I have been wanting to understand how and why life arises as it does my whole life.
Probably the most important thing I learned in art school was that in any good work of art, every detail will point to the intent of the artist. This understanding inspired me to look at life in a deeply metaphorical way. Life is art. My art work in college was about the fundamentals of how meaning is expressed, e.g. through gesture and shape, resonance, and dynamics of expansion and contraction. I knew instinctively that life, the universe, everything was all interconnected holographically in a web of intent, and that every detail was pointing to the intent to carry meaning. This understanding profoundly serves seeing life alchemically and spiritually.
As long as I can remember I’ve been interested in inner- and inter-personal dynamics, physical and life sciences, and esoteric knowledge. I knew very early on that our perceptions are affected by our attitudes and points of view toward the world. Seeing how realities arise from our projections was critical for this understanding. My study of the energetic nature of our being and the interface of the emotional body with living has been a personal pursuit of mine for decades.
The 1980s was my decade involved with the work of Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff said that the emotional body was too fast to understand. I remember putting out a sincere prayer during a meeting: I want to understand the emotional body. After I left the Gurdjieff organization, I began studying breathwork and started seeing how we could work with the emotions through relaxing the body and breath and allowing processes to unfold. A training I was involved in later called MotherwaveWork brought this together with working with beliefs, movement, hypno-therapeutic techniques and spirit. My engagement with this school confirmed even more deeply for me the knowledge that all aspects of self and life are deeply interwoven.
I’ve seen how profoundly the universe exquisitely, intricately reflects us. It elegantly reflects what we hold and how we hold it. We are responsible for how we see the world. The universe is for us, not against us. I’ve seen and understood this directly. This world is about Love (ask any Near Death Experiencer or spiritual master), and the perception of Not Love is a reflection of how that is misunderstood and misguided. In a world as complex as this, that is not necessarily simple to understand, especially considering how convolutedly we have been held in deception.
The origins of Alchemy of the Apocalypse occurred just before December 21, 2012, a recent collective expression of the apocalypse meme. I realized I was feeling nervous, I had some fear, so I sat down to meditate and face what I was fearing. I started making a list: What was I really afraid of? Fear of immense difficulty, fear of lack of resources, fear of turmoil, fear of people going crazy; these fears still can easily arise in today’s world. I saw that these fears were being stimulated from some ultimate projection of a possible catastrophic near future.
The inspiration came to look at the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and in doing so I saw that every one of my fears could be assigned to one of these four archetypes. This “revelation” became a source of deep inspiration into understanding how our fears may precipitate exactly what we most fear, and the potential profound counsel that this biblical warning is providing.
Since I know that I must be responsible for what I hold, I began looking for how to work with and understand these fears, a way in which I could stay present and not ignore a potential gift. I already knew a lot about how to process fear. I had understood fear as an energetic contraction dynamic from very early on and knew that by contacting my fears directly in the ways that I understood of how to fearlessly work with and open to them, I could allow them to reveal their value. It was later in studying Alchemy that the beautiful, functional, expressive framework of this understanding emerged.
My approach to my spiritual life has been informed by an understanding that I am both within Source and I am Source. This perspective is one of both surrender and trust, and also taking responsibility. This is a fine line to develop. It gets challenged by what and how we fear. Alchemy of the Apocalypse addresses this edge: directly, subtly, and deeply, with application to how we are living our daily lives.
