Ripples After My Heart Opening Initiation
Coffee Time with Pat on Saturday Morning
Certainly Friday’s experience of writing and then reading aloud to my writing group my blog entry titled Initiation At 70 was a heart opening experience, a time of vulnerability and expansion, a rare time of freely flowing tears for me. Afterwards I was emotionally exhausted, though I was able to have a delightful dinner with fellow writer Jennie, Pat being out for the evening.
Pat’s and my coffee time Saturday began with Pat sharing equally momentous experiences she had on Friday. I found I could be present to her in her sharing, but I felt a wave of resistance come up in me about sharing my own “oh-so-wonderful” Friday experience. This made me very curious. Though I did share my experience, I wanted to explore with Pat my resistance to sharing with here.
Gary: Could my resistance to sharing be my strange shame of nakedness that Pathwork Lecture 152 Connection Between the Ego and the Universal Power speaks about? (Open Quote from Lecture 152) If so, the issue would be having my heart so open and vulnerable that I would feel stripped naked emotionally and full of shame in being so open in front of you. Pat: As you share your resistance your energy feels stronger than this. Gary: Yes indeed! This resistance is beyond shame. There is a strong defiant, “Pat, you shall never know me in my Essence!” I can feel this negative energy. This strong negative current in me scares me. Pat: Yes, you are revealing your aggression toward me by staying separate from me, by pushing me away and hiding. This is not just your superficial personality, it is tapping into archetypal energies to stay separate. These are the deep energies, the karmic stuff.
Gary: That could be. What I am feeling is fear, terror even, to be exposed from this vulnerable heart space. Pat: Maybe the strange shame of being your naked real self – being wide open and so vulnerable emotionally – is, in fact, the root here, and layered on top of that existential terror of the shame of exposure is the aggressive defensive energy to stay separate. Gary: The feel of the shame is fear of being seen and judged weak, stupid, or wrong. Fearing that I would be seen as wanting, and therefore, because I am wanting, I believe I would be dismissed at the level of my deepest self, my Real Self. The fear is that of being annihilated because I am “merely and utterly human”!
Pat: I get to see this all a little clearer than perhaps you do. And it is not helpful if I pretend that I don’t get it at these deeper levels. I would be stupid to disregard what I see. And you don’t want me to disregard what I see. But also I do not want to be pushy. Gary: (a little confused, yet triggered, by Pat’s words) And it is hard for me not to moralize here – hearing your words about “seeing more clearly than I” and then my concluding that I am “less than” you spiritually, and comparatively spiritually immature. Yes this is all dualistic consciousness – the comparing – but it is what comes up in me. And then seeing that this immaturity of being in duality itself makes me immature, makes the immaturity even worse – a negative vortex around immaturity sets in until I see myself as the most immature person on the planet! What a ride this is!
Gary (continued): So let me slow down and watch all of this in me. Why do I moralize – making myself “less than” with you? There is an image here: I can’t be approved of or respected if I am less than you. If I am less than you spiritually – and spirituality, I notice, is the most important category of “competition” or “competence” – I will have to submit to your superior spiritual wisdom — survival of the fittest. And my child self is defiant and wants to submit to no one! And behind this is a misunderstanding about approval – thinking that approval in our relationship is the same as love in our relationship! So this leads to love being equated to submission! Yikes! Just look at all that is going on here!
Pat: Look at what your have just done here. This is your way! It is amazing to me to see how you are so quickly able to see all of these links and connections and then put them into clear words and paint a picture. Gary: I’m bouncing back to life here because of your “approval.” I just have to smile at this. But even so, seeing the above is indeed thrilling to me, like solving a puzzle, only it is the puzzle of my Life! And for you to see this too encourages me.
Pat: We are blessed that our ways are different – you Pathwork and me Tibetan Buddhism as taught in the Awakening Into Presence program. We are here in Life, the two of us. This is the work that we are choosing, choosing that which supports our awakening. Rather, supports THE Awakening. Within me is the Awakening One – here there is no personal. Gary: This “no personal” is still just an idea for me, perhaps true, but not a felt sense in me. For me reality seems to be both personal/individual AND the One Universal Self. Neil Douglas Klotz in his I Am: The Secret Teachings of the Aramaic Jesus explains this well, but his work is new to my more traditionally trained Christian mind and therefore is something I have to sit with to get on a deeper level. I also am increasingly appreciating the metaphysics of Pathwork as set forth succinctly in Pathwork Lecture 20 God: The Creation, and explained in more detail in the few lectures on either side of Lecture 20 (click to open a quote on Pathwork Metaphysics).
Pat: I can see that my mind cannot grasp all that this is. My mind can only surrender into the Mystery of what is. “Oh Great Mystery, I don’t know – possess me.” To think that the Mystery is playing out through me right now. It’s all here in every moment. It is so helpful to somewhat understand: the individual balance with the Universal – all in the incarnated Body.
Gary: I am not there either, but again I am drawn to Neil Douglas Klotz – someone I would have rejected out of hand two or three years ago. He talks about Jesus’ original language being Aramaic – and claims that much of what Jesus said gets distorted in the so-called “original Greek” in which scholars and seminarians place so much emphasis these recent decades. Jesus did not speak Greek, and Klotz observes that some of the deeper mystical truths contained in the words in Aramaic cannot be adequately expressed in Greek.
I now get this. Earlier I thought Klotz was claiming an earlier translation in Aramaic, and I dismissed that, thinking that there was no earlier translation than the Greek. But I do not think Klotz is so much speaking of a translation that predated the Greek but rather uses the Aramaic words that Jesus would have used rather than the Greek, which Jesus clearly did not speak. Having said this, however, Klotz does talk about an Aramaic Gospel that was popular in the Far East up until 1400 or so that supposedly existed before the Greek New Testament manuscripts. In these writings and recordings Klotz emphasizes the ideas behind the Aramaic words that Jesus would have used.
Erena mentioned the Original Prayer by Klotz that she enjoyed a number of years ago. Of course I now own that as well! It is a translation and explanation of the Lord’s Prayer but with the Aramaic word-meaning emphasis. Chanting is big in Klotz’ work and seminars. He says the sound of the language is more important in Aramaic than the literal pictures the words might paint. Pictures were not as significant in Aramaic. Pat: The same with Sanskrit. And as you speak of this I remember Buddhist chants in some of the CDs that I have. I cannot do the chants, but I open the channels of my cells as I listen to them. I allow the vibrations to play through my system. Gary: And Klotz says it is the vibration of the word sounds, not the meaning of the words per se, that is important. As a mental type this is somewhat foreign to me, but I can consider and perhaps embrace his point of view. Pat: Yes, the sounds would be the Living Word.
Pat: (after this 2 hour coffee-time conversation) These coffee-time connections are pretty amazing. No wonder that 40 years ago I said that the life I was living then wasn’t “it.” Thank goodness in my heart I knew what the “it” that I wanted was. This “it” is now moving us both forward. This is moving us to a deeper capacity for Love. Gary: Amen.
Shared in love, Gary