About

ABOUT

I have spent forty years of my life firmly believing (among many other things that were even more immutable than these ones) that:

  • the reality is what I see
  • the universe is a chaotic amalgam of baryonic matter in which there is no place for a patriarchal God on his gilded chair
  • I‘ll eventually melt away and become earth when I die (and that will be the end of me)
  • my mind is an outflow of the chemical reactions in my brain
  • the dreams that I dream at night are clumsy stories created by the random firings of the neurons in my brain

I know, it is not an inspiring and encouraging worldview, but this is what I have accumulated along the first half (admitting that I am going to be as lucky and as long-lived as my grandparents) of my journey. Actually I vehemently defended it as the unique, the scientific, the absolute truth, even at the cost of insulting my own intelligence, closing my eyes over the reality of some of my personal experiences. This created a powerful inner conflict, and maybe this explains why I used to be depressed most of the time. It took a major Depression that lasted over seven years, an awesome experience of discovering that my dreams had been dreamed by others before (I refer here to collective, archetypal dreams), another awesome experience of discovering that I was nothing of all I thought to be, but that I was much more, and years and tons of reading to finally find out that:

  • I really know nothing
  • science itself knows nothing: the universe that science used to assume as “known” makes up only 4.5% of all that is out there; the rest, 95,5% turns out to be of a different, unknown nature: roughly 68% dark energy, and about 27 % dark matter
  • I am not the form that I see in the mirror, so what will remain behind when I’m gone is not me
  • the conscious thought that I used to see as My Mind is nothing but the visible tip of an infinite unknown – the consciousness that permeates the universe
  • the dreams that I dream are by far the most important guidance to the inner and the outer me; they are by far more real than what I used to see as the “real reality”
  • in the same way that there are patterns for biological evolution, there are also patterns for the evolution of consciousness, known as archetypes – I have named them “patterns of soul development”

The inner journey of self-discovery and the outer journey of discovering a “more real” reality – both actually and consistently guided by dreams – deserve to be known and shared; certain aspects, through this blog and eventually in a work of non-fiction; others, in a more literary form, as permitted by the memoir genre. There are always two stories: the story about to be written, and maybe an even more important one, the story of how this story came to be.

13 thoughts on “About”

  1. First thank you for the comment, as a ‘fellow Iașian’, on my latest blog post. I haven’t waited to arrive home to come to your blog as I’m now sitting in Piața Unirii with a beer, waiting for my wife, sprayed with some misting thing keeping me delightfully cool despite the 35degC air temperature. In fact, unlike most Romanians around me, I like the heat!
    Hotel Traian is over to the left and, as you will know, Liceul National (where I taught English for a couple of years) immediately behind it.
    I’m in complete accord with your first four conclusions after forty years though I do not give the same importance to dreams; the sixth I’ll leave open.
    Of course, Carl Sagan was right, we are indeed made of stardust.
    Not only do I know nothing (despite being a graduate in physics) but nor do I want to know anything. Atât!

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    1. How very nice, barely out of Iasi for like three weeks, already missing it.
      Thank you for your “About” comments, nice and unexpected – I kniw I have been seriously neglecting my blog, but all for a good cause, I’ll write about it soon. It feels great to get your compliments, even with the low nite on dreams – but, if I didn’t convince my husband that they are valuable ( in a deeper, Jungian sense), then I shouldn’t try to convince anyone.

      Have a great stay in Iasi, enjoy, you and Petronela!

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    1. Heii, thanks for thinking of me! You always have some sort of magic wand that uplifts and flatters me :). “One Lovely Blog Award” may be just what I needed, but I’m afraid that I’ll have to miss this one too, as my blogging activity has been really lousy lately. Not that I’m not working on anything, on the contrary 🙂 – hope to re-start posting as soon as possible. But I have a feeling that you are doing way better than me, keep it up like that – and please, let’s keep in touch, especially when I start posting.

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  4. Thank you for sharing this. That’s a beautiful picture, too. I’ve been running in six different directions lately, always hoping things are going well for you and yours. I always especially like what you say about dreams. I’ve been eating things that are good for neurogenesis in the hipocampus (blueberries, grape seed extract, 90% dark chocolate), as well as running and swimming a lot, so my dreams are more vivid of late. If only I knew what they mean!

    Keep writing. You’ve go so many important things to say.

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    1. I’ve been trying to write to you since last Sunday when you issued Ch 12. Mostly I wanted to say that I can see obvious maturity – like tasting the good wine in a year, then tasting it after two, three years later (of course, wine is ever maturing, so I just can imagine the flavours it’s going to develop with time).

      Thank you for the compliments, thank you for thinking of me; I couldn’t even write one line lately, as if suddenly I became illiterate (some inner storms, I know – like every storm, they will move away, live my sky blue again).
      Everyone around me is fine, and I wish I could be as pacified as they all are (but maybe they are so because I contribute a lot with my own energies, more than they would like to acknowledge, more than I would like to give, before I discover myself depleted).

      I believe the things to do, plus meditations and other soul-hygiene, are all contributing to awaken your pineal gland – the one responsible for the dreaming process as awakening of the soul. Understanding your dreams is so easy – all my friends now perfectly decode and understand their dreams. If you would like me to guide you on this discovery path, we should move on to more direct communication means: like fb messaging, or what’s up (this one has a microphone function too).

      I am always grateful to hear from you, my friend.

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      1. Thank you so much for the encouragement and for offering to help me decipher my dreams. Someday we will work on this, I hope. I’m not bold enough to text chat.

        It’s troubling to hear that you haven’t written much lately. I understand how it can be. I’m going through an interesting phase now where I’m reading (mostly non-fiction) all the time that I’m not exercising or doing other time-consuming things. When I sit to write, I feel like the story is blown out of proportion in my mind… like I’ve got to get it right or the consequences will be way significant. Nothing could be further from the truth. It doesn’t even reflect my writing, since I insist on “allowing the viewpoint character to take credit/ blame” for every word. If it’s good or bad, it’s merely how I feel Johanna would write it, not me. So this helps me relax and gain emotional perspective.

        Here’s a wonderful Ted Talk where a successful author says a vaguely similar things about the strange magic, fear and “block” that creative people must somehow deal with. And how she deals: https://embed-ssl.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius#

        Another thing coming between me and writing is a lack of self-discipline. All my life I’ve worked my rear end off due to fear, not from love of the work. Yes, parts of pathology were interesting, but nothing creative ever happens unless you’re doing research, which I wasn’t, unfortunately. And with nothing creative going on, fear and moral duty were the driving forces of my hard work- not love for adventure.

        Now I’m driven by love for my VP character as well as two of the others. Which is well and good, but the power that always pushed me forward in the past, fear, is now a headwind at times. And the delicate voice of creative energy wants my butt in the chair, my mind with Johanna on the Moon, giving her full attention, ignoring my emails, ignoring life’s drama.

        So I’m reading non-fiction like a fiend, searching for the answers and finding clues along the way.

        One huge clue for me is the book “Grain Brain” by Perlmutter, MD.

        Anyway, I’m going on too long here. Please keep writing. You have the magic. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say “the Magic has you.”

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        1. Haha, I liked that: “magic has you” – I guess it has all of us, otherwise we wouldn’t fight real invisible wars that, for others, look like mere windmills. It is essential to me to know that others go through the same battles – I know it theoretically, but kind of needed to know it in “flesh and bones” through your own situation – just a matter of identification (you know how us, humans, are still connected by the herd instinct). I strongly feel with you about keeping that butt there where it should be – on the chair at the desk, I mean – but sometimes we seem to reason with that part, which kind of refuses to get squeezed under all the weight of our brain.
          I know that TED talk – I’ve watched all there is, I guess, in terms of motivation and self-help from successful people. The things is, I really get motivated while watching it, but it magically disappears five minutes after.
          I also know the “fear-motivation” – I have been practicing it all my life. We both badly desire to free ourselves and find more constructive ways to find that much-needed self-discipline (we are in the middle of a healing process, I guess: you respond to your love for your character[s], I respond to emotional involvement – when some thing or cause stirs me, I feel I can write endlessly (or, at least, till the time I have to go out, do errands, make breakfast, lunch and dinner, answer the phone, etc, etc).
          I have noticed a pattern, of which I believe I am entirely responsible. When I was fully involved with teaching, my time was almost fully taken by all sorts of things that needed my immediate attention – between the time you actually spend with your students, time for research, preparation, correction, reports, etc, I was gasping for a time when I won’t have to do any of that (I love teaching, but I don’t like the 200% of the additional time spent outside of the actual thing). So I promised myself that, if ever I will be free from all that, I would entirely dedicate my time to writing. But now I am always under the impression that I owe time, presence, assistance to everyone around me – it’s a form of guilt that pushes me to do so, as if my writing work didn’t matter, or isn’t of value since it”s not valorized. This is, for sure, in my head, but I guess it’s not entirely unfounded: I get to constantly hear remarks around me: “oh, writing is fun, you aren’t doing anything”, or “You didn’t write anything so far?? What are doing all this time?” as if writing happens between bacon-and-eggs and the pumpkin soup.

          Meanwhile, I feel that I am growing. Your sporadic “reminders” are a special balm on my writing heart. Thank you for doing that.

          One more thing: the fact that you feel the need to read non-fiction is also a kind of right medicine for you (like my cat who discovered all by herself that eating some kind of green leaves in my planted pots helps her eliminate the fur balls, we seem to know what’s good for us for a given situation. You reminded me of a dream (I just went back through them and discovered that I already have a book there) I had back then in 2005. It was about me being annoyed with myself and my clumsy writing; the dream literally told me to read Paulo Coelho, it will make me feel better. I didn’t follow the advice (I was still in denial at the time). But I was shocked when, sometime in 2009, I just happened to read “Zahir” that my daughter bought, and I realized that all my inner struggle about writing melted away – my writing had nothing to do with his style, theme, etc, but I felt like growing new wings. It was maybe one of my last fiction books (maybe the last), ever since I can only read nonfiction. All this is so helpful, I know – but the time passes by, ever so quickly, ever so frustrating. I know I need more self-discipline.

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  5. Wonderful insights…consciousness permeating the universe…have you seen a video of John Hagelin talking about Consciousness (it’s part of the “what the bleep do we know” movie, I believe)?
    Quite a turnaround you’ve done. I had a similar journey but had my days of “great revelations” a bit earlier. It still feels like a struggle sometimes.
    Thanks for sharing, enjoy reading about you and some of your posts!

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  7. I feel like I’ve found a treasure! And I have! I’m in a phase in life where I’m thirsty, so thirsty for knowledge! Thanks for bring there and sharing your experiences!

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