There Is a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem

What I Mean by Spiritual

It is written in the Bhagavad-Gita, the ancient Eastern holy book, “We are born into a world of nature; our second birth is into a world of spirit.” This world of spirit is often depicted as separate or distinct from our physical world. I think it is important to see spiritual as a part of physical, rather than to separate these two dimensions of our reality. It is all one. Spirit represents that which we cannot validate with our senses. Like the wind that we feel but cannot see.

Two great saints from different corners of the world as well as different religious persuasions have described spirit this way: “Spirit is the life of God within us” (Saint Teresa of Avila) and “Whatever draws the mind outward is unspiritual and whatever draws the mind inward is spiritual” (Ramana Maharshi). The key to understanding spirituality is this idea of our inner world and our outer world—one world, yet two unique aspects of being human. I have a friend who compares the physical to a lightbulb and the spiritual to electricity. He insists that electricity has been around as long as spirituality but that we did not make a religion of it when it was discovered.

Likewise, when I refer to spiritual I do not intend it to be synonymous with religious. Religion is orthodoxy, rules, and historical scriptures maintained by people over long periods of time. Generally, people are born into religions and raised to obey the customs and practices of that religion without question. These are customs and expectations from outside of the person and do not fit my definition of spiritual.

I prefer a definition of spirituality as described in Saint Teresa’s and Maharshi’s observations. Spirituality is from within, the result of recognition, realization, and reverence. My personal understanding of spiritual practice is that it is a way of making my life work at a higher level and of receiving guidance for handling problems. The ways in which I personally do this involve a few simple, but basic practices. I have enumerated them here in my own order of significance.

1. Surrender This is first because it is the most crucial and often the most difficult. For those of us who have grown up believing life is a “do-it-yourself” project it is hard to admit that we need the help of many others just to survive for a day. In order to surrender you must be able to admit to being helpless. That’s right, helpless.

In surrender, my thoughts are something like this: “I simply do not know how to resolve this situation and I am turning it over to the same force that I turn my physical body over to every night when I go to sleep. I trust in this force to keep digesting my food, circulating my blood, and so on. The force is there, it is available, and I am going to treat this force that I will call God, as a senior partner in my life. I will take the words ‘All that I have is thine’ in the scriptures at face value. I am willing to turn any problem over to this invisible force which is my source, while always keeping in mind that I am connected at all times to that source!”

In other words, the spiritual life is a way of walking with God instead of walking alone.

2. Love Activating spiritual solutions means converting inner thoughts and feelings from discord and disharmony to love. In the spirit of both surrender and love I find it helpful to silently chant to myself, “I invite the highest good for all concerned to be here now.” I try to see anger, hatred, and disharmony as invitations to surrender and love. They can be doorways to taking responsibility for thoughts and feelings. They are the entryway to the inner world where spirituality is. With this understanding I have the option to allow spirit to manifest and work for me.

I use a metaphor of a long cord that is hanging from my hip and I have the option of plugging that cord into one of two sockets. When I plug into the material world socket, I receive the illusions of disharmony and actually have the results inside of me. I feel out of sorts, hurt, upset, anguished, and hopeless in terms of being able to solve or correct my problem. When I am plugged in this way I struggle to attain false powers. This struggle inhibits me from receiving mystical or spiritual power. Defining empowerment only in material world terms is a reflection of being spiritually disconnected.

When I imagine this cord being yanked from the material world socket, and replugged into the spiritual socket, I immediately experience a sense of peace and relief from the angst. This spiritual plugging-in metaphor is an instant reminder to me to substitute love for anguish or frustration. I can relax and remember that the spirit is God, which is synonymous with love. Emanuel Swedenborg said it well when he reminded his students, “The divine essence itself is love.” This feeling of love is the substance of what holds every cell together in our universe. It is cooperation with, rather than fighting against. It is trusting rather than doubting. Simple? Yes. But even more so, profoundly effective in resolving problems. Love and love alone dissolves all negativity, not by attacking it, but by bathing it in higher frequencies, much as light dissolves darkness by its mere presence.

3. Infinite Carl Jung reminds us that “The telling question of a person’s life is their relationship to the infinite.” My concept of the infinite includes accepting, without doubt, that life is indestructible. Life can change form but it cannot be destroyed. I believe our spirit is inseparable from the infinite.

This awareness of our infinite nature is terrific for putting everything into perspective. Relying upon the part of ourselves that has always been and always will be alleviates stress in any given situation. “The spirit gives life, the flesh counts for nothing,” the scriptures advise us. All of these things that we perceive as ourselves are of the flesh. In terms of infinity, they “count for nothing.”

When I unplug myself from the material and replug myself into the spiritual I immediately let go of fear, judgment, and negativity. I know that I must bring the energy of the spiritual socket to my immediate life circumstance. Infinite love is what I receive from that new energy source. It has always been there, but now I recognize this infinite power and see myself as having all my circuits flowing with this one source.

4. Empty Mind My spiritual approach to problem solving involves being quiet and letting go of my ideas about exactly how something should be resolved. In this space I listen and allow myself to have complete faith that I will be guided in the direction of resolution. Call this meditation (or prayer if you like); I feel strongly about the need for meditation to nourish the soul and access divine assistance.

Beyond the actual act of meditation is a willingness to empty my mind of my agenda and be open to what will inevitably come to me. I send a message to my ego, which says, “I am going to trust in the same power that moves the galaxies and creates a baby rather than in my own self-indulgent assessments for how I would like things to be going right now.” I relinquish my thoughts to the power that spirit has to make things work and let go of any agenda that interferes with the perfect expression of God within me.

Completely emptying the mind of our agenda leads to forgiveness, which is a vital component of this practice. Getting to a state of emptiness means ridding ourselves of all blame and angry thoughts about what has transpired in the past. Empty means just that, empty. There is no room for hanging on to who did what and when, and how wrong they were. We let it go simply because it is a component of our agenda, and what we want is God’s plan which works, and to toss out our own, which obviously doesn’t. Thus when we empty our mind of our ego-driven thoughts we invite forgiveness into our hearts, and by letting go of the lower energies of hatred, shame, and revenge we create a mind-set of problem resolution.

5. Generosity and Gratefulness Sometimes I feel the necessity to remind myself that we come into this world with nothing and we will exit the same way. So, finding a spiritual solution to every problem involves doing the only thing I can do with my life. That is, giving it away and being simultaneously grateful for the opportunity to do so. Here is a formula that works for me:

• I get back from the world precisely what I put out to the world. Which is another way of stating the proverb “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

• If “Gimmee! Gimmee! Gimmee!” is my message to the universe then the universe will send the very same message back to me: “Gimmee! Gimmee! Gimmee!” The result is I will never feel peaceful and I will be condemned to a life of trying to fulfill all the demands being made on me.

• If my message to the universe is “What can I give?” or “How may I serve?,” the message I receive from the universe will be “How may I serve you?” or “What can I give you?” Then I experience the magic of sending generous thoughts and energy out wherever I go.

I recommend your spiritual practice involve being generous and grateful with your thoughts. The more you send out thoughts of “How may I serve,” rather than “What’s in it for me?,” the more you will heat back “How may I serve you?”

6. Connectedness The Sufi poet Rumi once explained that the terms I, you, me, he, she, and they are distinctions that cannot be made in the garden of the mystics. In spiritual consciousness you view yourself as a flower in this garden and everyone else in the garden connected to you in an invisible way. Then you will feel the assistance that is available to you.

At the level of spiritual consciousness we know we are connected to everyone. Our concerns and difficulties are something we realize that we share with everyone else. Problems do not affect our body/mind/personality, because we have suspended total identification with our body, our personality, and all of its achievements. Instead we begin to see ourselves as the beloved.

Nurture your sense of connection to everyone and God as well. This allows you to remove your ego from conflicts. Do not see anyone as an enemy, or view anyone as an obstacle to fulfillment. This awareness of being a part of everyone allows you to suspend anger and frustration toward others and see them as partners in the resolution of problems.

Know that there are people to whom you are connected who are available to help you find the right job, to solve a puzzling issue that seems irreconcilable, to help you back on your feet, and to resolve financial difficulties. Everyone becomes a compatriot rather than a competitor. This is spiritual awareness as I practice it.

We are not alone. We are not what we have, what we do, what others think of us. We are divinely connected to God and to all of God’s creations, and consequently each of us has an unlimited inventory of resources available for the purpose of helping us to a state of peace and problem resolution.

Being connected means literally that at any given moment of your life, you can ask that the love that surrounds you and connects you to everyone and everything else please guide you right now. Then you relinquish your negative self-talk images and observe everyone and everything that you see as your loving assistant. It is in these moments that the right person or event will materialize and assist you.

I try to remind myself in moments of despair of the beautiful affirmation from A Course in Miracles: “I can choose peace, rather than this.” It works. Or I use this affirmation often: “I see nothing, I hear nothing, I know nothing that is separate from me.”

7. Cheerfulness In terms of outward appearances there is something noticeable about people who have reached a high level of spiritual awareness. They seem to be in a constant state of bliss. In my own life I know that my state of cheerfulness is a reliable gauge of my level of spiritual enlightenment at that moment. The more cheerful, happy, contented, and satisfied I am feeling, the more aware I am of my deep connection to spirit.

Ask yourself this key question, “How do I feel most of the time?” If your answer is that you feel anxious, anguished, hurt, depressed, frustrated, and so on, then you have a spiritual disconnect. This could mean you have allowed your personal energy field to become contaminated by the debilitating forces of those in your immediate life space. (You will read more about this, and how to keep your energy field uncontaminated, in chapter five.)

When you are spiritually connected you are not looking for occasions to be offended and you are not judging and labeling others. You are in a state of grace in which you know you are connected to God and thus free from the effects of anyone or anything external to yourself.

I often ask myself, “How am I truly feeling inside myself these days?” If my answer is “Not so hot” or “Upset,” I meditate and go to the quiet place where I can plug my cord into the spiritual outlet. The state of cheerfulness returns quickly. Every teacher who has been truly significant in my life has demonstrated this wondrous quality of being able to laugh, to take life lightly, to be silly and giddy.

Use this measure to test your own level of spiritual awareness, and if you are not of good cheer remind yourself that you will never be fully satisfied but in God. I love Erich Fromm’s insight, “Man is the only animal that can be bored, who can be discontented, that can feel evicted from Paradise.” Only you can evict yourself from the garden of paradise.

These then are the seven ways I define spiritual: Surrender, Love, Infinite, Empty, Generous, Connectedness, Cheerful. You can see that spiritual is not restricted to any religion in my interpretation. Keep this list handy as you read on.

What I Mean by Problem

In one sense, in my heart, I feel that there is really only one problem for any of us. That is when we allow ourselves to be separate from God. But in a very real sense, we can never be separate from God, since there is no place that God is not. Thus the paradox. When we are connected to God we have no problems. We are always connected to God. Yet we still believe that we have problems.

The answer to this conundrum will be the focus of the major portion of this book. The problems of disease, disharmony, discord, fear, anxiety, scarcity, displeasure, disappointments in others, and so on are in our minds. When we have these problems we find ourselves feeling alone, alienated, isolated, angry, hurt, depressed, afraid, and more and more anguished. Yet when we truly reconnect to our source these feelings disappear.

This is why I use the word problem as if it truly exists; yet I know every time I use it that it is an illusion. So every time you see the word throughout this book, know that I perceive it as an illusion created by ourselves because we have separated ourselves, in that moment, from God.

There is a powerful line in A Course in Miracles which reminds me of this lesson: “It takes great learning to understand that all things, events, encounters, and circumstances are helpful.” Great learning is an understatement! It takes great faith and courage to begin to view our lives in this way.

How strongly do you desire to truly know, beyond a doubt, that every problem you experience including the very worst thing in your life, actually contains the seeds of the best thing? We can learn to view every crisis as an opportunity, which wouldn’t necessarily make life easier, but would make it more satisfying. We would never be able to view anything as a negative occurrence, because we’d see everything as useful information.

This may sound oversimplified if you face seemingly unsolvable problems every day. I implore you to have an open mind and also some logic rooted in your past religious conditioning as illustrated in “Problems Are Illusions” below. The logic will create a space where you can call on your spiritual connection for the resolution of your problems. It will also give you a base for the problem-solving tools I am offering you in the last seven chapters of this book.

Problems Are Illusions

Give some thought to the following three quotes from the scriptures.

• “God is too pure to behold iniquity.”

• “God made all that was made and all that God made was good.”

• “Your eyes are too pure to look on evil, you cannot tolerate wrong.”

Almost identical observations have been made in all religions. The Holy Koran puts it this way, “Whatever good you have is all from God, whatever evil, all is from yourself.”

If God is good and God made everything, then everything is good. God cannot behold iniquity. So where does all of this stuff that we lump into the category of problems come from? The answer is obvious. When we come to believe that we are separate from God we experience this feeling of separation in our mind, and our mind tells us that we have a problem. The problem, created by our beliefs and existing in our mind, causes us to feel an absence of peace or love. Those beliefs can manifest as disease in our bodies. We begin searching for a solution.

But in reality, since God is only about good, and God is everywhere, what we have done is separate ourselves in our mind from God. Though we find ourselves suffering with these problems, everything that we label a problem is an illusion.

You can see why it is so important to see any and all problems as things that we create in our mind. If we can create non-good or non-God in our mind, then we can also not create them in our mind even though we may have no idea how to do that. Our conditioning is so strong that we often have far greater faith in our problems than we do in our ability to no longer have them.

We often display a much greater faith in the power of cancer, heart disease, or AIDS than we do in the power to heal them. We do this in a multitude of ways. We become enamored of the problem and its damaging effect. We live out the illusion while ignoring the fact that nothing iniquitous can be of God, and God made everything. The evil, the pain, the anguish are of our own creation and they represent opportunities to gain that greater learning that A Course in Miracles describes.

I know that some of these ideas sound strangely impossible to implement. I ask you to keep an open mind as we travel this path of healing to bring peace back into your life on a permanent basis.

The Eastern gurus use the term maya (illusion) to describe the existence of problems that really do not exist. The universe is good. God is good. God is everywhere. God is invisible spirit. Anything that is not good cannot exist. But we feel it does, so we have to come up with a solution, and this is the very reason why I have felt so compelled to write this book. There is a solution. It sits there right in front of you.

The last seven chapters of this book provide you with a series of easy-to-apply solutions to this puzzle. For now, however, let’s take a brief look at the word solution as it applies in the title of this book.

What I Mean by Solution

I once sat in on a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in which ten people who had been drinking most of their lives were gathered in a rehabilitation center where they had to live away from their families and loved ones. The words of a sign on the wall kept gnawing at me throughout that meeting. It read, “Your best thinking got you here.” I thought how true that is and how it applies to all the circumstances of our lives. Our best thinking got us here.

Our best thinking is exactly where all our so-called problems exist. If we couldn’t think about them, they would not exist. We can change our very best thinking and begin to see the error of that thinking. What we need is a change in thinking to realize that a connection to the divine good, or spirit, or God, is what heals or eradicates our problems.

The power that we call God, which grows the flowers and moves the planets in perfect orbits, counts us as one of its creations. I encourage you to learn to rely on that power in times of crisis.

Correcting Errors

In mathematics when you add two plus two you will always come up with four. This little addition example of two plus two equals four is said to have substance because it is true. Now if you state that two plus two equals seven, you have an error, and two plus two equals seven no longer is said to have substance or reliability. Try balancing your checkbook using two plus two equals seven. So how do we end that error? Very simple, we correct it, and it goes away. That is, we bring truth to the presence of the error, and the error disappears.

You cannot send problems out of your life by attacking them or understanding them in more depth. Instead, you correct the error in your thinking that produces the problem in the first place. Once you bring a correction to the problem it no longer has any substance or validity, and it disappears completely from your life.

The solution, stated generally here and more specifically later in this book, is to bring a spiritual essence to the “problem” of disease, disharmony, or discord. Then the error or the illusion will vanish. Problems represent a deficit of spirit in some sense. The error is corrected permanently when you apply the seven components of spirituality. The error is that these problems, which we are experiencing in our minds, in reality do not exist.

Correcting these errors is tantamount to dissolving our fears. And when you turn and look directly at your fears, what you face dissolves in the light of consciousness. It is in this context that we have within us the ability to eliminate those illusions that we call problems. We correct these errors with the creation of a new spiritual delivery system. This is the key to understanding the healing of the body as well as our relationships.

This is the basic introduction to this somewhat radical idea of having a spiritual solution available for every single problem. I’ve always loved Shakespeare’s line, “Go to your bosom; knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.” The heart symbolizes the part of us that does not rely exclusively on thoughts. Thinking is the source of problems. When I ask an audience to point to themselves, ninety-nine percent will point directly to their hearts, not their heads. Your heart holds the answer to resolving any and all problems in your life.