No Tommy Hilfiger

A friend asked me last night why I refuse to buy Tommy Hilfiger products (with the exception of my black bomber jacket). The explanation: I have no idea, other than the fact that my major other-worldly shopping buddy has it in for that designer for reasons unknown to me but having something to do with some Central American country. If anyone can figure that out, please let me know.

This imaginal friend of mine is a society lady, well known in fashionable circles and whose name you all might recognize, who died some years back; let’s call her Sarah. For some reason she started visiting me a year or so after she died, to my total astonishment.

My theory about why certain imaginal figures are drawn to us, or the other way around, is the same as my explanation of why relationships form in the real world: some resonance is present between the two souls, in terms of life experiences or passionate interests. It’s just the way the Universe works. Nevertheless, it does create some odd pairings, like this one: a high-society fashionista and me, who (although I clean up fairly well and actually taught dress-for-success for several years) has little interest in fashion per se.

Anyway, among the other topics Sarah and I discussed, my sartorial habits came up. At the time, I was running nearly every day, and although she regularly kept me company, Sarah thoroughly disapproved of my running gear: usually jeans and whatever t-shirt happened to be clean. Hey—-I’m running through the subdivision, for pete’s sake—what do I care what the neighbors think? As for her, well, poor thing! I mean, how perfectly dreadful to be not seen with someone inappropriately dressed! But after a couple of months I got tired of hearing the grumbling and agreed to go shop for suitable running attire.

So I get to the Galleria, and as soon as I arrive the grousing begins—-evidently the stores in this mall are not nearly upscale enough to suit my friend. I argue that my budget is not the same as hers was, and that I’m not about to shop at Saks for clothing to sweat in, thank you very much.

On the way down the crowded escalator one of those weird moments occurs where there’s sudden silence all around—-for some reason all the chatter of the people around you ceases at once. After several seconds, I hear a woman coming up the escalator say, loudly, “…and you must NEVER buy anything by Tommy Hilfiger!” Another heartbeat and the chatter resumes. OK. Message received.

Sarah and I compromise on Lord and Taylor. I grab a sweatshirt and a pair of jogging shorts that I can already tell she doesn’t care for and head for the dressing room. Picking a door at random, I open it and see that the last person in there apparently left all the clothes she tried on—-except that nothing looks like it’s been tried on. Everything is neatly on hangers, arranged just so. All are my size. All are jogging clothes. And not a Tommy Hilfiger in the bunch.

So I got my jogging outfits and Sarah was relieved. Ever since then we’ve shopped together off and on, and she finds the most incredible clothes. She no longer stocks the dressing rooms for me; it’s mostly a matter of nudging me toward the right rack in some obscure corner of the store. And she’s learned about sales, thank goodness! Designer stuff on sale works for me. Most of my favorite things are the result of these kinds of trips.

Sarah and my bad-boy alter ego Brian Kinney (whose favorite thing other than sex, booze, and drugs is expensive clothing) have recently teamed up. Last winter I was having a hard time finding a leather bomber jacket that I had wanted desperately for years and finally decided to buy. I didn’t want a girly-girl jacket but one with a harder edge to it and also some serious warmth. I can’t remember the circumstances, but I found one online, finally, at a good price. I hesitated to purchase it because the designer was—-you guessed it—-Tommy Hilfiger. But Sarah didn’t say a word and Brian just kept insisting that it was the right one. When it arrived I realized why they made an exception for this particular jacket: the sleeves are lined with red satin and there’s red trim and stitching inside. Those of you who’ve read Red will understand the significance!

Those two outdid themselves for my birthday this year, though—-a light-weight leather blazer with incredible sleeves and (it had to be) red accents inside, originally $500 and on sale for $99. Love it, love it, love it!

No more Tommy Hilfiger, though.

Gnosis and synchronicity

Early in childhood, in order to survive, we learn to suppress certain ways of knowing and ways of perceiving the world that don’t fit the commonly accepted framework of society. I learned not to “hear voices,” or converse with dead people and other imaginal beings; I learned not to sense people’s energies or see their energy fields. I suppressed these abilities so thoroughly that it is only in the last few years that I’ve been able to re-develop them to some extent. Had I not done so, it’s quite likely that I would have been medicated, given shock treatments, or institutionalized. Along the way I suppressed my intuitive nature almost completely, and learned to value only things that “made sense” in a linear and rational way. As a result, part of my soul withered into years of depression.

What happened in my life is a microcosm of what has happened in western culture for the past couple of millennia: my own gnosis, my intuitive and certain knowledge, and my own body’s knowledge and wisdom have been denied their reality and subjugated to the logos of reason and intellect. I often encounter events in my outer life whose relationship and meaning are nearly undeniable, but they are not related in terms of logos; rather, they are apparently random events that happened to coincide in time: synchronicity.

Here is an example: I woke early one morning several years ago from a dream about being painfully misunderstood but unable to speak up for myself. This was a situation that I had encountered very often as the child of an authoritarian father. An hour or so later, my father unexpectedly dropped by the house. As I opened the door and let my dog Wendy out to greet him, I noticed that the neighbor’s dog, who hated mine, was loose. Before anyone could react, the neighbor dog attacked Wendy, who outweighed him by about 70 pounds. Wendy, of course, wound up on top, growling as though she would tear the smaller dog limb from limb. From my perspective on the porch, I was the only one who could see that Wendy was all bluff; her teeth were not even near the other dog. My father raced over to the two dogs, dragged Wendy off by her collar, and began hitting her on the face, telling her what a bad and vicious dog she was. For some reason I was completely calm. I raised my voice to get his attention, and said, “Don’t you punish my dog; you let me do that.” He stopped immediately.

Seen rationally, there is no logical connection between the dream and the event, and no meaning to be derived from their coincidence. But my intuitive knowing says that they are intimately, though not causally, connected, and that there is meaning in the synchronicity: on this morning, in the “real” world, I was able to speak up for my dog in a way that I had never been able to do for myself as a child, and because of the dream, I understood that. This kind of knowing is my essential way of being-in-the-world, and yet it was not only dismissed by my family, but actively discouraged. In the same way, our Western culture has suppressed all such forms of wisdom. It has been going on since before Plotinus; Descartes just happened to phrase it in a way that caught on: Cogito, ergo sum.

Red

Here’s a story that will make you think. If I hadn’t already been convinced that there are no coincidences in life, this series of events would have done the job!

Back in 2004, I was working part-time at the local medical school. It wasn’t a great job, not even an interesting job, but it did give me health insurance and enough money to make ends meet. Most of my free time was spent with my father, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. Our relationship had always been difficult; his influence over my life was enormous and in many ways kept me from living my life as I would have liked, out of fear of his judgment.

Dad died in early March. His death freed me in many ways, especially financially: he and my mother had left me a trust fund that would give me a small but significant income each month. A the same time, Dad’s death forced me to examine how much of the constraint I had felt in my life was due not to the man himself but to the internalized father, to the parts of my own psyche that seemed to speak with his voice. This was a difficult realization, and much of the work of transformation was internal, unconscious, and frequently reflected in dreams.

During that spring I had many odd experiences, but none stranger than my encounter with red. It began with a dream:

We are settling my Dad’s estate. There is some kind of object involved that we have to keep around, or keep a record of, because it will change things—it’s a transformational object of some sort. I don’t remember what it was or looked like in the dream, but the symbol that seems to have replaced it in my mind is something red and disk-shaped, 3-dimensional.

About a month later, a seemingly unimportant event brought the dream of the red transitional object back to my awareness. One of the cats had caught a dove and was torturing it, as cats do. I went outside to put the bird out of its misery. After stalling for quite some time, not wanting to use my bare hands to dispatch the poor thing, I picked up its body and literally ripped its head off.

It was a real surprise to discover how little force it takes to actually pull a bird’s head clean off its body—far less than opening a bottle of beer, for instance. And I wasn’t prepared for either the blood that poured out of its neck or for the flapping and flopping of its body afterwards. I held my hand over it to keep it still. Its head moved, too—its beak opened and shut, and so did its eyes. It was very strange. Afterwards I went upstairs and washed the blood off my hands; I could smell the iron…. It was such a little thing, the killing of it. One could get used to it quickly. How interesting, I thought.

By the next day, the color red was on my mind constantly. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Being a good depth psychologist, I decided to surround myself with red things, even wearing my father’s red flannel shirt and drinking redbush tea. What would happen? What would red feel like, sound like? Red was not a large part of my life—I’ve always avoided the color. Why?

Red kept appearing in disquieting ways. I found just the fact of being surrounded by red very uncomfortable and unsettling, but kept at it for several days. I noticed red everywhere—not just flowers and clothing, but stop lights, “Do Not Enter” signs. I saw a documentary about a man who was genetically female but always felt male. They showed parts of the operation he underwent to remove the female organs and create a kind of penis. It seemed too horrible to take in—the bloody destruction of all that was female in that person’s body. It was shocking, sickening, riveting.

I began to form an idea of the meaning of red in its many aspects. Red: blood, danger, anger, passion, survival. Red: sexuality, power, intensity, strength. Red draws attention, commands attention, revels in attention.

At this same time I began a series of art pieces involving the color red. The first piece, “Meditation: Red No. 1” was a kind of spiral or vortex created with torn pieces of the red parts of magazine photos and wrapping paper. “Meditation: Red No. 2,” which I began a few days after the first piece was completed, was a blood-red linen shawl, unadorned except by long fringes on the ends. Sitting and working on the piece was magical. This was springtime, and I felt myself slowing down into an almost trance-like state as I worked, sitting in a small rocker outside the back door.

My internal transformation continued through dreams, and I came to realize other aspects of red: Red is confidence, authority, courage. Red is returning to my own sense of agency, my own appropriate sense of power. Personal power and integrity—red.

On Sunday, May 9, I wrote in my journal:

I want to enjoy this new freedom I have, and also work very hard on discovering what my soul wants. I feel I’ve been given a huge gift of trust and support. Mom and Dad, in an odd way, are supporting me while I do what I know I need to do. Love and “trust,” in a way they couldn’t have done while they were alive. Now I want to live up to that trust. The Universe is supporting me, and I appreciate the opportunity and the responsibility, in the sense that I want at the end of my life to know that I lived as consciously as possible, and as courageously and joyfully as possible.

The next morning before I went to work, my journal records this statement: “I’m feeling very weird today. Nervous—like something bad is going to happen.” I got dressed, and decided to wear a white blouse and my new red shawl. I rarely wore red at all, and certainly never to work, but I decided to make brave and see what would happen.

An hour or so after I got to work, without warning, my supervisor informed me that my job had been eliminated. I had one month’s severance pay, and she wanted me to clean out my desk and leave immediately.

I’ve often wondered what the scene was like from her perspective, with me dressed like the sacrificial lamb in white and blood red. In my shock, all I could think was, this is what happens when you wear red.

In retrospect, as so often happens in life, the “disaster” of the moment was a great blessing. What I “lost” with the job was more than made up for in other ways. The income from the trust replaced the lost salary; my partner was able to cover me on her company’s health insurance plan due to a sudden change in policy. Most importantly, the “loss” of the job has enabled me to do the work on my dissertation that I would otherwise never have been able to do; and I would never consciously have relinquished the security of a “real job.”

I had let it be known that I was ready and willing to live consciously, courageously, and joyfully, trusting the Universe to support me, and immediately, the opportunity to do just that was presented to me. As they always say, be careful what you ask for, because you just might get it!

Turtle love

I came across this fine fellow—a male three-toed box turtle—the other day as he was enjoying an ear of corn on my compost pile. Seeing him reminded me of a fascinating afternoon I spent back in May watching a pair of turtles doing the nasty out on the hillside. Turtle love is v--e--r--y s--l--o--w i--n--d--e--e--d . . . . I have no idea what this has to do with the imaginal world, but it’s too good not to share.

I came upon the two of them unexpectedly. Rather than pulling their heads into their shells, like they normally would, they both just looked at me. The male, with his angry eyes, swiveled his head in my direction as though he were daring me to interfere. I apologized profusely, backed away, and watched the rest of the event through binoculars from the deck. As soon as I left, the female seemed to urge the male to get back to what he was doing, and it didn’t take long for him to recover his interest.

Far from just tolerating the experience, she seemed to enjoy it as much as he did. Her head arched back toward his as he reached for her, though their armor prevented a kiss. His humping was rhythmic, about every three seconds, and he extended his head, neck, and foreparts farther and farther out of his shell. Half an hour into the event, he was vertical, and I could see that he had a death grip on her bottom shell with his back feet while his head and front legs opened and stretched to the sun as if in worship. By the end, some 45 minutes after I first found them, he was still attached but literally on his back, pulsing, his head first lolling out, then rolling back into his neck like a deflating penis disappearing into its foreskin. All the while his body convulsed every three or four seconds, pulling him nearly vertical and then releasing him to sag back to the ground. Guys, you can only pray for an orgasm like that one!

By this point she was looking more than a little bored. Eventually she shifted position and tried to walk away or throw him off. She couldn’t drag him far, though, on his back as he was, and still gripping her shell, so she stopped and waited. After another ten minutes he let go one leg, then (five minutes later) the other, and lay on his back for a while longer, apparently utterly spent.

Suddenly, he snapped out of his trance. In a flash (in turtle time, that is) he righted himself with a thrust of his head and one foreleg. He blinked his red eyes twice, his head came up, and he looked at his sweetie as though seeing her for the very first time. Hello, you beauty! He turned toward her eagerly, amorously. She, who had been watching him vaguely, was having no more, thanks, and closed herself up. He, not wanting to take no for an answer, circled her twice, sniffing her and butting her front and rear, lifting her hind end completely off the ground with his shoulder. Still she refused. Enough already! After the second circuit, he took off at a clip—amazingly fast for a turtle—in search of his next conquest, one supposes. When last I looked, she was still sitting there, head out of her shell but not moving, deep in whatever post-coital thoughts female turtles have….

Believing that it’s real

Perhaps the most difficult part of doing imaginal work is believing that it’s real. In a culture that provides us with no framework for these kinds of experiences, it’s so easy to tell yourself that it’s all in your head, that you’re making it all up. And the more important the imaginal world is to you, the easier it is, in some perverse way, to talk yourself right out of it.

I was lucky. More than ten years ago, my first experience of imaginal beings since childhood came in a way that made it nearly impossible for me to doubt their reality. I can’t discuss it in a public forum, but the experience was profound and life-changing. Even so, at the time I still wondered if somehow I was imagining it all. These kinds of things just couldn’t possibly real, could they? In the face of hard evidence (in my case, actual evidence in the waking world), I still managed to doubt. So I can readily understand if you’re telling yourself that this is all nuts.

It would be great if there were some way of verifying our experiences. Wouldn’t it be great to have a “trail buddy” to go along with us, someone we could turn to and say, “Hey! Did you see that?” and get confirmation from. We need someone to compare notes with—especially those of us who are more concrete and practical-minded. It all just sounds so crazy, eh?

I (being a Gemini) have always been of two minds about the imaginal (yes, folks, even I still wonder at times if I’m nuts!). Part of me has always known, in an instinctual, intuitive way, that psychic experiences are real, and that you can actually enter a different space and converse with beings whom others can’t see. But my parents were always telling me to get my head out of the clouds and stop daydreaming, and eventually I absorbed what they taught me. I basically quit believing in anything but the practical realities of everyday life, until the imaginal world forced its way back into my life.

My mother did tell me a few times, with much nervous laughter, about her own mother, who “had the sight.” Granny had some pretty hair-raising experiences, it seems. The incident I remember best took place while she was in the nursing home, slowly fading from cancer but completely sane and alert. One evening while my mother was visiting, Granny looked out the second-story window and calmly reported that she saw her son-in-law Jack’s face there. Mom thought she had gone round the bend until a phone call came late that night that my uncle Jack had died suddenly. Now, my mother didn’t believe in “the sight,” she said, but that experience shook her up a bit.

So anyway. All this to say that we just need to trust our intuitions here. Experiences of the imaginal world go against everything we’ve been taught about how the world works. There isn’t going to be a lot of support in the culture, and even for those of us who have long experience with it, there are always moments of doubt. Try “pretending” it’s real, maybe. If you ever find a trail buddy, take advantage of it! And as you gain experience, it will get easier, I promise.

Dancing in imaginal space

Some additional analogies occurred to me last night that might help some of my readers understand how you “get to” the imaginal world, or how you know you’re in imaginal space. It’s like dancing, in a way. For instance, any of you who contra dance know the concept of “giving weight” when you do a move like an allemande. Each dancer pulls back slightly against the other, so that there’s a sense of connection, a sense of “someone there” as you move around each other. Without that slight tension in the arms, the rotation is much more difficult and much less powerful.

An encounter with someone in imaginal space is like that: suddenly there’s “somebody there,” a kind of energetic connection that wasn’t there a second ago. It's an energetic push-pull kind of thing that gives a sense of aliveness. Sensations are heightened until they approach what you might feel if the person were with you in the waking world. Hard to describe, I know; but it's one of things that, when it happens, you'll know it.

Here’s another thing to look for; again, it’s a dance image. Imagine waltzing with a partner you know well. You know how that energy flows between you, so that leading and following become almost effortless? You’re tuned in to each other. The same thing can happen in an imaginal encounter, and once again it’s that energetic connection that lets you know it’s “real.”

Something else that often works for me is to watch for the imaginal being to make eye contact with you. This can be especially powerful. You know how you can tell when someone really looks at you? You know they’re focused on you and what you’re saying or doing. Same thing here—there’s a certain intensity present, and you can sense the living presence. It’s like the difference between a real person and a photograph. In fantasy, or in a photograph, you can see their eyes; in the imaginal, they’re looking at you. When you’re looking your fantasy image or person in the eye and they suddenly look back at you, you know you’ve made the imaginal connection.

So you might try this: start with a fantasy image, and do “your part” of whatever your fantasy activity is. Watch their eyes. Have a one-sided conversation, or offer to dance with them, or imagine yourself dancing by yourself and invite them to join you (that’s one I like!). Try letting the imaginal being respond—eventually he or she or it will. Then follow the energy—you already know how to do that—and you’ll find imaginal space. And just trust—you’re doing fine. You’re already there—you just haven’t realized it yet!

So Brian is real--now what?

OK. Those are the three pieces in the “Brian Is Real” series. They will give us a common language on this journey. From here on, I’ll share other musings, experiences I’ve had with imaginal beings, and things I’ve learned along the way.

If you’ve followed me this far, you might feel like exploring a bit yourself. Entering the imaginal world consciously is not to be taken lightly. This is not a tour around Universal Studios or the San Diego Zoo. At its tamest, it’s more like hiking through the African rainforest without a guide. Beautiful, wondrous, and exciting it may be, but it can also be deadly. Enter the imaginal world and you’re in direct contact with the Unconscious. This is the realm of myth and fairytale, home of the gods and heroes, land of demons and dragons. It’s also the place where the visions and voices of the schizophrenic dwell.

The best way to stay safe? No guarantees, my friend. Carl Jung advised against this kind of exploration, and he ought to know. Stay grounded, stay humble, and ask for guidance from your Guardians or angels (they’re there, whether you’ve encountered them or not). They’re comfortable here, and have your best interests at heart. And it's a good idea to check in with a trained psychologist if you start working with the imaginal world in a big way.

So if you’re sure you want to try this, sit back, close your eyes, and visualize yourself someplace lovely, quiet, and safe. See it, feel it, hear it, smell it: use all your imaginal senses to place yourself there. Then just wait expectantly and see who or what shows up. Be patient—it might take a while—but keep trying.