek gods were flawed. They were patriarchal (despite the existence of many goddesses), spiteful, and full of jealousy, but they also personified the dynamics of nature. They represented our vices and revealed that these flaws are also part of our divinity. The bad lives alongside the good as what is sacred and natural. These Gods were not idols; they are us in archetypal forms.

On the other hand, monotheistic religions such as Christianity, mirror our seeking and subconscious realization that there is a universal God more powerful than each of us separately. Yet, humans have misinterpreted this existential oneness, this omnipresent power, as an exclusivity belonging to a belief system that needs subscription.

While Eastern philosophy and earth-based spiritual traditions also bring their own logos, more or less intact in their original interpretations, humans have still found ways to make these cosmological narratives about exclusivity to mental beliefs, behavioural actions, and personal or collective identities.

Nowadays, science, economics, and politics have become alternative religions. They are the predominant logos of our modern world. No longer trusting in Heaven or Earth, we see ourselves as the sole providers of our truth and safety. Without something greater to hold us together, what else can we do but think that life is everyone for themselves?

Is this a pitiful trajectory for our search for God or a victorious discovery that we can be our own Gods? The answer is not black or white because the greatest misinterpretation of who we are, which has led us to this point, is to believe that Heaven and Earth are a dichotomy.

I’ve debated back and forth for many years whether to use the word God in my writings because of how it is associated with religion, and for many people, in particular, with Christianity. It would be less contentious and maybe even more semantically accurate for me to use a secular word like Universe. But still, I keep going back to God as if behind the word is an immanent light like the crown of the sun during a solar eclipse. This is a word that needs to be healed. It is a word that carries the wounding of our human divinity, the trauma our human egos have created for us in the name of God. It is our responsibility to heal our relationship with God, the iconification of our sacredness as created by the narratives we've adopted about our spirituality. And so, I use the word with purpose.

So it seems that the tortured poet is a real phenomenon. For example, my favourite works by Hermann Hesse and Saint-Exupéry are so beautiful written yet have been attributed to the authors’ pain. But I wonder, what is the cause and effect? Is it that the pain of being human is so hauntingly beautiful that we can’t help admiring it? Or is it the vulnerable expression of pain that is so courageously beautiful? Perhaps, from a less masochistic perspective, it is the release of the pain and the healing that comes with it that makes it poignantly beautiful?

Regardless, I want to ask myself more important questions. Is it worth it to purposely seek out pain to create beautiful artwork? And is pain necessary so that such beauty can remain in the world? I don’t think so. Or rather, I hope not. I don’t want to participate in that pattern anymore.

We can create beauty without purposely seeking or creating pain. We will still have the dark amidst the light, decay amidst new growth, and loss amidst the joy. But I believe our ability to work with the tools that create beauty, whether that be language, movement, sounds, or the composition of colours and shapes, can be beautiful in itself. Within our existence is already the seeds of all the beauty we need.

When we are not behaving in alignment with our words then we are the same as artificial intelligence. This intelligence is just an input-output programming of the collective consciousness in auto-pilot form without reflection. When we believe that these thoughts and beliefs and programmed knowledge are who we are, we are playing out the sci-fi horror story of AI becoming independent and taking over the world. It has already happened in the form of our egos.

Artificial intelligence can be a useful tool, even if used merely as a mirror to our own thinking. It is the test that we’ve created for our collective selves to remember our human nature. We can use robots for the activities that we believe to be a chore. We can use robots to help us manage thoughts that are overwhelming. But why would anyone want to believe that the creation of art, including writing, is a chore? If embodying our truth, expressing the gifts of our human talents in the world were a chore, what else would we rather be doing? Making money?

If this is the case, then humanity has come to a crossroads where we must decide whether our sole point of living is just to make money—to gather a humongous security blanket over us to consume and consume more, believing that this can make us feel safe for being alive. But how much is this safety worth? The millions of dollars in a bank account or the billions of debt in the national banks? Or perhaps, the pricelessness of our sacred spiritual existence that took the risk for us to manifest in material form?

Indeed, finding security can be easier than confronting the overwhelming matrix of thoughts that keep us believing that our expressions, our truths, and our unpragmatic creativity aren’t worthy in this world. When we cannot trust our nature, we take away our true power to fight against a false enemy: we fall into the trap of believing that AI can devalue the true value of art. But have you ever believed that artificial flowers can take away the beauty and magic of a living blossom?

There will always be magic in life even when artificial flowers serve their purpose in dark corners. So while I do not dislike AI, I am concerned that we may not pass our test as a species. What would the world then become? But maybe, this test is only for those willing to take it. Everyone else will fall into the background of collective programming until humans are forced into extinction. In the mean time, we commit to our nature; just like how most plants prefer to grow in an abundance of soil and nutrients, there are always those resilient ones that can be found in the cracks of a concrete surface.

“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.”
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars (1939)

The purpose of technology, from language to airplanes to the Internet, is to bring us closer together. But if we are already "one" in our ultimate spirituality, is technology self-defeating? It seems that with the expansion of artificial intelligence, humanity’s relationship with our own technologies has reached a pivotal point. We must now evaluate if it is worth having the dream of Humanity on Earth continue to exist.

When we can connect in cyberspace, disembodied, why would we still need a body, a physical home, and a planet? When the history of our minds become one through cloud storage, retrievable by a machine, why would we need material reality?

Of course, when we connect in cyberspace this way, we still need the physical. We still need the machine, the body, and the planet. We may have disembodied our connectedness but we cannot fully let go of our materiality without collapsing the dream all together. So, the state of our digital technology is plunging us more deeply into the greatest problem of our nature: do we want to exist here in the flesh or not?

If we do, then instead of using technology (including language) as the ends to connect, let us use it as a means to bring value and appreciation to our spiritual existence with each other here on Earth in material form. What is most important about technology isn't knowing how much a machine can do but how much a human can potentially do. Technology reveals to us in symbolic form the truth of humanity: that we are all connected, we can magically manifest things into reality, and that we can be loved for who we are.

Our dependency on technology, however, can lead us into the opposite direction. This dependency isn’t about how much we use it, but about how much we believe we can be fulfilled in having our powers offloaded to a machine. Or more accurately, how much do we want to voluntarily have our machines take credit for our spiritual powers. Technology’s effect on change isn’t linear like climbing up the stairs. The progress is circular even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface in the present moment. That is because technology, in the face of our nature, will always lead us back to where we are supposed to be.

The Little Prince (1943) is one of my all time favourite books, but honestly, I didn’t feel much for it the first time I read it. It was only when I got older and had developed a deeper awareness for pain that I started to like the book more and more. Although it’s marketed as a children’s book, in my opinion, it is truly a book for adults. Specifically, it is a book for the adult who is searching for their inner child who had been lost and abandoned in an unforgiving adult world.

Supposedly, The Little Prince was written while Saint-Exupéry was severely depressed and in exile in the US. So, it is clear that the book is symbolic of his yearning for his inner child and the part of himself who wanted innocence to prevail over the desolation of adulthood. However, it was a scene at the ending of his memoir Wind, Sand and Stars (1939) that revealed to me how personal the Little Prince character was to the author’s outlook on life.

He concludes the memoir with ruminating thoughts of his time on a train full of impoverished Polish families who were being sent back home after working and residing in France. In front of him was an adorable young boy. He first imagines the “beautiful promise” life would give to the boy if he were to be protected like the “little princes in legends” or the roses that are tended to in a garden. But then, he resigns to the melancholic reality that “this little Mozart” would be condemned to the “stamping machine” of society.

In contrast, the ending of The Little Price is ambiguous. The prince dies, according to many theories, by suicide with the help of the snake. In other interpretations, he returns home in spirit. In parallel, Saint-Exupéry, also disappeared in a plane crash (presumably) a year after the book was published. Neither the prince's nor the author’s bodies were found in each of their worlds. So, what is the ultimate truth? Did they actually die?

The Little Prince has sold over 200 million copies worldwide. It is the most translated book after the Bible. Adaptations, quotes, images, and merchandise related to the story are cherished all over the world. So, in many ways “invisible to the eye,” the Little Prince and Saint-Exupéry lives on. We may not recognize it, but innocence has already prevailed over desolation. We just have to prove it to ourselves by protecting the little prince and his rose inside each of us so to not let the machine of a dispirited culture take away from our beautiful future.

What are you looking for in nostalgia? The romanticization of your youth? A vague time in history of perceived harmony? The empty void to fill in a mid-life crisis? Or your original heart? You may have had glimpses of it in your childhood or you may have had a terrible childhood full of pain, but that original heart is always with you, because it is the origin of your existence and your guiding light to return to who you really are.

In our old world, people think that innocence is a vulnerability, and vulnerability is a disadvantage. But the opposite is true. Vulnerability is the gift of our humanity, and innocence—the absence of guilt and deceit—is the marker of our divinity.

Vulnerability is meant to be challenging. If it was easy, why would we need to exist? We could have stayed unmanifested in the love of universal oneness or manifest on Earth as another animal species that is more aligned with its natural state of beingness. So, why would the cosmos need humans?

It is through being human that the spirit of the universe can experience the poignant beauty and humility of surrendering to the intense fear of wholly being seen and unconditionally loved in a self-aware and conscious form. To reach this state, we need to accept our vulnerability to pain. We are at a time in humanity’s evolution when the stories we’ve created about who we are—our identities—can no longer hide our world pain. Some people will want to desperately hold onto the old world through more identification to greater elaborate stories. Some will numb themselves with distractions, while others will resort to manipulating other people’s truths. But all of this is merely the ego’s attempt at self-preservation.

Can we still find the sacred souls beneath the self-denial, the lies, the stories, and the illusions? If we peel back the layers and see through the lies, what is left is the tenderness of our human vulnerability. Our ability to feel pain can kill us, but it is also pain that can save us. So, when we come up against an enemy, someone so cruel whom we think we can never forgive, look past their facade and find that vulnerable human inside of them. The one who is so afraid of their own pain that they cannot even bear to recognize its sacred beauty. They may never recognize our truth, but our vulnerable hearts will recognize the one that they have abandoned and ours will grow even stronger.

Have you ever wondered if other people are real? I once saw a YouTube video of someone trying to convince NPCs (non-player characters) in a video game, unsuccessfully, that they were characters in a simulation. Oftentimes, I feel like I’m doing the same thing in “real” life.

In my book Poignant Landscapes, I included an excerpt, from my diary when I was a teenager, reflecting on whether people and our so-called reality are real. My adult self then responded that I believed people are real because I can sense their existence in my body. After some additionally healing and contemplation, I feel that this answer isn’t completely accurate.

My new insight is that I feel the realness, the existence, and the humanness of another person because I have the empathic ability to “read” people’s insecurities. Even when they try to hide it, I know their vulnerabilities. I know that they are naturally raw and tender, capable of being hurt, and so, equally capable of being loved. To me, this vulnerability towards love is my evidence that they are real and not just programmed characters in this existential matrix.

When I read the energy of a room, I feel how open the people inside are to their shadows. Often the case, they will say that this space is welcoming for all, but the energy will say otherwise. It’s not like they are completely lying. They aren’t consciously saying that you are welcome only if you believe in so and so, but that is what they are saying unconsciously through their energy. The more nuanced message they are emitting is that as long as we pretend that we are good people, everything will be ok. But I cannot feel safe to be fully authentic in these spaces. In a room full of people who are afraid of their own shadows, how can they help me feel authentic and safe in mine?

They can label the community as inclusive or respectful by saying that we must leave our “-isms” at the door. But that is the same as telling you that you are not welcome in your fullness—your shadows and the trauma stored in your body must be rejected in order to come in. This is spiritual bypassing. We don’t confront our shadows by leaving our “-isms” at the door. We heal by allowing the misguided stories of these “-isms” to surface into our consciousness.