Into the Mystic 9781771331913, 9781771331883

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My Years with Olga

Memoir Series

Copyright © 2014 Susan McCaslin Individual copyright to their work is retained by the authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronically or mechanically, including photocopying, recording, or any information or storage retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Published in Canada by Inanna Publications and Education Inc. 210 Founders College, York University 4700 Keele Street, Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Telephone: (416) 736-5356 Fax (416) 736-5765 Email: [email protected] Website: www.inanna.ca

an Ontario government agency un organisme du gouvernement de l’Ontario

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program. We also acknowlege the financial assistance of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Note from the publisher: Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credits in subsequent editions. Printed and Bound in Canada. Cover artwork and design: Tracey Tarling, “Calm in the Waters, Unfolding Flight,” 2014, mixed media on plaster, 48 x 48 inches. Artist website: www.traceytarling.com Cover design: Val Fullard Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication McCaslin, Susan, 1947-, author Into the mystic : my years with Olga / Susan McCaslin. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-1-77133-188-3 (pbk.). — isbn 978-1-77133-191-3 (pdf). — isbn 978-1-77133-189-0 (epub) 1. Park, Olga, 1891-1985. 2. McCaslin, Susan, 1947–. 3. Mentoring — Religious aspects — Christianity. 4. Spirituality. 5. Mysticism. I. Title. BV5095.P37M33 2014 248.2’2092 C2014-905737-7 C2014-905738-5 FSC HERE

for Claire

Vignettes

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“First attested in 1751. From French vignette, diminutive of vigne (“vine”), from Latin vīnea, from vīnum (“wine”).” A Wider Ecology 1 Olga Historic 7 Mystic Encounters of the First Kind 13 Beyond Believing 16 A Serviceable Tool 18 Mystic Catalyst 20 Poetic Aftershocks 23 Olga of the Spirits 26 Betwixt and Between

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vignettes

Prescient Precognitions

34 Madness and Divine Mania

38 Olga and the Cosmic Christ

42 Osiris-Christ

48 My Teacher’s Teacher

51 Olga in Love

60 Companions of the Way 64 Is There Such Thing as a Soul Mate?

69 Dreaming Dreams

73 Interdimensional Olga

74 Present Presences

79 Saints with Foibles and Warts

80 Music and Mystery

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Mystical Communion

91 Olga on Prayer

93 Granny and the Boys

94 Quantum Olga

100 Cosmological Travel

104 A Visit from Philo

106 In Deep Space

109 The Third Eye

113 The Diamond Consciousness

115 Building the Kingdom

116 The Tea Ceremony

117 A Mystic’s Bookmark

120 Olga and Institutional Christianity

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vignettes

Olga’s Vision of the Church of the Future

129 The Shattering of the Vase

134 Cosmic Law

141 Practicing Chords

143 Cross-Media Creativity

147 Abyss-Balancing

153 Lineages

156 Olga Passes

162 Arctic Sophia

169 Geothermal Speaking

173 A Tapestry of Fragments

175 Interspiritual Conferencing

178 A Posthumous Gifting

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Who Am I? 185 Mysticism and Activism 190 Out of the Depths 197 “No Guru, No Method, No Teacher” 200 Notes 203 Acknowledgments 208

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Dare you see a soul at the white heat? Then crouch within the door.

—Emily Dickinson

Olga as a young woman. Courtesy of the Park family..

A Wider Ecology

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n a rainy day in the autumn of 1969 when I was

twenty-two, Patricia, a friend at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, took me to meet Olga Park, an elderly widow living as a hermit in a tiny brown and white Tudor-style cottage at the far end of the Burrard Inlet east of Vancouver. The door swung open to disclose a petite woman with powderwhite hair, weighing less than 100 pounds, about five feet tall. Olga had luminous, grey-blue eyes and a dome-shaped forehead. She wore grey polyester slacks, a white pullover, and a grey tunic. On her head was a grey kerchief that made her resemble a nun. Later, she told me she wore grey because in her visions it represented the “colour of service.” Her simple apparel was set off by a dashing pair of what I can only describe as white “gogo boots,” giving her a chic but eccentric air for a 78-year-old. She had the slightly androgynous quality of the aged, and when holding forth on the sofa, reminded me of the older William Blake at Felpham Cottage where he created many of his illuminated manuscripts. Once, Olga showed me a daguerreotype of herself as a child, resembling Alice Liddell, Lewis’ Carroll’s inspiration for Alice in Wonderland, and another photo of herself when she was a young mother. My impression of her at the time was that of the wisdom crone. As I passed under the lintel of Olga’s cottage door, I had a palpable sense this was a place where immaterial presences were constantly coming and going. I also felt Olga embodied a spiritual maturity beyond anything I had ever encountered, that she could be trusted. Since visionaries and mystics have been among us 1

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through the ages, why should there not be one hidden here in more recent times, and why not in Canada? When writing this memoir, I asked myself why the story of my years from 19691985 spent with an almost unknown mystic might matter, not just to me, but to others, and why now? Every authentic spiritual teacher-learner configuration is both particular and archetypal. The tale of sitting at a teacher’s feet, then moving on to discover one’s own path while integrating the teacher’s example, is universal. Think of Socrates and his female wisdom teacher Diotima; Rumi and his teacher Shams of Tabriz; the young nun Richardis and Hildegard of Bingen; or poetsongwriter Leonard Cohen and his Zen master Roshi. Going further back, there are stories of healers, shaman and shawomen, the Rishis and Rishikas of the Upanishads, the yogas and yoganis of India. Even before the naming of names and tracing of lineages, there were the unnamed teachers of the Palaeolithic who were part of the world’s shamanic oral traditions, the mythweavers, healers, and storytellers. If you join with me on this journey out of curiosity, even with a healthy agnosticism, you will hear about experiences of non-material dimensions beyond the common range of seeing, hearing, and knowing. Olga experienced extraordinary mystical states throughout her lifetime, but I do not call her a mystic simply because of these. For me, a mystic is a person whose life is an embodiment of love, whose wisdom arises from the earth and aspires to the stars. A genuine mystic isn’t merely someone seeking self-fulfillment, but a person whose entire life is moving into alignment with the vaster systems of nature and the invisible worlds that encompass and transcend those we can see and measure. A mystic’s love begins with the self, the family, the local community, but extends to the planet and even the universe, grounded in an all-encompassing mystery. My story about Olga is not meant to persuade anyone to believe her unusual accounts, and certainly not to adopt a belief system based on them. Olga had an evolving worldview, and did not operate out of a dogmatic belief system. Though she located herself within the mystical streams of Christianity, there 2

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was something primal about her, the sense that she was part of wisdom ways going back beyond historical Christianity. The relationship of the sage or wisdom teacher and learner may not be one with broad appeal at this time because we know all too well about its abuses. The public has had enough of autocratic religious leaders, pedophilic priests, and power-hungry cult leaders being granted too much authority over those they presume to shepherd into salvation. Yet the existence of a shadow side to the guru-learner relationship does not negate its valid manifestations. Being with a teacher is one of the time-tested ways of accelerating spiritual growth. Not everyone remains for so many years with a single teacher. Sometimes seekers encounter a number of significant mentors over a lifetime. Many work their solitary, individual ways through the complexities of the interior life. Although I have had other mentors, Olga was for me so remarkable that she falls into a category of her own. Olga respected my individuality and encouraged the growth of my soul. She demonstrated for me that embarking on a spiritual path is not about patriarchy, creeds, or power politics. Through her, I discovered that the Christian tradition of my childhood faith held at its deepest core a path of non-violent, universal love that coincided with those of other religions and spiritual traditions. Since her youth, Olga experienced unsolicited waking visions, precognition, out-of-body excursions, nature epiphanies, auditions of “the silent Voice,” third-eye vision, clairaudience, clairvoyance, experiences of earlier incarnations—an entire host of what could be called paranormal experiences. What I learned from her, however, is that mystical experiences, though inestimable treasures, are not to be expected, induced, exploited, or sought as titillating prizes to show off or foist on others. Mystics like Olga demonstrate the hidden potential in us all to live more holistically. As pioneers, they often suffer because of what might be called their depth of field. By virtue of their heightened sensitivity, they are often misunderstood and can experience intense loneliness. It still amazes me that Olga lived daily with an awareness of complex interior realities that might drive some of us crazy. Yet she had a gift for remaining grounded. 3

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From the start, I saw Olga as an advanced or “old soul,” not merely because the numinous was so much a part of her everyday life, but because she was so fully dedicated to serving others and the world. You could not separate the contemplative and the activist in her, the praise-singer and the prophet. Olga opened me to my own interior guidance and helped me experience trust in what the poet Dante calls “the Love that guides the sun and the other stars.” When I set out to write about her, I wondered whether people could understand Olga without having known her. Though she wrote down many of her experiences, her personal presence was for me more compelling than some of her writing. Yet she wrote clearly and well. Her vocabulary was influenced by the spiritualist and theosophical movements of her time, but she was not an occultist. Though she had studied the saints and mystics of many world religions, she was not especially ethereal or otherworldly. She had clearly moved outside institutional Christianity and closed systems of belief, yet valued community. Despite her extraordinary inner life, there was no question about her sanity. In fact, she seemed more well-balanced and rational than anyone I had ever met. She did not take herself too seriously and had an infectious sense of humour. This book is not traditional hagiography, the life of a saint. Yet Olga was “holy,” particularly in the sense Thomas Merton talked about sainthood as the potentiality for a hidden wholeness in each of us. Early on she urged, “Don’t take my word for anything. Test things out for yourself.” For her, mistakes were not only infinitely forgiven, but absolutely necessary for growth. Since her death, I have swerved from some of her formulations and rejected others, but I also realize her views were constantly changing. “Even God evolves,” she said, “so we might as well get used to it.” In this series of vignettes, Olga’s voice and mine alternate. In the writing process, I found myself acting as Dr. Watson to her more intuitive Sherlock Holmes, for she lived on the fringes of everyday knowing. Acting as guide through the intricacies of Olga’s interdimensional worlds, I cite her self-published and previously unpublished writings. I have not changed her wording (except 4

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to fix minor mechanical errors and remove a few anachronisms) out of a desire to retain her tone, vocabulary, and the cadences of her speech. Olga did not generally use gender-neutral language, since most of her writings preceded the second-wave feminist movement of the seventies. However, she always intended the masculine “he” to be inclusive, so I have taken the liberty of editing toward gender neutrality. She would say, “God is both masculine and feminine and beyond both.” When I asked her to explain, she replied that humans have various images of the divine, but that God transcends gender as we know it. “God is Spirit,” she would add, “both male and female. God isn’t outside the cosmos, but within us and within all things, and we are within God.” During the writing process, I was drawn back to the cottage to find Olga kneeling in her tiny garden, cultivating herbs and delicate wildflowers. She told me once that for every human ailment there is a plant or herb somewhere on the planet that can cure it. Olga never set the spiritual world over and against nature but saw them as a whole. Because of my immersion in Olga’s world, my notion of ecology began to expand. I have come to consider the environment as the natural world of which we are all expressions, and ecology as interactive, self-regulating biosystems in which everything is interconnected. But what about the relation of what we can see, touch, taste, and smell with the non-material spheres to which Olga claimed we are also intimately bound? Olga taught me that having a relationship to the living cosmos has everything to do with being here and now in the earth. The word ecology in Greek means “household” and Olga, though she was not fond of ordinary housework, was a housekeeper of larger, more inclusive rooms. Because she accessed these mansions, from what we call the material up through the non-material dimensions (spirit and matter being on a continuum), she was part of a wider ecology. Olga took my moribund Christian belief and opened it to the experiential, lifting it out of a closed belief system inherited from my Presbyterian upbringing. After meeting her, my own visionary experiences intensified and I began to write out of them as a poet. 5

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While never seeking extraordinary experiences, they came upon me because of my contact with Olga. I began to consider that the material world is more nuanced than we imagine. Perhaps consciousness in another form transcends the death of the body, and awareness of the spiritual dimensions does not diminish, but enhances our commitment to this planet. Perhaps we are part, not only of the earth’s aweinspiring ecosystems, but of a universal ecosystem that includes asteroids, planets, suns, galaxies. Maybe the distinctions we make between mind and matter, material and non-material levels of being, are just conveniences for our bifurcated minds. And perhaps when we begin to see things out of our own wholeness, we will find ourselves stepping into this wider, deeper ecology to know it once again as home.

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Olga Historic

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ary olga park was born on February 24, 1891 in Gargrave, North Yorkshire, England. Her mother, Ellen Bracewell (1860-1943), was a nanny for the local gentry and her father, Bruce Bracewell (1865-1941), was a tradesman and interior decorator for the great manor homes in England. His ancestors had been weavers. The name Olga had become popular in England during her youth because a Danish line had married into the Royal family. Princess Victoria (Victoria Alexandra Olga Mary, 1868-1935), Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, was prominent in public life when Mary Olga Bracewell came into the world. Olga was somewhat delicate as a child in England, suffering from a disorder of the eyes. Through her mother’s connections, she was admitted to a children’s hospital in the Yorkshire countryside where she lived outdoors for long periods, relatively free from the pressures of school. He eyes eventually healed, and it was during this time that she developed her appreciation of nature. She loved reading, showed an early talent in music, and possessed a clear and pure soprano voice. She attended various schools in the suburbs of Birmingham until the age of fourteen when she won a scholarship to Aston Pupil Teachers’ Centre for three years, intending to become a teacher. Olga read widely, especially in the mystical and religious traditions. Some of the books she read as a child, given her by the board of her church as prizes for “faithful attendance and good behaviour in day school and Sunday school,” included The Dead Secret, Exiled in Siberia, After Long Waiting, St. Bartholomew’s 7

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Eve, Darkness and Daylight, The Scarlet Letter, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. In her unpublished notes she comments on her early reading: Oddly enough, it wasn’t the “story” in each one that left a lasting impression, but the incidentals of circumstances—travel by horsedrawn sleigh over the snow-enveloped tundra of Siberia, searching for fossils of a little girl in Australia, learning to read and write of a girl in Germany, escaping from the hired assassins of the church on Bartholomew’s Eve in France, finding an old letter in a secret drawer of an old desk. These incidentals made me aware of places and ways of life that I would not normally have heard of. They stimulated my thinking about the life of other places.1 This spirit of adventure in the incidentals of everyday life remained with her throughout her life. When I visited her in the late 60s, her shelves included biblical commentaries, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Shakespeare, Tennyson and many of the classics of the western mystics. As a child, she attended prayer meetings until Darwinian debates broke up her local Wesleyan church. Some members left because they found a literalist interpretation of the origins of homo sapiens in the book of Genesis incompatible with the more recent findings of geological science. Olga’s cousins, however, were high Anglican, so despite parental disapproval, she sneaked off to attend the St. Thomas Anglican Church nearby, drawn by the music, liturgy and sacramentalism. Though spiritualism was current in some Wesleyan Methodist congregations of her times, Olga was not exposed to spiritualist concepts in her youth. Then, in 1910, came the big move to Canada that completely changed Olga’s life. Her father, an interior decorator for the local gentry, decided to leave behind everything he had built in England and move to Vancouver in hopes of improving his prospects, and brought the family with him. The unsolicited psycho-spiritual experiences she describes in her self-published books, Between Time and Eternity (1960) and An Open Door (1972), began a few years later, around 1914 and earlier. The transition to Vancouver was difficult, as Olga was 8

On the left: Olga as a young woman. Photo courtesy of the Park family Right: Olga with her husband James and grandson Jim, March 1958.

Olga at eight years old, with her aunts in Cross Hills, Yorkshire, England, before the family’s move to Canada. Photos courtesy of Jim Park.

Olga’s cottage in Porty Moody, British Columbia. Photo courtesy of Mark Haddock.

Left: Olga with her grandson Jim. Right: Olga’s altar. Photos courtesy of Jim Park.

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forced to abandon a promising musical career in England where she had social connections and further educational opportunities. She describes the Vancouver of the early days as a place of pioneer conditions with few cultural amenities. When she first arrived, she was greeted by a stark landscape containing miles and miles of blackened stumps left over from logging. Her father first worked out of Revelstoke for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Later, her parents farmed in South Vancouver where one of her fondest memories was delivering milk in the winter by horse and sleigh. Her father, a dairy farmer on River Road, became involved in the local union as one of the organizers of the milk board. Olga loved animals and horseback riding. As a young woman she worked for the telephone company for a short while and briefly considered becoming a nurse. In 1917, Olga married James Fleming Park, a Vancouver banker who was originally from Glasgow, Scotland. They lived in various residences in Vancouver. Throughout this period, she taught Sunday school in the Anglican Church, developing innovative educational curriculum for youth. During the early years of their marriage she had several miscarriages, and one son, Jamie, died shortly after birth. Olga later gave birth to Robert, who lived a full life. Olga was a born storyteller who held the attention of adults and children alike with her lively and often humorous anecdotes. I recall her relating how a group of disaffected teenage boys used to linger outside the door of her Sunday school classroom pretending not to listen in as she dramatized stories from the gospels for the younger children. In mid-life, she embarked on a detailed study of the New Testament scriptures in light of what Jesus might have really said versus what the developing church likely imposed on his life and teachings. Eventually, she left the church because of her sense that much of what she called the “Churchianity” of her times was not in alignment with the actual life and teachings of Jesus. Her parents retired in Whonnock, bc, where she used to visit them in the days when a journey to what are now the suburbs was a major undertaking. After her husband’s death in 1959, she lived with her son and daughter-in-law in South Vancouver. 11

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In 1964, she moved out of her son’s home to a small one-room cottage in Port Moody on Alderside Road at the eastern end of the Burrard Inlet where she enjoyed her garden, wildflowers, and walks to the corner store. At this period of her life, interested seekers of all ages and walks of life who heard of her by word of mouth or through her writings began to visit. Some who arrived became her learners, and received instruction in the simple communion practice she had developed. She insisted that whatever group formed about her was ultimately an interior one, and that she did not wish to form a club or group structure of any sort, certainly not one involving dues, membership, official status, or doctrine. The first of these seekers was a young man from England, Brian Longhurst, who discovered her book Between Time and Eternity in an alternative bookstore in Vancouver and looked her up. Olga continued living alone at the cottage until 1978, when at the age of 87 she moved to Vancouver due to frail health after breaking her ankle. There she resided in my friend Patricia’s basement suite until January 1983 when, due to advancing age, she moved to a care centre for the elderly in Vancouver. Olga left her physical body in December of 1985 at the age of 94. Her son Robert died a few years later. She is survived by her two grandchildren, Jim Park and Valerie Tickell, as well as Valerie’s son Brian, Olga’s great-grandson.2

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Mystic Encounters of the First Kind

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y friend patricia enthused, “You’ve just got to come

out with me to Port Moody and meet this amazing mystic, Mrs. Park.” How could I resist, having already embarked on a serious study of the mystics? Since childhood I had been intrigued about interior realities. I soon found myself buzzing along in Patti’s car to Port Moody, once the terminus of the cp Rail. I had come to a terminus in my life as well, having moved through the high school years as an introverted English honours student, and on to my hippyish university days where I practiced yoga with the campus guru, attended classes of the renowned Buddhist scholar Edward Conze, and rode around Haight Ashbury, San Francisco, in a big hearse brightly covered with psychedelic flowers humming along to Donovan’s “Mellow Yellow” in the 1968 “summer of love.” Despite the dismantling of my childhood Presbyterian faith during my undergraduate days, I found myself drawn to the prospect of meeting a holy woman. My receptivity to the mystical depths of my own Christian heritage was strong. As a child, I had had a familiar sense of Jesus as a compassionate presence who loved me unconditionally. Unlike many of my friends who had been wounded by their Christian upbringing, my own experiences had been mostly positive. In addition, my adored father had been a Sunday school teacher who regularly read me the Bible when I was young. Of course, I took a lot of things in the Bible literally as a child and teen that I rejected when I started studying English literature and philosophy, but I still prayed and sought guidance in my daily 13

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life. I was not what you would call a believer, but neither was I a skeptic. Looking back, I would call myself an open-minded seeker. My mom, with her Southern Methodist upbringing in the bible belt of Alabama, had been a more ambivalent example of the extremes and consolations of an active faith. The astonishing religious visions she reported during her mental breakdown in the early sixties, when she was diagnosed with schizophrenia, seemed both terrifying and numinous to me. My brief experimentations with psychedelic drugs, prompted by reading Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception in the early seventies, were part of an intense spiritual quest rather than mere thrill-seeking. But drugs created more anxiety and paranoia than self-transcendence, so I abandoned the wilder lifestyles of some of my friends. Looking back, I think a part of me wanted to explore the territory traversed by my mother during her psychotic episodes as a way of bonding with her and testing for myself the liminal places of the mind. Maybe this Mrs. Park, I thought, was a sort of Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan guru, minus the peyote caps. At the time, I had been reading the popular series about the young anthropologist’s encounters with a Mexican shaman. Though the authenticity of Castaneda’s reportage has since been questioned, the books explored the relation of seeker and spiritual teacher in a way that appealed to my generation. George Harrison found his guru in the Maharishi, and I thought I might find mine closer to home in Olga. Around this time I was also studying the medieval Christian mystics, both Catholic and Protestant, whose lives and experiences seemed to have parallels with those of eastern sages like Lao Tzu and the Buddha. Among my favourites were Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross. Like Rumi, when he met his teacher Shams of Tabriz, I was ripe to meet mine. I did not know it yet, but my journey was just beginning. On the afternoon when I first met her, Olga’s entire being exuded a radiance derived from a day-to-day experience of what she called the “other life.” It was as if she lived in more than one dimension simultaneously, yet was completely grounded in her love of gardening, bible study, painting, and writing. The core of 14

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her message was that I should not take her word for anything, but that if I established a regular time and place for contemplation, I would surely find my own interior guidance.

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Beyond Believing

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The mystic heart is the deepest part of who or what we really are. —Wayne Teasdale

T

he first thing i remember Olga saying is, “When it

comes to the spiritual path, it’s not about belief.” She spoke of Jesus not as a figure from the remote past, or as a mere symbol, but as an intimate presence who could step in and out of her life at the cottage at any time. In her book Between Time and Eternity, she had written of past, present, and future as a series of adjacent rooms and related how, when under anesthetic during the birth of her second child Jamey, she stepped out of her body to see the nurses weighing her prematurely-born son in a room down the hall from where her anesthetized body was lying. She later recalled every detail of the conversation between the nurses about the baby’s health, and they confirmed later that what she saw and heard had actually occurred: Even after the amazing experience at the birth of our second child Jamey, when I stepped over the border of this life for a brief hour, I did not realize the implications of what had happened. Even ten years after that, when I heard the voice of an unknown speak in answer to my urgent prayer, I was greatly shocked and troubled. This is the first reaction of most Christian believers when they come face to face with the reality of what they have been professing right along. It is as though we Christians had built up a religious thought-form world in which there are three rooms—the Past, the 16

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Present and the Future. In the room of the Past are the people and scenes of the Bible. In the room of the Present, we are looking into the room of the Past and pretending to imitate what we see there. Of course we can’t do it. The room of the Present is a different shape, and the windows and the doors and the furnishings are all different, and we are not our real selves but ideal thought-projections. And in the room of the Future everything is still more unreal. This is our “heaven.” The people from the past are there with us in this room of the Future, but they are not living and moving any more; they’re just “sitting thinking,” and we are the same as they. The whole thing is like a shadow show. But suppose one of these shadow figures from the room of the Past comes into the room of the Present, out of the room of the Future, and starts talking to us and changing things in the room of the Present. Our shadow show of religious ideas and attitudes is then all upset. It has come alive and it won’t stay put any more.3 Meanwhile, my world was not staying put either. Mental furniture was being moved around. I was not having out of body experiences or hearing the silent Voice, but Olga began to play a prominent role in my dream life, so I determined to visit her again and to learn more about the sources of her wisdom.

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A Serviceable Tool

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hose first visits led to many more, and our talks became

a weekly sharing of her communion service as well as instruction in her daily practice of contemplative prayer. She explained that the ritual she followed had been given to her by her teacher and guide in the other life whom she associated with the author of the Gospel of John. It did not take long for Olga to begin to tell me more about her solitary practice of mystical communion, a ritual she had recently been “commissioned from above” to share with others. “This practice,” she said, “has nothing to do with the idea that Jesus ‘died for our sins.’ That notion was brought in later by the church. If you have to believe certain things about Jesus in order to be saved, what happens to his teaching about forgiveness? Jesus taught that we are forgiven as we forgive.” I followed Olga’s advice and set up a small prayer table in my home, trying as best I could to establish a regular time for prayer and contemplation. Eventually she taught me the entire order of service she used for her weekly communion. It was based on the ritual in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, but devoid of substitutionary atonement theology, the idea that God requires a sacrificial victim in order to forgive sin. There were no creeds, but many uplifting songs, hymns, prayers, and poetic biblical texts. “Without some form of ritual,” she said, “there is no containment for the psychic energies.” She explained that showing up regularly creates an energy field conducive to heightened states of awareness and enables those in the “other life” to work more effectively with us. 18

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I have learned since that the process of writing is analogous. If I do not make myself available each day at my writing desk or by being attentive during a nature walk, I am less likely to be prepared for the visitations of the Muse when she comes with a sound pattern, image, or thought.

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Mystic Catalyst

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eeting a mystic is not a spectator sport. Lights go on. Things start to happen inside the seeker who is drawn out of some indefinable longing. The mystic acts as a transformer and catalyst. As a seeker, I felt an insatiable longing for purpose, a true vocation or calling rather than merely a job. Unable to overcome writer’s block while working on my Master’s thesis, in September 1971, I returned to my parents’ home. This move felt regressive. Yet there in my old room one night I had the first of a series of vision-dreams, dreams qualitatively too intense to be ranked among ordinary ones, but not visions arriving in full waking consciousness like Olga’s. In my dream journal I wrote:

I find myself in the dungeon of a grey stone prison, hands and feet chained with a group of others. I remember being told to wait for a voice—the voice of an angel. At midnight a voice trumpets: “Open wide, open wide, Ye Gates.” (I’m surprised at the archaic English.) At the sound, the chains fall away. We proceed to one of four gates. I walk to the western gate, wait there for a short time, rubbing my hands where the chains had left an imprint, while others mill about with me in the dark. Then the gate swings slowly on its hinge, releasing us into the night. Feeling as if I know the way, I fix my eyes on the path ahead. A morass stretches ahead, a swampland of innumerable pools, each one filled with bathers trapped 20

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in murky waters. My job is to walk on the narrow ledges connecting the pools and find my way to a secret grove in the distance. Pushing through the grove of trees, I see a dazzling, gold-white luminescence. My whole being leaps ahead in anticipation, but I am not sure of what. Then I see one I know instantly as the cosmic Christ, his appearance like that described in the books of Daniel and Revelation, with an aura of rainbow light and eyes like the sun. Yet he is clearly human, more human than anyone I have ever known. This being’s immeasurable compassion permeates my whole being; yet he gazes beyond to the entire group of those his power has freed. My only impulse is to throw myself at this being’s feet, as if I have known him through many lives and just awakened from a long sleep. I stretch out my hand to touch the rim of his aura, like the woman in the gospel who was healed by merely touching the hem of his garment, and immediately power surges through me like a thousand bolts of electricity. The impact catapults me out of the vision. I awake whispering over and over, “He’s real!” What did I mean when I repeated, “He’s real!”? I felt I had had a living encounter with ultimate reality—the source of divine energy and unconditional love. The mystical terminology for this kind of clarity and certitude has been called the noetic. Within the experience, the magnitude, vividness, and intensity are so great that doubt seems impossible.4 The Christ at that moment became for me both a living symbol and a living presence. In some ways the figure was the Jesus of my childhood but, in another, a universal presence of light. Systems of psychology cannot explain such visions, and modernist empiricism generally reduces them to brain-states. Yet this event was different from the typical “born again” experience that occurs in evangelical circles where emotionality seems to dominate. Spiritual practices cannot induce such a moment, but sometimes prepare the ground. Timelessness cannot be corralled 21

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within a systematic theology, though theology has its place in suggesting and pointing. I was aware at the time that Olga’s accounts of her experiences of “the Master Jesus” could have led me to interpret whatever interior experiences I had as analogous to hers, but her influence does not negate or undermine the transformative power of the experience itself.

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Poetic Aftershocks

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Sun Gold Crux of everything why should I not be devotee consecrating all that flows from your mere touch your fragrant word? Tongue-tied then and now I track the old ravines stumble in the gullies and ditches losing and finding myself a thousand times in your luminescence Human, human one who dwells in light, dwell also in my dark5

I

recorded my first vision in all its immediacy as a dream

transcript, but decades later found myself writing the above poem that took me back inside the encounter in a new way. Mystical experiences are both personal and transpersonal, 23

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moving beyond the distinction between creature and creator, the finite and the infinite. They take you into what the mystics have called the non-dual or unitive realm where such distinctions are living paradoxes, active contraries rather than oppositions. Most of my early experiences fall into what has been called deity mysticism, where the divine is perceived as a being or presence outside oneself; more recent ones have offered a sense of profound unity and interconnectedness with all things. I do not rank the latter as higher than the former, or think we necessarily graduate out of deity mysticism. The ways in which the divine can manifest are diverse, and suited to the individual at the time. The experience of a loving, divine “You” or “Thou” is profound. Yet years later, while revisiting this big pilgrimage-vision in the middle of balancing motherhood, career, and writing, these words arrived: “You are the light you have been moving toward.” The notion that I too could be the Christ light seemed shockingly arrogant at first. Yet now I realize the words imply that the figure of the luminous Christ in the early dream represents not only my inner teacher, but a state of consciousness within me of which I am mostly unaware—what Olga called the Christ-consciousness. This sense of identity with the light is common in many of the world’s mystical traditions. I now think the figure of light I interpreted as a reality outside myself simultaneously represents the living light within me, and within each of us. As the poet William Blake puts it: God appears, and God is Light, To those poor souls who dwell in Night; But does a Human Form display To those who dwell in realms of Day.6 Mystics, like the fourteenth-century Julian of Norwich, with her long and short versions of her initial “showing” of the Christ on the cross, helped me recognize that the process of visioning and re-visioning is part of a lifelong unfolding of our big archetypal experiences. This re-visioning process allows us to have the initial experience, reenter it, walk around, and re-experience it years later. It helps us integrate the vision into daily life. 24

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A vision, as distinct from an ordinary dream, is like a poem that reveals further nuances each time it is heard, spoken, or read. Visions require an open-ended approach. We reinterpret them as we grow, and growing helps us reinterpret them. The movement is out of the literal into the visionary where symbols open doors to a fuller, often unspeakable reality. We stand under them. My early vision is about an awakening to “the cosmic Christ” or Being of light within. Meister Eckhart speaks of God as the Self with a capital “s” as opposed to our ordinary constructed, egocentered selves. In Hinduism, Atman (small self) and Brahman (large Self) are ultimately one. Buddhists often see enlightenment not as an infusion of light from outside, but an awakening to what is latent within. It is not that we are gods, in the sense of being equal to the Absolute, but that the infinite in us intersects with the Infinite in an all-encompassing oneness. As Olga said of Jesus, “God was in the all of him, but he was not the all of God.” By implication, God is in us, but we are not the all of God. Perhaps this is what Jesus meant when he said, “You are gods.” We are scintillating chips off the old block of light, divine sparks, beings who participate in the hidden wholeness without knowing it. The contemplative monk Thomas Merton speaks of how we all walk around “shining like the sun” but seldom recognize this light in ourselves and others.

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Olga of the Spirits

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fter world war i, when Olga was in her 20s, life beyond death was a subject of much interest in both Britain and North America, possibly because many people lost their sons to war, and so many lives were cut short. Séances were common, and spiritualism an active movement in Vancouver where Olga lived. The Prime Minister of Canada himself in the midtwenties, McKenzie King, was known to dabble in spiritualism. When Olga lived in east Vancouver, she attended spiritualist meetings for a short time. She said that part of her interior work had to do with helping the newly dead transition successfully from “earth-life” to their new surroundings in the intermediate realms. Many of Olga’s earliest out of body experiences had to do with World War i. Once she saw Vimy Ridge explode before the event happened. Another time she helped a platoon of soldiers who had just been killed realize they had been catapulted into the after-life. I have sometimes wondered why interest in life beyond death seems greater during and after war than at other times. One explanation is that during times of trauma, when loved ones are suddenly killed, people wish to believe life goes on. As people lose their children and absorb the devastating loss of so many lives, they may be more open to stories of survival in other dimensions. Yet my deeper sense is that while wish fulfillment may be a factor, something else is also at play. Perhaps because of the collective trauma, people become more receptive to the subtle dimensions, or what the Celts call the “thin places.” 26

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Many today are skeptical about anything smacking of the paranormal; modern materialist science refuses to take seriously what it cannot conceive as objectively provable and reproducible. Some scientists who are engaged in the study of the implications of quantum physics and string theory tend to be more open to the paranormal, or at least remain healthily agnostic. Since the widening of the split between reason and imagination-religionspirituality in the seventeenth-century, science has tended to limit its investigations to the realm of the materially measurable, quantitative, and causal, abandoning the paranormal to religion, and therefore marginalizing or ignoring accounts of out of body experiences, precognition, and previous lives, especially in the West. David Ray Griffin, an Alfred North Whitehead scholar and psychologist, argues in Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality that the modern worldview “does not make room for paranormal influences. It rules them out a priori.”7 Those who are open-minded are often categorized as dualists who separate physical realities from transcendent ones. However, Griffin points out that this is in itself a false dualism, since one can distinguish without separating matter and what has traditionally been called spirit. During Olga’s era, there was considerable interest in evaluating mystical experiences objectively. She was for a time the Canadian representative of the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies in England. When she was a child, the philosopher William James wrote The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901-1902). Prominent writers like philosopher Henri Bergson, psychologist Carl Jung, and British physicist Sir Oliver Lodge were open to psychical research, as was the Canadian psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, a friend of Walt Whitman. Bucke’s influential Cosmic Consciousness (1901) could have influenced Olga, as she constantly used the term “cosmic consciousness” and shared some of his concepts. She cited Oliver Lodge and Arthur Conan Doyle (the author of Sherlock Holmes who was also a spiritualist). She even claimed to have visitations from the latter two figures. However, Olga did not encourage people to court paranormal experiences. As a girl growing up in England, such experiences 27

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simply came upon her spontaneously. She initially found them disturbing and had to make sense of them by herself. She was not afraid of the unknown, or of remaining open to further investigation. Being alive for her was like being dropped into the middle of a fascinating detective story. She loved the Sherlock Holmes mysteries and saw herself as someone invited into a universe where the paranormal jostled comfortably with the everyday. The paranormal was not irrational or abnormal, but simply a feature of everyday life. In mid-life Olga, corresponded with the Psychical Research Society in London where scientists were seeking empirical ground for the survival of consciousness after the death of the body. She actively explored what today would be called New Age movements. Later, she came to consider occult groups as “far too psychic,” pointing out they tended to be overly influenced by the group mind and religious emotionalism. Though she was drawn to some spiritualists for a short time, she was not interested in becoming a medium at séances. Her focus was on what she called “the higher spiritual realms.” She taught that spiritual laws were not to be manipulated for personal gain or power, or used to impress others. By the time I met Olga in 1969, she had separated herself not only from the institutional church, but from all esoteric groups. I believe she was initially interested in the latter because in them she first encountered people who were exploring the kinds of supra-rational realities she too had experienced. However, although she moved on, it was clear she had incorporated some esoteric language and concepts into her vocabulary. She spoke of “the God-consciousness,” “the etheric body,” “astral travel,” and “cosmic law.” Throughout most of her life, she kept her extraordinary interior life to herself (even from her husband), since she knew people might think her odd, but by the time I came along she was sharing her stories freely with people of all ages and backgrounds, especially with open-minded young people. Decades before we met, Olga had been a member of St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Kerrisdale, a neighborhood of Vancouver, where she and the Rector at the time, Charles Sidney McGaffin, 28

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freely discussed the mystical element in religion. When Olga was the Canadian representative of the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Research, she organized meetings at various Anglican and United churches in Vancouver where people discussed the relevance of life beyond death experiences. In the end, disappointed at the resistance of mainline congregations and the obduracy of mainstream clergy, she left the church altogether and became a solitary. She was disappointed at what she saw as the church’s inability to take seriously the very beliefs it professed, such as the “life everlasting” and the “communion of saints.” In the religious institutions of her day, she could not find what she called “meaningful fellowship” or a place where she could share her interior life. The churches seemed preoccupied with social propriety and doctrine or “right belief.” She felt her notions would be deemed heretical, though I would have called them radical in the sense of going to the root of things. For example, Olga did not believe Jesus was God incarnate. As mentioned earlier, she did not think his crucifixion was required in order for God to forgive sin. In fact, I never heard the term “original sin” pass her lips. She also believed in reincarnation due to her experience of past lives. In short, she fell between the cracks of institutional religion and esotericism, and so was forced to carve out her own path. When I asked Olga why she left the spiritualists, she clarified a distinction between the psycho-mental and the spiritual. She had no trouble asserting that there were higher (more inclusive) and lower (less inclusive) levels of consciousness. She pointed out that higher mystical states included but transcended both linear reason and emotionalism. Often she spoke of a “three-fold consciousness” or “Christ-consciousness” where body, mind, and emotions conjoined under the guidance and authority of the most comprehensive level of being—Spirit. Olga used the language of higher and lower levels, but these terms had nothing to do with domination hierarchies where the more powerful level dominates the lower. In her teaching, the higher level is more holistic. The angelic intelligences and “Christ servers,” she said, never intrude, having respect for free will. Olga believed that consciousness expands by means not only 29

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of our response to life experiences, but through meditation, singing, and prayer. Once she compared the incremental opening of consciousness to the unfolding of the delicate petals of a rose: “If you pry the petals open prematurely, the rose won’t bloom. We are meant to flourish, but it has to be in God’s timing.”

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Betwixt and Between

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Steady State Ekstasis You follow Spirit up a ladder or She follows you Who’s following whom? you wonder, then land on a rung of being well past judgment but not discernment of the big scape to which you belong with your thumping animal heart and all its everyday amazements— ant’s trek, whale’s bewildering song Presto! As if this were enough And so it is, as you finger the wood’s worn grain the imprints of bare feet signs of others’ playing up and down the stair 31

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for so it is, not ladder but stair, spiralling No thing above No thing below only this intertwining rest into action this mystery betwixt and between8 During her lifetime, Olga wrote several books on the spiritual life. Though she began her autobiography Between Time and Eternity with the disclaimer that who she is in terms of personality and circumstance is of little importance, the story of her revelations, visions, and lifelong faithfulness to what she received is well worth hearing: You see, except for my name, there is nothing in my outward life to differentiate me from a thousand other women in any city anywhere. So we will skip all that and I will try to tell you of the inner person; of how I have felt and thought and why I am writing this book. First of all, I want to say that I do not consider myself to be the “psychic type.” The inner experiences of which I write do not stem from natural psychism but from religious sincerity. Psychic awareness is a personal condition, like having an extra eye or ear which acts as a channel of contact with the unseen worlds around us. It has nothing to do with religion and the religious sense. To have this extra sense makes life more complicated. Psychics have more intense temptations and trials than people who are not psychic. There are more psychics who are not religious than those who are. Don’t let that word “religious” frighten you. More than likely you don’t know what it means. Let me tell you what it means to me. I don’t think I was born religious, but about the age of nine years something happened—a sort of waking up inside; and from then on I was on fire with religious idealism. This religious sense made me happy, not gloomy. At play I was fond of the outdoors and very 32

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much of a tomboy, but I loved to go to Sunday school and church; I loved the spiritual exercises of morning and evening prayers; the daily Scripture reading. The people of the New Testament interested me particularly. When the gospels and epistles were being read it seemed as though these people were trying to tell about a side of life that was hidden, secret, but to them more real than the physical and more worthwhile.9 Since Olga wrote those words, I have pondered the meaning of her hidden life. In some ways obscurity sets her within the oral traditions of spiritual transmission where the names and identities of the sages remain shrouded in mist. Who are the medieval workers in stained glass at Chartres? Who were the Rishis of ancient India? Certainly they were sharply individualized, just as we all are, but we cannot find a signature or stamp of temporal identity on their works. Yet Olga did write continuously, keeping meticulous records of her psychic and spiritual encounters. Sometimes I see her inhabiting a kind of Clark Kent persona, dodging into phone booths to change into astral garments for her wild night flights, but all the time carrying out the charade of being a little old lady living by an inlet of the sea, crossing betwixt and between disparate zones.

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Prescient Precognitions

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n between time and eternity, Olga wrote of precognition:

I suppose there is scarcely a living person in whose family experience there is not somewhere a prophetic dream. As a rule, however, these are extraordinary occurrences bursting through to warn of death or tragedy to loved ones. One or two dreams of this kind have come to me at long intervals, but in the main my dreams of significance have been part of a long chain down which an instructing and guiding purpose has been woven. For more than twenty-five years I have known that dreams can be, and often are, a link with the life beyond death. Long before then I was having very vivid and important prophetic dreams, which I was able to recognize as such by the events in which they were fulfilled. This was usually in a period of from ten to fourteen days. At that time I was not interested in psychic matters, and I had no thought whatever that my prophetic dreams were in any way connected with the life beyond death. My thoughts were all on romance and preparations for my forthcoming wedding. That was during the World War of 1914-1918. Quite frequently I dreamed of trudging the roads of Flanders with the soldiers in deep mud and black darkness, crawling along trenches or sheltering from the hail of bursting shells. On one occasion I stood under the ruined arches of what had been the entrance to a large and beautiful church. Often the shock of not merely witnessing terrible events, but of being emotionally part of them, would bring me awake suddenly. One night I saw a vast expanse of territory blown up in a series of explosions, as if the whole had been mined. 34

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I woke with a shock. After lying awake for some time, longing to sleep, yet afraid of further harrowing experiences, slumber stole upon me and I found myself back in the old house in Warwickshire, England. I was leaning over the back of Grandfather’s old Windsor armchair, in which my father was sitting, and I was reading over his shoulder a telegram which he held in his hand. It was dated April 9th of that same year, and bore my brother’s name and number, with the word “Missing.” My father was stationed at an aerodrome in the south of England at the time. Whether he received any official notice of this sort in due course I do not know, but we here in Canada did. At what date I do not know. It stated that my brother was missing after Vimy Ridge. He turned up later as a shell-shock casualty. After his return at the close of the war, he described his experiences at Vimy, saying that the entire section held by the Canadians had been lifted into the sky by mines. This took place, as every child of today knows from schoolbooks, on April 9, 1917. My dream occurred at the end of March, about two weeks earlier. The general conditions in the dream show that I was tuned in to the conditions, physical and emotional, of my brother—but, by some extraordinary process, to conditions still in the future at the time I had the dream. There is no proof in this dream as it stands of communication from the world beyond death, but taken with the dream which followed the same night, I conclude that it came from the same agent or agents. In the years since then I have had hundreds of prophetic dreams, a few of which—relating to myself and the more personal affairs of myself and near relatives—have been just as clear in focus and accurate in detailed fulfillment. Many out-of-the-body excursions occurred during the years from 1918 to 1930—the unveiling of Holyrood Memorial by Edward, Prince of Wales; the incident of the breaking of the string of pearls worn by Queen Mary as she officiated on behalf of her invalid husband King George V at a state function; the practicing of the management of the lengthy train of her coronation gown by Queen Elizabeth under supervision of Mary, her queenly mother-in-law. These, and many more incidents of public importance or general interest, proved to me the actuality of my soul travel; for I read of 35

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them weeks later in the London Illustrated News or the Glasgow Daily Mirror. Precognition is by definition a knowing and seeing beforehand. As creatures of time, as Olga said, we divide reality up into blocks of past, present, and future. Her experiences, however, suggest these divisions are quite arbitrary. Looking back through Olga’s writings, one sees that events of prescience came early on in her life. When I asked her about their purpose, she responded that they were not given simply to put her “in the know” about the future, but to educate her about psychic and spiritual realities. First, they demonstrated to her irrevocably that she could trust her guides in the spirit life and that the higher dimensions were real. She learned that beings from those realms could mediate between the visible and the invisible worlds, helping her negotiate them. She pointed out that such mediation was essential to help her safely transit the various planes of consciousness. Second, she came to see her early precognitive experiences as a training ground for more advanced levels of being and knowing. As she aged, her experiences had more to do with the integration of wisdom into her daily life and serving the whole rather than seeing into the future. Precognition has always been baffling. As Olga suggests, many people have some stories in their families about people who dream of something before it happens or have an intuitive sense of the future that is born out later. For instance, my grandmother foresaw the death from tuberculosis of her younger brother long before he grew ill. The philosophical issue surrounding precognition is not that people report it, but what it means in terms of free will. If you can envision the future, does that mean it is pre-set, fixed, and unchangeable? Olga, like many theologians and philosophers before her who have struggled with this issue, explained that the ability to foresee a possible future does not mean the future is pre-determined. She felt that beings from more integral levels of awareness can sometimes see the trajectory set by humans, know outcomes, and share their awareness with us, if it is important for us to 36

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know. She could be temporarily taken to a level of awareness in which time is on a continuum with eternity and various outcomes coexist. Olga noted that in eternity, all times are simultaneously present. Time is held within a unity that transcends it, but our linear brainminds can barely wrap themselves around our daily lives, much less the elegant curvatures of time-space where past, present, and future seem like relatively arbitrary categories.

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Madness and Divine Mania

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n the eighties, my mother came up from the Seattle area

briefly to meet Olga, having heard much about her. Olga later noted that Mom seemed mistrustful. Given her fundamentalist Christian background, she no doubt perceived Olga as something of a witch conversant with demonic spirits. When I later confided to Olga that my mother had lived with schizophrenia since about the age of 40, and previous to that suffered a condition akin to what is now known as bi-polar, Olga expressed empathy. Over time Olga provided me with some understanding of how what we call mental illness can overlap with but is distinct from visionary awareness. “A person suffering from schizophrenia experiences several levels of reality simultaneously but is confused, and can’t integrate them,” she observed. Since writing a volume of poetry about my mother’s long struggle and its impact upon me as a child, teenager, and adult, I realize that identifying a person as “schizophrenic” can be a way of othering those who seem different.10 My own sense is that someone who hears disturbing voices and has troubling visions may be responding to a traumatic dynamic within the system of the family, the larger community, or the world. We need to look at what might be called the ecology of mental illness. Whatever may be the societal and genetic components of mental illness, there is a preponderance of such disorders in my family. While I have had a fulfilling life, I have carried enough of my own anxiety to realize we can all be pushed to our limits, and that the differences between us are only a matter of degree. Complexes that have made life difficult for some members of my 38

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family have sometimes worked to my advantage. For example, I will immerse myself fully in the minutiae of language and obsess over a poem until I get it right. Unlike my mother, however, I have been able to enjoy a fulfilling teaching career, writing life, and family life. But contrasting my mother’s constant anxiety with Olga’s peace, I realize that a person on a mystical path is moving gradually but surely beyond ego fragmentation. Olga seemed to be connected to some larger order of things, both in the physical and transcendent worlds. In the world of deep ecology this is called “a dynamic homeostasis.” The ancient Chinese poet Lao Tzu called it “the middle way,” or simply “the Tao,” an ability to flow with the quiet but powerful motions of the universe. I have already noted how my mother’s experiences made me both wary of and curious about visionary states. Even before Olga spoke about mental illness, I felt Mom’s disordered thinking disconnected her from the world and from others. She lived in a constant state of fear, disproportionate to any clear outer threat. During her early episodes, Mom spied men in the electrical wires who were bugging her home, trembled when cryptic messages issued from the tv, and cringed before hissing serpents hurtling toward her through the air. When she was in the hospital, the voices issued imperious commands, announcing which cup was safe to drink from and which not. The voices once forced her to bow down before the refrigerator at midnight and not make eye contact with her children because they had the “evil eye.” Even when the hallucinations and voices diminished, she often cohabited with anxiety, alternating between periods of exhilaration and fatigue. There were chemical imbalances in her brain that the drugs could not fix, and after returning from the hospital, she refused all help from the medical profession. Despite her warmth and infectious humour, she spent more than half her life in psychic discomfort. Olga’s voices and visions were different. As Hamlet teasingly puts it, “I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw” (Act 2. 2). Olga clearly knew a hawk from a handsaw, and much more, but kept her own council. She did not share her visionary experiences indiscriminately. 39

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Once when Mark arrived at the cottage, Olga was breathless: “Just before you came in, a large golden eagle was perched right there, on the back of that very chair.” But her account soon made it clear the unexpected guest was a visionary eagle, a waking vision. She explained to Mark that the manifestation of the eagle represented a higher presence in her life. The high-flying raptor was both symbol and presence of her Teacher, whose gospel was traditionally associated with the eagle. She moved on to analyze the symbolism of the experience as one would a significant dream. She recognized her vision as a phenomenological reality, visible on the plane to which it belonged, but not to be confused with everyday phenomena. Now, I have never found a mystical eagle perched on the edge of my sofa. Yet we all transit constantly between the surreal world of our dreams and waking consciousness. Olga’s dreams were mysterious, but yielded wisdom she was able to integrate into her daily life. She did not confuse the various planes of awareness. Her voices and visions did not induce fear. She had autonomy and was not the victim of her vital imaginings. As for the hearing of the silent Voice, Olga explained that the Voice was not a voice ringing the air, but rather, the union of her own higher consciousness with the realms of divine wisdom. So she did not exteriorize it as completely objective or dismiss it as completely subjective. In my own meditation practice, sometimes a word, phrase, or train of thought will flow in, suggesting a union of my mind with something mysterious, about which I am curious. All artists know about this sense of convergence. Some call it the Muse, poetic inspiration, the flow. Schizophrenics can be terrified and sometimes feel compelled to obey their voices, which can command them to carry out self-destructive or socially destructive actions. Integral mystics like Olga surrender to the divine, the Muse, Creative Spirit, the Holy Spirit, without losing their higher reason. In The Apology, Plato’s mentor Socrates tells how he received his wisdom from a female teacher named Diotima. This classical western father of dialectic and higher thought, in fact, acknowledges a feminine visionary source for his wisdom. 40

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Numerous accounts in the dialogues show Socrates quietly stepping away from the crowd and communing with his daimon (not a “demon” but an intermediary spirit) or personal muse. Momentarily he is wrapped up in a trance, after which he returns to the discussion to offer his next stunning argument. I too think of wisdom as feminine, and Olga as a modern-day manifestation of the goddess of Wisdom, Sophia. Like Socrates, Olga would occasionally step out of the flow of the conversation to receive inspiration from above or within. Like all true wisdom teachers, she drew from a deeply intuitive well that is part of each of us. For whatever reasons, she was able to access this source more deeply and more constantly than many of us. Philosophers, poets, and prophets of social justice have always spoken from this wisdom realm of archetypal images and symbols and presences.

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Olga and the Cosmic Christ

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here is no getting around it. Although Olga affirmed the major teachers of the world’s religious traditions and acknowledged the legitimacy of other paths, she was unabashedly devoted to Jesus. Her Christian orientation was not tied to affirming particular beliefs about him, asserting that Christianity should be imposed on the entire world, or that it was better than other religions. She did not think Christianity was the only way. Yet she would often say that, for her, as both historical figure and visionary presence, Jesus was timeless and incomparable. Since childhood she had yearned to serve this Christ of her inner life with every fibre of her being. For her, Jesus was not merely a biblical figure, but a living presence, the personal face of the invisible, unnameable oneness she called God. She did not think Jesus had singled her out for special favours; yet her whole being wanted to commit herself unequivocally to serve the values and principles he had embodied, values of love and forgiveness she discovered in searching the biblical accounts of his life and teachings. Yet for Olga, wanting to serve did not entail an attitude of blind faith. She trusted and honoured the Christ, but asked honest, challenging questions. “His voice of authority (cosmic power) and his voice of tenderness are two aspects of the one voice of Love,” she explained, when I asked about his tone. Olga did not worry about offending anyone or being boxed into a category. Her direct experiences of Jesus as a living presence were of such a powerful, qualitative order, that she could no more deny them than stop breathing. 42

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Consider this. Recently, some friends and I were trying to figure out where to have dinner before attending a book launch, and someone suggested a nook called Dharma Kitchen in Kitsilano, Vancouver. Immediately I emailed back that I loved that restaurant and had particularly enjoyed an item on the menu called the “Buddha bowl.” Then I thought to myself, “I wonder what it would be like if a restaurant offered a “Jesus bowl?” Maybe a fishy dish with some matzo flatbread and a tall glass of red wine? The truth is, on the west coast of North America, it is pretty cool to be a Buddhist, but less cool, even socially stigmatizing, to say you are a Christian. You would not find a “Christ bowl” on a menu, and people have not worn “Jesus boots” since the seventies. Popular culture has reduced Jesus to a cliché, a pop icon, or a tortured figure in a Mel Gibson movie. Also, because institutional Christianity has been associated with fundamentalism, violence, homophobia, patriarchy, and colonization, one can hardly be surprised that its religious art is not popular in the more progressive political and arts communities. Yet for me there have always been the Teilhard de Chardins, Martin Luther Kings, and Thomas Mertons, who have shown that the Christian tradition harbours respectable public intellectuals, activists, artists, and visionaries. My own sense is that since Olga’s time, globalization and the Internet have made more people aware of the interrelation of the various faith traditions and brought them to the realization that no single religion has a monopoly on truth. For me, Olga was a herald of interspirituality, though she might not have used that term. By interspirituality, I mean the realization that a commonality underlies the many spiritual paths, though they are highly distinct as well.11 Another concern I have grappled with since Olga’s passing is that the more personal manifestations of figures like Jesus or the Buddha are often seen as naïve anthropomorphic projections. Yet why do devotional experiences of the divine have to be placed in opposition to more transpersonal ones? Perhaps it is not a matter of an ascending hierarchy of experiences of the sacred, since both the personal and transpersonal can coexist. Olga would speak of the cosmic Christ in one breath and in the next of dropping into the mysterious silence beyond words and images. 43

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If we are both human and divine, the universe greets us with both a personal face and transpersonal grace. These two modes of experiencing the divine, what have been called the cataphatic and the apophatic, thrived in her side by side. For Olga, God was more than personal, but could not be less. When I told some of my friends in graduate school about my association with Olga and devotion to the mystical streams of Christianity, the word went around that Susan had become “a Jesus freak.” Because I do not like labels and “ism’s,” I generally avoided talking about my spiritual orientation. I have imagined conversations where someone asks me, “Are you a Christian?” and I reply, “Tell me what you mean by the word and I might respond.” At this point in my life, if I had to call myself something, I would call myself an interspiritual person with a Christian formation that has never abandoned me. Many things I used to believe have fallen away, but the core of my faith remains. Hopefully, it has grown up. Like Olga, I have an ongoing sense of the presence of the mystical Christ during contemplation, in my dreams, and in daily life. Olga recorded many of her manifestations of the Christ in a selfpublished volume titled An Open Door. The one she called “the Master,” the Cosmic Christ, her primary teacher and connection with ultimate reality, was for her the continuing consciousness of the former Mediterranean peasant, activist, and enlightened one, known as Jesus of Nazareth. Yet she also thought we all had the capacity to become embodiments of the cosmic Christ energy. For those not of a Christian tradition, Olga’s Christ might be comparable but not identical to Buddha-mind or Krishnaconsciousness, the fully integrated human awareness. For Olga, the Cosmic Christ has access to the memories and experiences of his own past (what has been called the Akashic record), including his incarnation as the historical Jesus. Therefore, she thought he could, through the Christ-mind in the eternal consciousness, join mind and heart with those who serve the same purpose, “the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth.” The kingdom is not to be realized merely in an afterlife, but here and now. For her, the Christ-consciousness is an outpouring of compassion, love and healing for planet earth. 44

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Since Jesus became an embodiment of divine love, one might ask how his earthly revelation is distinct from other manifestations of the divine mind. Olga’s sense was that each wisdom tradition is a jewel in the spiritual crown, but that the path of Jesus was a unique outpouring of compassion through unconditional forgiveness and love, what has been called “kenosis” or self-emptying. She felt that because he came at the beginning of the Piscean Age, the last age of a cycle of approximately 25,000 years, he had a mission in the raising of consciousness of humanity. Olga believed all humanity has the capacity to reach the level of consciousness Jesus experienced during his lifetime. He was for her the “elder Brother,” one ahead of us on the path who calls us to become our fullest selves through a transformation of ego, a decentering of the false self. He was a forerunner who realized the evolutionary purpose of human potential to become expressions of justice, non-violence, and divine love. She urged that we all have the potential for integral consciousness—the balancing of body, mind, and feeling through the wholeness of Spirit. Olga on the Cosmic Christ12 On October 12, 1946, the Master appeared standing at the side of my bed. My husband was sound asleep and he stood between the two beds. He was as on the occasion of the Last Supper. His garments were stained with everyday wear and dusty with travel. I was immediately aware of the difference between his actual attire and appearance and the representations of him by artists. There was nothing otherworldly about him. He was very tall. His forehead was not high or dome shaped. He had a strong chin. The hair of his head was light brown with a reddish tint. It was wavy, and not long as usually depicted. He had a short, neatly trimmed beard, which was the same colour as the hair of his head. The eyes, I would describe as hazel, almost amber, and deep set. There was a sad gentleness in them. I noticed his well-developed muscles and the length and strength of his arms. His garments were of quite strong, rather coarse material such as the poorer classes of his times probably wore. His outer cloak was purple of a brownish tint that seemed to indicate that it had been home-woven and home-dyed. 45

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Under this, a full-length garment of coarse linen in natural tint was visible. His eyes looked towards me but past me in the same manner as when he manifestated as Osiris in the Great Pyramid.13 With both hands, he held at his breast a crystal chalice and with both hands he placed it in mine, saying: “I give you these in token of my love.”14 Within the chalice was a flower stalk of silvery grey colour bearing three scarlet flowers. I interpret these three flowers on one stalk to signify the three levels of consciousness—physical, psychic, and spiritual united—in which regular private Communion with the Living Christ results. After the Master had placed the chalice in my hands and had spoken, He paused a moment and then said: “I will come again in the cool of the day.” I took this to mean that in the latter years of my life, when I would be free of toilsome occupations and responsibilities of marriage and family, I would be a dedicated channel of his love. He then began to withdraw from the etheric vehicle by which he had manifested. His eyes became as flames of fire and his living form became clear sunlight as he stood behind his etheric form, which collapsed to the floor and disappeared.15 For an instant only, I saw him as John, the Seer of Patmos, describes him in Revelations 1.16: “His countenance is as the sun shining in His strength.” The Master has made many manifestations through the years, but not yet another such as this. Twice He manifested in the double rainbow. This is a circle formed by one rainbow in the clouds of heaven met by its counterpart of earth, with Christ standing in between. It signifies Christ uniting the two realms of consciousness—heaven and earth. This is His Cosmic Mission through the ages. The records, each and all, proclaim him to be as Paul wrote of him, “The same yesterday, today and forever.” As of old, upon the mountain trail or seated on the shore of the Galilean Lake, he calls attention to the laws of God manifest in the world of nature, showing that there is really only one law operating at different levels of consciousness and in different conditions and substances; so that, whoever looks, and wherever, he may see and know God. One of His most frequent analogies is the at-one-ness between the seed and the mature plant, and that, as is the seed, so will be the tree; and as the tree, so must the seed have been. On such occasions as this when the Master speaks with his 46

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Christ-authority, what he says are not just words, but the impact of his power speaks to one’s entire being. In contrast is the impact of his tender concern and gracious wisdom when he speaks protectively. To spare me the disappointment that the newly established Research Program at Oxford University, England would not immediately open up opportunities for the consideration of all relevant testimony [pertinent to their research on the validity of paranormal experiences], he spoke the following on April 20, 1969, and as he spoke, I felt as a small bird in His hands, fluttering its wings. He said, “Be at peace, Little One: do not be in haste to leave the nest and to try your wings in the open expanses until you have mastered the skill of short flights in the gentler currents. I am with you to release you and to draw you again. Indeed you are within my reach at all times and your flight is under my control.” In answer to the question, “Since you, Lord, are the Spirit of Prophecy, why do I walk, as it were, blindly?” he said, most tenderly, “Because of the steep places, I have veiled your eyes.” The Master speaks quite frequently in parables. Concerning the giving to others of that in which I have been instructed, he said, “Offer not a full plate, neither recommend that in which you yourself have special delight. If someone comes to your door with meat from his own or some other table, is it not because he himself is full and has no hunger? Think on these matters and learn of me.” In concluding this testimony of my personal experience of his manifestations, I add this observation: He is not bound by rules or regulations of any organization on earth nor to any system governed by clock and calendar of earth. In his own inimitable style of speaking, he states the conditions which draw his personal manifestation: According to your hunger I feed you, According to my purpose I lead you, According to my need of you, I speak. (from An Open Door)

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Osiris-Christ

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esides “dream visions” that occurred in the early morning

while in the hypnogogic state (between dreaming and waking), Olga had out of body experiences. The following, which she recounts in An Open Door, reveals the Christ as a revelation of the Egyptian god Osiris. In the astral body Olga was taken inside the great pyramid of Giza by her spirit guide: I was standing on a narrow sliver of a ledge, with my back against the spiralling wall. I looked back for the man with the lamp [Olga’s guide, her Teacher, who guided her by the light of a cube-shaped lamp], for he was behind me after I started the ascent. He was not in sight, but standing just a pace or two from me was a tall man in ceremonial attire. I judged him to be a Pharaoh of ancient times. I now know him to be a manifestation of Osiris. At that time I had not even heard of Osiris. He had on a long robe of linen—natural colour—and carried the crook and flail crossed on his breast.16 His facial expression was of one looking down the long corridors of time and his eyes were flames of fire. His garments had the appearance of great age and as I reached out to touch them, the part that I touched crumbled to dust. Directly I saw him I had the spontaneous and overwhelming feeling of devotion to him that I have felt always and only for Jesus, the Christ, and I flung myself at his feet crying out, “O my dear Lord and Master.” At this, the whole of his appearance as Osiris fell away, and he stood before me as Jesus the Good Shepherd with the crook of the Shepherd of Israel in one hand and the flail of Cosmic Law in the other.17 48

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Olga’s interpretations of this and other visions enlarged over the years. She did not conclude that Jesus had literally been Osiris in another life, but focused on how both figures were associated with the partaking of grain (bread) and wine, with death and resurrection. She took a comparative-mythological approach, except that she experienced the figure of Jesus as a cosmic being, not merely a mental projection. As I reconsider the vision, it clearly implies an interreligious perspective, where the myths and stories of the gods in earlier religions enrich the Christian revelation, placing it in a continuous line with them. The more ancient traditions don’t simply prefigure the Christian revelation, but are part and parcel of a stream. Olga didn’t narrow her imagery and symbolism to that of the Christian tradition, or assume the Christian revelation was final, but constantly sought connections with other revelations of the divine. Like a poet with language, or an archeologist with strata, she was interested in the layers. Olga was convinced that her visions were not mere wish fulfillments. Her vision of Vimy Ridge exploding before the event occurred or was reported in the local newspapers would not likely convince a hard-core materialist of the reality of precognitive awareness, but it might leave some agnostics with some openness to the possibility of precognition. So when Olga said she had an encounter with the cosmic Christ, I found myself becoming convinced her experience was genuine. Maybe, I thought, the one she called the Christ has a life-consciousness in an intermediate or subtle realm that intersects with what we think we know as firm and final here. After all, birds hear sounds beyond the range of human hearing, so why might there not be dimensions of life beyond those we can measure? How can we be entirely certain that “When you’re dead, you’re dead,” especially when Indigenous peoples have no trouble speaking of the ongoing life of their ancestors, grandfathers and grandmothers in the spirit world? We in the West have been caught up in a flatland of materialism that has shut out other modes of knowing and being. Olga’s visions also suggest that the form of Jesus in his historical milieu is not a final revelation of the divine. Her sense was that 49

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the church tried to shut down the ongoing revelations of Spirit, closing the canon throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era, while Spirit continues evolving.

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My Teacher’s Teacher

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In the Caves of the Sea Lions Brown flesh hunkers down on sleek rock face Would that the world could sustain such lolling, such disdain for ledgers, accounts Though diving for the occasional fish they accomplish more than those who stare at their concentrated abandon Big Daddy shoves Junior into the deep in play or territorial strife Behind a grid with all these strangers shuttled down an elevator shaft from the highway to the damp sea air how can I wed such work and play? One cow throws back her head and casts an arc of bellowing praise Bulls’ stentorian riffs recur cooking up a blast, cacophonies for a polluted coastline 51

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Some ghostly, aquiline companion witnessing everything through my eyes infuses nothing but this one desire: to be for a moment outside the glass bowl letting my unwieldy land-lubber bulk slide off the rock and grow flippers serpentine through the underwaves like a gravid ballerina in her element18 When I first met Olga, she spoke not only of the Master Jesus, the Cosmic Christ, but of her primary guide and mediator of the “Christ Wisdom,” one she called her Teacher. In esoteric tradition it is common to have a spirit guide. Olga’s teacher first appeared to her when she was about twenty-three. He manifested in her dreams as a nameless guide, and later as an Egyptian she believed she had studied with in an earlier incarnation. In her later years, Olga identified this teacher with the source of what she believed to be the highly redacted Gospel of John. She associated him with the unnamed “disciple whom Jesus loved” or “the beloved disciple” mentioned in the Fourth Gospel. Yet she also urged that every disciple is beloved in his or her own way. In the gospel, the beloved disciple is not only a disciple, but a symbol of everyone’s inherent capacity for intimacy with the divine. As a Protestant, I had been brought up to believe hearing from the spirit world was dangerous. King Saul’s desperate visits to the soothsaying “Witch of Endor” was a biblical cautionary tale about the risks of dabbling with evil spirits. However, in my later reading and thinking, it became apparent that mediation through a teacher, whether one located in this life or in the interior life, could be a legitimate means to growth. I remembered reading about Carl Jung’s Philemon, a spiritguide he describes in The Red Book (Liber Novus, “The New Book”). Jung describes how Philemon and other figures emerged from his collective unconscious: “They brought home to me 52

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the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life.”19 Likewise for Olga, the presences of the Master and the Teacher had a life of their own. Olga’s experiences are also somewhat like those of Austrian anthroposophist Rudolph Steiner, who wrote of the aeons or primal beings within human consciousness, though I never heard her mention his work. Similarly, there are parallels between Olga’s Christ servers and the Indigenous peoples’ spirits of the grandfathers and grandmothers. The teacher-learner relationship permeates wisdom traditions east and west. Having an inner teacher show up can be like being offered a quantum leap to spiritual awakening. But rather than telling you about the Teacher, I will let Olga speak for herself as she did to me. I soon came not only to believe this numinous figure was “real,” but to experience his presence. Once in Oregon at the caves of the sea lions, I caught a glimpse of him standing beside me gazing through the Plexiglas at these marvellous creatures’ antics on the rocks below. There is no doubt Olga considered her encounters with the Teacher not merely psychological projections, but experiences of an actual other, a living presence and faithful guide. Olga, On the Teacher Comparatively few people are conscious of contact with the unseen worlds and their inhabitants. Some are vaguely aware of otherworld impressions and feelings. I do not refer here to spiritualist mediumship, which functions by group concentration, but to the individual psychic awareness, which is the fruit of spiritual growth. Some few function consciously in the psychic or soul world during sleep, which is the way in which my own psychic sensitivity began. This occurred with me at the time that I became aware of the man named in these records the Teacher. That is to say, I do not think my consciousness of that other world came involuntarily, but that it was induced by the Teacher directing his forces upon me as one person might shine a light upon another. There was never at any time any coercion of the will or forceful interference with, or possession of, 53

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the physical body. My first contact with this man was in a vision where I saw a white dove struck by a hawk, but I did not see the Teacher who mediated this experience face to face. I was only aware of him standing by. It was not until twenty-six years later that I saw him clearly and began to receive instruction from him. In March 1940, I woke one morning with the recollection of having been in a strange place—a large room down the length of which was a special table on which were laid out in bas-relief maps of the Mediterranean and the civilizations which were cradled there. The whole thing impressed me as the image of a large symbolic human being, with the head at Babylon or thereabouts and the limbs stretching down either side of the Mediterranean Sea. The temples of Egypt, Greece and Rome, as though representing the religious systems of those civilizations, stood out in miniature on this relief map.20 On waking I had only a hazy recollection of the instruction I had received but a very clear impression of the instructor, for he stood right before me to my waking sense, though my eyes were still closed, impressing his appearance upon me with his large magnetic eyes. He was of slight build, about five feet five inches in height, lean face, wide forehead, sallow complexion, large dark eyes and straight black hair, not clipped short as we are accustomed to see a man’s hair, but falling straight on either side of the head to the ear lobes; no hat or turban, a long, loose, collarless coat or cloak of dark blue cloth, voice of light baritone quality, manner serious and cultured. His English was perfectly spoken but in a careful, deliberate style. I noticed particularly a certain relaxed ease in his posture and movements characteristic of a man in holy orders or of one who leads a life of contemplation. He wore sandals. My awareness of this Teacher was a red-letter day in my dream-experience. It would seem to have been carefully timed to usher in a new and very trying period of my life when many loved ones and acquaintances would be passing over the border into the life beyond. Without the help of the Teacher I should have been sad indeed, and perhaps I should have fallen prey to some of the unprogressive influences often met with as the result of psychic overreaching. 54

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Now at this time I had neighbors who talked along theosophical lines of “adepts” and “masters” who lived self-determined and selfextended lives in the remote fastness of Tibet, as though these were members of a monastic hierarchy in telepathic contact with world affairs, exercising occult influences upon them; none of which seemed to me sensible or desirable. But no one had told me that there were teachers in the realms of spirit whose particular mission was to instruct those of earth who might be ready in the “mysteries of the Kingdom of Heaven.” Nevertheless, I entered into this relationship with the Teacher with joy and confidence. It was a far cry from the time when I had first realized with astonishment that God sometimes answered prayer by the ministry of spiritually developed humans communicating from the life beyond death. The Teacher of whose work I am about to write was, in the terminology of spiritualism, a “guide.” At that time I had heard of the guides of spiritualist mediums, and supposed the Teacher to be one, though it must be remembered that when I first became aware of him I knew nothing whatever about spiritualist experience and terminology. My first contact with a medium came in an ordinary social way through mutual acquaintances, and through this medium I met other people of spiritualist experience. It was such a relief to find people who were not afraid of contact with the life beyond death, and who were undoubtedly experienced in psychic matters, that I made the mistake of supposing them to know more than they did and of consulting them about the interpretation of my private visions. My friends in spirit cautioned me about leaning on the interpretations of others, and the Teacher gave me one or two visions and spoken warnings to impress upon me that all mediums were not at the same spiritual level. “Do not despise your faculty of discrimination,” he said on one occasion; and when I was in some confusion, due to my failure to distinguish between psychic receptivity and spiritual enlightenment, he gave me vision after vision designed to explain the condition. So I came to understand that a medium is just a channel. The quality of what is received depends on the type of spirit communicators attracted by the earth-audience and by their environment. When the Teacher first began to manifest, I was not certain of his identify. He has always spoken of himself as “thy Teacher.” His 55

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work with me has been to acquaint me with the nature of the life beyond death and to assist me to construct a protected pathway upon which others besides myself can come and go safely. He is a person of great patience, strong concentration and unwavering spiritual judgment, with a masterly skill in the construction and presentation of allegorical tableaux. When he first began to take me visiting in the life beyond death, it was not a totally conscious experience. There are several kinds of contact with that life of varying degrees of awareness. Some are just impressions, as of still pictures upon what my father and mother call “the psychic envelope.” Some are molds which if need be can be animated. These are built from the surplus psychic substance that forms the clothes of the soul-body. When I first became aware of the Teacher, I knew nothing of spiritualist experience and terminology. Bookstores in Vancouver and New Westminster carried no occult literature. Words such as “clairvoyance,” “clairaudience,” “clairsentience” and even the word “reincarnation” had no meaning for me. Magazines from England, France or Germany sometimes carried advertisements of professional astrologers, but there were no magazines or books on the subject. Spiritualist mediums from other parts of the continent sometimes held meetings in Vancouver of which we heard incidentally from neighbors; but in my social environment, all mention of such was strictly taboo. For myself, I was sincerely Christian, not just a conformer with social custom, but of restricted, orthodox concepts. My knowledge of religious beliefs other than Christianity was practically nil. Except for those portions of the “classics” required by my teacher-training course, my contact with good literature had been very limited. Nothing more unlikely than the manifestations of the Teacher could possibly have happened to such a one as I in such circumstances. Without introduction or explanation other than the statement, “I am thy Teacher,” he appeared; first as an unknown, friendly, capable protector in dream situations of disturbing character, then as one in charge of soul-flights and out-of-the-body excursions. When I had come to know him and to trust him, he showed himself, early one morning, standing at the foot of my bed, visible and audible to my normal senses. 56

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It was many years before he added anything to that identification! His appearance, especially his complexion and hair, inclined me to think he had been an Egyptian in his life on earth. His familiarity with astrological terminology and knowledge of the Great Pyramid, which was revealed in later contacts, confirmed me in this assumption. There were, however, certain features in his manifestations that indicated a close connection with Moses and the people of Israel. There was a cosmic outlook in his communications that was unique. It was as though he looked back, not merely for centuries, but over the ages, and mapped the progress of mankind and linked up incidents from the individual past into a continuing thread of purposeful experience. There was his statement that I had entered the Great Pyramid first in ancient Egypt, and in the time of Moses in a later incarnation by another entrance. Who was this Teacher who guided my feet with the cube lamp, symbol of the Inner Sanctuary of the Temple of Israel? Under the guidance and control of this man, I was made aware of the ability of the soul to travel while the body slept, and to see and feel what was taking place, or had taken place, or was about to take place at a distance—distance in time as well as place—and had occasional awareness of persons in the life-beyond-death—some known to me and others unknown. I did not, for some time, know that I was traveling in the soul body. I perceived the similarity between these experiences and those recorded in the Bible that had happened to Joseph, the son of Jacob, to Nebuchadnezzar the Chaldean and to others, which were called dreams; and so I thought of mine as dreams. I had no understanding of the nature and complexity of human consciousness and its operation during sleep. From 1914, when the Teacher first made me aware of him and began to expand my consciousness, until quite recently, I have had no clue to his identity in any former incarnation other than his appearance and attire. On January 8, 1970, a manifestation occurred that indicated a close link between the Teacher who was directing my Christ-Service, and the man who wrote, or supplied the narrative material for the Fourth Gospel. On that date I was engrossed daily in a critical study of that gospel. In comparing the testimony of the various gospels, I found that the Fourth Gospel was written from an entirely different 57

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outlook to that of the other three. Indeed, I had begun to have doubts that it was an eyewitness record. At this point, as I broke off from my deskwork to get my lunch, a man spoke as though standing nearby, saying, “I am he.” By that time, I had discovered that the man whose writings from the narrative material of the Fourth Gospel was Disciple 13 at the Last Supper, and that his name is not mentioned anywhere in the gospels. That he was not John, the son of Zebedee, was quite clear because of the naming in John, Chapter 21, of the six who went fishing with Peter after the death and resurrection of their beloved Lord. I had no thought until then that the “disciple whom Jesus loved” had any close connection with my special work, nor had I given serious consideration to the fact that the Communion Service in which I had been instructed by the priest [from the other life] who spoke the strange language, was predominantly a compilation of quotations from the Fourth Gospel and from the Revelations to John of Patmos. That this John of Patmos was the “testifier” referred to in the Fourth Gospel (Chapter 21.24), I now concluded and this was confirmed two days later by the Master himself. On that Sunday, after Holy Communion, the Master spoke unexpectedly saying, “Well done, Little One,” and I was immediately aware of the man who had said “I am he” standing with him. I thanked the Master for the manifestation, and referred to the other man as “your beloved disciple” and was immediately corrected by the Master saying, “My brother.” Since then the Master invariably refers to this man as “my messenger.” The traditional symbol of the writer of the Fourth Gospel is the Eagle and this has been shown many times in communications through the years. The most memorable occurred on December 7, 1965, when, shortly after waking, I was greatly astonished to see a Golden Eagle feeding its young under the eaves of the cottage. The nest appeared to have been converted from a swallow’s. Every detail of the bird’s feathers and markings, its talons and beak, was distinct and true to life, though I, myself, could not have visualized even the outline of what I saw. With its left foot the bird clung to the roof of the cottage and with the right foot it held a dead rabbit from which it fed the young eaglets with its beak. The communications of the Teacher are notable for quotations 58

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from the Fourth Gospel and from Revelations, and a few are in the style of the writer of the Book of Daniel. In the early years he gave me warning not to despise my faculty of critical discrimination, and against the improper exercise of mediumship. He instructed and trained me in control of my psychic energies. He made known by clairvoyance my association with Greece in a former incarnation and with a Teacher there who had instructed me. On November 10, 1946, he regressed my consciousness into the past when I was a little girl reading a letter in Greek and stumbling over the words for “eternity” and “immortality.” It should be noted that I recognized the letter characters of the Greek language, but that I have no knowledge of their sound or meaning. One more word regarding the identity of the Teacher: our present knowledge of the nature and operation of personality is very meagre, and our understanding quite inadequate for explaining how one person (or persons) can overshadow another, especially when one is of present life on earth and the other of life-beyond-death, and is merging with his own persona of life on earth in ancient times in a quite different social environment. Yet this happens more frequently than is generally realized. It is a part of the tradition of the teaching of Jesus at the Last Supper: “You in me and I in you.” It is in fact the basic principle of all life, mutations of life and individuation. So it should not seem strange that the communication of those in the realms beyond death is by merging of personal knowledge and wisdom from the highest of which we have conception, through angelic agents of nonhuman life, through Jesus and his Servers, and through hundreds of intermediary agents to an individual recipient at the earth-life level. (from Between Time and Eternity and An Open Door)

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Olga in Love

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hen i first met olga she was a fragile-boned, 78-year-

old hermit. Her husband Jim Park had long departed this world, and she hinted that in order to cultivate contemplation, she had since remained on “the solitary path.” In fact, Olga suggested from time to time that marriage as an institution has often not been conducive to spiritual growth. After all, she pointed out, when Jesus was asked whose wife a certain woman would be in heaven, since she had had more than one husband on earth, he sidestepped, saying that in the resurrection “they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven.” When I asked Olga what this meant, she said that institutional marriage as we know it is not necessary in the higher states of consciousness. Her sense was that Jesus honoured marriage as a union of souls, but not as a domestic property arrangement whereby one person controls the other. Olga did not use the phrase “patriarchal institution” to describe marriage, but she often noted that being tied to domestic arrangements and the social structure of marriage had been an impediment for many women. In her later years, she was freer to open fully to the realms of spirit. Olga spoke quite openly about sexuality and had nothing against the bodily expression of intimacy. She expressed the rather bedazzling notion that the pleasures and ecstasies of spiritual union were far more profound and fulfilling than most forms of lovemaking in the outer physical body. Olga had a fully developed sense of each of us being enwrapped in various 60

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sheaths—the physical, the astral or subtle body, and the spiritual body. There were bodies within bodies within bodies. For her, the deepest forms of love involved a union of multiple levels of consciousness opening out into the infinite. The mysteries of true partnership and union were not to be taken lightly. Most people would have no idea about them and might be afraid of the kind of interior intimacies she had experienced. I could barely imagine Olga in love, except with everything— animals, plants, human beings. I could not imagine her with a particular partner because she seemed so complete unto herself. Yet the heights and depths of her solitary path drew me, and I determined to remain celibate, as I had come to see celibacy as a “higher path” than ordinary marriage. Another reason I was drawn to the single life until the age of thirty-two is that I had had several unsatisfactory relationships with men in my early twenties, and felt attracted to the vocation of a solitary. In the early seventies, backing away from the counter culture of free love and sexual expression made me something of an anomaly. Sometimes I felt like I was going against the grain of the times, but the solitude I experienced as a result greatly enhanced my meditation practice and writing. Secretly, I had a deep yearning for what I conceived as a spiritual partnership—a holistic relationship that would integrate many aspects of being. Although I hesitated to use the term, I was longing for what in popular parlance has been called a soul mate. For me, having a soul mate, despite the obvious cliché, involved two people being joined in a way that mutually enhances their growth, and contributes something to the world. I hoped such a partnership would be a form of service as well as one of enduring personal fulfillment. My insistence that I was on a solitary path was sincere at one level, but at another I was a blazing, heady romantic wanting the whole shebang, the love of my life to suddenly appear. So when Olga began to talk about her spiritual partnership with a man from the other life whom she called the Rector, I was all ears. When Olga was married and teaching Sunday school at St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Kerrisdale, Vancouver, she developed a close friendship with the Rector, Rev. Charles Sidney McGaffin, 61

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originally from Ireland. I was struck by the handsome young Rector’s photograph, which still hangs in a hallway at St. Mary’s. As Olga and the Rector worked together closely on the Sunday school curriculum, they began to share their more profound thoughts and ideas. Olga said she felt instantly at one with the Rector’s mind and values, and they became close friends. Though the Rector himself was by all accounts comfortably married, and Olga and Jim on good terms with both him and his wife, rumours began to fly. The Rector was oblivious to the gossip, but Olga knaew about it and eventually left the church in order to protect his reputation. She deeply regretted that she never had the opportunity to explain her motives for leaving to the Rector, and that an unresolved breach remained between them. When she heard of the Rector’s death she was devastated. Olga confided to me that immediately after leaving St. Mary’s she became so depressed at the thought of never seeing the Rector again that she considered throwing herself in front of a train. When I knew her, Olga was old, generally positive in outlook, and anything but depressed, so I could barely imagine this AnnaKarenina-like younger woman in turmoil. In An Open Door, Olga explains how her relationship with the Rector resumed not long after he passed to the life beyond death: About six months after the death of the Rector, the Teacher took me to visit again on the other side of this life. I awoke to find myself on a mountain summit. There was a cloud rolling across the part of the mountain that lay at my feet. Beyond the cloud was a low-roofed building like a monastic retreat. The Rector was sitting on a bench, rapt in thought. He had on his usual outdoor hat and coat. His face and eyes bore a sad look. The Rector came nearer, and we spoke briefly. The thing he was so sad about seemed to be that his work on earth was unfinished. Olga related how she had more out-of-body visits with the Rector. She told me her encounters with him in the astral planes helped him move beyond depression and regret. Not only did Olga assist with the Rector’s adjustment to his new circumstances, 62

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but she eventually helped him make contact with her Teacher and became the Rector’s spiritual partner. Their relationship was for Olga a union of two realms as well as two individuals. Many times when I arrived at the cottage, Olga would mention the Rector and note that he had “been around,” helped her with a problem, or shared an insight. However much I accepted the Rector’s presence as a constant, I continued to hope that my yearned-for spiritual partner might accompany me through life in this plane of existence.

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Companions of the Way

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Psyche Obscure and rare that state to which I fell or rose, no, floated awake into your invisible arms You whispered, Desirée, and touched me with a thousand exquisite fingers—a rush like hummingbird wings filtering through every parcel from crown to toe to crown crescendoing, falling, continuing night’s extravagant enterprise when we flowed and spiralled in the chakras of the spine blossomed in the thousand-petalled lotus of the brain You were not in and out and away like any ordinary lover but lingered all night, sequestering, calling me Beloved21

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lga taught that the relationship between two people

can be a locus for what the mystics have called divine union. Some have spoken of a hieros gamos or sacred interplay of two as one. One way of describing this non-dual state is by saying that when entering it we leave behind the division of reality into rigid either/ors—us versus them, subject versus object, and male versus female. For Olga, this kind of unity was accessible to all. She hinted further that her relation with the Rector was such a union enacted between two people, one on earth and one in the other life. Both 64

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were developing in a parallel fashion as individuals, but in their shared journey toward wholeness, they resonated together. The more individualized each of them became, the more intimate their union. Olga thought that in this kind of dance, the individuality of the participants isn’t effaced, but fulfilled. Whatever the case, death could not separate Olga and the Rector. It did not matter that he was in one dimension and she in another, since the various planes of consciousness were deeply intertwined. Love was indeed “as strong as death,” if not stronger, as stated in the Song of Songs. The “mystical marriage,” as this state of unity in diversity has been called, is one of the great sacramental mysteries, not only in Christianity, but in many of the world’s spiritual traditions. Because of Olga’s compelling personal story, I continued to yearn for a mystical marriage, but with a partner here on earth. Complaining a few times to Olga of loneliness, I once mentioned my wistfulness for the kind of profound connection she had with the Rector. I had renounced dating, and resolved that the next relationship in my life would either be the “big one” or I would have none at all. Olga simply smiled and suggested I send out to the universe my longing for a Companion of the Way. I was not to make a request, so much as to open myself to the possibility of such a partnership. The important thing was that I had to desire it with all my heart, while being absolutely open to things unfolding in their own way. The method of prayer she taught was something of a paradox, as it involved simultaneously a passionate yearning and non-attachment to outcomes. Olga explained that when articulating a wish or heart’s desire, one is not trying to manipulate a deity perceived as outside who controls the strings to grant special favours. Rather, “asking,” “seeking,” and “knocking” (as in Jesus’s teachings) are ways of putting oneself in a condition of receptivity, being authentic about one’s desires and clarifying them to ourselves, then surrendering them completely to a greater intelligence. The universe does not circle around the individual. Yet making our desires and intentions known is important. Shortly after her remark about releasing my desire to the Holy One, I began to have a recurrent dream I called the dream of 65

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“the man on the other side of the mountain.” In it I find myself climbing a mountain, picking my way along a steep and difficult trail, when I suddenly become aware almost telepathically of a mysterious man scrambling up at the exact same level, but on the other side. As I ascend, I have the sensation of simultaneously being in my body and watching the scene from above. When I think I might just circumvent the whole climb and walk around to the other side of the mountain to meet this guy, the inner voice says, “Wait to meet him at the top.” For several years after this series of dreams, absolutely nothing happened. No mysterious man showed up, and my dreams of finding a spiritual mate started to seem unrealistic. Then in 1974, I met Mark. Mark was a philosophy student at a college in the Fraser Valley where I was an instructor; he enrolled in my early morning literature class for one semester. I knew him only as my colleague Grace’s most promising student, so he and I only had a few exchanges during our time at the college. Years later, in 1977, when he was completing his philosophy degree at the University of British Columbia and I was teaching as a sessional lecturer in the English Department, Mark looked me up in my office to discuss what he had heard from a friend was our mutual interest in the Canadian folksinger Bruce Cockburn. We started to go for coffee regularly and I came to look forward to our conversations. For months, we would spend hours talking in person or on the phone, walking, hiking, and revelling in our mutual interest in music, spirituality, nature, and mysticism. Yet because he was nine years my junior, and formerly my student, I did not consider him a potential partner. During the period when Mark and I were becoming friends, one day at the cottage when I was alone with Olga, she began quite unexpectedly to talk about her interior psycho-sexual experiences, experiences similar to what in the east is called kundalini, the awakening of the energies in the spine that flower at the crown chakra in the head. She was matter-of-fact, relating how the Rector came in once while she was drowsing and they joined in a “night of ecstasy.” “I was up the entire night,” she mused, “I couldn’t sleep because the ecstatic sensations went on for hours. The delicacy and exquisiteness of the union is 66

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completely indescribable. It far surpasses the pleasures of the physical body because it is a psycho-spiritual union in which the physical, etheric, subtle, and causal bodies are aligned.” She waved her hands in circles as she spoke, as if to suggest ascending spirals of fire. I did not know quite what to make of Olga’s account, but had read of similar ecstasies in the autobiography of Teresa of Avila and some of the medieval saints, so I knew there were precedents for rapturous ravishments in mystical tradition. A few months later, however, in the period when I was spending hours talking to Mark, I had my own unsolicited and surprising experience of kundalini. I am sure psychologists would say Olga’s account was no doubt a catalyst for my own through the power of suggestion. Yet the phenomenon of one person’s experience awakening a similar experience in another does not invalidate the encounter. Some say the presence of a teacher raises the learner’s awareness. In any case, the mysterious, invisible presence in my all-night rapture, repeatedly called me “Desirée,” desired one. Though such an experience has never repeated itself, it remains indelibly inscribed in my cells. Years later, I wrote several poems that attempted to capture the flowing energies that began in my genitals but moved slowly, delicately, and exquisitely through every part of my being from toe to head. The event seemed to last the entire night, yet in another way was timeless. For me, only the musicality of poetry can begin to convey it. Later, when attempting to come to terms with my own wild night, I wondered if the mysterious presence could have been the Cosmic Christ as bridegroom, or the Divine Presence of God who knew me better than I knew myself. “Closer than the jugular,” say the Sufis, for whom God is the Beloved. In 1979, after Mark and I had agreed to merge our lives, I thought the midnight stranger might have been Mark himself, brought to me in his astral body before we acknowledged our love. Between the time my last relationship had ended and my relationship with Mark began, I had been on my own for seven years. Perhaps I needed some internal awakening in preparation for what seemed a complete rebirth. I was initially concerned Olga might be disappointed to hear 67

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I was abandoning my commitment to a single path. For some time she had encouraged me and some others who studied with her to embrace the solitary life as a kind of fast track to spiritual awakening. And I had discovered for myself that deepening my practice of daily meditation required enormous amounts of solitude and silence. Eventually, though, I screwed up my courage and introduced Mark and Olga. I need not have worried, for Mark had the same instant connection with Olga that I had experienced years before. He too became a regular visitor at the cottage, sometimes going by himself and even spending the night there on one occasion when she needed help after falling and breaking her foot. When, months later, I disclosed to Olga that Mark and I had decided to get married she laughed and said, “Well, it’s about time.”

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Is There Such Thing as a Soul Mate?

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he archetype of the lovers or the divinely joined

pair endures in our collective psyche. Thirty-five years into married life with Mark, I would like to reflect on what it means to see one’s beloved as a spiritual partner or soul mate, or whatever might be the current terminology for this kind of partnership plus. I am sure someone less romantic might argue that the notion of soul mates is a purely human construct, something we have created to give meaning and purpose to relationships that are inherently pragmatic, temporal—rich, beautiful but evanescent. Another more cynical view is that such cultural constructs, from courtly love to Hollywood movie scenarios, just set people up for disappointment. A skeptic might say we mostly form long-term partnerships to meet our pragmatic, sexual and psychological needs and then invest them with spiritual values. Yet for me investing relationships with meaning is precisely the point. Humans are essentially meaning-makers. We are beings who, for better or worse, have a propensity, even a need, to create meaning out of what we are given. So in one way, it does not matter if soul mates are gifts of the universe or created by those who see their relationships through a certain kind of lens. Maybe we sometimes enrich each other with meanings that we then rise to embody. To have it one way or the other sets up a false dichotomy. I would say that soul mates are both given and made. If one travels further into the territory of soul partnerships, perplexing conundrums arise. What if the two people grow apart and go their separate ways? Is there a betrayal of the original 69

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vision or were the two people simply mistaken? If my soul mate dies and I find another, does that mean I have betrayed the first one? Is long-term commitment, longevity, a sign of soul-matedom? If I admire eagles, who are said to mate for life, am I forced to see the more promiscuous species as of a less refined sensibility? The questions are endless and perhaps unanswerable. In fact, when I go down this road I suspect I am coming at things from the wrong angle. It is easier to suggest what soul mates are not than what they are. Being with someone you know is your spiritual partner doesn’t mean the relationship will be easy. Mark and I have experienced as many bumps, ordeals, and messiness as anyone else. What is amazing is that we have co-evolved for so many decades and are still engaged in an ongoing conversation. We never seem to tire of one another and I never feel I know him completely. He is a trusted mystery. Soul mates may believe their relationships are written in the stars, but they are not predetermined and still require effort and nurture. To define the term soul mate too narrowly would circumscribe the freedom, joy, and spontaneity of such interconnectedness. Having a soul mate is not coterminous with marriage, but can coincide with it. Insofar as marriage has in many cultures been tied to patriarchy, the institution can subvert what Shakespeare called the “marriage of true minds.” Neither are soul mates necessarily members of the opposite sex, since the phrase embraces couples with diverse gender and sexual orientations. And it is likely not everyone requires a soul mate. Some mystics seem to be married to larger communities or to the entire universe. Soul mates hold and reflect each other’s essential truth, beauty, and goodness, along with their imperfections. From time to time, they have a sense of being sustained by a love that transcends them both. They meet in a larger, more spacious field that moves them gradually away from selfishness and ego-centrism into trust, empathy, compassion, and ever deepening love. They are on a perilous journey. They have a sense of moving into a oneness that precedes them through the power of a love they can’t name or fully comprehend. Maybe it is not the longevity of the 70

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relationship that is the measure, but its capacity to be contained within the timeless. In the end, all the above-mentioned qualities of the soul mate archetype do not need to be constantly and consistently present, but it is essential that they be periodically desired, renewed, and re-imagined. Being with a soul mate is a process, not a product. To call to and be answered by another person’s otherness in this way is to enter a vast network of mutuality and to honour the divine Eros that the mystic Richard of St. Victor called the desire to “go in deeper and speak more openly.” When I ponder the configuration of soul mates, I see an analogy to a phenomenon in quantum theory called “quantum action-ata-distance.”22 Physicists have noticed how one quantum object or event (a wave-particle) seems to influence its correlated twin object or bundle of energy, no matter how far apart they are in the time-space continuum. Sometimes people seem to resonate together in this way. On numerous occasions Mark and I have been apart, but mysteriously aware of each other’s thoughts, experiences, and dreams. For example, when I was in the early stages of pregnancy with our first and only child, Mark dreamed that a blonde, blue-eyed toddler of about three years old approached him at a bench in our local shopping mall. He was holding a newspaper up in front of his face, preoccupied, when she tugged it down and placed herself eyeball to eyeball with him. “Are you my daddy?” she questioned? “My mommy and I are looking for my daddy.” As it turned out, our daughter grew to look a good deal like the blonde dream-girl, and had the same intense way of demanding Mark’s attention. I too had dreamed long before her conception about a blue-eyed laughing girl. For me, the soul mate configuration comes down to a key word—“oneness.” When Olga spoke of the Rector she would press her forefinger against her middle finger as if to say, “like this—one.” Being with a soul mate has been a discovery of unity in polarity, a union of apparent opposites. During the banquet in The Symposium, Plato has the playwright Aristophanes relate the myth of the “round human,” a whimsical tale of the once unified being the gods split in two. The longing 71

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of lover for lover, he says, stems from this original unity. And in one of my early favourite novels, Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, there is a revelatory moment when Cathy exclaims, “I am Heathcliff!” It is not that she has lost her identity in her difficult and thorny counterpart, but that, however different they seem outwardly, part of them arises from the same landscape, the same ground. From this centre they are essentially one. Romantic though it sounds, and susceptible to psychological reductionism, this kind of oneness is for me the heart of the matter. Could it be that soul mates actually enact the essential unity in which we all participate? Maybe soul mates are a living metaphor for the unity of things. Together they share the inhalation and exhalation of a single breath, the heartbeat of the expanding and contracting universe. Experiencing such oneness manifests at a personal level the cosmic and eternal principle of yin-yang, leftright, the resolution of polarities in an active unifying ground. In relating her story of her love for the Rector, Olga focussed on the dyadic dance between two people apparently separated by death. Yet the implications of her sense of oneness with him resonate beyond the relationships of pairs. If love is a dynamic field in which all boundaries fall away, then Olga’s sense of soul connection is relevant to our relations within communities, the other-than-human species, and the very planet itself. The ecstatic love affair that wakes us in the night extends everywhere. It does not just fulfill us as individuals and couples, but challenges us to care more about each other collectively as well as the world in which we live.

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Dreaming Dreams

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ivid dreams, so vital they remain etched on body, mind,

and spirit for a lifetime, are not uncommon experiences. Psychologist Abraham Maslow ventures that these, among other “peak experiences,” are universal and may indicate the workings of a consciousness within us all beyond empirical knowing. When such dreams pass through the filter of language they are altered, and altered yet again when reentered through memory and desire. The original experience seems unspeakable, yet can be companioned by words. The experience, revisited, likewise may evoke the resonance of words. Such dreams also make us aware of the limits of language. Language hints at the invisible like footsteps in snow. Metaphors arise, fall away and surge up again in new forms. Such tropes and traces are all we have to carry back. Somehow the energy of the original experience clings to the words and words fold back into the experience. Yet words are not mere ciphers, since something ineffable clings to them. A true vision, as mystics witness, can radically transform a life, and such a transformation is ongoing. Sometimes a vision becomes a living parable requiring a lifetime to inhabit. It simultaneously probes, disturbs, and consoles. A true vision makes us more real. It keeps opening us to a life of its own that draws us back into the world where we are tested by further experience. We do not interpret a vision, but are interpreted by it. It is a fountain of mysteries. We catch what we can in our hands.

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Interdimensional Olga

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Living Clothes It’s ordinary time. I’m roused by my alarm but not fully awake The white door of the closet opens and behold! (Believe me, “behold” is the word) a congregation of shimmering sheaths, living garments flowing, singing dancing, weaving, shining — kundalini earth fires yearning to move up the spine become the body and extensions of the body transparent wings in chartreuse, magenta rose, Prussian blue, orchid, lavender, sea-green fuchsia, blush, raw sienna, burnt orange plum, and scarlet (darling, I’m in the crayon box alive and all the colours have birthed themselves self-distilled, honey, wine) Goddess, I’m blushing This unified coronation of cells I call me smiles, dons the aquamarine swirling skirt 74

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which falls over my head, twirls like a carousel and plunges into breath this only ever now23 Beings from the spirit world constantly stepped in and out of Olga’s cottage. Sometimes she would be “overshadowed” by one or another of her otherworldly visitors who would speak through her. Though she seemed to enter an altered state, she insisted her mind was not in a trance, as is the case with some psychic mediums, for she remembered everything clearly afterwards and insisted there was no loss of free will. She outwardly appeared to be fully present, but in a deep meditative state. Sometimes she would see groups of other-world helpers sent to bring insight to an issue or assist with a particular problem. The Teacher and the Rector took charge of her nocturnal flights. When breakthroughs from the spirit world began for her around 1914, Olga felt that having extra-sensory awareness was a challenge. At first she was disturbed at the possibility of being interrupted at any time by “psychic intrusions.” As she matured, she felt the cosmic Christ of her visions was establishing a balance in her that screened out these undesirable psychic phenomena. Eventually she was able to move comfortably from one region of her universe to another. It was as if the right and left hemispheres of her brain learned to cooperate with each other. The joy of life consisted of being able to be in the earth, access the realms of light, and sink into the dark ground of mystery from which we are never entirely separate. What would be craze-inducing or just plain spooky for some was the everyday for her. Yet the point is not just that she negotiated multiple dimensions, but that she communed with regions where things were richer, more purposeful, and more complex than in ordinary time. From this perspective, commonplace events made more sense. Access to more comprehensive worlds, she said, set her on a lifelong program of interior development. She might have replied similarly as did Carl Jung who, when asked in his 80s whether or not he believed in God, responded, “Now—difficult to answer. [Pause] I know. 75

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I don’t need to believe.”24 Olga too speaks from experiential “gnosis” or direct intuitive knowing. From childhood, I too had a sense of standing on the borderline between realms. My parents called me “Suzie with her head in the clouds, Suzie with her nose in a book.” I loved to make up stories about fairies while playing in a grove of willows near my house. My grandmother, of Irish descent, enchanted me with tales about the “wee folk” living in the roots and branches of elms and oaks. While I was a fairly normal child, falling off bikes, climbing apple trees, and taking part in neighbourhood garage plays, my other life carried on simultaneously in the regions of dream and imagination. Even before attending school, I was easily transported to places of wonder by books. When I was about six, my great Aunt Lois, a free-thinking schoolteacher, moved house and stored her vast collection of myths and fairy tales in our basement. These musty treasures, which I still own and whose odour I still love to inhale, included not only volumes of the Red, Blue, Lilac Fairy Books, the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, but Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, George MacDonald’s Phantastes and Lilith, and two sets of classical literature for children, Journeys through Bookland, and My Book World. Every other summer when our family drove through the deep South of the United States to visit my maternal grandparents in Florida, my parents would cast their eyes into the back seat and tell me, “Suzie, why don’t you stop reading and just look out the window once in a while?” My dad’s constant warning was, “You’re going to ruin your eyes.” At seven, about the age of Carroll’s Alice, I went to see the Disney film Alice in Wonderland and afterwards fixated for weeks on a single question: “Where’s Wonderland?” My family got so annoyed hearing me repeat the query, that one day dad took me for a drive to the most beautiful park he knew on the outskirts of Indianapolis, one with a ravine full of daffodils and irises. “Here you go,” he smiled, pushing my nose into a bank of flowers: “This is Wonderland.” I was devastated. Truly, the park was beautiful, but these were not the talking flowers of my imagination. He took my hand. 76

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Although I stopped asking, “Where is Wonderland,” the question did not go away. As I moved through school, I excelled in anything having to do with reading and language. So it is no surprise I ended up majoring in English literature in university. I seemed designed for it, being awkward at sports and more practical subjects like arithmetic. Strangely, I was fine with the math involved in geometry. I later learned that Lewis Carroll himself had been a logician and mathematician. My father was an aeronautical engineer who took me stargazing and to planetarium shows where we marvelled at what Carl Sagan later referred to in rhapsodic tones as the “billions and billions of stars.” A sense of wonder in us both united Dad the rationalist and me the dreamer. At university in the sixties, I had the first of many recurrent dreams of seeking an opening to a mysterious world behind the stacks in the library. Sometime the bookshelves would collapse and give way to interior worlds. Mostly I would wake up before being able to explore these intriguing spaces. In my late twenties, I had another recurrent dream of opening the doors of a wardrobe, something like the one in C.S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. There I discovered an array of dresses—diaphanous sheaths that melded to the shape of my body and became an extension of my spiritual energies. These magical dresses were made of subtle, flowing stuff, finer than gossamer, studded with luminous multi-coloured stars. I now see the imagery of the living clothes to represent a state in which the inner and outer life are one, where the soul dances freely, not entrapped by the costumes society forces us to wear. This longing for worlds elsewhere persisted, but as I matured, I took my father’s advice and became more attentive to the book of nature. Thanks to him and later to my environmentalist, activist husband, who took me on excursions into wilderness, I began to develop a naturalist’s eye as well as a greater concern for the public sphere. In the late sixties, I had marched against the Vietnam War, but since retirement I began writing letters about environmental devastation, social injustices, and have become much more politically engaged. It occurs to me that starting out 77

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as a somewhat other-worldly introvert, I could have become an escapist, or one who unconsciously devalues the earth, my animal body, this beautiful planet. Instead, I find myself more and more engaged with everyday reality. The world around me appears increasingly enchanting, wild, magical—integral to the divine unity I had sought as a child. As she aged, Olga became for me a model of the unified human being, a fusion of the mystic and the pragmatist. “Jesus was a scientist as much as a mystic,” she announced. “He worked with cosmic law.” When she broke her foot at the cottage in her late eighties, rather than being distraught during the x-ray procedure, she marvelled at the delicate beauty of the bones of her feet on the screen: “Just look at the intricacy of the architecture—the tarsal, metatarsal, phalange— the movement and dexterity of the joints.” Her round face shone. Olga often said, “The universe is all about vibrations and frequencies. To be aware of something in another dimension, you have to be attuned to it. If you’re not attuned, just as to a band on a radio, you can’t hear it. If you’re not at-one with it, you could walk right through another dimension without knowing it was there.” My husband took her notion seriously, but joked privately that we should all be singing a chorus of the Beach Boy’s “Good Vibrations.” Perhaps some scientists would laugh too, but many scientists have conceded that matter is more like a dance than a series of disparate objects in space. For Olga, matter and spirit, matter and mind are variations of the same cosmic stuff. In the end, it seems we are all interdimensional beings. We block out much of the real simply because we cannot process it. As T. S. Eliot puts it, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”25 Olga seemed able to bear more of it than most. I take comfort in her view that, however many worlds there may be, the many dimensions are really one, interrelated and part of a larger whole. She lived her days as if we and other human beings, the non-human creatures, nature, and the cosmos were all intimately interconnected, distinct, but essentially one. .

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lga and i were settled on the sofa at the cottage with cups of steaming tea considering Jesus’s statement, “Not a sparrow falls without your Father,” when she suddenly raised her snowy head from the text and queried, “Have you ever noticed that particular scripture doesn’t read, ‘Yet not one sparrow falls without your Father being aware of it?’ It actually says here in the King James, ‘Not one of them falls without your Father.’ This implies God is actually present in the falling of the sparrow. God is that falling sparrow.” Looking back, after having read philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead and Teilhard de Chardin, I would say Olga was a process theologian without ever having heard the term. That is, for her God is not outside the process of things, but within it, suffering and feeling within the world, within plants, creatures, in and alongside each of us and all of creation. God for her was not simply the manifest world but the totality of what is manifest and what lies hidden, the active power of love that continuously gives the whole beauty, coherence, and meaning.

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Saints with Foibles and Warts

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lga was not a saint, yet she did have a certain saintly

quality. And I think we all have the capacity to be saints according to a certain understanding of the word. Being saintly, “sanctus,” or holy, is not about being perfect in the sense of flawless, but about moving toward wholeness. It is a process. A saint can be as quirky and inconsistent as the rest of us, sometimes more so. A saint is one who has begun to live steadily out of the compassion and love that lies at the heart of the universe. In his song “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen’s implies we are all works-in-progress: “There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.”26 And in his early novel Beautiful Losers (1966), Cohen defines a saint as someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if [s]he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself [or herself], for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a [person] setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his [her] glory.27 Another twentieth-century poet who sought such a balance all his life was the monk, religious writer, and contemplative Thomas 80

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Merton. As a young man at Columbia University, Merton was challenged by his friend Robert Lax to go flat out for sainthood rather than just a virtuous life. Merton writes: I forgot what we were arguing about, but in the end Lax suddenly turned around and asked me the question: “What do you want to be, anyways?” I could not say, “I want to be Thomas Merton the well-known writer of all those book reviews in the back pages of the Times Book Review,” or “Thomas Merton the assistant instructor of Freshman-English at the New Life Social Institute for Progress and Culture,” so I put the thing on the spiritual plane, where I knew it belonged and said: “I don’t know; I guess what I want is to be a good Catholic?” “What do you mean, you want to be a good Catholic?” The explanation I gave was lame enough, and expressed my confusion, and betrayed how little I had really thought about it all. Lax did not accept it. “What you should say”—he told me—“what you should say is that you want to be a saint.”28 No one today is officially canonizing Merton. After all, he sneaked out of the monastery to drink beer and listen to jazz, and even had a love affair with a young student nurse when he was in his early fifties. His writings on peace and the Vietnam War got him into trouble with the abbot at his monastery in Gethsemani, Kentucky. These things make him more trickster-like than unsaintly, as far as I am concerned. In fact, they show that a saint is not disconnected from everyday life and from politics. Many consider Merton the premier contemplative writer of the West in the twentieth-century, one who spoke of the silent centre of reality where we can access “a hidden wholeness.” If Olga was holy, she, like Merton, was no plaster saint. She often spoke of her journey as a lonely pilgrimage and admitted that impatience was her besetting temptation. She would sometimes 81

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get frustrated when things were not moving ahead quickly enough, partly because she could see a much larger picture. As a child she knew a Scottish ship’s doctor who used to say, “One step at a time, Lassie.” So “one step at a time” became her motto. She flew in her astral experiences, so why not in everyday life? I have no stories to share of an unethical, devious, manipulative, or immoral Olga, as she was always truthful and “straight up” with me and with all who knew her. However, she could on occasion be difficult. Once when I was shopping in Gastown in Vancouver, I discovered a hand-woven grey shawl with silver fringe that seemed perfect for Olga. It was made of soft wool, not at all scratchy, and I could envision her cocooning inside it on those cold, wet rainy nights at the cottage. Besides, her birthday was coming up. When I delivered it on the special day, she did not say much, but sniffed and set it aside. I was expecting exclamations of pleasure, especially since I had spent over thirty dollars on it, a goodly sum for a graduate student living on a teaching assistantship in 1972. I later found out through our mutual friend Pauline that Olga had refused to wear the shawl, giving it away to a neighbour. “Does she think I’m some kind of old granny? A shawl just isn’t my style.” I was devastated. On another occasion, I picked up an Alice-blue cotton hippie style flowing dress at a second-hand store and wore it proudly to the cottage. Colours were important to Olga and signified spiritual states, so she had definite opinions when it came to aesthetics. When she saw me, she shrieked, “That shade of pale blue doesn’t suit you at all. Besides, you look best in tailored clothes.” Again, I was taken aback, but too in awe to challenge her. In truth, during the early years I was a bit intimidated by Olga and eager to please her. She could be crotchety one moment, and the next, a sage, so I brushed off the apparent inconsistencies. This pattern eventually changed. Olga later admitted that when trying to move some of her students along, she could overstep her boundaries. After that, she would be quicker to apologize and change her behaviour, insisting that making mistakes is how we learn. For example, for a while Olga decided her students should practice the communion ritual in pairs, rather than as 82

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solitaries. She thought bringing people together would create a sense of community, that we could encourage each other and share our insights. So at her suggestion, Patti and I ended up meeting weekly at my place. It did not work. We ended up gossiping and I began to miss my solitary Sundays. Things soon fell apart of themselves and Olga had the humility to acknowledge the team approach was just not working. Perhaps she wanted to create community because she had been lonely much of her life. When speaking about the spiritual path she said, “The first stage is humility. You can’t master the other stages without it. It’s the foundation stone.” One derivation of the word “humility” is “humus,” indicating connection to the earth.29 Olga’s earthiness was tied to her sense of awe before the mysteries of God and nature. It also took humility for Olga to admit that some of her earlier theological formulations were expanding and changing. Over her lifetime she moved from a more literal to a more symbolic understanding of many of the biblical accounts. For example, for a while she spoke of Christ’s return or “Second Coming” as his reappearance on the earth in an “etheric” body at the end of a cycle of ages, but in her later years she suggested that his “coming again” was the birth of the Christ-mind within each individual. When I first met her she was studying the book of Revelation, the apocalypse, and took many of its apparent predictions literally. She grew to interpret the book as a dramatic action parable about a universal transformation of consciousness. We all have a constructed self that is grounded in a potentially more integral Self. The ego is essential as a base for growth, yet not sufficient as a lasting centre, because it isn’t wise enough and doesn’t go deeply enough. With luck and effort, we come to recognize our costumes and masks for what they are and treat them lightly. Olga distinguished the outer personality, the genetically-shaped, culturally-conditioned self, from a state of essential being. “Our personalities are time-limited,” she said, “but our essential selves are eternal.” After I had been visiting Olga for over a year, she shared a symbol she had been given in recurrent dreams: that of a violet 83

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flower with a golden centre. Olga’s secret symbol was shown her repeatedly in a variety of dream contexts. She thought it represented her essential being as the Master Jesus saw her, and was his gift to her. The deep-toned violet was a fitting symbol for her life—inwardly rich yet invisible to the world, unknown, unrecognized, except by a handful of seekers. She was a Pisces, the last of the twelve signs of the Zodiac, and her symbol, the violet, dwells at the the higher end of the spectrum of light.30 Her path from her late-middle years on entailed a withdrawal from the world. Until learners began to show up, hers was almost entirely a path of contemplation. In later life, her calling was to raise consciousness one person at a time, beginning with herself. As much as she aspired to spiritual leadership in the public sphere when she was in mid-life, she never became a well-known writer or spiritual teacher. The churches and esoteric organizations to which she belonged were not ready for her extraordinary experiences or her mystical awareness. Olga’s life is itself a teaching: as creatures with foibles and flaws, we all have deep golden centres we can’t always see.

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n july 4, 1973, olga received some thoughts on music

during her morning meditation:

Music is inherent in all things. It is the wisdom of God manifest in sound. It is the relationship of universal rhythmic energy, the relativity of motion, of sequence, of intensity, of coincidence of the lines, circles and spaces of sound. The hearing of humans only registers an infinitesimal fraction of the universal sound pattern. Music parallels sight with sound in all respects, but is much closer to the infinite than sight. It transmutes the coarser realities. It relates, it combines, it harmonizes, it transforms, and it recreates an ever more perfect relation to the God purpose. Music is the healer and comforter of the soul, the enlarger of consciousness. It is the soul of language. In song, the soul of humanity both hears and speaks. Music is inherent in worship, though no sounds vibrate the air, but the vibration brings into the outer the feeling and enlarging mutations of the within.

Music, thou handmaid of God, Enlarge my understanding, Comfort my soul, And lift up my steps.

As a girl growing up in the village of Gargrave in Yorkshire, England, Olga had a passion for music and aspired to be a classical concert singer. From an early age she felt that music had the capacity to transform body, mind, and spirit. 85

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She once told me how as a child she was jealous of her older brother Ben, who, because he was a boy, was offered piano lessons, while she was denied them. Her parents could not afford what to them were luxuries, so they gave the eldest son priority. While Ben was having his weekly lesson, Olga would creep to the door of the parlour and observe the music teacher inscribing musical notations on the large slate panels framing the fireplace. She would then memorize everything the teacher said and later steal into the room to practice her scales when no one else was around. Eventually Olga became an accomplished pianist and vocalist. Through family contacts she was finally given lessons at a nearby music conservatory where she won prizes for her clear soprano voice and extraordinary vocal range. As a talented young woman studying to become a teacher at Aston Pupil Teacher’s Centre in the suburbs of Birmingham, Olga continued to dream of becoming a professional musician. Olga’s Wesleyan Methodist parents had exposed her to the emotionally resonant hymns of John and Charles Wesley, and afterwards she discovered the hymns and musical traditions of the Anglican Church. Despite her disappointment at the lack of musical opportunities in Canada on her arrival, Olga adapted, eventually joining St. Mary’s Anglican Church choir and participating in local concerts. Within a few years, she was invited to assume the role of lead soprano in a performance of Mendelssohn’s oratorio Elijah. Just hours before the big debut, Olga came down with swollen glands in her throat and was unable to perform. When she related this story from the vantage point of her eighties, she interpreted the repeated closing of doors on her musical career as part of divine guidance. She felt that if she had been allowed to fully develop her musical talent, she might not have deepened her more interior, mystical gifts, the capacity for visionary knowing, seeing, and hearing. In fact, she believed she had already developed her musical expertise in other lives, and therefore had chosen before her birth to allow her prospects for a professional musical career to be blocked. She came to embrace these apparent barriers as part of a larger purpose. 86

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Though her explanation may sound like rationalization, I can see the value in accepting limitation and finding within it new modes of creativity. Despite these external setbacks, music never abandoned Olga, nor did she allow anything to diminish its centrality in her life. In fact, the love of music lay at the heart of her mystical awareness and practice. The music in her communion service was as important as the words, since the interwoven rhythms of words, music, and silence sustained the sacred space. Shortly after meeting Olga, she gave me a worn-out cassette tape of herself singing arias and songs a friend had recorded when Olga was in her early sixties. The friend had also made a vinyl recording, which her grandson gave me after her death. It was apparent her voice had begun to lose some of its suppleness, yet its clarity, sweetness, and purity remained. The voice was always important to Olga. When I phoned, she would often comment first on the quality of my voice: “Oh, you sound well today. Like a clarion.” Or, “Today your voice is just you.” Another time when she heard her own crone-like, ninety-yearold ruminations on a tape recording she laughed and sighed: “O how hideous! I sound like an old witch!” Yet to me her voice was vibrant and craggy. When loved ones from the spiritual realms spoke through her, it could deepen into a register I can only describe as shamanic. The cottage where Olga lived when I met her was much too small for a piano, but she always kept at her side a dilapidated auto harp that she called her “little Lohengrin.” Almost every time I arrived at the steps of the cottage door, I would be greeted by the thrum of its chords and Olga’s voice lost in a hymn or some sweet swath of song. The first time my husband came to the cottage to visit Olga by himself, he knocked firmly on the door three times. There was no answer, so he tried again. He could hear her strumming on the auto harp, fervently singing: “Creator Spirit, by whose word, the earth to light and life is stirred.” She obviously could not hear him, as she was becoming increasingly deaf at the time, so Mark tested the door handle. After a final attempt, he opened the door a bit and called out. Startled, she leapt up in her chair and yelled, 87

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“Don’t you knock?” He apologized, and explained that he had tried. Olga quickly shrugged off the intrusion and said, “Come in, come in.” Olga’s Lohengrin is now tucked away in the recesses of our crawl space. Its black bars are still covered with masking tape scrawled over in Olga’s handwriting. She had at one point completely reconstructed the instrument because its chord structure did not reflect the intervals of the music she heard in her head and that she associated with Pythagorean tonal shifts. Like the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, Olga saw mathematics, music, and colour as interrelated in nature, art, and the cosmos, and urged that music is literally capable of helping us attune to the higher vibrations of the planetary spheres. The Musica Mundana of nature and the cosmic or universal music of the spheres were for her parts of a grand unity that played within us and in all living things. Olga believed in a correspondence between the natural world, mathematical intervals in music, and the order of the heavens. I recall Olga telling me that the intervals, ratios, and proportions between notes on a scale weren’t fixed, but capable of infinite variation. She expressed a notion that the newer twelve-note scale most composers had adopted in the twentieth century did not reflect the elegance and harmony of the cosmos as well as did the scale of the older tonic sol-fa. I found out recently from a musically savvy friend, Wordsworth scholar and poet, Lee Johnson, that there was reason in Olga’s apparently mad musical tastes. He pointed out that she was probably keen on modal scales from ancient Greece and the Middle Ages. These were made up of tetra chords, four notes descending: two such tetrachords, following from each other, made up a scale. Associated with church music, modal scales have been used by composers such as Stravinsky, Vaughan Williams, Debussy, and Satie. Lee writes: “Some feel atonality is against nature. There is a centre to everything that exists. The planets have the sun, the moon, the earth. The reason I like Oriental music is that everything has a firm centre. All music with a centre is tonal. Music without a centre is fine for a minute or two, but it soon 88

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sounds all the same…. Things which are very complicated tend to disappear and get lost. Simplicity is difficult, not easy. Beauty is simple. All unnecessary elements are removed—only essence remains.”31 Like Lee, Olga was fascinated by centres and circles, those of the planets and solar systems, and galaxies, those of the seasons, those of life forms. She taught that everything emerged from within a still point of nothingness, and that all things were unified through cosmic law. So, all these years later, I begin to decipher her antipathy toward atonal music as a return to more ancient scales. In her last years Olga was consumed by a serious study of Handel’s Messiah. She was convinced that, though Handel had done very well with the music itself, he had misconstrued the ordering of the pieces. So she completely restructured the oratorio. In the new sequence, deconstructionist Olga was able to emphasize the ultimate source of all being as an inclusive Presence of evolutionary love, rather than a wrathful judge. The truth is, Olga was seldom satisfied with things as they were. She had to shake things up and remake them. She changed the words of her most beloved old hymns to reflect her mystical, non-dogmatic theology. References to “the blood of the lamb” and atonement theology were excised. She used to say, “The term should be at-one-ment (spoken as three separate words) rather than atonement. God does not require the blood of his son in order to forgive. But everyone needs to be in greater oneness.” For her, music was a union of the soul with more loving and harmonious levels of consciousness. Olga also believed in the primacy of hearing over the other senses. She thought that hearing is the first sense to emerge in human consciousness and the last to accompany the soul in its withdrawal from the body. To undergo a shift in consciousness was analogous to tuning in to a resonant frequency on the bands of a radio. “We have a choice about where to place our attention,” she noted. Once when listening to a songbird in her garden she inquired, “Did you ever notice how young birds practice their scales? They don’t just arrive knowing them, but have to perfect the songs 89

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of their species. The process is innate as well as learned.” She talked about how some birds’ notes move in a spiral far beyond the range of human hearing, similar to the form of the spiralling galaxies. And she insisted the mystical ear could hear what the poet Keats called the “unheard music.” Once when I arrived at the cottage to participate in her communion service, Olga said we could not begin until she shared an experience that had occurred the night before. She found herself walking with Jesus and the disciples on the night of the Last Supper. As they headed out the door of the upper room on their way to Gethsemane and crossed the stream of Kidron, she joined her voice to those of the other disciples in a joyous Jewish hymn. She found herself among a band of disciples, their various voices blending with Jesus’s rich baritone. What struck her most was the sense of camaraderie in the midst of duress. As a disciple among the disciples Olga sang out fearlessly, open to whatever might come. Like William Blake who was said to have died singing, Olga carried music in her soul to the end of her life. In the nursing home in her final months she would spontaneously break into song, hum, or report hearing heavenly singers: “Oh, a tenor just came in. What a melodious voice.” Olga felt her reflections on music that opened this vignette were mediated through the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras with whom she felt a profound affinity. For her, music wasn’t merely uplifting, but constitutive of the order of things. As I write, I hear her voice, and in her voice her presence resides. “Hearing is much deeper even than seeing,” she says, “yet all the senses are one larger intelligence moving in infinite variations.”

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Mystical Communion

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Without a regular practice, growth is slower and more incremental. —Olga Park

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lga’s vision of a more mystical form of worship than

that of the conventional church services with which she had been acquainted led to her practice of “solitary communion,” a phrase that for her was not an oxymoron, since in silence and solitude she communed with worlds and beings invisible to many. Olga practiced her home ritual from the time she left the church in the 1950s until her death in 1985. She felt she was given the words and order of service “from within” over the years through her Teacher. Olga’s order of service was based on the Eucharist from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, but she called it a “mystical communion” because the entire service led up to and out of “the Holy Silence.” It was a simple sitting in silence she compared to that of the Quakers who spoke of the inner light. Rather than prescribing a way to fight thoughts and ideas as they arise, as in some more concentrative forms of meditation, she taught a method of acknowledging and gently releasing them. In a booklet of instructions for the communion service she writes: This method of entering into the Silence is different from others in that no attempt is made to still the objective mind. Instead, an attunement is made between the mind of the communicant and the mind of Jesus. This progresses through the devotions to the place of Silence, and the door of the soul opens without effort to the Christ 91

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communications through the agency of your own embryonic spiritual mind. Sometimes, she explained, one will have a sense of intuitive knowing, see an image, feel inexpressible peace, smell a fragrance, or receive a word or phrase of insight. Olga was not against institutional religion per se and acknowledged the need for a living faith tradition that might help people ground and assess their private revelations. Yet she was at a stage in her own journey where being a solitary and meeting with small groups seemed more appropriate. She felt that going to church without a complementary practice of interior deepening, often turned churches into social clubs rather than places for genuine interior awakening. She often noted that for many Christians, church was a form of kindergarten, and that people needed to evolve a deeper and more experiential understanding of the traditions they professed. The beauty of her practice was that anyone could perform it at home. Though she was a Christian mystic, there was no sense that contact with the living Christ meant rejecting the truths of other religions. It always impressed me that Olga was both profoundly Christian and fully universal; that is, her faith brought her into oneness with the truths of other religions but she remained grounded in her adoration of Jesus.

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Prayer, when properly understood, is the great strengthener and healer, because it is the channel between the souls of men and the throne of God. Its substance is faith, and faith works by radiation. On this, as on a beam of light, our spiritual and psychic conditions are radiated, and on the same beam the answer returns. Without this radiation life sinks to the level of the physical struggle for survival. With this radiation all adverse conditions are brought around to serve our highest and happiest fulfillment. The love of God is then able to bring about for us fulfillment in the place of frustration. It is not important to the effectiveness of prayer that we should have a particular intellectual conception of God, but it is vital that, in the words of Paul, “we believe that God is, and is the rewarder of them that seek.” On this basis, the prayer of an Australian aborigine is as effective as that of an Italian or English archbishop. In the first half of my life I had the idea that prayer was a private communication channel between God and me. I know now that it is a radiation upon a specific psychic wave-length or vibration, visible to the psychic and spiritual consciousness and accessible to all in harmony with it, and that our loved ones in the heaven-worlds meet with us when we pray. Anyone who will set aside a particular place and time for daily prayer is certain to get psychic manifestations sooner or later, especially if that place be secluded and kept solely for prayer and spiritual reading. Love attracts love, and we cannot radiate love without gathering in our friends in spirit. (from Between Time and Eternity) 93

Granny and the Boys

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ord of olga spread, attracting a wide range of seekers

to the cottage from many demographics and backgrounds. As mentioned earlier, her first learner was a young man from Britain named Brian. My friend Patricia met Brian in a typing class where she heard about Olga. Then there were a group of middle-aged women, one a neighbour, and other friends of that neighbour. There was a young potter and visual artist who worked at Matsqui prison teaching pottery to prisoners, and his father-in-law, a Dutch photographer named Henk who had stood up against the Nazi occupation of his homeland. Olga did not intend to start a group, but once people began dropping by regularly, she had to consider the nature of this disparate community of seekers. She never charged money for sharing her experiences and always gave out her self-published books for free. Yet after a while, she began to regard those with whom she built a special relationship as part of an informal society that had its roots in the interior realms. In her writings she refers to this loosely associated group as the Society of the Mystical Communion of Christ. Many who visited Olga never met each other. Yet when some of her friends did get together, Olga insisted on small groups, in harmony with Jesus’s statement in Matthew that when “two or more are gathered together in his name,” the ascended Christ is there among them. She was into small group dynamics long before they became fashionable. Among those who showed up were four young men, one of whom was her only grandson Jim. When I met Jim, he was working at the bc liquor control board. He and his friends Steve, 94

Olga with her “learner” friends, c.1968.

From the left: Olga with her son Robert, c.1975. Bottom: Olga with her grandson Jim, 1980s. Photos courtesy of Jim Park. Above: Susan McCaslin, c. 1974. Photographer unknown.

Olga with Susan McCaslin, c.1980.

Mark Haddock, Susan McCaslin, Olga and Steve Force, c.1981. Photos courtesy of the Park family.

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Bruce, and Frank, lived together in a big ramshackle house in east Vancouver. Though it was the early seventies and most people I spent time with were “hip,” these guys were hipper than most. They had not dropped out of the system, as they mostly all had jobs, but they were definitely countercultural. I had similar values and dressed in the colourful flowing skirts of the era, but because I was diligently working away in graduate school, and then at a Christian college in the Fraser Valley, I could not rival them in coolness. Besides, they were in their early twenties and I in my late twenties when I knew them best, so I considered myself the older woman, and adopted Olga’s pseudonym for them—“the boys.” Every once in a while, Jim would phone Olga (Granny), announcing he was coming out with his pals, and Olga would get excited, as she adored them and their youthful energy. When I first saw Jim, he impressed me as a cool biker in his tight jeans and black leather jacket, and seemed a man of few words. Olga told me once how, when Jimmy was a child playing on the floor of her house, he pointed out a vast array of multi-coloured globes of light that others, except for Olga, could not see. He stretched out his hands and tried to catch them. Olga explained to him that just because the other adults could not see them did not mean they weren’t there. Once when visiting the boys, I heard them laugh about how they sometimes smoked marijuana or hashish before coming out to see Granny. They suspected she might not approve of their habit. It was not that they wanted to push boundaries or shock her. Rather, I heard one of them say they got high in order to take in more of the vibe and penetrate deeper into the Granny experience. Like me, they respected her immensely and wanted to learn about interior realities, but toking up was perhaps their way of ritualizing the experience and placing it in the realm of the sacred. After months of their somewhat erratic visits Olga unexpectedly said to me when we were alone, “The boys don’t think I know they’re on pot when they come around, but it doesn’t matter a whit. They are lovely young men. We’ll just keep this between you, me, and the gatepost.” 97

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One of the boys was a tall, gentle guy named Frank with soft brown hair that fell to his shoulders. Frank was a visual artist, wrote poetry, and (later) spun glass, conjuring fanciful hourglasses out of air. Immediately on meeting him, Olga looked into his eyes and said, “You’re not a Frank at all. You’re really a Jan, short for Janzen.” The incident reminded me of how Jesus occasionally changed peoples’ names, the unstable Simon becoming Peter the Rock. Jan took to his new name instantly, and he remains Jan to this day. When I last chatted with him he was living on the west coast of Vancouver Island in a fanciful hobbit-like home he built himself while creating his art and writing poetry. The one I got to know best was Steve, who became for a number of years Olga’s closest companion. Steve had been raised Roman Catholic and had been an altar boy as a child, so he understood the power of ritual and sacrament. Yet his mother had been an alcoholic, so he was working through some rough patches. When Olga fell, fracturing her foot, and could no longer manage alone at the cottage, Steve offered to live in Patricia’s basement suite with Olga and look after her needs. Because of Steve, Olga was able to manage for a number of years without moving to a nursing home. Steve became Olga’s scribe, student, helper, and nurse. Together they did intensive Bible studies and shared weekly communion. Sometimes when I arrived I would find them on the sofa, heads leaning together, while he meticulously copied out her morning meditations or her words from a tape recording. Essentially, Steve gave up communal life with his friends for a monkish life of solitude, insisting that being with Olga was not a sacrifice, but an apprenticeship. Many of us who hung around Olga continued our various spiritual practices and went on to develop some kind of art form. Though most of us have moved apart, we each affirm that knowing Olga transformed our lives. Brian, Olga’s first student, moved back to his home in England to develop a business in ecologically friendly fertilizer before such products were popular. Later he became a writer and has published his own memoir about Olga.32 Steve met and married a British woman, moved to England, trained as a nurse, and had 98

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two sons. Peter, a potter, visual artist and actor, is working on a documentary film about Olga’s correspondence with a prisoner from Matsqui in the Fraser Valley of bc. Patricia, my friend from university, became a high school teacher and tutor, and now does psychic (spiritual) readings. Pauline, well into her 90s, writes and meditates every day and we spend at least an hour a week together chatting on the phone. I can never catch her out in an error and her lucidity and wisdom seem to increase with age. After the boys got older, sometimes they joked about how much longer they would get to be “the boys”: “When do we graduate to being men?” They had long surpassed 30, but for Olga they were forever young.

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Quantum Olga

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lga invites me to participate with her in her Sunday

morning communion service. On crossing the threshold into her cottage, I notice her altar is tucked away in a corner adjacent to the bedsitting room. In fact, the cottage is really just a single room and a bathroom with alcoves for the kitchen and prayer space. The altar is covered with a white linen cloth on which rest a crystal wine glass (the cup of life) and crystal plate containing some pieces of bread (the word of life). I am invited to make myself at home on the “settle” to the right of the altar, an old wooden bench, which used to grace the entryway in her home in England. There I “settle” in. We begin to say the words of the service together. At the place where Olga lights the incense (representing the “prayers of the saints”), the fragrance of oil of frankincense wafts through the cottage. Olga tells me the incense symbolizes waves of gratitude emanating from us and the Christ-servers in heaven. At the mid-point in the ritual, our voices blend in song. Olga’s crumbling but still resonant soprano fleshes out my mezzo in the words of the hymn “Creator Spirit.” Creator Spirit, by whose word The world to light and life is stirred, Come visit here each seeking mind And pour thy grace on humankind.

Then individually and together we slide into the silence. It feels like the complete and simple energetic well from which all things 100

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intricate and beautiful constantly pour. Olga calls this timeless calm “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” As a poet entranced by words, I think of it as the peace that surpasses all language. Time draws a breath. The presence holds us, blessing every cell in our bodies. This “witnessing presence” of which the eastern traditions speak comes, as Olga says, quoting Tennyson, “Closer than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.” Sometimes a word or phrase falls out of this zoneless zone, and I write it down in a little notebook brought for the occasion. This time the message is no-message, just a certainty that everything is singing parts of one continuous song. Then the silence deposits us again in our places. Olga sits across from me in a chair to the left of the altar. We sing the closing prayer and consecration, based on the words of an ancient prayer: God be in my head and in my understanding God be in my heart and in my seeking God be in my life unto Christ’s desiring. As we chant the words, we bring our hands, palm to palm in prayer position, up first to our foreheads, then cross them over our hearts, then our solar plexuses. Finally, we bring our pressedtogether palms back up to our foreheads and draw them in to our chests near the heart. Olga incorporated the body into her service, using what the east calls mudras. Afterwards we remain in the altar room for a while, chatting about our sense of the service, what feelings, images, or insights arose. Then Olga suggests I might like to remain kneeling at the altar for a moment or two while she sits in meditation. Whenever I kneel at the altar, I feel myself peacefully enveloped, as if within a veil or what Olga calls “a cloud of light.” It is for me the “cloud of unknowing” of which the fourteenth-century anonymous English author of the book by that name writes. 101

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Between the altar and the sitting area, Olga has strung a number of electrical cords. There is a cord running from her cassette player to the wall as well as the tangled cords of two lamps. The cassette player contains the taped music Olga uses for the service, consisting of her and several others singing hymns to the sound of her auto harp. If Olga is to get up and leave the room while I am at the altar she will have to negotiate these tangled cords and push some furniture out of the way. But as I kneel in the silence all is perfectly still. After a few seconds at the altar, I turn my head to the left, just to see if Olga is still in deep contemplation. She is gone! Yet I have heard no movement, no noise. Besides, there has not been time for her to make her way out of the sanctuary. I stumble over the cords and chairs, look around, and finally head to the tiny kitchen that opens out as no more than a cubby off the sitting room. There she stands at the counter happily preparing lettuce and cheese sandwiches. “How did you get from the altar to here past all those cords so quickly without making a sound?” I ask. Olga is not nimble or quick moving, but deliberate, unstable on her feet. In addition, she cannot see very well. So certainly she would have made some kind of sound negotiating the obstacles that clutter her hermit quarters. She smiles and says nothing at first when I first press her for details. Then she laughs and hints that there is more than one way of moving through time and space. As I drive back to my basement suite, it seems to me that Olga was clearly first in one place, disappeared, then reappeared in another. It was as if she translated her molecules and atoms from point a to point b, in “the twinkling of an eye.” But can this be? Strictly as a layperson, I will share a few of my speculations on the implications of quantum physics as they might apply to Olga’s amazing transposition. Since the development of quantum physics, it is widely known a light photon can behave as either a wave or a particle depending on the observer’s position in the field. In other words, position and momentum can’t both be tracked at the same time. Of course, I as witnessing presence would have been part of the configuration that co-created the reality between Olga and me. 102

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This phenomenon, called Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, was developed to explain how subatomic particles seem to disappear from one location and reappear in another. So why are such quantum motions not theoretically possible for humans? Why is such a “quantum leap” unthinkable for the unified conglomerate of matter and consciousness that is a human being? Let us assume for a moment that such things have happened, say to the Rishis of ancient India, or to holy sadhus in the Himalayas who have been said to levitate. If such things do occur, even if rarely, western science clearly does not yet have the ability to explain the dynamic behind them. The larger question for me, then, is what might be the significance of such quantum motions if and when they occur? How does such a thing become more than a magician’s trick? I for one, cannot respect a teacher or guru who demonstrates such peek-a-boo tricksterism simply to impress or show off, gain power, or otherwise aggrandize the ego. For me, the answer is that these sorts of inexplicable events are signs of what we all have the capacity to do and be. Quantum motions are within the range of human capacity, but a capacity the majority of humankind has not yet been able to access. If we can move faster than the speed of light, like Olga, if we can enter timelessness and reappear in time, then we are beings of both time and eternity. Olga argues as much through the title of her first book, Between Time and Eternity. We all live in the liminal zone between the hidden source of all things and its manifestations. Part of what we are has access to the realm of the unknown, the creative, the mysterious, what mystics call the dark ground of being. Based on my acquaintance with Olga, I would say an awakened consciousness is inherently a more compassionate and loving consciousness. Are these quantum motions, then, simply byproducts of our deepening into a more holistic state of being? Pioneers like Olga are not different from the rest of us—just a little further ahead on the path.

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Cosmological Travel

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lga often used the word “cosmic” to describe the

living Christ of her inner experience, a term she absorbed from her esoteric studies. After many years studying with her, I invited a colleague from the Philosophy Department of the Christian college where I was teaching English at the time to meet my spiritual teacher. I explained to Grace that Mrs. Park was a Christian mystic, a person who had had lifelong, direct experiences of the “cosmic Christ” and had spent her later years developing a practice of contemplative prayer. My friend, a brilliant philosopher of Mennonite background who had studied under the empiricist philosopher Kai Nielsen, “did not suffer fools gladly,” as the saying goes. Grace was blessed with a clear and logical mind, bringing both her curiosity and her skepticism to bear on anything that smacked of the paranormal. That afternoon the three of us sat on Olga’s well-worn sofa over which Olga herself had painted in pale pastels a scene of Greek columns opening out to the sea. After speaking of her various encounters with the living Christ, Olga concluded by declaring, “He’s absolutely cosmic!” At this point, Grace queried in a skeptical philosopher’s interjection, “And what exactly do you mean by ‘cosmic’?” as if perhaps anticipating some New Age platitude. I held my breath, wondering how Olga would respond, fearful that Grace would write Olga off as quirky or, worse, crazy. Olga did not miss a beat, but simply began speaking of “the cosmic” as the larger order that includes and transcends the smaller. While 104

speaking she waved her hands in the air, drawing circles within circles, as if to suggest worlds and dimensions that included the place where we were sitting, the tea tray, and the Peak Frean biscuits. After we left, Grace was uncharacteristically quiet and I was too afraid of her rejecting Olga (and by implication me) to ask what she thought. She never brought up the subject of Olga again and did not ask to repeat the visit. However, after leaving the small Christian evangelical college about a year later, she was offered a position at King’s College London and went on to teach for decades as a professor of religion, culture, and gender at Manchester University. We drifted apart when Grace moved to England, but a few years later I heard she had switched the focus of her academic studies to mysticism, joined the Quakers, and produced one of the definitive feminist theological books of her generation on the life and writings of the English mystic Julian of Norwich.33 I do not pretend that one encounter with Olga altered my friend’s life path, since lives are transformed by a whole succession of internal and external events. However, I do think our many conversations on mysticism at the college and her brief encounter with Olga contributed to her continuing investigations into the mystical way.

A Visit from Philo

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A man of ancient times visited me the week before Easter (April 1974). I have never had such an experience before. The whole cottage was filled with a condition of absolute peace. This man spoke on the awareness of God and gave me a list of statements I labelled “a basic philosophy of life.” I concluded from the scale of his speaking and his wisdom that he was a distinguished Jewish philosopher of the second century. Based on a description in a religious encyclopedia, I believe him to have been the philosopher Philo Judaeus. He is a fountain of Wisdom. He said, “All must come into unity.” And “All (communication) is by mediation.” He had the truth though he came before Christ. He said that all is a balance at all levels of consciousness. At the human level there is a balance of feeling and reason. These are usually designated as male and female. Philo spoke on awareness, relationship, purpose, balance. (from the unpublished writings of Olga Park) A Basic Philosophy by a Pilgrim of the Way (received by Olga Park as mediated by Philo) Life, all life, is consciousness, awareness. All awareness is by means of an environmental structure. The outer is a containment of an inner. It is an expression vehicle. The expression vehicle is on a fulfillment cycle. The inner is limited by the containment. And after fulfillment of the outer containment, this inner awareness is contained in other expression vehicles progressively. All experience is cumulative and is benefited by at-one-ment with the cosmic law of progression. All life-consciousness operates in 106

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containments. The human body, including the brain, is a containment. Awareness, conscious or unconscious, is only confined by focus or attachment. Pleasantness is dependent on harmony and balance. Harmony and balance depend on relation to purpose. Purpose is either of the immediate limited self, or of the expanding progressive self. This is so at all times and in all circumstances. The self is not solitary. It is always in relation to other selfexpressing units and the relation is always either horizontal or vertical. It is either of what has been or what will be. Communication is the most important feature of relationship. Relationship operates by awareness. The word of the great Master of Masters, Jesus of Galilee, is, “We go forward a step at a time from the place where we stand.” Lately, when thinking about Philo, I have been trying to distinguish two kinds of mediation of which Olga spoke. One she rejected, while the other she thought essential. Olga was something like a Quaker in that she felt there should be no human, priestly intermediary between the individual and the unitive reality she called God. That is, she followed Jesus’s teaching that one can approach the ultimate oneness simply and directly without mediation of a temple or ecclesiastical hierarchy. She left the church because she felt corrupt human structures had little to do with Jesus as she knew him. On the other hand, she also taught that “all is by mediation.” She meant that human consciousness is generally comfortable at the psycho-mental level, but can become disoriented when exposed to more rarified and encompassing levels of consciousness. Her view is that there are dimensions within dimensions, each a fractal of the other, vibrating at higher and ever higher levels. The presence of these higher realms did not at all diminish her commitment to the earth because the heavens and earth constitute a wholeness. She felt we have the potential to access these many dimensions, but to do so from where we stand requires a sort of buffering. In some of my own interior experiences, I have felt the mysterium tremendum, a natural awe before what transcends ordinary consciousness. Once in my 30s, when I had a visionary experience of the cosmic Christ manifesting as a living cross without nails or 107

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wounds on the wall beside my bed, I was shaken for several days afterward. It is not that the divine was trying to be scary, but that the voltage at that level had to be mediated, or “tuned down” in order for me to have the experience in the first place. Crosswise Blast of vision, who can describe a living cross? Who would believe that pieces of you like shafts of stained light have melted into my bloodstream? A river falling uphill a reversing waterfall Somehow when you entered your own utmost poverty, time flipped. Pileated woodpecker’s crimson and energetic tapping is your knock The voice that burns from everywhere and nowhere, opens all frames Each day the mirror gives back another crease, a fold, yet I am new Each day a little death, a downy quilt or comforter kicked off Each sorrow, furrow brings me nearer where you are to rise and fall again dear Androgyne who leaves me trembling here.34 108

In Deep Space

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n one of olga’s visions, she was transported to deep space and found herself standing on an invisible ledge. Casting her eyes over the aquamarine sphere of planet earth behind her, mantled in cumulous, she saw the streaming procession of the equinoxes in the distance. The Master Jesus stood beside her, encouraging her to take her first space walk. “I felt like Peter taking his first steps on the Sea of Galilee,” she whispered. “I was terrified and frozen to that ledge. Then quite calmly, the Master flung out his arms, and from his fingertips shot a line of white light forming a tightrope across the abyss, followed by another and another, till a bridge of cords of light stretched out in front of me.” Olga ventured out on this ledge of light, one foot in front of the other. As she did so, darts streaked from her own feet, as if adding molecules to the structure of the bridge of light. She ended her account by saying, “We go forward a step at a time from the place where we stand.” When I asked about the relation of this cosmological Jesus to the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, she commented that Jesus had many previous incarnations. He was a being who had transcended the need to incarnate, but volunteered to do so as Jesus of Nazareth in order to raise the consciousness of humanity. He is dedicated to the raising of consciousness of “whosoever will” and to the building up of the kingdom of heaven (a state of higher consciousness) on earth. Some mystics, like Olga, affirm reincarnation not as an ideology, but because they have had actual experiences of past lives. In 109

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fact, teachings about reincarnation were part of some forms of early Christianity but suppressed by the church.35 Olga said that in his incarnation as Jesus at the beginning of the Piscean age,36 he attained not only personal awakening, but served the evolutionary development of humanity. At the Edge of the Planet On July 16, 1971, a moment after waking, about 7:00 a.m., I began to see the swirling substance of the universe speeding away from right to left, and then luminous bubbles, somewhat like the moon. They were all of various sizes and spaced at various distances from each other, and all were going in the opposite direction from the general drift, and moving toward that part of the heavens from which I was viewing them. One was very large—seven or eight times larger than the largest of the others. It had what at first seemed to be a fold in its circumference, but then like a cloud-belt. These bubbles each and all were revolving and at the same time expanding in a larger pattern with myriads of golden star-points. Having seen this sample of the picture instruction, there was not more immediately, so I decided that the spirit guide was waiting for me to get my breakfast coffee.37 After I had risen and put everything in order and was settled on the chesterfield, the viewing began again. The light was turned on in the centre of my forehead so that I could see the picture about to be shown on my third-eye screen. And once more, I was looking at the golden star sparks ever speeding and expanding from right to left; and the guide said, “This is the substance of which and in which and by which all things are formed within and without. As there is a heaven of heavens, so there is a within of every within.” I then seemed to be viewing the heavens from the circular edge of the earth, as though the cloud formations of our atmosphere were billowing at my feet and the guide continued: “Viewing the heavens from this point, it seems to you that you are standing still on a stationary orb within everything else in motion and speeding past and outwards and beyond; but you also are an integral part of all, both the motion and the pattern of it all. It is a matter of consciousness and focus.” 110

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I then saw patches appear in the moving stardust as though someone had stopped the motion in those areas, and instead of speeding sparklers, there were layers of bands of substance of various densities and colours. Instead of standing on the edge of the earth planet, I was standing before a straight edge, somewhat like that of a table or an altar. It was white, but there was nothing on it except a metal object right in front of me. The object was upright and may have been an instrument for determining an exact centre of an angle—a sort of T square upside down. After this, the rich purple of the Master’s aura appeared and I saw it emerge out of a within [an interior] of topaz gold. I then saw rings of colour—orange flame, purple, pale mauve, and in the centre, pale green fading into pale sunlight. I am inclined to think this is my own aura. I then saw the lilac four-petalled flower in the centre of my forehead. It was stationary for a moment and then began to recede until it was no longer visible. I gave an involuntary jerk and knew the viewing session was over. A curious phenomenon which I recall as I make these notes was the concentration of dazzling white light outlining the form and dimension of any person or thing about to be formed. I wonder if this explains the statement in Genesis Chap. 1: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Also, as the viewing began, someone quoted from the Bible, “Hast thou considered my servant Job?” I feel that all this relates not only to outer space, but to humankind—their physical being, their mind and emotions, and all their circumstances and affairs. (from Olga’s unpublished notebooks) Reflection on Olga’s “At the Edge of the Planet” Olga’s visions of finding herself in deep space reflect how consciousness shapes and mediates experience, including the observer, in the field of perception. By moving from the perception of space as outer to the interior space of the psyche, the vision also suggests the ancient notion that the microcosm or “little order” repeats and is contained within the macrocosm or larger order. Olga taught that the centre of the individual psyche and that of the cosmic psyche intersect or “indwell” each other. Jesus’s 111

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teaching that she thought related to this principle was: “I am in you and you are in me and all of us are together in the Father [the Fullness, the Oneness].” Much of her teaching proceeded out of a sense of what might be called Interbeing.

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The Third Eye

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The centre jewel that was lost has been restored to my beloved’s headdress.38 —from An Open Door A Chant for the Opening of the Third Eye Open the portal just above the eyes’ yes where nothing is withheld You who know this weary, fluttering mind Play on the double-fretted board of the forehead where two vertical bars embed themselves Fill in the trenches where war’s worries march their forced march through sand Neither botox, surgery, nor peels appeal but only new stirrings, fiery tinglings just behind the centrepoint of the brow, past the gap where angels post and nothing holds itself apart39 113

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Olga’s account: On April 30, 1967, at Holy Communion, Christ appeared as a miniature figure of burnished gold, saying, “I am with you always.” The message conveyed, both by the spoken word and the manifestation, was the same—that he, Jesus, the messenger of God, proven in the fires of earth, was able to succour those who are still being proven in those fires. On May 31, 1946, he opened a slot in the centre of my forehead, revealing the third-eye; but there was no sight in it. This incident was part of a sequence of super-conscious experiences. First I heard children in the life after death singing, “Go work in my vineyard, the Master says ‘Go’.” Then I was standing beside a small, dark pool, which expanded until it became the lily pool in Stanley Park, Vancouver, bc. As I stood beside it, the deep stillness that pervaded the manifestation was broken by the plop of water lilies emerging here and there. From this scene I was instantly in my own room again. There a small table had been set with a white cloth on it as if for Holy Communion. On it was a lectern holding an open Service Book. The voice of the Master spoke prophetically in the style of Isaiah, Chapter 59: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon you; and my words have I put in your mouth that you might declare the good news of my Kingdom to the poor in spirit, and pour water to them that are thirsty, and revive the faint-hearted.” The Master then drew near, and made the slot in my forehead revealing the third-eye. Sixteen years later, on November 2, 1962, He came again in similar fashion and activated sight in the third eye that has been with me ever since.

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The Diamond Consciousness

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lga taught that any seeker beginning a spiritual

practice might request healing, comfort, and guidance. Once when I was kneeling at my home altar, I saw inwardly two lines radiating from my head at the level of my ears from the right and left like twin antennae. These lines were met from above by two lines of light descending from a point and meeting the two lines from below to form a diamond. For months afterward, each time I closed my eyes to pray or meditate, I would see the diamond shape. When I asked Olga about it she said, “Oh, that’s the diamond consciousness.” And indeed, it seemed as if my head was encased in a diamond-shaped container of light. I thought years later about possible parallels to this imagery in the Diamond Sutra of Buddhism where the Buddha discusses with one of his disciples the nature of pure consciousness, non-attachment to concepts and beliefs, and the place where dualistic awareness opens out into pure unitive being.40 At the altar when I closed my eyes I would often see a turquoise light. For Olga, colours had an integral relationship to the state of consciousness from which they emanated. She was very sensitive to the dynamics of light, colour, and sound. She associated her Teacher, for instance, with the turquoise tones, which she felt were devoid of self-serving motivation. She associated certain shades of red with aggression and warfare. The clear diamond light, however, contained and transcended all colours and represented pure consciousness.

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Building the Kingdom

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he point about olga’s inner life is not that she happened

to live in many dimensions, but that her experiences were accompanied by a life of increasing mindfulness, kindness, and compassion. They somehow made her more empathetic, more fully present. She thought of Spirit as the source of everything, the point of nothingness from which all things emerge and to which they ultimately return. Olga was unlike mystics who have been dismissive of the physical world, as she felt the Christ remained just as deeply committed to planet earth as he had been in his lifetime. In fact, his mission (and she didn’t hesitate to use the word “mission”), “is the same today as it was in ancient Galilee: the building of the kingdom of heaven on earth.” Olga experienced the presence of a timeless world as a reality of pure being, entirely interwoven, interconnected with this one. She was not a dualist. She thought we could know the divine directly, here and now, so our business is to be present creatively and participate in raising awareness. For Olga, the kingdom is not a coercive system of authority, but a communion built on interrelationships. She had worked out a sophisticated sense of the relationship between limitation and freedom, contending we were here to learn from our mistakes, and that God does not interfere with free will. If fact, she said, “If that happened, God wouldn’t be God, because God is cosmic law,” the power of love and wisdom working through the processes of nature and the universe.

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The Tea Ceremony

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lga was very much a product of the Yorkshire Dales

of England and properly English, especially in her sense of the protocols for a splendid cup of tea. Whenever we shared communion at the cottage, the partaking of bread and wine would be followed by an ample tea—a sort of communion after communion. When my husband wrote a short memoir of Olga, he too recalled the tea ceremony: Olga would make her way into the tiny kitchen and put on the kettle to make a pot of her favourite tea— Darjeeling mixed with jasmine—served in delicate but stained bone china cups. She offered cookies—Peak Freans, bourbon crèmes, and Cadbury chocolate fingers. Tea was served on a simple grey metal secretarial—a very small typewriter desk—covered by a tea towel, the creases of which she tried to flatten out with her hands. Though her bone china cups were stained and chipped, you would hear from her if you happened to match a cup with the wrong saucer. She liked things to be “properly English.” Olga had a way of making the humblest settings seem regal and significant. She made you feel like an honoured guest, and that God had ordained this visit together. Tea always seemed to taste better at Granny’s place. We’d go home and try unsuccessfully to replicate the taste of her tea, even using the same brand. Was it the teapot? 117

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The water? Mentioning this to her once, she laughed and replied, “It’s the love I put in when preparing it!” Once I saw her gently tearing lettuce for a sandwich, thanking it as she did. She said that even plants have their own level of awareness, and that it was too shocking to abruptly cut them with a knife—you should treat them with respect. One of her favourite meals was a grated apple sandwich, with the crust cut off the bread so she could chew it. My friend Brian reminded me of how Olga once served omelettes and “fried strawberry sandwiches” after communion. He said they were delicious. She was a vegetarian and advocate of the natural food movement before either became popular. As I was writing on the Zen rigours of Olga’s tea practice, I received this email from Jim, Olga’s grandson. When I was a boy, Granny taught me the value of logic and patience through jigsaw puzzles; later on, she taught me the fine art of making a good cup of tea. When I reached my teens, she began teaching me about religion, mysticism and direct communication with those who dwell in higher realms. She also was a great storyteller.41 Interestingly enough, Jim lists tea preparation as one of his grandmother’s primary teachings and places it on an ascending scale just short of her more lofty spiritual teachings. In a book about spiritual experiences, the concreteness of a good cup of tea seems fitting. Before taking tea, Olga would deliver a simple prayer of radical gratitude for the fruits of the earth. Her white head dipped low as she clasped her hands together in prayer position, her voice deepening while she intoned: “For these and all thy good gifts, O God, we give thee thanks. Bless them to our health and strength, and use our lives in Christ’s service. Amen.” Soon she would have us laughing over a story or anecdote. Apparently she and the Rector had an ongoing private in-joke 118

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about how he played Mad Hatter to her Alice in their visionary life. When sipping tea beside her on the sagging sofa, spilling crumbs, and nibbling on spinach sandwiches, I felt a bit like Alice myself squeezed in next to the White Queen. After the decorum of the ritual, Olga would adjourn to the tiny kitchen and dispatch the dishes with a great banging and clanging. “I never cared much for housework, so might as well get this over with. Besides, there’s no room in here for two to turn around. So shoo.”

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A Mystic’s Bookmark

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nce when i was at the cottage helping Olga clean

out boxes before she moved to my friend Patti’s basement suite in Vancouver, she pulled a musty box out of a file drawer containing handfuls of hand-made bookmarks. One of Olga’s hobbies was fine calligraphy using illuminated lettering. She had painstakingly crafted these delicate bookmarks on cream-coloured, semi-transparent parchment-paper trimmed around the edges with serrated scissors. Each bookmark (and there were perhaps about fifty or more) contained illuminated capital letters entwined with lilies and other flowers, a decorative border (each one unique), and what she had selected as the three essential teachings of Jesus typed out in the middle, followed by pertinent scriptures from the New Testament to illustrate each teaching. The lettering and flowers were coloured with pale pastels and gold ink. The bookmarks had a monkish flare, transporting me back to my first viewing of the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Dublin. When one holds a bookmark up vertically, the phrase, “The Essential Teachings of Jesus” runs down the length of the paper. Most of the bookmarks are signed personally, “Designed and Illuminated by Olga Park.” Again, I think of my hero William Blake and his illuminated poetry manuscripts. I consider the hours these small treasures must have taken to craft and how Olga used her solitary time at the cottage. Years later, after Olga’s passing, her grandson kindly gave me the entire boxful of bookmarks. Retired from teaching, I was able to take time in my daily meditation to reflect more carefully 120

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on the particular three teachings Olga had extracted from all the many things Jesus was reputed to have taught. I wondered why she had chosen these three teachings and how they related to one another: To desire good for all and to forgive one another. Matt. 5:44-45; 6:14-15 & John 13.35 To cultivate our own spiritual faculties to the utmost. Matt. 5:48; Luke 24:49; John 10:34 & 14.12 To pray and work for the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. Matt. 6:9-10; Juke 10:9 & 17: 20-21 After reflecting on the wisdom of each teaching, looking up the scriptures, and considering their many layers of meaning, I began to notice the ordering of the teachings as a larger gestalt. The first teaching is about desiring universal good and cultivating mutual forgiveness. We begin with community, desiring the common good, not just our individual welfare as apparently autonomous beings. Like children at birth we begin in community, dependent on our parents, families, society; then we expand. Olga’s statement contains an important “and.” Forgiveness. We are in the dynamic of mutual reciprocity, where forgiveness, “giving for” each other, becomes the impulse of our being, the realization in action of our vital interconnectedness. We are in a state of deep participation in each other and with the world, whether we acknowledge it or not. The absence of the flow of forgiveness creates a blockage that can only be removed by recognizing our essential oneness with what we deem other, even the enemy. Yet how do we forgive intentional wrongs done to ourselves and to others, especially when some atrocities do long-term, unspeakable damage? The first teaching is the toughest. Yet according to biblical accounts, Jesus lived out this principle of forgiveness when he was able to grasp that his torturers were acting unconsciously and forgave them from the cross. 121

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With the second teaching we return to individual life—a cell, a part, a bit, an island. Here we do what we must do—move, evolve, grow, unfold the potential lying deep within. Developing our full potential is not a selfish ambition. This is why we are here: to flourish, despite and even because of our flaws and imperfections. It is our responsibility to develop what we’ve been given to the utmost, but not through mere effort of will and mind alone. Rather we flourish by allowing the larger order, the larger processes of thinking and being, to flower in and through us. Finally, the third teaching: the kingdom. Since democratization, we have not been comfortable with “kingdom” metaphors, as they seem to imply an above-down hierarchy, the age of kings and peasants, or at this time, the discrepancy between the 1% and the rest. But for Olga, the metaphor of the kingdom is a way of expressing an interior self-realization, a heightened quality of attention: “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” In the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, “within you” can be translated as “among you.” So the kingdom is also a collective awareness, not merely an individual one. Olga is suggesting that the kingdom is both without and within. What is within is constantly expressing itself in the outer world. Ultimately, the inner and the outer compose one unified field. Being in the kingdom isn’t simply an eschatology about a future kingdom, but being present to the miraculous unfolding of the present moment. In kingdom consciousness, the dichotomies of within/without dissolve. Desire for the kingdom takes us back to our inter-relatedness, to love and forgiveness as expressed in the first teaching, but in a new way. This teaching is distinct, because after developing our individuality to the utmost, the kingdom is an order, an ecosystem if you like, that we can collectively choose to build. According to Olga, for Jesus, the kingdom is about social justice, fairness, restoration, reparation, healing, rather than about judgment or retribution. So the essential teachings unite the poles of individual and collective life. This is a way of saying the two go hand in hand. As each individual strives toward greater awareness, a new consciousness gradually emerges out of the heart of the collective, the city, the polis, the kingdom. When the within comes to the 122

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without, the two are no longer two, but one. Put more simply: Love and forgive others. Love and develop yourself to your utmost capacity. Love the world and the community through action. To my mind, Jesus’s teachings, mediated through Olga, parallel the three jewels in the Buddha’s teaching: take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha. The Buddha in this paradigm is comparable to the Christ-consciousness in a state of love and forgiveness with all; the Dharma is the means, path, or way (practice and process) of developing individual consciousness to the utmost; and the Sangha is the emergent divine community, the kingdom of heaven on earth. For Olga, the movement of Jesus’ teachings is an unstoppable flow from the within to the without.

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Olga and Institutional Christianity

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The Thirsting Christ (a Lamentation) (a poem received by Olga Park) It is I, the Christ, who speaks, The Christ whom men undiscerningly worship, I, the Christ upon the cross, From out the three-hour darkness Wherein I did suffer in my soul the sin that had been, The sin of Israel and of her priests, Against Moses, and against the prophets, And the sin that should be, the sin of my Beloved, Against me, her Christ. I had felt its beginnings in the strivings by the way Of those, my stewards, unto whom I must entrust my all, My household, my sweet vineyard. The spirit of the world was there already Contending for my flesh: so I took and stripped myself That they might know as indeed I had taught them often That the body is more than raiment: And I took a basin filled with water— Emblem of my own pure springs, my own essence of life— And I washed away the soil from their feet, The uncleanness of their contentious self-desire So they might know to keep my household Free and clean from the spirit of the world. I had felt its threatenings in the judgment spirit of John and James 125

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Who desired that all who received me not should be destroyed by fire. I had sensed its flabbiness in the conforming spirit of Simon Peter, Who would have had me refuse the cross; The treachery of its cupidity in Judas. Who desired to serve both God and Mammon. I had taught them by precept and by example And by the influence of my spirit: I had done all, And I had kept them unto the last from that spirit of the world. But there upon the cross I felt it enter in again— The spirit that cried, “It is necessary that one should die for the people: Away with him! Crucify him!” And my spirit was driven forth into desert places. Then I saw the spirit of reckoning standing in the place of faith; And the spirit of the scribes had darkened the lamp of my truth; And the meek and the poor in spirit, The pure in heart and the peacemakers Had their honour taken from them and given to the rulers of earthly kingdoms— To the clever and the proud and the scornful, And the light of heavenly wisdom had gone out. And an altar was set up, and on it Stood the symbol of Israel’s shame, and countless thousands Worshipped the symbol without understanding: And kings crowned me afresh with thorns, And soldiers mocked and spat upon me; And authorities of Church and State nailed my hands That I could no more bless the humble; And my feet, that I could no more hasten to the healing of the sick; And the dew of my life essences was dried up, And the whole body of my church was shrivelled: The whole earth is in darkness because of her and reels to and fro: All her bones are broken: Let the sword pierce her heart until she 126

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cry with Israel Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani—My God, my God, Why hast thou forsaken me? Olga was critical of institutional Christianity, seeing much of it as authoritarian and even regressive. The Church, she believed, had tended historically to emphasize dogma and beliefs rather than direct experience, attempting to control the masses through fear. She also spoke of how some Protestants had thrown out wisdom when they abandoned ritual, mystery, and the mediation of the saints; yet Protestants were often too literal in their interpretation of scripture. She felt much of Christendom after the time of Constantine was tied to empire-building. She was also dismayed that Billy Graham-style evangelism had come to predominate in the religious psyche of the United States and much of North America. Olga made a distinction between mystical spirituality, which was experiential, and dogmatic religion, which favoured fixed beliefs and was often about control. Olga would have been considered a heretic by many Christians, since she did not believe that Jesus claimed to be God incarnate or the only Son of God. “No good Jew would claim to be God Almighty,” she noted. And she was too much of a non-conforming Protestant to be comfortable with a priestly hierarchy. In some ways she was a lay nun without borders, if you use the word “nun” in its original sense of the Sanskrit nona, meaning mother or elder. She was monk-like, if a monk is not just a celibate devoted to a religious order, but a monachus (Gk.), a person seeking oneness or wholeness. However, the deeper reason Olga left the church was that her visions and biblical studies led her to conclude that the institution of the Church (both Catholic and Protestant branches) had perverted Jesus’s teachings and suppressed his true legacy. A new kind of consciousness had emerged through his life and teachings that was accessible to all. Based on her lifelong study of the scriptures, she concluded that the early bishops and Church fathers had heavily edited the gospels to reflect emerging church doctrines. In one of her most startling visions, Christ revealed himself to Olga suspended from the cross. Afterwards, she received the 127

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above poem about how the church has continually crucified Jesus throughout the 2000 years since his death, impeding the flow of his healing power and love. In An Open Door, she records both the vision and the poem on which it was based. She reports her initial dismay at the poem’s troubling implications. “It was a travesty, “ she commented, “that the words of the high priest Caiaphas, ‘It is necessary one man should die for the people,’ should have become embedded in the church’s core teaching that God requires a blood sacrifice in order to forgive sin. She was appalled that despite Jesus’s teaching about love and forgiveness, the Church had promulgated the image of God as a punitive father. Olga’s Vision of the Dying Christ On November 21, 1948, at Evening Prayers, as I meditated on the Lord’s Prayer, the figure of our Lord appeared on the left side of the altar as dead but upright. On his brow was the crown of thorns and his eyes were just heavy black shadows. His features were ashen as in death. A winding sheet of unbleached linen enveloped him. I was deeply shocked and asked why he manifested to me in this way. He answered, “That you may know that I am he who was dead; but I will be the newly-risen Lord who lives evermore.” On October 31, 1948, at evening prayers, the cross with Christ crucified on it, and dying, appeared above the centre of the altar and I heard him say as one dying, “I thirst.” Then, there appeared a plain white cup with no handle. It was hanging from the cross by a short chain. In the psychic consciousness I reached out my hand and lifted it, and immediately it was filled with clear, cool water as from a spring within the cup. This I offered to him. The vision then vanished and I heard him say, “Just as you have done it to one of the least of my brothers or sisters, you have done it to me” (Matthew 25.40-45). At the time, I was puzzled as to why the cup should be without any handle and attached to the cross. It is my understanding that it signifies that my mission for Christ could not operate as subsidiary to any organization already in existence, because what the Master proposed was not after the pattern of anything in the past. (from An Open Door) 128

Olga’s Vision of the Church of the Future

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lthough olga abandoned institutional religion, she never renounced the need for spiritual community. Sometimes she spoke of our small gatherings at the cottage as extensions of what she experienced in her visions as a “cosmic collegiate system,” a gathering of hearts and minds from within. When we became absorbed in theological discussions, or took communion with her, she felt we were part of a vast order of “heavenly hosts.” Spiritual growth, or what she called “going forward,” was unceasing. Old revelations were constantly reinterpreted in light of the new. The truth might be timeless (eternal), but we were evolving. She once told me, “Even God goes forward.” One of her most remarkable visions took place while Olga was in full waking consciousness. While lifting an iron to press a shirt, she was transported into “the church of the future.” This church, made of what she called “living substance,” was not an authoritarian structure, but part of an ordering principle beyond our ordinary perception.

The Church of the Future In 1928, after moving to a larger home, I was ironing the week’s laundry, standing with a hot iron in my hand and one of my husband’s shirts spread out on the ironing board. The dining-room windows were across to my right, the open stairway across to my left. The fireside seat with the paneled wall above it was in front of me. Then suddenly, I was no longer aware of my earth environment, but was in a large church of cathedral style. The large nave stretched 129

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ahead of me, but instead of going straight forward, I turned to the left and entered a side chapel. It seemed to be for solitary prayer and meditation. The walls were covered with murals depicting scenes from the life on earth of Our Lord. The scene of the Transfiguration was the most prominent. It covered an entire wall. Facing this, in the centre of the chapel, was a single prie-Dieu. The atmosphere was rarefied, as though innumerable prayers and meditations had created a spiritual updraft that swept the soul upwards and bathed it in a healing, exalted Peace. From this chapel, I returned to the nave; and as I walked there, I was surprised to note that there was no pulpit. There was the usual lectern with eagle wings outstretched, but these supported—not the full Bible—but the New Testament. There were further surprises. In the chancel, in the place where I expected to see the altar, there was a plain door and above the door was the Inscription: “If any man thirst let him come to me” (John 7. 37). From the chancel I passed into a long room which I was told was the Consultorium because in it were stored the records and spiritual witnessing of all Christ’s Servers. It was in the charge of a tall man in a plain brown cassock as of a Roman Catholic monk. I did not see him; I only had the impression of him. The impression was identical with the appearance of Ignatius Loyola who manifested in February 1947, about twenty years later. I passed from the Consultorium to a small Baptistry. This also was a surprise, for the room and its font were so small I concluded it could only be intended for single and private baptism. The font was in the floor. Another surprise was that the Baptistry was the exit from, and not the entrance to, the church. I am obliged in describing the experience to give the impression of entering the church and walking around, and observing as in timeand-place sequence; but actually I was aware of the whole and every separate part and detail all at once. I was able to perceive an unseen guide of whom I asked questions and received answers. It was an out-of-time-and-place experience manifesting in semblance of time and place conditions—conditions that were still in the future. Having seen all, I exclaimed, “What church is this?” 130

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As I spoke I found myself in the physical world again, standing with the hot iron in my right hand just as I had been before I entered the church. The experience had been of a dimension beyond time and place and my question was asked as the change to the physical operation was taking place. It was answered by the Christ messenger from that other realm, speaking by means of my own super-conscious awareness: “It is the Church of Our Lord—the Church of the Open Door” (See Rev. 3.8). This vision signalled an extension of consciousness in which my concept of the Church as a sort of standardized model of worship procedure and doctrine approved by Jesus Christ, and destined to last for countless ages, got a severe jolt. It was an out-of-time-and-place experience, and looking back from my present awareness [1970’s], it seems to have been designed to give a preview of changes in human comprehension of Jesus and his mission that would come to pass in the remaining years of this, the last century of the Piscean Era. These changes were signified by the Transfiguration scene being given prominence over that of the Crucifixion; by the Door of the Christ-Presence taking the place of the altar; by the testimony of Christian witnesses becoming a Consultorium; by the Baptistry being at the exit instead of the entrance; and at the conclusion, by the naming of the church as “The Church of Our Lord—The Church of the Open Door.” Reflection on Olga’s Vision of the Church of the Future Olga’s vision of the Church of the Future is not a prediction of a renewal of institutional Christianity, but a symbolic representation of an emerging consciousness within individuals and within the collective psyche. It is an access point to the divine, born out of a mystical understanding of Jesus’s life and teachings. Though Olga lamented Jesus’s crucifixion by the Romans and acknowledged how the image of the suffering Christ spoke to people who were oppressed, her vision suggested it was time to foreground the story of the Transfiguration rather than the Crucifixion. “We’ve had two millennia of Jesus on the cross. It’s time to focus on his transforming power,” she declared. Olga shunned crucifixes and would not wear one or have one 131

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in the cottage, but preferred the equilateral Celtic cross. She also embraced as her symbol the Maltese cross where the arms of the cross open out at the four quarters like petals. She had a friend make a petit point brooch displaying a white Maltese cross on a turquoise background, which she always wore as an emblem pinned to her jacket. The event known as the Transfiguration is only included in the Gospel of Luke where Jesus, like a new Moses, appears on Mount Tabor in his body of light or visionary form to three of his disciples just prior to the crucifixion. For Olga, the predominance of the Transfiguration in the Church of the Future ties to her sense that the times call for a complete transformation of consciousness within the individual. In Olga’s vision, the door of the Christ-presence replacing the altar signals the emergence of what she called Christ consciousness in human awareness, a wisdom way of being and knowing. An altar, after all, was originally the site for the slaying of animals to appease a warlike God. It therefore holds residual connotations of sacrificial worship. While it is symbolically important to sacrifice our egoic desires, our need to control and manipulate reality, Olga’s vision breaks with the past. The interchange between the human and the divine is instead “an open door,” a presence, a place of free passage. The emphasis on what Olga calls a “consultorium” (place of collaborative consultation) rather than the testimony of Christian witnesses is also significant. It reflects a more egalitarian and open form of interchange, one that draws on the collective wisdom of the community, not a body of priests or authorities speaking from a privileged height. There is also a temporal aspect to the notion of a consultorium in that the testimony of witnesses is not closed, but remains open to our own continuing experiences and witness today. More recently, I have wondered about the moving of the baptismal font from the entrance to the exit of the church. Although John the Baptist baptized in the river Jordan, by the time the system of bishops and priests was instituted in the first and second centuries a.d., converts could be baptized only by priests or bishops. Converts to Christianity would submit to baptism in 132

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order to receive the sacramental bread and wine. In other words, baptism became a ritual of submission to the authority of the church, which promised salvation from sin. In the higher consciousness, however, receiving spiritual nourishment is an organic process, unmediated by an earthly priesthood. The drinking from the waters of life symbolized by the baptismal font occurs at the end rather than the beginning of the process of awakening. Collectively, all people undergoing spiritual rebirth are the church of the future. They carry the sacred space of the temple or temenos within them. They are the temple of Holy Oneness, the Church of the Open Door. As the prophet Habakkuk expressed it, “We are the temple of God.”

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The Shattering of the Vase

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Although I was resident in the parish of St. Mary’s [an Anglican Church in Kerrisdale, Vancouver], the Rector of which was the clergyman I had met briefly in 1917, I had not been able to attend church owing to the illness of my mother, who was living with us at that time. The first Sunday that she was able to take breakfast with us, my husband and I decided to go to the eleven o’clock service. While standing before the bathroom mirror to put on my hat, I noticed that the bathtub needed a rub around, and as I was busy doing this, I heard a man’s voice announcing a text of scripture as if for a sermon. It was: “And she broke the box” (Mark 14.6). The theme of the sermon was that the box or vase, beautiful and costly as it undoubtedly was, had to be broken in order that the exquisite perfume of the ointment it contained might “fill the whole house.” Immediately following the announcement of the text, the man said, “I want you to pay special attention to that; it is important.” Several sentences followed that gave me a fairly comprehensive idea of the theme in the preacher’s mind that he was setting forth. This was astonishing enough, but as I sat in church about an hour later, and the Rector announced his text and began to speak the sentences in the exact sequence and appropriate emphasis that I had already heard while wiping out the bath tub, I was shocked beyond measure, rather bewildered and a little frightened. Already the boundaries of awareness of time and place had been shown to be no boundaries at all by my experiencing of events thousands of miles distant, of events still in the future, and now awareness of events in the past normally screened from recollection, and by the seeing and knowing beyond contact of the physical 134

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senses. First the boundaries of time and place had been demolished, and then the sensory guardianship of my individuality had begun to totter. Forty-nine years later, I now recognize that sermon as revealing an important lesson set for me in this incarnation—the necessity for the breaking of the box that contains all that we most cherish. I realize also that it was an important lesson set for the Rector. I will endeavour to state the lesson as I now perceive it. In the beneficent ordering of the universe, life is conceived, nourished and protected in a vehicle. As the life-unit develops, it breaks the vehicle or container and continues on within a larger containment. At first, the new area of operation is so much larger that it doesn’t seem like a container at all, but at length this also becomes a limited, restricting condition—a prison—and the growing, expanding life within it breaks it. So, eternally, the death or shattering of the container becomes the open door to life in a new dimension. Human self-consciousness is wounded by this perpetual defeat of its determination to make the immediate and temporal the all of everything. Thus we are perpetually coming face to face with the great lesson of life—that the body is more than the raiment; that the life is more than the meat that feeds it; that the purpose of the box is more than the box itself; that the self-giving, the outpouring of love and life, is more than the possessing and holding; and that the Law of Life and Love is eternal fulfillment. The sermon concluded with these words: “And the house was filled with the odour of the ointment” (John 12.3). (from An Open Door) The Psychic Vase and its Shattering This was an out-of-body experience in ancient Greece. It occurred three years after my hearing of the sermon on the text “And she broke the box.” The relation between the two experiences is fairly obvious. In both, attention is being called to the Law of Eternal Progression. First, I was in the presence of a very old man. He was a teacher of profound wisdom and I was his pupil. The bulk of his instruction I did not bring through to waking consciousness: I remembered only 135

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the story of the vase and its shattering with which he concluded his teaching. A remarkable feature of his telling of the story was that I lived it there and then, as he was telling it. Here is the story. Many centuries ago, there lived an aged man of great knowledge and magic power whose most treasured possession was a beautiful and wonderful vase. Where the vase had come from or how old it was no one knew. He used to relate a prophecy concerning it with an origin as mysterious as the vase itself. The vase, said the aged one, imprisoned a soul that, by the selfish pursuit of pleasure, had brought about this imprisonment. In course of time, so he prophesied, the vase would pass into the keeping of a maiden destined to release the imprisoned soul and receive as her reward the secret of the happy influence that was shed around it: for whoever possessed it or received it into their dwelling was always happy as long as it was with them. At length, the first part of the story was fulfilled, and the vase passed into the keeping of such a maiden—the daughter of the aged one—who, though herself growing old, was still a maiden, though unfortunately, she was ugly and misshapen, and was unsought and unloved. At this point in the story I became identified with the maiden and I lived the rest of the story as the Teacher told it: For some time the maiden, Flora, was happy and content in possession of the vase. She loved its beauty. At times, as she gazed on it, the carved marble seemed to glow with life: the figures of the nymphs who lightly supported it seemed to blush with warm vitality; the flower petals seemed as fragile and fair as nature’s own; and the grape vines to bear such apparently luscious fruit clusters that she almost thought she could pick them. More than its beauty, however, she loved its music; for sometimes at dusk, and sometimes at dawn, strange, sweet melodies murmured in and around it, and suggested to Flora mysterious and sacred thoughts. Then the idea began to grow upon her that she, ugly and despised, was unworthy to be the guardian of the mystic vase, the sole beneficiary of its mysterious influence, and she resolved to take it to the temple nearby and dedicate it to the service of the gods. Because of the fame and beauty, the preciousness and desirableness 136

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of the vase, she went on her purposeful errand late at night and secretly. She carried the vase carefully concealed beneath her dark cloak and made her way in slow, ungainly fashion across the temple floor. Then suddenly, at that most unexpected hour, that strange, sweet music burst forth in soul-enrapturing strains. Flora was startled and afraid; her fingers trembled. The precious vase slipped through them and broke into a thousand fragments on the marble floor. With that echoing crash, the music ceased abruptly. Then arose the muffled cries and sobs of Flora, who, with face buried in the dark cloak, lay bowed in anguish and fear: anguish for the loss of the vase which had been her sole comfort and happiness, dismay that what she had desired to devote was now neither hers nor the gods’. Then, too, she was full of fear as to the meaning of this thing. Was it not a manifestation of the anger of the gods? She was so full of sorrow and fearful imaginings that, for a time, she did not realize that someone was speaking to her: “Flora! Why do you weep for what was but a beautiful shroud?” Timidly, Flora raised her head and looked around, but didn’t see any temple attendant or angel, though the voice continued: “Don’t weep because you did not give that beautiful clay to the gods; they don’t need it, and if you had given it, you might have come here often to gaze upon it, and presently have desired it once more. So it would it have been the cause of grievous sin to you. Neither grieve that the vase is broken, for there was no power in its lifeless beauty to bring you the happiness of your desire. You have already found the secret of happiness; for in true humility and selfless devotion you resolved to give this, your most treasured possession, to the gods, and that it broke is the sign that you have their favour. The vase is shattered so that your sacrifice of self may remain. Go from here in peace; bearing within you the secret of happiness. It shall make your form most lovely and yourself beloved.” Reflection on the Shattering of the Vase: Olga’s Life Metaphor The first time I met Olga, she gave me a copy of An Open Door. That night I read with fascination her twin tales of the shattering of the vase. Now, decades later, I have come to think 137

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of the shattering of the vase as Olga’s central life metaphor. It also happens to be a universal metaphor for the mystical way. Even as I absorbed Olga’s account of hearing a sermon before it was preached and her tale of Flora, I connected these with the Kabbalistic creation myth of the shattering of the vessels. As an undergraduate I had studied Jewish scholar Gershom Scholem’s ground-breaking works on Jewish mysticism, ancient mystical Jewish texts like The Zohar and The Book of Creation, and some of the Medieval Kabbalists like Isaac Luria who wrote of the “Breaking of the Vessels.” In those works I discovered powerful myths about the divine Sefirot or ten containments of primal light. When the primal vessels of light fall into time, they shatter. However, this shattering is not strictly to be lamented, as it generates a creative chaos that makes possible all diversity and multiplicity. That which is broken can be restored as we recognize that we are all broken shards of light. Every shattering is at once a release and a rebirth. The metaphor of the shattering of the vessels is also a deeply feminine trope associated with the womb, a safe containment that eventually grows too small and deposits the child into the world. However, the exploration of what seems an infinite sphere until it becomes a constricting vessel applies at many levels. Olga saw the process as an expression what she called the law of progression: “So, eternally, the death or shattering of the container becomes the open door to life in a new dimension.” The shattering of the vessel is also associated with Mary Magdalene and the precious jar of ointment broken over Jesus’ head and feet. The shattering of the vessels certainly pertains as well to Olga’s personal life where so often the plans she made for herself (as an educator and musician) were shattered. Certainly, she could have pursued these callings in England. Nevertheless, the Flora story provides an analogue to Olga’s. When she involved herself in local churches in her new surroundings, she found herself up against literalistic thinking and closed-mindedness. When she joined more esoteric organizations, divisiveness and power struggles led to her disillusionment with group structures. Even in a relatively progressive church at St. Mary’s with an idealistic rector who treated her as an equal, petty gossip broke up the flourishing of 138

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their friendship and contributed to her exit from the church. In one way, Olga’s life was a continual effort to build containments that shattered. Yet out of those losses new patterns emerged. In a sense, this is the story of all life. In the central scientific creation story of our times, the universe erupts from a dark ground of potentiality in a cosmic explosion— the big bang. Whether scientists and cosmologists consider the universe as benign or indifferent, they often use the metaphor of an explosion. Those who have an ontological bent might call it the shattering of ultimate unity into diversity, or of the nonmaterial into materiality. In any case, according to this image of origins, things begin with a bang, not a whimper. Fragments fly outward as the universe expands. Before I could read, my father read me the creation stories in Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve’s exile from Eden. Since then, I have wondered how and why the universe, sometimes gently, and sometimes more painfully, nudges us toward growth. Studying the Book of Job, which explores human suffering, hasn’t enabled me to resolve rationally the classical problem of evil, why the innocent suffer. Yet the Christian story of death and resurrection, of life continually emerging out of death, with its parallels in many religious traditions and in nature, suggests that when the containment shatters the story isn’t over. Sometimes, I experience Spirit as a gentle persuader, pushing through the confines of my own shattered constructs. Many mystical perspectives like Olga’s hint also at the existence of a place of consciousness beyond shattering, a place where the boundary between self and world, me and not-me, disappears— where the walls fall. This place is the dancing that holds the tension of the polarities in unity. This place beyond shattering may coincide with what the east calls nirvana. T. S. Eliot called it “the still point of the turning world.”42 Unlike most of the early leaders of the Christian church, who rejected the concept of reincarnation, Olga spoke of a great cycle of twelve ages, tied to the zodiacal signs, and a turning of the cycle after about 25,000 years. She taught that we evolve over time through many incarnations until we are ready to transcend the karmic wheel. 139

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Several times Olga announced, “I feel this will be my last incarnation.” She thought Jesus himself had evolved through many human incarnations but had come in his last incarnation, not for self-fulfillment, but for service. She experienced him as intimately involved in the temporal process as well as a part of her own consciousness. Olga taught that we are all creatures of both time and eternity, moving together toward the no- shatter zone, which in one sense we have never left because it has never left us. Following her lead, I have come to think that placing “God” outside the process of things diminishes the divine by exiling the vital intelligence from the whole. Olga worshipped a dynamic God who is both the process itself and the origin of the process. To progress within such a unified field requires affirmation of our particularity, of phenomenal things—a heron’s nest, a red fox with its bushy tail. This sensual world of quicksilver change is on a continuum with what Olga called eternity reality. The here and now matters because it is part of something vast, unnameable, whole, and mysterious. More and more, we may come to discover ourselves in the noshatter zone, not in order to escape, but because we too are capable of becoming agents of creative transformation. Sometimes, like the sages and saints, we may find ourselves unknowingly residing in an active peace, stepping out of the shards alive and whole.

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Cosmic Law

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Natural, karmic, and cosmic law are one. —Olga Park

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cosmic law and its variants. Karmic law was the law of cause and effect operating in the material and psychological planes. The related teaching of Jesus is, “As the seed, so the plant.” Olga didn’t accept the notion that the “good” thrive because they are being rewarded while the “bad” are being punished, but she did notice how experiencing and learning from the consequences of our thoughts and actions can further growth. Consider some of Olga’s other active principles. They are living dynamisms embedded within matter and the operations of the universe. God, or the One in perennial wisdom traditions, cannot be separated from cosmic law. What follows is my paraphrasing of what Olga called cosmic laws: •Truth is an ever-new emergence from within. Everything evolves from the within to the without. This is the law of emergence. •God, or ultimate unity, is the supremely inclusive, allencompassing consciousness that descends from above. The spatial metaphor of “the above” represents for Olga that which is more holistic and inclusive than what is below. This is the law of transcendence. •A contemplative or meditative practice enhances spi141

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ritual transformation. This is the law of praxis, action. We learn by doing. •Each individual contains within the heart a means of direct access to the divine, also symbolized as an inner spark, seed, or pearl of great price. This is the law of interior, intuitive knowing. •The natural world is a manifestation of the divine. As William Blake puts it, “Everything that lives is Holy.” This is the law of interbeing. •We evolve from where we stand by going forward a step at a time. Our apparent mistakes are woven into a larger fabric. This is the law of progression. •Universal love is continually creating newness, and we, as part of the whole, are inherently creative beings. “Behold, I make all things new.” This is the law of creative transformation. •When we surrender ourselves and our situations to the divine, what seems out of balance can eventually be righted. Olga taught a practice of “commitment prayer.” We can surrender to God’s love. This is the law of kenosis, letting go, or self-emptying. •We are essentially part of one another and part of the whole universe. We come to “Love our neighbour as ourselves,” because our neighbour is ourself. This is the law of interconnection. •Humility is the first and most essential step on the path of spiritual growth. We cannot receive when full of our own fixed concepts. This is the law of receptivity through unknowing. Of course, all these laws or principles are interrelated and overlap.

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Practicing Chords

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Contemplation cannot be taught. It cannot even be clearly explained. It can only be hinted at, suggested, pointed to, symbolized. The more objectively and scientifically one tries to analyze it, the more he empties it of its real content, for this experience is beyond the reach of verbalization and of rationalization. —Thomas Merton43 One morning while I was in silent contemplation Olga’s words returned to me: “Without the practice, growth is slower and much more incremental.” Later, while walking the dog, I laughed when the thought returned in a rhyming couplet: “When the practice is sporadic, the growth gets erratic.” Because of Olga’s example, I have aspired throughout much of my adult life to contemplate regularly, but have had difficulty integrating the practice into my daily life consistently. I will keep it up for a while, get bogged down with various distractions, and then the practice falls away for a time. Later, the desire to be more continuously in the silence returns and I begin again. The excuse for the lapse is usually that I am too busy; but one is always too busy. It is possible to distinguish without separating meditation and contemplation. Some forms of meditation are tied to concentrative techniques, including such practices as focussing on a mantra or sacred word in order to free the mind from incessant thought. Olga more often used the term contemplation, as it suggested to her entering a sacred space, the Holy Silence, where one didn’t 143

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make extreme efforts to still thought, but opened to the flow from a higher level of consciousness. Now in my mid-60s, the determination to contemplate returns more insistently than before. I feel the urge as a new resoluteness. There are periods when I see daily contemplation not as a chore, but as a necessity, something as essential as air, as breathing. During these times, after waking each morning, I go straight to my prayer table, even if only for five minutes to say, “Here I am. I’ve showed up. I want to serve. Guide me. Thank you.” Because I happen to be a writer, a poet, I know how in the writing process silence can give way to words, and words to silence as in a dance. But when I first began contemplating, I felt out of my element. I used to think my contemplation was not pure enough, not a complete letting go of thoughts, concepts, and words. My mind seemed to want to troll the edges of language, the places where language arises. There is no “one-size-fits-all” form of contemplation, no one right way of doing it. For me, words sometimes open into pools of silence and are permeated with presence. Words can also hint and point and wave their hands, calling for me to engage with them. Olga taught me to contemplate by asking questions. “Put your genuine question out to the universe and wait,” she would say. She did not advocate that everyone should follow the words and hymns of her communion practice, but she thought everyone could benefit by developing a daily time for prayer or meditation. To my mind, such a daily practice need not replace more public forms of worship, but is essential if one is to reach the depths. There are enduring elements that make a ritual work, but the words, music, and rhythms of silence and speaking should resonate with the individual. Some of these enduring elements are sacred music, sacred words, a dedicated space for surrendering the self, for requesting guidance, for non-judgmental self-examination, for praying for others in need, and, mostly, for entering the silence. For Olga, the Lord’s Prayer or what she called the Kingdom Prayer, was the ultimate model, the ultimate refuge. Not all elements of this prayer have to be in place in every prayer or meditation. It’s about innovation and tradition being happily 144

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married. Over the years this ancient prayer has been re-inscribed in my heart in thousands of ways. Each saying of it is another poetic reconstruction, another midrash or creative interpretation. When lingering over this short ancient prayer phrase by phrase, word by word, I feel I am talking to an Ancient of Days, the Holy Presence, the Holy One. It links me with the divine as a “Thou” from the roots of my own “I am.” This kind of affirmation is extra-personal, meta-personal: an “I to Thou,” and “Thou to I” engagement. Words become portals to silence where the I sits in awe, resting in peace and joy. Within the nest of these ancient words I enter a haven, a safe but spacious room where the same words have been uttered, intoned, sung, whispered, cried out by thousands upon thousands for over two millennia. I am part of a community, even though I am alone in my room. I step into the great communion of saints, past, present, and future, in this life and beyond, who have found or will find healing, comfort, and guidance in this prayer. I release myself and my concerns into the Cosmic Mind and Heart of the Nameless I Am. Being in the prayer is more like being prayed than praying. One morning before dressing, eating, checking email, talking to my husband, and thinking about my plans for the day, this colloquy on the value of a regular practice flowed in. The words in which the contemplation arrived seemed similar to those Olga used when she spoke of her practice years ago. These words and thoughts felt like a union of my heart and Olga’s, a kind of charged remembering. A Colloquy So I begin: What’s the purpose of meditation? Release from fear, egotism, and therefore a greater empathy and compassion, a more effective activism. Why did Olga work so hard to create and teach a communion ritual and a morning meditation in the form of an order of service? We all need a containment for our higher thoughts and aspirations. 145

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Isn’t a ritual kind of confining? A ritual doesn’t have to be a box. You aren’t boxed in, censored, stuck in an ideology or behaviour code. There are no “thought police” in a truly spiritual containment. It’s an energy field created by the wisdom and truth of the reverberating words and the sincerity and intent of the one praying. A place where words and singing open into silence and mystery. It both energizes and calms. Its energy is a presence and a communion of presences. What, then, is the purpose of the practice? The purpose of the communion ritual and daily contemplation is to bring the “threefold consciousness” (body, mind, and emotions) into full integration. It’s to wake up. The practice isn’t for God; it’s for us. What we call God is the Presence that sustains the containment, the containment itself, the shattering of the containment, and what lies beyond the containment. This presence is the Poet, Evolver, Friend who meditates within us, beside us. Meditation meditating. The containment is alive. It serves for a time until we no longer need it. So we move from containment to containment, vessel to vessel, for we are creatures of symbol and form. And what’s the purpose of being fully integrated? It’s to be part of the “building of the kingdom of heaven on earth. And what is this kingdom? A collective order, a community uniting randomness and disorder where love rules, not greed and ego. The rule is not by an iron hand, but through spontaneous attuning to the chords of love. These cords (chords) draw the soul home.

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ot only did olga sing, play piano, write mystical

theology, compose poetry, and contemplate, but she was a visual artist who worked in watercolours and pastels, an adept at illuminated lettering, a gardener, a herbalist, and an amateur astrologer. And that is just the beginning. Her aesthetic sense permeated the way she presented simple meals and set out tea. It affected the Jain-like way she gently tore off pieces of lettuce and marvelled at the magenta stains of beets. I would call Olga a holistic creative because these seemingly disparate aesthetic passions were absolutely interconnected in her mind and life. Although one or the other might predominate for a while, Olga did not let go of one form of artistic expression in order to develop another. They all moved alongside each other, intersecting and overlapping in various ways. You might say she specialized in mystical awareness, but mystical awareness was a many-rayed mandala including the arts. Given half a chance, we all start out as integral creatives. Children are acrobats in trees, sculptors in mud, and fashionistas with dolls. They wax and press leaves into books, organize garage plays, and dance on evening lawns with fireflies. The great thing about the exploratory years of childhood is that almost everyone can recall at least one time of complete absorption in creative play where the mind stood amazed within the creative process. What encourages this spontaneity and experimentation is that a child, unless pushed too soon by parents or society, or suffering from limiting social conditions, doesn’t generally feel she has to be expert in any one area. When I gloried in swirling fuchsia 147

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finger-paints, I was not concerned about a final product worthy of exhibition. My parents’ proud posting of a few of my efforts was enough. Though often, my early experiments in writing, visual art, song and dance were carried out in secrecy, away from the eyes of parents, teachers, and evaluators. Many people who show talent in multiple art forms eventually specialize in one to the exclusion of the others. Since I was equally good at singing, writing, and drawing as a child, I thought I might like to become a singer, playwright, novelist, or visual artist. By Grade 12, thanks to the encouragement of an English teacher, I discovered a special love for poetry, and by university had largely given up on distinguishing myself in other areas. During university, I mostly explored the English poetic tradition. Yet I did play guitar and compose songs in my twenties, and took up opera lessons in my fifties. Today, I still sing my heart out in the shower, doodle in my journal, and dance in the kitchen when no one is looking. What I noticed about Olga was that she was able to permit various manifestations of form and beauty to pulse through her more or less continuously. She also maintained an aesthetic of attentiveness to the natural world. Once when she was in her late eighties, we went for a long walk along the shore of Buntzen Lake near Port Moody, and she insisted on lingering well past dusk. “Just absorb that soft pink light,” she remarked. Then she lifted one hand to trace the profile of the mountain’s ridge with her forefinger, making a little arpeggio in air. Afterwards, she fell into a protracted silence. Olga’s attentiveness to natural beauty led her to surround herself with beauty. The first time I stepped inside her cottage, I noticed the entire wall over her sofa bed was a hand-painted mural depicting a scene from ancient Greece of a secluded bower. Clear Mediterranean blue, sunlight yellow, and soft white dominated the colour scheme. Her colours favoured translucent pastels suggestive of visionary realms. Though she never exhibited her work, it captures the transparency of things, the auric glow around emergent forms, the new greens of spring. I am fortunate to have inherited several of Olga’s best pastels and watercolours. One large landscape of a lake and mountain 148

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graces my husband’s study. The most iconic of Olga’s paintings, however, and the one I most treasure, is a pastel she called “Christ Among the Seven-Branched Candelabrum” which now hangs above my meditation table.

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The symbolism of Olga’s pastel is based on the book of Revelation where John, imprisoned on the island of Patmos, first beholds the cosmic Christ. Olga was aware that the sevenbranched candelabrum is a Christian variant of the ancient Jewish Menorah, which stood before the door of the Holy of Holies in the ancient Jewish tabernacle. Olga’s drawing is not simply an illustration of John’s vision, but her own radical re-visioning, for the double-edged sword and seven stars named in Revelation are conspicuously absent. As well, she depicts the figure of the Christ as a living candelabrum, a flaming tree, rather than a lord of light standing among disconnected lamp stands. Olga’s understanding of the book of Revelation, in fact, swerves from literalism, for she interprets it as “a dramatic action parable.” She felt the book encapsulates symbolically the evolution of humanity to full awakening of our individual and collective capacity for love and compassion. She felt the last book in the Bible had been wrongly interpreted as a series of judgments inflicted on humanity by an angry God separate from humanity and from the earth. In Olga’s depiction, the Christ wears a soft white garment made of cloud stuff. The seven branches of the candelabrum are golden streams, branches ascending from the feet to the crown of the human form. For me, they suggest what the east calls chakra energies converging at various centres in the body. The outer arms of the candelabrum intersect with the figure at the solar plexus or navel centre. The second two branches run through the chest or heart and appear as arms raised in exaltation. The third set intersects at the eyes or place of vision. The central flame, corresponding to the crown chakra, emanates from the head. There are three burning candles on each side and one in the centre, all converging at a level height to create a sense of equipoise. The chakras most prominently featured are those of the feet, the solar plexus, the heart, the head (eyes), and the crown. A rainbow aura in graduated shades of gold merging into mauve encircles the figure’s head and shoulders. At the top, where the candles break into luminous cloud, the whiteness seems to open into infinite space. The figure is not encased in the frame but in an open field. 150

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It is also notable that the horizontal heart-branch of the candelabrum intersects with the vertical plane of the figure to form a cross. As mentioned earlier, for Olga the cross did not symbolize Jesus’s sacrificial death offered to God for human salvation, but the intersection of the vertical and horizontal energies of the cosmos, matter and spirit, time and timelessness. She suggested that the cross was a pre-Christian and universal symbol inherited by the Jewish people during their sojourn in ancient Egypt. The figure of the Christ in the painting seems to me androgynous. The background in which the figure floats is aqua, close to turquoise, a colour Olga associated with selflessness. The spaces between the branches of the candelabrum are of the same pure white that composes Christ’s garment. The Christ is, in Olga’s phrase from her communion service, “enveloped and surrounded as by a cloud of light.” The figure seems awake in every fibre and cell, as if all the neural pathways have been opened. For me, the Christ here represents not a cosmic Lord we are called to worship, but our deeper, truer selves. Therefore, when the Christ in John’s vision says, “I am the Alpha and Omega, the one who was, and is, and is to come,” the speaking resonates within. For we too in our own way are the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending of a unique expression of the divine. A part of us has never left the centre of timelessness where past, present, and future converge. Now as I reconsider Olga’s creativity, I ask: Why is creativity essential to the mystical life? For me, it lies at its very core and is inseparable from empathy and compassion. The integral imagination opens us to a doubling of life’s mystery, a double astonishment. Sometimes we enter silence, the wildness preceding words and naming. The mystery of silence is the mystery of what Olga calls “the within,” the interior ground from which all things emerge as from a point of nothingness. It is beyond even the duality of being versus becoming. A quantum physicist might associate it with dark matter, or a mystic with the dark ground of being. The truth is, we can’t say very much about it. Our words and symbols can only suggest and point. 151

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Yet imagination allows us to extend ourselves empathetically into the lives of others and the world around us. Another mystery for Olga was that of “the without”—the natural or manifest world, the outer conditions of our own lives, what has been called the creation. This is the body of the world, the sacred manifest in all its terror, beauty, and glory. Again on experiencing it, primarily in nature, we pause and are lifted out of ourselves. Paying attention to the mystery of creative manifestation involves a deeper knowing than that of the linear, rational mind, a deeper seeing than that of the physical eye. For Olga the mystical consciousness isn’t simply the within or interiority as opposed to the without or exteriority. It’s what lies at the pivot between the two, the door hinge of inner and outer. It is what holds the two together. Olga called it the place “between time and eternity.” It’s a place of such deep interconnectivity that war, competition, jealousy, greed, and hatred simply have no substance there. So for Olga the mystic consciousness is the peace-making consciousness—an active peace poured out from the pivot of the world. When the mystic mind, even for a nanosecond, enters meta-time or eternity, creative forms of elegance, surprise, and originality arise. And if a person participates in that arising, praise, adoration, uncontainable joy break out spontaneously. Mystics like Olga choose to live in this place of creative overflow as much as possible. They know they cannot sustain this condition and that they are not perfect or better than others. They simply intuit that this centre of what the Greeks called energia is the birthright of every sentient being. Mystics (and we are all incipient mystics) may stumble and miss the mark, but are drawn to this open doorway, this pivot between the worlds. Mystics are open doors for others because they are themselves in the process of opening.

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have always longed for balance and thought of it as

something like an Aristotelian mean between extremes, a middle way of “nothing too much,” even though my hero Blake said, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” Another image arises: a pair of scales held high in the air by the classical goddess Justice or Themis. And sometimes I hear in my mind the dreaded words engraved on the wall in the ancient Hebrew story of Nebuchadnezzar: “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting.” Yet a recent meditation yielded a different concept of balance. Quite suddenly, as happened to Olga, I was transposed to outer space where galaxies and stars were streaming past, turning on a great invisible axis. Occasionally some disturbance arose from within the cosmic soup, which upset the flow. These small upsets seemed to be initiated by parts of the system that were acting as if independent of the whole. Immediately, in every instance, the whole system rushed in to correct whatever damage might be caused by the temporary imbalance. Stars would gather together in groups to seal up gaps, while galaxies would reorganize their star patterns, using the swerves created in space to create new configurations of breathtaking beauty and meaning. The patterns restored were never the same as the patterns lost, broken or destroyed. This seemed to me a truer picture of cosmic balance than the concept of a mean between extremes or the image of the scales, for there was no element of condemnation involved. The thought that nothing I might do could ever destroy the harmony and 153

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balance of the whole took away all fear. Like the apparently errant parts, I could never go outside the mercy. This realization remained palpable for me throughout the week, removing my anxiety for my loved ones, myself, and even the planet itself, though I knew it was fragile and ephemeral, and that destructive human activities are at work defacing it. Yet at the same time the experience called me to be part of the restoration of the balance, part of human reparation to the planet for the damage done by human selfishness and greed. Out of this kind of experience the mystic Julian of Norwich was able to assert without naïveté or wishful thinking, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”44 Such pronouncements are grounded in unitive being, but one has to have an intuition of the experience to be convinced. Unaided reason cannot prove the reality of divine pattern-making, which isn’t a blind force but more like a beehive of creativity. It is not design imposed, but pattern emerging and at play. From the perspective of time, this restoration, or what the Kabbala calls Tikkun, seems to take eons to achieve, while individuals meanwhile suffer horrendously. The ancient mystery of evil and suffering remains problematic. Yet if we are beings who unite the temporal and the eternal, and the two states coexist in us, then even in the middle of suffering, timeless awareness can break in, infusing the moment with hope, not simply that the universe will fix things, but that we have the capacity to participate as part of the healing. Perhaps this is exactly what happened to Jesus on the cross and the reason was able to say, “Father forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing.” He held in his being the intuition that the balance destroyed by his unjust murder could be used by and through the greater whole. He had compassion for his enemies because he could see how they were unconsciously defacing their souls. He was not a passive victim, but one who chose to respond from a place where things are constantly made new. Because he carried this wisdom, even during the agony of torture, people later called him the Christ. Because he allowed this wisdom to pour through him, he became an embodiment of what some of the early Gnostics called the Logos-Sophia, a 154

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local embodiment of the Plērōma, the great fullness, or of Sophia, the divine feminine wisdom. Not all of us are called to sustain a vision of wholeness under such duress. But because he like Moses, the Buddha, Mohammad and others did sustain such a vision, something shifted in the body of the world, the world that includes us now. We too, in our own way, are capable of radiant acts of transforming love. At the end of my meditation, I glanced up at Olga’s mandalalike watercolour of the cosmic Christ in the centre of the sevenbranched candelabrum. I suddenly saw her drawing as a symbol of the law of cosmic balance incarnated in what Blake called “the human form divine.” The figure is similar in some ways like Michelangelo’s Vitruvian human. The human body, when fully filled with divine light, is itself a miracle of equipoise. This divine balance is constantly being recreated in all of us all the time, and to participate consciously in it, even within the realm of the imperfect, is to be fully alive. Another way of saying this is that the cosmic Christ of Olga’s painting represents evolutionary human consciousness fully expressing the creativity of the universe. We aren’t the only or highest form of “fearful symmetry,” but like Blake’s “Lamb” and “Tyger,” we are one among the many.

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Phaedrus You do not understand this revealing Years and years will pass before you have the faintest perception of its significance Nevertheless, you must hold on to it Your service is a descent. Starts high when you are young, then plummets down into things. So how could you know? Hunched over a computer screen shoulders again seared by sensation Three fingers strain to rub the ticklish shoulder nubs Drenched like cabbage leaves in dew invisible pleated skin erupts sheer wings, too tender for defence The Avian Lord soars somewhere in the ether while the cunning serpent of the Nile dreams dreams of flight45 156

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When thinking of Olga, I have from time to time asked myself: what is her spiritual lineage? Certainly she placed herself in the Christian mystical stream. Yet what kind of Christian mystic was she exactly? Are there precedents? Does she fit into a tradition or straddle various ones? My response to Olga was certainly shaped by my own study of Christian mysticism, as well as other world religions such as Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, and Sufism. So I wonder, as well, about my own lineage as it relates to that of Olga, my primary teacher. In university I discovered Plato, who became my favourite philosopher. You might say I was attracted to the Plato of the myths more than the Plato of the abstract paradigms, where he seemed to make a sharp division between time and eternity. I returned again and again to the myth of the charioteer and of the soul growing wings in the Phaedrus, the myths of Ur (his story of reincarnation) and of the cave in The Republic. I had less affinity with the Plato who argued that the body is the prison house of the soul, though I loved his dramatic dialogues. Interestingly, the mythic parts seemed to spring out of the dialogic bits and vice versa. Later, I realized Plato wasn’t as much a dualist as some of my professors had suggested. He helped me bring together reason with the mythopoeic imagination. Always his heightened poetic symbols and dramatic presentations seemed to exceed the abstract grids the critics imposed upon them. Plato’s account of the soul growing wings in the Phaedrus stimulated a powerful dream. Wet, moth-like nubs sprouted from between my tingling shoulder blades in the middle of the night. As I walked around the next day, I could still feel their warmth and rawness, the pleasant aching. Some critics have argued that a person comes hardwired as either a Platonist or an Aristotelian. According to this line of thought, the Platonist is more interested in the inner worlds and the Aristotelian in the outer workings of things—nature, science. If so, I clearly fell on the Platonic side of the spectrum. For most of my early life, if it were a contest between empirical science and transcendence, the imaginative, interior worlds would win hands down. Now I have come to recognize that to separate science from philosophy and religion is an oversimplification, not only of 157

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the Greek philosophers, but of the complex interweaving of our physicality and spirituality. Recently, it occurred to me that Olga’s sense of interdimensionality did not entail a devaluation of nature. Affirming transcendent worlds did not necessitate downgrading the physical world. She loved her garden and, like her beloved Master Jesus, drew her teachings from nature. She was an herbalist and adored birds—the flicker outside her window, the swallow skittering over the grass. Though Olga does not fit easily into a single lineage, I would say she was more Celtic than Platonic. That is, her sense of the interpenetration of the spiritual and physical realms is actually closer to the Celtic realms of faery that Yeats describes in The Celtic Twilight than to the more abstract reasoning of the philosophers. She was attuned to what the Celtic people called the “thin places” where one world verges on another, the liminal places. For her, this earth is a portion of heaven when seen from another angle. Besides the Celtic Olga, there is the Gnostic Olga. Though she strongly rejected one Gnostic teaching that Jesus did not actually die on the cross, her approach to spirituality is much closer to what we now know about some of these early communities than one might expect. When I was studying with her in the seventies, I became interested in the pre-Christian and early Christian communities (later called “Gnostic” by the orthodox Christians who opposed them as heretical) that thrived in Egypt and the Middle East in the second to the fourth centuries a.d. Many of these communities often met in homes and small groups; women were allowed to take leadership roles; there was no priesthood or complex hierarchy; and the emphasis was on each person’s potential for transformation into a Christos or Christ. I began reading twentieth-century scholars like Hans Jonas and g.s.r. Mead who translated and interpreted the extant Gnostic texts. It turns out that many of these diverse esoteric communities developed a mythology in which various spheres of life emanated from the Plērōma or divine fullness. The Christ’s counterpart in the Plērōma was the divine feminine Wisdom or Sophia, the feminine presence. Like Olga, the Gnostics spoke of multiple planes of 158

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being and visionary experiences. They were the esotericists of their era. I do not believe Olga knew a great deal about the early modern recovery of the lost Gnostic gospels. Many of these texts only became available to the wider public toward the end of her life. Since her death, however, more and more material has emerged based on the discovery of the Nag Hammadi codices of lost gospels found in Upper Egypt in 1945, two years before I was born. According to eminent scholars like Elaine Pagels, Karen King, Bruce Meyers and others, a clearer picture is now available of the existence of a mystical, alternative Christianity, violently suppressed by the early Church by the end of the fourth century. I am now convinced that had the church not been successful in eradicating many of these early Jesus traditions, Christianity might look very different than it does today. Looking back, I would say that many of Olga’s formulations were loosely Gnostic, as she too offered a mystical, heterodox form of Christianity free of dogma and creed. Some of the parallels between Olga’s teachings and those of the Gnostics involve liberation through inner knowing rather than belief, the sense that there are various levels of attainment and spheres through which the soul passes, and the idea that many of the concepts of God accepted by religious convention have been false and even destructive. A number of the Gnostic communities taught that, although the world seems dual, divided up between time and eternity, we can transcend this apparent duality to attain oneness, integration. Many of them taught that we are sparks of the divine light hidden in the world with the potential to become Christs. Recalling Olga dancing lightly on her feet about the cottage or communicating her latest revelation, evokes for me not just the Gnostic wisdom teachers of the early centuries of Christianity, but the even more ancient, pre-Christian figure of the shaman. I would call her a kind of mystical Christian shaman. There was something primal about her, something going back perhaps to Palaeolithic times. When I first read Black Elk Speaks, an account of the turnof-the-century Oglala Sioux medicine man from the Dakotas, edited by John G. Neihardt, I noted that Black Elk anticipated 159

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the decimation of his people in visions, prophesying their “end times” in the face of what is now widely recognized as cultural genocide. His writings are clearly apocalyptic. While in Paris on tour, he travelled in his soul body back to his home in Pine Hills, South Dakota, and later was able to confirm that what he saw happening with his family and tribe in a visionary state actually did occur.46 The West since the Enlightenment has embraced a form of materialism whereby realities of higher consciousness and multiple planes of reality are dismissed as subjective and unreal. Shamanic teachers and healers, whether on the steppes of Russia, the plains of North America, or in a simple cottage in Port Moody, live in a multi-tiered universe encompassed by the spirit world. They don’t question their direct links with the ancestors, the grandmothers and grandfathers. Olga and her lineage will not be pinned down, and she herself wasn’t interested in locating herself within a particular spiritual line. It was enough for her that she was a servant of Jesus of Nazareth, and that she had had a long and intimate association with him through more than one lifetime. She was not concerned whether the seekers who came to her located themselves within a particular tradition, but gladly welcomed all open-minded, inquiring spirits. The following poem on gnosis or direct knowing captures her spirit. Gnosis and Poesis We are the gnostic heresy distributing the sacrament embedding Christos, Dionysus rolling in your dreams (the burden of dreams) There are things we know They called us elitist, secretive, when the secret is open to all with ears (meaning Imagination) 160

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They said we were given over to closets, cloisters called us dualists though we said, Within and without are one The kingdom is laid out like barley in the fields Just because the conversation continued and something wanted to stop it barricade it in iron ships they made a dead man on a cross the sum who flew into our bodies as gold-limned light they called us orgiastic because we chanted the holiness of mind and body tumbling together because we wanted to embed the holy saying I don’t just believe but know walking the vision into bones and nostrils (aroma of now) Refusing the institutional clasp, sectarian shuffle, we became essemplastic reclaiming words irreducible as calla lilies All the vast technology gods cannot own the earth where fullness steps caressing the genomes in desire’s double dark47

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Midwifery When my mother tripped the light fantastic I stood as midwife culled words that released her as she hovered a while above my head listening as I spoke to the silent bedframe She dressed herself then in syllables redressed in a bed of vowels watched my brother circle the room’s narrowing square All was clear to her now for nothing could separate the love-filled A pair of freckled arms led her out to the Christ an amber man on a soft divan who whispered The place of your deepest resistance is the place of your deepest healing48 162

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Olga’s entire life was given over to the experience of the dissolution, if not erasure, of a line separating life and death, the living and those in another form of consciousness. So to write of her death or passing can give a false sense of separation. Yet our human sojourn in a particular body, born to particular parents, at a particular time and place is important. Each lifetime, each story, is part of a larger narrative. Particularity matters. We naturally cling to our bodies, commitments, associations, responsibilities, and loved ones. Having faith that “life goes on” does not ease the sense of loss we feel for those particular eyes, those irreplaceable gestures that will never return in exactly the same way. In 1984, it became clear to Olga’s immediate family that she could no longer manage in Patricia’s basement, even with the help of family, friends, and her faithful assistant Steve. So her son decided to establish her in the Three Links Care Facility in east Vancouver. When I first visited her there, Olga remarked, “My son wants me to think I’m in a retreat centre, but I know I’m in a nursing home. It’s all right, though.” Her tone was not ironic, judgmental or angry, just matter of fact. When my husband and I visited, we would find Olga seated in an armchair or reclining on the bed in her small room in her usual grey pantsuit and kerchief, studying the scriptures, or deep in contemplation. She seemed to carry her spiritual atmosphere with her as a snail carries its home on its back. Sometimes when in pain, she would add generous dollops of brandy to her tea. Once when I was carefully measuring out one teaspoonful at her request, she grabbed the bottle from my hands and made sure the cup overflowed with it. Since she did not usually drink, it was clear she was in more pain than I had imagined. Though her short-term memory was “in and out,” as she put it, her contemplative thoughts were as resonant as ever, and her laughter as contagious. Several times she asked if I could do some research for her on new scientific developments about long-term versus short-term memory, the interrelation of the various regions of the brain that related to memory, and whether or not scientists were interested 163

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in the impact of meditation on the structures and chemistry of the brain. Olga wanted hard science. Unfortunately, I was so wrapped up in my graduate studies that I did not follow through for her. What I remember most about our visits during that time were the moments just before leaving. Often my husband, Olga and I would find ourselves in the hallway in what we used to call “the big huddle,” though it was less of a football huddle than a “love huggle.” We would lean into our circle with our arms drawn around one another. More and more, Olga developed severe pain in her stomach, and she likely died of stomach cancer, though at 94 no one was proposing invasive tests. After we heard she had been removed to palliative care in a nearby hospital, my husband dropped by her ward on the way home from university to see how she was doing. There he found her in various states of cognitive awareness: once sleeping peacefully, then another time fiercely gripping the railing of her bed, holding on with all her might, unaware of his presence. On returning home he asked, “Is there such a thing as a ‘death grip’? Olga was clinging to her bed. I could not even lift her fingers off the railing she was so strong, yet oblivious to me being there.” It struck us as affecting that someone so aware of the life after death, and who had helped many friends and acquaintances through that transition, would herself be resisting death with such intensity. In one way I was surprised that Olga would fight so determinedly to live, since she had always spoken of accepting death as the gateway from one state of consciousness to another, as simply stepping into a larger room. Yet it is evident that mystics and advanced souls are not necessarily spared suffering and do not always slide gracefully away just because they have cultivated an awareness of interior dimensions and the art of letting go. In fact, almost every great spiritual teacher I have studied speaks of the mysteries of suffering as well as the mysteries of joy. The first thing the young Siddhartha noted about the outer world was the conjunction of age, death and suffering. As Blake says, “Joy and woe are woven fine.” The compilers of the stories of Jesus might easily have edited 164

Olga in her garden in east Vancouver, c.1961. Photos courtesy of Jim Park.

Susan McCaslin and Olga, c.1980. Photo courtesy of Mark Haddock.

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out the account of him crying out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” in an effort to make him seem more God-like. But allowing the words of the Psalmist to burst from him at the moment of his death is essential not just in connecting him to David and the prophets, but also in revealing his humanity. If I learned anything from Olga’s life and passing, it is that none of us is exempt from suffering. One of Olga’s students, potter and visual artist Peter Daniels, was with Olga at the moment of her passing. When he and his wife heard Olga might not last much longer, they cut short their holiday, going straight to St. Paul’s hospital in Vancouver where they were told by the nurse that Olga might not make it to morning. They returned the next day. Peter approached Olga’s bedside and clasped her hand. Under his breath he intoned the Lord’s Prayer, just as Olga had spoken it so many times before, pausing after the word “forever” in the phrase, “forever and ever, Amen.” As he came to the word “forever,” it seemed to him as if Olga were waiting, her breathing pausing ever so slightly. As soon as he said the “Amen,” she flew like a bird from her body.49 A few weeks after Olga’s death, we attended her memorial service. Though the service honoured her life, and stories were shared about her contribution as a wife and mother, nothing was said about her spiritual writings, her work as a spiritual director, and her esoteric studies. The minister did not know her, and it seemed somewhat odd that such a service would take place in a church, given that she had avoided them for decades. Although there was much good will and love expressed at the service, Mark and I felt that Olga was not there. About a year after her death, I began to have a succession of dreams about Olga. Always I would be searching for her, and at last, I found her living outside Vancouver in another small cottage near a lake. We held hands and had a brief visit; then it was time for me to go. In these recurrent dreams I would always feel some self-recrimination for not having come sooner or more often. My mentor was here in the same area all the time and I had not even bothered to look her up! How could I have ignored her for so long? 167

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Finally, in one particularly vivid dream in 2000, I struck up the courage to phone her and heard her say, not in a blaming, but a factual manner, “Why, all you had to do all along was pick up the phone.” How easy she made it seem, and yet how hard. I puzzled for months over just what “picking up the phone” might entail at the psychic and spiritual levels. Sometimes I would think I had it figured out, but at other times it was as if I was on permanent hold. Yet the message somehow fit with her teachings on how communication between various planes of being is governed by scientific laws. In the intervening years, I have at times felt she and I were one, “closer than breathing, nearer than hands and feet.” Once we had a long conversation, much of which I could not retrieve from memory on waking. Other times I feel I have unconsciously removed myself from her. Often, though, I have the sense she is much closer than I know. Eighteen years later I midwifed my own biological mother through death. The poem with which this vignette begins was written for my dear mother Phyllis, who lived to the age of 81. In 2003, when I received word that Mom would not be with us much longer, I spent the last afternoon and evening by her side, reading her favourite scriptures and prayers. When I entered the nursing home in Redmond, Washington, saw her ashen face, and heard her laboured breathing, I grasped her hand and told her how much I loved her. I said that if she needed more time she should take it, but that if she was ready to move on we would all be fine. Though her body was lying on the bed, I distinctly saw her hovering in the ceiling, looking down at me and at her own body below. A few hours later, I returned to my hotel room, receiving the call the next morning that she had quietly departed in the early hours of the next day. I felt she had waited until my arrival to say goodbye.

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Arctic Sophia

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have had two significant visions of pools: the one

described earlier when first embarking on my spiritual path at the age of twenty-two when I made my way through a bog of murky pools to touch the hem of the garment of the cosmic Christ among a grove of trees. A second came at the age of sixtyone as part of a late mid-life reawakening. The first arrived when I was in the process of establishing an identity, and the latter when it was time to let go of the one I had constructed. Though visions have a particular dream logic, they remain mysterious. Dreams and visions are themselves pools, reservoirs, stagnant or quick, places where the perceiver reflects on herself, mirroring origins. Recently, a vision involving pools recurred, but this time, rather than pools of entrapment, they were crystalline pools set like sapphires in an Arctic landscape. Afterwards, I wrote: I am travelling through a landscape of ice fields, snowcovered mountains, and azure skies. Stretched before me are pools of glacial-blue intensity, some nestled into ice grottos and caves. Steam rises from their surfaces and they beckon from a distance—hot springs, geothermal dazzlers, warm eyes gazing up out of the permafrost. A group of us, tourists and pilgrims, makes its way from a log lodge and hikes across the snowfields to the first of the hidden pools, where we strip off our heavy gear and plunge into its welcoming warmth, as at a resort or spa. I remove my backpack, parka, clothing, and boots and plunge in naked. The waters relax yet invigorate, 169

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melting away what seem like decades of stress. After a day exploring a few more of these hot spring grottos, I dress and make my way back toward the lodge. As I enter the building, I notice a side door that leads to a small room where it is whispered a wise woman is “telling fortunes.” Curious, I wait in line for my turn to receive a few words from the sage. Finally, I step inside an unadorned room with no furnishings, nothing on the walls. At one end in a far corner I see a very aged woman resembling Olga lying on the floor on a pallet or stretcher. It appears she is dying; yet her eyes are the exact shade of blue as the arctic pools. She is clearly a living embodiment of the Arctic landscape, white-headed but with eyes like sapphires. She signals me to kneel beside her bed and tell my story. I do so and pour out all my cares, relating how I have recently retired and feel a bit lost, uncertain whether to write another book, study French, offer a workshop on the mystics, or travel to Turkey. I confess in tears how I’m having trouble reinventing myself, and that I feel like a failure. Then I blurt out that I’m also feeling my age— 61—and have new aches and pains, the start of arthritis, a back problem, some grey hairs. Through all my babbling, she remains silent, while absorbing, holding a space for my confusion, shame, grief, and fear. I have never experienced such absolute, non-judgmental attention. Yet as I speak again of aging, she unexpectedly throws back her head in a long laugh. At first, I’m embarrassed, assuming she’s laughing at me; then I realize it’s absurd that I should be telling this “Ancient of Days” how very old I feel. From her perspective, I’m a child. As I notice her creased face, the face of the oldest person I’ve ever seen, I grasp the absurdity of my whining and start to laugh too, for her laughter is infectious, a compelling outburst of sheer, unadulterated joy. Finally, I stop and wait for a word from her, my Sophia, Mother, and Friend. For I’m suddenly aware 170

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this being before whom I am kneeling is absolute Being, Becoming, beyond all dualities, is God, is the whole of the wide universe compressed into the form of a very old woman. Then she bends forward, clasps my hands, locks eyes with mine, and enunciates slowly—“be bold!” As I’m yanked out of the vision, I ask, “Who is this woman?” and a voice reverberates three times, “Sophia, Sophia, Sophia.” Bold! In that moment, radiance plays in her face that makes her seem young, and being bold seems the most natural thing in the world. The stretcher or deathbed is more like a maternity bed. There is no more for her to say or for me to receive. I am dismissed. At first I had the impression the figure in the vision was Olga; yet on leaving the dream I was told she represented Sophia. Clearly, Olga was and remains a Sophia figure for me; and the aged one of my dream was archetypal. Now I see how both the personal and transpersonal interpretations are simultaneously true. The figure in the dream is both Olga and an embodiment of Hagia Sophia, Holy Wisdom. Facing the next stage of my life I ask, what does “being bold” mean specifically for me? Bold. The short, crisp, West Saxon word contains the word “old” but is not limited by it. It is stark, a spitfire utterance reminding one of “Eric the Bold” or some Viking conqueror, but clearly applies to the spiritual realms. Did Sophia mean “bold” like the Arctic landscape itself, deep blue contrasted to gelid white? Or bold, like the opposites fire and ice, containing a union of opposites? Or bold like a mother who has cast off the kind of mothering I felt was expected of me for some new mode of being? Through the encounter with Sophia I remain emboldened. Reading recent reports of melting glaciers in the Arctic, I see too that Arctic Sophia’s message is pragmatic and political. It is a call to address the impacts on the earth of human technological development and unsustainable consumption. It is not at all 171

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surprising that such experiences resonate at both the personal and the socio-political levels, one not cancelling out the other. The ancient earth mother is sick and dying because of the activities of humans; yet she is calling us to join her in the work of earth restoration. She will survive, but we may not unless we join with her in the bold work of repairing what we have damaged. I did not know it at the time, but a few years later I would be drawn into an environmental cause related to the saving of a local rainforest in my neighborhood. The poetry I was soon to write would increasingly concern itself with our endangered global ecosystems. I would be getting bolder.

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Geothermal Speaking

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onths later, while facilitating a workshop on the

mystics and struggling over how much of my interior experience to share, I realized Sophia’s words constituted permission to go deeper with the group. In Indigenous cultures, the elders teach us to refrain from speaking of one’s innermost sacred experiences in youth, but to wait for the right timing, to wait for a commissioning. Though I have had these sorts of visionary dreams periodically since my early 20s, until this time, like Olga, I had generally kept them to myself, sharing them only with my husband and a few close friends. Now Sophia says it is time to “be bold,” to cast off my concerns that others will think me eccentric or even egocentric. The visions are not mine to hold onto, and the time has come to get myself out of the way and open up a space for the bubbling forth of the clear blue geothermal waters. Later, I sensed that something had shifted since conversing with Sophia. As a second-wave feminist of the seventies, I had long ago embraced gender-neutral language for God or the divine, and abandoned my childhood notion of God as a guy in the sky looking down from outside the world, offering love and mercy as well as judgment. Intellectually I knew all about the feminine divine. In “The Wisdom Poems,” I had written about Hokhmah or the figure of Wisdom (Sophia) in Jewish mysticism. I had delved into Jungian psychology that speaks of the animus and anima within each psyche. I had never been an essentialist, never associated the feminine exclusively with the maternal and nurturing and the masculine with the intellectual and active. Yet 173

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since this encounter with Sophia, a change had occurred in the deepest part of me. For now when I pray or meditate, I see the feminine face of the divine, the living face of Sophia or Holy Wisdom as the Ancient of Days. Now I know viscerally that the divine unity can be imagined in multitudinous ways—as an old man, a woman, a child, a lover, a grain of sand. To a dog, God may be a dog; to a lion, a lion. We cherish the divine names and images we are given, holding them lightly until it is time to let them go.

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A Tapestry of Fragments

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A Tapestry of Fragments for Olga One day it comes: the big commission for which one is totally inadequate Once the master Jesus came to her saying, “Will you do this for me? When she replied she couldn’t possibly, he said, “Never mind, I will perform it” So such things get done but the doer does nothing except to sit and wait watching the beautiful fragments of tapestry fall into patterns as when the spirited vermilion leaves of the vine maples wed the cast off rags of the plum Today I am sewing some pieces of her broad but secret life

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the sweep of it, the grandeur few know or will know but when I find myself among the arc of students on the floor, or rising from my seat to speak, the words are a chapter of an older story, a piece of a cloth woven before my birth Those who are not good with their hands may be weavers of words Seen from the back the threads seem all loosened and askew What do I need to know about the view when the pattern is spread out whole?50 As mentor and friend, Olga has not passed out of my life to become a mere memory. Much of what she taught had to do with her experience of the life beyond death, so contact with her after she surrendered her body in 1985 was not a surprise. In fact, she told me many times that death cannot separate those who truly love each other. Yet it is not as if she drops in for tea in some kind of ghostly form, or is anything like an “earthbound” spirit. In one of my dream visions from over a decade ago, I found myself at a wedding party, wandering among the crowd in a garden. I entered a large house and a grand foyer where I spotted Olga. I could not believe my eyes at first. She looked much as she had in her later years, but perhaps a bit younger. Her eyes conveyed delight about a great surprise she had prepared. I asked not in doubt, but as an expression of incredulous joy—“Is it really you?” As we embraced, I knew nothing had changed between us. 176

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She leads me to a small well-lit room off the central corridor. It is set up as a classroom, but the desks are arranged in an arc with spaces between them, rather than in rows. And instead of writing, the students (about six to eight of them) are working individually on pieces of a tapestry. They are doing a kind of hand weaving on frames, as well as fine needlework. Olga gives me to understand that I’m to teach this class and see to the coordination of the fragments of the tapestry. I feel totally inadequate, for I’m trained to teach English literature, and not at all skilled at handicrafts. Yet I agree to do whatever she asks. She takes me aside and we talk a bit more. All I remember of this conversation is the sense that she is entrusting me with something very important. After accepting, I become separated from her again and find my husband in the wedding crowd out in the garden. Not having given much thought to this dream-vision, I now find myself writing a book about mysticism that weaves together fragments from Olga’s life, my own, and mystical tradition. I have also facilitated a number of workshops in which people discuss mysticism, and, if they feel comfortable doing so, share their mystical experiences in a small-group setting. I remember too that Olga undertook a lengthy study of the New Testament she called “A Tapestry of Fragments.” The wedding context of my vision has biblical resonances of the wedding at Cana, the marriage supper of the Lamb, and the union of the bride and groom referred to by Jesus in his parables, suggesting a joyous and creative celebration. Olga herself came from a family of weavers, as weaving was the profession of many of her ancestors. The metaphor of weaving permeated Olga’s life. Collectively we need to weave together a vaster tapestry. We are all and each co-creators in the act of shaking out a fabric wide and varied enough to enfold our planetary diversities. I cherish another dream in which each person is bringing a precious piece of fabric bearing a tale or story to be woven into the whole. In this open cosmos, every person’s contribution enriches and is enriched by the whole. 177

Interspiritual Conferencing

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Just the Other Night I saw Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed on a tufted slope overlooking a city which could have been Jerusalem or Istanbul sharing coffee in brown stoneware mugs they had shaped from earth’s sweet coffers and none of them was preaching or arguing with the others about anything because they were tracking the course of a small black ant struggling to attain a crest of its choosing How to help without interfering was all their concern and admiration of the rich soil which cupped them, beautiful shards against a sea-dropped sky51

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ince revisiting olga’s lifelong manifestations of

Jesus, I have concluded there is a field of living images and beings within consciousness that humans co-create through active participation. Cultural conditioning in part determines how we interpret this realm, but the relation between experience and belief is reciprocal. In most of the mystical traditions there is a complementary imageless realm that cannot be named—the great 178

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silence, the unconditioned, the uncreated. This placeless place has been called the source of all phenomena, the very ground of being. We can’t say much about this invisible source, but we can be one with it. For me, the place of the unnameable is where the various religions meet. It is important to honour the diversity and uniqueness of our spiritual traditions. They cannot all be reduced to a sameness. I have crossed through and beyond Christian dogma but still locate myself within a Christian mystical stream. I have moved beyond “isms.” I do not believe it is contradictory to say I am on the Christ path, yet fully interspiritual at the same time. It is not surprising that Olga would behold Jesus with her inward eye, a Muslim appeal to the Prophet, or a Buddhist seek to embody Buddha mind. I find it amusing, in fact, that when numinous figures appear in people’s visionary experiences they are often wearing robes and sandals. We clothe these universal energies in the imagery of our various traditions. We co-create from what we know, but this process doesn’t mean the visions are subjective or unreal. Olga once related a dream in which Christ, Mohammad, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and other spiritual teachers were seated on a grassy knoll overlooking a plain. She came upon them as they discussed spiritual matters with the utmost casualness and good humour. No one was fighting with anyone about anything (though there might have been some points of animated discussion), but all were excited about the interconnections among their various teachings and paths. In an echoing vision of mine years later, Jesus was sitting crosslegged as the Buddha is depicted in sacred art, and the Buddha was stretched out in the posture of a cross, with legs crossed one over the other and arms stretched wide on either side. They were laughing, chatting, having a picnic. I was struck by the irony of the various religions duking it out in the valley below, while their founders were enjoying each other’s company.

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A Posthumous Gifting

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few years after taking early retirement at 60, I

ventured off with my husband on a trip to Turkey and Greece. Toward the end of our vacation, I suddenly developed a strange sensation of numbness and tingling in my feet and arms. Because of severe neurological disorders on both sides of my family, and because my dad died of als, I panicked. As the symptoms intensified, I relived my father’s progressive loss of muscular control and his untimely death at the age of 66. When I returned home I underwent a series of neurological tests to determine the cause of my intensifying symptoms. While awaiting the results of mri scans and other tests, I often found myself weeping and shaking uncontrollably. On one particularly difficult day, an unexpected parcel arrived in the mail. Out tumbled several of Olga’s hand-made, illuminated booklets of luminous gold and turquoise lettering that I had never before seen. The parcel had been sent by an old friend I had not been in touch with since the late seventies; a man who had also been one of Olga’s students, but who later moved to the west coast of Vancouver Island. Jan, one of the former “boys,” was divesting himself of possessions and remembered I had inherited Olga’s writings and other memorabilia. He decided to track me down and send these small booklets with their delicate calligraphy. The first booklet, encased in a cream-coloured cover of heavy embossed paper, is titled “The Message of the Lotus Flower.” As I held the books in my palms, I had the distinct impression Olga had sent them to me personally as a gift, and that her timing was impeccable. 180

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At the time, as well as being distraught about my health, I had been struggling with the question of whether Olga’s Christian mysticism would have relevance to people from other religious traditions, or for those who are seeking a more interspiritual path. From the time I began to write of my years with her, I had wanted to convey the universality of her teachings. Since high school, I had not considered Christianity the exclusive or “only way,” or that the Christian tradition with its devotion to Jesus superior to other religious traditions. My grandmother used to collect National Geographic magazine and prominently displayed a Time Life special issue on world religions on her coffee table. She transferred her fascination about world religions to me. Olga too honoured other traditions. Although she said repeatedly that the cosmic Christ was the “most advanced” being known to her, she also wrote as early as 1960: This is not to say that fellowship with spirit and holy guidance is confined or reserved to professing Christians. On the contrary, it is experienced by people of all races and faiths whose channels of reception are not blocked by the fixation that God’s revelation of truth is limited to one particular race or religion.52 Increasingly as she aged, Olga focussed on how the creative intelligence within all had been working through the world’s diverse spiritual traditions throughout and before human history. She felt, however, that the work of Jesus was unique, global, and universal. Yet in my hands I held evidence of her poetic effort to conjoin the imagery and wisdom of East and West. The text read: My Peace I give to you. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a Lotus Flower whose beauty glows 181

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the more exquisitely against the darkness of the depths that brought it forth. My Peace I leave with you. As I read the words of the poem contained in the booklet—for a poem it was—the knot in my stomach untied. The two phrases, “My peace I give to you” and “My peace I leave with you,” framed the poem with a blessing. The holy synchronicity of these words entered my heart as direct assurance both from the cosmic Christ, and from Olga, that whatever the outcome of the medical tests, all would somehow be well. In what I came to call her “kingdom of heaven poem,” Olga echoes the familiar “like unto” sayings of Jesus about the kingdom of heaven (the kingdom of heaven is “like unto” a child, a sower, a seed, a man, a woman) and made them new. By referring to the sacred lotus of the East instead of the biblical “lilies of the field” or Dante’s white rose of heaven of the West, she had created a new synthesis. Her words about how the beauty of the lotus “glows even more exquisitely/ against the darkness/ of the depths/ that brought it forth” anchored me to my own mysterious deeps. The image of the lotus rising out of the darkened field, primordial matter, chaos, the depths, was a cosmological statement about the beauty that constantly arises, both seed and flower, from the mystery of unknowing. As I read the words, I suddenly knew that somehow those depths, however unknowable, were producing in me the astounding miracle of the full-blown lotus, a flower that already is. After receiving Olga’s gift, I began each day’s meditation by slowly reading the poem and letting its peace flow into my body, mind, and spirit. Soon I had it memorized and referred back to it throughout the day. This one small poem saved me from crippling anxiety, arriving at the timeliest time from my dearest friend. After several months, the doctor pronounced I had no serious neurological disorder, but a mild peripheral neuropathy for 182

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which the medical profession cannot find a cause. My disorder was not “presenting” like my father’s fatal illness, and I was told it was not going to morph into loss of muscular control. Since then, the symptoms have diminished so much that I am barely aware of them. Not everyone is so fortunate, but I hope that had the diagnosis been dire, I would somehow have been able to walk through the uncertainty and suffering holding the peace of the lotus. This does not mean I would have been free from fear, but 183

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gave me hope that some part of me has the capacity to remain grounded despite whatever comes. I still ask myself, how did Olga manage the timing? What is her awareness of me now? How are we linked and how does our friendship thrive? And would I not just love to have a long conversation with her in the flesh? The writing of this book has been part of that ongoing conversation.

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Who Am I?

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Prayer of Opening I am body, soul, and spirit and I am that I Am that builds this body and is me and not me in the beginning that is always beginning so I honour this body from which I Am is never separate until I consign my solar system of cells and nerves to the sea from which I Am comes again making me and all that is over and over new from a mind-mine of endless surprise When the little self that has served me so well slumbers and sleeps the great I Am opens its eye 185

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casting its nameless name into the world I am silent unimposing to the outer eye effective in thought and speech atomic in compassion claiming nothing for myself out of this everything I Am53 Between 1982 and 1983, when Olga was 92, she initiated regular phone conversations with one of her learners, Pauline Mowat, to explore the timeless question: Who Am I? Pauline, now ninety-six, engages in similar conversations on the phone with me each week. Often at the beginning of a phone call Olga would exclaim, “Thank God for Alexander Graham Bell!” She was fascinated with technology and would have embraced the electronic media of today, but also would have been wary of its incursions on the contemplative life. When I examined Pauline’s written record of Olga’s thoughts as spoken over the phone, it seemed more like a series of aphorisms or wisdom sayings than a conversation or theological discussion. Olga begins by considering our genetic and socio-cultural identity, but emphasizes our spiritual origins and purpose. She focuses on the nature of consciousness, which she considers the ultimate miracle and mystery. These pioneering sayings suggest a spiritual evolutionary perspective. Olga felt that Darwin’s studies on the adaptation of species were ground-breaking. However, she also thought materialist interpretations of Darwin did not address the reality of a divine source of intelligence embedded within evolutionary processes, or that evolution proceeds more by co-operation than by “survival of the fittest.” Her sense of the consciousness of the universe was quite different from what fundamentalists call “intelligent design,” for it doesn’t require a creator who stands outside the process. Olga’s reflections on the question “Who Am I” suggest that individual consciousness is located within a more comprehensive 186

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divine intelligence, and that the process of evolution itself is an expression of higher mind emerging in acts of love, creativity and discovery. According to Olga, our human I am-ness is located within the greater I-am-ness of the whole, or within what she called God, the eternal consciousness. From Who Am I?54 (unpublished notes from a series of phone conversations between Olga Park and Pauline Mowat)55 A new system is required in which you receive the light of understanding for a new going forward. There have continually, through the centuries, come into earthlife spiritual and intellectual pioneers who have introduced new visions and new paths. So the average person of individual and private inspiration had to choose among many paths of belief already established. Any person who believed and lived by his or her own inner conviction was called a “heretic” because that person didn’t belong to any of the patterns of belief and understanding already established. The pattern of the stars is the relation of one awareness with another. I think God is the whole of this and the intelligence of it. I didn’t realize this at the time, years ago, when I decided to set aside a little room devoted to higher consciousness activity. Everything operates by vibration. Everything operates in a pattern. God works in patterns. The body has an aura, invisible and perhaps insubstantial. It comes from the within. It’s an energy. The universe operates in layers. It is as if the physical of earth were surrounded by vibrational circles. People were drawn to Jesus because they wanted to know about the soul, mind and spirit and how they work together. The Master said it was by desire that you receive awareness from those who are within the higher realms of life. All people are going forward by their own desire, which brings response from the higher and more sensitive realms. This is the law of life. It is the same at all levels. It is by the within. Anybody can know the awareness and have it, just as soon as they are ready. 187

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Life is continual development and going forward. It is the desire within the soul that will bring the going forward. All life is going forward, so we must leave that which we know and go to where we have to learn the new. We have built sounds representing things (language). As regards to writing a book, start where you are, and before you know it you have a book. We incarnate in order to learn. God must tolerate this, so we must do the same with others. The light of wisdom is a tiny spark within that has to be cultivated. Everything is a pattern within a pattern within a pattern. “Be-ing perfect” is living and knowing you are the Christconsciousness. We are going into higher awareness and our physical is going to be transformed into the body in the higher consciousness. The fulfillment is evolution. It is God’s way of working. What is new was there all the time in embryo. I know that whatever happens to me, eventually circumstances pull me out of it. I know this because life is balance and the law of God is progressive. All life is balance. A miracle has to be a living potential—not a great one doing something. It is God within, emerging. God is the reality of a more wonderful and fascinating creativity. This is the greatest miracle of all—awareness. The purpose of God was not and is not by dying and coming to life again in another dimension. It is by the soul and soul body being raised to a higher level of conscious life. Look, behold a door, a door open— is a parable of evolution within humanity. First you look; then what you see is the means by which you see. The purpose of God is the going forward from the I-me-mine level to I am eternally. “I Am” means eternal consciousness. The God-purpose in human life on earth is to raise the conscious level in an orderly progression, culminating in the Godconsciousness. The evolution of humanity is not automatic and instinctive. It is a response. One might presume that the within is the objective which is 188

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perfect, and then projected into the without as a related condition— but this is not so. It can’t be perfect (whole, complete). It has to be a process. Substance is not something made out of nothing, but is the essence of reality in transition from one dimension to another. The great lack is the ability to think. Contemplative thinking makes the spiritual contact effective. The dependence on mechanical contrivances causes people to do less and less thinking. The most important thing Jesus ever said was, “The kingdom of heaven is within you.” When your thinking leads to discernment of a higher dimension, you have the pearl of great price. God is in all, the source of all at all levels. We must be in school—to learn an entirely new outlook and objective. The Master told me the pattern of operation of evolution is to descend into conditions (where death reigns) but to retain, not only the ideal of, but wisdom and power of the God-consciousness from which he came. This is not a sacrifice but a demonstration of principle. You don’t resist evil, but swallow it up—take it in and dissolve it and transform it. Spirit at the earth level is like fire, existing of itself, not by destruction of some other element. It is like the burning bush seen and experienced by Moses. The within that becomes the without is a process (it is not perfect). Substance is not something made out of nothing, but the essence of reality in transition from one dimension to another. You can lose your three-fold personality (body, mind, emotions) as it is, but not your essential being. We are part of the life energy populating the planet. Energy grows; if held back it explodes the containers. Contemplative thinking makes spiritual contact effective. I have thought for some time that God is the unity of male and female. Self-will prevents the wisdom of God, but self-will is the agent of the wisdom of God. The experience of spiritual reality is essential to evolution. 189

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hat do you think of when you hear the word mysticism?” I once asked this question of a writer at a literary gathering. “Mystics are quietists, navel-gazers,” she responded. For her, a mystic is someone who dwells blissfully in the present, unconcerned with politics or with actively engaging the public sphere. Nothing to my mind could be further from the truth. Though Olga led no protest rallies, she did take political positions and wrote letters expressing her views. As noted earlier, in the sixties she also served as the Canadian representative of the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical Research, making efforts to open up dialogue in the mainline Protestant churches about the need for a more inclusive and experiential Christianity. In the seventies, she commended the then current premier of British Columbia, Dave Barrett, when he knocked at her door, for improving the transit system in her area. She supported politicians who were committed to serving the public domain, noting how the political tensions between various factions stem from conflict between greed, short-term vision, and expediency versus the common good. Publically recognized political figures like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, though not strictly speaking “mystics,” were visionaries in whom the contemplative was united with the activist. For Gandhi, action arose from non-violent “soul force,” satyagraha, and for Dr. King, from his deep faith and sense of equality and justice. Mystics and spiritual leaders with soul force are people whose interior illuminations can explode in fireworks, 190

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offering light to the communities around them. Often such people are not only contemplatives but activists. Though Olga was less visible, a kind of hidden mystic in the world, her interior life had a ripple effect on others. Olga saw her lineage teacher Jesus as one who embodied principles that could bring about “a kingdom of heaven on earth.” Barefoot Francis of Assisi heeded voices and visions that led him to found a new religious order based on simplicity, anti-materialism, and respect for all living things. He has been called the patron saint of the ecological movement. Hildegard of Bingen, as prioress of her order in twelfth-century Germany, travelled widely, conversing with popes, shaping liturgy, and creating public forms of art and music that still resonate today. She wrote botanical and medical texts, three books of visions, and even manuals on sexuality. The sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila rode around Spain in donkey carts founding reformed Carmelite convents, contemplative orders that refused to serve the leisured elite, places where people could cultivate the contemplative life. People of mystical awareness often find themselves acting for the good of the world, not simply out of duty, but through the overflow of the contemplative state itself—compassion, empathy, and a sense of justice. Often they feel the urge to dedicate themselves to serving the world precisely because they have experienced directly the profound interconnection of things. Many environmental activists I have known through my husband’s work say their call to activism issued from some sort of numinous experience in nature that made them realize nature’s intrinsic value and inherent right to be protected. Not all activists would call themselves spiritual, religious, or mystical, but many are motivated to direct political action by their appreciation of the beauty and mystery of the natural world, their sense of awe and reverence in the presence of something larger than themselves. Mystics’ unitive awareness prevents them from separating outer and inner, this world and possible others, matter and its invisible counter side. Their lives often become sites where interior experience and outward action for social change converge. Once when Olga and I were seated on her sofa talking about 191

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the space race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, she pointed out that our technology, despite its marvels, had been used to manipulate nature to the planet’s detriment, and our own. “How sad,” she said, “that humans think by planting their little tokens of ownership on the moon, they are progressing.” Not all mystics are activists in an overtly political way, but something about the contemplative life calls for engagement with the world—“incarnation”—to use religious language. It is clear there is a dynamic correlation between mysticism and activism, but why? Olga thought of prayer as a form of activism whose inner workings we do not yet understand. She often spoke of having a vocation of prayer and praise and would spend hours at her altar praying for particular individuals and for the world. Prayer for her was not an appeal to a superior being outside the world to grant favours, but a means of becoming one with evolutionary emergence. When Olga promised to pray for me, I knew she meant she would focus her full attention on my issue or problem and release me to divine guidance. Not only her prayers, but her entire way of mindful living now seems to me both a political act in the largest sense and a prayer. Once in 1973 when my husband was visiting, she asked him what was going on “out there” in the world. Olga had no television or radio, nor did she read the newspaper. She said she had had an unusual vision the night before of an object hurtling through space with the potential to cause harm. Then she saw “the Christ light” stream out towards it and lasso the object so that it came under control. We marveled at her account, because the news had been dominated by concerns that Skylab was falling back into the Earth’s atmosphere, and nasa was uncertain where this space station might land. Everyone feared it might crash in a populated area and kill or injure people if it didn’t burn up entirely on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. In the end, Skylab plummeted down in a rural part of Australia and no one was harmed. Olga was not at all surprised to learn this, for she had seen the Christ energies surround and contain the potential disaster beforehand. Recently, and for the first time since I marched in Seattle against 192

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the Vietnam War, I became a fully committed activist. In October of 2013, I discovered the Township of Langley was proposing to sell a beautiful rainforest near our home, a twenty-five acre parcel of public land composed of mixed coniferous and deciduous trees with high biological diversity values. Provincial environment agency reports indicated it harboured three species of owls and was prime habitat for at risk and endangered species. It contained a gigantic black cottonwood that a local dendrologist said could be up to 400 years old. The Township was determined to sell the forest in order to build a recreation centre in a neighbouring community. Developers were poised to purchase the land and build estate homes, as the Township had advertised it for sale and had written offers to purchase in hand. Having recently retired from more than thirty-five years as an instructor of English and Creative Writing, I found myself free to plunge into a local grassroots campaign to raise awareness about what was called by some McLellan Forest East. My contribution was to bring together poetry, music, and the visual arts to draw media attention to the forest’s plight. During a more than three-month campaign, I had the sense that Olga was with me, inspiring me to commit entirely to this initiative. A restless unrest rose up, as if from the forest floor, and seized me. I dropped everything else I was doing and gave myself completely to working for and with the forest and the community. Soon after organizing an “art in the park” event that gathered local poets, a dancer, environmental activists, educators, children, elders, and the general public, I wrote in a poem: “I fell in love with a forest and became an activist.” The forest then began giving me poems. Often I had wondered what it would take to motivate a contemplative poet like me to fully engage with a political issue. The answer was simple: the beauty of biodiversity. I had no choice. Though I knew the personal act of writing poetry was intrinsically political in the largest sense, this communal effort required of me a new level of political engagement. I spent my days and nights working with a grassroots group Watchers of Langley Forests (wolf), strategizing about how to bring public 193

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attention to the issue, then building on the momentum of our first successful art event. The issue was soon covered by the local, then regional, and later the national press. Renowned visual artist Robert Bateman came to the forest and spoke to reporters. The story was told in the Globe and Mail and Global tv News. A choir performed in the forest at Christmas. Busloads of students from a local high school (Langley School of Fine Arts) arrived to create and perform their art in the woods and later present it at a local coffee house. Several of those students made a documentary film. Local visual artist Susan J. Falk began to paint the trees and offered an art exhibition of her work at a local gallery, donating the proceeds of a silent auction to our campaign. Inspired by the ancient Chinese poet Han Shan who hung his poems from trees and scrawled them on rocks at Cold Mountain, I spearheaded what I called the Han Shan Poetry Initiative. Over two hundred poets from all over Canada and as far away as the uk, Australia and Turkey sent in forest poems that were then suspended from the trees in plastic paper protectors. Soon poems were fluttering from the trees, gently tied with ribbon with the help of members of wolf. People came from all over the lower mainland to stroll in the forest and read poetry honouring this ecosystem. After months of media coverage and overwhelming public support, the Township decided to take sixty percent of the forest off the market but to sell the remaining forty percent. Then a local woman, Mrs. Ann Blaauw, who heard about the issue in the papers, stepped forward to purchase the whole property to ensure it become an ecological reserve into perpetuity, dedicated to the memory of her husband Tom. The property is now held in trust by Trinity Western University to be maintained as the Blaauw Eco Forest. Certainly not all such local initiatives are successful. After hearing from other activists whose forests have been razed, I realize things converged for us in a series of almost miraculous ways. It was as if the trees had entered my dreams. Many of us involved, whether religious or not, had an uncanny sense of providence as events progressed. I could not help feeling I 194

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was part of a powerful force field. Something wanted the forest saved. In poetry, a synecdoche is a figure of speech in which the part embodies and reflects the whole. These particular Western Red Cedars, Douglas Firs, Western Hemlocks, and Black Cottonwoods, are parts of an increasingly narrowing number of such forests, interconnected, intrinsically valuable, and essential for our and the planet’s health and wellbeing. Every forest is a fractal of the whole. Olga taught that we build the kingdom of heaven on earth through acts of love and justice-making, and that the cumulative impact of these actions can be much greater than we can comprehend. She also helped me realize one cannot be attached to outcomes, but must simply keep on doing what is right while being attentive to the process. Though the poet W. H. Auden once said, “Poetry makes nothing happen,” my experience is that poetry is a tough and gentle art form with the capacity to change everything. Thoughts matter, prayers matter, poetry matters. In her quiet way, Olga transmitted these teachings to me in her garden as she cupped a fawn lily or planted a healing herb.

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Olga, approximately age 80. Photo: Henk Van Den Brink, c. 1974-79.

Out of the Depths

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medieval mystic Meister Eckhart speaks of “breakthrough,” a moment when the mystery takes an unaccountable leap into the individual and the individual into the mystery. “When we’re thinking, who or what is doing the thinking?” Olga once asked me. To what larger field does our thinkingfeeling belong? This capacity for being both knower and known, she believed, somehow emerged in humans alongside the development of language. When we say to ourselves, “I am,” we become witnesses to the flow of our thought and image stream. We are that stream, yet we witness it at the same time. Considering our ongoing degradation of the planet, our human greed, and horrific violence, it has become clear that, though enormously clever as a species, we are currently the chief despoilers of the planet. We are consumers, predators who are demolishing the habitats that sustain us, severing ourselves from the wisdom of the self-regulating ecosystems to which we belong. Olga’s notion is not that we are morally superior to other species (in fact, often the opposite), but that we are, because of our cleverness, more responsible. Because we have the particular kind of language that allows us to transmit culture through writing, art, and now electronic media, we hold awesome powers, both creative and destructive, and therefore must continually decide how to use them. In her final thoughts, Olga distinguishes between the small self and the inclusive I Am, from whose centre the whole is experienced he

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as a unified process. We have never truly left this great “I Am” or plenum of being. She intuited that the development of the essence of each will not be lost or swallowed up in the sea of the great oneness. That is, when the unique snowflake merges with the sea, its uniqueness is not lost, but fulfilled. Olga’s stories suggest that Jesus developed his full human potential by living and dying at the pivot of the visible and the invisible worlds. Other spiritual pioneers have done so as well. The point is that we, like Jesus and the other prophets and wisdom teachers, have the capacity to live from what Olga called “the within” and become fully human, to realize our full human potential. In fact, she noted that collectively we have not really done so, but are acting like an angel-beast on an adolescent rampage. So what is the way out of this dilemma that Ronald Wright calls a “progress trap?”56 Prophets and teachers from all eras have imparted their wisdom, but the collective body of humanity hasn’t risen to embody compassion, enact justice, and live in harmony with nature. Collectively, we have not fulfilled our purpose of making reparation to the earth, healing the planet, or achieving world peace. Olga’s response to “how the kingdom of heaven on earth can come to pass” was always “through the spiritual practice,” beginning with the individual. Her particular practice, the ritual of ingesting wine and bread, enacted a union of heart and mind with Spirit, higher purpose. Her communion ritual was not about commemorating Jesus’s life and teachings from the past, nor about being “saved,” but about entering the life stream of the Christ-consciousness or becoming “a Christ.” She felt that during the communion service and in the holy silence, frontal regions of the brain were activated and developed. Science now has identified three brains, one piled on top of the next: the reptilian brain (instincts, fight or flight), the mammalian brain (emotions, empathy, interconnection), and the neo-cortex (intellect, mind, higher thought). According to Olga, at the apex of the neo-cortex, like the apex of the Great Pyramid of Giza, lies a hidden centre, a third eye (a new “I”) that has the capacity to bring all the other centres into balance. 198

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Olga taught that humans are still evolving, developing a new brain and new body out of the foundations of the old, a consciousness that mediates between matter and spirit, partaking of both. The communion practice helps accelerate this process of integration. She wrote: “Substance is not something made of nothing, but is the essence of reality in transition from one dimension to another. Soon this sense of process will be the scientific concept dominant in books and teaching.” Contemporary brain research, which explores the complex interactions of left and right hemispheres, and shows how the neo-cortex lights up when people enter deep contemplative states, seems to be corroborating some of Olga’s intuitions. She taught that, through focused desire and dedicated spiritual practice, more and more people will begin to awake to this latent capacity for integration and compassion. She also thought that if this integral capacity awakes in larger numbers, a massive transformation can take place in the social sphere. Today I find myself in my imagination again kneeling beside her in her garden, helping tend the plants just a few steps from the cottage door, breathing in the fragrance of the big western red cedar rising just off the porch, and rejoicing at how much Olga loved this planet.

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his resonant phrase from Irish singer-songwriter Van

Morrison’s song “In the Garden,” may seem a contradictory note on which to end a book about a relationship with a spiritual mentor.57 However, as I have proceeded along the path where Olga first set my feet, it seems totally pertinent. For those who embrace a particular guru and a method or spiritual practice, there comes a point of letting go. Yet this letting go is a releasing of the externals of the process, not its essence. When Thomas Merton made his final journey to the east and stood rapt before the great statues of the Buddhas at Polonnaruwa in Sri Lanka, he spoke of being “almost forcibly jerked clean of the habitual, half-tied vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves….”58 For me, this moment recorded in his Asian Journals represents a leap out of ego and metaphysical speculation into sheer being, not a renunciation of his Christian path, but its completion and transformation. At the end of his life, Merton became a fully transcultural person, not an apologist for a particular path, ideology, or verbal formulation. Yet if he had not emerged from within his particular chosen path, he might not have arrived at this precise place of freedom. I continue to benefit from Olga’s teachings and follow many of the practices she transmitted. Yet a shift has occurred that allows me to carry her communion practice within me wherever I go, often while paying close attention to the natural world, when breathing deeply, or in the middle of a conversation or crisis. In my dreams, and in the everyday when I sense her presence, I 200

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know she too has moved on. She is and is not the Olga I knew. We are not pinned down, defined, finished, even in death, since evolution by definition evolves. Sometimes, when puzzling over a conundrum, my husband and I wonder, “What would Olga say?” and “Wouldn’t it be great to sit down and have a long conversation with her right now to find out what she is thinking?” Paradoxically, she still seems far ahead of us, but in another way, she is beside us. If we did have occasion right now for that long-overdue chat, we would meet not only as former teacher and learners, but as friends. After all, one of Jesus’s most memorable sayings to his disciples at the end of his life is: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” At some point in the guru-novice relationship, the learner has to stand on her own two feet, since establishing the independence of the learner is that relationship’s very purpose. As I move further into elder-dom, the urge to transmit and transform is upon me, even as I continue to be transformed by my years with Olga.

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From unpublished notes, November 4, 1974. Information for this biographical sketch is drawn from Olga Park’s son Robert’s eulogy for Olga, the family records of her grandson Jim Park, and the recollections of her friend, Pauline Mowat of New Westminster, bc. 3 Park, Olga, Between Time and Eternity (New York: Vantage Press, 1960), 12. This book is out of print but available on Olga’s website: www.olgapark.ca 4 Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart: Discovering a Universal Spirituality in the World’s Religions (Novato, ca: New World Library, 2001), 24. Teasdale writes: “Mystical awareness confers an absolute certitude on the knower or experiencer. Every tradition makes the point that this certainty is total, undeniable, clear, and eternal. One cannot doubt the reality of the experience while in the midst of it….The vividness, intensity, and immediacy are so profound, the magnitude of certainty so great, and the eternal so real, that the experiences are beyond doubt.” 5 Susan McCaslin, “Sun Gold” from “A Breviary of Visions,” in A Plot of Light (Lantzville, British Columbia: Oolichan Books, 2004), 12. 6 William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence,” in Blake’s Poetry and Designs (ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and John E. Grant, New York: Norton, 1979), 212. 7 David Ray Griffin, Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), 15. 8 Susan McCaslin,“Steady State,” in The Disarmed Heart (Toronto: The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 2014); to be published in The Poet’s Quest for God, ed. Todd Swift (London: Eyewear Publishing, 2014). 9 Olga Park, Between Time and Eternity, 12. 10 Susan McCaslin, Flying Wounded (Gainesville, fl: The University Press of Florida), 2000. 11 Wayne Teasdale, The Mystic Heart. Teasdale writes: “Interspirituality 1 2

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points to the realization that although there are many spiritual paths, a universal commonality underlies them all.” 12 Whenever Olga used the term “master” to refer to her relationship to Jesus, she clarified that she did not have in mind any form of authoritarianism, but was affirming Jesus’s attainment of spiritual mastery and her free will obedience to higher wisdom. 13 This episode of meeting Christ as the Egyptian god Osiris is also described in An Open Door. 14 From An Open Door. 15 Etheric vehicle: Olga had a sense of bodies within bodies, levels of being within Being. The “etheric vehicle,” a term derived from esoteric tradition, represented the inner body closest to the material plane. She taught that each person has a physical vehicle, an etheric vehicle, and spiritual vehicle. She has a sense of these various vehicles as sheaths or bodies existing on a continuum from less to more rarified. The etheric vehicle consists of subtle matter, occupying a place midway between the physical and spiritual dimensions. 16 Olga explained that in Egyptian symbolism the crook and flail represented the implements by which the shepherd king guides the sheep. For her they represented guidance rather than coercion. 17 Olga Park, An Open Door (self-published, 1974), 20. This chapbook is compiled from meticulous records Olga kept from 1914 to 1972 and represents the most significant of her visionary experiences. 18 Susan McCaslin, A Plot of Light (Lantzville, bc: Oolichan Press, 2004), 21. 19 Carl Gustav Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (ed. Aniela Jaffé; New York: Vintage Books, 1961) 178–194. 20 This experience was the basis for Olga’s Man, the Temple of God (New York: Vantage Press, 1968). 21 Susan McCaslin, Lifting the Stone (Toronto: Seraphim Editions, 2007), 59. 22 Diarmuid O’Murchu, Quantum Theology: Spiritual Implications of the New Physics (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2004), 29. 23 Susan McCaslin, The Disarmed Heart, 75. 24 Jung on Film: The Richard Evans Interviews (1957). Web. Accessed October 29, 2014. 25 T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” The Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 14. 26 Leonard Cohen, “Anthem,” in Stranger Music: Selected Poems and Songs (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993), 373. 27 Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (Toronto: McLelland & Stewart, 1966). 28 Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1948), 237-238. 204

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“Humble,” from Latin humilis, “lowly, humble,” literally “on the ground,” from humus “earth.” Online Etymology Dictionary. Web. Accessed October 29, 2014. 30 Violet light is at the higher end of the visible spectrum, with a wavelength ~380-450 nanometers. Wikipedia. Web. Accessed October 29, 2014. 31 From an email from Lee Johnson, by permission, 2012. Johnson’s critical study, Wordsworth’s Metaphysical Verse: Geometry, Nature, Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982) covers some of this ground. 32 Brian Longhurst, Seek Ye First the Kingdom: One Man’s Journey with the Living Jesus [Kindle Edition]. 33 My friend and former colleague Grace Jantzen (formerly Grace Dyck) (1948-2006), went on to become a feminist philosopher-theologian, publishing God’s World, God’s Body (1984), Julian of Norwich: Mystic and Theologian (1987), Power, Gender and Christian Mysticism (1995), Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998), and others. 34 Susan McCaslin, A Plot of Light (Fernie, bc: Oolichan Books, 2004), 23. 35 Geddes MacGregor, Reincarnation in Christianity: A New Vision of the Role of Rebirth in Christian Thought (London: Quest Books, 1986). McGregor argues that reincarnation is not merely an eastern teaching but one that also influenced both Judaism and Christianity. Early Christian theologians like Origen and Clement of Alexandria entertained heterodox notions of preexistence that were later excluded from Christian theology, but that survived into the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Certain of the so-called Gnostic groups also taught reincarnation. 36 Olga also studied astrology, but not in its simplistic, “newspaper tabloid” form. She adhered to a teleology of spiritual evolution whereby history unfolded in cosmic ages. She believed Jesus incarnated at the juncture between the age of the Ram (Aries) and the age of the Fishes (Pisces). Like the ancient Hindus, she spoke of a Kali Yuga or great cycle of ages and thought humankind was approaching the end of a major cycle of over 24,000 years. 37 Olga clarified that a “spirit guide” for her is a “Christ-server” or mediator of other-worldly experience in the life-beyond-death, and that mediation is required if one is to have such experiences in comfort and safety. 38 Received by Olga, related to Susan, 7 August 1973. 39 Susan McCaslin, The Disarmed Heart; first published in Vallum: Contemporary Poetry, 10.1 (2013): 6. 40 Diamond Sutra. This discourse, known as the Vajracchedika Praina 29

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Paramita has been translated as “The Diamond Cutter of Transcendental Wisdom.” Web. Accessed October 29, 2014. 41 Jim Park, from an email correspondence, 22 Feb. 2013. 42 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “Burnt Norton” (London: Faber & Faber, 1972), 15. 43 Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation (New York: New Directions, 1962), 6. 44 Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, Trans. M. L. del Mastro (New York: Image Books, 1977), 124. 45 Susan McCaslin, A Plot of Light, 27. 46 John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000). Black Elk’s soul travel is covered in Chapter xx, “The Spirit Journey,” 172-176. 47 Susan McCaslin, The Disarmed Heart, 63. 48 Susan McCaslin, Lifting the Stone, 59. 49 Peter Daniels, included by permission,17 July 2013. 50 Susan McCaslin, A Plot of Light, 38-39. 51 Susan McCaslin, Veil/Unveil (Toronto: The St. Thomas Poetry Series, 1997), 14. 52 Olga Park, Between Time and Eternity, 105. 53 Susan McCaslin, Arousing the Spirit: Provocative Writings (Kelowna, bc: Wood Lake Publishing, 2013), 208-209. 54 Who Am I?, a self-published chapbook by Pauline Mowat. Mowat has also self-published a chapbook on Olga’s writings titled The Beloved Disciple. 55 Pauline Mowat, transcribed from Who Am I? and selected by Susan McCaslin. 56 Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2004). 57 Van Morrison, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher, 16th studio album, Mercury, 1986. 58 Thomas Merton, The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1975), 233.

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The Olga Park Materials Olga’s website: www.olgapark.ca. Olga’s archives: The published writings, unpublished writings, writings by others, and memorabilia of or associated with Olga Park are currently being archived by the University of Manitoba: Fonds mss 380 (A11-71) — Mary Olga Park fonds

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just as it takes a community to raise a child, so it takes

a wealth of interconnections to write a book. Gratitude is the only fitting response to living at the centre of bliss and turmoil, faith and doubt that can be a book’s birthing. Twenty-five years in the making, Into the Mystic began as field notes in my journals in the late 1980s, became an educational leave project at Douglas College, New Westminster, bc, developed into a workshop manual for sessions I facilitated on the mystics at Canadian Memorial United Church, then an unpublished tome on mysticism, and now this mixed-genre spiritual memoir. My deepest appreciation goes to Olga Park, who set me on a spiritual path. Next comes my husband Mark Haddock, who continues to walk that path with me, and offered eagleeyed copyediting of the final draft; and my daughter Claire Haddock who proceeds on her own spiritual quest. Gratitude goes also to Olga’s friends and associates, whose stories, notes, and recollections inform this volume: Jim Park, Valerie Tickell, Pauline Mowat, Patricia Hutchinson, Brian Longhurst, Peter Daniels, Steve Force, Jan Jantzen, and others who knew Olga personally. I wish to thank my memoir group, the Memoir-sistas: Kate Braid, Heidi Greco, Joy Kogawa, Elsie K. Neufeld, and Marlene Schiwy. This gathering of women writers, centred in the Vancouver area, helped me process the highs and lows of composing personal narrative throughout the last three drafts of the book. Our monthly meetings and yearly writing retreats at the Bethlehem Retreat Centre outside Nanaimo, bc, have been 208

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invaluable. As the manuscript developed, these women listened, responded insightfully, and assured me the story of my journey with Olga was worth telling. I would like to thank Rex Weyler, journalist, writer, ecologist, one of the founders of Greenpeace, and author of The Jesus Sayings, for helping me keep track of the narrative arc while integrating poetry into the creative process. Thanks go to my friend J. S. Porter (author of Spirit Book Word and Lightness and Soul: Musings on Eight Jewish Writers) for commenting on my work on the mystics and on Olga over the years, reading the final draft, and being unfailingly supportive. Others who kept me on track and encouraged me include poets James Clarke, Penn Kemp, Katerina Fretwell, Sandy Shreve, Allan Briesmaster, Eileen Curteis, Harold Rhenisch, and Antoinette Voûte Roeder, as well as dancer and writer Celeste Snowber, and visual artist Erica Grimm. The following provided invaluable input: journalist Douglas Todd (The Vancouver Sun), feminist writer Teri Degler (author of The Divine Feminine Fire), fiction writer Cynthia Flood, visual artist and writer Eileen McKenzie, and ecopsychologist Toni Pieroni. I wish to thank my publisher Luciana Ricciutelli and publicist Renee Knapp at Innana Publications for their unfailing support and encouragement. I am also deeply indebted to visual artist Tracey Tarling for her stunning cover art, and to Val Fullard at Inanna Publications for the cover design. Finally, I am enormously indebted to my friend and former colleague, Janet Allwork, for her insightful and clear-eyed copyediting.

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Photo : Mark Haddock

Susan McCaslin is the author of thirteen volumes of poetry, including The Disarmed Heart (2014), and Demeter Goes Skydiving (2012), which was short-listed for the bc Book Prize (Dorothy Livesay Award) and the first-place winner of the Alberta Book Publishing Award (Robert Kroetsch Poetry Book Award). Susan lives in Fort Langley, British Columbia, where she initiated the Han Shan Poetry Project as part of a successful campaign to protect an endangered rainforest along the Fraser River.