Mostly A Mystic: Reflections on a Spiritual (But Not Religious) Life

By D. Patrick Miller

"a constantly touching and insightful memoir..." — from the Foreword by JACOB NEEDLEMAN

Twenty-five years in the making, the spiritual memoir of Fearless Books founder D. Patrick Miller is now available in print. MOSTLY A MYSTIC: Reflections on a Spiritual (But Not Religious) Life tells the story of how a young investigative reporter transformed into a modern mystic. Along the way, he has played a significant role in furthering the public awareness and understanding of A Course in Miracles (ACIM) as both a spiritual journalist and an independent publisher.

"I had to confess long ago that I'm mostly a mystic," says the author, "mainly because I am so often mystified." Chronicling a childhood marked by an emotionally disturbed family life and a young adulthood transformed by a seven-year illness and spiritual crisis, Miller tells a story that will reverberate powerfully with readers who have faced their own challenges in a "spiritual but not religious" age of rapid and tumultuous change. The book features a Foreword by the author's long-time mentor, philosopher Jacob Needleman.

A collection of autobiographical essays published over 25 years in such magazines as Yoga Journal and The Sun, plus new writing, MOSTLY A MYSTIC explores astral projection, disillusionment with gurus, growing up with a bipolar parent, surviving and thriving after a serious illness, the meanings of home and homelessness, ending one's religion, the expense of not selling out, and what it's like to study and practice A Course in Miracles over the long haul... as well as a lot more. For anyone who has contemplated the progress and significance of their own unconventional spiritual path, MOSTLY A MYSTIC will provide a wealth of reassurance and information confirming that you are not alone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: D. Patrick Miller
• Release date: Dec 14, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310405259

D. Patrick Miller

Patrick D. Miller is Charles T. Haley Professor Emeritus of Old Testament Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary in Princeton, New Jersey. He is the author of numerous books, including The Religion of Ancient Israel. He is coeditor of the Interpretation commentary series and the Westminster Bible Companion series. In 1998, he served as President of the Society of Biblical Literature. He was also editor of Theology Today for twenty years.

Book preview

MOSTLY A MYSTIC

Reflections on a Spiritual (But Not Religious) Life

First Digital Edition

© Copyright 2015 by D. Patrick Miller

SMASHWORDS EDITION

FEARLESS BOOKS

www.fearlessbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the express written permission of the publisher.

All quotes from A Course in Miracles are taken from the Standard Third Edition published by the Foundation for Inner Peace, PO Box 598, Mill Valley, CA 94942-0598, www.acim.org. The Course is not now under copyright, but the author wishes to express his appreciation to the Foundation for their generosity and cooperation through the years of granting permission for numerous excerpts from the Course in the essays appearing in this book, when published prior to the revocation of copyright.

Table of Contents

Foreword by Jacob Needleman

Introduction

Chapter 1: Flight Patterns

Chapter 2: Back to the Real World

Chapter 3: All Shook Up

Chapter 4: The Perfect Mother

Chapter 5: A Healing Catastrophe

Chapter 6: Climbing the Stone Face of Fear

Chapter 7: Homeless

Chapter 8: Ending My Religion

Chapter 9: Miracles Over the Long Haul

Chapter 10: The Co$t of Not Selling Out

Appendix Note

Chapter 11: Ending the War Within

Chapter 12: Why You Don’t Trust Reporters — And What They Could Do About It

Chapter 13: Genesis Corrected

Acknowledgments

Foreword

I met Patrick Miller a quarter of a century ago, when he approached me for an interview that would appear in The Sun magazine. That interview became the first of six which he recently collected and published under the title Necessary Wisdom.

Not more than ten minutes into that first interview I said to myself: This is not an interview; it’s a conversation.

And then, again, five minutes later, I was saying to myself: This is a special kind of conversation: it’s a dialogue.

Let me explain. In one form or another an interview is concerned solely with the person interviewed, in this case me — my thought, my views, my actions, my life. In a conversation, however, two people are concerned with each other’s views, thoughts, opinions. A conversation is about us, we — two human beings confronting or opening to each other as separate individuals.

But a dialogue is a special kind of conversation that is dedicated to a specific issue or question. In our case it was to be questions concerning the spiritual search in the midst of modern life — questions such as the meaning of God or mysticism or love, or even the possible spiritual significance of money, in our inflamed materialistic world.

Did Patrick and I come to new insights about these issues? Yes, certainly, to a degree.

Eventually, however, I realized that our dialogues were spiritual events themselves, events that responded to the issues not only by the intellectual content of our exchange, but by the quality of mutual listening that emerged between us. That is to say: by the human energy of mutual attention that touched us.

In Christian art there exist images showing two individuals speaking to each other while just above them there hovers a white dove — symbolizing the descent of the holy spirit. I am not saying that our dialogues attained that exalted level. But I am saying that the work of mutual listening, which entails the noble effort of two people fully accepting each other into their own minds, is a forerunner of human love. Such mutual listening, such unconditional mutual attention, however transitory it may be, or even the mere effort itself to practice such listening — is in its way more of an answer to questions of the spirit than words or ideas alone can ever be.

And in whatever sense Patrick here describes himself as mostly a mystic, or as spiritual but not religious, the simple fact is that in this book he is listening to and for the spiritual life of our culture with both a critical and an open-hearted attention. In that sense this constantly insightful and touching memoir is rooted in a lifelong conversation, and perhaps even an ardent, ongoing dialogue — a dialogue with the world around us, with all its silent questions and noisy answers, and all our spiritual hopes and struggles. — Jacob Needleman

Philosopher Jacob Needleman has been teaching and writing about the riches of the inner life for four decades. A professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University who has been featured on Bill Moyers’ World of Ideas series, Needleman’s most recent works include What is God? and An Unknown World ( from Tarcher/Penguin), and the Fearless Books title Necessary Wisdom: Jacob Needleman Talks About God, Time, Money, Love, and the Need for Philosophy in Conversations with D. Patrick Miller.

Be cheerful but grave.

— Paramahansa Yogananda

Introduction

Although the stock photo appearing on the cover of this book appears suspiciously Photoshopped to my graphic artist’s eye, I chose it because it reflects a formative experience of my spiritual life. Eight or nine years old at the time, I was standing in the second floor den of our family’s house before a broad expanse of windows, watching a ferocious night thunderstorm soak the flood plain that lay a couple hundred feet below me, down the hill from the house. Back then, that plain — bordered on one side by a small creek that I spent much of my childhood splashing around in — was populated with about twenty-five oak, hickory, and walnut trees of at least a hundred years vintage. Every occurrence of lightning, coming ever closer, briefly illuminated them in stark relief, like the skeletons of mysterious giants standing in a wading pool, suddenly revealed in a stop-action flash.

Then, as the pelting rain softened, a strange electric buzzzz went through the room before everything I could see went totally white for a second, followed immediately by a pounding smash that shook the entire house. My mother and two sisters in the living room screamed and within seconds, it seemed, my father had rushed up the stairs from his basement workshop into the den and grabbed me by the shoulders, as if to haul me to safety — not unlike he had done about five years before when our first house, built on the same floor plan, burned to the ground. Then he had dragged me from my bedroom, half-asleep, through smoke and cinders and out the one exit that was not already consumed in flames.

This time, the fire was outside and already safely contained. We both stood there in wonder watching a few tall tongues of flame, rapidly shortening in a heavier rain, issuing from the neatly split trunk of one of the formerly tallest trees on the plain, about three hundred yards from where we stood in the den. Had the windows in front of us been solid sheet glass instead of an array of narrow panes, they surely would have shattered from the sonic impact.

In the next morning’s bright sunlight, my dad and I went down to examine the still-smoking hulk of the shattered tree. One half had completely fallen over to the ground; the other was splintered in several standing shards, all of them seared with charcoal burns. While violent summertime weather, including the occasional tornado and flooding rains, wasn’t uncommon in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, this experience had shaken me like nothing before.

Suddenly I understood the relative powerlessness of human beings before the forces of nature that we liked to think we could control or protect ourselves from. And I understood as well how the notion of a violent, punishing God could not only have arisen in the primitive minds of early humans, but been passed on without too much reconsideration through generations of religious thought. The Biblical God I was learning about in Sunday School at that age was certainly a confusing fellow, offering infinite mercy and unconditional love at certain moments and eternal damnation at others, sometimes for what seemed like relatively minor misconduct — bad behaviors that He, after all, had provided us with the choice and capacity to commit.

Thankfully I outgrew these bewildering notions of a Lightning God within a few years, growing into a more rational if naïve agnosticism that would serve me reasonably well before lightning of a different variety struck my life in my early thirties. That lightning strike is described in detail in Chapter 5, A Healing Catastrophe, and it marked the beginning of my explicit spiritual path.

But as this book of memories details, my unrecognized spiritual life began much earlier, probably with the apparent accident of being born into an emotionally troubled family. While we outwardly lived the comfortable life of the upper middle class, we privately lived the life of a small group of human beings struggling with the inner fires, lightning bolts, and grievous floods of barely manageable insanity. It would be a long time before I grew into a useful spiritual outlook that taught me how to forgive and transcend at least some of that insanity. And I would eventually comprehend that such insanity was part and parcel of what we ambivalently call the human condition — and not just the peculiar invention of the Millers living out on Plott Road, up the hill from Reedy Creek.

Writing as a saving grace

My mom was a frustrated writer and successfully instilled in me the notion that I would pick up where she never left off. She started me in on reading two years before public school could get hold of me — with the dubious result that my poor sister Karen had to listen to me, a first-grader, reading to her sixth-grade class from Moby Dick in a freakish performance of literary legerdemain that, so far as I can figure, did absolutely no one any good. By junior high I was contributing to an unauthorized alternative newspaper, and in high school and college I wrote for both the official campus papers and rebellious upstarts that I had a hand in starting. Later, after moving my life to California, I would write for an environmental activist journal and the weekly San Francisco Bay Guardian, whose motto declared that it was a newspaper’s duty to print the news and raise hell.

Indeed, my early career as an investigative journalist focused on environmental issues was based on the convictions that something was certainly wrong with the world, that those responsible for ecological wrongdoing needed to be rooted out and exposed, and that I was just the guy to do it. (The world can seem so simple before you turn twenty-five!) What I shortly learned, however, was that all the ‘convictions’ required by investigative journalism made me sick to my stomach. Not to mention that it could take years of dogged research and writing to expose just one bad guy — as Woodward and Bernstein, my heroes at one time, exposed Richard Nixon. Soon I realized: What about the next bad guy? How long would it take to convict him? I had to admit I had much bigger ambitions than chasing down political miscreants; I really wanted to save the world.

Thus my investigative career was short-lived, and I knocked around writing poetry, satire, and incomplete fictions while learning typography and other graphic arts — technical skills that would later serve me in good stead as an independent publisher — without having much sense of purpose in life, until the spiritual awakening of my thirties. Thereafter my writing career took off in earnest, leading to over one hundred articles in print for such media as Yoga Journal and The Sun (published in my native North Carolina), and eventually my current career as a book author, editor, and independent publisher. Initially skeptical of the online revolution that began to overtake all our lives in the 1990s (yes, I sheepishly admit once thinking, "E-mail? That will never work!"), I eventually became a webmaster, blogger, and e-book producer as well.

I never felt moved to write a personal history from start to finish, but over the years I did write a disconnected series of autobiographical essays, usually with a spiritual bent, that I have assembled and connected for this collection. Although they are not arranged in a strict chronological fashion, these pieces cover my life from my childhood in the 1950s to the present day. Each one is footnoted with its original publication when available. Thus they offer a kind of literary vérité in that each one conveys the writing skills and styles I possessed at the time. I’ve done minimal editing or rewrite save for the purpose of updating useful information. Because they are driven by themes instead of linear time, some of these pieces have minor overlaps presenting some of the same stories or ideas from slightly differing perspectives. To me, this actually represents the nature of spiritual reflection, which seldom proceeds in a straight line from start to finish, but is often revisiting past beliefs and experiences in the light of new learning. Finally, a closing Appendix presents three published articles that, while not strictly autobiographical, exemplify how a spiritual perspective influenced some of my best work in journalism and satire.

Regardless of my mother’s intention in pushing me toward a literary career, writing began to save my sanity with my teen journals — and it has continued to provide that saving grace through a professional career now encompassing forty-some years. Sometimes I wish I had followed the rest of my mother’s advice: that is, to first become a safely tenured English professor who could write with the security of an academic institution and steady salary behind him. Instead, I quit college to bicycle across the United States, co-writing an exceptionally concise and poorly paid travelogue series with my pedaling partner, Win Minter, for the Charlotte Observer. A couple years later, I quit my first real job in the San Francisco advertising realm to pursue the professionally itinerant path of a freelance writer, self-employed graphic artist, and independent publisher (a career choice described in more detail in Chapter 9, The Co$t of Not Selling Out.) About the best I can say for myself, Mom, is that this irrational path proved to be my route to becoming a Real Writer — although I don’t know that I’d recommend it to a young person with literary aspirations and any hope for financial security. While I’ve been professionally identified as a journalist, copywriter, graphic designer, book author, editor, and publisher, the life history outlined in this book clearly establishes that I am mostly a mystic… with all the dubious intuitions, inexplicable certainties, and glimpses of the transcendent that go along with such an identification.

An unexpected membership

As such, I’m both a member of an ancient esoteric lineage and a product of my times, in which more and more people are identifying themselves as spiritual but not religious even if they don’t know exactly what that means. I hope the course of this book helps readers understand a few things about what that identification does mean, and why it’s so significant to our culture at this time.

One of the first clues to the surfacing of the SBNR attitude appeared in 1988, when the utterly mainstream periodical known as Better Homes and Gardens magazine conducted a survey on Religion, Spirituality, and American Families. The poll drew a whopping 80,000 responses, far more than most public opinion samplings, and included these findings:

Some results suggest that respondents’ spirituality is strongest on a personal level. The largest group (62%) say that in recent years they have begun or intensified personal spiritual study and activities (compared to 23% who say they have become closer to a religious organization). 68% say that when faced with a spiritual dilemma, prayer/meditation guides them most (compared to 14% who say the clergy guides them most during such times)....

It’s significant that a pre-1990s poll even distinguished between religion and spirituality, a parsing of terminology that would have been left entirely up to theologians not long before. Since that time, a number of succeeding polls have indicated that people who identify themselves as spiritual but not religious comprise up to 33 percent of the adult American populace, possibly higher in Western Europe, and the percentage keeps rising. This catchphrase has also entered the popular parlance on matchmaking sites, gained its own Wikipedia entry, and spawned at least one website, SBNR.org. In the spring of 2010, a truly startling survey was released by Lifeway Christian Resources, a research and marketing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, which might be assumed to be trolling for good news pertaining to mainstream religious practice. Instead, Lifeway’s research suggested that 72% of the under-30 Millennial generation identify themselves as SBNR. As Lifeway president Thom Rainer said, the continuance of this trend may mean that the Millennial generation will see churches closing as quickly as GM dealerships.

Of course, since no one has precisely defined what it means to be spiritual but not religious, we could be talking about little more than a vague sentiment held by an increasing number of people who can’t be bothered to support their local church, synagogue, or mosque but nonetheless don’t want to think of themselves as unspiritual. In Western culture where scientific rationality has such a powerful hold on popular consciousness, even that stingy interpretation of the data is significant. It’s more likely that people raised in the contemporary Western mindset increasingly find the myths, rituals, and rules of mainstream religions difficult to swallow, much less live by. Yet many of them have spontaneously experienced or deliberately pursued firsthand mystical experiences that cannot be sufficiently explained (or explained away) by science.

There is an enormously positive potential in this view of the SBNR phenomenon. It could signal the beginning of a mass cultural maturation in which increasing numbers of people refuse to accept either traditional theologies or reductive rationalism to explain the fundamental mysteries of human existence (chief among them being the simple question, Who am I?). After all, the great religions were founded in the individual visions and experiences of prophets like Jesus Christ, Mohammed, and the Buddha, who refused to accept the traditional answers of their own times, and courageously explored the ultimate ground of being for themselves. Their revelations were later codified into religions that were supposed to provide infallible guidance for the masses — but it can be convincingly argued that a lot has gotten lost in the translation of every profound spiritual teaching into a social religion. In the best possible light, then, SBNR signals the willingness of huge numbers of people to become their own prophets — with all the ontological hazards, conceptual detours, and spiritual bypasses that do-it-yourself enlightenment entails.

In America, we traditionally turn to religion, psychotherapy, self-help, or shopping in understandably desperate attempts to fix our lives or soothe our souls. Starting out on an authentic spiritual path may begin with such a motivation, but eventually leads to the recognition that our lives are healed and our sanity saved not by finding the right answers to all our problems, but by learning to ask better and deeper questions about exactly who and what we are — not to mention how we came up with all these problems.

In this