Unconditional Remembrance: Your Connection to Sourceis now out in the world. That journey may be a topic of a different newsletter. Right now, I’d like to share with you an outtake from the book. As I was almost done writing Unconditional Remembrance, there was a moment when I realized that I needed a different approach to the preface. Actually, I went a completely different direction! (You’ll have to read the book to see that one, though.) This is Part 1.
In my early twenties I spent a month at Cold Mountain Institute on Cortes Island in British Columbia, Canada, in the New Horizons program. The program was created by Bennett Wong, M.D., a psychiatrist, and Jock McKeen, M.D., whose specialty was traditional Chinese acupuncture. The blending of eastern and western thought with what were then cutting edge personal and interpersonal transformational practices ignited something profound in me. My mind leapt to seeing the intersections between Chinese Five Element Theory, western human potential modalities and the “mythology” of the search for the Holy Grail.
Shortly after this, I had the opportunity to be in the presence of Joseph Cambell on two separate occasions and to have a private conversation with him about the search for the holy grail as the archetypal search for the Self. When I met Joe, I was already immersed in the archetype of the Hero’s Journey. It had captured my imagination, giving me another piece of the puzzle, and presenting a kind of organizing mythology for understanding my own journey.
If I were to give a chapter title to that part of my life, it would certainly be the Search for Self, which I saw represented in the Hero’s Journey. The search for the self is told in countless stories – myths – around the world, in every culture. “Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation.” (Joseph Campbell,The Hero with a Thousand Faces)
As a newly minted psychotherapist and committed searcher for the truth, I saw this search as both a guide for the work I was to do in the world and as a way to frame my personal journey.
Campbell’s teachings were popularized in the Bill Moyers PBS series, The Power of Myth, but if you haven’t seen it, or read his books, I’ll describe the basics.
It includes, like all rites of passage, separation, initiation and return. Or, I could say, connection, forgetting/separation, remembering/reconnection.
The journey begins with receiving an inner ‘call to adventure,’ when your life presents something unexpected or even threatening. Is your relationship hurting your heart? Do you have dreams that feel bigger than your waking self will entertain? Are you waking up in the middle of the night with doubts that won’t go away? The inner call shows up in all kinds of ways. It’s personal to you. Sometimes it comes as a gentle nudging of your inner desire. Ignore it and it grows louder.
Hearing (and acknowledging) this inner call brings you to a moment of choice. You can ignore it because you fear the change it may be asking you to undertake. Or you can heed it because the call is stronger than your fear.
You can “get busy” and pretend you didn’t hear it. Yet it will return. It is persistent. It will call to you again and again, until you (finally) listen.
Until you embark upon the journey.