Beneath the Surface

I N T R O D U C T I O N

This is not a scientific treatise. Many pieces of a working hypothesis deserve to be examined. I am presenting an idea about a human wholeness that we’ve lost and are ready to reclaim. But that reclamation involves a process of reunification. Writing and reading, as a linear left-brain function, cannot easily serve that process well. The reader could, in fact, use this book to serve the separation by creating new definitions and thought compartments to reinforce our dichotomized thinking. Herein both the poetry and the science may irritate you. They poke each other. They want to simultaneously engage the attention of both sides of our brain and have them find themselves in each other. The reader can experience this with nagging frustration or integrating challenge. To fully share in the writer’s experience, the reader will do both.

This book has three parts.

In chapters 1–5, I celebrate and explore gravity, touch, and shared energy as creative sources in our evolution, as fonts for our uniquely human nature. I’ve structured these chapters to encourage connection of the body, feelings, and the mind in remembering our origins, a journey from grooming to language. Shared myth has been well used for this purpose, but myth has also been used to disconnect from experience, to hide from the truth of compromising choices. In invitation, my words can only suggest my felt reality and hopefully offer a few arrows along a path of personal exploration of the deep, primal echoes in the soul.

Chapters 6–8 of the book focus on herding, especially shepherding in the Middle East, and the shifts in human consciousness that accompanied it. The herder’s thinking and belief systems have had profound effects on Western civilization. In the herding experience, we can find the wound of separation between the masculine and feminine consciousness in each of us. The Hebrew and Christian scriptures give insight into both the gifts and wounds from that seminal herding experience. The understanding that can emerge from confronting herding choices may offer a key to freeing the masculine human soul from a heavy load of fear. Through projection and identification, how we managed sheep and cattle has reflected back into our self-assessment and shaped our human culture with cruelty as well as wealth. In this section, I keep to my own culture because that is what I know intuitively, and I do not try to project onto other cultures. By that choice, I do not suggest these ideas are confined to just Western culture.

The third part is about healing, reclamation, and reattunement. We can use touch and shared energy for healing while controlling contagion. We have “paid attention” to some things by shutting other things completely out of our attention. We ignored our breath, our most basic connection to life, as we industrialized and citified. Our growth carried both a high price and very great rewards. As we mature emotionally, I believe that we can learn to hold both-and rather than either-or and thus reclaim much of what we have paid for our progress this far. Section three shares some ideas for holding a more open attention that invites perception on several levels: our ego, our sensate self, and the shared consciousness. Perhaps we regain the comfort and benefits in the shared energy of touch, we’ll transcend isolating personal space, not only reclaiming what was lost but growing with new intentionality. Unity consciousness is not something we can “get”. It will always surprise us with new creativity. But we can recognize that we are always playing in it. We can grow in talent and insight for searching the both-and spaciousness of it all. It is my prayerful intention that this book be an instrument for nurturing wholeness, harmony, and radiance in our evolving human consciousness.