Life is not a perpetual honeymoon. This earth is a school. Spiritual growth does not come without effort, and effort and change often mean pain. I think it is meant to be that way: if there were no difficulties, we wouldn't look for anything higher. And that would be hell because it would keep us from the infinite bliss which is our birthright.
- Brother Anandamoy, The Psychology Of the Soul: An Interview With Brother Anandamoy

THROUGHOUT OUR EXPLORATION, we have repeatedly considered the many ways in which the trials and tribulations of life might actually bring us closer to God. Herein lies the challenge of understanding the concept that "suffering is Grace." Sometimes when we first hear that, we are inclined to react with annoyance and anger, thinking that what it means is that God is punitive and sadistic.

But, as Brother Anandamoy points out in the above quote, perhaps if we didn't experience difficulties in life, we might not be motivated to look for a higher truth, a deeper peace, a more abiding joy. The recognition that hell would be living in a state in which we are forever cut off from the "infinite bliss which is our birthright" is immensely important. It bears repeating that our culture's vision of "heaven" - a state in which we would have all the wealth, health, beauty, power, and fame we think we want - has not, over the entire course of human history, often delivered the happiness it seemed to promise.

In his landmark book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman points out that one of the key indicators of emotional "maturity" is the ability to delay gratification. Study after study has shown that children who learn at an early age to forestall immediate fulfillment of desire are the children who grow up to be the happiest, most well-adjusted, most successful adults. In other words, if given the choice to have one cookie now or two cookies in thirty minutes, the children who demonstrate the ability to analyze the situation and to wait for the better reward are the children who will most likely experience success and happiness in life. Mastering that simple childhood skill is an almost unfailingly reliable predictor of a much more successful future not only socially but also intellectually and professionally.

Children who do not learn to delay the fulfillment of desire are much more likely to be poorly adjusted later in life. They perform at a much lower level academically and socially, and they are much more likely to exhibit "delinquent" behavior in adolescence and adulthood. We might reasonably conclude, then, that parents who resolve to help their children cultivate the ability to delay gratification are giving them one of the most important life skills a human being can have.

Now think of how often our interactions with God have involved offering up a list of requests, or even "demands," and expecting that God or the universe should just deliver what we want right now. We are often seduced by new methods and new formulas for fulfilling our desires immediately. Rather than seek the happiness that would spontaneously arise from a higher vision of human life and a deeper connection with our own soul, we turn to teachings and practices that function in service of what the culture values. Many of us are drawn to spiritual paths that offer us wealth and possessions rather than those that emphasize love, peace, contentment, and kindheartedness. We have been so totally brainwashed by our cultural value system that we assume love, peace, and contentment will come from wealth and possessions, despite a profusion of evidence to the contrary.

Unfortunately, our culture has so completely indoctrinated us with its deluded model of happiness that we don't fully recognize just how deluded it is or how very easily it can infiltrate our "spiritual" beliefs. When we feel unhappy we most often, unwisely, conclude that it is because our lives are not yet filled with enough of the things our culture values. Even in our spiritual lives, we are susceptible to confusing greed with enlightened action. It doesn't matter whether the greed is for money, or sex, or power, or more relationships. It doesn't matter whether the greed is for continuing something that has ended or the desperate longing for something that has never begun. Greed is greed. It isn't a route to happiness.

The simple truth is, there is no reason that you cannot be totally fulfilled, totally at peace, and totally in love - right now - no matter what the circumstances of your life are. I intentionally did not include "totally happy" in that list. It would be cruel to suggest to ourselves or to each other that we should be totally happy when we are going through heartbreaking, heart-wrenching losses and disappointments. The expectation that we should be "happy, happy, happy" all the time is one of the fundamental problems in our cultural psychosis. It often plays out vividly in the spiritual teachings that our culture most readily embraces. But while total happiness is an unrealistic expectation, we can still be peaceful, fulfilled, loving, and, yes, joyful.

Remember Meher Baba's suggestion that "being spiritual" means "being 100 percent human and 100 percent Divine." It means becoming a living embodiment of both form and formless, matter and spirit, being capable of unbounded love, infinite peace, and undisturbed joy, and - paradoxically - also being capable of feeling deep sadness and boundless compassion when the conditions of life call those emotions into play.

Despite all the benefits that positive thinking, creative visualization, spiritual healing, and the Power of Attraction ("like" attracts "like") have offered to us throughout the ages, the simple fact is that these paths only work for certain people in certain circumstances. Sometimes, the unrealistic expectations they foster result in a kind of boomerang effect. It is absolutely true that our thoughts exert a tremendous influence over our life experience. It is also true that the Power of Attraction is a fundamental law in the world of form and widely recognized in the field of physics. But jumping to the conclusion that all our problems are caused by negative thoughts and all our joys and successes are caused by positive thoughts can create unforeseen complications and suffering when not viewed in the wider scope of human experience. Our thoughts in this moment are by no means the only determinants of our experience. They certainly have an effect. But there may be much larger and more complicated forces at work. In other words, many of our experiences are determined by karmic forces set in motion long before we took birth.

To suggest to those who are dealing with cancer that they caused their own illness with negative thoughts is both ill informed and cruel. To suggest to a mother whose child was murdered that her child's death was caused by her negative thoughts is coldhearted, presumptuous, and preposterous. To suggest to people that their spouse's sudden heart attack was caused by their negative thoughts is both callous and unenlightened.

Twenty years ago, my friend Scott Chesney was a healthy, handsome, popular, athletic sixteen-year-old. One night while sleeping in his own bedroom, he had an extremely rare spontaneous spinal cord stroke. There had been no injury and no warning. He woke up the next morning ready to go to school, only to find that he was now paralyzed from the waist down. He has been in a wheelchair ever since. Would anyone be so cruel as to suggest that his own negative thoughts - or his parents' negative thoughts - attracted this event into his life?

It is absolutely possible that in certain circumstances, the eradication of "negative" thought patterns can result in physical "healing." But it is also possible that it won't. I have seen far too many people wind up in increased despair if their efforts to reformulate their thought patterns haven't resulted in their disease going into remission, or their loved one's disease going into remission, or the manifestation of some other change they are longing and praying for. If the effort to change their thought patterns doesn't result in the healing they were working toward, many people are left with even deeper feelings of loss, betrayal, and failure. My friend Stephen Levine used to say, "I have an entire library of books on healing that were given to me by people who have died."

While cultivating a more positive, joyful outlook on life is always helpful, the downside to spiritual teachings that focus solely on creating positive effects is that they tend to deny the realms of experience in which all the positive thinking in the world doesn't appear to change circumstances at all. Simply stated, there is no amount of positive thinking that will remove all suffering from life. Even the greatest positive thinkers of our time have not been able to achieve lives devoid of suffering. Their facility for looking at things in a positive light has often assisted them in traversing life's troubled waters more quickly and easily, but it hasn't eliminated those troubled waters from their life experience.

Every great spiritual teacher, every enlightened being, every God-realized soul eventually dies. Some die of cancer. Some die of heart attacks. Some have been assassinated. Would anyone suggest that enlightened beings are attracting their own illness with negative thought forms?

The cultivation of real happiness is one of the great challenges and primary goals of all spiritual endeavor. Though our life circumstances may cause us to go through periods of intense sadness, there is no loss, no disappointment, no catastrophe that can arise in our lives which in and of itself deprives us of the ability to be happy. Happiness is always within us. It resides within us eternally. It isn't a state of knowing, it is a state of being. It arises when we awaken to our eternal connection with our Creator, with God, with the source of all that is. There is simply no way to ever be disconnected from that. If we were disconnected from it, we wouldn't exist. It is the very source of our existence.

If you are feeling miserable at this moment, rest assured that nothing written here is meant in any way to denigrate the excruciating agony of emotional misery. But you have everything you need at this very moment - within you - to find your way back to joy. You can begin now.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John E. Welshons is the author of When Prayers Aren't Answered and Awakening from Grief. A much sought after speaker who offers lectures and workshops on terminal illness, grief, and other topics, he has been helping people deal with dramatic life change and loss for over 35 years. He is the founder and president of Open Heart Seminars and lives in New Jersey.

Visit his website at www.openheartseminars.com.