MISSION IMPOSSIBLE!

I was so excited about this new understanding and clarity that had been gifted to me that I had to tell others. As I began talking, I was met with blank stares and uncomprehending faces. I was talking, but clearly, I was not communicating.

I was learning from personal experience why William James, in his book Varieties of Mystical Experience, wrote that mystical experiences are ineffable. I was learning why Buddhists wrote, “Words are fingers pointing at the moon. They are not the moon.” I was beginning to understand Alfred Korzybski’s words, “The map is not the territory.” I was beginning to understand why “the Tao that can be spoken is not the Eternal Tao.”

The blank stares and uncomprehending faces caused me to pull back and start looking at the words I was using. How could I use analytic, divisive words to communicate a unifying holistic experience? It was like trying to hammer a nail using a screwdriver. It was like a Zen koan, a “paradox to be meditated upon that is used to train Zen Buddhist monks to abandon ultimate dependence on reason and to force them into gaining sudden intuitive enlightenment.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/koan.

I tried didactic teaching, but that clearly didn’t work. All it did was throw me into self-righteousness. I was very clear that that was a “space” in which I did not want to function. I began telling stories, asking questions, writing poetry, and playing with alliteration, metaphor, and allegory.

My writing was beginning to evolve into word art, and away from any attempt to communicate “Truth” or “Knowledge”. That felt more in integrity, but I still couldn’t answer that life purpose question: “How can I use analytic, divisive words to communicate a unifying holistic experience?”

Why do strange, unexpected thoughts suddenly pop into your head out of nowhere?” I don’t know, but I know that they do.

After working and playing with words for 15 years and struggling unsuccessfully to answer that “life purpose” question, it suddenly occurred to me to change one word in the question. What if I were to change the word “communicate” to “facilitate.”

The question then became, ““How can I use analytic, divisive words to facilitate a unifying holistic experience?” That was do-able, but it required me to stand fully in my own creative and co-creative power. That was both humbling and terrifying.

Could I do it? How could I do it?

It felt like “Mission Impossible”! Who did I think I was to take on such an important mission?

Andrew Harvey once said, “Why don’t you simply model who you are?” But who was I?

The questions that kept flowing through my mind still felt like life purpose questions. I still felt driven, but now I was driven, not to talk about the change I wanted to see in the world, but to BE the change I wanted to see in the world. Part of that change was learning how to use my words consciously, alchemically, and intentionally to cocreate order out of chaos, peace out of dissonance, abundance out of lack, courage and moral strength out of fear, integrity out of rage, and POWER WITH dynamics out of “Power over,” “Power under,” and Power against” dynamics.