I recently read an article on the research being done on near-death experiences (“Altered States: Scientists Analyze the Near-Death Experience,” by Lee Graves, The University of Virginia Magazine, Summer 2007). While I was impressed by the evidence being compiled that these experiences are not just the misfirings of a dying brain, I was especially struck by a particular message that emerged again and again.
This message was embedded in the article’s opening story. The story was about Rocky, a bagman for the Mafia, who was shot in the chest one day and left for dead. He had a profound near-death experience and, as Bruce Greyson described it, “came back with typical near-death aftereffects. He felt that cooperation and love were the important things, and that competition and material goods were irrelevant.” As a result, he actually changed careers and “started helping delinquent children and victims of spousal abuse.”
After that, this same basic message was voiced repeatedly, by experiencers as well as by researchers summarizing the reports of experiencers. Here are some of the ways that message was put:
How we spend our time on earth, the kind of relationships we build, is vastly more important than we can know. (George Ritchie, NDE experiencer and author of Return from Tomorrow)
They [NDE experiencers] seem to know that the love they create while living will be reflected and radiated back to them when they die. (Melvin Morse, M.D., author of Closer to the Light: Learning from the Near-Death Experiences of Children)
We’re all in this together. If I hurt you, I’m hurting myself. (Bruce Greyson, prominent NDE researcher)
It sort of wakes you up to the importance of other people and relationships. (Raymond Moody, author of Life After Life)
How strange that when someone apparently passes beyond the veil and glimpses the other side, the message that person receives is about the incomparable importance of our relationships on earth.
Part of why I was so struck by this was that this is the very message that I have taken away from A Course in Miracles. Please read the following twelve quotes and try to catch their vision of the importance of our relationships:
It is only in relationships that salvation can be found. (P-2.In.4:3)
You have found each other and will light each other’s way. (T-18.III.9:6)
One instant spent together restores the universe to both of you. (T-22.VII.6:3)
You have assumed your part in [your brother’s] redemption, and you are now fully responsible to him. (T-17.VIII.5:5)
All therapy should do is try to place everyone involved in the right frame of mind to help one another. (T-3.VIII.5:5)
One asks for help; another hears and tries to answer in the form of help. This is the formula for salvation. (P-2.III.3:4-5)
Nothing in the world is holier than helping one who asks for help. And two come very close to God in this attempt, however limited, however lacking in sincerity. (P-2.V.4:2-3)
If their relationship is to be holy, whatever one needs is given by the other; whatever one lacks the other supplies. (P-3.III.4:4)
No one is sent by accident to anyone. (P‑3.III.6:2)
When you meet anyone, remember it is a holy encounter. (T-8.II.6:1)
Even at the level of the most casual encounter, it is possible for two people to lose sight of separate interests, if only for a moment. That moment will be enough. Salvation has come. (M-3.2:6-8)
All who meet will someday meet again, for it is the destiny of all relationships to become holy. (M-3.4:6)
When we read these quotes, we can be astonished at just how much importance they grant our relationships. Yet this theme is not confined to these few passages. The entire path of the Course is one of realizing that other people are not the annoying nuisances we thought, but instead are literally shining with divine worth and significance. This realization is what frees us from our chains: “And each one is released as he beholds his savior in place of the attacker who he thought was there” (T-22.VIII.8:1). The author of the a course in miracles says that when someone seeks to open his mind to true reality, “it is always some change in his perception of interpersonal relationships that enables him to do so” (P-In.1:6).
Yet the Course is about more than a strictly internal change in our perception of others. It is also about joining with others in a common goal. “Each one must share one goal with someone else, and in so doing, lose all sense of separate interests” (P-2.II.8:4). This, of course, is a holy relationship, and the Course says that holy relationships are literally “the source of your salvation” (T-20.VIII.4:5).
We could even take this one step further. In the Course, relationships are not only the source of our salvation, they are also meant to be the focus of our lives. The Course says that our whole “function on earth is healing” (T-12.IX.5:2)—meaning, extending healing to others. To say that this is our “function” is to say that this is what we aresuited for, what we are here for. Just as a toaster’s function is to toast bread, so our function is to heal people. This function is meant to encompass all of our behavior: “[The Holy Spirit] will teach you to use your body only to reach your brothers so He can teach His message through you” (T-8.VII.12:4). And it is meant to be full time, to go on “every moment of the day” and even to continue “into sleeping thoughts as well” (M-In.1:6). The Course even promises that we will be given a special form of this function, designed around our particular strengths (see W-154.2:2), so that the people we serve get the very best in us.
This focus on the importance of our relationships extends into every nook and cranny of our day. We are meant to wake up saying, “Help me to perform whatever miracles you want of me today” (T‑1.15.2:4). We are supposed to take a moment each morning to let ourselves be born again to each one of our relationships. “Use no relationship to hold you to the past, but with each one each day be born again. A minute, even less, will be enough” (T-13.XI.5:2-3). Then we are supposed to walk out into our day and be constantly on the lookout for situations that need a miracle from us (W-77.7:4-5). We are asked to bless literally everyone we meet (W-37.6:2). We are supposed to regard each chance encounter as a potential holy encounter, not really chance at all, but arranged by the Holy Spirit for the sake of a holy potential.
Thus, if we land on an elevator with a stranger, we are meant to treat it as an arranged meeting with a long-lost friend (M-3.2:2-5). If a child bumps into us by accident, we are supposed to treat this as a God-given opportunity to let this child know that she’s worthy anyway, even when she doesn’t look where she’s going (M-3.2:2-5). If we feel a pang of regret at running into someone at the store (W-121.10:1), we are meant to realize that this pang is actually anger, and then try to see the light in this person and let this light awaken us (W-121.10-13). We are supposed to be so focused on holy encounters that we even regard the holy encounters of others as somehow our own: “A brother smiles upon another, and my heart is gladdened. Someone speaks a word of gratitude or mercy, and my mind perceives this gift and takes it as its own” (W-315.1:3-4).
When we put all of these passages together, it can be quite surprising. Is how we relate to others really this important? Does the Course really see our every interaction as suffused with this kind of divine meaning? Yet this shouldn’t actually surprise us. After all, the Course came in order to help Helen Schucman and Bill Thetford live out Bill’s “better way,” and listen to how Helen described that way:
[Bill] was not going to get angry and was determined not to attack. He was going to look for a constructive side in what the people there said and did, and was not going to focus on mistakes and point up errors. He was going to cooperate rather than compete. (Absence from Felicity, by Ken Wapnick, p. 94; see also Cameo 26, “Helen and Bill’s Holy Relationship,” in Appendix I of the Complete and Annotated Edition.)
This notion of the importance of relationships, then, takes us back to the very origins of the Course. For the Course’s original purpose was to help Helen and Bill learn how to “cooperate rather than compete.” It came, in other words, to teach them—and us—how to get along.
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