“Lostness” has become institutionalized.
I arrived at the park from the plaster job in La Jolla for my first apprenticeship session. The swingsets and the paths were strangely familiar. As I was waiting, I flashed back to walking in this park 5 years earlier at 3 am one night from Aysha’s, a dear and gifted teacher of mine. At that time, this park had spoken to me as a place to be engaged with in the future. I turned around and walked back to her place. Standing in the park both then and now was similar to a deja vu experience, where future and past somehow ‘collapsed’ into a large timeless presence. I saw Dove and we joined each other at a park table. I looked inquisitively for what was next. Dove starting speaking and this is what he told me:
DOVE: We worked together before, and I am here to reconnect you with activities and possibilities which you have done before but have forgotten, and they will be familiar to you. You have lived in a period of relative ignorance so that you could be able to relearn, and that will open you to teach, because of a deep compassion and love that drives your soul. Your path in life is to follow teachers who wake you up, so that you can fully appreciate the process of waking up.
JON: I’m getting this sense, right now, that there are so many things going on in my head.
DOVE: You are learning the importance of being an ‘air traffic controller.’ You are getting to know the right thing to say, which resonates with others, allowing for open space so that you can be a mutual witness.
JON: There is promise in your voice. What you say makes me feel real and it’s oddly familiar!
DOVE: In learning the right things to say, it is helpful to consider using “a teaspoon of sugar” with lightness – more happens, and with more clarity. You don’t want to be rudderless. You always want to know where True North is. You are the captain, knowing the space and being aware of it. Being the captain means cultivating a sense of identification with the space. That identity is who you are and that permeates into your personality. It is an authentic place to sit, and one can let go of striving. Being so clear, you can deal with other variables. “Doing” has become peoples’ identity which is inherently off center and off authenticity, to the point that “lostness” has become institutionalized. And institutionalization itself gives the illusion of not being lost. People are scared to death, and so terror becomes institutionalized. Deep at the core, people are not sure.
JON: No wonder I’ve always felt confusion, inside and out.
DOVE: Your long standing confusion and ‘lost times’ were a vague awareness that something was amiss. Because of your discomfort of it, others’ attempts to anesthetize you did not work.
JON: How do you know all this? That’s exactly my life’s frustration and I’ve never worked it out.
DOVE: By seeing you, others saw that everything is “off,” and that somehow you understood this and could give a consistent response that seemed to help. The agitation you feel has to do with the illusion of being disconnected. Unraveling the conundrum is the way to reconnect with The Source. The key is to get acquainted with being in The Center, the art of standing next to The Source. That facilitates it…its fun! It is an allowing, a stepping out of the way. A sacredness happens, and there is an order and a meaning to it all. It has lots of energy and purpose, and needs an adult to direct it. To be a good custodian for The Center means there is a willingness to operate with certainty and alignment, to fend off the negative and to keep a safe place. Doing it without flinching allows you to step where you wish. The spirit of it all is to wake up and play. There is a lot of psychic human wreckage out there. One can embody all the responses and energy and not be taken over if one stands beside the great archetype, as it will do the heavy lifting.
JON: I remember in 1994 there was a man literally raging at his four-year-old son in a busy public park. It was getting very abusive. I was with my six-year-old daughter and she was visibly upset. Everyone in the park seemed frozen about what to do. I went and just stood beside the man as he raged on, holding a space and that calmed him down in ten seconds. He got that I was there and was staying there, and then he told me how afraid he was. And his son got to see that.
DOVE: The Source moves through you and does the heavy lifting. Internal strength is really developed by allowing. Even pain has a function. Allowance, your allowance, for the suffering inside relieves the suffering outside by giving others a positive experience.
Dove did what he called an energy attunement on me. It reminded me of something I used to do when I was little, which looked like scrunching up my face really, really hard and asking for something really, really hard and I could feel something shift and then things would get a little better. He said he was helping me to connect to “Source” and then asked if had I experienced anything.
JON: I did have a little vague kind of experience, in the way a whisper is subtle. It was like a bright corkscrew shape rising on an angle from my heart upward through my left shoulder. But, as I am saying that, there is a voice in my head saying “you’re dreaming something up, that’s a real stretch.”
DOVE: Well, it was your experience after all.
JON: I suppose you are right, it does have reality to me, otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything. Dove, as I just said that, I am right now in this very moment as I speak, sensing a broad horizontal arrangement of things: trees; people; the swings and the houses. It stretches way out across the park like some kind of invisible tissue connecting everything. I have no idea what it is, but yes, there is some sort of a reality to it. It’s like when you see heat rise off the earth, but not that distinct, not that visible. It’s a subtle, fleeting, intangible sense in my mind’s eye.
