I am at the San Francisco airport waiting for my plane back to Phoenix. The week that precedes my sitting here is bulging at my metaphysical seems. My bags, too, are more full. I carry new things.
I wanted all along to write down so many details, so many finite tentacles of infinite energies: the lover’s bench on the Mendocino coast facing the ocean, the overlapping hearts and alphabet of initials carved into its weathered surface — what a platform. What an echo of so many bodies entwined.
Also, the bits of living, breathing nostalgia fixed along the path I ran each day, like pale, contoured driftwood and other heartbreaking reminders of a continued existence shaped by things past.
But most of the details have evaporated, lifted and carried with the ocean mist that constantly moves along those surfaces like a hungry animal made of air and water. Form but not form, loosely patterned after form.
This past week, I met Hal and Sidra Stone, the founders of Voice Dialogue, the Psychlogy of the Selves. Its a rather simple theory that each of us harbors many “selves,” many harmonious and conflicting energies within — some that are primary and projected into the world, and others that are shadow or disowned and often suppressed. Then there is what they call the aware ego, which to me sounds like the neutral mind they talk about in khundalini yoga. It’s the place that exists on the narrow path between oceans of consciousness. The place of awareness that can hear and see all the various energies with compassion and without judgement. As simple and obvious as this might seem, as reminiscent of several mythologies and theologies throughout history, there is a subtle complexity to it that lends it richness and depth. The development of an aware ego and the ability to channel life decisions through it is extremely difficult for most people and can take years of hard work. Hal and Sidra Stone are two brilliant people with very different professional, academic and psychological backgrounds, and who seem to have come together in this life for a clear and direct purpose — to develop this work and to use it for helping couples create a true partnership. They have written several books about their ideas and a the result has been the beginning of a movement in the world of psychology and a community of followers who call themselves Voice Dialogue Facilitators. Even so, Hal and Sidra have never created a “certification” for those who practice or facilitate voice dialogue, because by its nature it can’t become a fixed form. That will remove it too much from its original energy. It must stay an energy, a body of work that shifts and evolves just as the world and humanity and consciousness itself shifts and evolves. It’s fascinating, really. My dearest friend, one of the closest people to me in this life, Iudita, has been telling me about these people she calls her teachers since I’ve known her. A few times, when I was particularly struggling with some turmoil in my life, she’s facilitated me. But that’s the extent to which I have been exposed to it. So it has been something to be in attendance as the videographer for eight hours of talks that Hal and Sidra gave to a group of elders in their community. By something, I mean captivating, disorienting, synchronistic, deeply moving, terrifically insightful, frightening, provocative. As a result of my witness, I have had several nights of lucid dreaming, messages from the unconscious. Hal calls the God energy ‘the unconscious’ or ‘the intelligence.’ It communicates in dreams through symbols with which we have associations. The suggestion was enough to launch me into the experience of a series of dreams I earnestly decoded during the days.
Hal and Sidra have made a living for nearly 40 years guiding people through their vast psychic terrain, gently introducing them to the strangers they encounter there, helping them to integrate and balance these myriad energies, and finally to hold them all in tune from the level of compassionate awareness. As it happens, this process is helped along by interpersonal relationships, as we tend to attract people as lovers who carry our disowned selves as primary energies. We come together with them to integrate those energies and become more whole. Therefore, this work helps create relationships that stay vital and vulnerable and dynamic for long durations. And it helps individuals to experience the same kind of raw relationship to life and to the world. As Sidra said this morning, it keeps one on the growing edge. It’s not necessarily comfortable and cozy, but it’s worth the price and hardly ever dull.
Today they finished their series of talks with the topic of death and dying. This was particularly interesting because just the other night, I discussed this topic at length with my new old friend, Richard and his girlfriend, Barbara when they hosted me in their lovely home for dinner. Richard’s second wife died about six years ago after eleven years of cancer. He walked with her through that. He spent all that time flexibly stretching neck-deep in the rude, uninvited dance of dying. He fell apart in its aftermath. He went on living in its shadow. The bedroom he now shares with Barbara is the result of his late wife’s request to build her a room in which to die. It’s a beautiful, open, sky-lit room with huge windows overlooking the forest and a rustic, stone fireplace burnt with good use. She did die there in that room, beneath the skylight, under the constellations it revealed, beside her husband. I postulated that life contains millions of small deaths, opportunities to practice letting go, ranging from the minuscule to the colossal, so that when the inevitable happens and we die, the ultimate letting go will come as less of a shock. Richard and Barbara talked about books they have read and masters they have listened to who know about death, who have been across its boundary and returned, who claim that consciousness goes on and that the energetic linkages we call relationships continue. I admitted my fear of death, that its unknowableness disturbs and frightens me. Barbara said her fear was of the pain involved in getting there, not what will happen after the event.
So today Sidra told a story of her experience with death.There was a time, 41 years ago, when she died. Her body was without vital signs. During that time, she has a memory of hovering above as a floating single point of consciousness with no edges, just watching the people crouched over her, all of them very upset that she was gone. She wanted to cry out to them that she was fine, that she felt better than she had ever felt before, exquisite even, but she sensed suddenly that her children needed her, that she wasn’t done. Reluctantly, but deliberately, she returned to her body, squeezing herself back into the marshy, squishy container of the physical form. But while she was up there, she said, without boundaries, she was aware of how much she didn’t know. She was aware of all these other spaces being breathed in and out of our universe.
Hal shared his experiences of the communications he’s had with his son and his father, both dead, that gave him an understanding of what ‘the intelligence’ wants from us. Each of us, he said, is an experiment of divinity. The longer we live, the more opportunity it has to do its work with us. It doesn’t want us to be spiritual, Hal said, it wants us to be total. It wants us to embrace everything. A condition of true homeostasis. A balance. And its always trying to balance. If we wander too far in any one direction, the opposite energy will come crashing in. The body, he said, is the temple for divinity. A vessel to hold these amazing things we carry.
As they spoke, I felt myself expanding, literally spreading out through the room, beyond the room, outside, into the cold ocean air, the wet grass, trees, fog, rocks, lighthouse, light. I became aware of my body as an instrument, a mechanism for sensing and interpreting energy as form, and the act of containing what I understand to be my soul became — suddenly and completely — a stunning honor. I was giddy and emotional all at once. I wanted to laugh and cry, scream at the top of my voice, burst out the door and tear off into a sprint.
It’s a single day, this life. It’s an awakening, a soft dawn, a yellow morning, a bright hot noon, a mellow slow afternoon, a lingering twilight, an opulent evening, and then the insolvent darkness, night — the inevitable sleep. Each small simulation we live through stands for the whole. Altogether, faster than we know. Over too soon. Always, too soon.
Richard said during our discussion at dinner, “It’s a short ride.” This as he looks out from the twilight at the bright day, wide-eyed and credulous as sky. Even so, I agreed with him. I agreed.
Here is an excerpt — the last stanza — from a poem he wrote while in the cancer ward at the hospital with his late wife, Laoma, waiting while she underwent radiation on her brain. I found it on the wall of his workshop, mounted on a placard beneath a glass dome holding a photograph of Loama’s face with the radiation mask she wore in place over it. Directly above that is a siren box with a yellow and red warning sign that reads: “HIGH RADIATION AREA.” The piece as a whole is shocking and abrasive, as it’s meant to be, as the experience of it was. The poem stanza is the acute summation of everything attempting to be expressed in this blog entry. I’ll leave you with this. It brings it all into such accurate focus:
Stand in the fire with us
and laugh…
for in the depths of our agony
we discover exquisite joy.
The holy warrior enters
and behold…
it is a new day.
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