09.29.07
ZIG-ZAGGING THROUGH CONSCIOUSNESS by Amalia Weinberg
I started off as a good little New York Jewish girl, the only daughter of immigrants from Nazi Germany. My parents weren’t very religious but belonged to a Reformed temple, attended services on holidays and some Saturdays, celebrated the Sabbath with candles and a special meal, and never ate pork. I was expected to be Bat Mitzvahed (a ritual, welcoming a young woman into the congregation as an adult.), to get a good
education, marry a Jewish man and make Jewish babies. I didn’t question any of this. At first. When I was about 12, a year before my Bat Mitzvah, I refused to go through with it. I argued that I wasn’t interested in religion and that the ceremony would therefore just be a sham. I suspect my fear of
standing before the congregation to read from the Torah and give a speech were also deciding factors. What I was interested in at the time was science fiction–alternate universes, extra sensory perception,
aliens. I loved reading about different realities and wound up with irreparable cracks in the consensus reality, generally considered the only reality.
The one expectation of my parents that I did fulfill was their wish for me to get a good education. In college, I majored in psychology, studied mental functions like perception and sensation, experimented with rats, and wound up with an intellectual desire to understand consciousness. What is it? Where is it? And how does it work? So I went to graduate school and studied clinical psychology to find out. I learned a lot about pathology and psychotherapy. I also learned that in the early to mid ‘60s, “consciousness” was not yet a legitimate field of study—at least not in the Freudian, Eastern establishment school I attended.
Not much happened, spiritually, for me until the Summer of Love in San Francisco. Until then, I’d had only a brief glimmer of a transcendent reality. It happened while watching an ant on my arm when I was about 6. I knew I was far too big for the little creature to see, and for a moment, I sensed that I too lived on a giant, more vast to than I could imagine. It took just one blow-your-mind acid trip to remind me that there was more to reality than I could understand. With that psychedelic
boost, my consciousness broke free of my little self and entered a cosmic, timeless state of oneness. It was a profound experience and got me started meditating. (Back then, for $35 you could get your own secret mantra and be initiated into TM.)
Then came the Women’s Movement and a different kind of consciousness-raising. A shift in awareness was happening in the way people saw men and women and maleness and femaleness in general. Like so
many at the time, I became aware of our culture’s male orientation and suddenly politics, relationships, history—everything–looked different. I saw the analytic, linear kind of thinking favored by Western culture as “male” and understood that the receptive, intuitive state of mind had
been ignored and devalued because it was considered “female.” As part of a feminist therapy collective, I also had a great time working to change traditional attitudes about women. We were too busy redefining psychology and practicing therapy from a feminist perspective for me to be concerned with inner spiritual development. After about five years, when the Women’s Movement seemed mired in anti-male anger, I came across 2 books that knocked my spiritual socks off.: Seth Speaks and In Search Of The Miraculous. Seth, supposedly a channeled being who spoke through Jane Roberts, pulled the reality rug out from under me with his message that our personal reality is created from our own thoughts. I can’t remember what Ouspensky, and through him, Guirdjief, specifically said to me, but he re-ignited my interest in
consciousness. I got so fascinated, I formed a group to play around in the mind. We used to regress each other to past lives (I saw myself as a temple priestess—of course), and do other fun things like meditate with an acupuncture needle in our 3rd eye, or practice healing and telepathy.During that time, I had one of those orgasmic moments when you suddenly see everything as a whole and you’re hit with a realization that is so encompassing, it can’t fit into linear thoughts or words. For me, my feminist-inspired appreciation of the open, receptive state of mind and my fascination with consciousness came together in one colossal ball of string that I spent the next 8 years trying to unravel.
These years were the period in my life when I got hooked on a quest. Disdaining conventional ladders to higher levels of money or status, Iset my sights on higher levels of consciousness. I didn’t go the Hippy route (seeking enlightenment in India), or follow one of the teachings popular at the time (like Zen or EST). Instead, I went my own way, a path that zigged and zagged because what I was after kept changing.
First, I turned from the directed, controlling “male” state of mind and tried to develop what I saw as the richer, more spiritual “female” state. I practiced opening my mind and letting thoughts come in. Even as a woman, it was hard to be so passively receptive–and scary. Reality became fluid, so fluid, that I wondered if I could go crazy. Everything that had once appeared solid or “really” real, turned out to be unsubstantial thoughts and images. I found myself in a realm of imagination, dreams, intuitions and possibilities with no firm ground and nothing to stand on. That’s when I started writing a book about my experience. Although the book was never unpublished, writing it gave me a lifeline to hold onto while everything dissolved.
Eventually, I realized that, by itself, passively receiving thoughts and images was as limited as holding and solidifying them. It was far better, I decided, to cultivate an androgynous state of mind that
combined both: receptivity to thoughts and images plus the focused control that could literally “real-ize” them. During the next couple of years, I helped my therapy clients become aware of ideas they
unconsciously held onto and “real-ized.” Once they saw how they were creating their personal reality, they could decide to choose what they real-ized. Why go on making yourself weak by repeatedly thinking you are weak, for example, if you can choose to believe something better. Anything was possible. Wow! What power!
Sooner or later, however, I saw the spiritual dead end I was in. Sure it felt good to choose to real-ize what I wanted but the “I” that did the choosing was the ego. Once I saw that, I went after, what seemed like, a higher, more spiritual state of consciousness, a state that transcended the desires of the little self. I had an image of placing one foot in the male state of mind, the other in the female state, and rising above both to the detached, non-judging perspective, traditionally known as, the witness. This was it! I thought. Finally I’m on the right track. Or so it seemed. As a therapist and in my personal life, I spent the next couple of years learning to sit in the eye of the storm of my experience. Then came another one of those sudden moments of clarity: I saw that the witness perspective may be a platform to observe what goes on in the little self, but does not transcend it. I’d spent eight years clearing and straightening out the house that was my little self but I was still stuck inside the house.
Before I could head after another, ostensibly better, state of consciousness, I saw the pattern of my quest: climbing to higher or more expanded states of consciousness may seem more spiritual than climbing the rungs of wealth or status but it was just another ladder. And I’d had the hubris to think mine was better. It was time for a teacher.
Three days later, he showed up. No, he wasn’t Jewish and we didn’t marry and have kids but we did stay together many years. He was strange and difficult to relate to but I saw his radiance, his ability to be totally present, and I liked where he was going. As for him, he’d read my manuscript about consciousness and liked where I had been. The week we met, I remember trying to decide if I should follow this man. I hesitated with fear at the edge of the proverbial cliff, . . . then jumped. Living with him pushed me past other fears and over other edges. In the end, I felt freer and more open and had had some great adventures, but I was still attached to my little self.
Now? I feel Jewish and sense a cultural kinship with Jewish people but if I had to fill out a questionnaire, I’d check “spiritual, not religious.” Am I more conscious than I used to be? Have I gotten anywhere? Should I be reaching beyond where I am? I don’t seem to ask those questions anymore. Maybe that’s because I’m in my 60’s and no longer driven by youthful or middle-aged ambition. Or maybe I failed to reach enlightenment and gave up trying. Either way, I feel satisfied
with the way I am. I sit with a weekly meditation group, love the inner peace that yoga brings, am more confident and stronger than I used to be, and on rare but memorable occasions, see how incredible life is and feel very grateful.
Comments from MPJ: Here it is fairly obvious that the point at which this person broke through past Stage Two is described in the first paragraph. Then what she describes is a very long period of being a continual seeker of truth. I suppose this is a sort of Stage Three time - though most of the journeys she details each seem to keep her sitting of the verge of, if not dipping into, Stage Four.
And by the last paragraph, it does sound as though she has reached Stage Four. No longer striving so hard, finding joy in community and allowing life to offer its mysteries when it will, she seems much more evolved than in the prior parts. She has given up trying to control or force her own growth, (doesn’t need the certainty that there is a definite path that is the right one) and while this isn’t written anywhere that I have seen in the literature, I am pretty sure that is a characteristic of Stage Four belief .
MPJ said,
October 18, 2007 at 9:00 pm
Amalia Weinberg wrote:
Margaret, you cite “no longer striving so hard, finding joy in community,
allowing life to offer its mysteries when it will,” and giving “up trying
to control or force her own growth” as evidence of Stage Four Belief. If
that’s so, then Stage Four seems to have a lot to do with the maturity that
can develop with age, independent of religious or spiritual outlook.
Consider the following (based on what Margaret Karmazin and I wrote for the
introduction to the book I edited, Still Going Strong; Memoirs, Stories and
Poems About Great Older Women):
:
Learning to see what’s good about being older is like exploring an unseen
world. It can feel like groping in the dark, bumping into shapes that have no
names. Terms like “wisdom,” “serenity,” “post-menopausal zest,”
“new freedom” and “giving back” are surfacing in articles and books,
but as a culture, we’re a long way from appreciating what they mean.
At sixty-five, I feel I’m just entering this new world. What have I found so
far?
Emotional maturity: Sometimes when I’m about to be drawn
into one of my typical emotional upheavals, I suddenly see it coming and can
decide to pass it by. Such bursts of self-awareness do happen when we’re
younger but can be more common when we’re older. After sixty years of
playing and replaying the same psychological dramas, they finally become
boring.
Self-acceptance: People, myself included, can be so
dissatisfied with themselves when they are younger. I find that my relentless
striving to be better in one way or another has given way to a new and welcome
comfort with myself.
Inner peace–a state I longed for but didn’t experience when I was
younger: Back then, I was too busy “doing” and “becoming” to enjoy or
even allow the spacious stillness of just “being.” Now, at times, I
can.
Courage: I’m more confident and secure than when I was
younger. A lot of women my age seem to feel the same way. Perhaps it’s
because we’re not so concerned about what men think of us anymore, or what
anyone thinks.
Perspective: Decades of experience make life patterns more
apparent. I see the
trajectory of younger people’s actions, long before they see it themselves.
No wonder
the insight of elders can be so invaluable.
These are only glimpses of what we may find in this newly evolving stage of
life, but they raise the possibility that we’re not over the proverbial hill
when we get here, but at its peak
MPJ said,
October 18, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Thanks for your comment Amalia. I am sure there is some truth to the idea that spiritual maturity tends to parallel maturity in life in general. (And in all the various “lines” Ken Wilber speaks of.) But I don’t think it is necessarily a factor of age, per se. I can think of plenty of older people, women included, who for whatever reason demonstrate none of the “mature” traits we are discussing. It may be that they did not have the same opportunities for growth that others did.
Anyway, I am certainly not trying to judge anyone. My purpose as I have said before is to try to let people understand that growth does exist and to give them a glimpse of what it can look like.
Thanks for your input.
MPJ