The hero’s journey takes him away from the organized comfort of the ‘known’ to explore the mystery of ‘what is’—and his insights will bring new life to his world once they have been integrated. With each generation, what the world requires in the way of ‘life-giving perspectives’ changes—and so the specific nature of the hero’s task changes as well. Speaking of the nature of that task half a millennium ago, Joseph Campbell noted,
Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the co-ordinated soul … the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the world spiritually significant.177
By hoarding his spiritual center of gravity within himself, the tyrant drains spiritual relevance from the world. The contemporary challenge of reopening our hearts to the living grace of the world around us is made both more difficult and more likely by the perspectives we have gathered in our far-flung explorations of space, matter, life and humankind. Half a millennium ago most people could look to the star-pierced sky and know that God had placed each twinkling jewel there for our eyes only, and that our Earth was the still center around which all else revolved. The scientific advancements that on the one hand disabused us of those presumptions have, on the other, led us to recognize an even deeper affinity with those far-flung heavenly furnaces: the matter from which we are made, and from which all life on earth is constituted, was forged in such furnaces. Staring into the night sky, we behold our light-suffused origins; and through the limitlessly refined web of the quantum mechanical world, we are still bound to them, as they are to us. By individuating from Being we have gathered perspectives that demonstrate our indissoluble connection to Being. But such perspectives by themselves, however earnestly we acknowledge and affirm them, will serve only to direct us tyrannically; until an idea is integrated, it will remain judicative and authoritative. The real issue, then, is how to regain our axial consciousness, that those perspectives might journey to the center of our being and join it, changing it and being changed in turn—birthing new responses and new responsibilities. And that raises the question: what does it even mean to integrate a perspective?
We might address that question by considering an example of the mythic journey of the hero from our own day: the NASA moon landing. That mission exemplifies the hero’s journey in its simplest form: when the astronauts took flight, they executed an ultimate defection from the status quo—departing from Mother Earth and leaving her familiar terrain far behind. They sailed to an unknown landscape and walked upon it, impressing upon its face the first footprints ever recorded there. Their boon secured, they returned—changed by their experience, which itself in turn changed their community. Jean Houston was assigned to work with the astronauts to help them remember what they saw as they walked on the moon, but despite hypnosis, meditation and active imagination exercises, they didn’t recall a whole lot. Finally, one of them told Jean she was asking the wrong question—what really mattered wasn’t what they saw on the moon, it was what they saw as they were coming back to earth; the black and utter dark of the universe all around, punctuated by numberless pinpricks of white light—and floating within that infinity was this anomaly, this pastel orb revolving slowly through space. Looking closely, as a later astronaut Ulf Merbold described it, you could see that the curved horizon
was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.178
Cosmonaut Boris Volynon explained,
During a space flight, the psyche of each astronaut is reshaped. Having seen the sun, the stars, and our planet, you become more full of life, softer. You begin to look at all living things with greater trepidation and you begin to be more kind and patient with the people around you.179
Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin noted,
Looking at the Earth from afar you realize it is too small for conflict and just big enough for cooperation.180
These men may have left to conquer, but the perspectives they achieved awakened in them a hero’s submission to ‘what is’, in all its fragile mystery, and rendered the world spiritually significant. On his way back from the moon, Edgar Mitchell gazed out the window and “suddenly experienced the universe as intelligent, loving, harmonious”; and the Earth itself as “a glimpse of divinity.”181
The Earth as photographed from space was the most powerful single image of the twentieth century—and, I have heard, the most commonly published image in all of history. It gave us a perspective of ‘what is’ that has transformed our consciousness, though we have only begun to integrate it—for seen from space, the Earth is a living, dynamic sphere in constant flux, with no sign of national boundaries or ethnic conflicts, no evidence of ownership of its resources, no endorsement for any one of its ideologies. Having once seen the Earth from space and fully integrated that perspective, you could not return to walk its meadows and feel its rain in quite the same way ever again. And that brings us to another marked difference between a perspective that is integrated and one that is not. An unintegrated perspective carries no responsibility: segregated from Being, it lacks the ability to respond to it—the first condition of any responsibility. An integrated perspective, on the other hand, cannot but confer new responsibility: it is not just connected to Being; it has been fully accommodated into it, so that the newness of its vision augments the unhesitating and unthinkably sensitive responsiveness of Being itself.
To resist such responsibilities is common enough, because responsibilities carry consequences; but any such resistance impairs our ability to respond in general: it is a form of neglect that leaves us dulled. When we seek to ‘know the thing in part’, as the young student of Noh was attempting to do, we are discounting the body’s intelligence, which is the source of our wholeness, and of the compassion that accompanies it. The hero’s task of integration, then, requires that we liberate the body’s intelligence from the artifices of isolation, and open it to the one shared and ordinary present. When Joseph Campbell said that the hero-deed our age faces is that of rendering the “modern world spiritually significant,” that is what he was referring to: retrieving the felt self from the shattered world of the ‘known self’; retrieving the One from the shattered world of the many. That was the hero-deed of the astronauts: they carried back to us evidence of the One, refuting all our attachments to the fractured many. So although we can understand the hero as an agent of the cycle, helping to bring the season of spring to the frozen community, the ultimate calling of the hero is of greater moment. As Campbell writes,
The supreme hero, however, is not the one who merely continues the dynamics of the cosmogonic round, but he who re-opens the eye—so that through all the comings and goings, delights and agonies of the world panorama, the One Presence will be seen again.182
As we look over the comments made by returning astronauts, that is precisely what comes through their words: the sense that the inner eye has been opened to the One Presence. Once we understand that the nature of the hero’s journey is a quest for perspective and integration, we can see that his role is to bridge worlds that have been sundered: to bridge male and female; familiar community and cosmic mystery; knowing and feeling; past and present; perspective and Being. But his ultimate task is to bridge the human world with the all-aware unity of the divine whole.
Myth remains, necessarily, within the cycle, but represents this cycle as surrounded and permeated by the silence. Myth is the revelation of a plenum of silence within and around every atom of existence.… Even in the most comical and apparently frivolous of its moments, mythology is directing the mind to this unmanifest which is just beyond the eye.183
The supreme achievement of the hero, then, is to resensitize us to the silent Source. In that regard we might say of myth, as T. S. Eliot said of poetry, that the chief use of the ‘meaning’ of a myth may be to satisfy one habit of the reader, to keep his mind diverted and quiet, while the myth does its work upon him184—enabling him to feel the ‘unmanifest’. By the same token, we can understand that the great mistake of the tyrant is that he “has occluded the source of grace with the shadow of his limited personality,”185 as Joseph Campbell put it, and so he believes that his strength is his own. Mistaking the shadow for the substance, his efforts are doomed to failure. But of course the tyrant’s delusion is precisely what our culture in its core believes and exults in—the conviction that its strength is its own. And as long as we persist in that delusion, we will be charging towards the tyrant’s demise. We see no need for mediation between worlds because we recognize only the corrupted world of multiplicity, every part of which is ultimately knowable; in such a world there is no unmanifest, and all is amenable to our control.
The journey of the hero is shaped by two grand mythological adventures of integration: with the Divine Female and with the Divine Male. The Divine Female element, or the goddess, is the love that brings forth forms from the unseen dark via the yielding midwifery of ‘what is’; she also sustains those forms and draws them back into the dark when harmony requires it. In that regard she is the Source that can be seen in every falling leaf and mountain range, heard in every birdsong. The Divine Male, or the god, is the Source that cannot be Seen: the Imperishable Perspective, the Law that no man can read, the Plenum of Silence around every atom, the Ordering that has no order, the Governance that needs neither hand nor force. The unseen wholeness of the world is a revelation of their marriage—the union of the sacred female mystery with the sacred male mystery—and that marriage begets a universe suspended in stillness and churning with fecund transformations. What we have spoken of as the One Presence, the Logos, the Tao, the Great Spirit or Christ consciousness, then, is neither male nor female, but is rather the deep, deep harmony that arises when those two sacred aspects dance as one.
The supreme hero, too, stands beyond male, beyond female, beyond name: he cannot otherwise integrate what has been rent asunder, nor rise above the limitations of personal hopes and fears and the blind spot of the self. In opening his eye to the One Presence, as Campbell explains, he
no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent.186
Whether the hero’s adventure carries him to a meeting with the goddess or a reconciliation with the god, it transpires in both cases that “the hero himself is that which he had come to find.”187 The One Presence is the truth of his own life, as much as it is the truth of the world; in the end, the One Presence is the ultimate perspective to be incarnated and lived. It is in the One Presence that the world’s spiritual center of gravity is discovered. In order that his newly-won perspective can be carried back to the community and integrated,
a transmutation of the whole social order is necessary, so that through every detail and act of secular life the vitalizing image of the universal god-man who is actually immanent and effective in all of us may be somehow made known to consciousness.188
When the astronauts came back with a simple photograph showing a god’s-eye perspective of our planet, the image traveled across the world and into some of its remotest corners; but we struggle to integrate its message of fragility and organic seamlessness. When Christ returned to his community, his message spoke so forcibly against the trappings of power and so passionately about the love that binds us all, and he so consistently showed by example the need to honor and cherish the female element in each of us, that the powers that relied on the “organized inadequacy” of his community retaliated. Not only was Christ slain by those he wished to save, the message he brought back has been repeatedly subverted and manipulated to serve the vested interests of tyranny—all, of course, in the name of Christ’s love.
In general, the values of our culture require that perspectives remain unintegrated—for once it is integrated, a perspective gives us sensitivity rather than leverage; kinship rather than ownership; responsibility rather than power; and an attentiveness to the present rather than to schemata. Our patrifocal culture warns that such sensitivities are hindrances to our willpower—and we learn our lessons early, so that our resistance to the integration we so desperately need is often too subtle to notice.
And just as the vested powers of a community may resist the integration of the hero’s insight—even ferociously—the same is true of the vested powers of the male element within us. If our journey brings us to the brink of a new perspective that contradicts what has been frozen as the ‘known self’, we either relinquish what is frozen and allow it to melt, or we resist and become stuck. Sometimes it is only in the aftermath of a personal crisis, when the scaffolding of the ‘known self’ collapses and the painted scenery of the ‘known world’ falls away, that what is frozen in us can finally thaw; and then the gift of a possibility awaits us, if only we can recognize it as such: that left facing the unknown we might feel ourselves reflected there. Once we do, the gentle, patient work of integration can finally begin.
As we saw in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, myths warn us that even when male and female have united, there is an ever-present danger that the male element will want to ‘check up’ on the progress of the female by looking back, thereby losing her and plunging the self into the divisions of self-consciousness. If the male element is not looking back, of course, it is facing forward. But how do we translate that from myth to experience? In the moment when Orpheus turns back, he has just made the transition from the inner world to the outer—but Eurydice, following, has not. We earlier identified that gateway between the worlds as the heart: it is the heart’s energy, its love, that opens inner world to outer. Facing forward, then, is the heart’s surrender to the world as it is. As Lao-tzu wrote, “The Master gives himself up to whatever the moment brings.”189
If the gateway of the heart is closed, we are looking back—a state of self-consciousness that isolates the intelligence of the felt self from the present, causing it to languish and vanish, as Eurydice did when Orpheus looked back. When the corridor within is cut off from the present, we feel alienated and confined and anxious. What opens that corridor to the light and grants us the spaciousness of the world is the gateway of the heart. The heart, ultimately, is a gateway to our own sensitivity—and at any moment the access it provides is clear, because paying the least attention to your heart will tell you whether it is heavy or light. A heavy heart is a heavy gate—slow and reluctant to open to the world, and so unable to nourish the sensitivities of the felt self. A light heart is a light gate, opening to the world without resistance. Facing forward, then, is no mere idea or attitude: it is an instantly recognizable physical sensation of ease in the heart that welcomes the world in gladness and so brings us into relationship with it. And what sustains the heart’s lightness is love: a love of Being, a love of life itself, which places us in the specificity of being here, now, whatever it might bring.
Light-heartedness is essential to the hero’s act of self-achieved submission. To wit: if we submit with a heavy heart, with reluctance, or with a sense of foreboding, then our submission is not truly self-achieved, but foisted upon us by circumstances. In short, we are offering compliance. Only if we submit with the light-heartedness that might characterize a child at play can our submission truly be called “self-achieved”—for a “self-achieved submission” is one that is utterly at peace. It may be a little bizarre for us to think of a carefree or cheerful or peaceful submission, but that is exactly what the spirit of the hero asks for: a sense of “Here we go, come what may,” trusting deeply in the self and in the revelations of the felt present. As the adage says, “Life, when lived fully, dances lightly from test to test.” To live fully is to live with a cheerful acceptance of the wounding and wondrous and ordinary world that is constantly calling out to you and supporting you in all you do.
When we talk about the felt self, then, as a unity of consciousness by which we “rest in the pelvis and act from the heart,” we have to guard against any misconception that when we act through the heart, we do so willfully. When our impulses are driven by willfulness, the male element is in charge: supervising and looking back and determined to achieve certain results—all of which clenches the heart. The felt unity of our consciousness is something altogether different: at rest in the pelvic bowl, our awareness of the self as a whole joins the stillness of the present, which receives all, and from which all impulses arise to greet the world. When the heart’s gateway to the world is lightness itself, such impulses rise through us and, empowered by the heart’s love, pass into the world to discover the fullness of our being in action.
It helps to recognize that when we look back, we are looking for anything that will substitute perspective on the unknown for an experience of it. Our reflex to ‘look back’ and grasp for the certainty of a perspective is so profound that it takes us over even when we are doing nothing. Whenever a gap is encountered in our regimen of doing, for instance, we tend to fill it with waiting. Waiting is a peculiar state in which doing doesn’t cease; it is just restrained, like an impatient horse. We wait in lines, we wait at bus stops, we wait at red lights, we wait for elevators, we wait in elevators—we wait for the show to begin. Such waiting puts us in a kind of limbo in which we can’t stop doing even though there is nothing to do: closed off from the energy of Being, our hearts grow tense as we strain towards a better future when we will finally be able to start doing again, as if by so straining we could hurry time along. We are addicts, and doing is our fix. As a society we have so thoroughly divorced ourselves from the female element, and have so thoroughly forgotten how to just be, that some people spend most of their lives waiting—waiting for the big break, the next step, for their show to begin—as if life itself were up ahead, waiting on the horizon. In fact, the habit of waiting is so deeply entrenched in our culture that many of us feel uncomfortable if we are not waiting for something. We feel vaguely lost. The present will always be insufficient if we are insufficiently present.
I have often found that if I really want to get at a deeply established personal pattern such as waiting, or the incessant need to ‘look back’ and grasp at perspectives, I need the equivalent of a disclosing dye—those little red tablets that, when dissolved in the mouth, bizarrely show up all the areas on your teeth that have not been properly brushed. And so I have a handful of questions I return to, simple, potent questions that reliably disclose my own abstractions—questions like, “What happens if I let my heart open now?” or “What happens if I stop doing and just pause?” I find that second question especially useful when it is especially inappropriate. And it often triggers a knee-jerk reaction (“I can’t pause now!”) signaling that the stakes are high, that something important will be threatened, that calamity will befall if I should be so foolish as to actually allow the pause to happen. It is a calamity, of course, only to the ‘known self’. The essence of such a pause is to release us from the confined, driven agenda of doing, allowing us to float through the heart’s gate into the nourishment of the world. When God rested on the seventh day, it wasn’t because He was tired; He was creating The Pause, directing us to rest in the nourishment of Being in order that our work might never lose sight of it. “And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it.”
Our culture suggests that nourishment derives from doing rather than Being. In any enterprise we obsess over what we do, how we do it, and often how quickly we do it. To be sure of success, we undertake those whats, hows and how-quicklys willfully; the train of thought that drives them hurtles through the scenery of our lives, and we customarily watch that scenery pass by the window of our compartment, noting it without being nourished by it. Spectators, as Thomas Merton observed. The idea of stepping out of the compartment of the ‘known self’ and getting off the train seems plain pointless. We believe that if we are in the compartment in the train, we are really getting somewhere in the world. But in reality we can’t be, because we are not in the world in the first place; being there is such a different experience—to actually step onto the earth, and breathe the scents on the air, and hear the awakened present all around you.
Consider though, that to risk the pause, sabotaging the locomotive that drives the ‘known self’, is to risk an opening of the heart that reunites Orpheus and Eurydice with the world; it is to give yourself over to a little adventure into the felt unknown. Into reality. Such a pause constitutes a form of prayer—a union with the oneness of Being. When you allow that pause to happen, you may have a sense that the world around you is brought into sudden focus. In fact, what is coming into focus is your felt self, newly discovered.
In that moment when you pause and unite with Being, you hold on to nothing, you brace against nothing, you neglect nothing. You simply come to rest in the receptivity of the pelvic bowl. Much as a surfer continuously falls through the wave that continuously rises up beneath him, you ground in the still point, falling continuously through the present, even as the present moves continuously through you. And to address what it takes to remain in that place, rather than speak of a willingness to give yourself up to the wave of the present, we might speak of love: a love for the stirrings of the present that awaken your whole Being; a love for the dance of the present that transforms everything and never pauses to own any of it; a love for the stillness of the present which, like the depths of the sea, silently receives the message of every ripple on its face, and of every living being that moves within it; and a love for the abandon that enables you to give yourself up to the wild peace of the world as it endlessly runs its course. What is being loved in all those cases is essentially Being itself—the great creative flux of all that is, making everything new. Just as the sky needs the earth, that love of Being is rooted in our deep, personal need for completion, and in the wordless joy of finding it. That love is as passionate as was the love of Orpheus for Eurydice, and it lies at the very core of the heroic element within each of us.
And here we can articulate one of the major themes of this book: the choice the male element faces between uniting with female Being or separating from it is a choice we make between Energy and Idea. Visceral thinking, which is empty of idea, is a sensitive confluence and harmonizing of the energies of the present; the cranial brain, which is insensate, is nonetheless filled to the brim with ideas—and the function of its ideas is to capture energy and hold it still so they can marshal it and organize it. If our awareness is dominated by our ideas, the male aspect of our consciousness has dissociated from the female and is binding up energy. If our awareness turns towards the energy of the present—the energy of its vibrations, of its stillness, of its coursing dance—the male aspect is surrendering its wealth to the female, rather than hoarding it. Such a surrender expresses a love of life that celebrates the energy of ‘what is’ and the gifts and losses that come in its wake. The choice we consistently make in our own lives, then—the choice to which the timeless myths sensitize us—is between the love of Being, which releases the male element heroically into the energy of the unknowable present, and the tyrant’s fear, which encloses the male element from that energy within the consolidations of idea. We might also say that in assenting to the heroic element we express our allegiance to Energy; in assenting to the element of tyranny, we express our allegiance to Idea.
Of course, Idea is indispensable to an evolution of consciousness. The hero metaphorically leaves the “organized inadequacy” of his community for just that reason: to gain perspective that, once integrated upon his return, will liberate and revitalize his community. In other words, when the Energy of his community has settled into a stasis that cannot evolve, the hero ventures into the unknown to gain a critical perspective that, carried home, will topple the ‘known’ and liberate the Energy of life, which is and always will be a mystery, breathing through and sustaining the vibrant present. The heroic act plays itself out on the scale of communities and societies, but it also plays itself out within each of us. If you open your eyes to the world and feel its particulars to be largely ‘known’ phenomena within your catalogs of Idea, you are gazing out of a window in the stronghold. The alternative is simple enough: to drop into the pelvic intelligence, look upon the world around you and grow utterly passive to it, so that you feel stirring within the whole the Energy of its life in this moment; if you can do that, you have begun the ordinary, heroic surrender to Being. In that context we can understand that when perspective is integrated, it sensitizes us to the Energy of the world; by contrast, everything within your consciousness that is not experienced as Energy is Idea that has not been integrated yet.
If we are to greet the Energy of the present as one would a lover, we would be wise to acknowledge the archaic meaning of greet, which was “to weep.” The cost of moving on is always loss—but it is precisely the transience of ‘what is’ that makes it so precious. Only Idea seeks asylum from that transience. But how far you will entrust yourself to the Energy of the transient now is established by how much of yourself you are willing to discover in the world around you. “If you receive the world, the Tao will never leave you.” We turn away from the world to seek refuge from its uncertainties, and from our own. But the refuge we seek lies in a duplicate of the world. To face backward is to lose the self in its own fiction.
We think of ‘fiction’ as being at the opposite end of the scale from ‘truth’, but in our moment-by-moment choice between Idea and Energy we could more poignantly consider a scale that ran from ‘fiction’ to ‘trust’. When Orpheus is told to trust that Eurydice is with him, he is being told symbolically to resist the fiction that a perspective will render Being knowable. No truth in the world can survive the vanities of perseity; conversely, only a deep trust will enable a deep integration. It’s not surprising, then, that trust and truth are connected, both springing from the Indo-European base dru-, which also gave us tree and meant “firm as a tree.” Historically, tree, truth and trust have a long-standing association. Buddha’s moment of truth came while sitting under the Bo Tree—The Tree of Enlightenment. Christ’s came while on the Tree of Redemption—The Holy Rood.190 Odin found truth by hanging himself on a tree:
I ween that I hung on the windy tree,
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Odin, myself to myself,
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs.191
As Odin points out, we may see the tree, but not its nourishing roots. That is perhaps what makes the tree so apt a symbol for “true expression,” as Grotowski commented; for when we do know the roots of our own expression—when we look back to ascertain them—then our expression lacks both trust and truth.
The tree is an expression of trust, giving itself to and sustained by its world. Great artists and athletes alike understand that kind of trust, and occasionally they talk about the experience. Athletes refer to it as being “in the zone,” and they instinctively know—or quickly find out—that the zone, like Eurydice, disappears the moment they doubt or question it. When Catfish Hunter pitched a perfect game against the Minnesota Twins, he said it was like being in a dream: “I wasn’t worried about a perfect game.… I was going on like I was in a daze. I never thought about it the whole time. If I’d thought about it I wouldn’t have thrown a perfect game—I know I wouldn’t.”192 To be “in the zone” is to have passed beyond Idea and the chattering in the head that serves it, beyond all the doubts that make you ask, “Am I in possession of Buddha consciousness?” and beyond all need to ‘look back’. Goalie Ken Dryden talked to a friend of mine about the way his glove hand would reach out and catch a puck that he couldn’t even see through the throng in front of his crease. The hand was guided by an instinct he had learned to pay attention to, and integrate, and trust. Michael Murphy’s book In the Zone** is replete with similar examples. You trust the Energy of Being, or you disconnect from it, reflexively. All sports are different ways of learning to trust the present: learning how to just be in the midst of the extremities of doing.
The quality of being “in the zone” is not unique to athletes—it is something with which gifted artists, mathematicians, chess players, stand-up comics, public speakers and many others are acquainted. On August 2, 1999, The New Yorker published an article by Malcolm Gladwell called “The Physical Genius,” in which he looked at a range of accomplished individuals who regularly performed “in the zone.” They included neurosurgeon Charlie Wilson, baseball player Tony Gwynn, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and hockey great Wayne Gretzky. What distinguished them was what Gladwell called “a special feel” in their field of expertise, one that gave what they did “a distinctive fluidity and grace.” He dubbed them “physical geniuses.” In describing Charlie Wilson, Gladwell writes,
Wilson has a plainspoken, unpretentious quality. When he talks about his extraordinary success as a surgeon, he gives the impression that he is talking about some abstract trait that he is neither responsible for nor completely able to understand. “It’s a sort of invisible hand,” he went on. “It begins almost to seem mystical. Sometimes a resident asks, ‘Why did you do that?’ and I say”—here Wilson gave a little shrug—“ ‘Well, it just seemed like the right thing.’ ”193
Gladwell emphasizes the role imagination plays in physical genius, but I am wary of the confusion that the word imagination might create in this context: the word literally means “forming images”—something at which the fantasies of our enclosed head-consciousness excel. Physical geniuses do not attend to an image of reality—a duplicate—but to its living pulse; and in that their genius is physical, it attends to that pulse sensationally. In fact, their genius is to feel what the rest of us cannot: specifically, “the thing as a whole.” Wyndham Lewis once wrote, “The artist is always engaged in writing a detailed history of the future because he is the only person aware of the nature of the present.”194 I could agree with that rather rash claim if we can appreciate any physical genius as an artist: like Orpheus, acutely present, and uncannily sensitized to the converging and shifting vectors of energy that reveal their world. As a colleague of Charlie Wilson explained,
If I look at a particular field—tumor or aneurysm—I will see the gestalt after I’ve worked on it for a little while. He would just glance at it and see it. It’s a conceptual thing, a spatial thing.… He could do it (the operation) because he had the picture of the whole anatomy in his head when he picked up the instrument.195
One characteristic that physical geniuses seem to share is that they put in hours and hours and hours of practice. As a kid, Wayne Gretzky had to be hauled off the ice long after everyone else had gone home—even when temperatures hovered at minus thirty degrees centigrade. Practice alone, of course, does not make perfection. In fact, repeating the same activity over and over can have the opposite effect—it can deaden you to it, make it mechanical. So we have to understand that physical geniuses were doing something else than mere repetition—something they hungered for and couldn’t keep away from, something that uniquely fed them. And here we begin to get a sense both of what it means and what it takes to integrate new perspectives.
Gladwell noted that Charlie Wilson didn’t have a lot of perspective on why he did certain things, didn’t completely understand them—they just felt right. In reality, Wilson couldn’t afford to have perspective—he couldn’t afford to ‘look back’, to stand outside ‘what is’ and deaden himself to it; he couldn’t afford to give allegiance to Idea, which knows a phenomenon in part, according to a range of perspectives gathered from lectures or case histories or studies. It’s not that he was without such perspectives—it’s that they had been so fully integrated that their effect was beyond any fixity of abstract knowledge; they were able to inform his movements from a place of wholeness, guiding them as though by “an invisible hand.” Perspective, when integrated, heightens the mind’s sensitivity—and so helps our consciousness to evolve.
Wayne Gretzky was also guided by an invisible hand. His most famous advice to other players was: Don’t skate to where the puck is—skate to where it’s going to be. Knowing where it’s going to be isn’t something you calculate; it is something you feel. When the best hockey players go out on the ice, they are not guided by any stand-alone perspective on how to play the game: as Catfish Hunter intuitively understood, the ‘zone’ lies beyond perspective and beyond all its forms of self-tyranny—“I never thought about it the whole time.” They enter a zone of still sensitivity in which they feel the thing as a whole, attuning to the other players, the quality of the ice, the flex of their stick, the weight of the puck, the energy of the crowd, to all the sensations of the present that can be felt, seen, heard and smelled. They even observe telltale details that escape the rest of us. Gretzky’s sensitivity to the whole of the rink and to the weaknesses of the moment is what made him so dangerously effective. His powers of observation seemed to include the sixth sense. Coach Darryl Sutter once observed that Gretzky wasn’t that big, and he wasn’t the most talented player—but he was the most insightful player there was.
Even those of us who are not the Gretzkys or Wilsons of the world know full well what it is to lose all perspective by integrating it. Can you imagine trying to catch a ball using reason—calculating velocity, trajectory, wind speed, drag, spin, and tallying where to put your hand when and how fast to close it as the ball flies towards you? We don’t run our bodies according to such unintegrated perspectives, because they would interfere with our natural physical responsiveness. Suppose we had an instruction manual on how to ride a bicycle, elucidating every perspective it involves, from the biomechanics of the ankle to the curvature of the space-time continuum that we experience as gravity, to the workings of the inner ear that convey a sense of balance. However exhaustive any such manual might be, and however diligently studied, the perspectives it provided could never enable a beginner to hop on a bike and ride away.
You learn to ride a bike by gaining perspectives and integrating them. At first you tend to overcompensate when you lose your balance, unable to feel what the bike as a whole is doing. Later you can steer with one finger, or even with no hands, as you learn to feel the unity of bike, road and world in ways so subtle you might, like Charlie Wilson, not even be able to articulate them in words. Once that happens, your front wheel is continuously adjusting right and left to maintain your balance—but there is no authoritative little voice in your head saying, “Now right. Now left.” There are no cybernetics. You make your adjustments according to a “special feel” that devotes its attention to Energy and requires neither perspective nor supervision. That is the nature of physical genius, and that is what integrated perspectives feel like.
The potential for physical genius lies in all of us. And so a seasoned carpenter can hold a two-by-four and feel the weight it will bear; an engineer practiced in aerodynamics can stand in a landscape and ‘see’ the turbulence of the wind coursing across it; a master builder from medieval Europe, without recourse to span tables or compression strength charts, can ‘feel as a whole’ the design for a towering cathedral, and oversee its construction, and know it will last for centuries. When your physical genius has patiently integrated the perspectives that bear on a phenomenon, sensitizing to the whole of it, you will be informed by the whole. To cling to an unintegrated perspective is to turn away from the very whole that guides you.
As the above examples indicate, our integrated perspectives promote our ability to heed the guidance of the world—whether we are riding a bike, reading an invisible breeze or designing a cathedral. That is true even of those perspectives that might initially make us self-conscious. If I were to comment to you that tension in your abdomen and sacrum and pelvic floor is restricting your breath and keeping it from contact with the soft depths of the body, you might consider that perspective, and compare it to ‘what is’, and find it to be true. If you react to that perspective by pushing the breath into that region willfully, it will gain you nothing but mechanics that will quickly fatigue. To integrate that new perspective means something else: it asks us to bring consciousness to those soft depths—releasing the tension that strangles awareness—so that the pelvic floor can yield to the breath as it drops in. Eventually breathing with such awareness will simply feel so much better than carrying around tension all day long that it will be integrated into what you recognize as a feeling of well-being. The soft responsiveness of the pelvic bowl, now beyond the supervision of any perspective, simply becomes a part of your sensitivity, a part of the spacious corridor within that enables you to feel whole and join the whole.
We might note that the intelligence of the body as a whole specializes in integrating information—even when we have no conscious awareness that it is doing so. In fact, as Nick Herbert explains in Elemental Mind, the amount of information we process without being aware of it is at least a trillion times greater than the information we process consciously.196 The countless processes of the body’s oceanic flux of molecular exchanges is just one part of that; we also smell pheromones, and are attracted to someone without really knowing why; we subliminally hear the breathing of the person we talk to, and are informed about their rhythms of being; we can see people do things and sense what they are experiencing without being aware that our mirror neurons are mapping their actions through our own bodies. Other information processed unconsciously is less obvious: a close friend of mine, as a schoolchild, stood up from his desk in the middle of a lesson and ran out of his classroom, out of his school and all the way home to find his mother lying on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, hemorrhaging. As he came through the door she said, “Thank God, Jack, I prayed you would come.” By doing so, he saved her life. We might also appreciate that the subtle vibrations that inform animals about thunderstorms or earthquakes or imminent danger pass through our bodies as well; and they might register more clearly in them if our bodies were more available to the coursing Energies of Being.
Anything that relaxes the body into its sensations heightens its consciousness and its ability to integrate perspectives. We can literally increase that ability with a massage or a walk in the woods or a soak in a warm bath. In England they have a saying that the greatest scientific discoveries have occurred in the three Bs: the bath, the bus and the bed. Each is well suited to the deep work of integration that the body carries out, in that each provides a situation in which our willfulness is more or less put on hold: you can’t lie in bed and will yourself to sleep; a bus ride can induce a pleasing kind of passivity as you are carried towards your destination; and a bath is often a ritual as much for melting away cares as for washing. As the will is lulled into quietude it releases the perspectives onto which it has fastened and you can simply ‘be’: the muscles of the body, taken off alert, are allowed to soften, and the intelligence of the body is released to do its work—which can include newly integrated, startling scientific insights into the nature of reality.
When a perspective is integrated, it is accommodated by the intelligence of the body as a whole. The axis of that intelligence rests on the pelvic floor, informed by the world in ways that are utterly beyond the cause-and-effect logic of which our culture is so fond. In its function, the embodied center of being within us has many of the qualities of what physics has dubbed the quantum vacuum. As systems scientist Ervin Laszlo describes the quantum vacuum, it is
the locus of a vast energy field that is neither classically electromagnetic nor gravitational, nor yet nuclear in nature. Instead, it is the originating source of the known electromagnetic, gravitational and nuclear forces and fields. It is the originating source of matter itself.197
The integrating genius of the pelvic intelligence is the quantum vacuum of the self: touched by the present, it receives into it all the perspectives of our living, and then rebirths them as the living sensitivities of the felt self, awakening it to the mutual awareness of reality.
The integration made possible by the female genius of Being excludes nothing—not mathematics, not rocket science, not art, not molecular investigation: Friedrich Kekulé famously ushered in the science of organic chemistry as he dozed by the fire and dreamed of a snake biting its own tail—the secret to the benzene molecule. Any such integration of perspectives constitutes an evolution of consciousness, the merging of male and female; and it is the only means by which such an evolution can be achieved. Einstein has been popularly quoted as having said,
The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why.
It is left to us to trust the intelligence we cannot command and submit to it attentively, allowing the self to integrate with it, even as it integrates the self. Without that trust we will always be Looking Back to the parts and missing the whole that calls to us.
When a perspective is integrated, it ceases to be a duplicate and becomes a sensitivity. The integration of a perspective happens once it is brought into relationship with the pelvic intelligence. If the corridor of the embodied axis is wide open and we are at rest in the pelvic bowl, the integration of our perspectives is a continuous dance that accepts the world as its partner.
As we have seen, we are tacitly advised from childhood to retreat from the corridor and seclude ourselves in the head. Our cultural evolution over the past eight thousand years has been shaped by the migration of our center of consciousness from pelvic bowl to cranium; the corridor we have abandoned has been partitioned into a many-chambered catacomb. This exercise simply reverses that trend. It carries the center of our consciousness down the corridor, toppling walls on the way as it conveys the male element back to Eurydice. In practice, it is evocative of the two-headed Celestial Serpent of Mayan myth, accepting the rising sun into its Eastern mouth (the cranial skull), passing it through the body, and discharging it from its Western mouth (the pelvic skull) at sunset.
The Elevator Shaft can be done standing, sitting, lying down, running or walking; but I have found it easiest to learn while standing. Start with feet comfortably apart, knees soft, hips floating and the breath dropping in and releasing out through the whole body. Bring your awareness to the center of your visceral intelligence, which you might imagine as a mindfulness that sits deep within the pelvic bowl. Then feel within the body a spacious shaft that includes the spine but sits just in front of it and runs from above the scalp, down through the torso and out through the pelvic floor. Allow yourself to feel the dissociated male aspect of your consciousness residing in your head—your conscious center, your thinking self. Feel that center as specifically as you can, so that you can actually shift the center of your awareness around inside the cranium like a little ball of energy, moving it up, down, or side to side. Try letting that center rise through the cranium and through the scalp itself to hover just above the head; and then allow it to drop through the shaft like an elevator until it passes down past the pelvic floor. With practice you’ll be able to feel its descent quite tangibly, as if a sphere of energy were descending through the flesh of your body. Once it is slightly below the pelvic floor, allow it to rise just enough that it comes to rest in the mindful center of the inverted pelvic skull.
Be patient with yourself while finding your way into this exercise: you are reversing eight thousand years of cultural conditioning; you are retracing the journey of Orpheus to the underworld; you are discovering you, here and now, as you open your sensitivities to include the genius of your integrative intelligence. The exercise is not something to ‘get right’, but to play around with. Feel the descent as specifically as you can along the corridor, opening the conduit within you. Whenever that descent is stalled, pay attention to the partition standing in its way, welcome it with love, and then ease your way down through it. The energy contained by that partition, released from its confines, will naturally follow that descent and merge with the welcoming genius of the pelvic intelligence. You can also play around with the depth to which you can drop through the elevator shaft. Can you drop your center to sit at knee level? To your feet? To below your feet? Playing with your center like that eventually makes it easier to let it come to rest in the pelvic bowl; once it is there, resting, notice how that changes the center, and changes how you feel, and changes how the world around you feels.
A variation on the Elevator Shaft will give you a direct experience of what it means to integrate a perception and birth a sensitivity. Take any simple perspective and render it as a phrase, such as, “I am here” or “The tree is tall” or “The rose is red.” Feel that idea in your head, and then allow it to drop down the elevator shaft until it comes to rest in the pelvic bowl. If you are patient enough to carry the idea into the pelvic intelligence, you will find that the borders of the idea fall away as it dissolves in sensation. The first time I invited others to try this, one person took “Fire is hot” as an idea, carried it down the elevator shaft, and felt it as sensations of heat in the pelvic bowl. Another who took “Roses are red” felt the roses come to life there. Perceptions, when integrated, become sensitivities—and so enrich our presence in the world. We live by words every day, but until the word is made flesh, Idea will rule; the more we are ruled by Idea, the more we stifle the Energy of Being. As we have seen, our ‘headism’ specifically prevents the word from becoming flesh, so that our thinking can operate independent of our Being, chattering away to itself. If we are literally to incorporate our thinking—which constitutes the integration of idea or perspective—we have to surrender it to the flesh. This is the metaphoric journey of Orpheus to reunite with Eurydice, reenacted within the body’s depths. Eventually, you can carry the present itself down the Elevator Shaft, to rest in the pelvic bowl; and when that happens, the present becomes a sensitivity rather than an idea, and its sensitivity is recognized to be the thinking self. At that point you are truly “feeling the thing as a whole.”
The Elevator Shaft exercise does several things. First of all, it gives us an experiential understanding of how the perceptions, ideas and thinking of the male pole of our consciousness can submit to our being and merge with it to become sensation: the prototypical homecoming of the hero. It also shows you right away where the spaciousness within the body is too compromised to allow your male perspectives to travel down through it; it improves your ability to ground yourself within the pelvic bowl; and it tangibly carries you from a unipolar to an axial consciousness. The Elevator Shaft can be repeated as often as necessary, and you can practice it virtually anywhere, anytime: in line at the grocery store, while traveling to work, while sitting at a desk, working. With a bit of practice you will find that in the course of a day, if you notice you are caught in your head, it only takes a few seconds to drop through the elevator shaft to come to rest in the pelvis: the mythic homecoming.
* Michael Murphy and Rhea A. White, In the Zone: Transcendent Experience in Sports (New York: Penguin, 1995).