Toward a New Spirituality of Holism: A Conversation with Caroline Myss

Interview by Kate Tripp.

Caroline Myss is a five-time New York Times best-selling author and internationally renowned pioneer in the fields of human consciousness, spirituality and mysticism, health, energy medicine, and medical intuition.

1440: How do you understand God at this point in your life?

Caroline: I no longer have a religious or anthropomorphic view of God. For me, God is law. God is represented in the laws of nature and the organizational system of the universe.

God is both impersonal and intimate.

We see the impersonal nature of God in the structure of the universe, down to the duplication of the mathematics of nature and how perfect it all is. The intimate nature of God is prayer.

1440: This is a very different understanding of God than that of modern religions. Do you think we're evolving toward this understanding?

Caroline: Earth-based gods are colliding now because we've reached the end of earth-centric religion. It's the end of the "God-as-man" era. Abrahamic religions are fighting for the last vestiges of this mythology, but God has no religion. It's time for the myths of religion and the politics of religion to fade away.

Most of us won't live to see this, but we are evolving into a spirituality that is organic. Our individual health and the organics of our bio-spiritual ecology are one with the bio-spiritual ecology of nature. That will be our salvation.

1440: How did you come to have this understanding of God?

Caroline: I came to this not from my work as a theologian, but as a medical intuitive. I first began to wonder why people don't heal, and then eventually I wondered why people don't want to heal. We're becoming sicker. We're becoming more depressed and more addicted.

I realized that these illnesses were actually soul illnesses—spiritual crises—and the language that people needed, the holy language of prayer, simply was not available. We had dismantled the route to the soul so successfully that people didn't even know there was such a thing as a spiritual crisis anymore, so they had no option but to say they had a psychological crisis.

1440: How does this play out on a practical level with our health?

Caroline: It means if I'm sick and I go to a doctor and the doctor says, "Your heart's not well. I have a medication for it, but it's going to knock the hell out of your kidneys," then I say goodbye to that doctor. We need doctors that can treat us as a whole system.

The new spiritual dictate is ecological theology; it has to be holism.

We cannot adhere to a religion or medicine that is based on separation. This is why it's time for religions to begin to evaporate.

1440: Is there anything useful from religion that we can keep?

Caroline: We can retain the mystical teachings because they are not about separation or the politics of God, which is what religion is. Mystical teachings are fundamentally about the laws of the universe. The laws of men have to go—the laws of the universe are what will be retained.

1440: We've traditionally turned to religious leaders for spiritual guidance. Where will we look for guidance in this new model?

Caroline: The soul is deep, profound, and rigorous, and it brings you to truth. It does not bring you to your history so you can figure out who hurt you. It is not a journey of discovering how to get even with others.

It is a journey of how to discover why you want to get even, why you want to hurt others, why you are unforgiving. It's a journey of excavation of why you sabotage your health. This is where prayer comes in.

And it's why no one should go into the soul unescorted. If you go unescorted, you will never heal. You need a spiritual director and companions to help you along the way. Spiritual directors will be the new priests. We still need the sacraments. We do not fare well without confession.

1440: Are there other practices that have the same effect as prayer?

Caroline: I'm all for holy listening. Holy listening is a way of relaxing, of releasing the debris and waiting to hear God. It's not a practice; it's a devotion. It's a devotion because you make a vow that says you'll show up in holy listening and wait.

You wait and you wait and you get over that childish, egocentric entitlement that says because you've showed up you expect to hear something. Expect nothing. God is everywhere, but most of you are blind as a bat.

Guidance is around all the time, in every single thing, not just when things ‘work out.'

How do you know if things are working out? Remember, you're looking through a tiny lens. You don't see what's coming, you don't see what's gone, you don't see the influences of other people. How do you know what's supposed to be happening?

Everything is being worked in a grand, huge, eternal alchemy that is constantly unfolding. The hand of God is in every single second, every single breath, and that's how you have to think. You have to shave down your expectations and appreciate absolutely everything. You have to realize the power of a smile or an act of kindness generates so much force in the world. That's God in the world.

Join Caroline for The Power of Prayer: Insight, Transformation, and Truth, Jan 31 – Feb 2, 2020, at 1440.