Four Mosswood Poems

Griffin Rider

Track the griffin you once rode
to the airport where it lies caged and bound
under the control tower that plays
the jingle from the music box
you were given when you were six.
Free the winged lion. Feed it the manna
your controllers stole from its core.
See your bright dreamer awaken in its eyes.
Ride it again to find the girl whose mother let her
fall out of the sky but has been kept safe
in a garden on the dark side of the Moon,
When she is back in your heart,
ride to the House of Stone and Guilt
where the hag turns in circles of self-loathing
and offer forgiveness, the heart of healing.

 

Masks

“Put off your mask,” she says.
I tell her, “I’m not wearing one.”
“That is the best disguise.”
In this city, when people are unmasked
you see the false face behind the false face.
I do not speak of magicians.
They put  on masks to step into
the energy of an old god or a wild shaman,
a force of chaos, of disease or whirlwind,
and must then master that power
to bend it to their purpose.  If they fail
or wear the mask too long, it becomes poison.
Don’t wear any mask for too long
or you may find you have no face left
except the one molded by the role you played
or that you can’t find yours self in the mirror
because you have become a ghost of the living.

 

Heron Staff

The space is full of flapping and feathers
and discordant bird cries. I sit still
with my heron blue staff. I will remind them
there are right and wrong ways to call on gods.
I am enthroned between Hestia and Ogygia.
I must keep the balance. Any judgment I make
will be on myself as well as the bird people.

 

Surprises in Flight

I’m going up like a rocket to see my Teacher
in a higher world, a seventh heaven.
I have juice for the flight. Lift-off from my world tree
is flawless, and the drum frees me from the little mind.
I see over cities and continents. Then I am hooked,
rocking in midair, because a long arm has reached out
and plucked at my sleeve. I come down gracelessly
to join him on his balcony above the world.
He is impossibly beautiful, as always, in his white suit.
“We need to talk,” he says. “The Family are waiting for you,
up among the gods. But they want you to write more books
and deliver a lot more entertainment before you check out.
Don’t be in a hurry to leave. Enjoy what you can in a body.
We will be swapping places soon enough.”

- Mosswood Hollow, July 13, 2018

On Spiritual Enthronement, or Fusion with an Aspect of the Higher Self

 

Plotinus said that our most important tutelary spirit is the self on a level above the one we are on. I have found this to be true. I think of this self as my double on the balcony, because in half-dream states I have encountered him on a high roof terrace, a vantage point from which it is possible to find patterns in the confusion of life below and approach life choices with detachment and even a sense of divine comedy.
      I meet this life teacher in interior dialogues, above all, once again, in the half-dream state that researchers call hypnagogia but is more elegantly described as dorveille in Old French, dormiveglia in curent Italian. I feel that at a tremendous turning point in my life, our minds and energies merged.
      Let me try to make a general obseravtion before I turn this discussion over to the record of a conversation I made many years ago. . 
     As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with a higher self and now progress to a relationship with a self on yet a higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey — on a continuing or even constant basis — our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

    “Take heart. I am with you always. I know you better than you know yourself.” This was the opening of communication with an inner teacher that I recorded on the night before Halloween in 1993.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two.”
     This was the essence of communication from the same inner voice, as I received it on March 13, 1995. Over many months, I had come to know and trust that inner speaker. He had given me a wealth of information I was able to test and verify, and apply in ordinary reality. That night, I had stretched out on my bed after applying myself to several hours of reading and reflection on our relations with inner teachers. What was coming through now was direct knowledge.
     “Your mind on my purpose.”
      That was familiar language, the way this inner voice encouraged me to give my full attention to what was coming through. The best communication of this kind, I had learned, comes in a state of relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation. I don’t think of this as channeling, because I am fully conscious throughout, able to ask questions and to engage in a full dialogue when that seems appropriate. On that night, a self that was no stranger gave me some very clear information:

    "When fusion takes place between a focus personality and the Higher Self - that is to say, the control personality on the plane directly above the focus personality -the result is a step forward in personal evolution that will revise the scales of the contacts. The Higher Self now becomes an entity on a higher level than before.

    "This progression has taken humans from the conditions of the group soul — comparable to animals or even insects — to higher individuation. It can take the species as a whole to a new plane. Indeed, from this point of view, you are attending the emergence of a new species.Your physical equipment imposes limitations on both consciousness and memory. The three-tiered brain joins you to the crocodile and the horse as well as the emerging human. New structures in the brain are being evolved. Rising on the planes brings a process of physiological change — in the metabolism, in the composition and replacement of cells, and, naturally, in the chemistry and electrical engineering of the brain.
     "Now we are one but may still talk as two. Beyond us, a higher, clearer, purer intelligence is seeking to manifest and contact you as you rise on the planes."

       This came from an inner voice of the kind we come to know and trust. As I recorded hundreds of pages of communications from this source over the years, I reassured myself that if I was going crazy, I was in good company. Socrates knew such a voice, and Plutarch wrote an essay about it. The truest guide is no stranger. As Rumi put it: “The one who knows everything is with you now, closer than your jugular vein.”

Text adapted from "The Double on the Balcony", chapter 31 of The Boy Who Died and CameBack: Adventures of a Dream Archaeologist in the Multiverse by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Journal drawing: "Path to the Higher Self" by Robert Moss

 

 

What’s Going On in Your Dream House?

When you record your dreams, pay special attention to the dream locations. The settings may be familiar or completely foreign, vivid and sensory or cloudy and indistinct. You may be in a place whose physics appears quite different from ordinary reality. You may be at home with people you don't know in regular life. You might be living in a medieval castle that seems to have been constructed yesterday.
    Again and again, you dream you are in the old place – back in the home you shared with your ex, or the office where you worked at the old job, or at grandma’s house, or in the school yard. Maybe you’ll want to ask yourself: did I leave part of myself behind when I left that old situation? Maybe your dream house is a hybrid, melding elements from places you recognize from the past with novel architecture. The house may seem familiar at the outset, but then proves to have more rooms and more stories than you remember. These may be stories of your life and levels of your psyche or Self.
     It can be fascinating to revisit a dream structure of this kind through conscious dream reentry, and learn more about what is going on. Jung found in his dream of a many-layered house - a dream Freud insisted on misinterpreting - a model for understanding connections between the conscious mind, the personal subconscious and the collective unconscious. In his dream, he started out on a floor that looked like a normal bourgeois home. As he descended through successive floors, he found himself in primal territory, in a dirt-floor basement containing skulls and bones of distant ancestors.
     I find it especially intriguing to go up on the roof of a dream house. Sometimes I find there are levels beyond what I expected. Sometimes, on a roof terrace or garden, I meet a benign figure I recognize as a slightly higher self, a witness self who can give me perspective on my life situation, since he is up above the scrum. I have called this figure the Double on the Balcony.
     I dreamed I was in a house that I used to own, in another reality. It was quite familiar in the dream, but does not correspond closely to any house I have occupied in this world. My dream house was a palace, with sections open to tour groups. It has sweeping marble staircases leading up to what used to be private family apartments and my library. I tried to go up the steps, but they petered out and I realized the library and the private rooms had been long since abandoned and sealed off. I did not give up on my detective work. I took another staircase to a balcony with wonderful views over green forests and meadows. I told ladies I met there, matter-of-factly, "I used to own this house." I know I will come here again. I need to get up that staircase. And I need to understand what life story I am inhabiting in this palace that has seen better days.
    By focusing on a dream location, we have an excellent portal for conscious dreaming, shamanic journeying and astral travel. If you have been to a place in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might return to a place you have visited in ordinary reality. Your dream house may be a place you will visit in the future. I have been guided, in while series of dreams, to houses I did not recognize at the outset but proved to be future homes that I purchased and occupied. We take real estate tours in our dreams.
    The dream house may be a structure that the astral architect in you has constructed for various purposes: as a place for rest and relaxation, as a sanctuary or a study, as a place of rendezvous, as a pleasure palace. Such creations may have their own stability. They may be homes that await you in the afterlife or interlife.    Your dream house may be a place where you are leading a parallel life with people you may or may not know in your physical world. It may be a construction or renovation site, a place waiting for our imagination to raise the walls or put on the finishing touches.
     How about drawing or mapping your dream locales, making floorplans of that dream house? You will be growing your astral geography in ways you will find increasingly rewarding and exciting. You may even find you are claiming some real estate options in this world or the next.

What's that? Your memories of such things are blurry? You can take comfort from Seth, as channeled by Jane Roberts in Dreams and the Projection of Consciousness : "If you have little memory of your dream locations when you are awake, then remember that you have little memory of your waking locations when you are in the dream situation. Both are legitimate and both are realities. When the body lies in bed, it is separated by a vast distance from the dream location in which the dreaming self may dwell.” 

Drawing: "Double on the Balcony" by Robert Moss

Encounters with a Greater Self

 Ultimately we make peace between the many aspects of our selves by rising to a conscious connection with the Self on a higher level, a Self that is no stranger. There are many ways of perceiving and receiving the knowledge and power of a Greater Self. In practical terms, your most important life teacher may be the aspect of the Greater Self whose home base is the level of consciousness and reality immediately above the one where you spend most of your time...

This was the wisdom of the Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus. He taught that every human soul is a spectrum of possible levels of consciousness. Each of us is a cosmos, and we choose the level on which we live. Whatever level we choose, our spiritual guardian or daimon is on the level just above. Live well and evolve, and you may rise to a higher level with a daimon on a higher level again.

Plotinus offered one of the most rousing statements from the real philosophy of the ancient world: “The soul has the power to conform to her character the destiny allotted to her.” 

When I lay down for some horizontal meditation on the afternoon of October 14, 1993, I had mental contact with an intelligence that told me that “dreams are the primary dimension of being” and that the most important thing to teach people is that “Dreaming and waking are the same”.

 I felt within the larger presence – and its presence within me – throughout the day. I came to understand that he is with me, and has been with me, even in situations from which I have fancied that the Higher Self absents itself out of discretion or disgust. 

Your life partner, the soul pal who will never leave you, is your higher self, the soul of your soul, on the level where you can engage with each other. To open fully to this engagement requires a surrender of ego agendas and what don Miguel Ruiz calls the four agreements, self-limiting beliefs and accommodations that bind the soul. It may take desperate circumstances to bring this about, or a desperate state of mind. What follows the surrender is not a master-servant relationship but an active engagement, a blissful friendship in which you are never alone.

  I like to call my slightly higher self, Plotinus’ guardian, my Double on the Balcony. When I set out to meet him, I follow the road of dreams to a terrace above the world. Sometimes it is the rooftop of a tall building, twenty stories up, or more. Often the terrace has the air of a civilized café, operating just for us. I find him seated at a table, perhaps with a glass of wine the color of moonlight. He is usually impeccably dressed, in a perfectly tailored white suit or a dinner jacket. Occasionally I have the impression that he has a female companion; once she seemed to be an opera singer. But she is never part of our conversation.

He is impossibly beautiful. He looks like a man in the prime of life, maybe thirty years old, yet carrying the knowledge of millennia. He does not judge me. He is my witness. He knows all of my life. It is as open to him as the contents of a doll house when you remove the back and the roof. More than this, he remembers my other lives.

I should say, rather, our other lives. Something I have remembered, through our conversations, is that we have a twining relationship across time. When I am in the body, in a life on Earth, he is up here, on his balcony above the world. He still enjoys pleasures and creature comforts, but he is not enmeshed in the confusion and clutter of the physical world. He can sample delights that we associate with a physical body without being confined to one. The babalawo in me, the African diviner he calls my witchdoctor, says it has always been like this. While one of us is down in the marketplace of the world, the other observes as a “double in heaven”.

I like that phrase, but his is a near heaven, rather than a remote one. He is a Free Self. He is not bound by the conditions of physical life. From his terrace, he can see the big picture. When I join him up there, I can see the crossroads and forking paths of my life from an aerial perspective.

He shows me some navigational challenges that lie ahead. There’s a spaghetti junction with whirling stands of traffic going off in all direction like an exploding bowl of pasta. It’s dizzying to look at. Inspecting this with his mildly humorous detachment, I see the scene lift to reveal a manageable locale, the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Now I can survey, one by one, the possible roads I can take from that place of decision. He reminds me that when life on the ground poses difficult choices – when I run into blockages or risk making a turn without reflecting on where that direction will take me – I should come up here, look at things from the higher perspective, and freeze the action while I observe myself traveling more than one of the possible roads in order to clarify and compare the probable outcomes.

From such encounters comes daily practice, one I can share with others. I picture myself in the thick of a situation where I am facing a choice or conflict or dilemma. I see myself pausing from acting or worrying, placing myself in a quiet mental space whatever is going on around me. I feel light coming down around me, until I am within a column or pillar of light. This brings the sense of blessing and protection. I sense benign energies and intelligence reaching down to me within the pillar of light. Then there is the sense of traction, of being carried up within the pillar. I could be carried up many levels, as if on an elevator. But it is sufficient, for everyday navigation, to go up just one level, to that terrace above the world.

 Here I find again my Double on the Balcony. From his table, I can see a relief map of my life, and of other lives and situations that will concern me. When the traffic patterns are hard to read, I can have everything slow down or stop so I can study it at my leisure.

As we go through a process of spiritual evolution, we may grow to the point where we can fuse our current personality with that a slightly higher self and progress to a relationship with a self on yet a higher level, and so on up the scale. Through successive transformations, we may reach a level where we are able to survey — on a continuing or even constant basis — our relations with many aspects of our multidimensional self, including personalities living in other places and times, without losing our ability to navigate in our present bodies.

Text adapted from Growing Big Dreams by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo: "Kildare Window" by RM

Conversations with a Free Self on a terrace above the world

Higher Self, Greater Self. These are very big words. I want something smaller for him. There may be many levels to the Higher Self, ten that I know, others beyond counting. He lives on a level just above the level I am on.
    When I set out to meet him, I follow the road of dreams to a terrace above the world. Sometimes it is the rooftop of a tall building, twenty stories up, or more. Often the terrace has the air of a civilized café, operating just for us. I find him seated at a table, perhaps with a glass of wine the color of moonlight. He is usually impeccably dressed, in a perfectly tailored white suit or a dinner jacket. Occasionally I have the impression that he has a female companion; once she seemed to be an opera singer. But she is never part of our conversation.
    He is impossibly beautiful. He looks like a man in the prime of life, maybe thirty years old, yet carrying the knowledge of millennia. He does not judge me. He is my witness. He knows all of my life. It is as open to him as the contents of a doll house when you remove the back and the roof. More than this, he remembers my other lives.
    I should say, rather, our other lives. Something I have remembered, through our conversations, is that we have a twining relationship across time. When I am in the body, in a life on Earth, he is up here, on his balcony above the world. He still enjoys pleasures and creature comforts, but he is not enmeshed in the confusion and clutter of the physical world. He can sample delights that we associate with a physical body without being confined to one. The babalawo in me, the African diviner he calls my witchdoctor, says it has always been like this. While one of us is down in the marketplace of the world, the other observes as a “double in heaven”.
     I like that phrase, but his is a near heaven, rather than a remote one. So how shall I describe him? I have decided I will call him my Free Self. He is not bound by the conditions of physical life. From his terrace, he can see the big picture. When I join him up there, I can see the crossroads and forking paths of my life from an aerial perspective.
    He shows me some navigational challenges that lie ahead. There’s a spaghetti junction with whirling stands of traffic going off in all direction like an exploding bowl of pasta. It’s dizzying to look at. Inspecting this with his mildly humorous detachment, I see the scene lift to reveal a manageable locale, the Place de la Concorde in Paris. Now I can survey, one by one, the possible roads I can take from that place of decision. He reminds me that when life on the ground poses difficult choices – when I run into blockages or risk making a turn without reflecting on where that direction will take me – I should come up here, look at things from the higher perspective, and freeze the action while I observe myself traveling more than one of the possible roads in order to clarify and compare the probable outcomes.
    From such encounters comes daily practice, one I can share with others. I picture myself in the thick of a situation where I am facing a choice or conflict or dilemma. I see myself pausing from acting or worrying, placing myself in a quiet mental space whatever is going on around me. I feel light coming down around me, until I am within a column or pillar of light. This brings the sense of blessing and protection. I sense benign energies and intelligence reaching down to me within the pillar of light. Then there is the sense of traction, of being carried up within the pillar. I could be carried up many levels, as if on an elevator. But it is sufficient, for everyday navigation, to go up just one level, to that terrace above the world.
     Here I find again the Free Self, my wiser twin. From his table, I can see a relief map of my life, and of other lives and situations that will concern me. When the traffic patterns are hard to read, I can have everything slow down or stop so I can study it at my leisure.

Graphic: "The Art of Conversation" by René Magritte (1963)

A month of balconies

It's been a month of balconies. A balcony in the Bucegi mountains of Romania, overlooking woods alive with bears and wolves and owls. A terrace in Bucharest, perfect for late-night conversations with good friends.
    A balcony at the Hameau de l'Etoile in southern France, overlooking the Pic Saint-Loup and the trail to a Goddess cave. A balcony in Paris, overlooking mansard roofs and the vibrant life of the Latin Quarter.
    A high terrace with sweeping views of São Paulo, perfect for sipping espresso and munching  pão de queijo, filled with the moist white cheese of Minas Gerais. A balcony on Santa Catarina island in southern Brazil, overlooking the Atlantic ocean, where swallows swooping back and forth by day seem to be weaving invisible skeins of possibility. Over the weekend, the clouds open to reveal a fertile young moon with her horns turned upward and, after midnight, the three stars in belt of Orion point to Sirius.
    On the last day of my workshop in Brazil, inspired by a dream shared by one of the participants at the breakfast table, I led our dreamers on a group journey, powered by shamanic drumming, to a balcony high above the world. We entered a high-rise building were we were required by security to leave our baggage behind. We rode an unusual elevator high above any plausible floor, to a roof terrace where we found someone waiting for us: that slightly higher self I have called the Double on the Balcony

You are not my shadow.

You stand closer to the sun.

Of all my doubles, you are the most interesting.

You are watching when I forget you.

You are with me when I don’t notice.

You are not my judge, or my guardian angel.

You are the one who remembers.

You are my witness on the balcony above the world.*

We practiced looking at current life issues from the perspective of a second self who is not caught up in all the fog and confusion of everyday life. We tracked our present life roads into the possible future, looking at where we might be five years from now if we continue in the directions we are currently following - and then backtracking to see how things will come out if we make different choices.
    I love balconies with a view, in both worlds.

* from my poem "The Double on the Balcony." Full text in Here, Everything Is Dreaming: Poems and Stories by Robert Moss. Published by Excelsior Editions.

  

Victorian Ghost Hunter Shows Me the Spiral Castle

"Go up on the mountain," said an inner voice I have come to know as I lay under the sheet, preparing to let my body sleep. "Meet me there."
    I knew that voice, and smiled because it echoed something my dream double had said recently to a friend in a green valley, far away. He told her that he could not spend time with her because he had to go up on a mountain to meet his elder brother, who had sent him a message that he wanted to share an important secret. I have no brothers in ordinary life. I suspect that my elder brother on the mountain, in my friend's dream, is a second self who lives just above my world, able to read patterns that escape me. I often think of him as my Double on the Balcony.
    So around 2:00 a.m. I relaxed, and enjoyed the sense of slipping free from the body, the noise of the fan, and the muggy heat of the town. I arrived at a castle on a rise that did not seem to be a mountain, but may have looked mountain-high to medieval travelers or besiegers. The castle was entirely constructed of red brick, in northern "Brick Gothic" style.
    I now had a companion. He did not look like my Double on the Balcony, and if there was a family resemblance I suspect it would be shared interests. He looked like one of the Victorian ghost-hunters who intrigue me and are quite often the theme of my studies and sometimes my dreams. He had a dark, full beard and wore a frock coat.
    He was eager to show me the design of the castle. It had been constructed and expanded in three phases. The core of the castle, its inner keep, combined the oldest and the newest part of the structure. The builders had worked out from this center, in an expanding spiral, and then returned to the center in the final phase, spiraling back in. From the air, the spiral pattern was clear.
    I had no idea, until now, that a castle could be both strong and so fluid. As my guide escorted me around the walls, he was almost skipping as he helped me to understand the spiral patterns. I clapped my hands with delight. He showed me there were friendly pubs and cafes in each of the three sections of the castle, and that I could take a break whenever I liked.
    I returned to my body from this excursion full of good cheer and confidence, quite sure that certain issues of structure and construction I've been facing in a current book project will be easily resolved, if I hold to that spiral design. I don't remember how my traveling self got to the castle. The red bricks remind me of castles I have visited in the Baltic, especially Trakai and Kaunas in Lithuania, and there will be more about my adventures in Lithuania in my new book.
     The Victorian-style gentleman reminds me of W.T. (William Thomas) Stead, the newspaper editor, radical reformer and eager psychic researcher. Along with F.W.H. Myers, Stead is a great favorite of mine among the Victorian ghost-hunters; he was well acquainted with Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James and William James.
    I was reading a collection of essays by Stead just before going to bed last night, so I may have invited his attentions - or encouraged one of my own doubles to do some Victorian dress-up. Stead was fascinated by "ghosts of the living": by the possibility that, wittingly or unwittingly, all of us are capable of projecting astral doubles or rather tangible "thought forms" that can interact with others. 
    He came to think that we may be leading continuous lives outside our present physical bodies, and that dreams can be memories of those other lives. In his essay "The Ghost That Dwells in Us", Stead reports the case of a man who claimed that whenever he closed his eyes he woke up in another body in a life that was completely different from his ordinary reality. He enjoyed both lives, but preferred the one he was living while his body was asleep.
     Stead speculated that "it is not impossible to conceive the possibility of a continuous series of connected dreams, which would result in giving us a realizing sense of leading two existences." I think this is exactly right. If we fail to notice this, it is because of our imperfect memories. In our dream situations, we forget what we are in the world of the sleeping body. When we return to the body, we forget most of what we experiences when we were out of it, or living in other bodies in other realities. But when we acquire a "realizing sense" (in Stead's quaint and attractive phrase) of what may be going on here, we may start to remember more of what it means to be alive in the multiverse.
    By the way, Stead gets around. He was renowned for his personal psychic gifts when he was alive. He communicated with an assistant by pure telepathy, beaming thoughts to her and then letting his hand record her responses - which were usually quite specific and accurate - through semi-automatic writing. Before he went down on the Titanic, he had promised to report on conditions on the Other Side after death. He kept his promise. He returned (via a medium) to give one of the best and (to my mind) most reliable accounts of what happens after death in a marvelous little book published as The Blue Island.

For more on Stead and the Victorian psychic researchers, please see The Dreamer's Book of the Dead.

The Cafe Rouge ascension technique

Berkeley, California

We need to learn to grow visions of bright possibility so strong that they want to manifest in the physical world. And we want to learn to use locales in ordinary reality as gateways to other worlds. Here's a small example, involving a theme that is anything but small: how an idea for a portal to a higher self became a physical locale on Fourth Street in Berkeley at lunchtime on Sunday.
    Spiritual guides and teachers can take many forms. For me, over many years, one of the most important teachers has been a being on a level above my present self that I think of as the Double on the Balcony. He is no stranger. He observes my present life and can see many things that are veiled from me when I am caught up in the hurry and distraction of my world. When I go looking for him, I often find him on a kind of observation deck that often resembles a roof garden or a terrace cafe with sweeping views. Sometimes he is sipping a drink the color of moonlight. Hence my pet name for him, the Double on the Balcony.
    He is a witness self. He is able to remind me of things that I forget. When I am in danger of making serious mistakes, he sometimes intervenes to offer course correction. I wrote a poem about him, "The Double on the Balcony" that is  in my new collection Here, Everything Is Dreaming:

You are not my shadow.

You stand closer to the sun.

Of all my doubles, you are the most interesting.

You are watching when I forget you.

You are with me when I don’t notice.

You are not my judge, or my guardian angel.

You are the one who remembers.

You are my witness on the balcony above the world.

I wanted to give the very lively and creative group that gathered for my weekend workshop in Berkeley an opportunity to encounter a second self of this kind, on an accessible level, and to rev-vision their life issues from his perspective. I am always experimenting with new portals for group adventures and shamanic journeys. After walking Fourth Street in Berkeley a few times, and having meals and coffee at a couple of pleasant cafes, I thought it might be fun to suggest to the group that during my drumming, they would enjoy themselves walking that street - in their second bodies - and picking a building, perhaps a restaurant, that could offer a gateway to the Double on the Balcony. Once inside the building, they would make their way to a level above the street, perhaps an upper floor in a restaurant that they had not previously known to be there. From here, they would discover means of ascent to higher levels - stairs (regular or spiral), an elevator, or a skylight. I was having fun rehearsing the way I would introduce this colloquial script for a journey of ascent to a (slightly) higher self before we took our lunch break.

    I had already decided to go to the Cafe Rouge, where I had enjoyed an excellent dinner the evening before, roasted salmon drenched in olive oil, and burrata on a bed of white nectarines, basil and toasted almonds. When I reached the cafe with several of my workshop participants, I was escorted up a staircase to an upper level of the restaurant I had not known was there. "You are taking us to a higher level," I joked with the hostess.
    

When I sat down, I enjoyed the soft play of sunlight through a skylight overhead. I looked up, and saw that the skylight was framed by stars, inviting an excellent journey to a much higher level.
    The cafe had become the portal I had imagined. The worlds were joined. I had no doubt but that we would have excellent experiences in the group journey I had planned, to meet our personal versions of the Double on the Balcony and receive life guidance from his or her perspective. And so we did.



Photos of Cafe Rouge in Berkeley (c) Robert Moss