Summer Letter from Michael Lerner

Dear Commonweal Friends:

I hope this Summer Letter finds you well.

This is my personal letter to you. You receive the Commonweal eNews from our Executive Director Oren Slozberg each month. Commonweal is flourishing under Oren’s remarkable leadership. Our reach has grown three-fold. We have new programs, new staff, and deepening diversity. I could not be more grateful that our collective work is in such capable and caring hands.

‍Healing—the Heart of Commonweal

‍This letter is about our healing work. Healing is at the heart of Commonweal. The founding vision was of a center for “healing ourselves and healing the earth.” But our understanding of healing has deepened immeasurably over the past 48 years.

Our understanding from the start was that healing is different from curing. Curing, by definition, means that a disease goes away completely. Healing is a movement toward physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual wholeness that can take place during living or dying. Healing is part of our journey from beginning to end.

In my 50 years of work I have watched healing move from holistic medicine, to mind-body medicine, to mind-body-spirit medicine, to integrative medicine, to functional medicine, and even to intuitive medicine. We must add the traditional medicines like Traditional Chinese Medicine, Ayurveda, homeopathy, herbalism, and all the energy healing modalities.

‍Healing, Psychedelics, and Consciousness

‍Let me ask you eight questions:

• Do you trust your intuition?

• Have you experienced synchronicities?

• Do you believe prayer can make a difference?

• Have your dead visited?

• Do you believe in near death experiences (NDEs)?

• Do you believe in psi phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and remote viewing?

• Do you believe the soul may survive death?

• Have you ever had a deep epiphany in which you saw the universe as a single overwhelming reality of infinite beauty?

You may have found you can often trust intuition, that synchronicities are real, that prayer seems to make a difference, that your dead have visited you, that NDEs are real, the psi phenomena are real, and that the soul survives death. If so, you are not alone.

A Psychedelic Renaissance has ushered in a transformative new phase in healing. It is not just the mind—as we understood it in mind-body medicine—but about the very nature of consciousness itself. The question the Psychedelic Renaissance poses about the nature of consciousness is a profound one. Have mainstream science, medicine, and culture misunderstood the mind for the past century or more? Mainstream science, medicine, and culture hold that the mind is purely an epiphenomenon of the human brain. Mind simply bubbled up from the biochemical evolution of life. But no one knows how this happened. It’s called “the hard problem of consciousness.”

The mainstream consensus has no place for the healing power of prayer, for soul survival, for intuition, for telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, and all the other psychic phenomena grouped together under the suspect phrases parapsychology, transpersonal psychology, and the spiritual traditions.

The Psychedelic Renaissance raises with new urgency the question of whether the ancients had it right after all. That consciousness is not just an epiphenomenon of the biochemical evolution of the human brain but a fundamental ubiquitous dimension of the universe.

This is no trivial question. Many people have experienced transformative experiences with psychedelics when they are used safely and wisely with experienced guidance. Psychedelics are potent medicines and can also have devastating effects when used unskillfully.

Specifically, many people have now used psychedelics for physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual healing. That means for our cancer work that psychedelic medicine is a potent and potentially transformative intervention for some people who choose to explore it safely and wisely.

Michael Pollan explored all of this in his groundbreaking Changing Your Mind. I held two conversations with Michael about his book that you can find at TNS.commonweal.org.

[We do not use or recommend psychedelic medicines at Commonweal. This is not about what we do at Commonweal but what people who come to us with cancer or simply come for myriad other healing questions report that they are doing and discovering.]

‍Why Do People Come on the Cancer Help Program?

‍We held our 223rd week-long Commonweal Cancer Help Program in June. We celebrated the solstice under a full moon. We met mostly in a beautiful tent in Hummingbird Meadow. We shared our meals on the porch of Pacific House. We tested repeatedly for COVID. COVID is no trivial concern for most of us.

Most staff and board members at Commonweal hold the Cancer Help Program as the deepest work we do. We have devoted 38 years to offering the Cancer Help Program. The question remains—why do people come?

Conventional medicine can treat the body. It cannot heal the spirit or the soul. The spirit moves upward to our highest hopes. The soul stays close to the body, remembers its suffering, needs to grieve and to be heard.

When the spirit flags under the burden of illness and when the soul yearns to be held, touched, and heard, the retreats are nectar for the spirit and balm for the soul. Some are truly reborn here. Many others leave deeply changed.

We all suffer. We all need to heal. But healing requires close attention to the specifics of our lives, our loves, our losses, and our griefs. Yes, meditation and yoga and massage and good food are part of healing. But it is when we find a safe place to speak to the specifics of our inner lives—to be heard and not judged—that the deepest healing begins.

‍Deep Healing Is Not Always About Cancer

‍So often, the deepest healing is not about the cancer, nor even about the suffering with treatment. The deepest healing is often about love and loss. It is about love and loss in our most important relationships, past and present. It is about our spouses, our lovers, our parents, our brothers and sisters, our children, and our friends. It is about abuse or neglect in childhood that marked us for life. It is about how someone broke our heart. It is about a child lost to some great sorrow.

Deep healing can be about the absence of someone to hold at night—someone to grow old with. It may be about precious work or precious community that we’ve lost.

Finally, deep healing is about our grief about ourselves—our disappointments with ourselves—that somehow after all these years we are still less than we wish we were.

So deep healing is also necessarily about forgiveness—forgiveness of ourselves and others. It’s about letting go of what we can’t change. It’s about discovering what matters most to us now.

‍Helping in Minute Particulars

‍The visionary poet William Blake said we can only help another person in “minute particulars”—a concept central to his aesthetic credo. The discovery of what matters now in our lives is also about minute particulars. It’s about how we will live, day by day, hour by hour, sometimes even minute by minute. Breathing through what we almost cannot stand. Discovering the immense healing power of being in nature. Finding solace in some small creature that loves us as no human has ever been able to love us.

‍End-of-Life Questions

‍I sometimes say the Cancer Help Program is here to help you live as well as you can for as long as you can (or choose to)—and, if and when the time comes to let go, to go into the mystery the way you would choose to do so. The ancients believed that how we die is often a reflection of how we’ve lived. So, considering how we’d like to go, and doing what we can to work toward that, is not a trivial part of healing into life and death.

One great shift in healing has been the dissemination of compassion-in-dying laws across the country, enabling people to die with greater dignity. Traditions vary on whether this is good or not. It certainly is reducing a great deal of suffering.

There is another dimension of end-of-life care. Four months ago I read a book by Jim B.Tucker, M.D.: Before: Children's Memories of Previous Lives. Tucker succeeded the late Ian Stevenson at a University of Virginia project devoted to this research. Tucker now has more than 3,500 children in his database whose memories of past lives have been rigorously studied. Tucker’s research convinced me that soul survival is real—at least in some cases. That led me to reconsider a whole range of phenomena I had thought plausible but not certain.

I am now convinced that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. Consciousness appears somehow ubiquitous to me in the universe. This raises fundamental questions not only about soul survival but also about the whole range of psi phenomena— telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, remote viewing, and much more. If this is so, it raises fundamental questions about healing and the nature of consciousness. That is a subject to which I will return in another letter. If you look up panpsychism in Wikipedia or read Jeffrey Kripal’s The Flip, either will launch you into the territory of healing and the mind that I am exploring now.

‍Please Support Our Work in Any Way You Can

‍This concludes what I have to offer you in this personal letter. I am so grateful to remain a part of the Commonweal community and to do my part in the Great Work to which we all contribute.

I send each of you my deepest wish that your journey continues as best it possibly can.

In closing, I ask you to support Commonweal in any way you can. We depend on you. We need you. Our work cannot continue without your support.

You can contribute here at the link or code, below. Monthly contributions are a blessing. One-time gifts are equally welcome. When you include us in your estate planning it makes an immense difference. You can give us appreciated equities or make gifts of things of value—cars, houses, property, and the like. Please contact Oren or Arlene Allsman or me to discuss any of these questions.

Commonweal continues because of you. It’s that simple.

Love and prayers for your journey,

Michael Lerner
President

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