next few years began delving into the transpersonal. This was not new to me since
my mother, in spite of her Jewishness, had always been involved with clairvoyants
and considered herself psychic, and she was, and had carefully explained to me the
rubrics of spiritualism.
However, it was thirty-five years ago that this thesis started to take shape
when I made my first visit to the Mediterranean, to Greece and to Israel. For
reasons of mind, heart and soul I found myself wandering around Athens and the
islands of the Aegean and later in I srael. I n Greece some places seemed to be
somehow familiar, to resonate with something deep inside me, something
transcending time and place, and which, literally, induced, if not a spiritual
experience, then an intensified awareness. Greece had already been brought alive
for me in books about Alexander the Great, Plato and Menalaeus and the Trojan
War; I had already seen Greece and lived there in my inner world of imagination. I
detested modern Athens but liked the outlying villages and the islands.
Nevertheless, it was Delphi and the areas where Alexander had travelled that
especially affected me. I had read Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy and her other
Greek-themed novels but something like the Surry Hills episode was happening in
reverse: whereas Park had written about what I had experienced in Surry Hills, now,
in various places in Greece, I was experiencing and being affected by what Renault
had written about things that had happened over two thousand years ago.
However, I also had to give substance and enrichment to my Jewish soul-
heritage by dwelling in I srael where I worked the soil of a kibbutz orchard not far
from the old city of Tiberius. Connected with the fertility of the land, I gained a
deep sense of the sacredness of the earth, the Shekhinah, that in the Kabbalah
represents the presence or life force of God and in rabbinical literature suggests the
feminine aspect of God and the soul; Yahweh’s indwelling presence in the world
(Bloom, 1996:51). I n the old, holy city of Safed I studied the ancient and mystical
language of Hebrew and became aware of the Kabbalah and Zohar and other
mystical traditions that I supposed had their origins in the primordial human psyche
and might even have some connection to archaic shamanism and the enigmatic
upper-Palaeolithic cave paintings. I n fact, it was in I srael and Greece that I first
became convinced of the existence of a dimension that transcended time and place:
an imaginal realm, as real and as energetic as any physical locale and so much
more powerful than anything I had previously known.
ron
(Ron)
#1