Rose and Woods
We both explored our own soul journeys for many years before we met in 2006 on the Internet. We were attracted to each other through our shared love of Eckhart Tolle’s teachings, a deep fascination for expanding consciousness through practicing presence, and a passionate desire for global transformation.
From the beginning our email correspondence became a living dialogue and inquiry into what a conscious, soulful life can be, and how we can create more of those potent “peak experiences” when everything comes together in a heightened, more expanded state of being. We met in person for the first time in New Zealand where Rose was living in a beautiful cottage and garden next to the sea in Golden Bay, and we discovered how, in each other’s presence, we could have dialogues which took both of us into a higher vibrational field where we received new creative insights and weaved new threads of knowing. This was very exciting for both of us and it seemed to be directly related to the work Rose had embarked on to create transformational community. If two people can come together in a creative field of presence, then so can a whole community, and when that happens together we send out ripples into the world and our new consciousness touches and transforms the world.
We have now been on a nearly four year journey with each other in conscious relationship and laying the foundations for A Whole New World; this blog is the latest manifestation of our exploration, and we invite you to join us and participate with us in creating more soulful lives and a more soulful world.
The soul’s yearnings
Rose wrote the following message shortly after Woods left Golden Bay to return to Virginia in October 2006:
Rose: What I want to understand goes beyond you or me, there’s something I’m reaching for, something transcendent my soul is yearning for. Since you and I have this wonderful ability to dialogue, I see our conversations as a vehicle for discovering more of what a soulful life is and what it can be.
Before we met, I thought I could find what I’m looking for in relationship and maybe I have and will to some extent or another. I realize now what I’m longing for is not to be found in relationship, nor in vocation and both of these are different sorts of vehicle. My real longing is for transcendence, for becoming one with the evolutionary impulse itself. In our face to face conversations – the ones that went on for hours and hours – by being present together, we went beyond egoic thought into a stream of consciousness that was neither you nor me but that which was presenting to be expressed through us. I call it love. It might also be called evolutionary consciousness.
The reason (partly) I’ve been so maniacally writing since you left is my attempt to reconnect with that stream of consciousness and put myself in service to it, and I have a growing sense this is where my passion is now, so that everything else pales beside this ability to listen to and “bring down the music”. I’ve had similar crazy feelings lately to those I had in 84/85 when I was going through a spiritual awakening, a kind of driven creativity which is the only way to alleviate the pain of separation and find any peace.
I’ve been longing to let go most of my material encumbrances and set off on a spiritual adventure; to be in a BIG spiritual energy, like some of the gatherings that happen in India with millions of people in a higher state of consciousness. The limitations of egoic consciousness are so painful I am just about ready to do whatever it takes to throw off the shackles once and for all. Nothing short of spiritual enlightenment feels enough.
I feel tensions within me between the work I’ve committed to do in the world and the pull of the inner life. Joseph Campbell said “follow your bliss”, Tolle says “the present moment is the portal”. I’m having difficulty envisioning a future and I realize what I need to do is be totally present, trust the evolutionary process, follow my passion and my bliss, and let life unfold.
There’s something about getting it down and sending it off to you to be witnessed that feels more powerful than just having thoughts in my head. Are we transformational catalysts for each other? And is what’s needed for global transformation simply to enter into all our relationships as transformational catalysts? Does it take a particular configuration of qualities to be this for each other?
Woods: I want to say we seem to be asking what revelation is. I know you are in part referring to an inner quest for a kind of permanent revelatory subjective state, the familiar altered state of consciousness at the heart of creative and spiritualized experiences, which gives us a taste and caress of bliss and makes bliss junkies of us. It’s a delicious, timeless consciousness. I’m reminded of my experiential “discovery sessions” during the 90’s and how “hooked” I got on them, and how I longed for them all week long; on the verge of this heightened state waiting the unbearable week till the next session. When you say you believe we are being transformational catalysts for one another, I understand you like the mysterious creative boost I have on you, and this is reciprocal, as I equally dig the creative boost you have on me, or what our creative readiness in tandem catalyzes.
Musing on the words creative and spiritual, I see they have become fused for me. Creative has left the art class of high school and spiritual has left the stained glass cathedral of my youth, and the best of both words, and that toward which they both point, is the same, as Tolle would say. Put differently, a person having a full blown creative experience of the highest magnitude and a person having a full blown spiritual experience, are having the same experience, though their interpretations of their experiences may radically differ. To the extent that we can “love” someone, they can become a transformational catalyst for us. But we must “love” them. That might be one of those configuring “qualities” that must be in the mix for an experience to be transformationally successful.
If there is “a particular configuration of qualities” that must be present for creative transformation I submit this old list of ingredients I identified during my discovery sessions in the mid 90’s:
desire, motivation, and openness to it
designating a specific space/time coordinate for its emergence
belief that the uncreated can arise of its own accord
careful attention to its actual arising
felt love and a sense of the beautiful
psychic receptivity and intuitiveness
joyful sense of wonderment
vast cosmic humility
and a deep feeling for the sacredness of life.
Could it be the more ingredients and conditions like these we have in common with another person or persons, the greater the potential for transformational alchemy? And could we say these qualities could be looked upon as aspects of evolving consciousness? Then again, it may very well be all that’s required is for two people with intent, who know how to be creative, and get off on it, to engage in it together. Your question is a good one, Rose. I think it’s mostly just being open and freed of any limiting beliefs that sets the stage for powerful creative, spiritual, transformational experiences; or whatever you want to call these expanded states or new form of consciousness.
Some thoughts have formless sacredness clinging to them
Tolle hasn’t quite said so, but I believe he could say that once we are no longer obsessional thinkers, run by our minds, our mind can be used in the service of presence. He has implied this by saying that some books written from presence carry the fragrance of presence in them. Separately he’s said that the sacred sutras from ancient India are examples of uprisings from presence. In my discovery sessions, I tried to make my mind subservient to a more intuitive or psychic way of knowing and put it more in the service of what I now call presence. One way I could tell I was in my “discovery zone”, was how my voice would drop an octave, how I’d have less to say, and how what I said didn’t seem to be coming from me. Sometimes I’d have to force myself into verbalizing at all. Just now I recall my spiritual experience in your garden, and how little I said and how it was mostly limited to blissful descriptions of my special experience, such as “the sunlight is love itself.” Words spoken from presence have a higher resonance and vibration. They have an implanted poesy about them. There’s more mindfulness, wisdom, perhaps higher intelligence in them.
The taste of a mango
In December 2006 Rose came to visit Woods in Virginia and in March moved here ror a longer visit. Our explorations of consciousness continued for the two years we lived together in Virginia where Rose wrote Living your Passion and Woods finished Dazzlephrenia and we discovered how having a conscious relationship involves mirroring each other’s shadow sides so we could be released from them, and create more space for co-creativity to flower more fully, all the time laying the foundations for A Whole New World.
Here is an extract from a conversation we had when Rose returned from a three month visit to England in September 2009.
Woods: Rose arrived back from the UK yesterday and I feel a dimension of awareness returning that’s hard to access by myself, it brings with it an aliveness I’ve felt a loss of.
Rose: You were saying how presence feels sacred to you?
Woods: Yes, loss of presence can almost be defined as an absence of the sense of the sacred.
Rose: Can you say what the sacred feels like?
Woods: When I use the word sacred I think of the mystical experience that has occurred to so many people who have beautifully recorded throughout history how the world felt different. And the core of that is a state of radiant alertness and a deep profound sense of witnessing the fullness, the totality of what existence is. We have moments when that totality can’t be disturbed; it’s a feeling of completeness and rightness of the world. It’s full of glory, glowing and so fabulous, we don’t have words for it; it’s so immeasurably beautiful and wonderful. Then we just forget and fall out of that transcendent nature of reality.
I want to go back to the importance of people learning to develop deeper states of presence. Creating a whole new world at least in part involves people cultivating more states of presence to help them to de-stress their lives and to enjoy life to the fullest; to realize their potentials. It’s a basic uplifter at a time when people need a way to stay as sane and as balanced and relaxed as they can, as life becomes more complicated and confusing and scary.
Rose: I want to pursue this idea of sacredness you’ve introduced. We appear to step into a different dimension when we’re at our best together, as we are right now. This dimension feels very complete, there’s nothing missing, yet the fullness of it is very simple. The fullness comes from the taste of the mango, or the sound of the cicadas, or the color of the tree. It’s latent in very simple here and now things. The environment we’re in now lends itself to that because it’s so lush and soft. This is interesting because I see America mostly as being very yang, yet this little piece here feels quite yin; Mother Nature is abundant and nurturing here in Virginia. There’s something in the etheric energy of the environment that provides a container for consciousness to expand into.
I’m very much into this idea with the Soul Sanctuary work I’m developing that what’s needed is a container for being to expand into. We can make a container with a relationship, or a group of people, or in nature. This particular little Garden of Eden here provides a container for being to expand. I find it relaxing, there’s nothing to fight against, nothing I need to resist. Whereas elsewhere I’m continuously coming up against mess and the absence of beauty, and the mess encroaches on me and doesn’t allow me to have that fullest expansion. I can’t expand into something which is cluttered; it’s necessary to have space. This deck where we’re sitting is an uncluttered space, if there was lots of stuff scattered in the space it would be distracting and pull our attention away.
For me sustainability is something to do with simplicity and an empty space. I’m not looking for anything to fill me up yet everything that comes into the space feels like an act of grace. Even eating a mango feels like an act of grace. That’s the sacred aspect you were talking about. Our soul connection is energetic too. With you also, when we’re attuned to each other, there’s nothing I have to fight against or resist, it’s a state of relaxation, a letting go, an openness. It’s a relief to relax. Sacredness has an etheric energy, an energy of the soul.
Magnificent Moments of Being
In the blog we invite you to join us in our inquiry into how we can nurture more states of magnificent being each day. We’ll be sharing our own stories of Magnificent Moments of Being and we’d love to hear your stories of the highest and deepest experiences you have harvested from your life. We are pulling our own special times together into the first e-book in the series on Magnificent Moments of Being, and our vision is then to collect stories from people all over the world, from different generations, different cultures, ethnicities and faiths. For surely, these magnificent moments of being are part of our shared humanity, and when we see our higher selves mirrored back in the other, love, compassion and unity grow, and we will find the Great Peace.
Let your awareness drop within you like a stone, sinking below the level of what words can express…to the deep web of relationship that underlies all experience.
It is the web of life in which you have taken being and which interweaves us through all time and space..See the being before you as if seeing the face of one who, at another time, another place, was your lover or your enemy, your parent or your child…
And now you meet again on this brink of time, almost as if by appointment. And you know that your lives are as inextricably interwoven as nerve cells in the mind of a great being.. Out of that vast web you cannot fall…no stupidity or failure, or cowardice, can ever sever you from that living web.
For that is what you are.
Rest in that knowing. Rest in the Great Peace.
Out of it we can act, we can risk anything and let every encounter be a homecoming to our true nature.
Joanna Macy, Coming back to Life, Practices to Reconnect our Lives, our World, New Society Publishers.
To find out more about our books on the soul journey: Migration to the Heartland and Dazzlephrenia, go to: http://www.awholenewworld.net/books.htm
Photos by Braveheart www.illusionsbybraveheart.photoreflect.com
