In
1971, I had an experience of such significance that understanding
it became my life's work. During the course of a week that year, I
was deluged by a transmission of insight and of access to higher realms
of knowledge. In the process I received a gift of spiritual awakening
and clairaudience, which I had no way to integrate or understand when
the experience was over. Hesitant at first, scared of what people
would think and facing possible alienation from my family because
of the voice I began to hear in my head - I finally made the only
decision I could make. I decided to devote my life to interpreting
this voice and to using the knowledge it imparted to assist people
in their own enlightenment.
I
invite you to consider my story as a frame of reference for the teachings
in subsequent chapters of this book, and not as an indication of what
you might experience or should be experiencing as a result of reading
and using the Marriage of Spirit techniques. My journey was a product
of the times and circumstances in which I lived. Chances are, your
journey along the continuum of enlightenment will not be the same
as mine, and that is as it should be.
I grew up in South Africa - a country ravaged by apartheid. After
graduating from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg
with a bachelor's degree in fine arts, I assumed a career as a painter.
Painting was my passion and was something that had always come easily
to me. Since my childhood, art had served as a vehicle for expressing
the inexpressible. Even as a child I experienced altered states, visions,
and perceptions whose only acceptable outlet seemed to be through
my hand and onto canvas.
It was only later with hindsight, that I came into the conscious understanding
of how each vision and subsequent painting was a gift given from my
unconscious, a learning experience that would help prepare me for
my life as a mystic. Altered states often happened while I was painting
or even while I was contemplating painting. This weaving of art and
mysticism fostered in me an expanding desire to find a greater understanding
of the nature of consciousness itself.
While
painting in my art studio one morning in 1971, I went into an altered
state. It seemed to have been brought on by my extreme response to
an argument with some friends at dinner the night before. We had just
finished eating and had stumbled into a thorny discussion about art
and science. The two men at the table, one of them my husband, considered
themselves scientists; my girlfriend and I were artists. At the time,
it seemed like a stupid argument about the merits of art versus science,
yet it had struck a chord deep inside me. I had unusual clarity that
night, and I could see there was no intrinsic difference between the
two. They sprang from the same source, expressed the same essence.
At the core they were the same.
Seeing
two seemingly opposed means of perceiving the universe, one based
in intuition and one based in empirical logic, as one and the same
thing was an extremely radical idea to all of us then. Yet the truth
of this was crystal clear to me in that moment. It was my absolute
certainty about this sameness that was so fascinating to me
at the time. However, no matter how hard I tried, I could not begin
to explain to the others what I was seeing. Suddenly I was painfully
aware that all of us, by arguing about the supremacy of art or science,
were not just missing the point, we were also involved in several
polarized struggles. Male-female, right-wrong, real vs. imagined.
For some reason, that night, this dualism was more than I could bear.
I became very agitated and then quite disconsolate.
The
next morning in my studio, after having been awake most of the night
grappling with what I had seen, my mental state suddenly shifted.
My mind broke open and became crystalline and vast. Time seemed to
stand still. Understandings about the previous night's discussion
flooded my awareness. I had the clear realization that my knowings
of the evening were the truth. This sensing of truth was so profound,
it made my heart race, and I experienced emotions I had never before
felt. I was in what I now know to be a state of unity consciousness,
a state for which I had no reference point at the time.
That
morning, as the insights continued to pour through my consciousness,
I knew that I needed to write. I was seeing the resolutions to all
my frustrations from the night before, gaining a very clear mental
understanding of them, which allowed me to verbalize them in my journal.
As the pages accumulated, the innate unity which underlies all of
the dualities that we know in this world became clearer and clearer.
This initiated in my mind the understanding of the fundamental concepts
behind the Marriage of Spirit teachings. I had always felt a mystical
presence in my life, even as a child, and particularly in conjunction
with my painting ~ but this intense and direct transmission of information
about unity was something new, and it grabbed my full attention. I
was compelled to be completely present with the experience.
During
a week of accessing this state of higher consciousness, I wrote about
thirty pages of notes and created two paintings. One painting was
of a flying angel, painted as though I was looking up at it. The other
was of a mother holding a child. Both were subjects that I had never
used before. The two paintings emerged effortlessly, almost as though
someone else was using my body to paint them. I know now that the
paintings were another gift from my higher self, messages from the
state of unity. The paintings would play a significant part in a later
drama.
Each
morning during this particular week I woke to find that the altered
state was still present, and when it finally abated, I was overwhelmed
with grief at the loss. However, I was still left with the legacy
of the experience. Not only did I have the thirty or so pages of writing
and the two paintings, but this breakthrough experience left me with
clear but intermittent inner guidance ~ guidance which stayed with
me in my everyday awareness.
Three
difficult weeks passed as I tried to make sense of what had happened
during this extraordinary event. I vacillated between elation and
depression, wondering at times if I was going crazy, wondering why
this was happening to me. Then I learned that I was pregnant with
my first child. Caught up in the excitement of that, I put the precious
pages into a closet, pushed the events which they recorded to the
back of my mind, and temporarily forgot all about my experience. At
the time, there was no place for it in my life and no time to make
one. A month later, curiosity got the best of me, and I tried to re-read
them. To my dismay, the writings were all but unintelligible. The
concepts that had been obvious to me at the time, I was now unable
to relate to. Because of the loss of the unity state, I had no context
into which to fit them. They might as well have been written in Greek.
The world stood still for a moment, and then it began to spin as my
sense of reality tilted. My thoughts raced out of control as I fell
prey to the belief that I had spent a week writing nothing but gibberish.
My mind gave in to the fear that perhaps I was going crazy. Becoming
increasingly embarrassed and paranoid, and to my later regret, I threw
the whole dissertation away.
Much of the paranoia and fear that made me destroy the writings describing
the mystical experience were related to a sense of apprehension about
how my conservative husband would react. Initially, although I was
relatively comfortable with the idea of receiving inner guidance,
there were times when I questioned my own sanity. In 1972, shortly
after the birth of my daughter, when I finally told my husband about
the mystical experiences that were now commonplace in my daily life,
his reaction reinforced my worst fears. He had recently done a medical
elective in a mental hospital, and he assured me that the only people
who heard voices in their heads were those who were mentally ill.
Neither
one of us had ever heard of channeling or of other forms of divine
communication back then, and when I saw the look of fear on his face,
I thought he would have me committed to a mental institution if I
persisted. Out of fear, I never mentioned my experience to him or
anyone else in our circle of acquaintances again. For a long period
of time,
I
lived a kind of double life ~ the one in my head, and the one in my
body. My body continued to live the life of a doctor's wife, driving
the car pool, going to social functions and taking care of the family.
Eventually the discomfort of denying my inner self became
so
great and my confidence in the fact that I was not crazy was so strong,
that I finally decided to come out of the closet. This was a gradual
and painful process that spanned a time of many outward changes in
my life as well.
I became an adult under the oppressive regime of apartheid ~ at a
time when its ideology of separating black and white had reached a
point of critical mass and when it was clear to most people that something
monumental was going to happen soon. Stifling censorship and strict
rules about how people ~ both white and black ~ should live their
lives had for a very long time been an integral part of the nation's
collective consciousness. In the summer of 1975, when I awoke from
a dream and told my husband that we had to leave the country, we both
knew instinctively that a time of great transition and upheaval was
beginning.
I
cannot imagine a more perfect example of extreme polarization into
which a mystic could be born. My life-long feelings of depression
and helplessness surrounding the injustices of the apartheid system
in my country ~ feelings shared by many of my countrymen ~ would have
to be replaced by hope, compassion and love if things were ever going
to change. But how? The how came to me directly through divine
intervention in a way that challenged head-on my notion that one person
cannot make a difference. The voice that had come to me in 1971 was
guiding me to hold the intention, hope and belief for the possibility
for peace in South Africa. I understood that others were being asked
to do the same, and that the individual and unified intentions of
even a small number of people would be enough to bring about significant
changes. Much later I came to understand that at a point of critical
mass, when a certain number of individuals are holding the same intention,
change is manifested in the whole of human consciousness. That is
eventually what I saw happen in South Africa as the end of apartheid
gave way to a new regime.
Two
weeks after my prophetic dream, my husband was handed a solicitation
for a research fellowship at the University of California Los Angeles
(UCLA) Medical School.
A
week after he accepted the position, rioting broke out in Soweto,
where my husband was completing his residency. It was the beginning
of the revolution. Suppressed at first by the press was the fact that
many of the first riots were staged by children, ages 8 to 18. The
police opened fire on some of the groups, and many children were killed
or severely wounded. It was a frightening and brutal time for all
people in South Africa. I would have felt extremely guilty for leaving
had it not been for the voices of my guides. They urged me to come
to the United States to further my spiritual growth so that my prayers
for peace in South Africa could grow in strength and meld with those
of many others in South Africa and around the world who also prayed
for the end of apartheid. It would be those united, individual voices
that would eventually help shift the balance of energy, the magnetic
charge of experience, in favor of dissolution of the old regime. Through
this experience, I began to see that if enough people awaken to their
true, inner, divine nature, the whole of human consciousness can undergo
the kind of evolution of consciousness that seems to be what is required
of us if we are to survive as a species on this planet. Since that
time, the destiny behind my teaching the Marriage of Spirit principles
has been to help raise consciousness.
After the birth of my daughter in 1972, a deep restlessness came over
me. I knew I was looking for something but did not quite know what
it was or where to find it. The clarity of the unity experience in
1971 was gone. I knew also that what I was looking for was connected
to her arrival and in some way connected with what I was to give her.
On the strength of that small knowing, I became available to inner
change, and the spiritual seeker in me was born. The birth of my son
followed three years later. His conception came at a time when I had
just become initiated into formal meditation, and this time my expected
baby announced his arrival in the form of a dream. I realized that
a tremendous sensitizing of my awareness and my seeing was taking
place as I observed the dream. I was beginning to attune to a more
subtle level. Hence I perceived the meaning conveyed in the dream
of my unborn son ~ a perception that would have been too subtle for
my awareness to register in the past.
My
marriage did not survive the coming out process ~ a process increasingly
punctuated by periods of intense meditation, study, and inner work.
My husband and I drifted further and further apart. After the unity
experience in 1971, and during the later separation and divorce process,
I found myself drawn to the writings of authors who were on the cutting
edge of a new spiritual psychology. The writings of authors such as
Carl Jung, Roberto Assagioli (Psychosynthesis), Arthur Janov
(The Primal Scream), Fritz Perls (In and Out of the Garbage
Pail), and Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving), resonated with
the inner teachings that I was experiencing at the time. Their work
helped to ground me in thought and practice, and it helped motivate
me to continue with my own spiritual growth.
In
the early 1980s I was guided to work with two teachers of transformation
for a period of about four years. My children went to live with their
father, and in 1986, after becoming increasingly aware that I was
growing in spiritual connectedness, I entered a period that was, in
its conception and form, rather like a Himalayan cave experience.
Many people are familiar with this concept ~ Indian and Tibetan yogis,
such as the great Tibetan ascetic saint, Milarepa, who retreat to
distant caves, to live reclusive lives of meditation and austerity
in their quest for enlightenment. Yet my cave experience took place
in one of the most densely populated areas of west Los Angeles. I
have often wondered why I was guided to go into seclusion in such
an odd place and finally decided that, if for no other reason, my
guides had a great sense of humor. In fact it was probably because
I had several very rigid concepts about big cities. I believed that
a large, densely populated area was the last place that I, or anyone
else, could wake up.
During
a two-year period in a small apartment near the confluence of two
major freeways, on the west side of Los Angeles, I began an extended
and solitary spiritual practice of complete seclusion and deep meditation.
For two years I worked through a step-by-step unfolding of an awakening
into the same state that I had held so briefly in 1971. It moved my
awareness from the memory of a temporary, altered state, held at the
dawning of my quest, to the solidly grounded, natural state in which
I now permanently live.
Also during the inward-turning time of 1986-88, I came to see one
of the amazing and intricate pieces of my own unfolding destiny. I
realized that the experience in 1971 had also been a connecting with
the soul of my as yet unborn daughter. The paintings of the angel
and the mother and child that had emerged during that week were telling
me of her imminent arrival in my life and most importantly that the
state I was experiencing was her message to me. As amazing as it seemed,
we had made an arrangement to awaken one another. I saw and understood
clearly that she was the angelic being who at that time was helping
me to remember the state of unity consciousness.
This
notion of divine assistance is common in mystical teachings, especially
amongst the Tibetans. The arrangement between my daughter and me was
this: when I was caught in the forgetfulness of this life and she
was out of the body, she was to remind me of who I really am ~ in
a much larger and more essential way than I had been aware of up to
that time. And when she took manifestation and was caught in the limitations
of world and body and had forgotten her origins, I would be free enough
to show her the way and to help her to awaken. She was born in February
1972, exactly nine months after my seven days of initial unity consciousness.
We all have remarkable mystical experiences, whether or not we are
fully aware of them or choose to admit to them. Unfortunately, our
altered states are often quickly buried in forgetfulness or pushed
aside when they threaten our existing sense of reality ~ which they
do when we don't have a way to integrate them into our current awareness.
However, in this instance, I could not escape mine easily because
I had written it all down, making it real and concrete, even though
those writings were now gone. I had tried to get rid of the experience
by throwing the pages away, but I could still see them clearly in
my mind. They had been branded into my awareness. As fate would have
it, the basic premise of unifying opposites and a return to unity
never left my conscious mind again.
I
have since come to know that all human beings are inherently capable
of accessing vastly different states of consciousness. It is part
of our capacity for multi-dimensional awareness. However, it is not
usually possible for someone in one paradigm of awareness to have
the remotest understanding of another paradigm concurrently. It is
possible to flip in and out of different modes of perception overnight,
but much harder to cross-reference them ~ which would require a mental,
emotional and physical integration of often paradoxical elements.
For the most part, we understand certain states of awareness when
we are in them, and we don't when we are not. It is a fairly basic
metaphysical concept that helps explain why my thirty pages of writing
suddenly appeared indecipherable to me once I was back in this worldly
reality.
Although
as an artist I used images that came to me through dream states, I
did not have any formal understanding of metaphysics as a discipline
until later in my life. What was present for me earlier, however,
was a feeling of connectedness to nature and a more poetical sense
of my inner self. Early on, I identified with ways of understanding
that were outside of the sense of reality and conditioning that my
family gave me. This is one reason that my life as a mystic was eventually
so easily assimilated into my conscious being. Another reason that
the mystic life agreed with me relates to the fact that I was caught
in a relationship of dominance and submission with my father. While
being submissive to the will of others is a behavior that I have had
to unlearn and process quite a bit throughout my adult life, early
on it allowed me to completely give myself to the voices and teachers
I encountered. Their transmissions required total commitment and selfless
absorption on my part ~ something that would have been hard for a
stronger-willed person to accomplish. And so it often is with certain
aspects of our personality and specific events in our lives ~ they
are there for reasons we rarely understand at the time. In the true
spirit of polarity, what seems to be cast in negative energy one moment
is shown to be making a positive impact the next, and vice versa.
Knowing
now that there is an inherent perfection to all events in our lives,
I realize that it was fine that I threw the whole essay away. Although
I regretted not saving it, I did not feel that the information was
lost. Key pieces stuck with me, including the essay's very last sentence
about the unity of all things. I also vividly remembered
the central theme of the writings ~ that a process of bringing together
or unifying all the polar opposites inherent in this dualistic life,
brings us into the vast oneness of consciousness that is the true
source of life. It was the memory of this oneness, which I had experienced
directly for one week and which I know now as the unified state, that
became my motivation for understanding the altered state I had experienced.
Finding
the fundamental unity of consciousness underlying all of life's dualities
is enlightenment ~ our real state of consciousness. It is the
theme of this book. We can all experience this enlightened state by
integrating the dualistic, or polarized, schisms in our personality.
In other words what my unconscious was showing me that week was:
These
teachings, given over time, became the primary methods of integration
which I used on myself and which have led to my ever-growing experience
of the unity of all things. This unity is our true eternal nature.
And the desire to know it is the source of the yearning inside every
human being.
Unity
consciousness allows us to bring the events of our lives full-circle.
We yearn for closure in our lives, for events and thoughts to come
around to completion and to reveal some aspect of truth about the
structure of this reality and our place in it. Western culture in
particular, with its heavy reliance on logical, linear progression,
finds little solace in a life's apparent linear progression toward
death and into the eternal void of purposelessness. We see ourselves
living within the limited confines of space-time, and we often conceive
of life as a form of suffering due to the perception of its nature
as a random progression toward an unknown end. In contrast to this
view, seeing larger circles of meaning at work in the structure of
human life enables us to bring closure and spiritual significance
to the journey of life. Digging into the subconscious mind, tying
up the loose ends of forgotten lessons and significances, and releasing
destructive patterns of behavior are practices that lie at the heart
of the Marriage of Spirit teachings.
-
Get
a journal and keep it specifically for writing down all your mystical
and spiritual experiences. By grounding these precious gifts in
writing, you bring them from the realm of ideas and formlessness
into form. You not only make them more tangible for yourself,
but they often become fuller and more expanded. You begin to see
much more of the experience and to absorb deeper levels of the
gift spirit is offering you. Journaling helps preserve these treasures,
rather than allowing them to be covered over by the sands of time
and lost in the mists of memory.
-
Try
to remember past mystical and spiritual experiences, even from
childhood. Recapitulate the experiences and write about them in
as much detail as possible in the very beginning of your journal.
Make sure to date them, even if approximate. Dating them helps
later on with understanding larger cycles of change. History has
a way of repeating itself, and perception changes that happened
years ago will be revisited in the future. Life is a spiral; we
return to where we once were but at a higher level of vibration.
