At such times something familiar is lost, but something of great value is found. Our true life is offered to us—a life more transparent to our deeper values. I have seen people let go of many previously treasured, hard-earned things and begin to follow an inner compass rather than an old blueprint, no matter how respected that blueprint is by others. Often they take risks that were unthinkable before their illness. They seem, despite their loss and suffering, to have a greater trust in life than before—a greater sense of who they are and what matters.

Seen from this perspective, illness is part of a larger human tradition of initiation, an opportunity in life which is present for us all. As I understand it, initiation is a time when a shift in consciousness occurs and a new path opens for us. And while nothing has changed, everything is different. We see the same world differently. It is a profound personal transformation of experience.

Until recently I had viewed initiation in a more limited way, as a change in lifestyle, usually marked by ritual—joining a sorority, graduating, getting married, having a bar mitzvah—ceremonies that led to greater freedom and responsibility. But thinking back on similar events in my own life, I realized that at the end of such ceremonies I really never felt any different. I seemed, in some basic way, to be the same person that I was before.

To further explore this puzzle, I began to ask people who were not sick about experiences that had changed them irrevocably. People told me stories. This one was told by a physician.

The event took place when he was twenty years old and his brother, who was eighteen, was dying of leukemia. He was in engineering school and did not want to come home, but his parents insisted. About twenty-four hours before his brother died he was sitting in his brother's room reading to him. His brother lay frail and very, very tired, in his bed. As he was reading he suddenly felt his brother's hand on his arm. His brother was staring at a blank wall, his face all lit up. He said, "George, look, someone's there! See? Someone has come for me."

Entrance of spirit...I could feel it. there is a presence in the room, a "radiance" as a"profound and ultimately benign." In that moment I knew it was my beloved Michael.

When a path of initiation opens, it's not a path we travel. It's a path we are. The traveling is not outward, it's inward, toward our essence, toward our true nature. And because we are able to inhabit that nature more fully our outer life can become more transparent to it, more coherent with it, more true to it. The inner and the outer life become more of one piece, and the result is a sort of healing.

Initiation is a time when a shift in consciousness occurs and a new path opens for us. And while nothing has changed, everything is different.

In thinking about it over the weeks that followed, I realized that I had gone through a major initiation. I had experienced a profound shift in my own way of seeing the world. I had gone from a person who was always fixing a broken world to a person who felt privileged to serve a holy world.

But this hadn't happened as a single event. It had happened slowly over time through a series of events, and I could see what had happened only by looking back. And so I've come to think that experiences of initiation are very common, very ordinary, very subtle. They happen to all of us as a natural part of living.

We might view life as a movement toward the soul, a return to what is most genuine and unique in each of us. And in the trajectory of a lifetime this turning toward personal integrity happens not once but many times. Some of these turnings are small, some are large. All are important.

So an initiation need not be a moment of radical transformation, but rather a movement of return, a turning toward the soul. With each initiation we come closer, we turn more easily, until that final initiation, death, when we turn away from the personality and become the soul. Before then we have many rehearsals, many times when we have the opportunity to turn away from the false self which possesses us; the person who we have been taught we are, and who others want us to be, even the person who we ourselves want to be—toward the true person who we are, and more closely follow the path of the soul.

The year was 1972, almost a decade before the emergence of the field of Holistic Health. In that moment my direction in life, my whole future, was being offered to me, and I must say that I did have a moment of recognition. At a deep instinctive level I knew that this was mine. But what went through my conscious mind was a single thought:

Life is a movement toward the soul but we ourselves are attached to other things. So the soul has to take us and move us along by whatever handle happens to be sticking out. I believe that if I had seen the opportunity for what it really was, known what I was going to have to surrender, to give up in order to have it, I wouldn't have gone. My family was Russian immigrants, and we believed that if you let go of anything it left a permanent hole in your life. So anything I had ever let go of at that time had claw marks on it.

The unknown is seen differently, as mystery, something to move toward, not something to avoid, something which increases one's sense of wonder, one's sense of alivenes.

In anguish I went to the edge of the cliffs and stood looking at the Pacific, still wild from last night's storm. Coming into a new relationship with the unknown is a very important step in initiation. The unknown is seen differently, as mystery, something to move toward, not something to avoid, something which increases one's sense of wonder, one's sense of aliveness. In every initiation we move closer to mystery. We befriend it. It is what we will be serving for the rest of our lives.

By nature I was an intuitive, even a mystic.

The last step of this initiation process happened about a year later. By then the way I saw the world had radically changed but my outer life hadn't changed at all, except for one small thing. One of Kahlil Gibran's paintings is a hand with a single compassionate eye in its palm. For some reason I had been drawn to this picture. It had struck me as enormously beautiful even before someone at Esalen had told me it was the "hand of the healer." I had cut the picture out of Gibran's book but was too embarrassed to put it in my office at the medical center. So I put it over my desk at home. This was the only external change I had made in the two years. I was still on the faculty at Stanford Medical School, and at about that time I received a faculty promotion. Everyone congratulated me, but somehow I wasn't happy. It was strange, because all my life this had been my goal, yet now I felt trapped and suffocated.

In that moment I stepped through a doorway into another reality in which all the odd parts and pieces of myself turned toward each other slightly, and for the first time they fit together seamlessly. I who had always felt an outsider, always felt like the wrong person, always covered up how different I was. I did remember, and I knew I belonged.

Much in life distracts us from our true nature, captures the self in bonds of greed, desire, numbness, unconsciousness and drama. These bonds seem strong and unavoidable. Yet every initiation, no matter to whom it occurs, is a witness to the possibility of freedom for us all—the evidence that the soul is stronger than all that, can draw us toward itself, despite all. Every initiation is a message of grace.

There are many stories in every story. On one level this is a beautiful childhood memory shared by a very sick man. On another level it's a story about a man whose compassion goes back to his very beginnings. But perhaps there are even other readings. Certain practices run through all the branches of Buddhism. One of these is a practice done on those holidays that celebrate enlightenment and the promise of freedom. At such times, in China, Japan, Nepal, Korea, live fish are bought at the market and taken to running bodies of water and set free. These fish are symbols of the promise of return to the great freedom which is our true home.

Over many years of listening to people with cancer, their dreams, their poems, their stories, I've come across many images for the soul. I think the rainbow trout is one of the most beautiful. This man was not a Buddhist. He didn't know any of this consciously.

Initiation is a part of the vision quest, the search for understanding. There is a saying that is very close to my heart: "The voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new vistas but in having shifting perceptons."

But today I was able to walk through an airport unaccompanied for the first time in years. I was able to read signs, to see people's eyes, to marvel at the play of light on the carpet. It gave me such a sense of gratitude. If initiation is the experience of having new eyes, perhaps we should think of it in just that way—not as something we're trying to achieve through our personal ambition, but as a possibility ever-present in life. An occasion of gratitude, a witness to the fact that despite everything that is limited, small, unconscious and trapped in this world "all is well."