I read a lot of eclectic books, always have. If it looks interesting, I’ll give it a shot. One that has stayed with me is a book called “Lost Christianity: A journey of rediscovery to the center of religion,” by Jacob Needleman, a philosophy professor and religious scholar who taught all over the place. It came out in the early 80s, which means I found it compelling enough to finish while working three part-time jobs and still attending to our family.

The book traces how Christianity traded in authentic body-based spiritual experiences for theology and structure. He raised the question of why so many Western seekers were drawn to Eastern religions instead. So he begins to looks for the contemplative heart of the Christian tradition. An interesting journey!

I always felt that the heart of our existence was compassion — yes, even for the worst among us. I still get into arguments with friends over whether Hitler or slimy ex-boyfriends deserve compassion. “You don’t ‘deserve’ compassion,” I always argue. “If someone has to earn it, that’s not compassion. That’s transactional.” (It is probably appropriate to mention here that an astrologer who was giving me a reading once told me, “You know, anyone can love a cuddly little kitten. But you? You love people who are cockroaches.” (Thanks, I guess.)

“Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.” –Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche.

Anyway, one October morning in 1999, I was taking part in a Sunday chat with some online friends and we got into a friendly debate over compassion. I wrote my thoughts down and hit send, and then something happened.

(I hate to talk about this, because the transcendental experience I’m going to describe was, as they say, ineffable. But I’ll do my best.)

My study suddenly filled with a blinding white light, and I was transfixed. I felt this overwhelming sense of unity with the rest of existence, a connection unlike anything I’d ever known. It was a benign, loving presence, and I was part of it. I had a sudden insight that we are all tiny drops in a vast sea of existence — and that was okay! I remember laughing out loud, thinking about the energy we waste trying to stand out, to be special.

I pulled down a Bible from my bookcase and started flipping the pages, far too fast to read them. I had a powerful realization: “Wait, the whole book is an allegory!” And then (okay, this is the really weird part), a torrent of information was downloaded into my brain. (None of which pieces of information I remember on any conscious level, and I don’t know if I was supposed to. It was sort of like getting a superduper tuneup.)

And forgiveness took hold of me.

It seemed to me the entire experience took maybe 30 minutes, but when I looked at the clock, three hours had passed.

A few weeks later, I was having lunch with a friend who was open to most things, so I told him about what happened. “Interesting. Henry James wrote about this in Varieties of Religious Experience,” he said, and then he told me about it. I went right home and found it on the internet.

So I didn’t have a brain tumor, or epilepsy, or a particularly interesting migraine. James, who is considered the father of modern psychology, gave example after example of the same phenomena. Whew!

I began cautiously approaching the subject with people. One of them was a salesperson for the company where I worked, and he was more than glad to talk about his own experience. “There’s so few people you can talk about it with,” he said. He lived in the South, and said he “didn’t want to be associated” with the born-again Christians around him. “I doubt they had the same kind of experience I did, because most of them are still as mean as snakes,” he told me. (Henry James concluded the main characteristic of the authentic transcendental experience is that the inner changes are permanent.)

My own experience had nothing to do with organized religion or what we commonly call God, or Jesus. I felt no compulsion to jam it into one of those boxes; it was so much bigger. (If I mention it to my friends, I call it The Cosmic Fuck.) I mean, you could call it God, but it seems to diminish it. And I was forever changed.

Which brings me back to bodhichitta. It’s what Buddhists describe as an awakening through compassion, and it’s a pesky kind of thing. I love a good steak, but it was a living thing, you know? I tell myself that plants have feelings, too, but what does that leave me to eat?

I bring this up because I have to write about Donald Trump, while also struggling to hold onto my humanity and compassion. (Trust me, I struggle every day.) And he’s almost impossible to love, right? But while he is a dangerous, thoroughly despicable human being, I also keep seeing that belligerent little boy, trained by his psychopathic father to be some kind of societal terrorist. All this mess, because his father thought love was weakness. I don’t anticipate feeling compassion for Trump will actually change him (God knows, unconditional love hasn’t changed any of the, ahem, cockroaches in my life), but the only result worth having happens within.

And besides, not-hating Trump helps me sleep at night.