human potential

Saturday, June 14,2003

As always, I’m ready way early. I’ve been up, dressed, hung around the pier to get more of my fill of sea and waves and early morning. It isn’t quarter to eight yet and I’m entirely packed and waiting first for breakfast, then for the ferry – which isn’t due til 9:30. Better early, I suppose.

From last night:

1) I was in the middle of a dream. My wife in the dream and I were living separate. She came to me for comfort. I was in bed, under the covers, naked. She came into bed naked, and as she fitted her self against me, backing into my front, like spoons, my body got intensely charged with energy (not sexual energy), my hands especially. One moment I was in the dream; the next, I felt myself move into the waking state, my body remaining unmoving. It was the strangest transition. I think the fact that my body didn’t move made it more tangible somehow. (And now, transcribing this later, I remember that in a Monroe program eight years ago I once transitioned from an altered state to a normal waking state in just that way, and it was just as memorable then.)

2) I thought I was going to retrieve dad – which was confusing, since I’d seen him in Focus 25 in 1995 and had seen later that he was gone. I did go looking but can’t find him. There was something else, but I can’t remember it. In recording these dreams, I get a sense of how actively our internal life goes on with us mostly not aware of it.

Breakfast, then a chat with an Anglican minister who is a prison chaplain, on the bench waiting for the ferry to Mull. Aboard the ferry, I realize that I am very sad to be leaving. I hadn’t fully realized, emotionally, how I would hate to leave it. And all day, as I travel, it will seem to me that I am moving into denser and denser vibrations. Fanciful, probably. It is just traveling, after all. Still –

On the bus crossing Mull to Craignure, I think, “I’ve spent five days essentially in silence, though occasionally chatty enough. I feel (surrounded by talking pilgrims) that it may have sunk in. I don’t know that I want to go back to talking so much. But how many times have I said that?”

Craignure to Oban via another ferry ride, then Oban to Glasgow by train. I find a seat by a table, opposite a man reading a newspaper, and alternate between reading Merton’s journal and writing in mine.

“Reading Merton, it suddenly occurs to me, a difference, if not the difference, is that God is so personal to him, not in the sense that God seems to me – something we are part of, something transcendent yet partaking in humanity as in everything else. It seems as if God is a mere person to him (though I know that statement would have shocked him.) I am reluctant to say this so flatly; it is easy to unintentionally caricature another’s thought and beliefs. Still, I am searching for the key. Here is an intellectual, in a sense that I will never be even if I wished, and he has come to some sense of God that I cannot fathom. Surely it cannot be as simple as I seem to see it? How could he hold so simple – not to say simplistic – a concept?”

“One is – or anyway, I am – so apt to assume that others are okay and it is only I who cannot find satisfaction. But Merton in 1964 was complaining (justly, it seems) that he was spending too much time writing, for occasions too trivial or anyway incidental to his life. And certainly it seems he read far too much, far too compulsively. So to that degree he is a mirror image of my own complaint of producing too little. For if he produced too much, for too little reason, and often from reasons too intellectual and (self-consciously?) “artistic” – I produce too little, for too little reason, for reasons neither intellectual nor artistic, but – inertial? commercial? unorganized?

“Yet one sees that the version of his life we are familiar with was authentic enough, influential enough, regardless what might have been theoretically possible. Perhaps the same can be said for me. It’s just that it seems to have come to so little, and I am already older than he was when he died in Bangkok.

“It might be well if I took what we might call a vow of essential silence; that is, speaking only what is required and appropriate and otherwise just shutting up! How much energy I must waste in what might be called incontinent talking. Is this not what Merton was doing (or anyway accused himself of doing) with his pen? Nor is this the first time I’ve had this intuition. Time to heed it?”

“(2:30) Aha! Here it is. I think that we are coming to a more profound understanding of things than the Christians have. And our newer understanding is crying out for expression and cannot be contained in a simpler, different, understanding. It is not a matter of goodwill but of incompatibles.”

After a while the man opposite me at the table leans over and asks me, diffidently, “Are you Bill Bryson?” A big Bryson fan, apparently; has read all his books. Saw an American with a beard, writing, and hoped. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that I had read only one of Bryson’s books, and didn’t particularly like it. But I wish I had thought faster and had modestly admitted to being Bryson; it would have made his day. Quite a pleasant man. We get into a theological discussion (what, again?) that goes nowhere in particular. But a nice man.

We reach Queen Street station in Glasgow, and I get the bus across to Central Station, accompanying a blind man who seems to get around just fine. (He had lived for a while in America, and has a girlfriend there, he says.) Then a train to Ayr and a very comfortable wait at the station hotel for Russ and Jill Russell to meet me. I’m sitting there absorbed in Merton when I hear, “Well, there’s a peaceful scene,” and look up to see Russ and Jill smiling at me.

On to their lovely home and garden (and fish pond!), and supper with lots of salad and new potatoes. Difficult not to overeat. I tell them, “This is the house I would have liked to grow up in,” full of books and fine paintings. The evening goes in talk and companionship, left out of the journal, as such times usually are. One cannot live it and record it both.

Friday, June 13,2003

Eight dreams to transcribe.

1) I start to go outside, and a man steps aside for me, and lets me go first, and I go, and he stabs me! In the back. He’s going to do something but instead, I annihilate him with this blast of anger, an amazing thing. He’s literally not there on the field. There’s nothing left. It was a blast of anger, it just flashed. I’m wondering, what was that all about? I had just finished naming the seven deadly sins, of which anger is one. Susan had said I had all sorts of anger that I wasn’t aware of, that I was not wanting to have, because I was trying to be too “nice,” as she put it.

2) Nancy Dorman’s brother and I and somebody else come back from something and we’re going to leave something at her place. There’s a sign on the door that says “don’t knock.” Then we’re listening to her answering machine tape and for some reason we decide something happened to her when we were gone. We knock on the door and she opens it looking very sleepy and exasperated. Her brother says, “Well Nancy, we were worried about you because” [I forget why] and she explains that she had left a note saying not to wake her up, and we had somehow turned it all around. The common denominator there is the strength of my emotion, because I was really concerned, sure something had happened. I remember an unacknowledged sense of almost theatricality about the emotion of concern.

3) I forget the beginning part because I forgot it was a dream, but Susan and I and somebody are looking at greeting cards from the Iona Community and on the back of them it says “Peace, love and joy,” and she says. “Oh, they shouldn’t have joy in there,” and then I realized I was dreaming. (And in fact I didn’t get a sense that she was a joyous person in real life. She seemed to have great integrity, but not necessarily great joy.)

4) I was thinking about something and my hand worked the tape recorder. I was dreaming that I was taping!

5) Great satisfaction in the thought that I was sending her (whoever she was) back to her husband with my sperm in her.

6)  Explaining to somebody that at Monroe all the sessions went on quite regardless of Christianity. It wasn’t a factor one way or the other. There were all these places we’d left.

7) I was running with my cat, or dog, which didn’t usually run off the yard, but ran with me, racing. I jumped over a height from a tree, onto the yard of a neighbor I had when I was a kid. The cat — my favorite cat — jumped, missed, fell, and broke her neck I think. It was ghastly. But then followed a Grin ‘n’ Bear It cartoon, a sweatshirt saying Send Bush to the Moon or something.

8) Saying to dad in some disgust after he had pointed out that what I proposed was impractical, “Well okay, but it was a brilliant idea.”

Between dreams, recurrently, I get the sense that my left arm muscles are all contracted, the arm being pulled in on itself. By concentrating I can help the muscles to relax.

I feel different at breakfast. More at home, chatty for the first time. Afterward, I go walking to Columba’s Bay, using my tape recorder. And when I later come to transcribe the tape, I find dreams I hadn’t written out. But when had I had these dreams?

• [First part lost, perhaps taped over.] I thanked him and said to him and at least one other person that I had never understood how Hitler was able to get away with so much: It was because he manipulated the politicians and the politics of other countries, by owning them or by fear.
• The detective had just cracked the case, and he says to his assistant that he’ll be glad this is the last interrogation in this case, and the guy (who is himself a criminal or ex-criminal) says “Yeah, when you’re in a bad mood you’re really open about how you feel about me.” There was something about an electric burner on a stove. Atop it is an upside-down top of a pan, and on top of that was something, and on top of that was something else. Somehow the guy was going to indicate he was going to confess, by turning on the burner. When they picked up the top two things, they realized that the third one down was hot. That’s when they knew it was going to be all over.
• [__] challenges a man about some piece of theology, and he’s got two pieces of ham that he put on top of his sandwich; one one way and the other at right angles to it. The man said, “Well, you’re just saying that to embarrass me in front of our visitor,” (meaning me) and I said “I’m not going to get involved in it.”
• My wife, I guess, wanted us to join the Catholic church just for the sake of fitting in, even though everybody knew that I didn’t believe what was going on, what it was about.
• Thinking our house was overrun then by these forces, like being in the mountains and seeing something coming down from the mountain like spirit or wind or something.
• Here at the B&B, someone is about to drink something, and I say “it’s a matched cup.” They were surprised I’d recognize even the concept – whatever a matched cup may be.
• At the cash register after a meal, there’s a drawer there and you open the drawer and there’s the books they’re holding for you, if you have any. I pick one up and pay for it at the register. There was more to the dream, but I didn’t record it in time because I was lying in bed waiting to be served!
• Won the battle and lost the war, but what did it refer to? One was a rabbit, I think, and it was wild, and somehow allowed itself to be tamed, for the sake of food, maybe.
• A dog or something sees me up there across the way and comes chasing up after me, through brush. I’m not moving, and it’s expecting to chase me. But there’s something about the spirit in a way.
• Working with wood with an assistant. We have to take time out to find the right screwdriver to unscrew these long thin metal screws from the end of the wood. I had made something and the wood had splintered off, so I need to get my assistant to unscrew the piece that was left so that we can put a new piece on.

Now then, this is what I was speaking into the recorder during the morning hike to Columba’s Bay and back.

“It just came to me: It’s not a bridge from one to the other, it’s a bridge away from all of them. The schoolmen, the churchmen, the sciencemen – all of it! I’m going to ruthlessly steal everything we need, whether it’s theology, example, organization, whatever. Because I’m more confirmed this morning than I was when I went to bed, there’s no building bridges to them. But first I should review everything that’s gone on tonight and see what it looks like.”

Fish and chips for lunch, and a scone for later, and I settled up with the B&B. (Also became  a two-bit hero by using a pair of pliers to fix a loose piece on the toilet so that it would flush correctly.)  Again there will be no boat trip around the island because the swells are too high. So, I walk up to the beach at the north end, and at quarter to three I’m sitting on a park bench looking out toward islands that are followed by the Atlantic Ocean. There’s nothing I have to do, and no place I have to go.

It has been a remarkable four days and four nights: more time, perhaps, than I’ve spent on myself and on my own at least since college. If I had a project I could work on every day, and manual labor of some kind, I could stay here a long time. Imagine living with an ocean on all sides. And, by the way, this is the fifth time in four days that I am sitting in a place where there is no one around, although on this fifth time, unlike the first four, I can see and hear people. But I’m still alone. There were four times, one each day, when there was no one in sight, no one in sound.

My time on Iona is more or less up, and I have to return to the other world. Don’t know that I’m going to go home transformed in any fundamental way.

“There are some things that are required, and one is that any substitute for religion – or for this religion, anyway – must deal with the heart, and not just with the head. Not even primarily with the head. At the same time, it must be as intellectually respectable as we can find. That is, we must do our best with what we have, to make sense of what we have experienced. But the experience comes first. Interpretation comes second, and dogma or theory come a hell of a long way third. And we need to restore the difference between authority and power. Authority comes because someone knows or can do. Power comes because they have the ability to punish or to hurt.

“Since this is a time when everything is coming apart, it is also a time when everything can come together in new forms and packages. Schoolmen system is gone. Same with religious. And science, the religion of rationality, is still disgracing itself. So the question becomes – in what way can science, spirituality, religion, education, and art come back to form an organic, whole, healthy unit. No one today can answer that question.

“And it just occurred to me: You don’t build bridges to shipwrecks. You might throw them a line.”

Thursday, June 12,2003

At six I go up to the Mac and find a large building that very much looks like communal living. Warm enough, inviting enough, but way too big for normal life. Courtesy of Susan’s invitation, I partake in their common meal on the last night of their weekly visitors’ stay. She tells me she is not impressed by the level of spirituality; says it is more like her idea of a church summer camp. There isn’t for her what she had hoped.

After the meal, she and I find a quiet place to talk. I am quite open with her. I tell her I would like to build a bridge between what I call the metaphysical types and the Christians. She says to me – meaning to help – that all my searching is because I am angry with God and haven’t accepted God. This doesn’t ring true to me. (Later I think maybe it was projection: She does not seem to be a joyful person.) She says I need to give up my will and be willing to do whatever God wants. I tell her, I did that years ago. Finally she asks me to answer one question: Have I accepted Jesus as my personal savior.

This question is asked with all good intent. She likes me, she really would like to help me, she really thinks she is giving me the word. The effect is the opposite of what she would have wished, but, oddly enough, it is just what I need. For I realize, as she asks me this question, that there is no responding to it, because the only honest response would to be ask her what the question means. To her it’s perfectly obvious, and she will take any questioning as an evasion or an attempt to play word games.

Quite suddenly I realize, it’s useless to ask what she means, and useless to attempt any bridging across that gulf. With Christians, even discontented, spiritually awake Christians, it always comes down to the same point: Accept Jesus as your personal savior and all else is resolved. For Christians know; they have the key; they cannot learn from you or even from your questions, because they know. Nothing you know of feel or have experiences is of any use to them at all. So, beyond a certain point, there is no dialogue with them; it is like arguing with a communist.

Her well-meant charge to me has the unexpected effect of suddenly freeing me to be who I am. I will waste no more time trying to build bridges. I will say what I know. If Christians want to claim the Bible and God and Christ and goodness and holiness and charity, etc., let them claim all they want. But I will calmly take what is mine, whether they pretend to ownership or not. If there is no bridging over to the churches, there isn’t.

So let us take what we need and lump the rest. The medieval contemplatives and others who strove for what I would call higher consciousness may serve to be our guides. The disputation over facts of existence etc. we can leave to others. Let us leave the Christians alone and be only our truest selves, and if we are good our goodness will shine forth, and we will attract others of like goodness. If we are not good – if we fall into anger, pride, envy, gluttony, sloth, covetousness, lust – we will draw to us what we are. By our fruits let us be known.

Furthermore, and henceforth, let us boldly appropriate whatever in Christianity is good, as in any other religion or way of belief – taking it as our birthright, regardless of apologies or exegesis.

I do believe I may have just gotten what I came to Iona to get. Ironic, isn’t it? My goodness, I’m energized, and liberated! Enough trying to bridge incompatibles! I’m free! We’ll see what it comes to.

So, I read Merton discussing his reading, and think, what is he talking about? (Susan didn’t use the term “the wrath of God,” but she did say that God is angry and getting angrier. She didn’t seem to know that anger is one of the seven deadly sins. Perhaps this is Catholic theology.) So much of Merton’s world depends on God versus the devil, with all these medieval arguments I have no patience with. It is obviously true that I don’t have the background to understand it all – but we don’t need background today, we need the water of life and health, and we are not being given it. Scholarship can go too far, and destroy what it examines.

It will be telling, whether this mood lasts. It would be nice to be really on my feet. What a relief, to look forward to saying just what I think, to one and all, right or not, provisional or not, informed or not. Surely this must have been a great block in my writing? And it stemmed from talking to Susan, which stemmed from her inviting me to supper, which stemmed from my giving her the book, which stemmed, originally, from my trying to give her some energy because she was tired. All but the first cause took place today, right after I came down from the mountains. It feels like some blockage, either in will or in communication, has been blown out.

I decide to try to do two long walks tomorrow, to the north and to the south. I pack, so that I’ll feel I have plenty of time during the day tomorrow, leaving out only what I will use on Friday and travel in on Saturday. I continue reading Merton, still amazed at the time and effort he expended on what seem to me inessential questions – nearly nonexistent, because not really real – that seemed real enough to him and to those whose books he is reading. But then, he was an intellectual and I am not.

Thursday, June 12,2003

At 8 a.m. I record a couple things from the night’s tape recording.

I’m lying here, not dreaming, not asleep, yet all this stuff has been going through my mind generally, gradually. I don’t know where it comes from.

Something very appropriate in my lying here in sleep mask and earplugs. It’s like isolating myself from everything around me for this purpose. But I’ve done that my whole life, without the results I would hope for, and I’m thinking, maybe I need to go more into the world. Perhaps if I could find a proper venue I could write an article about the spiritual nervous breakdown caused by the Protestant revolution and the materialist revolution that followed.

It would be an unusual mixture of elements because it would take for granted that:

• we are many lives joined, and that
• these lives contend within us, and that
• changes in civilization result in parts of ourselves fighting violently or actively or quietly or in whatever manner, against each other, we being the battleground.

Stuff the guys have told Rita and me would be much background on it. And I begin to sense that the book on what they have said has more to do with this than with the fact that they said it. Perhaps the book has lacked a point of application to individuals, and this is it, or part of it.

A view across to Mull

After breakfast I find what I have been looking for: a comfortable bench to sit on; a view of town and sea and Mull ahead of me; sunlight so bright as to require sunglasses for the first time.

But then I find a gate that leads inward toward the hills. A local woman says it is all right to go through as long as I tie the gate firmly behind me. So after a while I am perched looking westward at one more set of hills that overlook the Atlantic. But between me and them is not only a valley but a fence. A good excuse to stop here anyway. Another lovely day. I left Dun I yesterday when I saw clouds coming in. I didn’t want to be caught out in the open with hills to climb and descend in the rain. I suppose I exaggerated the danger  (it’s a small island, after all) but how much space does it take to break your leg or arm – or your neck, come to that. It’s hard, in unfamiliar surroundings, to estimate risk.

An Iona hillside

I have found a spot with no one in sight or sound of me. Just grass, or whatever it is, and rock, and sky — and sheep droppings. Paradise? I invite David to talk into my tape recorder. Nothing. Then a few minutes later I feel him come through:

“If by transformation you think that you mean walking to a place, becoming instantly transformed, and walking away a different man, your ideas are more romantic than realistic. It is as your friend Richard said, you go to a holy spot not to go one person and become another, but to be infected, and by being infected be able to then infect others. You know in a different part of your mind that this is what you’ve been doing at Iona; at Machu Picchu [in 1999]; at Avebury; Salisbury [both in 2001]; at Monticello [various times], for that; at Skye [in 1970], long before you knew what you were doing – nor did you have any part in the planning of it; at Sligo; at Yeats’ lake; at Yeats’ tower; in the Ox mountains; Galway Bay; Connemara particularly [all in 1976];

“If you will remember, every time you went to any tourist place, you attempted to feel your way into that time, and came away always discouraged because you did not feel that you could do it. You wished away the asphalt and the cars, the airplanes, the buildings, all of 20^th  century America – even your fellow people; even to a degree yourself. All of which of course is impossible and undesirable.

“But while your conscious mind was attempting to pretend that it was back in another time, another level of yourself was using the physical locality as a means of re-connecting with another person. Most particularly the time in Wyoming when you were there with your friend and your wife and your sister-in-law and you went prowling around the perimeter of a bygone fort, feeling stirred but not knowing why, wanting to connect and not knowing how, and this I should think would be obvious.

“So on one level you are accomplishing exactly what it is you want to do, because on this island you will find that there is a pattern to be discerned. First you went south, then north, now you’re in the hills in the center. As you pin down precisely where you’ve been – particularly the two hills – you will find a grounding at each place, a grounding in a certain order.

“Now, you will also notice that your unaccustomed silence, your uncomfortable and perplexing silence at breakfast times, is connected with the reconnection with other places and other times. This is not to go into ‘why,’ but it will uncover itself. Your inability to communicate in an easy, human way with your fellow pilgrims, your inability to overcome the “ministership” of one of your pilgrims particularly, will reveal itself as intimately connected with the process that is going on here.

“You seem strange to them. It’s not the kind of strange that repels, it’s the kind that somewhat fascinates, at least interests. Anyone looking at you can see that you’re not (I hesitated to say) entirely here. But after all, you just opened your eyes in the midst of this and found yourself on this rocky crag somewhat to your surprise, as has happened repeatedly. When you first closed your eyes and meditated today, and opened your eyes again, where you are, where you have been, where you’ve not left, seemed somewhat strange to you. You needn’t fret yourself so much about getting something done, or accomplishing something by a given moment. Living and enjoying the moment is [wind noise drowns out the word].”

Then I go clambering around, and after a while I come down near the Iona Community gift shop. I do a little more shopping, and give a copy of my novel Messenger to the woman I’d offered energy to on Tuesday, who I will call Susan. (I had brought it for Robert but somehow hadn’t gotten it to him.) She invites me to supper at the MacLeod Center at six. This I take to be something happening at last.

The 2 p.m. boat around the island again doesn’t go out (conditions too rough) so I decide to sit and quietly read.

Wednesday, June 11,2003

At suppertime, I ask myself if I am getting bored on Iona. “I don’t think so, but I haven’t much experience in doing nothing. Not that what I do usually amounts to anything, but it does fill the time. Here, I have been letting the time go, as the three hours I spent on the hillside this morning. It is as if I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to talk to, no project underway, for the first time in my life. Not true, but as if. I am more distracted by routine customarily than even I knew.

“But my life has somehow passed me by! And what would have filled it better? Family? Perhaps family was not quite the obstacle it seemed – but it certainly seemed obstacle enough. There wasn’t much of intentional me there.”

Later, “This supper will mark the end of two days here. Is it being a success? The evenings have dragged because I have gone to bed too early. I could find a bench by the sea and continue reading The Cloud of Unknowing, as I was doing a while ago this afternoon. Perhaps tomorrow I will take a boat ride around the island. I wouldn’t want to miss seeing so much that I don’t think I would be able to, else. But I didn’t come here for the scenery, did I? Not in that sense. I came to be transformed by it. Is this occurring? Can it? Could it?

“I intend self-transformation. The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing would argue that one is transformed by God, if at all. We on earth can only – only! – add willingness, or refuse it. And he would have warned against pride, and rightly so. It is so clear that he knows what he talks of; that he intends to help his readers, even those unknown. (Could he have dreamed, would he have cared, that he was actively speaking to readers 700 years in his future?) He saw everything strictly within the Christian belief. Is he right that it is everlasting? Or is it true that the passing of the Age of Pisces means eventually the passing of the age of Christianity, and the birth and development of new forms and perhaps new content? I wish I could find a way to reconcile the truths of the different systems of understanding and belief.

“Why me? Well, who else is interested in doing it? Perhaps there are many, as anonymous as I, but if only by virtue of that anonymity, I know of them not. It seems to me I am alone.

“In Robert I saw the man of dreams, who finds God speaking to him; whose life was saved by dreams, by attention to dreams. In Michael I saw the passionate, angry crusader for social justice, the man who projects out of body routinely, the dissenter from all traditional religions. In Findhorn I saw the intentional community seeking to marry social activism with transcendent spirituality, again separate from Christianity. Inverness seemed to me only commercial activity, though of course I could not expect to meet anyone of spirit even if they were there on all sides. At breakfast that day I saw Swedes who were, it seemed, so unaware of alternative forms of Christianity as to describe themselves as Christians rather than Lutherans. And I see here a young minister-to-be, very pleasant, apparently open – yet his church insists on a Saturday Sabbath as an important point, which tells me that for him, for them, it all rests on their interpretation of God’s commands as stated (if only sometimes by implication) in the Bible.

“And then there were those lives of saints: Brendan, Cuthbert, and the one I’ve scarcely started, Wilfred. And Merton, and the Iona Community, and The Cloud of Unknowing, and in the background of my mind the readers of Magical Blend magazine, and Neale Walsch’s readers, and the varied readership of Hampton Roads.

“Perhaps it is as simple as ‘all paths are good.’ Perhaps there is no task here needed to be accomplished. Or perhaps the path to set out for people is The Pathless Path, following their heart; living, or striving to live, in love. But I do not yet know. Perhaps in a couple of days it will come clearer.”

At 8:30 I ask myself why I am going to bed so early here, and decide it is because there is nothing to do but read or go outside; I hope to be contacted by dreams or other experiences, and I am tired from active days. So I go to bed. But I’m up again half an hour later to record something I’d forgotten, and then I wind up reading some of Merton, and one thing leads to another. At one point, I play around trying to find a good acronym for the seven deadly sins of pride, anger, lust, envy, covetousness, gluttony and sloth, with no good result unless you count LEG CAPS, rather like kneecaps, but different. (Some people have too much time on their hands, says I!)

It consoles me, though perhaps it shouldn’t, that Merton had so much trouble with his life. If he did, why should I not? But he had done so much, so early, and died at only 53. But I am struck by his incessant reading and pondering. (Sound familiar?) Yet some of his concerns seem so unreal. For instance, what is meant by “the wrath of God?” Does God have a bad temper? Does it mean that he can’t stand what he’s seeing, even though he has restricted himself from interfering? What does it mean? Anger is one of the seven deadly sins, is it not?

The theology Christians take for granted, and build upon, or dispute about, seems so far not only from our stupid materialist society’s superstitions and irrelevancies, but from any honest searching that proceeds independently of churches. Yet if rooted in reality such concerns must have their translation somewhere. Where? The wrath of God – what does it mean, outside Christian thought? And if it means nothing, what does this reflect on? Christian thinking? Non-Christian thinking? Language? Translation? Where is the Perry Miller [a famous historian] who will hack a couple of trails into this forest?

Wednesday, June 11,2003

Three dreams on the tape recorder:

1) I almost didn’t recognize it as a dream, more like a daydream. At the end we are in a boat, way at the top of a hill. Lying there, feeling the motion of the boat I’d taken to and from Staffa. We – whoever “we” are – came out the back door, and there’s this long, long, long way down to the water.

2) The two ladies from the Iona Community gift shop, in the office by their desks. Suddenly they collapsed downward. That is, they disappeared, as though they had been angels rather than people.

3) There was some kind of building work being done in the church. And there was a man working who was somewhat skillful. I was involved with it at a less skilled level. The man had to quit. He couldn’t do it any more, there was something wrong. The posture hurt his feet, or something. I offered to do the work, or was asked, I forget which. The woman in charge of the thing said I had great [force?] The idea was that I could do the job, and otherwise it couldn’t be done. [Robert will send me some clarifying thoughts on these dreams after I return home. See Iona (16).]

I notice during the night that I was reluctant actually to record dreams. I was almost too reluctant to think about them. I didn’t reach for the recorder. It seemed too much trouble. Which is highly suspicious, since that is what I was waiting for, and wanting, since the night before when I had six. But again, this seems to be a case of when you search for something, it flees from you.

After breakfast, on this sunny morning, I climb to the highest point on the island, Dun I pronounced “done ee.” Not very high, a matter of 300 feet, but a nice interesting climb, what with wet heather, uncertain footing, sheep droppings, and periodic steep climbs that sometimes require a bit of thought, whether going up or coming down. After getting to the top, I find a spot sheltered from the unceasing wind, a little to the north of the highest point. I have my field glasses (one of the few times I remember to use them). Sitting there, I can see all the north end of the Island, which looks like an English village, all fields interrupted by houses, and sheep all over the place. All the east is taken up by the long island of Mull. Staffa is in sight to the north, and to the northwest and west the islands of Tiree and Coll. As I sit, I take a few pictures, and I talk to my tape recorder as thoughts come, and mainly I just exist there with the wind and the clouds, and the sea, and a few birds and many distant sheep. The shadows of the swiftly moving clouds wash over the land like little schools of fish going by. After a while a few tourists go by within sight, but none within talking distance. I have nothing to do, and half a bar of chocolate, and a container of water, and even a package of oatcakes. I could stay all day if I wanted to.

I spend some time writing and thinking. I write: “I’d like to be the one who helped restore the church but it just can’t be within Christianity as they understand it, or within the metaphysical churches as they understand it. There’s got to be a new way. And it may be that the new way won’t be called a church at all. It seems a shame, though, to have all these people in their belief systems cut off from people in other belief systems when at their roots, somewhere back in other lives, they may be united and fighting against each other [internally]. That’s not the only reason it’s a shame, of course.”

At about 10:30 I say, standing there, “Let my ministry begin here, in this place, in this time, and just show me what it’s to be – because I’m 56 years old!”

Richard Leviton had given me a mediation to do, to connect with sacred sites, and four years ago I had done it when my friend Charles Sides and I went to Machu Picchu. This time, instead of that, I go to the mental state that Monroe calls Focus 27. Coming down from 27, ready and willing to do soul retrievals, I search for anyone left over from battles between Norsemen and monks, but I don’t find anybody, so I suppose all is well.

“I’m tempted to say “I just don’t see any way to go forward,” but that’s silly. Instead I say, “here’s where I’m finding out how to go forward.” Whether I want to or not, right?”

I note how much the chocolate bar in my backpack calls to me. What a slave I am. Yet while I’m thinking about eating, I am well aware that the process of digestion will interrupt what I’m doing. “Whatever it is that I’m doing.”

About noon, I come down off the hill, go back to the Iona Community gift shop and buy some things for gifts. I stop in at the Spar store and buy a turkey and cranberry sandwich. (My favorite, and I thought I’d invented that sandwich combination!)

Back at the B&B, I play a Hemi-Sync relaxation CD. I bring nothing back but the thought that “a lot of what seem like daydreams come up during the long preparatory process, and I suspect that Bob Monroe knew it.” (The significance of that, though, escapes me as I transcribe this 10 days later.)

I begin reading The Cloud of Unknowing, a mystical classic, firmly in the center of Western tradition, written by an anonymous Christian in the 1100s. I feel very much at home with him. I know that my Gateway experiences must resemble his, and I know that love is the way. I understand what he says as he says it. Except – Except – How is it to be reconciled? Original sin? Well, the separation is real, perhaps the perversion of the soul is real. But how are we to reconcile the one central difference? It is true that Jesus is the question that cannot be talked away, though it can be – and is – endlessly talked around. Yet the author of this very clear book says straightway that its techniques should only be used by a committed Christian, lest they lead to mischief. How do we react to that?

The thing is, The Cloud of Unknowing is so clearly written out of experience. (As was my own book, for that matter.) There is no arguing with experience, only with the conclusions drawn from it, or the interpretation of it. If he has had these experiences, he speaks from knowledge. How then can we of another age, another understanding of life, reconcile his experience and ours? Truth must always tend to converge. If we cannot find how to reconcile his experience with ours, the fault must be with us; it cannot be with truth.

Tuesday, June 10,2003

So I take the little boat to Mull (I am the only Iona passenger), where we pick up a boatful of others, and then to Staffa. A fun ride. Part of me is apprehensive about going on the sea, and another part revels in it, adjusting to it like riding a horse, and enjoys the whole trip first to last. Maybe someone who died at sea is less prominent than he used to be when on the water.

Staffa from the south looks like a ship heading west, one of those low-lying cargo ships you see sometimes, where the bulk of it is in the stern and the front is just a prow cutting the water. We get off, clamber around for an hour, and get back on for the return trip. Interesting, but I haven’t had any mystical experiences in Fingall’s Cave. Just used people’s cameras to take pictures of them, and took some of my own, and was fortunate enough to wind up in the cave alone for a while. We return not to Mull but to Iona: Those from Mull are getting two or three hours to see Iona before their return trip. Hah! Tourists! I live here, for the moment. (-:

My laundry is ready, in my room. I buy a big candy bar and ask for a quiet place to read or write (my room has no convenient table) and am given the keys to the lounge at another building. So I ask my friend –

“David, before I go looking for shops and maybe supper, any thoughts on today? For today has seemed a bit touristy.”

“There’s no harm that will do you. If you fear shallowing out – do a Monroe tape if nothing else. Meanwhile enjoy your time here. You are not required to take orders in any sense of the word, just only be here at this time.”

I go out, and walk toward the 12^th century abbey that is the main religious structure on the island. I go to the Iona Community shop across the road, thinking to do some shopping for certain people, but I succeed only in buying books for myself: a volume of Thomas Merton’s Journals, and Iona: God’s Energy: The Spirituality and Vision of the Iona Community, by the current leader of the community.

In the community shop, an interaction that will lead to important consequences. A woman who is sitting in a window seat by the book section of the gift shop complains to someone of being tired, and when she is alone I go up to her and say that where I’m from, we know how to give people energy, and I’ll be glad to do so if she wishes. She asks if I’m talking about Reiki, and I say those are just words, it’s all the same energy. She sort of humors me, saying I can try but people have tried to do this before and it never works on her. Now, interestingly, as I work, I do not feel any sense that she is rejecting the energy, nor do I pick up the kind of know-it-all-ism you get from some people that ensures it won’t work so they won’t have to adjust their belief system. In fact, I can feel the flow – but she claims nothing happened, and that she’s just tired because she’s tired, etc. A mechanistic understanding of it. So we left it at that, and although I notice that she goes back to work and seems less tired, I say nothing about it. I buy my books and leave, wondering how open to reaching out this community is.

Then into the restored church itself. As I start walking the first side of the cloisters, something emerges from within, and I am in tears. But then my automatic clamp clamps, and that is all I know about it.

I make a supper of some oatcakes and a tin of herring fillets. Last night’s supper was too expensive by far, I decide, and so this makes up for it. It isn’t yet six. I could still go out, as there are hours of daylight left, but I have walked my feet off. Instead I begin to read Iona: God’s Energy, and after a while I pull out my journal and ask what relevance it has for me. Where’s my potential contribution? The author’s description of spirituality makes me ask why a church – even a seemingly ecumenical church – must be so rejecting of those who have so much to offer. The need is there on both sides, and often the willingness, and occasionally the understanding. Where is the common path?

“I had begun to fantasize some connection – perhaps based on my little interaction with the woman at the center’s store – but it is like Findhorn in a different way. Not my community.

“But damn it, there’s a far deeper issue than merely me. The question is, how is society to be regenerated? Not by a closed sectarianism, not by a spirituality so personal as to omit the community. But – mostly – not by any attempt to require belief in certain “givens.” Not by reliance on someone’s interpretation of scripture as the final word.

“This fellow Matthew belongs to a church that celebrates the Sabbath on Saturday. It is an important thing to them. Why? Who cares? They would say, “God cares,” and scarcely anyone would agree both that 1) God cares, and 2) God agrees with their interpretation. So they condemn themselves to isolation from the other churches. And those others do the same thing, insisting on doctrinal points of no significance unless one can accept that God laid down in scriptures rules for conduct, rules for precise application, tests of obedience. And this is precisely what churches do think, and there’s the source of their irrelevance. They prevent the emergence of a common accepted path. So if they will not, others will – or won’t.

“What is the significance in all this for me? When I read that the Iona community is mostly spread out, I thought, “perhaps we can create a Monroe community, an extended, geographically diverse community, dedicated to mutual support of certain values, that our exploration may be supported by society and may produce results in that society. But so far, at least, I cannot see how this can be. Perhaps I shall receive a dream showing me the way.”

Ha! Little do I know! The way forward is going to be indicated not by a dream but by something in waking life, rooted in my initial gift of love that was my offer of energy to the tired woman.

I go to bed early, but I lie in bed, twitching, unable to sleep. Too much coffee or, more likely, chocolate. I notice an undercurrent as I think about the day: a week from now I will be getting ready to return. I tell myself I must make this trip come to something. How?

“I see in the intro to Dancing in the Water of Life – volume five of Merton’s journals, purchased today – that Merton saw a private and a public function to keeping a journal; hence, to writing; hence, to the spiritual search, though this is not expressly said. One gets oneself honestly situated, then one passes whatever one knows to the public.

“Perhaps from genuine humility (of which I have more than many suspect), perhaps from diffidence or even false modesty (no shortages there either) I have tended not to contribute to the public dialogue. Partly from lack of knowledge of how things work, partly from the fact that my life is realer to me than the lives around me. But perhaps it is time, and past time. Or perhaps it is not, and perhaps it never will be!”