In Situ Experience

In situ, for those with some medical/biological knowledge, is the "best" kind of breast cancer to have.  It refers to tumots that have not grown beyond their site of origin and have not invaded neighboring tissue.  I did not have that type of limited cancer, which they can basically scoop out.  The other meaning of in situ means "in the site of", and it is that situated awareness that involves me tonight.  I wanted to go back to Grace and Grit which I had put off reading until just a few years ago.  It is an unforgettable,  moving and unbearably touching love story for the ages.   But I am not situated anywhere near that tender, frightening, ennobling, and transformational context.  As my doctor told me, "You have run-of-the-mill breast cancer."  I am going back into Ken's and Treya's story to glean what I can of the spiritual journey taken by both of them, and to understand where I am situated, personally, medically, and culturally.

Page 19: "The essence pf mysticism is that in the deepest part of your own being, in the very center of your own pure awareness, you are fundamentally one with Spirit, one with Godhead, one with the All, in a timeless and eternal and unchanging fashion."

I grew up in a schizoid-inducing household which required the greatest adaptive talents my little self could muster in order to keep Spirit alive.  I was, from my earliest memories, a mystic, and was encouraged to follow this aspect of myself by my wildly creative mother.  I received no direction for my own development, but heard enough family-authenticated stories to know that my mother was capable of rare, esoteric mystical abilities which I could never match.  She was such an adept at self-hypnosis that universities would call on her to demonstrate her rarest of abilities: cessation of bleeding when a knitting needle passed through her arm; writing with both left and right hands simultaneously; and having eye surgery with no anesthesia at 87 years of age while in a self-inducedf trance with rapid healing, no pain, and no bleeding.  I knew that some people could access these rarified states of consciousness, but it seemed to me at the time that they were joined with severe pathologies.  It was not until adulthood that I came to tease apart my mother's mystical abilities from her pathologies.  In other words, why would I want to follow her in developing mystical abilities if it seemed to be joined with pathologies?

What a relief it was later in my life for me to read about mysticism, and the Self!  What a gift to be offered a clean, clear Identity! 

But decades had been lost to my constricted attitude towards any "development" or exposure to mysticism.  Instead I turned to political science and law, which I saw as bright line understandings of the highest level of human development and action.  Growing up in the South, in Dallas, with the John Birch Society, White Citizens' Council, KKK, and Kennedy's assassination framing my maturation, I was more drawn to that pathological aspect of humanity and what caused it.  How might the Lower Right be best designed to contain and to elevate those who hated?  Surely education and understanding of the brilliance of our Founding Fathers could provide a rational framework to demonstrate to those capable of "right action" to work for the reparations of the poor and marginalized, and thus marginalize those who hated. 

I basically walked through the '60s enamored of Amber values.  One reason that I eshewed the sex/drug/guru influences was that I had intuitively reckoned with Green's misunderstanding of its Red followers.  I saw it again and again, in Dallas, in New Orleans where I went to college, and at Columbia where I did my graduate work.  If Green could not *grok* the toxic effects of its Red camp followers, then I certainly had no respect for the group and had no interest in following along. So I missed out on the benefits of the hippies' parade, and dubbed myself a "situationist", meaning that I would assess each event on its own merits, and either concur or turn my back.

We will pass through more decades, with the '70s containing my employment and marriage and increasingly unbearable personal life from within and without.  The miracle at the end of the decade was the birth of my daughter, and my final embrace of "cutting-edge" health ideas centering around childbirth.  I did my usual obsessive informational search when I found myself pregnant in 1979, and discovered that there was a birthing method that had the safety of the hospital with a more natural birthing experience.  I became trained in the Bradley Method, and fought with the hospital to permit me to give birth sitting up.  For those much younger readers, the doctors had imposed on women in labor that they do calesthenics by doing sit-ups: lay down, then pop up for a contraction and push, then lay down again, and repeat....I won my battle, and can proudly state that I was the first woman to be permitted to give birth while sitting up!

I feel compelled here to explain my lag in accepting and understanding what so many have grown up knowing and practicing when it comes to alternative methods of healing and birthing.  I was no pioneer until 1979, and had to do years of catching up, including with my situation today.

In the '80s I became a lawyer with a heavy matrimonial and ctiminal practice.  At the same time my personal life deteriorated into a daily battle to get out of bed and face.....well, let us try to compare it with being at war without the bullets, death, and physical destruction.  I do not wish to recite the daily grief to which I was exposed, since I feel that is not in service of my current need to heal and strengthen.  But by then I was on a search for someone...very special...who could synthesize the inner and outer experiences of my life.  I found Ken's work in 1982, and followed a slow but steady path by reading through his bibliographies.  I was so desparate for something to make my unmanageable life coherent.  I figured that since neither law nor political science had the framework I needed, I would read through quantum physics, which I did, dfevouring over 100 books and taking copious notes, writing articles I never published, and creating lesson plans I never got to teach.

Yet there was Ken cautioning that modern physics was niot mystical and that adoption of a quantum theory would suffice for a spiritual worldview.

p. 21-2: "To use Plato's analogy of the Cave: physics gives us a detailed picture of the shadows in the Cave (relative truth), whereas mysticism gives us a direct introduction to the Light beyond the Cave (absolute truth).  Study the shadows all you want, you still won't have light....If you hook your God to today's physics, then when that physics slips, that God slips with it."  So quantum phsycis is a really neat thing to understand and to chat about with others, but it isn't IT.  Where to next?

Finally, in 1990 with the death of my beloved father, I am plunged into learniung all about my Jewish roots which had not grown very deep in the hard red texas soil, learning to say Kaddish for him, joining the temple choir, reading, reading, reading, and then hearing Deepak Chopra talk about quantum physics and meditation.  I began to watch him on TV, read his books, and took meditation lessons from his top aide.  I then found out that Jews mediate too, gee, who knew?  I began a daily and negative meditation practice while keeping a log as they had advised.  Each day I wrote about my pitifully sad attempts to meditate, how I was one of those who would never get it "right"; it became hard to read my entries  of defeat and I threw the journal away.  But I kept trying, really really hard.

In 2001 I found I could no longer subscribe to Judaism and went into deep reading on zen, which suited my emerging understanding of what Ken had been writing about.  In 2003 I started to work with Ken on Integral University and was exposed to so many brilliant teachers who basically continued the rewiring that Ken had begun on my consciousness.  I began to pedal faster and faster to catch up with my age cohort, all who had had deep spiritual experiences and practices over decades.  I was really a beginner, with more in common with the 20-somethings.

In 2006, with only 2 years left in my teaching career before I could retire with full pension and continue my legal and Integral careers, I entered a time at work of such bleakness and woundedness that it still inspires nightmares.  Jealousy, revenge, power, all came into play in a situation where I had no means of fighting back or even leaving the game.  I became chronically ill, and my doctor told me that my immune system had become so taxed by daily stress that it could no longer protect me.  He blatantly told me that I would not live out 6 months of my last year of teaching.  My lawyer told me my situation was the worst case of workplace harassment he had seen in his 25 year career against major corporations.

I left teaching on Dec. 21, 2007 with a confidentiality agreement and settlement in tow.  I was diagnosed with PTSD and after leaving one therapist found THE one who could give me the spiritual healing that I badly needed.  I finished this past summer, and was in the leave-taking part of therapy when I got a bad mammogram in September.

Treya's lump was discovered shortly before her wedding to Ken.  As with me, she and I were assured by every medical provider that it was probably nothing.  In my case I was repeatedly told that 80% of women with my...[name your symptom]...did not have cancer.  Next bad news, and I was assured that 80% of that group did not have cancer....until I was told that 80% of women who have cancer have my type of cancer.

Off to Sloan-Kettering tomorrow for more testing and more information that I really do not wish to hear, much less absorb.