Writing from the Deeper Self / Naomi Rose, Book Developer & Creative Midwife

Writing to Discover What You Don't Yet Know

Two Pieces from My Work-in-Progress, "Healing Civilization Simplified"

I don’t often share my work-in-progress, as many decisions and revisions tend to take place between the start and the completion of a book. However, I’m doing so here because I believe it can be helpful to you, if you are writing a book or considering writing one.

Much of the advice about writing urges you to “write what you know” — which makes sense, in the sense that writing from what you have experienced gives you a direct, often intimate bank from which to draw. But often (and I’ve done it myself), we think we’re supposed to take on the mantle of the complete expert, handing down our know-how to others as if we have the subject all sewn up.

But there is another way to write, and while it’s far more vulnerable, it’s also far more (a) interesting to do, and (b) generative of growth and transformation. It’s what you don’t yet know that draws you forward, and often draws more of you forward than if you were recounting something that, in your mind, is already all sewn up. Writing to discover what is not yet known is actually more evocative of our relationship with the Divine — where we get a glimpse of something, and then decide to follow it, even if that glimpse was as evanescent as a feather. That following into a place not-yet-known actually creates the territory that gives itself into visibility. This is one description of how the Divine creates through us. (Of course, we might not remember this while in the process of writing what we don’t yet know, or even believe it; but once we have “arrived” at “The End,” we can look back at the journey and realize the truth of this collaboration.)

A note before you read the two pieces of my writing that follow:

This page isn't linked from anywhere else on my site. You've arrived here because a newsletter or some other notice brought you — which feels right, since what's here doesn't quite belong in a main room of the “mansion” of this website.

Both pieces, below, are part of a book I'm currently writing called Healing Civilization Simplified. It's based on a book I published years ago by Claudio Naranjo, MD, called Healing Civilization. In it, Claudio made the overarching point that what should be an integrated "intra-psychic family" in each of us — the head/father, the heart/mother, the belly-instincts/child — tends to be out of balance, because for millennia, the head-mind in each of us has been overlaid by patriarchy. "Healing Civilization" offers a generalized remedy, but I wanted to know how to work with that in my own life: how has the patriarchal mind affected my being, and my sense of who I am? Understanding that gives me a better chance at bringing about the inner-family integration the book points toward.

That's the background for both pieces here. The first is the draft Introduction to "Healing Civilization Simplified" — writing that started as digesting Claudio's ideas and, partway through, turned into something more personal than I expected. The second, "My Father at 109," is more personal still — an unplanned piece that arrived on what would have been my father's 109th birthday, written to find out what I didn't yet know I thought about my own father, my own inner father, and the patriarchal overlay on both.

My intention in writing about myself this openly isn't self-focus for its own sake. It's my hope that in reading about my own particular unearthing, something stirs in your more conscious awareness about your own life — that you come away with a clearer sense of how patriarchy has shaped your own mind and being, and a step closer to moving into a more healing place with it.

I'm including both pieces because they sit at different points on the same continuum. The Introduction lays out the reason and the benefit of writing such a book. “My Father at 109” (which will likely be a section of a later chapter rather than a chapter in its own right) is a search that begins from utterly not knowing, and ends up with something valuable — and unexpected. (It also was written in longhand rather than typed, which tends to create a different kind of breath-paced sentence structure and paragraphing.)

May this writing encourage your writing. May the excavation I have done help you integrate your own “intra-psychic family.”

~ 1 ~

“healing civilization simplified”:

INTRODUCTION

[Which starts out as a kind of “expert voice” but then moves in closer. . . .]

We are living in a world that we inherited, and the tangled underlay of its roots may be invisible to our conscious awareness. We see and feel and live the consequences of this inheritance, but we may not recognize it as an inheritance. We may conclude, “This is how life is,” or even “…but I don’t want it to be this way” — but even if we address the manifestations of what we don’t like head-on (or if our distress takes a more quiet form, like a sub-voce background chorus), we may not recognize the scope and the origin of the cause of such distress.

But what if we were to learn that nearly everything we see in the external world that we can point to as problematic — ecological devastation, war, the arrogance of governmental leaders, and much more — is not simply “the way the world is,” or even “how people are,” or even “how some people are,” or even patterns of activity that have become habituated and created energetic pathways that are self-replicating and self-sustaining . . .

but are actually part of us?

Not intrinsically; not in our spiritual legacy and potential wholeness. But in our habituation to something that we may point to and see easily outside ourselves, but have no clue that this same set of enacted assumptions lives inside us. That both individually and as a human species, we have inherited something so invisible, so ubiquitous, so thickly wrought (like a huge rusted combination lock whose combination has long since been forgotten) that it has become a fact of life — overlookable, seen as solely external when looked at, and working against us from the inside.

What would we say about our chances of living in a good, kind, cooperative, evolving, healthy, beautiful world, then?

And yet there is a secret hidden in plain sight — in ourselves, actually — that holds both the “disease” all this points to, and the cure. The disease and the cure lie within us. And once we come to realize this, we can begin to heal ourselves — and in that way, heal the seemingly intractable, requiring-heroic-measures, out-there world in which we live, move, and have our being.

# # #

In 2009, the well-known consciousness pioneer, Claudio Naranjo, MD, approached me to edit a book he had written about what he saw as the true underlay of societal malfunction and self-destructiveness. Already a prodigious author at that time, Dr. Naranjo had come to this subject after many years (he began in the 1960s) of leading workshops and writing books about personal transformation. He was, after all, the one who brought the now-popular but then ground-breaking Enneagram of Personality to the West. Thousands of people had undergone at least some degree of transformation on an individual level through studying with him, whether in person (as in his SAT — Seeker After Truth — groups in Berkeley, California starting in the 1960s) or through his books, or with teachers who had learned from him.

His work had helped thousands see into themselves with more objectivity and sometimes kindness, and become aware that what they viewed as themselves was to a large extent a collection of defenses and conditioned patterns that drove them automatically. This understanding gave them a lens through which to see the true essence that underlay this automaticity, this “false self.” And the soul-lure of living truly, once unveiled and made available, turned out to be great enough for people to willingly take on the inner work of self-examination and self-discovery.

So this heroic work (he had even written a book called The Divine Child and the Hero) was what Claudio had dedicated himself to for many years.

The manuscript he gave to me, however, was a further reach. It was meant to affect the world outside, as well. Look around, he said, in essence. War, pestilence, greed, cruelty, misogyny all take over the circus of our culture, at our expense. Is this the way the world must be, just because it has been that way for so long?

And as I took my red pencil to the (at that time) paper manuscript and slowly gathered an understanding of what he was saying (and did my best to make the wording more comprehensible, as the book had been translated into English from his native Chilean Spanish), slowly I began to see that although he was writing about the ills of the world, he was also writing about me. And you. And basically, all of us.

For the problem, he wrote — the underlying problem, whose hidden roots had sprouted manifestations on the surface everywhere and for centuries — is patriarchy. Patriarchy, including all its assumptions, grandiosity, and disconnection from the sensitive, feeling soul that all infants come into this life with. And all the many manifestations of patriarchy — from colonialism to sexism to human and ecological rape and denial and downright cruelty, and so much more — are, to be sure, “out there,” visible and heart-wrenching and destructive and making the news daily, hourly, by the minute. But the problem is also in here, in ourselves: an inheritance we are unaware of and so act from without even knowing it . . . or its consequences.

That is — and this is the central point of Claudio’s book — we have so inherited the world of patriarchy that even if we don’t wish it, it lives in us. It has taken over our minds and had its effects on the rest of our being, internally. This then has played out in the larger “out-there” world in which we live and move and have our being.

I hope this is enough of a build-up to intrigue you. I’m sure you haven’t seen yourself as a carrier of patriarchy (if you’re reading this book, I’m sure of it). And yet what Claudio says is that each of us — all of us, every one — has been infected, so to speak, and that we carry that bacteria, that cancer, that invisible epidemic within us, unawares.

And yet there is a cure. It begins with awareness of the problem.

# # #

How does this invisible epidemic show up in us? That’s where the surprise element comes in.

According to the Enneagram (which is based on ancient spiritual teachings), every human being has three centers:

the head (thinking), the heart (feeling), and the belly (instincts).

Most of us are out of balance — out of tune, so to speak — in one or another center. Sometimes we are not even aware of having a center, which then functions automatically or hardly functions at all. Each center has its own domain, focus of attention, and strengths; and the inner work of self-transformation requires the conscious development and harmonization of all three centers.

This is not something we tend to be told in the popular culture. The absence of development and harmonization of our three centers affects us profoundly, but unless something has made this known to us, we don’t know it. This distortion — this profound and invisible loss — operates without our knowing.

So this is what Claudio speaks of in the book I’ve been speaking of, Healing Civilization.What he says inthis book is that the problem of civilization (or its lack thereof—Gandhi was once asked what he thought of civilization, and he answered, “I think it would be a good idea”) is that these three intrinsic centers — centers that we all have — are out of balance: that they are not balanced, not in tune, not in harmony. That they are so out of tune, in fact, that the center that is most out of tune has skewed the tuning itself, like an orchestra conductor who is tone-deaf and yet still insists on wielding the baton.

The center that is most out of tune — that is most tone-deaf, so to speak, and yet running the show and convincing everyone else to play out of tune, as if that were the only way to do it — is the head center. And to bring the point home, so that we don’t brush it off as merely an abstraction — Claudio personalizes the three centers by calling them the “intra-psychic family.” A family that, for the most part, is dysfunctional. That is way out of balance, with two centers being essentially overlooked and overpowered, and one center being tyrannical, dictatorial, dangerously unsafe. This unsafe center is the head center — our own head center (“What? No! Wait…!”) — and he calls it the “inner father.”

So now, maybe his view and diagnosis start to come more into focus. Each person has three centers: the head, the heart, the belly. And the head center takes over. This center, the head center — our head center, our inner “father” — is not a kindly, receptive, caring, strong father, the kind you always wished you had. No, this father-within-us, the father we have inherited (not only from our own ancestry, but also from centuries of enacted distortion) is a carrier of patriarchy. The head center dominates our being, ignoring or belittling the essential contributions of the heart (the inner “mother”) and the belly (the inner “child”). And so we move through our lives lopsided, and not knowing it. And this lopsidedness has profound repercussions in our lives and in the world.

When our head center is unable to respect, love, encourage, hold as equal, care for, listen to, invite out, and otherwise acknowledge the other two centers as valid and valuable and necessary, we cannot be whole. We may not realize this, it may be completely in the background — but still it has effects that we might be surprised to have pointed out, much like a raised scab on the skin indicates a deeper imbalance within. A purely logic-based medicine would likely treat the scab (excising it perhaps, or applying an ointment), whereas a holistic approach would look below the skin to see what’s affecting it (perhaps a food intolerance, or even a pervasive attitude of irritation), and what might be an appropriate cure, then.

The point of my analogy is that we may well have been taught to see our own selves in a purely symptomatic way, treating only the symptom while ignoring the search for a true cure. And it’s quite probable that – considering how long this way of holding ourselves has been going on (likely from very early childhood) – we take this to be normal: this self-exclusion and -rejection, which too often manifests as an exclusion and rejection of the “other.” And our losses, as a consequence, are both uncountable and invisible.

One thing that has been veiled from us by our introjected patriarchy is the value of each center operating at full capacity in the way it was meant to. To be a whole human being requires the cooperation of our intra-psychic family, each center true to its own nature, providing us with its innate and harmonious medicine.

The medicine of the inner father, the head, is that it can formulate ideas and come to an understanding on a larger scale, and provide strength and protection.
The medicine of the inner mother, the heart, is that it can offer love, cherishment, receptivity, tenderness.
·The medicine of the inner child, the instinctual belly-center, is that it can play, be spontaneous, enjoy life, live from the moment, know instinctually without any analysis paralysis, be captivated by wonder.

When all three centers are functioning as they are meant to and in balance, then we get to become what we may not even have dreamed was possible: a true human being. Then, our own lives take on a richness, and a resonance, and a strength, and a beauty, and a potency, and much, much more that we may have dreamed of but thought impossible, or never even thought to dream.

So the overlay of patriarchy within us — within our own head center — will continue to distort who we are and contribute to the world we live in (even if subtly, below our awareness), unless we do become aware of it. And once we do, our lives come into balance, and our lives in the world come into balance. And so the world comes into balance, not only through us — but also through us.

This, to me, is the main message of Healing Civilization. Although it says much else in addition, this is what I took away from the book for myself, and what I have remembered all these years.

# # #

And yet for me, as brilliant as this book is (and again, it has been selling steadily ever since it was published—did I mention that I became its publisher? I did, and it started me off on the Rose Press journey), it laid out the problem but did not address how to resolve it.

How was I to bring balance to my “intra-psychic family”? What are the pathways? How do you get there? Now that I knew my intra-psychic family existed, how was I to care for it, rectify the imbalance? I had my own external family imbalance to deal with, and the inherited ways associated with that. To add to that the possibility that this — my mere attempts to live as myself in the world — were also contributing to the dysfunction of the world, was sobering.

Claudio Naranjo clearly believed that it was enough to lay out the problem and point toward the solution. That was his genius, after all: to see through the falseness of how we have come to live, and to suggest a transformative solution. And so the book Healing Civilization remains a brilliant theory, a baton for others to take up and do something valuable with.

And indeed, others – many others, many brilliant, accomplished others, such as Jean Houston (author and program director for the United Nations International Institute for Social Artistry, among many other accomplishments), and Wilfred Graf (co-director, Institute for Conflict Transformation and Peacebuilding), and Hazel Henderson (author of Planetary Citizenship), and other luminaries applying consciousness to the culture and the outer world — have praised this book for its keen insight, its genius, its cutting-edge clarity about the root of the disease of our culture.

And yet, as I have said: this book that I edited and published, this book that has stayed with me since I first encountered it back in 2009, does not tell us how to bring about this healing in our own lives. It does not show us how to integrate the “intra-psychic family” so as to become whole human beings and have a positive influence on the larger world (whether we are public figures, or exist largely in our own smaller orbit).

And yet I sensed a wisp of optimism for my own possibilities that lay secreted within what Healing Civilization only hinted at. Because — if what I had inherited and lived inside, unawares, formed the hidden scaffold beneath my own symptomatic skin-scabs equivalent — and if that undiagnosed and unmedicated disease in me was affecting not only myself but also the rest of life, somehow — then wouldn’t I stand a good chance of helping to (gasp) heal civilization by healing the imbalance among my own three centers — my own “intra-psychic family”?

I decided I would take this on.

And that’s why this book exists: to do my best to open the door into integrating my own “intra-psychic family” and to chronicle enough of the journey through my own lived experience that you, too, can get a sense of the “how” as well as the “what” for your own life, your own three-centered-intra-psychic-family integration. So in this book there will be stories, and there will be practices that you can try out if you feel called to.

# # #

There is also another reason why I have been called to bring this book, Healing Civilization Simplified, into the world. Much as I admire the thinking and work of Claudio Naranjo, his writing is not always easy to penetrate and make one’s own. A “Five” on his native Enneagram, perhaps he believed it was sufficient to come up with the theory (doctors diagnose, after all), and left it up to his successors (his readers, in this case) to do with his legacy as they thought best.

If so, I am well qualified to do with his legacy as I think best.

For one thing, I knew him, though slightly. I was part of a group, from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s, that met in his Berkeley, California apartment to literally sit at the feet of Claudio’s friend and colleague, Reza Leah Landman, as she told from memory tales she had collected that would activate our imaginations and souls. Each Sunday night, I entered Claudio’s living room and took my seat to enter the enchanted world of fairy tales and other stories designed not only to enchant us but also to bring our souls more into palpable view. Claudio was not present, but he knew who we were in this group.

For another, I edited the book. When Claudio had finished working on the draft of what would become Healing Civilization, and once his original Spanish text had been translated into English, he remembered me from Reza Leah’s group and recalled that I was an editor—and so he contacted me and asked if I would be willing to edit the manuscript. Honored, I accepted. And then, staring down at the pages, I strained over how to better word his phrasing, his choice of words, as I would have with any new author (by that time, Claudio had written at least eleven books, the most recent being The End of Patriarchy). I felt at once overawed by his brilliance and international stature in the world of psychology and consciousness, and also frustrated by his sometimes (it seemed to me) sophisticated overcomplications. I was glad to make this book read more digestibly than the original version he handed me. But still, I have to acknowledge (again, despite the fact that, as I’ve said, the book has continued to sell steadily since its publication) that even the edited version was (is) not all that easy to digest.

For another, I published the book. Yes, this is the book that started off my life as a publisher of Rose Press books. I had never had the idea, or even the inclination to be a publisher. I was just so wowed by editing a book by someone of Claudio’s stature that I wanted to give everything I could. So one day I said, without any forethought, “I’m sure you could have pretty much any publisher you wanted. But if you would like me to publish the book, I would.” I don’t recall his response; perhaps I thought he hadn’t really heard me. But somewhere down the line, he astonished me by saying, “I have decided that I would like for you to publish this book.” I don’t know what brought him to that conclusion—he really could have had pretty much any publisher he chose, including those who had published his earlier books. But I took on this task as if ordered from on high. I hired an acquaintance with more publication skills than me to advise me; I hired a design firm to do the cover (and what a beautiful, appropriately symbolic cover it is); I hired an illustrator to come up with a Rose Press logo (because how can you be a real publisher without a logo?), and later she told me that her husband, who had seen her do hundreds of such illustrations, told her he had never before seen her be so immersed in a project. (It is a remarkably beautiful logo of a painted rose atop a book — almost fragrant.) So now I was a publisher, albeit a novice one. This is the book that got Rose Press started.

And — last but not least, as they say — I am writing Healing Civilization Simplified because I want to put Healing Civilization into practice in my life. I want to be a “full human being.” I have a spiritual path that is compatible with this, and much as I have done “inner work” for decades, I still come up against certain intractable-seeming glitches in my view of myself and of my influence on the larger world. I am by temperament an introvert, and I was very quiet and thoughtful as a child. There have been many overlays since childhood, I am well aware, and these I seek to become aware of and burnish off, or pray to have lifted so that my true being can be unveiled and lived from.

But there are some things that have never yet come into focus; some things about me and my sense of connection or disconnection that are still too close to see. One of them is the effect of what the Sufis call “conditioning” on my true nature; how my experiences, and who they told me I am or should be, have conditioned my views, sights and beliefs about what is possible. I am certain that there are conditionings I have taken in and accepted as truth (whether about me or about the world, or both) that still drive me, and that still keep me from being true to my most secret, beautiful, unknown self. So I have a personal reason for wanting to know how to integrate my “intra-psychic family”—and I know enough to know that first, I need to get acquainted with these three centers, to see them clearly and to experience each one from within, in hopes that they then could work together harmoniously.

What would that be like? I look forward to finding out.

Since I am someone who fled into my head when young to survive (that being the prevailing center in my family-of-origin and my culture at the time), I see the value in breaking this invisible tyrannical spell. And as a writer whose work tends towards the exploration of things I have not yet mastered or fully understood (the writing is the key that opens that door into lived experience), I feel equipped to take this on and share my findings with you. At least, I want to try. Because healing civilization is essential at this time, in our times; and if my own inner relationship can have a good effect on the outer world, it is worth the effort for both inner harmony and outer harmony.

Since you are reading this, perhaps you feel similarly. Perhaps you sense that there is more to you than you have been able to bring forth, and that there is a longing to be whole. And that there is a wish to contribute to the world “out there” in some way that is yours. If so, Healing Civilization Simplified can help guide you until your own inner guidance takes it from there. The vision of (as the Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat put it) “a beautiful world of beautiful people” lies before us, calling us into visibility, clarity, embodiment. And his father, the great Sufi teacher Hazrat Inayat Khan, said that the least thing we do on the inner planes has more influence than anything we can do in the outer world. Healing Civilization Simplified offers you (and me) a pathway into this view as a reality. A beautiful world, a healed civilization, apparently starts with us. And we don’t need to start by extending ourselves outwards to accomplish this. We only need to look within.

Thank you for joining me in this holy endeavor. Let’s make the world we want to live in, from the inside out, individually and together.

Excerpted from:

~ 2 ~

“healing civilization simplified”:

“MY FATHER AT 109”

Monday, August 31, 2026

My father was born on this day, 109 years ago. Of course, he didn’t live to that age. He passed what he was just 56. I am older than that, now, by almost 25 years.

If my father, during his life and my life with him—living with him for 21 years (except for the 6 months he lived apart from us when he and my mother were separated)—if my father was a mystery to me, a hermetic code I kept trying to unpuzzle with little success, perhaps he was a mystery to himself, as well. With all the specifics of his family and cultural conditioning—the Jewish immigrant world he was born into in 1917 Brooklyn, New York; with all the built-in hardships (his father died suddenly when he was still a boy, the victim of a gunshot by a robber when he was working driving a cab; his mother, frail and worried-looking, refused to learn English so there was no one to provide him with a transition between that single-mother, Yiddish-speaking household of four children, my father being the youngest, and the world outside, including school, where one had to speak English, and the rough streets outside; and that he had to stop his schooling after high school to help support the family; and on, and on, and on—maybe who he incipiently felt himself to be never had a chance to appear in full bloom and let him know, “Oh! I am this kind of flower!”

With all this, how was it that—while still in his twenties, without the college learning that his remarkable mind craved—he became not an accountant like the man his second-oldest sister would marry, not a salesman like the man his oldest sister would marry, not a Ford auto plant foreman and union leader like his older brother, but a writer by inclination and profession; a writer whose play scripts were broadcast weekly on a then-prominent New York City radio station, WNEW, in the 1940s and early ‘50s? How did someone with his culturally and emotionally impoverished upbringing become a person who could spin yarns on paper that would entertain intelligently, and yet play a kind of soundless violin accompaniment in the story’s background, so that you came away with a felt sense of alienation transformed into belonging?

Brahms (I once read, in a biography of that great musician) was like that, in his way. No one in his family was musical. There was no musical influence to pick up by osmosis and possibly training, as with Mozart, much less be encouraged and taught by. And yet, he did. He became that single-word place-holder for the response that comes as a matter of course: “Ah yes, of course: Brahms.”

My father did not gain such reach or fame with his writings. And at some point, the then-constant of radio stories were replaced by television. Although my father was initially able to make the shift into that medium and get hired to write a few of the earlier shows—a few episodes, I was told, of “Captain Video and His Video Rangers”—after a time, that stopped. I don’t know how he made a living (that is, I’m sure he did but I don’t remember) until much later on, when I was 13 or 14, and he got a job writing PR for a Jewish nonprofit, his final job until he died.

My father was such a mystery to me—full of contradictions from his upbringing and surround. He was, and most likely prided himself on being an intellectual—a New York intellectual. He had plenty of company in that dense subculture. And the ethos of being a “self-made man” was still in the air. It was America, after all, where you could be born into poverty and come up sprouting gold rings; where you could be born into a family where your mother refused to learn English, and become a wine connoisseur of language—original and clever and as polished as if many college degrees hung, framed, on your wall. He changed his last name from Mishkin to “Berton” shortly before I was born (an anglicization of his Yiddish middle name, “Baer”), and the apparent transformation was complete. He shaved closely, watching himself in the bathroom mirror, carefully scraping off the white lather from his cheeks with the gleaming blade. He wore suits, and dry-cleaner-pressed shirts, and ties, going out of the apartment. He was neat and particular, and yet humorous at times, regaling us with borrowed jokes and proverbs inserted into conversations as if he had just now come up with them.

But he sensed—he knew—that underneath all this convincing self-presentation, he was not what he presented himself as. He told me a story, once, called “The Man Behind the Mask,” some narrative about a man who felt he was inadequate to woo a beautiful lady, and so made a mask to wear that replaced what he actually looked like with this beautiful visage that called forth attraction and respect on that basis alone. The lady who had captured his heart noticed him for the first time, and fell in love with his presentation—love like he had never even dared to hope for! Yet he knew he was not what the mask made him seem.

The story had a happy ending: the man confessed the mask, in a fit of authenticity, rather than continue being false to his lady-love; and when she begged him to remove it, he (warily, knowing ahead of time the great impending loss) did. And saw her gasp. He figured that was it, she was repelled by his underlying face, it was all over. But instead, she said, with a look of amazement: “But it’s your face. It’s identical to the mask.” And when the man looked into the mirror, he saw that it was true: the face of the beautiful mask had become his own.

Years ago, I wrote a story that I called “The Man Behind the Mask,” about my father, how impenetrable he was to me, urbane and cultured and brilliant way beyond his upbringing and schooling—and a cipher to me. There was some unnameable, uncrossable gulf between us. It wasn’t that he paid no attention to me at all—he did, and he especially encouraged, from as early as my childhood, my incipient interest in the arts. He bought me crayons and paper, and paints, when I was young, and I had many happy times being absorbed in drawing pictures and coloring them in. He made me puppets, when I was young, from sawdust, flour, and water built up around a cardboard toilet-paper tube. And I got to watch the transformation in his hands from disparate raw ingredients to built-up shapes resembling human faces, which he would paint, then insert two fingers inside the tube and bring them to life by speaking for them in altered voices, very high and very low. The entire creation process was fascinating. I stayed by his side adoringly, throughout, spellbound. So obviously was my father God, the Creator-God. So I received his attention in that way, though a bit indirectly.

And when I was in my teens, he again supported my incipient artistry, with a passion all his own. Somehow I had heard about an open audition for a singing group that I had heard of, which would later go on to become mildly famous. My father insisted on driving me to the audition. We arrived and I sang, feeling stomach-dropping nervous. I don’t recall whether going there was my wish or my father’s. Afterwards they said “Thank you” politely, and I knew I hadn’t gotten in. But seeing him there waiting for me—much as by that time I was experiencing insistent pangs of feeling all alone in the world and unequipped—there was a warmth in seeing him there, waiting for me to have my turn.

He also was behind my attending a special high school for artists and musicians in New York City, inaugurated by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia in the 1930s to give artistic teens a way experience professional-level training at no cost. My father insisted that I try out for this high school—and so there was another audition, this time to see if I could draw well enough to be admitted. I likely would have chosen this route myself, had I known what I would receive from it; but his vehemence (“You will try out for this school!”) surprised me at the time, and left no room for me to refuse. As it turned out, I passed the audition, and spent the next four years studying watercolor, and oils, and printmaking, and sculpture along with the usual high-school requirements (English, history, math, foreign language). To an outsider, all this sounded exotic; but for me, obeying my father tainted the experience. I was yet to realize that he would have jumped at the chance to go there as a high-schooler (he was already 19 when it first started). He was a visual artist, too.

So while I had enough talent, by their lights, to get in, really, I was living out my father’s dream. The enjoyment that had come so naturally and spontaneously to me as a child, playing with the art supplies my father supplied me with so generously, had disappeared by now, replaced by trying to be good enough and comparing myself unfavorably to the other, highly gifted, students. And in his making me try out for this school (which did accept me) because it was what hewould have wanted for himself—in giving me a shot at the dream he didn’t get to live out—he stole something from me that I didn’t even know I possessed: my own soul’s light and path.

I have gotten back into drawing, in recent years. I have several series that I’ve made. One is called “Postures of Love,” love made manifest in the way a mother leans towards her child, the way the child turns toward the mother. Mother-love—while I didn’t really experience it, myself, past a certain age—was something that I was later, decades later, to find my way into: both because of becoming a mother and by, later on in life, finding a spiritual path that opened up my frozen heart. That Mother Love—that containing, protective cherishing and caring—though I did not experience it for long, as a child—was somewhere in there, and gradually was able to be excavated from the dried-mud-cracked land that survived the withdrawal of that embracing maternal sea. I had lost it, and I missed it, and I suffered for years from that loss—but it was in me, ultimately findable, retrievable, able and willing to live in me, sit in me, wear me like a queen’s robe, tell me what it was made of—all that greenery and mist, all that sumptuous soil and caring for the seeds planted in it.

But father-love—a loving, non-patriarchal outer father setting the template for my “Inner Father”—what could that be? I still ask, I still am asking, on this, my father’s 109th birthday (1917-1974). My father was a cipher to himself, no doubt—not only to me. And his idea of closeness was to sit together at the kitchen table and talk about history, literature, art, occasionally politics, over pickles and roast beef or bagels with cream cheese and lox. Food-and-intellectual-conversation was his idea of closeness, it seemed; at least, all that he could give. And I, I might or might not comprehend what he was saying, but I strove to respond to it, to keep the conversation going, to prolong the connection. If this was the only door to his heart that was available, I would walk through it, come knocking over and over.

And so I learned how to become articulate, to weave words appealingly, impressively, even dazzlingly at times. I read dictionaries for pleasure. I undoubtedly tried to woo my father with my words, to join him in the great dance of the intellect, the entire world—past, present, and future—fair game for our explorations and occasional sanctioned-by-Torah (although we were atheists) jousting debates.

But there was a cost in seeking to rise to my self-made father’s- intellectual level: I could not feel the words I said. They did not emerge from something real inside me—by that time, I had no sense of what was real inside me. They were the price required to enter that elusive world of my father’s heart. It was better to have some illusion of contact with him than none at all. And if this was the price of admittance—and since, obviously, I was equipped to do this, or else I couldn’t have managed to sustain my part in these conversations—then so be it.

But they felt lonely, these impassioned conversations about ideas. They were more like bottled infant formula than mother’s milk (to mix gender associations, for a moment).: contrived artificially to deliver most of the requisite nutrients, but lacking the body’s own, miraculous making of the nutritious milk from within itself; lacking the soft breast to rest one’s cheek upon while the liquid nourishment poured in; lacking that miraculous, loving gaze into your eyes that told you without words how precious you were, how your very existence gave pleasure, how welcome you were into this holy parental relationship like none other.

I am left, 52 years to the day after my father’s passing, still wondering what a non-patriarchal-influenced father would have been like. More specifically, what would my father, minus the overlay of patriarchy, been like? Does that mean that someone in his growing-up family would have had to see and care who he was? To say, “This child is very bright, loves to talk and write and draw and learn. Let’s make sure he gets what his soul needs”? Does it mean that when his abrasive, perhaps bigamous father died suddenly, he could have wept in his (in this scenario, grieving—yes, frightened—undoubtedly, but not felled into frailty) mother’s arms, his child-head laid across her soft breast? My uncle, his brother, once told me as an adult that when my father got the news about his father’s death at the age of perhaps 8 or 10, my father-as-a-child just sat wordlessly on his bed for hours. How did he know not to cry or seek refuge? What, already by age 8 or 10, had told him “Boys don’t do that”? Or perhaps, “There is no one to go to, don’t feel that.”

The boy who became the man who became my father had only thin, straw-like ways of expressing his heart. On paper, through some character’s voice, he was astonishing; and in abstract verbal conversation—at the kitchen table or anywhere else: in the car, in a restaurant, driving me to an audition—he was astonishingly communicative. It was in the areas of his broken, unexcavated heart that he was masked. He had hidden his broken heart so deeply away that he couldn’t even find it to mend it.

I didn’t know any of this as I “conversed” with him at the kitchen table. My own heart had become more and more well-hidden from me for supposed safekeeping. I assumed that my father’s conversing with me in these ways, about these subjects, was his heart: his love of abstracted conversation, his looking in my direction (even if not actually at me) while he talked, while I talked.

Since his passing, over these many years, these 52 years, I’ve had a lot of time to try to come to terms with the mystery of my father—the holes in his self-presentation, his “mask,” that eventually showed up in what might well be construed as tragic ways. There was the alcoholism I didn’t learn about until after he had passed (which raged forth plainly once I was no longer living with my family). There was his being fired because of his drinking from that PR job he had held for decades. There was that one middle of the night in my teens when I couldn’t sleep and, tottering out of my room and into the dining room, I came upon my father in a private, desperate moment. He was sitting in front of a lit candle and praying—in French—his voice emerging from the basement of his being: “Au fond de l’abime, je prie a Vous, Seigneur” (From the depths of the abyss, I pray to you, O Lord). I was shocked that this avowed atheist would be praying at all, and also by the state of his abjectness. I tiptoed back into my room so he would not see me seeing him.

These tragic things that underlay his natty presentation and eventually broke through, flooded the too-dry plain and took over, pulled him under so that he died when he was only 56….

I have wondered, since his passing, and in my way I have prayed to hold him as healed, by now, 52 earth-years later and who knows what kind of timing on the other side, no longer in the body, no longer subject to the pain and soul-forgetfulness of an embodied life on earth. . . .

I have wondered if he is all right, cleansed of the pains and distortions of a sorrowing soul dressed up to present a dignified appearance, as he did before everything that had been constructed on top of the true temple of his being fell apart. I have wondered if he has been trying to tell me something in the way of healing and repair, and I am only now beginning to be able to hear and be open to it.

I cannot know for sure, from any outside data or confirmation. But it feels like he has a message, a gift for me: something like, “Thank you for giving your mind and heart and forgiveness to me. Thank you for seeking to understand me, and why I couldn’t give you what you really needed. This work you have done, here, is part of both our healing. Know that, and watch carefully as your fathered heart opens and grows, and teaches your mind a kind of non-patriarchal kindness as well as reach. Let the dream of having been well-fathered and seen by me stay with you and make its way into your waking life. Watch for indications. Notice what may feel new in your own mind. The love I could not experience, and so share with you in life, is here now. It’s in you. Look for it. Water it. Stay tuned. I love you.”

Did I actually receive this, or make it up? And does it matter? Something wants to turn. Some door has been opened by my inquiry into “What is a non-patriarchally-influenced father-mind?” Of course, I had to look into it in terms of my own father: what else would I have to go on? It’s in me as the first implant of God, the All-Loving, the All-Powerful; that pure child’s faith, and taking on the coloring of the human father’s distortion like dye.

We are all the man behind the mask, beautiful enough in our true being. Perhaps part of finding the healthy Inner Father is to realize this, and to know there has been a mask, and to take it off the mask, and see what we see.

As the Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan taught: The mind is meant to be the servant of the heart, not its master.

“My Father at 109” is excerpted from the book-in-progress

If you would like to respond to what you’ve read, here — or if something in you is now stirring towards exploring your own unknown — I welcome you to CONTACT ME.

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