From the time I was about nine years old until I entered my last year in college, I hated God. I would often find myself railing internally and sometimes even externally against the small-mindedness of those who adhered to a patriarchal and largely superstitious approach to Him. The wars fought in His name, whether large or small, collective or personal, seemed like nothing other than horrific human folly built on a corrosive, fear-based addiction to “faith.” In some ways things haven’t changed. Brutality still presents itself in the name of faith, and humanity still tends to center itself on rather primitive notions of God. My anger surrounding the issues of religion, however, has softened substantially over the years. This doesn’t mean that I’ve necessarily “found God”; it’s just that after lots of travel, stillness, and study with some great teachers, the whole divine mess doesn’t hammer me as much any more, and as a result, there is more peace in my heart and mind.

Uncovering this peace gave rise to the book you now have in your hands. In my journey, I was introduced to a path that continues to inspire me. This path reveals that there is a way for each of us to approach our spiritual lives that neither negates nor excludes any religious tradition. There is a path for each of us that supports a deepening appreciation of the Infinite while still allowing for us to live engaged lives—where we get the kids to school on time and enjoy those things and those people who truly matter to us. All of us have exactly the tools we need to awaken to this spiritual Path, to become enlightened by it, and to be radically free from the things that hold us back from becoming all that we are. The only requirement is that we must want it enough to examine our lives honestly with patience, purpose, and care. This book attempts to show us how to take on this challenge.

Before we go on this journey, however, you should be aware of how I got to where I am. My spiritual life started early. I enjoyed the kids and teachers at my Sunday School. My family attended a rather progressive church in suburban San Francisco, where guitars were played, various approaches to God were openly discussed, and love for each person was central to the community. I’m guessing that Christ would have liked what was happening there. Unfortunately, the minister left. I heard all sorts of rumors, but the one that stuck with me was that the old guard of the church felt that he was a little to loose in his interpretations of Christ’s teachings.

As I remember it, we changed churches soon thereafter, and my experience at our new place of worship left me confused and angry. One of these new ministers, for example, told a bunch of us after a service that the Jewish and Muslim friends I had in my second-grade class were going to hell since they didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their personal savior. I thought this was ridiculous since there were grown-ups in this new church who had accepted Christ as their personal savior, who, I knew, after seeing their behavior at sporting events and cocktail parties, didn’t deserve to get in to heaven before my “non-believing” friends. This and other hypocrisies didn’t help to open my heart or mind to the kind of God that I was used to honoring. Then, in the years to come, seeing the televised images of Jim Bakker being led away from court in handcuffs and Jimmy Swaggart whimpering through a confession of indiscretion to his flock only encouraged me to withdraw further behind a wall of my own making. Insulated from religion and its trappings, I felt safe, impenetrable, and closed off to the effects of their harmful extremes. Ah, the feeling that one’s truth is The Truth—This must be the road to hell, I thought.

Extremism in general worked wonders in alienating me from any and all wisdom traditions. My loving suburban San Francisco parents, with their progressive mindsets largely agreed with me, yet they still wanted me to have some sort of spiritual grounding. To this day I’m amazed at how remarkably tolerant they were of my early seeking of alternatives. I remember telling them as a nine year old that I wanted to become a Jew since it “had a star as a symbol instead of a cross, and stars weren’t used to torture people.” (Besides, Mark Spitz was Jewish, and I saw him as a god.) My parents never once discouraged me. They simply smiled and suggested that maybe we should all “keep exploring the questions” that were coming up. Lucky me. They could have suggested that I go to the nice therapist with the sandbox in her office, or worse yet they could have taken me to the minister at our church either for some pastoral guidance, or as one of our more conservative neighbors suggested, for an exorcism. I’m grateful that they continued to support me as I struggled with the deep questions about life, death, and God that I had percolating within me.

As soon as the teenage years arrived, I grew out of the whole questioning phase and began the simpler path of outright rejection. The more books I read as a teen, the more that God, and the exclusionary worship of Him, became something that any person of education, thoughtfulness, and care must reject on principle, I thought. Since the concept of Him and the human tendency to hold on to this concept was at the core of so much pain and injustice, God must be avoided. I remember thinking that Nietzsche had it right when he told the world in the early 20th century, “God is dead.” Any celebration of His eternity and the salvation that His messengers offered us was simply a fear reflex, not unlike whistling if we were to walk past a graveyard. We were all going to die, I would say to any one of my friends who would listen, so why not just maximize our pleasure in the process? Be selfish, and enjoy the ride. Ah, hedonism—This must be the road to heaven, I thought.

The only problem was that the more pleasure I sought, the more pain I eventually felt. While attending the University of California at Berkeley, I continually succumbed to the temptations offered by pretty girls and flowing beer, yet no matter how much of any kind of indulgence I enjoyed, the pleasure of it was only fleeting and the payback of my excess weighed heavily on me. No matter how many skirts I chased or pints I drank, it was never enough. Hedonism, I decided after four years on an existential trampoline of bliss and pain, only leads us into a deeply personal version of the same spiritual war that all other faiths fought collectively. I was lost.

But at this point of doubt, something shifted in me as I questioned my blind pursuit of pleasure. Even in my darkest moments, I knew there was more to my existence than the cliché, “Life is hard and then you die.” It made sense to me intellectually, and yet like every other version of truth, living hard until death seemed so incomplete. Increasingly, as my questioning intensified, there were moments in my day-to-day experience that were transcendent, beautiful, loving, all-encompassing forays into something beyond anything I’d ever known before. Sometimes these moments occurred as I walked across the campus on my way to class. At other times I’d be holding hands with my girlfriend, afraid to tell her that life was bursting in me in some indescribable way that made all of us One Infinity.

At one point during the summer before my last year at Cal, I was coaching a group of six year old swimmers at one of our biggest meets of the season, when during their freestyle relay, I began to feel as if my body no longer had any boundary. I still functioned as a coach, enthusiastically offering cheers of encouragement to my precious little swimmers as they chopped haphazardly through the water, but I was conscious of what felt like a total lack of separation. In the midst of it all, neither my body nor mind existed as anything other than an extension of the moment at hand. I was the pool, the deck, the excited parents, the little swimmers, the sun, the sky, the zinc oxide on my nose. All of it.

What struck me over time was that none of these increasingly common blasts of universal tenderness and peace were anything like the all-too familiar alcohol-induced numbing of my mind and body. Instead, I can best describe these events as hyperconscious extensions of “me” beyond, and yet paradoxically closer, than my own heartbeat. It was unsettling, yet so very beautiful. What was all of this, I wondered? Was I losing my grip on reality? Was this some schizophrenic break getting ready to tear into my life? Or was this the miraculous and mysterious Truth about which the ancients had spoken? Ultimate Reality, perhaps? Or maybe I had a tumor, or some other terrible neurological ailment. Whatever the case, I wondered whether there was a way to stay near this place forever. How could I serve whatever this vast Opening was? Ah, to follow this path—It must be impossible, I thought.

After graduating from college I moved to New York where I toiled as a waiter and bartender by night, and as an actor perpetually out on auditions for bad theatrical and commercial projects during the day. During this time, my intimacy with the experiences of “Opening,” as I called them, diminished. Within a short time, my life in New York was in dire straits: my girlfriend at the time was leaving me, my rent was due, and I had no money. Waiting on tables and slinging cocktails for the rich and famous only reminded me that I wasn’t where I wanted to be. I felt so alienated from everything I’d come to regard as sacred, and worst of all, I had what felt like a hole in my heart that ached for a reprieve from all of the pain and frustration I felt.

It all came to a head when I came home to my cold East Village apartment one Christmas Eve. I didn’t have enough money to pay for January’s rent, let alone afford the trip home to San Francisco for the holidays. My parents were in the midst of both a divorce and a bankruptcy, so couldn’t pay to get me home either. In lieu of a celebratory tree, I had purchased a small wreath to set in the corner of my East 5th Street studio. Around it I had placed a few wrapped presents sent by my three younger brothers that had come in a care package days earlier.

I sat down and opened the presents. There was a book of Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, a coffee mug with “No. 1 Fireman” written across the side, and a flashlight without batteries. My mom had included a plaid duvet cover, but I didn’t have a duvet—only wool blankets. I laid down on my stomach and listened to the quiet of the space around me, and I started to cry.

I missed my brothers, my friends, my parents, and most of all, my life as I’d known it before. Now there seemed to be so few smiles. My father’s recent business failure had torn apart what was left of my parents’ relationship. Their divorce and increasing indebtedness were decimating everything I’d always considered stable. When I thought about it, the home I’d always known didn’t exist any longer. So there really was nothing left to call home—no place to which I could return. For the first time in my life, I felt absolutely and truly alone and in an emotional place of total disconnect from everything. I felt raw and unapproachable, angry and unstable, filled with pain brought on by a profound and endless alienation. Then, at the moment that it all felt most heavy, something broke wide open in me with a tremendous force. My words can’t describe or even point to what the experience was like. I just remember feeling like I was melting into the floor of my apartment, into the gifts from home, into the wreath, into the strain of my situation, into the hurt and glory of all experience of all beings all at once. This event went way beyond the blessed “a-ha” moment of non-division I’d experienced on the pool deck. This was deeper. It was as if I’d died somehow. I was still in this body, in this time and space, but the separate sense of “I” had really gone away.

Like all experiences, this one was temporary. I stayed there on my floor for several hours, until I finally got hungry and had some ramen noodles. After a few days, the intensity of the shimmer I was sensing all around me started to diminish. But in this internal explosion was a reminder that lingered for months. The pressure-cooker of all that pain had given birth to what any of us might call “a sacred journey” that, over the years, helped me contextualize the temporary death of my “I-sense.” I was still in the deep, dark, emotional pain of a life that wasn’t going according to plan, but I consciously vowed to open myself to the whole mystery of it all. Where this mystery and its intentional unfolding continues to lead me is described in the pages of this book.

Living from this openness, we simply work, live, and love with our whole being. In continuing this very life of ours, we also can help all of humanity if we’re careful not to think, once again, that we’ve got a monopoly on Truth. Even the articulation of teachings in these pages is only partial, yet it points to a fullness that each of us already has. As much as I’m hopeful that this book can support a deepening of lives led, I’m even more hopeful that the time-honored teaching that I’m sharing can ripple out to everyone that you might ever touch in this precious life, at some precious moment. Like right now.

Bows to all that is sacred and holy within and without you.

Michael McAlister

Pleasant Hill, CA

January, 2008

  • Share/Bookmark