This was why I joined a movement, known as Siloism, later as The Community for Human Development, from age 19 to age 38, when I began to participate less and less.
To cut to the chase, I was an activist who believed she was a revolutionary. Activism is being active in support of a cause you believe to be just and worthwhile for others and yourself. To be a revolutionary though, is to put your life on the line, to put your money where your mouth is. I went to millions of meetings, study groups, retreats, I led groups, seminars and retreats, but I was working for someone else's mission, as part of a larger whole, because I believed it was worthwhile and just. However, after 18 years and motherhood I changed and I began to feel a huge crisis, of existential emptiness overcoming me, that came from my inner world.
The movement I joined, I realized years later, was not an ideal community, and I saw that the world I believed I or we could change was not so permeable to change, and that we ourselves were -- despite our bravado, and our efficiency at getting things done, and even the continuing euphoria and unquestioning faith and determination of the many -- acting rather like a cult. At the very least, we were acting like holier-than-thou, self-righteous people who believed we had the right formula, the right vision, even if we said we didn't think this.
Whatever, I no longer felt a part of it. This terrified me. And I could talk to no one about it, it was as if I had stepped out of the bubble and to talk to me would require shaking hands with an apostate. No, it would never do. So I was on my own, and I was in a panic. I believed my life would lose all meaning if I left. But I had to.
My marriage, which had been based on both of us being firmly committed to the movement, fell apart. You can build a committed relationship over shared ideals, but it won't work if you don't put in the work of mutual respect, willingness to give and take, to communicate, to negotiate, day after day, year after year. My greatest ideal, of building a family that would last forever, broke apart. I saw that I was now in a position of total precariousness.
I had believed that if you gave your love unconditionally, the best of yourself to everyone at all times (dar lo mejor de sí), you would receive it back. It does not work this way. What is in your heart, not what is in your head, is what signals to the world: "Give me this same thing back!"
Inside me there was fear: of abandonment, of isolation; and feeling worthless, helpless, defenseless.
That was what I had been receiving for the longest time, and now it merely escalated.
My best intentions, my ideas of justice, of fairness, of honesty, faith, loyalty -- were nothing but a million shards of broken glass. The black monster rose up from inside me and devoured my world. It was also shouting at me: come here, fix me, face me! And I feared madness.
But I couldn't resist, I was exhausted, I had no strength left. I had struggled so long to sustain my highest ideals and faith. I had lost them all.
I gave in to depression, and entered my darkness for two years.
I accepted my truth. My failure. It was like death.
And something started happening inside me, that had actually begun some years before. My dream world intensified. It had been intense when I was in crisis, 19 years before, precisely when I had left my family and joined the movement at age 20. This time though, my dream life did not feature being pursued by dangerous animals like a bull or lions. Now it was full of tsunamis, of crossing a very high suspended bridge in the midst of a hurricane, the roiling giant waves far below.
And dreams came that were euphoric as well. An emerald tsunami coming toward my house to destroy it, yet it felt as though I wanted it to come, I was enthralled and there was something in its beauty that I wanted to surrender to. I dreamed about miniature things that made me happy because of their beauty and perfection, as if they were happy just to be. For example, a terrarium and inside it was earth that all sorts of tiny plants grew on, and there were beautiful bluebottle flies humming about and other tiny animals. It was full of life, color, beauty, and happiness. In another dream I was looking down at minature jeeps whose engines were running, though they stood still, and they were like toys, and I was in a childlike joy. In another, a small refrigerator opened and the trays came out by themselves filled with food FOR ME. It was nourishing me! I didn't have to do a thing.
Then the images of the Philippines came, and they were hypnotic and symbolic. In one dream I climbed over an old cement fence (bakod) into a house that was a kind of museum dedicated to Rizal. There were nurses inside, people walking around, and a painting of Rizal hung on a wall and everyone said that he was a great doctor and healer, the house was a hospital dedicated to him. I was a kind of guest of honor there, I'd come in through the back door, not through the front. There was another dream, with a powerful sense of sadness permeating it. I saw an old chair, very plain, of wood with a woven seat, and sitting on it was a woman wrapped in old blankets and cloths as if she were a mummy. I could only see her hair. She was poor and abandoned. The dream told me that she was Sisa, or Filipinas. I wanted to console her. She was as if asleep, unaware of the world, wrapped in her sadness. It was as if I was her, too. Her tragedy, abandonment, isolation were my own.
In the movement we had been taught, over and over, to help others. It was the only thing that gave real meaning to life. At this point, not having anything to do, because after the marriage broke up I was incapable of shouldering the burden of motherhood and their father took them to live with him and then refused to return them to me, I realized, after much reflection (and I was meditating a lot as well) that what I could devote myself to now, something that was absolutely a part of me and that I had forgotten for so long, was my Filipino world. And since no one in the movement could oocupy themselves with it, then I would. There were so many in the movement, and no one concerned with Filipinas, and it was so close to me, it was me, and in a way the madness inside me, the frightening ocean, had to do with Her.
Three years before I had gone back to the Philippines to research on my grandfather, and shortly after I discovered the biography of Rizal written by Retana, and I was already thinking of how identical our history was to that of Chile's, and how the "clash" between the Spanish and the Indian civilizations were exactly what happened in our land too, but was never spoken of in that way to us, and so had been bled of all life.
And because my rationalism had failed, I decided to open myself up to the non-rational. It was around this time that I expressed this to myself as "speaking to the invisible". Because I was in such chaos and sorrow, I often walked out to a large rock, sat on it and faced the mountains. There were cerro San Rafael, cerro Provincia, and on the other side, Argentina, and I would speak to the immensity, the cordillera and the sky, and ask for help. I was lucky to live in a semi-rural place then, which, though very difficult to live in (no telephone, no connection to the city water system, we got our water straight from the mountains, no paved roads, surrounded by thorn trees, dry brush and eucaliptus, fire hazard) it was beautiful, at night especially when you could see down below the bejewelled plain of Santiago city proper, a dark baize billiard table strewn with sparkling diamonds. The air was cleaner, it was quiet, the silence only broken by doves cooing plaintively. You felt closer to the eternal.
Looking back now, it was the beginning of my awareness of the Field, and it was when I began to speak to It.
I wasn't out of the woods, far from it. But the "coincidences" and intuitions started to come. Help as if orchestrated by invisible hands. The old Italian woman who healed me with energy and became my teacher, I realized, so I could learn to help others, do the same for others that she had done for me.
Our absence of love for ourselves, our loss of faith in life, are the greatest dangers of all. They are what we must heal so that we may connect more and more strongly with the Field, then channel its creative power as co-creators, of whatever we want, to create and receive well-being.
My rationalism found its complement in intuition. I had come from a childhood and youth in a country and society steeped in the irrational, and I grabbed on to rationalism in the movement. I learned to be an adult, to act in consonance with my idealism. And when, years later, I discovered it wasn't enough, there were no such things as perfect human beings without weaknesses, failings, capital sins, then I gave up activism and plunged into my chaotic inner world. Thanks to the fact that the movement in its early days had given me tools for inner work as well, tools I had until then only applied in practically schoolroom conditions, I stepped into my personal odyssey equipped with at least rudimentary skills. It was when I met Adriana, a true master of energy, that I got down to work with my inner Minotaur, not by grappling with him head on, but by engaging with the white Light of my Energy Field, raising its potential. My Minotaur was naught but my Energy, when it was polarized negatively, and blocked. It had to be transformed, not destroyed.
Much later I connected the dots and learned to actively ask for what I needed, how to do this and how to watch for the manifestation of what I asked for, as it came into being, not necessarily as I imagined it would, nor in the time frame I projected.
The love story with my homeland began, which is a combined left-and-right hemisphere reenchantment. I had always been enchanted by my land, even as a child, and then I forgot Her as I charged out into the world, looking for the fulfillment of my youthful dreams. Then those youthful dreams burned themselves out and I found myself faced with responsibilities, first of all, of motherhood, and of survival, earning a living without the protection of a man, and also without the support of companionship and committed love.
However, the path into the unknown is strewn with difficulties and renunciations. As time passes, old age finally begins, and all of the comforting stories and psychological and emotional crutches fall away from us. If we have been true and constant, we may find ourselves beginning to walk on air, or on water. Or seeing through walls (of others' closed hearts, embellished evasions), losing our fear of them, discovering what happiness can feel like when your cataracts vanish, suddenly.
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