Waltzing in the Devil's Heart
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN UNKNOWN SEEKER
Framed in the construct of a reassembling a healthy personality out of the shattered fragments of a dysfunctional past, my memoir focuses on the subtle interactions between the physical and spiritual universe, rending the veil through my life stories to explore the possibility that we are more than the sum total of our physical, mental and psychological make-up. From the mirrored pieces of a Hessian puzzle, a portrait of the human soul emerges, common to all in with its soothing cool breeze of the divine ghost.
PROLOGUE
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The human being is so much more than the sum total of their life
experiences. Whether traumatic or joyful, dull or exciting, every
moment of our lives is an opportunity to awaken and be conscious.
Dark clouds of despair or the subtle illusion of pride and ego fog the soul from its awareness of Self. Our journey on this planet is to escape the malicious misconception that mental intelligence is the penultimate sum of our totality.
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The truth is that we are not this body, this mind, or this ego. We are pure spirit. It is through the desire to completely surrender to that inconceivable divine force that ultimately liberates one from the karmic chains of past deeds.
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I have been committed to staying in the present, trying to remain in the
eternal now for over four decades. At the age of sixty-five, when I embarked on this memoir, I was required by the very nature of an autobiography to introspect the past… to comb the catacombs of my memory for any experiences that played a part in shaping my spiritual journey.
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I have been blessed to have the assistance of my mother who was an enormous help in filling time/place gaps in my early childhood that were a misty plague. Her first-hand accounts of my journey are imbued with the grace and deeply precious perspective of a mother’s love.
Still so many years, not weeks or months, remained vacant rooms in the corridors of my subconscious. When I sat down to write the outline of my ghosts of Christmas past I found a natural solution – simply go into meditation, into thoughtless awareness and trust whatever came up when I asked time specific questions about my life were meant to be the significant signposts for my story.
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Tell me about my days from a baby till three or What stories of my junior high days were important to my evolution? I asked these questions to my higher Self during meditation. The universe’s response embroidered a life quilt out from fragmentary echoes of time past.
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It has been deliciously satisfying to find certain memories built upon themselves the more I put attention on the initial recollections. Much needed memory neurons came out of the cerebral sidelines, filling an occasional unfinished story with additional bits and pieces of memory until I actually envisioned a fully realized recollection.
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The larger framework and value of these stories rests on whether they invoke a universal resonance in the lives of you the reader.
Most of the problems in our lives can be overcome by connecting and staying aligned to the divine intelligence that exists within all of us. We all derive from the same primordial Creator regardless of race, religion, or creed.
I have attempted to piece whispering fragments of my past into a cohesive understanding of the more infinite spirit... to reconstruct some spiritual nuggets as I reassembled my life mosaic from Hermann Hesse’s broken mirror of the human personality.
Whenever I was tossed willingly or unwillingly into my shadow self, a kernel of conscious awareness always sifted its way through the silt, adding more grist to my karmic mill. My journey has been to slow the plumb bob of desire from its wild swings into my dark side… to still its string so that it remains in the center. Calm. Blissful. The ever present lives in the space between each breath. In there alone lies the fount of divine compassion and love.
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One baby step into the timeless.