Gerald G. Jampolsky - Out of Darkness into the Light: A Journey of Inner Healing

THE PASSING OF A DREAM

Help me out of my prison of darkness
Created by the shadows of my ego.
Awaken me from my dream of fear
Where guilt, blame, and attack
Beckon from shadowed doors.

Help me to see the world differently
By finding no value in blame
And self-condemnation.
Help me to experience Love
As my only reality.

Help me to cross only
The bridges of forgiveness
That I may come
Out of darkness
Into the Light.

N ot so long ago, a book about a persons fight with God would have been the last thing in the world I would have wanted to read. The idea that I might write such a book would have been preposterous. God was a negative word for me. Besides, how can you fight with God?since I had convinced myself that there just wasnt such an entity.

At the age of sixty-three, I now realize that, without having been aware of it, I was fighting with God most of my life. This may sound strange coming from a person who once proudly called himself an atheisteven more, a militant atheistand did so in quite a superior manner.

I was sure that anyone who believed in God was intellectually soft, not tuned in to the real world. My snobbery was built on mountains of misguided thoughts. If anyone tried to strike up a conversation about God with me, I simply turned my back on them. I would have none of it.

And yet, my life had not always been like that. I can recall moments when I felt very different, when God seemed close enough to reach out and touch.

When I was about four years old, I was playing alone behind the apartment where we lived. The memory is crystal clear to me. It was one of the happiest moments of my childhood. I found myself talking to the daisies and the butterflies. And they were talking back. We carried on lengthy conversations. I remember feeling boundless love from them, and I recall how open and flowing my heart felt as I extended my love to them.

As a young child I also had conversations with the sky, the clouds, and with God. The joy I experienced during those moments was like beautiful music. I felt so at one with everything, and everything seemed so beautiful and so forever.

Whenever these memories threatened to surface in my adult life, I did my best to push them back. I held on to my militant atheist stand, maintaining my belief that people who were religious, who were on a spiritual journeypeople who believed in Godwere only victims of their own fears. In my mind the World War I statement that there are no atheists in foxholes was only further confirmation that people believed in God only when they were scared to death!

I believed that when you were fearful, you did not use your head. Fear made you intellectually soft. I was convinced that no definition of God could ever satisfy a person who was intellectually aware and alive. It never occurred to me, even for a second, that I might be the one who was fearful.

As a child I believed there was an external, superhuman God beyond the sky. I pictured him as an old man with a white robe, a long white beard, and bushy white eyebrows. I believed that if you did what God wanted you to do, you would be rewarded. If you went against God, you would be severely punished in some way. Mine was a belief in a frightening, vengeful, unforgiving God.

Only recently have I found that I am responsible for and can choose the thoughts I put into my mind. I know that only my thoughts can imprison me, and only my thoughts can set me free. It had never before occurred to me that in making decisions I have a choice between listening to my ego, with its voice of fear, or listening to the voice of God, the voice based on love. It is only of late that statements such as Let my will and your will be one or Let thy will be done have begun to ring true in my heart.

Like my parents, I had always been fearful of death, since I thought my reality was limited to my body and my ego. This meant to me that when you died, that was the end, there was no more of anything. I decided that if that was the script God wrote, I wanted no part of it. At the same time I thought that people who talked about eternal life were dreamers who obviously did not know the facts.

What little faith I had in God disappeared when, at the age of sixteen, a good friend of mine was killed in an automobile accident. In my eyes, my friends death was cruel, unfair, and insane. I was certain that there could not be a just, trusting, loving God. And that left me feeling more fearful, vulnerable, and unlovable than ever. Thereafter, I vacillated between believing there was no God and believing that God was surely out to get me.

I wanted my body to live forever. I fantasized about having my body frozen after death because maybe, just maybe, someone would discover a miracle drug that would bring me back to life and allow me to live forever. Before I was on a spiritual pathway, I saw death as the ultimate experience of the loss of control, and I sought to displace my fear of that by trying to control other people and the circumstances around me.

In spite of the external successes I had in my life, I always had a haunting feeling about the futility of life. That feeling was the voice of my ego, but I did not know that at the time. I felt there had to be more to life than I was experiencing. I thought there was no way on earth that I could continually protect myself from hurt or attack, from physical or emotional pain or illness. The bottom line for me in almost everything I did was my awareness of the impossibility of controlling death.

Whatever my ego said always felt like the truth to me. But now, finally, I see that the pictures my ego offers are only false images of the world and my place in it. My ego would have me believe that I am nothing more than a personality contained in a body that is limited to a particular time and space.