January 18, 2004
Theosophy and me
I spent my freshman year at a "cow" college in the Midwest, because my father was an alum, and I never considered anything else. I bunked with a dear, farm girl and a blond, urban sophisticate -a shiksa, raised in a fancy Jewish neighborhood in the city. (I have begun to believe that close connection with Judaism has had significance in my life, because, among many wonderful things, it has provided proximity to the Hebrew alphabet. I have had Jewish college roommates, bosses, mentors, therapists, boyfriends, best friends and husbands. All, after growing up in a community where there were none, and antisemitism was rampant.)
Aside: Jews were "chosen" to preserve the original texts of the encoded parts of the Bible, and a mighty good job they have done. Here's the catch, in order to preserve the Hebrew alphabet, they could not fully know the extent of the treasure they held. The responsibility would have been odious, and could have aroused unwanted interest by self serving parties. Jews, as a consequence, have had to remain blind to the true meaning of the Hebrew Alphabet. This is no longer the case.
Note: Carlo Suares has written several books, decoding the encoded parts of the Bible, buy using the energetic meanings of the Hebrew alphabet. Abraham Abulafia , the Jewish mystic, gives instructions on how to chant the Hebrew alphabet so that you call the kundalini , the power of the spirit into the body. That's what happens to the speller in "Bee Season". Rather than calling up a visual image of a spelling word, her dad, a kantor who has been studying this stuff, teaches her to "feel" the letters. "Bee Season" is an instruction book on how to call up kundalini. It is also a cautionary tale. This is powerful energy. The protagonist decides against living with the embodied spirit, at least for the moment. In the book, the protagonist's mother seems psychotic, as well as on the Asperger's end of the autism scale. With a split off part of herself, she builds a breathtaking shrine in a storage unit, using stuff she has shoplifted all her life. It is glorious. Misspent spiritual materialism? Oh dear, I've spoiled the story.
Back to theosophy . Maureen McKittrick was my roommate.( I used her real name here, because I thought she might someday google her maiden name, and come upon this) (I just did it, look at the nifty results ) For those non clickers, this is really too good to miss. Maureen had parents who were theosophists. At that point in my life, Lutheran was exotic to me.
Maureen told me a story in 1960 about walking home, as a child, from a horror movie with her father, asking him if there were such a thing as werewolves. Her father answered,"There are, if you let your mind dwell on them." Well, that stopped me from pursuing the unknown for the next forty years.
I had enough of a trauma history that about 85 percent of my projections into the unknown were pretty darn werewolfie. Who, in their right mind, would voluntarily step into that landscape. Not me! It took me a long time to empathize with enough aspects of myself so that I could unclutter the path enough to glimpse it.
So here is theosophy coming up again, in Alix Taylor's book, "A Door Ajar". This time I'm ready to pay attention.
Posted by Dakota at January 18, 2004 05:52 AM