Ups and Downs

“I was an atheist for almost half of my life. My disbelief in God first began when I didn’t heed my parents’ dire threat that God would strike me dead if I ate bacon. When I was eight years old and on my first Cub Scout outing, everyone began eating their breakfast of bacon and eggs. The bacon smelled so good that I suddenly decided to eat it. I distinctly remember quickly looking behind me to see if God was there, waiting to strike me dead. Nothing happened, but I continued to feel guilty for a long time afterward. I was scared that my parents’ warning would come true because I believed God to be frightening and vengeful. I also adopted my parents’ perception that the purpose of life was to suffer and survive in a fearful world where every day someone could threaten or attack you. 

When I was sixteen, and a good friend of mine was killed in an automobile accident, I lost the little faith in God I had. I couldn’t believe that God would let such a cruel thing happen. And this left me feeling more fearful, vulnerable, and unlovable. Therefore, although part of me rejected God, another part of my mind felt that God was punishing me for all my misdeeds. When I flunked kindergarten, I was completely devastated. The embarrassment, pain, and the feeling of not being good enough became a common theme throughout my early life. My ego voice gave me a continuous reminder of how stupid I was. I remained in the bottom of my classes in public school and barely got into college. It wasn’t until medical school that I discovered I had the learning disability, dyslexia. I struggled through Stanford Medical School and graduated on probation. During my internship, however, I was surprised to learn that one of my professors thought I was the best intern in surgery, and his belief in me gave me some hope that through my education, I would amount to something.

By 1975, the outside world saw me as a successful psychiatrist who appeared to have everything he wanted. But my inner world was chaotic, empty, unhappy, and hypocritical. My twenty-year marriage had recently ended a few years before in a painful divorce. I had become an alcoholic and had developed chronic, disabling back pain as a means of handling guilt. At this time, my closest relationship was with Judy Skutch (Whitson). She had just received the unpublished manuscript of A Course in Miracles, bringing it directly to me and telling me it was about God and spiritual transformation. As a militant atheist, I was strongly resistant to these topics, but she succeeded in convincing me to read one page, saying that she believed that this Course had the power to heal our “special relationship.” 

What followed was an experience I have never been able to fully articulate in words. After reading that single page, I began to cry. Deep inside me a tiny voice said, “Physician, heal thyself. This is your way home.” Then I felt the Presence of God and came to know that my purpose in life was going to be one of service to others, doing my best to share love and forgiveness with everyone I met, regardless of their behavior. This was the beginning of my spiritual journey. I began by reading A Course in Miracles Workbook, but the daily lessons were often hard for me to understand, so eventually Judy and I did the lessons together, which lasted for several years. Our relationship began to transform from a “special relationship” to a “Holy Relationship.”

Gradually, I began to see that I didn’t have to listen to my ego voice, which supported fear and separation. Instead, I could choose to listen to the Voice of God, a Voice based on love and joining. It really didn’t take much, though, for me to be attracted to guilt and suffering. In the flash of a second, I would judge the motives and behavior of people around me and suddenly become filled with doubt, distrust, fear, anger, and conflict. I found that I could hear my inner teacher and feel peaceful when I stilled my mind, let go of my guilty past, and came to God with empty hands. I learned that I could choose the thoughts that I put in my mind.

During my spiritual journey, sometimes I found it difficult to distinguish between the voice of my ego and the Voice of God. I had my ups and downs studying the lessons in the Course. At times, I would awaken in the middle of the night and words would pour from me which reminded me of the beauty, joy, peace, and safety that we can all experience by accepting God’s Unconditional Love. At other times, I awakened to the terror and cries of my ego, and words from my insane mental state flowed from me. I wrote my thoughts in my journals as diary entries and as poems. At first, I kept these poems private, using them only to increase my own awareness. When I began sharing a few of them in my lectures, I found that others, people who were struggling through their own dark nights of the soul, felt and experienced the very same things I was describing.

It was later in 1975 that I, along with others, was inspired to begin a small center where the principles from the Course could benefit children and adults facing life-threatening challenges. I was guided to choose twelve of the key principles and present them in a generic way so that peoples of all cultures and faiths, and even those who were agnostics or atheists, could all benefit from them. Judy and I meditated together to see if our Higher Power could give us a name for the new center. Judy came up with the name, Center for Attitudinal Healing. This was the beginning of the first Center offering free, support services. Now in the fifth decade, independent Centers and Groups continue to emerge all around the world.

During the summer of 2016, when my wife, Diane, was cleaning out our storage area, she found my journals from decades past. When I listened to them once again, I was moved, remembering my own struggles, and thinking that perhaps they could be helpful to others… I was fifty years old when I consciously started my spiritual journey, and now, at ninety-two, I am still a student of A Course in Miracles. Every morning, Diane and I read a lesson from the Course, meditate on it, discuss it, and do our best to remember it throughout the day. While God’s Light has become more consistent in our lives, we find that retraining our minds takes a continual commitment. My hope is that you may find some inspiration, peace of mind and with your own spiritual journey...” 
~ Gerald G. Jampolsky, M.D.

“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. 

Guilt, you are my false security blanket that assures me of continual suffering. You are the nemesis of my being. You are my judge, jailer and jail all wrapped into one. You keep me immobilized in a continual state of self bondage and self punishment. You put me in jail and throw away the key. You keep me in darkness, alone and in a state where there is no love and no hope. You make me lose all faith and trust. You hold in me a state where there is only self hate and projected hate, where I hate God, the world and everyone in it. You are my certain prescription for insanity. You make sure that every time I try to rid myself of you, my blanket of guilt, by kicking you off of me, I grab you and cling to you with all my might. You have convinced me that I cannot live without you.

I have felt lost most of my life, and it is only today that I equate losing my way and feeling empty inside as one and the same. When I have chosen to let my heart shrink and be empty of love, I manufacture that state of loneliness and separation that has plagued me most of my life. When will I awaken to know, without any doubts whatsoever, that I have been looking for my identity in the external world? I have been looking in the wrong place. Help me only to look inside so that I may be home once again, so that I can stop this endless wandering in a circle that goes nowhere.

Fear, what lightning speed you have! With the blink of an eye, you fill my heart and mind with terror. You make my heart pound with  apprehension of my own destruction. You produce a state of separation, isolation and aloneness that is beyond despair. Fear, my nightmare of deception, you tried to convince me that Love has vanished from my being, never to return again. Creative Love Force of the Universe, I hold my arms out to you and pray for your help. Awaken me and transform my fear into my true state of Love. Awaken me to the truth that there is no fear, that there is only Love. Awaken me to the truth that there is no separation and that we are  joined in Love as One forever.

I know I’m not rejected, but I feel rejected. I know that God doesn’t reject me. I want to feel God’s Love all the time and to identify only with the Spirit Selves in others rather than their behavior. I will never feel God’s Presence if I am concerned with form of any kind and make my love conditional on what that form should be. 

What is this cancer inside me, the fiery anger that lingers in its thin disguise, the coldness and the brittleness that comes from my pores at a moment’s notice? Could it all be fear, and nothing but fear? Is there no roadmap that can lead me to peace and freedom? Can I really feel whole and at one by simply crossing the bridge of forgiveness? Why does something that seems so simple bring out my greatest resistance? Obstacles, obstacles, obstacles is that all there is to life, a series of obstacles separating me from others? When will I awaken to the full awareness that all obstacles between myself and others are self-imposed? I have manufactured them through my own fear of love and my own fear of God.

Let me awaken from this world of darkness, from this house of fear that I have built. Let me arise from this dream world I have made, a fear house of mirrors, of terror that has no end in sight. Let me be released from the prison I have made, a dream world filled with illusions of fear that never disappear. Let me escape from the revolving door of frustration that I seem to be trapped in.

Let me ascend into Your Arms and Heart that I have never truly left. Let the Rip Van Winkle in me disappear. Let Your Light shine away all the dark shadows that have kept me asleep. Let me be born anew with the Light of Christ shining in me and return to the House of Love that You created and from where I never really left. Let my long, misguided journey be over. Let me be home at last in Your Heart of Love, the House of Love of Your Creation, never to feel lost or separated from You ever again.
 
Oh, what bitter agony. How hellish is the dark night of my soul. How seemingly impossible are my feelings of unrest. How my heart feels like it has shrunk into oblivion. When will I learn that longing for anything or anyone on this planet earth can only bring me pain, can only make me feel alone, rejected, and unlovable? When will I learn? When will I learn? When will I learn that I’m never alone when I am experiencing Oneness with my Loving Creator?

Help me awaken from the world of opposites where I seem to dream of  terror, pain and isolation. Let the passing of this dream be my awakening to reality. Help me see Love as everlasting and all encompassing and having no opposites. Let me remember that bodies are not real. Give me the strength to see physical death as only an illusion, and let me identify only with Joy and Love which are ever present.

Help me to let go of my preoccupation with the future. Give me the strength to stop my futile attempts to predict and control the future. Let me see no value in my plan of what the future should be. Rid me of my senseless questions about tomorrow and of all my desires to manipulate and control others so that the future can be to my making. Remind me that my fears and uncertainties of tomorrow are only related to my unfounded fear of You...”

~ Gerald Jampolsky, Poetry and Notes to Myself: My Ups and Downs with A Course in Miracles
Drs. Gerald Jampolsky and Diane Cirincione are married and are members of the faculty of the University of Hawaii School of Medicine, Department of Complementary and Alternative Medicine. Together and independently they have authored several bestselling books. In 2015 both authors were awarded the Ellis Island Medals of Honor for living lives dedicated to helping others and sharing their personal and professional gifts for the benefit of humanity.