phenomeNEWS: Caroline Myss is a pioneer and very charismatic international lecturer in human consciousness. Her current book is fascinating and intriguing: Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul. Hello Caroline!

Caroline Myss: Hi girls.

It’s fun to be talking with you again. How did you discover the inspiration for this new book, Teresa of Avila?

Well, it’s a long story and it’s a short story. It was the opening of my soul’s path. It goes back to my previous book, actually, Invisible Acts of Power. I can’t tell the story without going all the way to that book, where I was looking at the phenomenon of why people are drawn to be of service to others following life transformation experiences. I decided to study service and why people just had a passion to be of service, after they experienced tremendous life-crisis changes. I thought that was absolutely fascinating. So I solicited a letter from people that said share with me what acts of service you have either given to others or been the recipient of. And what so opened my eyes, if not my soul, really, was the size of these acts of service that people had been the recipient of and how tiny they were, but the profound impact they had on people’s lives. Like the man who said, “I had once been homeless. The reason I’m not homeless today is not because of the size of the gift of money that people would give to me, but rather of the woman who came up to me and was not afraid to touch me when I was in rags and leaned over and said, ‘You’ll get out of this. I know it and I’ll pray for you.’”

It was letters like that literally had me weeping at my desk. It left me breathless. And I thought that these people must have been channeling a profound grace to have the impact on the lives of others.

Simultaneously I’m teaching Sacred Contracts and I’m listening to people ask me “What’s my sacred contract? What’s my highest calling?” And juxtaposed to me are these examples people are giving me of individuals who simply leaned over and touched them and they resurrected them from the gutter. You understand that I’m looking at someone’s highest calling and no one can see it because it’s so humble.

This caused me to go back to the sacred teachings of all the scriptures. I pulled them off my shelf and decided I had to introduce sacred teachings into this book to show people that, in fact, these were the highest callings we could possibly have. What the great teachers – what Jesus, what Buddha, what our great teachers have told us – were exactly the truth; that the greatest callings we can have are the callings that come from within. So I started to read all of these beautiful, sacred materials again, to weave it into the letters that people wrote me that became invisible acts of power and in that process, as I saturated myself with the scripture, with the sounds, with the work of Thomas Merton, with the work of Rumi, I started to realize that I had entered into a retreat, a sacred territory and in that, I realized that I had crossed back into a very deep and profound spiritual practice. I simply was engaged in a form of prayer for eight hours a day. That’s what it amounted to. I was deeply involved in prayer for eight hours a day.

Then I knew I had entered into a field of grace. That actually led to a grand mal seizure. I felt that I was deeply in contact with the sacred. When I realized that, I felt a fire enter into me and I thought, “I am near God.” And the fire just pierced me and I was out cold. When I came out of that, I knew that I had been rewired. I don’t know how else to explain it to you, except that something had rewired me. And shortly after that, a month after that, actually, I was teaching a course on mysticism. I was doing a class on intuition to mysticism, but the second class was on mysticism and I was going to teach the work of the great Christian mystics on one day and on the next day, the Eastern mystics. And the first one was going to be John of the Cross, then Teresa of Avila, then Ignatius Loyola. John of the Cross was going to be first, but I grabbed Teresa of Avila first, instead. I grabbed, quite by accident, The Interior Castle, which is her classic work. I thought, “It doesn’t make any difference. Nobody knows my schedule.” And as I sat on this bar stool to teach the class, I said, “This is The Interior Castle by the great Spanish Carmelite mystic from the 16th Century, Teresa of Avila,” and as I introduced her, I suddenly realized I couldn’t hear my audience. I couldn’t hear it at all. I could not hear a thing. I had become involved in a bubble of silence. And I thought, “Oh, my God in heaven. I’m going to have a second seizure.” And I was so frightened but then I heard her voice and it said, “Daughter, follow me.”

Wow! Where did you follow her?

It was actually kind of funny because I knew her immediately. I knew her. I said, “Don’t let them know we haven’t met,” because I’m forever the teacher. “Don’t let them know I haven’t met you before and I’ll go with you.” For the rest of the weekend, I just dropped everything else I was going to teach and I taught Teresa of Avila, as if I had been a scholar. I just held onto her book. This occurred in front of my students. You must understand that I thought, “Do not let them see this. Do not let them see this.” But they did. Everyone saw. For that weekend I taught Teresa of Avila and The Interior Castle. I would just hold her book open and say the next castle. She said the soul was like a beautiful crystal that had seven mansions. And I said, “My God, seven mansions, just like the seven chakras, just like the seven sacraments, the seven levels of power that embody our interior self.” And I just fell into her template of the soul.

Well, at the end of that weekend, everybody was spellbound. No one breathed for that weekend. And everybody knew that Teresa had come to me. It was just a phenomenon. And by the way, this particular group has not broken up. We still get together, the same group of students. We were supposed to break up after three classes. This group has never broken up. We’ve continued to get together for years now, because it just bonded us. It is the most profound group of students I have ever been with in my life.

Well they never know who’s going to show up, either!

I don’t know about that, but it brought us together in a most sacred way. So after that, I came home, at the end of that workshop. That Sunday night I went straight up to my office where I had been writing another book for eight months and I deleted the whole thing, the disk, the backup, everything. Threw it out. The next morning I called my editor and I said, “I’m writing a new book and it’s called Entering the Castle. I encountered Teresa of Avila this weekend, St. Teresa of Avila, while I was teaching.” My editor paused for a moment and she said, “Tell St. Teresa she’s got five months.”

(laughter)

We worked and we worked and we worked. As we were coming to the end, it was a very subtle dynamic. It was not channeling. It was soft, intellectual revelation, where I would work my tail off. I studied her work as a ferocious scholar, the way I can get when I bulldog something, where I absolutely become relentless. Then I would pray. I sealed myself in my house and lived like a nun. I stopped all influences from the outside except when I had to surface for teaching and then I came back. There was no sound, nothing from the outside was allowed in the house. I cut out all social engagements, everything. I became a Carmelite, for lack of a better way to say it. I would wait until I could reach a point of that interior tranquility, then I would feel a presence and an idea would be given to me, that I knew was not mine and that idea had the magnetism that shaped each chapter. It was very delicate. Then as we were coming to the end of the book, I said, “This is it. This is the end of the book and now we’re going to part.” And the last time I heard her, all I heard was, “Farewell, daughter.”

Wow!

And that was it.

How long were you in this state of being in your home and cloistered like that?

Probably six months. After the experience was over, I walked around my house as if the interior had been gutted. I went through a withdrawal. It was quite extraordinary, actually. It was quite hard for a while, but it was over. The rewrite was just a book rewrite. I had to reshape the book but that was just ordinary, mortal work. That extraordinary journey, that extraordinary time, was gone. Rewrites don’t require that.

That is powerful! What a story!

It’s over. What I know so well is that you can reach such an extraordinary moment of experience of true mystical tranquility. You can truly have the most exquisite encounter with quietude or the presence of divinity and 10 minutes later lose your temper and be an ordinary shrew. It just boggles your mind. It does not in any way reshape your ordinary mortalness at all. It just makes you all the more baffled. What I say in the book, you’d better get it straight that the object is practice and never perfection. It is always the return to the sweet reality that there is such an intimate governing love and then there’s life. And both coexist.

Do you think this is an experience that other people can bring on for themselves?

You don’t bring on heaven. You can’t force a mystical experience. I’ll tell you what is absolutely there for the taking. That’s the capacity to channel grace. That’s why this book had to be written. There’s a mystical renaissance going on now. There is a thirst in people for the sacred and to activate within themselves that fountain of grace, that is very, very real. We have a need to be nurtured by the sacred. We absolutely have a need to know that God exists within us, that grace is real, that in fact we are as intimately connected as I’m telling you we are. That this is not fiction. That we are governed by love. That it’s truth. Not true, but truth. And in this world that has gone mad, at a level of chaos that is absolutely out of control, that there is a power greater than this chaos. This chaos is penetrating everybody’s life at the speed of light, but there is a force that is higher and greater than this.

How do we connect in with that grace and that force?

You can’t do it mentally. I can tell you that right now. Healing has been a part of my peripheral world. Why people heal. Why people don’t heal. What I now absolutely know, is that we’ve been going about healing in the wrong way. We’ve been approaching it mentally, as if healing is like a who done it. If I can figure out what the lesson is – all mental – then I’ll be rewarded with health because I’ll figure out what I did wrong, like a bad little girl and God will reward me because I won’t do that bad thing again, as if it’s a reward and punishment system. That is all mental. If I could figure out who done it, as if it’s a crime solving. Whoever hurt me, I’ll find them and I’ll make them pay for it and then my illness will go away. I’ll process it out. I’ve never seen that heal anybody, because you can’t heal that way.

Healing is fundamentally a mystical experience. It’s a mystery. You have to enter into the soul and the soul is not a mental experience. You cannot get to the soul through the mind. The soul is that which you must experience from within. You cannot define the soul. Words will not get you there. Prayer does. A person must be willing to enter a devotion of prayer, reflection, contemplation and the exercise of self-knowledge that I have described in my book, Entering the Castle. If a person is willing to cross the draw bridge into their castle, to participate in that regimen, they discover quickly the nature of their soul.

Yes. We love the part in there, the seventh mansion, how we are to use ourselves to serve the divine through service to others.

That’s right.

Can you speak a little more about that one?

You know, the self cell is essentially a worker bee vessel that is meant to be of service to others, to make the world a better place. No matter how you define your world, that world may be no bigger than you and the other in a room or you and the neighborhood. It doesn’t matter where you are. It is the other. We have, now, because of self-help and victim therapy, an idea that serving the other burns you out. You have to take care of your own needs. People are just exhausted from taking care of others and neglecting the self. That’s because it is operating from… I don’t know, is it the wrong approach? It’s the approach of the ego. It’s because they are not accessing grace. Grace does not burn you out. Grace is an endless reservoir of stamina. The book is about a guide that shows you how to build a soul with stamina. In the service of others, you don’t have that equation that this is either you or me. Either this moment in time will serve either you or me. I will be exhausted if I keep giving to you and not me, which is equation people operate by. Instead, the soul recognizes that to give to you nourishes me as well.

It’s a you and me and we both win.

Yes. And that is the equation of God. What goes around comes around.

But that is hard for people to put into practice every day. They don’t really believe those things. They may believe those things when their belly is full, but they don’t believe those things when their belly is empty.

Although they’re starving for the spiritual.

Yes.

We’re encouraged by seeing more people act out of that place of grace these days. There’s more stories of it and there’s more people who are making a difference in the world, saying, “This is the important stuff.” For instance, we were just talking about one of our favorite contemporary mystics, Oprah Winfrey and what she’s doing with her influence to make things better for others in the world.

She’s very much a mystic in the world. She’s an example of a contemporary mystics. Absolutely! Oprah is the perfect mystic out of a monastery.

She mentioned that years ago, that she saw television as tremendous medium to do God’s work in the world, is how she put it.

That’s exactly true. She is just flawless at it. She has found the perfect way to manage her light. She knows exactly what her light is and she is one powerful woman. She’s so perfect in a thousand million ways, because she’s the example that in doing God’s light, God does not make you poor and suffering and miserable and lonely. She stands in exactly the right position to show that you don’t have to do what people are so afraid of – becoming close to God – because they’re so afraid that God will wipe out their earth security if they go anywhere near the divine.

Right. You were raised a Catholic. Is that still your spiritual practice or has that changed? How as all of this changed or transformed you?

I don’t have a high regard for the politics of Catholicism. I can’t regard a church that bans women as thoroughly as it does with any high idea. I have problems with the politics. But the mysticism of that church, its mystical tradition, is absolutely compelling for me. And the mystics that that tradition has given humanity are unparalleled. Francis of Assisi, Teresa of Avila, Thomas Merton, the great mystics that come from that tradition are extraordinary. I’m very much drawn to the great mystical tradition of that church. At the same time, let me say that I have a great reverence for the teachings of Buddha and for the writings and the mystical teachings of Rumi. I will look for God wherever I find God.

That’s beautiful. If there’s an underlying theme in the whole book, what would that be?

The underlying theme is that every human being is inherently drawn to God and that we can sometimes say that we pursue our spiritual life but the truth is your soul pursues you and it is relentless. You don’t wake up to your spiritual life and decide. The fact is, you are never, ever, not involved in your spiritual life. It is whether or not you decide to finally come to terms with the fact that the whole of your life is indeed a spiritual journey. That has never been a greater truth. And that by choosing to live that congruently, it does not remove you from the physical world. It does not threaten your physical life or your safety or your health or your money, but rather it makes the whole of your life congruent. It makes everything come together.

It’s amazing to me that someone would say to me that they have faith but they cannot go near God. They’re absolutely convinced that going anywhere near a deeper theology is a path of suffering, when in fact, it never occurs to people that to actually go deeper into an interior life is a path of absolute liberation from everything they are suffering from already! Which is their fear, their compulsive fear of being humiliated. Their compulsive fear of failure. Their compulsive need of having everybody else approve of them. And they can finally put an end to that.

Beautifully said! And your website is?

It is www.myss.com and it would be wonderful if people would check that out, look into my institute, my workshops. My institute is academically accredited through Wisdom University in California, so people can pursue master’s or PhDs in mysticism or philosophy and incorporate my classes with that.

If there was one last word of wisdom you’d like to leave with our readers today, what would that be?

Entering the castle for people, is the metaphor for their soul. I really believe that people are being called to be mystics out of the monastery and that the new monastery is the world. And if people ask that question, “For what reason have I been born? What is my highest potential?” they have to begin to consider that the answer to that question may well be the journey into their castle.

Oh, wow! We’ve got goose bumps! Thank you so much, Caroline and much joy and luck on your journey. Our paths will cross again.

Bless you both, girls!