Celine Grey

I met Celine Grey in Dubai and I was delighted to learn that she was a personal life coach who’d devoted much of her adult life to spiritual learning and development. She had an adorable little baby who I got to play with at the time of our interview. We even did some of our portraits of Celine, her husband, and her daughter all together in the playpen.  

What I learned from Celine is that she made a deliberate journey beyond the religion, ritual, and dogma of her youth to a more expansive and internal spiritual center. Maybe it was destiny because Celine said that, as a child, her favorite book of the Bible was Genesis but that she understood it to be a metaphor: “As a child I thought it was a beautiful metaphorical way to actually set up the world. Now I see the world can be whatever you want it to be. It is said in a very simplistic way. And I was fascinated by the creation, the actual creation itself. The fact that someone could actually write about how the world was created. There was nothing, and then there was something. So it's the whole.”  

I think that is quite a remarkable understanding for a child to have. Celine obviously popped out of the womb being a metaphysician.

When we met in Dubai, Celine articulated for me a most beautiful, indeed metaphysical, understanding of faith and spirituality. She got that everyone has a light, a beauty, that they should use responsibly to create a better world. And, when a person doesn’t  take responsibility for that, it often gets pushed onto the responsibility of religions and religious structures.

So what is this idea that each individual is responsible for creation and for reality? When I was growing up, such ideas were foreign to me, although I was and am familiar with the Jewish teaching that individuals are co-creators of this world, along with God. In fact, that is the deepest meaning of Tikkun Olam, the Jewish phrase that means  ‘to repair the world,’ In partnership with God, repairing the world is the  obligation of every human. But this idea that we are responsible for creation and that we are responsible for reality is much bigger than that.  

In considering this topic, I was led to Ernest Holmes and his Science of Mind philosophy. It states that thoughts create reality and the God-Essence is “in us, through us, and as us.” Holmes expands beautifully on this idea in Your Invisible Power. “The Peace that is within you is not something separate from God. It is not something that bombards you from without. This Peace is something that expands from within. Always this Peace had been in you. Always this Peace has nestled at the center of your being, ready to reveal Its perfection and harmony. Peace stands at the door of your consciousness and awaits your acceptance of It. However, It does not stand outside your door, waiting for entrance, so much as It stands inside waiting to be expressed in everything you do.”

I also know from studying a powerful book called Death of the Mythic God: The Rise of Evolutionary Spirituality, by Jim Marion, that, with the advent of the Aquarian Age, humanity is moving into a time where civilization’s understanding of God is shifting to the internal and the non-personal. This thought is new for me. I am someone who feels that the Divine Spirit, the Great Connectedness, enabled a change in me, in my personality, and in my outlook on the world that I could not have achieved myself. Still, I see that there were many things I had to do to be a partner with God to become more of the person I had hoped to be. Maybe the teaching of my Jewish upbringing—that we are partners with God in repairing the world (and ourselves)—is more deeply true than I realized. We are part of God as partners with God.

I loved when Celine stated so clearly that we have everything we need inside of us and that the God essence is within us. So in a universal view where God is internal and non-personal, what is a Higher Power upon which we can depend? Celine described it beautifully when she suggested that the understanding of it starts at “the bottom,” at the division between the conscious and the unconscious minds, and the overlay of the “higher self.” Humans communicate both consciously and unconsciously, yet the true vehicle of all communication is driven by a person’s Higher Self which is perhaps the soul. And I resonate deeply with her belief that the Higher Self in each of us is in connection and communicates with the Higher Self of one  another. One of the most meaningful names for God that I use is “Great Connectedness” and Celine’s understanding of our collective Higher Power connection makes sense to me.

Celine shared with me a time when she changed her reality by changing her thinking. It makes sense to me that people have the power to change their bodies and health status through their thoughts. She said, “I've had serious health issues and because I didn't know how to deal with them, I dealt with them in a mechanical way, up to a point. I couldn't get pregnant so I went into serious introspection in terms of the way the unconscious mind controls the body. In meditation, and through my higher self, I got the  blueprint of my body in perfect health; 21 days later I was pregnant. That  was a very, very big thing for me and for my husband, who is a very pragmatic, computer-based person. He was impressed with the way the process worked! 

I know that seeing selves as part of God and creators of a collective reality is controversial. It may even seem arrogant but it makes sense to me. Certainly I see myself as part of the “Great Connectedness” and my thoughts create my reality. Thoughts also have the power to heal.

When I met  Celine, her husband, and their baby I felt like I’d walked into an apartment in the middle of Dubai and met compatriots; fellow souls committed to helping and healing others by exploring God’s Universe. Our Universe.