“Listen, Justin, I know it’s been very difficult, that at times you’ve felt you were losing your mind. Well, in a way, you have. It had to happen for you to go forward, to get to where you are today. You might say that you had to come to
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blows with the world in order to find your way. Otherwise you’d still be a part of the herd, like Moses was before he struck back.”
“That Moses thing doesn’t want to go away, does it?”
“It doesn’t seem so. Listen to me: I know you’re not sure you believe everything that’s happened to you—I mean you don’t believe it down to your roots.”
“You’re right, I don’t.”
“But you don’t have to believe it down to your roots. It’s probably too early for that. You only have to believe that it happened. That it all happened: ISLAUGGH, the myth, me, Betty, the Spirit, the voices, everything that happened, happened. That’s the story: It happened. You got it?”
I didn’t know what to say. She was right. “Listen to me very carefully, Justin,”
she said. “You only have to believe that it happened. Think about it. Anyway, it’s time for me to go.”
“It’s early. Let’s have another coffee.”
“No, I have to go.”
“Where are you going, home?”
“No.”
“Shopping?” I knew it was a stupid thing to say even before I said it. I don’t know how I knew it, but I already knew I was never going to see her again. When she got up, she said to me, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know I’m going.
Terry and I have been talking about the Far East. I don’t really know what to say to you. I’m going to miss you. We’ve been bound to each other for some time now, but that time is up. Our paths have already diverged. I can feel it.
“As soon as you told me the dream about Moses, I knew that whatever was supposed to happen between us had happened. Everything you have to know is waiting for you on the inside of your mind, the part that doesn’t think. That’s where your next journey is going to begin. Got it?”
“I got it, but I’m not sure I can handle it.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” she shot back. “If you get in over your head, someone will eventually appear. That’s how it works, Justin.”
“But how do I start? Jesus, how do I start walking toward my death, I have no idea.”
“You may not, but your dreams do. Pay attention to them. They’re going to start to kick in soon and you better be prepared. You may not get a second chance. The Gods don’t care much for laggards.”
“But how will I know which dreams to pay attention to?”
“My God, you are thick. You have to pay attention to all of them. Here’s a clue though: if you wake up one day and feel utterly alone, the kind of feeling you’d get if someone you loved unconditionally turned their back on you and walked out of your life without a word, it’s started. It doesn’t matter who that someone in the dream is—it may even be you. When that happens, you really better pay attention—remember: no holding back, ever.”
With that, she gave me a pat on the butt and walked out of Starbucks and into the 274 ALICE HICKEY
parking lot at what seemed a very lively pace, even for her. I even think I saw her skip once or twice before she climbed into her pick-up. The truck backfired and then slowly made a long circle around the lot, leaving a trail of exhaust smoke so thick I never really saw which exit she took. By the time it cleared, the truck was nowhere in sight. It was as if she’d disappeared. Maybe gone up in smoke would be a better term.
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Chapter 54: Charon, the Ka, and Witnessing
June 2008, Sarasota
When Alice left that night, I knew I would never see her again. I could feel it. She never called or wrote, nor did I have any way of contacting her; but if the truth be known, the ball was always in her court on that one. I wasn’t the only one in the dark, however. A few months after she left, I received a call from her son at Delta trying to reach her. What struck me at the time, knowing Alice’s age, was how young he sounded—he had the eager, friendly attitude of someone in his twenties.
He had found some freight seats to Acapulco and thought we might be able to use them.
When I told him Alice had left and I had no idea where she was, he was very consoling about it, “Alice is like that. You can never really reach her. She calls when she calls. When she called last time, I hadn’t heard from her for years. If she does call, tell her I have the seats, will you?”
“Sure, OK, but I don’t think she’s going to call.”
“OK, well, I understand, I do, I mean she’s like that, well, nice talking to you Mister Justin.”
All I can physically show you of Alice today are her six poems, the excerpts from her notebook, and two snapshots of her house. I went looking for that house on several occasions, but I was never able to find it. I asked Diane to take a trip out there to see if she could locate it, but she told me it was like flying blind. She said it was as if Alice no longer had a scent, or her scent had changed. She told me that she was never able to find the house. “That whole neighborhood has changed,”
she said. “They’re paving roads and putting in subdivisions. God knows what happened to the house, or the road, or her.”
I miss Alice. But everything has its cycle and time, including our time together, as magical as it was. I think Alice understood from the very beginning that we had come together in order to learn something, and that our paths would diverge as soon as that had taken place. It was time, simple as that. No apologies. No regrets.
True wisdom lies in accepting that we seldom really know why our lives intersect with the lives of others. We may have ideas, but in the end they are mostly that, only ideas. All we can really do is be alert to the possibilities being signaled, because such meetings are never accidental. While it is obvious I had no idea what was going on when we first met, Alice must have sensed almost from the outset that something primal was trying to reach me and that she was to be the bridge. She never wavered from honoring that perception. I would like to think that Alice viewed me as equally unwavering, but that may be wishful thinking on my part. When it came to intensity, Alice had no match. None.
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If I were to try to describe what it felt like to be with Alice, I would have to say it was almost identical to what the gathering itself felt like: that something larger was going on, something that had a rhythm and intent of its own, like a snake slowly coiling and uncoiling itself across a floor. I don’t think Alice would disagree with me on any of that. Even more to the point, when our time came to an end, I understood that the gathering itself was going to rest for a while before resuming its journey. I also sensed it was the proper time to end this book.
Like the gathering, I am at a balance point in time. My deepest intuition is that something hidden is very much at play, but what that something is, and where it is leading me, I have no idea. I do know one thing, however: as Alice had predicted, my dreams have begun to change.
A few months after she left, I had two vivid dreams. They were about a week apart and had the same dramatic theme: I would see my former wife, Pauline, beautiful and loving, and then I would suddenly see her with another man. She would acknowledge my presence then disappear with the other man. Those two simple dreams were so powerful and my sense of being abandoned so painful I woke up in tears, completely shattered, unable to function for hours. I couldn’t understand what the dreams were trying to tell me until I realized they were about a transformation—about me leaving the self I know as me.
My dreams about Pauline were not new. She has been appearing in my dreams for some 13 years, ever since our divorce. They always have the same dramatic theme: she was someone I couldn’t quite reach, or speak to, or touch, or understand. It was as if an invisible wall separated us. They have always been extremely painful dreams.
After a few years I began to understand that she was appearing as more than herself. I saw she was also appearing as a guide, just as she had been in the married life we shared. As the dreams became more complex, I realized she also represented the more loving part of me—the part of me I couldn’t reach, or speak to.
In our life together, Pauline had a way of expressing her awareness of this part of me. She’d sometimes look at me at a particularly intimate moment and say with a small smile: “Whitey wants to come out and play, doesn’t he?” She was right every time. Whitey never made it.
Over the years, these dreams have become less painful, sometimes even hopeful, which I took as a sign I was slowly becoming more open to my loving side. These last two dreams, however, were unbearably painful. They were also different in another way: they took place in the city—a busy place. All the other dreams about her had occurred in a room, or the country. Then, of course, there were the other
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men. They had never been there before.
At first, I didn’t know what to make of the two men. The young, heavy black man was dressed hip/hop style: hat, oversized black and white checkered shirt. He and Pauline were about a half block away when I saw them. She looked at me very quickly, as if to acknowledge my presence, and then disappeared into an office building. I had the distinct impression they were on their way to a subway inside the building.
The second man was young, handsome, and blonde. She introduced me; then drove away in a cab with him. Unlike the black man, the blonde man was right in front of me. I liked him. I remember thinking she had done well.
There was a finality to both dreams that was piercing. I have never felt so alone, so abandoned. Yet I knew the two men had no correspondence in Pauline’s actual life. She was happily married to a red-haired man. Then I realized the two men represented different aspects of my personality—that left/right split again. I saw the black hip-hop artist representing the Dionysian part of me, the moon side, the left side, the more unconscious, impulsive, passionate part—while the handsome blonde man represented the Apollonian side of me, the sun side, the right side, the more reasoning, conscious part.
I understood then why Pauline had appeared from a distance with the black man.
It was the part of me with which she was less comfortable. She wasn’t afraid of it.
She was even attracted to it, but she was also aware how dangerous it could be.
That’s what the black and white checkered shirt represented: the light and the dark.
I also understood that Pauline was again appearing as a spiritual guide, a Virgil if you will. The dreams were telling me that the irreconcilable left and right sides of me were about to go on a journey. One side of me was going to go deep underground, the other smack into the busy intercourse of everyday life. I understood then why the dreams had been so utterly devastating. I was about to be guided through a spiritual transformation in which those two irreconcilable sides of me were going to be changed. More simply put, the person I knew as me was going to die.
I pay attention to my dreams. No one will ever convince me dreams like these are meaningless, neural discharges. They are soul messages and they are not to be taken lightly. One thing that struck me was that the journeys were to be separate—the two halves of me were to be kept apart—much as suspects in a crime are kept apart and questioned individually. It was going to be some ride.
About a month later, as I was putting the finishing touches on this book, I had another unsettling dream. I was given a glimpse, as they say. It was night. I was in 278 ALICE HICKEY
the country in a small field, looking up at a dirt road just above my head. A small truck drove by and stopped. It had wooden staves holding the cargo, which I took to be animals, although I could barely see them in the shadows.
The truck was very much like the small trucks I had seen in Alamos hauling pigs to market. The driver got out. Then I was suddenly next to the truck, looking between the staves into the shadows, but all I could see were dark collapsed masses on the floor. Then I saw the masses were covered by something like the flat circular hats Asian women wear in rice paddies. A blue light was bleeding out from underneath the hats.
Then I was back in the field watching the driver summon one of the dark masses to leave the truck. I immediately took the dark, covered mass to be a woman. She rose to a height of seven or eight feet to become a thin, long necked figure in a blue, glowing robe. I sensed the woman was my mother. She began to move back and forth very slowly in the slow motion, otherworldly manner of a giraffe. She remained completely abstract and mute—I couldn’t detect any intent on her part to communicate with me. It was as if she were responding solely to commands by the driver. I tried to see her face underneath the hat, but all I could see was the lower, left side around the cheek. Her skin was the color of silvery leather—I could see the fine creases—then the dream ended.
A rush of associations came to mind. The Celtic underworld guarded by the boar was signaled by the pig truck, and then it came to me that the fine, leathery texture of the woman’s skin was identical to the texture of murdered Celts found in the peat bogs of Ireland—except the skin wasn’t the usual bronze, tannic color—but silvery, the color of the moon and the Mother Goddess.
I knew the dream was very special. There was something otherworldly about the motion of the woman—in the same way the motion of a snake seems not of this world. I realized I had been visited by Charon, the boatman on the river Styx (wooden staves = sticks = styx) who ferried the souls of the dead to Hades. In this case, however, Charon was bringing them out of Hades—to give me a glimpse of the merchandise, if you will. To show me what the world of the dead was really like.
What I had been shown was a figure even more lifeless than those depicted in Homer’s Hades. What I was shown by the driver were the barest traces of my mother’s soul. It was clear her soul, her animating essence, was no longer there, just as her physical body had long since dissolved into the elements of the earth.
What the dream was saying to me was that her soul had disappeared, become one again with the Life Force, just as her body had dissolved into the earth, into the physical manifestation of that same Force. All that Charon could show me of her was a shadow of her essence—a distorted, lifeless suggestion of her long-necked
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gracefulness.
What this dream reinforced for me, and what I have come to believe, is that the soul and the body are one and the same. They are undifferentiated. The soul is the body and the body is the soul. When one dies, the other does too. They both return to the Life Force—the Serpent of Creation eating its own tail—and then they eventually reappear again—as themselves and not themselves—which is about as clear a description of rebirth as I can give you. Anything more would be window dressing.
The concept of an undifferentiated body and soul is not a popular one in Western thought. If we go back to the more soul-driven cultures that existed in preliterate times, the concept was more accepted. It is at the heart of Egyptian thinking about the soul, which was extensive. We could learn something from it.
Here are some selections from my journal:
Julian Jaynes makes some interesting observations about the Egyptian terms for the soul, of which there are five. He builds a substantial evidential case that the modern interpretation of one—the Ka— as the Life Force, leads to a serious misinterpretation of Egyptian spiritual thought. Jaynes saw the Ka as being no other than the internal guiding voices all preliterate peoples heard.
I’ll add my own corrective two cents to Jaynes’ more incisive insight. I think the Egyptians came to the conclusion—at a very early stage of their spiritual development—that the body and soul were inseparable—undifferentiated.
When the body died, the soul died. You might call it one of the primal spiritual assumptions of Egyptian culture. It was no more questioned than we question our own assumption that the application of reason will eventually unlock all of nature’s secrets.
The Egyptians might spend most of their waking hours chattering about the afterlife and various parts of the soul, but that is the outcome of a culture with an intense curiosity about them. The Egyptians were clearly obsessed with both; which is why they were also obsessed with preserving the bodies of the dead.
The Egyptians must have sensed—and probably convinced themselves through extensive psychic investigation—that if the dead body didn’t dissolve into the elements of the earth, some part of the soul—and specifically some part of the Ka— would remain alive.
Once we understand that—that the Egyptians believed keeping the body from disappearing would also keep the soul and its voices—its Ka—from disappearing, we can begin to really understand their elaborate burial practices.
Mummification was at the center of those practices. Its real function has never been properly understood. The generally accepted explanation is that mummification would allow the physical body to be revived in the afterlife. If that 280 ALICE HICKEY
were so, then why were the brains not preserved in Canoptic jars as the other organs were, but simply scooped out onto the floor? The Egyptians had a well-developed medicine; they knew the body couldn’t function without the brain.
The reason they didn’t care about the brain was simple; mummification was designed to preserve the soul— or if you prefer, the astral body—not the physical body.
What the Egyptians feared most was what my dream about Charon was saying: when the body dies, the soul dies. You might say the efforts of the Egyptians to keep the soul and its Ka alive amounted to nothing less than trying to stop the Life Force from completing its appointed rounds. When we look at Egyptian culture in this light, there is only one conclusion you can come to: the Egyptians were bold beyond all imagining.
We should be equally as bold about the soul, but not in the way the Egyptians were. We have to develop our own boldness. One suggestion comes from the The Witnessses Log, which tells us we are not an accident, mere atomic flotsam, but the bold, oddly connected twin of Creation itself—a tiny dwarf star balancing the infinitely huge star of Creation.
It is our witnessing that gives us that power. That may seem an odd claim to those who can’t see how truly magnificent the act of witnessing is. It sets us apart from everything else in creation. Perhaps 3000 years of ferocious rationality have made us believe that the airy fabrications we call stories are insignificant. After all, what are stories compared to the atomic bomb?
It was only when I began to speak that I began to see how powerful and mysterious the act of witnessing is in its ongoing, reflexive creation of the world as we know it. I’m not only talking about stories like Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, or Einstein’s E=MC², but stories like Shakespeare’s King Lear, or Frost’s Reluctance.
It is the full, magnificent range of our witnessing that defines our humanity.
Witnessing is central to our humanity. The two are not only inseparable, but undifferentiated. To be human is to witness; to witness is to be human .
That realization didn’t take place overnight. It took me eight long years of unwinding a long, mysterious skein that seemed to have no end. I doubt that it has one. I still don’t have a complete understanding of why my life took the turn it did—and despite all that Alice helped me understand, I am still not sure where I am going.
All I have are some ideas. Ideas, however, are no substitute for the kind of truth that fills the body with light. That kind of truth still eludes me—and may continue to do so. I have to be humble about that possibility.
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I would like to think, however, that I now have a reasonably good understanding of the myth. Yet I wouldn’t be at all surprised if I uncover other layers of meaning as time passes—layers I completely missed this time around. Nor would I be surprised if others arrived at very different conclusions as to what the myth means.
All I can really tell you about the myth and the psychic events that surrounded it is this: they happened. And this : I tried to be a good witness; I tried to honor them.
If I have learned anything in these last eight years that I can pass on to you, it is this: we have to find a new balance between the male and female sides of our nature. I’m not talking about men getting facials. I’m talking about a new way of comprehending the meaning of our lives—and our deaths.
We’re already overdeveloped in the ways of the Male Spirit, of rational understanding, of the self. An increase in the ways of the Female Spirit, of intuition, of feeling, of the soul is what we need—because the mysterious ways and whispers of the soul offer us what we so desperately need: a more profound understanding of what it means to be human.
To do this, we have to surrender to the soul’s ways—and whispers. If we succeed, the door to the soul will open and offer us the chance of living a life that is not only worth living, but worth dying for—and isn’t that what it’s all about?
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Afterword
In case you’ve been too busy to notice, all of us are on a very fast train called Western Civilization and there is no getting off. There are those who think they can get off by going to India, or Oregon, but that is an illusion. The train is not outside us; it is in our genes, our cells. We carry it with us wherever we go. To get a truer picture of the train, you might want to think of it as a massive gathering that first appeared about 4,000 years ago. And it is no paper tiger. It has teeth.
Gatherings always do, especially one of this size. And for better or worse, we are part and parcel of it.
There are those who will tell you that Western Civilization is taking us on a journey that will allow us to become more enlightened, more civilized, more the architects of our own progress; but, in truth, at this point in time we are becoming less human. We are living only half a life, while the other half, the life of the soul, is rapidly disappearing. We may soon lose sight of it entirely. One thing for sure: our inability to find some way of bringing this older way of knowing back into our everyday lives is making us dim boys in a dim room.
But what is it we should do? For starters, we should turn our thinking minds off and allow ourselves to be attracted to the small, contrary gatherings that are continually forming along the edge of the larger one, like the eddies that form on the edge of a large whirlpool. It is a natural process, these smaller contrary movements.
We should take heart from them. Just as we should take heart from the remains of past gatherings that occasionally bob to the surface. After all, that is what archaeological finds like the Essene Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Codices are: the remains of gatherings that ran contrary to the general flow.
But those are the remains of relatively large gatherings. The gatherings I’m talking about don’t have to be large; a few souls are enough. And they don’t have to have to be driven by a complex set of ideas. All that’s required is an interest in becoming more complete. If that interest is visceral enough, a gathering will begin to form. There is nothing else that has to be consciously done. Everything will take care of itself, including the arrival of the other participants. Believe me.
The success of those gatherings will depend upon whether they can be successfully centered on a psychic gateway of some kind. The form the gateway takes, however, isn’t important. What is important is that we be open to it. Being open to the psychic world may be a real problem, however, because there is both a fear and a general confusion throughout our culture as to its nature.
Let me be very clear then about what I mean by a psychic event. Rather than give
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