Joseph teaches that life is "experience alongside metaphor". Here we are in New Mexico building a house. So, what is the essence of the “house” metaphor. This might not be a direct quote from Joseph but, somewhere along the line, I learned that a “house” is a metaphor for a moment in time. When sharing the vision that guided him to build peace chambers, Joseph wrote: “It was a house of the sound of presentness”. So, he is speaking of being present in the moment. I am going to circle back around to this teaching after I share some of my personal story. Stay with me, please.
I first arrived in New Mexico in 1981 as a fairly broken, confused yet idealistic and hopeful young person. As fate would have it, I stumbled into a school called the Southwestern College of Life Sciences (later shortened to Southwestern College), where I was forced to do a lot of personal work and earned a master’s degree in Transformational Counseling. The primary founder of the school was Robert Waterman, EdD. Especially to me as a young person, Robert had a big presence. He had a tremendously positive impact on the direction of my life, but to be honest, I was scared of him.
Robert is a powerful wisdom carrier who has dedicated much of his life to something called Noetic Therapy. Noetic Therapy evolved from the teachings of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866) who was among the first Western thinkers to articulate the primary relationship between our thoughts/beliefs and the experiences that life presents us with, including how our physical health manifests. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “You create your own reality” it can at least, in part, be traced back to Quimby.
Quimby’s thoughts and writings travelled from where he lived in Maine to the southwest through Neva Dell Hunter (died in 1978). Neva Dell worked with groups of seekers in Alamogordo, New Mexico where she evolved Quimby’s teachings into something she called Aura Balancing. Robert was present during Hunter’s early work in the 1960s. He further evolved the thinking and the practice of Aura Balancing into something he refers to as Noetic Therapy. For me, Robert’s work is a central part of the fabric of my time in Santa Fe and the Southwest.
Navigating my relationship with the land in Abiquiu and building this adobe house has been personally challenging. This work is forcing me to continually assess what I am doing, what I am asking of other people, where this is headed and why I am devoting so much time and energy to this work. I have realized I need help navigating what is unfolding. So, during my month in New Mexico, I scheduled a Noetic Therapy healing session with Robert!
I had a very good session with Robert. It was three hours, actually. In his 80s, his therapeutic work is as “right on” as ever. I found that now, as an adult, I could sit comfortably with Robert and honor our shared experience over these many years. After the session, Robert gifted me with some of his writings intended for Noetic Therapy practitioners. Here are a couple of quotes that spoke to me deeply:
When any practice or cosmology becomes routinized within a group, that group, to some degree, becomes separated from the One.
Our human default is to invent tradition and dogma that we can cling to for identity and belonging, use to judge others, and use to gain their compliance and accept our authority…
I believe this is a very insightful way of articulating what Joseph meant when he said, “Don’t get stuck in the form.” Not creating dogma and not getting stuck in the form is not as easy as it sounds. Dedication to a path and working in community requires a very high level of self-awareness. Letting go of ego is a moment-by-moment practice that few or none of us are perfeect with. It requires a sort of nakedness. A little later in the chapter, Robert summarizes Joseph’s teachings about “becoming a hollow bone” and “no mind” as he writes:
Honor what we know and what we experience and then know nothing. We surrender to all knowing by knowing nothing.
The truth right now is that I don’t know where all the work on the land is heading. All I can do is try to stay in the moment. To do my best to be a hollow bone. To be open to allowing whatever Spirit wants to come through. To simply be in the flow of what is unfolding that is beyond me.
While the divine is certainly all that was, all that is, and all that ever shall be, we humans can only experience the divine in the present moment. A house is a metaphor for a moment in time. May we each bring ourselves wholly into this moment. To be without sadness for the past or anxiety for the future. To surrender completely into this moment. To live in the House of God.
I first arrived in New Mexico in 1981 as a fairly broken, confused yet idealistic and hopeful young person. As fate would have it, I stumbled into a school called the Southwestern College of Life Sciences (later shortened to Southwestern College), where I was forced to do a lot of personal work and earned a master’s degree in Transformational Counseling. The primary founder of the school was Robert Waterman, EdD. Especially to me as a young person, Robert had a big presence. He had a tremendously positive impact on the direction of my life, but to be honest, I was scared of him.
Robert is a powerful wisdom carrier who has dedicated much of his life to something called Noetic Therapy. Noetic Therapy evolved from the teachings of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866) who was among the first Western thinkers to articulate the primary relationship between our thoughts/beliefs and the experiences that life presents us with, including how our physical health manifests. If you’ve ever heard the phrase, “You create your own reality” it can at least, in part, be traced back to Quimby.
Quimby’s thoughts and writings travelled from where he lived in Maine to the southwest through Neva Dell Hunter (died in 1978). Neva Dell worked with groups of seekers in Alamogordo, New Mexico where she evolved Quimby’s teachings into something she called Aura Balancing. Robert was present during Hunter’s early work in the 1960s. He further evolved the thinking and the practice of Aura Balancing into something he refers to as Noetic Therapy. For me, Robert’s work is a central part of the fabric of my time in Santa Fe and the Southwest.
Navigating my relationship with the land in Abiquiu and building this adobe house has been personally challenging. This work is forcing me to continually assess what I am doing, what I am asking of other people, where this is headed and why I am devoting so much time and energy to this work. I have realized I need help navigating what is unfolding. So, during my month in New Mexico, I scheduled a Noetic Therapy healing session with Robert!
I had a very good session with Robert. It was three hours, actually. In his 80s, his therapeutic work is as “right on” as ever. I found that now, as an adult, I could sit comfortably with Robert and honor our shared experience over these many years. After the session, Robert gifted me with some of his writings intended for Noetic Therapy practitioners. Here are a couple of quotes that spoke to me deeply:
When any practice or cosmology becomes routinized within a group, that group, to some degree, becomes separated from the One.
Our human default is to invent tradition and dogma that we can cling to for identity and belonging, use to judge others, and use to gain their compliance and accept our authority…
I believe this is a very insightful way of articulating what Joseph meant when he said, “Don’t get stuck in the form.” Not creating dogma and not getting stuck in the form is not as easy as it sounds. Dedication to a path and working in community requires a very high level of self-awareness. Letting go of ego is a moment-by-moment practice that few or none of us are perfeect with. It requires a sort of nakedness. A little later in the chapter, Robert summarizes Joseph’s teachings about “becoming a hollow bone” and “no mind” as he writes:
Honor what we know and what we experience and then know nothing. We surrender to all knowing by knowing nothing.
The truth right now is that I don’t know where all the work on the land is heading. All I can do is try to stay in the moment. To do my best to be a hollow bone. To be open to allowing whatever Spirit wants to come through. To simply be in the flow of what is unfolding that is beyond me.
While the divine is certainly all that was, all that is, and all that ever shall be, we humans can only experience the divine in the present moment. A house is a metaphor for a moment in time. May we each bring ourselves wholly into this moment. To be without sadness for the past or anxiety for the future. To surrender completely into this moment. To live in the House of God.
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