These journal entries are immediately after the Paxil episode. I find the experiences I describe quite extraordinary. I have been reading a book called The Journey of Soul Initiation by Bill Plotkin. His understanding of how the world works and what soul is is very different from our consumer-conformist culture’s understanding. He sees humans as being part of nature just like the rest of the living creatures on Planet Earth. There are growth stages and understandings that we need to live into to take the place designed for us on this planet.
February 28, 1996 I didn’t write about the sense of the world having grown vastly larger. This was happening periodically both while on the drug and while withdrawing from it. Listening to “The Mountain that Loved a Bird” I had a sudden sense/memory that we are all engaged in some enormous task. Driving through the world of bleak landscape, blue sky, blowing white clouds I had a sense of dynamic forces and dimensions, of being on the top of very high mountains. I found all this scary, like leaving a cosy fireside for a war zone, and so I’ve shut down again, unable to remember or describe it accurately. I see that it has to do with trying to enter a new state before I’m ready. I need to spend more time in/with the state I’m in: winter, depression, chrysalis, stay with it and integrate it into a foundation for the next step. Instead of being so afraid of being stuck, I need to cultivate it.
“Trying to enter a new state before I’m ready” is described by Plotkin, and also “chrysalis.”
February 29 Last night was better than before, but still not great. A lot of low-grade anxiety, continuous, but manageable. I woke at 1:00, after 3 hours sleep, soaking wet, had to change my night clothes.
As the year goes on I live through the “Summer From Hell” where I can’t sleep more than 90 minutes at a time, wake up sweating with hot flashes, etc.
Beverly says: “Everything is up for grabs.” Beverly says she too is finding it difficult to articulate what’s going on with her, that she feels disoriented, uncomfortable, like she had entered new territory and doesn’t know whether this is what she chose or what she wanted. Things that seemed a solid part of her are crumbling. Listening to her, I feel that she is reflecting just what’s been going on for me, and I see that the way by which we change is changing.
March 3 I can see that all my efforts to change myself are unavailing, and possibly only making things worse. I don’t understand at all what’s happening to me, so I have no foundation for any action. If I’m going to change, someone/something else must change me. So I’m forced to rest on that. Perhaps I will learn to trust it.
We both feel like we have entered new territory where we don’t understand what’s happening or what we are “supposed” to do. I put “supposed” in quotes, because our job is to intuit our next move.
March 5 I describe a colorful dream: one image is a hippie house, the wardrobe contains many little blue items, perhaps jewelry or stars. As I type “wardrobe” I think of the magic wardrobe in the first Narnia book. “The house has the feel of an old hippie house, a hand-made colorful gypsy quality.”
Well! there’s a colorful dream at last. The wardrobe, and window over the stove were very vivid. So let’s see. I’m trying to find a way to turn around, go back the other way. Even getting myself on back-country roads is dangerous, the world’s huge vehicles are still rushing about heedless of road conditions. I ask for help — though help isn’t very helpful. At least I’ve gotten off the highway. In the dream “101” seemed to run parallel to the highway and would take me back in the other direction. In California, 101 is “El Camino Real,” the royal road. Freud called dreams “the royal road to the unconscious.” It would be nice to recover some kind of dream life. I also think of how “101” is the course number of the basic elementary course. I’m having to go back and redo “Life 101.” This seems to be a lot of what I’m working on right now: giving up the struggle for philosophical and spiritual understanding, trying to rest on the foundation, trying to rest in the hands of the God I don’t believe in, trying to trust the “innate intelligence” of my body, having to give up my intellectual strategies of how to figure out and do my life, having to rest in the most basic kinds of life support, having to be humble enough to let that most basic part of my life support me. The message of this dream seems to be not to be in such a hurry to get back on the highway.
Again I’m getting the message that I have to “redo Life 101” which sounds a lot like what Plotkin is talking about. Go back to the foundation, trust the intelligence of my body, approach all this new information with humility, don’t be in a hurry.