Following our first visions after Pisti’s death, Istvan and I
participated in two worlds. One was the world in which Pisti was
no longer physically present. The other was the world of Mind, of
presence and creativity. Here the unique consciousness of Pisti
was present, but always within the context of his larger creating
Self. He, as Pisti, was like a living work of art in a large mosaic that
fit into an even larger artistic design.
Once I felt him say to me, “Think of my life as a painting.”
Together we looked at this painting, and I understood the artistic
necessity of its basic composition. That is, I was able to have at
least some understanding of the organizing principle working in
his life to help him realize the intention that gave him birth.
However, I also was able to see how the collective nature of
creativity complicates the achievement of these intentions. Once
again I realized how important it is to “Protect everything that is
coming into being.”
This experience reminded me of the image of the old man
who, in my dream before Pisti’s birth, had created the painting of
the young man I knew would be born as my son. As I pondered
this image of the old man sitting in the rocking chair and smoking
his pipe, the image began to take on a life of its own. I watched the
man slowly and calmly inhale the smoke. As he exhaled, I saw the
smoke divide into separate streams of intention and flow out in
many directions. Each stream of smoke manifested itself in a
living, conscious work of art. Some of the creations remained in
Mind while others materialized in time and space.
Sometimes the power and vastness of this creativity undid
me, and I fell back into the world where I was Pisti’s mother,
where he was dead, and where we would never be together
again. After all, this world also had its reality.
I knew that this world’s reality was our perception of the world
that we had historically constructed and collectively maintained.
I knew this—even while I experienced its paralyzing effect on me.
It was clear that my personal work was to deconstruct these
trained modes of perception within my own mind. I was grateful
that there was evidently a part of me that always lived in the
wisdom of Mind, that knew and understood the process of
deconstruction and creation that was working within me. Yet the
tension between the two worlds was real and would continue to
be real until the creative principles of Mind could flow through
me without being intercepted and garbled into the tangled shape
of our present worldview.
One afternoon, when I felt frozen in that empty, garbled
world, I decided to get out of the house and go to a bookstore. As I
browsed through the books, I was unaware of the music that was
being played until suddenly my attention was captivated by a
piece I had never heard. I sat down and attempted to appear
normal, but I felt something open in my heart. The sorrow was
overwhelmingly intense, but, strangely, so was the joy. When the
music finished, I put the book I was reading back on the shelf,
purchased the tape of music, and left the store. I was amused that
the piece was called Miracles.1
Later that evening I decided to listen to the music again. I
placed the tape in the stereo in Pisti’s room and went into my
bedroom to change clothes. As I stepped out of my sweats, I was
once again overcome by the music. I looked at the pictures of Pisti
on the dresser, and suddenly my perspective started to distance
itself from everything in front of me.Myconsciousness seemed to
be leaving the room and moving toward the music while my
body stood still. I quickly followed “myself” into Pisti’s room,
closed the door, and lay down on the bed in the darkness.
The moment I closed my eyes, I felt Pisti’s presence so
strongly that I was startled. I felt him say, “Let’s look at all my
forms as Pisti. Let’s live through them together.” I began to
remember him as a baby and then as a very young boy. Soon I was
no longer just remembering. I was inside specific moments. While
my consciousness fully participated in this past, it was also
strangely “located” slightly up in the air to my right where Pisti
and I were “surfing” the great creative waves of life together.
These waves were energetic and vigorous. One could sink and
drown, be ripped apart, or skillfully ride the waves in a state of
ecstasy.
Down on the bed I was crying, laughing, then frantically
trying to hold onto the moment—to make it last just a little longer.
At such times, I began to sink. Then I could hear Pisti say, “Live
each moment fully. Then let it go.” These were the critical periods
of excruciating tension between holding on and letting go. Then,
when I released everything to save myself from drowning, I felt
myself rise high on the crest of the life force. It was exhilarating. In
these moments I knew how deadly and unnecessary it was to try
to hold onto anything. After all, here we were, Pisti and I, alive,
participating, observing, and creating together on the vast,
eternal ocean of Mind.
Then I returned to time and space. Pisti was a young man. I
saw him smile. Pain shot through my heart. I would never see
him smile again. I heard Pisti say, “We can always create that
smile again.” But I knew that would be another life, another time,
and another space. I felt myself sinking, but I could still hear
Pisti’s coaching: “Flow with time. Surf with time. Surf on the
great force of life.”
As I saw the high school years coming, we both began to
laugh. I said I could let go of those years very well. The moment I
had this thought, we were living the last years of his life. I felt his
joy, his love, his deep desire to create a life of meaning and
purpose. And I felt my own relief and happiness that he had
made it through the difficult years. Then, abruptly, I landed in the
final month—the accident, the days in the Trauma Center. I
leaned over his beautiful image and kissed the middle of his
forehead. The combined energy of all his images returned. No. I
would not let him go.
But, I thought, he has already died, and here we are together.
His consciousness filled the room, yet I stood frozen in this last
moment. Slowly, Pisti said, “Remember Faust. Remember that it
is precisely when he cries out, ‘Linger, linger, [this moment]
thou art so beautiful!’ that he can fall into the power of
Mephistopheles.” In that exact instant the music was finished. I
sat up. The conflict was gone. I realized that something deep in
me was in the process of relinquishing the material forms of Pisti.
This was occurring, not because I was unusually courageous or
strong, but because I had experienced the essence that created
those forms. I felt a pervasive peace flow through my mind and
body. I lay back down on the bed. I looked out at the stars. I was in
awe of the universe.
I thought about what it really means to live each moment fully
with open hands, to love deeply and, at the same time, to be able
to relinquish it all. This, if anything, requires the exquisite balance
of Persephone, she who is bonded through love both to the
mother of life and to the husband of death, to form and to
nonform. I had been bonded to form, but I could not be bonded to
nonform until I had consciously experienced it. I, like
Persephone, had to be abducted by the Lord of the Great Void.
Anubis, the jackal, had opened the way to the powerful love and
creativity in the essence of all life. Now I also belonged to both
worlds—but I was still learning how to walk between these
worlds in harmony and in balance, how to weave them together
into one dynamic, living fabric.
I could see that Persephone is a sacred image of immanental
Mind: she reflects life that is lived in balance and harmony with
the principles that organize, dissolve, and recreate all life. Now
the deep layers of my mind were giving birth to Persephone in
me. I had experienced how letting each moment go allowed me to
surf the waves of life in a state of ecstasy. Pisti was teaching me to
let him go in material time and space so I could experience more
fully his essence in “the inner space and time of consciousness.” It
was becoming apparent that this balance of Persephone, as well
as that of the jackal, was the “Opener of the Way” to multidimensional
consciousness.
I laughed when I remembered that the music was called
Miracles. I had, indeed, experienced a miracle. As I thought about
the definition of this word as an event that appears to contradict
the known laws of science, I marveled at how such events must
always be taking place around us, in us, and throughout this
infinitely creative universe. Surely no science, however
advanced, could ever include all the laws of creativity. I wanted
to stay open to such events even though they appeared to
contradict what we have agreed is reality. I certainly knew that
my experience of Pisti’s absence in the world of matter was real,
yet equally real was my experience of his presence in the world of
Mind. This meant respectfully holding these apparent
contradictions in a state of balance so that what I now perceived
as two worlds could be experienced as one dynamic process of
ebb and flow, of birth and death, of absence and presence, of
darkness and light, of inner and outer, of matter and spirit.
In the meantime, however, Istvan and I were very concerned
about Jenny. She had been devastated by Pisti’s death. While she
was convinced that Pisti’s consciousness was continuous, his
absence was her daily reality. She was fortunate to have a loving
and understanding family who did everything they could to help
her through the grief she was experiencing. They knew that her
life was profoundly changed. I often wondered whether it was
more painful to lose a child to death or to lose a child to grief.
Istvan, Jenny, and I were often together during the first two
years following Pisti’s death. We went to Hungary together to
visit Pisti’s Hungarian grandmother and our many other relatives
in that country. We also carried Pisti’s ashes to Mount Baldy,
where Pisti and Jenny had spent so much time together, and to
Mount Shasta and Sedona. A few weeks before Pisti’s accident he
had said to Jenny and a few of their friends that if one were to die,
the truly wonderful thing would be to have one’s ashes scattered
at sacred places on the earth. When Pisti died, the three of us
vowed to do just that. And that first spring Jenny took my class in
mythology and symbolic language. After class we often spent
hours talking over coffee. Sometimes she would come by our
house to meditate in Pisti’s room. It was there that she too stepped
into the multidimensional world of immanental Mind.
Her experiences in “the inner space and time of
consciousness” formed the path that brought Jenny back to life
and balance. The first time she had such an experience, she said
she wanted to run out of his room and tell us that he wasn’t dead,
that not only was he creating with us but that he was creating in
other dimensions as well. “But,” she said, “I didn’t dare move. I
wanted to experience him as much and as long as I could.” The
following description of her experience is from her journal and
notes in her words that I wrote down at that time:
At first I know that Steve (Pisti) is present, but there is no
image. I wait. Then I see a sandy beach and the ocean. Now
Steve and I both have bodies, but they are spirit forms, sort of
transparent, yet I am able to see if I choose to see. I can see all
other physical forms. Everything is still and beautiful.
I am so excited because I know he isn’t dead and we are
together again. He picks me up and runs into the ocean with
me. We hold each other for a long time. It is so personal and
real. Finally, we are sitting on the beach together, and he says,
“I have so much to tell you.”
Then we go together into lush mountains and then out into
space. I look down, and I can see the earth. Steve wants to show
me the disease of the planet. He says the illness is getting
worse—both in human beings and in the environment. I can
see the dirt and pollution all around the earth. I realize that
this is a spirit picture from space. The earth is so small, but we
can see the damage we have done to it. I realize that this kind of
pollution gets in the way of our communication with “the
other side.” He encourages me to take care of my body, to
nourish it and to nourish the earth and its precious resources,
to love myself and to love the earth.
When Jenny told Istvan and me about this experience, Istvan
related to Jenny the similar vision of the earth that he had
experienced. This was a powerful moment for all three of us: Pisti
was urgently focusing our attention on the stressed condition of
the earth and the role the human species plays in that condition.
Jenny said that this part of the vision was a surprise to her
because she had not been conscious of the seriousness of the
problem before this experience. She felt such love coming from
Pisti for her and for the earth. He talked with her in detail about
taking care of herself emotionally and physically. Jenny now
understood that taking care of herself was the first step toward
taking care of her larger body, which was the earth.
I wanted to tell everyone about these amazing journeys into
“the inner space and time of consciousness,” but I soon realized
what I was up against. The same struggle with doubt, denial, and
outright rejection that I had experienced in myself now stood
before me in the images of friends with whom I thought I could
share these experiences. These friends were like mirrors for my
own rational mind in its effort to deny and destroy any
experience that contradicted its accepted view of reality. Yet they
were my friends, people who loved and trusted me. I knew they
wanted to be supportive, but they could not be if I continued to
inject the disorganizing principle of these experiences. There
were, of course, other friends who could and did listen to the
stories, but it soon became clear that such experiences are difficult
to hold in consciousness if there is not a worldview into which
they can fit. Istvan talked with only a few people, and Jenny, quiet
and private as she was, talked with no one for a very long time.
She simply knew that what she had experienced was another
dimension of reality, that she could not have understood it
without experiencing it, and, therefore, there was no possibility of
sharing it.
The three of us realized that Pisti was trying to awaken in us a
worldview into which our experiences would not only fit but
would be understood as natural expressions of the essence of that
worldview. Pisti worked with us in the mode of an ancient Celtic
Bard in his effort to awaken our deep memory, to ignite our
intuitive, artistic consciousness, to create the conditions
necessary for Baraka to magically and spontaneously occur in us.
In our dreams and visions he miraculously appeared and told us
stories, showed us images, joked with us (especially with Istvan),
danced, played haunting music, and we created living, visionary
narratives in which he and we participated. He communicated
with the greatest urgency that our world had lost its intuitive
consciousness of the creative principles that organize and balance
the marvelous and complex forms of all life. We had lost our
“ordered” structure, and the world had become a “wasteland.”
One evening I dreamed I saw Pisti dancing wildly and yet
effortlessly out of the North and into the room where I was
sleeping. His arms and legs, hands and feet were flying through
the air in perfect harmony with a music I could feel but could not
hear. His every muscle vibrated with this unheard music. When I
was able to see his feet more clearly, I realized that he was
dancing in the snakeskin boots he had liked so much. I began to
feel the pure joy his presence brought into the room, and, as he
continued to dance, I felt him say, “Dance life in snake boots!”
When I awoke, I remembered a conversation Pisti and I had
one afternoon about the symbolism of the snake. He had invited
me into his room to see two beautiful rattlesnake skins he had just
hung on his wall. The snakes had been run over on Mount Baldy,
and Pisti had skinned them. I mentioned that people of the
ancient world had viewed the snake as a powerful manifestation
of the divine and that they had honored the sacred mystery of
death and birth in the snake’s ability to shed its dead skin and
allow the soft, new skin to come into being.
I wanted to be able to dance life in snake boots, to be able to
release the dead forms so that the new forms could live in me. I
had experienced the exuberance and joy this ability releases. All
three of us wanted this. Istvan, Jenny, and I wanted to do
whatever was necessary to allow this new vision to be born in us.
Weunderstood that we needed to heal ourselves of the damage of
our present worldview and to learn how to heal our larger selves,
the earth, of this same damage. We wanted to achieve a balance in
our lives and to extend our connectedness with this
multidimensional world. We continued to be attentive to our
dreams, our waking visions, and our precognitive and
synchronistic experiences. Sometimes we did not understand
what we were going through, but we recorded everything, the
chaos as well as the order, with as much detail and accuracy as we
possibly could. Another world had opened to us, and we wanted
to be good cartographers.
Istvan and I spent most of our free time talking about our
experiences, listening to music, reading and meditating. We
studied different forms of meditation, and we used techniques
from some of the ancient shamanic traditions of Mexico and
South America. We felt comfortable and strangely familiar with
these traditions because they connected us to nature and to the
earth. Gradually we each settled into the form of meditation that
suited us individually, and we discovered our own particular
needs.
Jenny needed to be in nature, especially in the mountains
where she had spent so much time with Pisti. I discovered that
my body needed to move with music in a form of dancing
meditation, and Istvan, in addition to meditation, discovered
books: he read more in the next two years than he had read
during his entire life. For several months Istvan meditated lying
down in the panther position, which was the “bridge” position of
Istvan’s vision of Pisti in the hospital. When that no longer
worked for him, he used another form of meditation. He often
meditated in Pisti’s room, but from time to time I would hear him
blissfully snoring. When I kidded him about this, he laughed and
reminded me of my own words, that “this world also had its
reality.” This happened so often, however, that we finally came to
use the Hungarian word for meditation, meditacio, for nap. Istvan
insisted that this was his own personal technique for keeping the
“balance.”
After his meditacio one Sunday afternoon, Istvan emerged
from Pisti’s room to tell me a dream he had just had in which Pisti
showed him a film. He sat down at the table, folded his arms in
front of him, and closed his eyes. I sat down quietly and waited.
Something big was happening inside Istvan. I looked at his face
and watched the tears push through his closed lashes. His folded
arms seemed to hold him in this time and this space. I did not feel
it was sadness that Istvan was experiencing, but rather something
so profound, so sacred, that he could not speak.
And we did not speak that afternoon about the dream. Only
later that evening as we lay in bed, neither of us able to sleep, did I
urge him to try to tell me what he had experienced. Then he
explained how, during the dream, he felt as though he
“understood everything.” Yet, later, when he wanted so much to
tell me, he simply could not speak. This is what he finally did say:
I saw universes creating themselves, absorbing themselves,
and recreating themselves—but not necessarily in that order.
It all seemed to be happening simultaneously. There was only
Now. Everything was energy, but this energy was love. This
love was so powerful that it shot out of itself as material
worlds, universes, but no matter how much it expanded or
changed its forms, it could never lose itself because there was
nothing but itself. I experienced this from the inside out, from
the heart, but I had the mind of a physicist and was able to
understand what I was seeing. Pisti said that I would not be
able to hold onto this kind of knowledge when I woke up, but he
said that there are physicists and other scientists on the earth
now who are beginning to understand some of the basic
principles of life that have not been understood in the past.
There was so much, but I don’t have the words. Instead of just
part of me experiencing the film, all of me was experiencing it,
but somehow I was the film, Pisti, myself and everything in
the film, and all of that was experiencing “it” at once.
Pisti told me that consciousness on the earth is going through
a powerful transformation. He said that there is now enough
energy on the earth, that is, love and longing for love, to hold
the beam of light that is coming—whatever that means. I
understood it in the dream. What I do remember is that light is
energy that is conscious and loving, but it was more than that.
Pisti also said that the new child of the human species will have
another ring of DNA. Maybe that was a symbol, some way to
tell me that the children of the future will be born knowing
what we are struggling to understand. I felt that if we can heal
ourselves, we can give them this gift.
All that night I lay close to Istvan’s body. His telling of the
dream had created such vast spaces in me that I felt a need to be
grounded in the present moment. Once again I had been undone
by the vast and powerful creativity of the universe. I longed for
Pisti to be present in the material world of time and space. I
longed for the known world, the familiar world—with all its
limitations. It was true that I wanted to make room in myself for
“the immensities of the universe,” but tonight it seemed to me
that my relationship to these immensities could only exist
through my love for the individual forms here in my time and my
place.
I knew Pisti’s essence existed even though he was no longer in
the body. I had experienced his presence, his love, his
consciousness, but now, this evening, I felt such a need to see him,
to see his earthly form. I had trouble sleeping, and when I did
sleep, I had strange, confusing dreams. Finally, in the early
morning I dreamed Pisti came home. He walked into the kitchen
where I was making breakfast. I could see him clearly. He was
wearing the white Tibetan shirt he loved, jeans, and his old, dirty
Nikes. I asked why he was wearing his old shoes when I had
bought him new ones before he died. He smiled and asked me in
return, “Am I real enough?” We both laughed at his joking
response to my need as we embraced each other. I was prepared
to feel empty space, but much to my surprise, he was solid, and I
was not.
That morning before Istvan left for work, he made coffee,
brought it into the bedroom, and sat down. I told him the dream. I
explained how I had longed for the particular, and I got it, right
down to the dirty shoes. But I had been in for a surprise: Pisti had
walked into the dream as a trickster Bard. What was “real”
anyway? Pisti appeared in a very clear, specific image, but did
such an image make him more real? Was an image ever more real
than the presence of love and consciousness? Even in the dream I
did not expect the image to have substance, yet the image was
solid and I was empty space. My very “real” material body had
no substance at all. But was it not real? Then, suddenly, I realized
that Pisti’s old, worn-out shoes were probably a symbol of the
old, worn-out image that I thought I needed. I was not dancing in
snake boots.
As Istvan and I talked about the dream, I was reminded once
again of the quotation on Pisti’s pen and ink drawing: “Listen to
the force behind the force of pure creativity. It is the essence of
Life.” As we talked about this quotation, Istvan and I began to
realize that it had become the theme of our journeys into “the
inner space and time of consciousness.” Istvan said that he now
felt that if a person stayed centered in the “essence,” there would
be no question about what is real. Everything is real, whether it
has form or not. Suddenly, the word “listen” took on new
meaning. If we could remember to listen to the force behind the
force that creates all forms, perhaps then we really could “Live
each moment fully. Then let it go.”
I realized that I had been overwhelmed with the vastness of
Istvan’s dream because I had not been centered in the essence, the
heartfelt source, as Istvan had been. I was overwhelmed by too
much form, and I longed for the one beloved form that I had lost.
As we talked, I felt an urgent need to look more closely at Pisti’s
drawing of Dali and himself where this quotation appeared. I
jumped out of bed, ran into Pisti’s room, and removed the
drawing from the portfolio.
I took it back to Istvan, and we looked at it together. While I
had seen the background before, I had not really taken it in.NowI
saw that the entire design bursts forth from a central point and
emanates outward in ever larger, somewhat geometrical shapes.
Dali’s and Pisti’s forms are a part of this bursting forth. Integrated
into the background shapes are the words “Élan Vital.” They are
shaped to give the impression of a powerful resonance coming
from the center. Istvan said that he had never really paid attention
to the background either. “Now,” he said, “after our experiences,
it’s impossible not to see it, but,” he asked, “what is ‘Élan Vital’?”
I only knew that it was from Henri Bergson’s philosophy and that
it meant “vital force,” so I quickly looked it up in the dictionary,
and together we read: “the original vital impulse which is the
substance of consciousness and nature.”
