Her first experience of conscious awareness—February 1946, Detroit.
I walked and pulled my heavy wagon through the enchanting night. Tossing my papers, which landed on each porch with a soft thud. I wasn't thinking about the three dollars at all. I was doing my work with deep pleasure in a luminous world. And then something like a soft miracle happened, a subtle shift, an alteration of the atmosphere—something strange—like a presence—and as I looked and saw the light, the light looked back and saw me. I was alive and knew I was alive in a world of living light.

This was my first experience of conscious awareness.

...it would take many years before I stopped seeking out the pattern of relating that I learned at home... That began my rescue from the morass of unconscious self-destruction and bad attitude I'd been floundering in most of my life. There was no quick cure. It's a process I've continued: bringing what's hidden in the shadows into the light of consciousness, recognizing the patterns, deepening the understanding, and literally taking responsibility for who I am. It's too easy to blame the past for the present. We don't have to be victims of our conditioning. We just have to be willing to do the work of reprogramming ourselves.

As we discussed marriage, Neil held up a cautionary finger and said, "I win on a bump." That was vernacular for "I'm the boss." I was six years older. We were in my house, with my furniture. I paid all the bills and was responsible for running the house. He didn't work, brought in no money to the forming family, and seldom would in the years to come, but I agreed to this arrangement. He would be "boss" because after all, he was the man. It would take ten years and a whole paradigm shift for me to question this assumption.

Lee [Strasberg] told me that the first step was the willingness to make a mistake, to suffer the humiliation of daring to risk, to grow. I just had no idea how terrified I was not to be perfect. "Addiction to perfection" ...I had it. And it wasn't that I thought I was ever perfect or anywhere near it; it was that I thought I should be perfect, but was so far from it that I needed to hide the fact. I felt that I was just plain wrong. Essentially wrong, bad, unacceptable, shameful. That was really it. I was ashamed of myself. And that's what had to be hidden.

Most of the time we are inside our own ego and completely identified with it. We believe that we know who we are. We are the one who is having all these reactions to everything around us. The "I" that gets offended, upset, angered, resentful. The one whose feelings get hurt. The one who feels threatened or jealous or, conversely, pleased with oneself, the holier-than-thou one, or the superior one. That's all our ego and it is possible, by appointing one "I" as an observer, to step away from all that, and that first step is huge. Once you practice that step over and over, and see yourself as you are in reaction, that very seeing, without judgment or name-calling, just plain seeing, is the beginning.

That's where I was at this point. I was at the beginning.

And what was I yearning for? I was yearning to change my life, my inner life as well as my tumultuous outer life; yearning to find a way, my way, to a spiritual life. I could not embrace religious institutions I'd known, but there was that in me that longed to relate to life in a way that was meaningful. I did not understand life itself. Why I was here, where I came from, what I was supposed to do in the time I was on the planet. How was I to realize my full potential? Was it as an actress, a mother, a citizen? Or was there another dimension of being that every now and then I intuited?

It's always difficult for me to admit to my dark side—it doesn't fit with my self-image, yet it can be a powerful ally. Bringing that dark side into the light as an ally, keeping it at hand and conscious to call on, not for evil, but for my own spiritual work and psychological health, actually creates more love and light in my life. It's like marshaling all your forces to do what you have to do.

The battle between good and evil is fought inside us all the time. The choice we make in each moment, whether to manifest or to sacrifice our integrity, is just one way that the battle is waged…Recently I was given a definition of Satan that feels right to me. Evil lives in the shadow of each of us. It is all our repressed, disowned feelings our egos hate to see or acknowledge…When unchallenged, the shadow is very powerful. That is why it is imperative for each of us to learn about ourselves and be courageous enough to bring our own hidden impulses into the light, see them for what they are, and integrate them for our own good.

I'm still working on this. Every day. It's a duty that comes with being a human being.

While I shot Alice, I was reading Studs Terkel's book Working. It was a collection of interviews with different kinds of people about their jobs and their attitudes toward working. I remember one man who was a bricklayer and said that he had to be careful how he laid each brick. Each one had to be perfectly aligned with the next. If he allowed even one brick slightly out of line, it would bother him to the point that he would drive his car for blocks out of his way to avoid that brick. That kind of integrity is part of us all. And when it gets lost or falls away, it bespeaks of a loss of grace that is innate in us.

Our contracts [in Same Time, Next Year] were for six months. That's the longest I've ever done one play. And frankly, I found that by the fifth month of eight performances a week, I was having a difficult time keeping it fresh. I managed, but it took all my effort not to fall into mechanical acting. I like to keep growing in a role as long as I'm doing it. For me, opening night is just the beginning. I like to find new ideas, deeper feelings, better ways to express the character, at every performance. I don't always succeed. I have an off night sometimes, but it is the intention that matters to me. Acting is my profession and my art form, but it is also my way; my spiritual way in the world. Sufism is not a path of renunciation. It is a path of doing your spiritual work in the world. My spiritual commitment is to do my best effort at all times, whether I am acting onstage or serving in a soup kitchen. I give everything I can possibly give. For me, giving is the vehicle of expressing the spirit within and to give a gift that is anything but your best is to disdain the divine.

So it was in this play that I had the longest opportunity to test my spiritual courage and commitment, not just in my work, but in "the work."

The trappings of success are in fact a trap. All the rave reviews for Alice meant that the press wanted to interview me to the point of distraction from my work in the play [Same Time, Next Year]. I didn't read the reviews, but years later, much to my surprise I saw a scrapbook my mother had put together of my press for this period. One said, "Ellen Burstyn is the hottest thing since aluminum siding."

I don't think they were referring solely to my performance. It was because Alice was the first picture to give voice to the emerging liberation of the modern American woman. We were awakening from centuries of sleepwalking to the dictates of the patriarchy, and Alice was the first film that showed just how it happened to one woman. Also the fact that I'd introduced the project to Warner Bros., then brought in the unknown director Martin Scorsese, who was to become a major force in American cinema, added to the fact that Marty liked to improvise and that certain events in my life were integrated into Bob Getchell's brilliant script—put it all together and the press gave me credit for everything but hanging the lights.

It was during The Trip to Bountiful that my creative energies returned to me in a flood and I had my first experience of transcendence through the creative process. By then I’d answered my own question of why, as [Elia] Kazan said, "talent, like beauty, fades." It came to me in a quote from [Peter] Ouspensky. "Art is the search for beauty, as religion is the search for truth." The operative word here is search. It is not the finding; it is the search. That's why, after an artist has won awards and received the world's acclaim, she can make the mistake of believing that she "knows." It is in the "not knowing" that the search occurs. It is a living process where creativity thrives. It is standing in the space of "I don't know" with dissatisfaction with what has already been achieved, and eagerness to open to the unknown.

I remember reading somewhere that how we handle our greatest wounding is how we will handle our death. To me that means that learning to overcome or transform our suffering transforms ourselves into the being who greets our death. If we resent our wounding, we will resent our death. If we are afraid of being wounded, we will be afraid of our death. If we have done the work that helps us to see our wounding as the vehicle of our growth and be grateful to it, we will be able to see the approach of death as the ultimate transformer. That is my belief—so far, personally untested.

Over and over I find in the teachings of all the great teachers this admonition to find the truth in one's own experience, not to take in dogma as though it is our own experience when, in fact, it has been swallowed whole and not really digested. As a Sufi, I learn from all the wisdom traditions without being restricted to just one way. That gives me the opportunity to see truth shining through many different forms. The Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh has written that most of the boundaries between traditions are artificial. Truth has no boundaries. The differences are mostly in emphasis.

From the beginning of the trip [to Bhutan], each time we sat down and closed our eyes as Bob [Thurman] began to talk, an inner image of Jesus walked toward me and sat in a lotus position, facing me. Throughout the meditation, he sat there radiating light. On the fourth day, as Bob talked, I realized that although I loved the beauty of the temples, the tangkas, the stories, and the teachings of the Buddha, I was a tourist here. This was not my path. That's when I understood deeply that with all my studies of other religions, basically I really am devoted to Jesus. I am not a church-going Christian, not a conventional one by most standards, but in my heart, Jesus is my guru.

I know that becoming conscious is a never-ending process. My prayer is that by the actual end of this life, I will exit wearing my own true face and be completely unmasked. Authenticity has been my aspiration. Whatever is in the shadow, own it, pull it into the light, and let it shine.