Doctortayria's Blog

The words in this title came to me like a chill two nights ago. They arrived in a waking dream as I sat in my living room with a fire in the stove warming the house, snowy mountain and stars outside, warmth of home all around. Having turned on the TV to randomly watch something while I sorted through mail, West Side Story was playing. Seeing it for the first time in decades, I realized the multiple references to the Romeo and Juliet story. Plot details and characters from Shakespeare’s play showed up again and again.

The catalogue of mythic stories about the death of love flipped through my brain: Maria and Tony, Romeo and Juliet, Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde…  who knows, maybe even Jesus and Mary Magdalene. When the words came into my head, spoken in the same way we hear language in a dream,  I knew “the castle built on dead love” was a reference to my life. This lovely fire, warm home, friendships, career, children – the castle of my life, the words seemed to be saying, is built on dead love.

Two days later I sit down to write about this because I feel I have to. I don’t know what to say except to muse. What could this message want to impart? My personal history of love relationships is harsh, there is truth to that. My first love  at age 14 played out like Romeo and Juliet, forbidden by well-meaning parents, with the tragic death by suicide of that beautiful young man. Later my 20-year marriage died after some tragic shocks. And later again fate disrupted new love.

But since this message came in on the stream of a collective story, West Side Story, a tale that holds such deeply profound cultural resonance, I believe its meaning to be far beyond personal. Why does love in this world have such a difficult time incarnating?

In our calendar year, this is the season of the Herod story from the New Testament. If we were to take the birth date of Jesus literally, sometime around now King Herod was ordering the slaughter of all male babies under two years old after hearing from kings who traveled from the far east about the birth of a new king who would free the people. The eastern kings’ anticipation was based upon prophecies and astrological forecasts. Herod decided to slaughter babies??? So much fear surrounds the arrival of this child who came to be known as the lord of love.

If we look at the mythic dimension of this and all of the stories I mentioned, and see them as a part of our own collective psychological history, what do they reveal to us? How might we think about and assimilate their messages? Could our whole civilization in some sense be described as a castle built on dead love?

On the one hand, at some level I believe most humans instinctively sense that Love is immortal, transcendent, inscendent, the core vibration in universe. But what is it in our physical world that challenges a sustained incarnation of love, that seems to want to kill it before it even fully arrives, or conspires to destroy all faith in it when it does appear? We walk on the bones of so much death and destruction to the simple desire for love.

I find this almost unbearable to consider and to write about, yet the dream seems to insist upon an acknowledgement of it, and my dream last night further drives it home. So I pose the question, is there a new potential, a new possibility for incarnating love in a sustained way that awaits our recognition of it? If there is, I believe the only way to see it is to see clearly the reality we live in order to see through to the next potential.

Maybe the dead bones of lost love have stories to tell. In fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast the whole castle is waiting to be awakened from a long curse of sleep. Possibly our civilization is the same. Maybe the curse can be ended. How do we play our parts?

The story about my upcoming trip to Africa and Esther seemed to touch hearts. I can’t tell you what it means to me to receive the responses.

I wrote to Martha Muiruri at the orphanage in Kibera to tell her that I am coming, asking her to please let Esther know. This was her reply:

 Esther will be beyond herself with joy to hear you are coming. Every time I make fun to her and tell her “someone greeted you” she says with such a warm smile” I receive the greetings” and then I ask, “How do you receive greetings and you haven’t asked me who greeted you?” she shyly says “I know the greetings are from Tayria”.

 Thanks so much for the books; I want to read so widely in psychology. I want to be blessing people, like you… I highly appreciate and I look forward, and may God do you good. 

I will take love and blessing from all of us to them. And books.

Also, I sent this idea out to my mailing list, but thought I might mention it to blog readers as well. If someone on your Christmas list might enjoy a session with a trained person who listens to and helps you interpret your dreams, or who might appreciate an oracular reading, I will offer a gift certificate that you can give them for a 40-minute session, either by telephone or in person, for $35.  A friend set me up with PayPal so I can receive donations and payments easily from a button on the home page of my website, http://www.tayriaward.com. I have been slow to enter this new millennium in such ways; thank goodness for smart friends.

I want to help hear and trust the dream. There is unfathomable wisdom there.

Recently I had a vision that appeared as a view down a wormhole, a glimpse into quantum possibility, not that I can tell you what that means; it is the best term I can find to describe it. I saw a complete reality that is there to be entered, full of its own integrity and energy laws to support it, one that is not here where I am right now but there, on the other side of the worm hole. Like Alice when she followed the white rabbit, or taking the red pill in the Matrix movies.

I have studied quantum physics, even taught a course called The Physics of Thought at a college in Santa Monica, California, based upon the dialogue method and theories developed by physicist David Bohm. And I have been deeply moved by the explanations in String Theory which posit that many dimensions of reality live all in the same place and the same time, showing how we move between them.

The vision I had must be influenced by exposure to these studies but seemed not at all related to a cognitive or intellectual realm of experiencing. It was as vital and real as anything I have ever known, a parallel reality not yet entered but already fully alive and active. Yet the reality required my engagement in it, it wasn’t available without my agreement, my “Yes.”

As I have mused upon what might be required of me to enter this reality of possibility and energy three things have come to mind so far.

1. Forgiveness. I see it now like I never have before. Forgiveness is not about doing anything, not an action to be taken or an achievement of some kind; it is a way of being that is closer than our breath. We forgive ourselves, forgive life, forgive each other with every in-breath and out-breath. Lack of forgiveness causes things to stick; forgiveness opens flow. Let go of concepts and old realities that hold the mind into a pattern of distrust or resentment, with every breath a new reality is allowed for and created. We do this not through effort, as a “should,” but because we see.

2. No fear. Fear serves nothing. Let it go. “Perfect love casts out fear.” Fear is not a way to live, only a way to be dead while alive.

3. Self-confidence. I mean confidence in the Self, that self that is a priori, not a product of our history or circumstance. This requires an awareness of Self that is distinct from ego’s reality. Ego orients us in time and space, and is a great assistance in our lives unless we confuse it as an identity. Ego is a tool, like a good hammer. It doesn’t have to be defended as if it has anything to do with Self. It has little to do with Self just like our hammer has little to do with we are. One hammer is as good as another. Carl Jung said that “Every victory for the Self is a defeat for the ego.” The sense of defeat is a result of identification problems.

The view down the wormhole has me thinking. I’m going to take the red pill.

I just typed this quote for a friend that is never far from my thoughts. I first heard it decades ago, and have unfailingly observed the truth of it.

Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the choice to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too.

 All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no one could have dreamed would come their way.

 Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it, boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

 Begin it now.

                                                                                                        -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I have been having an almost daily sensation for what I think might be 2 years or more that I am waking up, each day waking up, like Rumpelstiltskin, from a very long sleep. The feeling is getting more acute. It isn’t that I feel “enlightened”, like “Oh yeah, now it all is clear.” It is simply a sensation of waking up. Then waking up more. Then waking up some more. Like an unfolding. It seems to be a sensation at a cellular level.

I believe this is a collective thing, I don’t feel that it is personal. Something is occurring – astronomically, astrologically, evolutionarily, physically, metaphysically, I wouldn’t know how to label it – but phenomenologically I know I feel it.

I can say how it feels to me in a personal way, though. Have you ever seen a sea anemone, how it opens up with its tentacles floating in the water, then when you touch it all of the tentacles fold back in? It hunkers down to protect itself until the danger passes. My sensation is of a little energy system like that on the crown of my skull, toward the back, that has been closed down and protecting itself – because of personal storms, yes, but because of the darkness of an era I think. Now, defying all logic, with things breaking down everywhere across the globe and natural disasters becoming the norm, my little anemone seems to want to go ahead and unfold anyway. Let’s open to the light that is dawning. Let’s see what it is about.

None of this is mental, my cerebral aspect is just trying to notice and catch up with what is occurring at another level. I think it is happening to our organism as a unitary planetary whole. It probably has a lot to do with why things are breaking down everywhere.  We can’t sustain the unsustainable any more. We’re waking up.

Viva la vida, I say. We’ve been in an oppressive death grip. Let life break out and break in, wake us up, shake us up, open the curtains, let in the air. I sure keep feeling it.

Yesterday one of the great thinkers of our time passed away at age 85, originator of what is known as archetypal psychology, James Hillman. I was fortunate to have had Hillman as a professor during my doctoral work at Pacifica Graduate Institute and to have heard him speak on numerous occasions. His books and essays have shaped my experience of self and world more than I probably could ever realize. I owe much to him personally. I can only hope that the effects of his thought and life will continue to stir us up, challenge assumptions, revision, revise and re-enchant our thinking and perceptions of the world.

If you don’t know of him, I recommend making an adventure into exploring what Hillman has put out there. His critiques of culture, his efforts to re-enstate the mythic imagination, his searing analysis of the ways modern psychology got it so wrong and so much more can be found on YouTube, googled essays and interviews as well as in his many published books. The Thought of the Heart and the Soul of the World and Revisioning Psychology are two books that deeply influenced me.

Here is a link to a fine article from today’s New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/health/james-hillman-therapist-in-mens-movement-dies-at-85.html

I will mention just two of Hillman’s many articulations that have formed part of the lens through which I view the world. One: “You have to stop taking yourself so personally.” I increasingly understand that I am part of a play of patterns, archetypes, projections and alignments that I have nothing to do with creating or controlling, I can only be in the dance. My life isn’t personal in that sense, and I err if I take it personally. There are thousands of ways that those few words inform me. Two: Hillman’s notion that the repressed gods present themselves as symptoms. If I attempt to eliminate symptoms rather than embrace and get to the deep root of them, I miss out on messages and relationships with the gods themselves.

Thank you to this great man for his life of rigorous thinking and teaching. He will continue to shine as a sage and trickster from wherever he dwells, I know it.

I wrote last night about Stevie Wonder and loving the world that gave him, and us, the opportunity to feel Martin Luther King Jr.’s face on the memorial.  It’s so good.

Tonight I feel the same kind of gratitude for Jon Stewart.

If you don’t know whereof I speak, watch his show for October 17, 2011. Stream it from Comedy Central. His rifts on Mitt Romney, the Mormon question, Wall Street, and more.

I so love the world that puts a Jon Stewart in it. Oh my God, I love this world!