Hello, and welcome back to Senior Perspectives, a show by and about elders, you know, older
folks living here in the beautiful North Coast of California.
Senior Perspectives, as you probably know, is brought to you by Redwood Coast Senior
Center, the jolliest, coolest, grooviest senior center anywhere in the entire universe, and
the favorite stopping off place for species from all over the galaxy, so be sure and come
by for lunch yourself.
And of course, also brought to you by Mendocino Coast Television, your own public access TV
station and we're in the Mendocino Coast TV studio and Kathleen Damiani is here with me
and this is a relatively miraculous meeting, wouldn't you say?
I would.
I had this intuition, I kept driving by, I discovered it one day.
We're here camp hosting, my partner and I at McGarraker State Park, where Tim does all
the horticultural landscaping and pruning and things like that, and I get to ride.
And I love Fort Bragg and I love Mendocino and I've fallen in love with it and we're
going to try to stay all the time we live, over by Truckee normally during the summer.
But anyway, I love that building and I love going around that corner and seeing, yeah,
and I was very drawn to the senior center so I walked in and there's this lovely atrium
and the flowers and the people and I said, gosh, this is a really friendly place.
And it was after hours and I talked to some of the people that were walking around and
I think it was Valentine's Day.
It was, it was Valentine's Day.
Yes, and so I'm poking around and I needed, I wanted information.
I said, gosh, this would be a great place to give a talk.
And they told me about Charles and they said, he's walking around here someplace and you
came in and I said, I want to give a talk about my book.
Molly O'Brien and the Mark of the Dragonslayer and it's young adult fiction.
Let's do this right here.
I'll show you what I'm going to do.
I'm going to hold it right over here and our brilliant crew is going to just zoom in on
this and get a picture of, look at that, Molly O'Brien and the Mark of the Dragonslayer.
Look at this beautiful book.
So you handed me this book.
And a bunch of material and I said, it's for young adults and it's fantasy and it's about
dragons and then I said, but there's no dwarves and there's no, there's none of those, there's
none of those dragons and trolls and all those token ripoffs.
It's about real philosophy.
And it's, yes.
And then you actually said, and I'm a philosopher.
Yeah.
And I said, no, remember what happened?
I said, I said, it's about the middle realm.
That's where it takes place.
And I said, you know, all these places where Harry Potter goes and all of that.
I said, this is, this is the real thing.
This is the collective imagination and it corresponds to Plato and his sublunar realm.
This is a true story.
His sublunar realm and his middle realm and his, and the inner radix sphere in Plato.
And he looks at me, he didn't look at me and say, get the heck out of my office.
Or people would go, huh?
Yeah.
People would go, hi.
He says, he says, I get what you're, he says, go ahead, tell them what you said.
I know exactly what you're talking about.
I get what you're saying.
Because?
I'm a philosopher.
And?
Yes.
What else was the other part?
You said, now what are the chances?
You said, what are the chances?
I'm walking into a senior center on the north coast of California and just happen to run
into another professional philosopher.
And then we went, oh my God, this is too cool.
So anyway, it is astounding.
Too cool for words.
Hardly anybody admits to such a thing.
Too cool for words.
Yeah.
It really is.
So, so, but instead of writing a boring treatise with sentences that are seven paragraphs long.
Something grabbed you, the muse emerged, and you have told this wondrous tale, which I'm
about three chapters into, by the way, and I love it.
Oh, you do.
Thank you.
Who could not love a goddess with a tail?
A goddess with a tail, yes.
Who's Ethiopian.
Not a tail like a starry, a tail like a.
Like a real tail.
Showing, showing that she's mother nature, mother nature.
But not just mother nature, not just the habitat that we see around us and all the connectivity
with us and the earth and the soil, but much, much more, much, much more.
So I wrote it as fiction.
I, I did spend how many years?
I don't know, 30 years, 25, since 1971, writing and doing philosophy, studying it.
Serious philosophy.
Academically as well as at my family's center for philosophy, Wisdom's Golden Rod in upstate
New York.
So I gave talks in San Diego and New Haven, Connecticut to a very limited audience of
other academics, mostly a group of architects, working architects in Boston and New York
City who are interested in sacred architecture.
And so I would give lectures, Jonas Ruta was his name, and he would bring people in from
Prague.
And so they were from all over and we would do this esoteric philosophy.
And what happened?
For which there is a rather limited audience.
Yes, yes.
And it was the same people every, every, right, right.
Brilliant but limited.
Brilliant but limited, right.
And I love, I love Sophia.
For those of you who don't know about her, you can find her on my website, my academic
professional website.
I'll say it slowly, but it's easy to remember.
Sophia and the Dragon.com.
Sophia and the Dragon.com.
All one word.
Sophia is spelled with a P-H-S-O-P-H-I-A and the Dragon.com.
So you can read all about her.
And I'll talk about her in a few minutes, but I'll tell you how I got to fiction.
Easy to remember, Sophiaandthedragon.com.
But how did I get to fiction?
Because I love, I can't describe to you how much I love real philosophy.
I tried to go through academic philosophy and I just ran out screaming.
I really ran out screaming until I discovered Sophia.
The word philosophy was coined by Pythagoras and it means love of wisdom, love in the sense
of friendship with wisdom.
And um.
Philo Sophia.
Yes, and what happened was as a writing exercise back in 2002, my editor, June Frickman, and
I decided to be really disciplined about this and we would write.
We would try something new.
I would try something.
I would try writing her as fiction.
So naturally I started writing about myself and I wanted to give a voice to Sophia.
It was actually a suggestion of a friend who said why don't you write about Sophia in
fiction.
Let her be a person.
Yeah, let her be a person.
Sophia but a person.
Yes, and this fellow Richard Gutrich, he said why don't you have a little girl in there.
So I did.
I just started on a whim and we made an agreement to do, I think it was ten pages a week.
Which is a tough whimsical place to set out to do philosophy from.
Very.
But I think right exactly the way philosophy, I mean I'm like you, I'm a rebel outside
the academy because it just got too stuffy in there.
I couldn't do it anymore.
It was very stuffy.
It was very, very stuffy.
Some of it really touched me.
And I love Schopenhauer.
I mean I love it.
It's my life and still always will be my life.
But there has to be a better way to tell about it.
To tell a story.
I remember reading Schopenhauer and he had a comment in his main tome that we were reading
about how sentimental the women were because they cried over the treatment of horses because
horses were treated so brutally during his time.
And I thought you idiot.
Don't you have a heart?
Don't you have a soul?
You must be a boy.
Which by the way, the other thing that's astounding of course is that you are a professional and
a philosopher and a writer and a teacher and all that kind of stuff.
And you're a girl.
Yes.
And us philosophy boys have not been very nice about that.
No.
No.
And as a matter of fact I'll divert the story a little bit.
Just to why I did the fiction.
But I've got to tell you why.
My husband died in 1985 and I went back to graduate school in humanities with a specialization
in philosophy.
It was a wonderful school, Dominion University, and I had a wonderful dean and wonderful mentors.
And I was doing a paper on Kierkegaard and I was in the library studying Kierkegaard and
I picked up a book.
One of my initial focuses when I started, I didn't tell you, when I started graduate
school at the East West Center, Winfield Negley, who was one of the great Kierkegaard scholars,
was the dean of the philosophy school there.
So you studied Kierkegaard?
I followed him around and yes, passionately, passionately.
And then ultimately left and went in a different direction than that.
But that was the love of my passion.
Was Kierkegaard?
Yes.
Well, I loved him too.
But notice you said you deviated from him, didn't I?
I did, I did, I did.
I learned some information about Kierkegaard that shocked me and this addresses your question
about the boy-girl thing, is that I discovered that he had fallen in love with this beautiful
woman and he adored her.
And he, what he did was he decided to reject her and he chose God instead.
And I said, I said no to Kierkegaard.
I said any fool who, excuse me, but I mean, religion to all those who.
And now we're not even getting into that yet.
Yeah, yeah.
You have to understand that we're coming from this.
I said if you turn away from a beautiful woman, what kind of a man are you?
I said I don't want to do a paper on a man who would say no to a beautiful woman to his
heart's desire.
Well, then I would say.
At least Dante, at least he carved his divine comedy from the interest.
A man with a salt would certainly recognize the face of the divine in the beauty of the
feminine.
Absolutely.
That's essential.
Absolutely.
If you didn't know that, you don't know nothing.
That's right.
So anyway.
So I.
We can go off there forever, but let's not.
So I said, I turned away from that section of the library at Old Dominion University
in Norfolk, Virginia and I picked up the interpreter's dictionary of the Bible.
That's what it was.
And I just flipped through it because I was a little ticked off.
And I just flipped through it and I came to the word Abzu, A-B-Z-U, which was a Semitic
word and it meant the deep, the deep, the ocean's deep.
And so I read about that and it said this was where the Ia, the father of arts and creativity
lived and this is where wisdom lived in the ocean's deep.
So then the wheels started turning and I said my goodness, this is Nietzsche.
I was also taking a course from a Nietzsche expert at Old Dominion University, Lawrence
Hutop, who's written extensively on Nietzsche, and I love Nietzsche at the time.
And I said this is Nietzsche's Dianitian realm and I said and this is the vote of wisdom,
Sophia.
And the sea is feminine.
And the sea of course is the ocean.
The great invitation.
The great invitation.
Yes.
And that's the unconscious.
And so academically I said this is it and I'm going to do a paper on Sophia and Core
respond, you know, correspond the Dianitian realm to this deep, this ocean deep and that
too, that paper, it's a very old, old paper, but it's on my Sophia and the website.
Now at some point we have a treat.
Sophia and the Dragon website.
We actually have at least a version of Sophia with us.
So you decide when the stage is right because we will want to introduce her and let her
have a little spotlight of her own here.
Okay, I'll read you just.
But we'll save her.
Okay, we'll save her.
I just want to read you a little bit of the opening chapters.
This is a dragon that's drawn by Rosemary Cabral.
Wait, where am I?
You show it.
I see the dragon right here.
Can you catch her?
Yes.
It's an alchemical.
Isn't that a lowly dragon?
Yes, it's an alchemical symbol of the.
What's the word for the creature?
Uroboros.
Uroboros, yeah.
And so this is the dragon biting its tail.
And I was eating lunch one day.
My children, when my husband died, they were three and four years old.
So I moved to Virginia shortly after that where my mother lived.
And one day I was eating lunch and I had this, I had a number of what Young would call active
imagination.
And I got this picture of this figure eight.
And in one of the circles it said Philo and the other Sophia.
That was in 19, he died in 1985.
So this would have been in 1987 after I'd moved to Virginia Beach, to Newport News,
Virginia.
And I call this dragon also because it's the abstract traditional symbol of infinity.
Of infinity.
But given shape and passion.
Exactly.
In the form of the serpent or the creature, the creature, it's infinity personified to
me.
It's like individualized everything.
Right.
You think?
Okay.
Yes, and also I think it's also the spiral of life.
I think the DNA goes in a spiral fashion.
It was also very interesting.
I didn't know all this at the time, but it was found on statues of Athena.
Really?
I didn't know that.
In Greece.
And the archeological digs found this picture.
They called it Owl's Eyes because she was pictured with owl's eyes and it was in this
shape.
And I didn't know any of this because what happened after my husband died was I would
call it a dialectic between the research that I was doing and dreams I was having and active
imagination.
So my boys were in school, elementary school, when this...
I was just eating lunch and this figure appeared.
It was sort of like anybody.
Jung would say this is a common everyday occurrence, but we brush it aside.
But for me it was very, very significant.
So I'll read this and then we'll get back to the part of why this has to be fiction.
Before you start, I'm just going to tell you we're halfway.
Thank you.
Okay.
So I'll just read you the first paragraph.
Okay.
Here we go.
Okay.
If I scream too loud, somebody...
No, it's all right.
Molly, a woman's piercing strong voice, split the roar in two, dissolving it.
Everything collapsed into darkness.
I slipped away into blackness.
By the way, this is me when I was eight years old, but then she becomes a figure of her
own.
I slipped...
In the school room?
Never mind.
I don't want to distract you.
Yeah.
Let me give a little background to this.
When I started doing this writing exercise with Jung, I started with an event that actually
happened to me.
I hated school.
I loved nature.
I climbed trees.
I climbed cliffs.
I lived in the creek.
We had a...
I grew up in St. Louis.
We had a monastery and a seminary a couple of miles away.
I hated being in school.
I was in Catholic school.
I wanted out.
I wanted out now.
Please.
I wanted out now.
When I was eight years old, I was in second grade, I guess.
I cried every day.
I cried.
It was a disruption to the rest of the class.
I didn't cry every day, but sometimes because I wanted to be outside.
The teacher, the nun, sent me to the library on the second floor of the school.
I reached for the wires, actually, to commit suicide.
I thought about it.
There were a coming in.
Because I didn't want to be in school.
Yeah.
At the window of the second floor?
At the window.
You know those old windows that pull out, and I reached out.
I thought about it.
Which is what Molly does.
That's what Molly does.
That's where we are.
That's where we are.
Okay.
All right.
Thank you.
That was a good friend.
I wanted to be outside.
I wanted to be with animals and horses and the forest.
Yeah.
Out that window.
So here, it starts with a real event, and then she develops into her own character.
So Molly was eight years old.
She had just been sent to the library.
And she was reaching for the wires, and she was in that in-between state.
In reality, I stopped crying.
I got hungry, and I went to the cafeteria.
But anyway, in this story, this is a transition point.
She's reaching for the wires.
She's hungry.
And she's thinking how desperate her situation is because she's in school and doesn't want
to be there.
So she hears this voice from outside.
Molly!
A woman's piercing, strong voice split the roar in two, dissolving it.
Everything collapsed into darkness.
I slipped away into blackness like a vast winter night sky, starless, frigid.
Hidden in this dark void, these words announce themselves everywhere.
I breathe a breath of force, of wind and roar and howling storm.
I am infinite power.
The voice now is neither male nor female, just deep and strong, rumbling like thunder
through my body.
There was more that I couldn't catch, but those words are burned into my memory like
a brand.
Then I passed out.
Or did I?
My memory was wiped out for a while.
I have no idea how much time passed.
Molly!
Molly!
The sound of my name rolled through the vast emptiness.
Molly!
The woman's voice dove again into the midnight silence and yanked me back to my senses.
For heaven's sakes, wake up and help me get free of these branches, she demanded.
Startled, I regained consciousness quickly.
Every word she spoke dissolved all traces of mist and noise.
This was no nun from my school teaching our third grade lessons.
I looked closer at the oak tree and saw a large, unusual looking woman pushing branches
out of her way.
Come and release me from these branches.
But, but who are you, I asked.
Who are you and what in the world are you doing in that tree?
My name is Sophia and I'm doing exactly what you probably do every day when you climb trees.
When you're way up, you try to figure out how to get down.
She said in a huffy tone.
She seemed to be sort of in the branches, sort of wound around the trunk and very high
up.
I was looking straight across at her from the library in the second story of my high
ceiling Catholic grade school.
I would have laughed at this strange woman or wondered how she knew that I climbed trees,
but I was too busy looking at her body.
It gave off a green haze that glowed in sharp contrast to the dead brown autumn leaves she
was pushing her way through.
She was wearing a loose fitting emerald green dress, so velvety looking that I wanted to
touch it.
Squinting hard so as not to miss anything, I kept staring at this odd looking woman.
Long black hair fell loose and wavy behind her neck, disappearing below her shoulders.
Where did she come from, I wondered.
Her skin was brown, deep brown with a ruddy overlay.
What is that?
What is that about her ears?
They were large.
Her ears.
They were large with big gold earrings dangling from them.
I couldn't stop looking at the gold hoops.
And then I'll go on.
I'll try to find the... And then I'll pass on here to... All of a sudden I tried to
see where she was standing.
I tried to figure out how she was in the tree, but I noticed something peculiar, almost like
scales wound around the large branch below her, curling like a gleaning snake.
Oh my gosh, I gasped, pointing to the branches just beneath her.
What is that below you, a snake?
Never mind the snake.
It's not a snake.
It's part of my baggage.
The woman snorted, annoyed at my question.
And it goes on.
Oh my gosh, I think I see a tail.
I thought with amazement, she has a tail.
And now, who resistably do we not have to introduce you to none other than Sophia herself,
or at least a facsimile thereof.
And as you can see, tail.
What a beauty.
Black hair.
She's Ethiopian.
In my mind, this is mother nature.
This is what we would see.
This is what Molly sees being a little girl, having the divine Sophia, having the heavenly
Sophia, divine wisdom, appear to her because it shows her connection to nature.
She in my mind is the evolutionary spirit or force that moves us through and upward
towards the principles, what Plato, what we would understand as philosophers, principles
of justice, truth, compassion, and beauty.
And she pushes us forward.
But she is connected to nature.
And so then further on in the book, she gets it.
Molly says, are you mother nature?
And she doesn't say anything.
But she's so much more.
So she leads Molly through a series of adventures.
So it is a story of philosophy, but it's also a story, an adventure story of how Molly
leads, how Sophia leads Molly to a place called the Middle Realm.
This is the place where stories come from.
I'm going to let her return to the underworld because we're now in the Middle Realm.
Yes, this was done, by the way, by Glenna Mahone Pointer in Virginia.
And she is 77 years old.
And she was moved to make this by reading this book.
I didn't ask her to make it.
She's a friend of a friend of mine.
So the Middle Realm.
Yeah.
We're down to six and a half minutes.
Six and a half minutes.
I've got to make this really quick.
Because philosophers really can't talk to us.
I know we could go on forever.
Yeah.
So what do you mean, Middle World?
Well, the Middle Realm.
Middle Realm.
Yeah.
I was driving on the New Jersey Turnpike to give a lecture in New Haven, Connecticut.
And all of a sudden, see, my notion of Sophia has evolved since 1987.
It has evolved.
And I realized that...
High Realm, thought, pure form.
We have this realm, just nuts and bolts.
Yeah.
Something else.
There is something else in this Middle Realm.
Carl Jung would call it the collective imagination.
And the Iranian Sufis would call it the Alam Al-Mithal.
It's also called the Mundus Imaginalis.
And if we had time, we will go into that.
Actually, we're going to go into that in a talk Saturday, March 10th at the Red Coast
Senior Center.
By the way, just a little digression, but we could easily run out of time at night.
In case we get run out of time.
Bookstore presentation is coming when?
At the gallery bookstore.
On?
Here.
On March 2nd.
Friday, March 2nd at 6.30 p.m.
Book signing.
Now, depending on what happens, this may be the day before this actually gets broadcast.
But either way, because then you're going to do it again, though.
I mean, not this again, but you're giving a much longer talk.
A longer talk.
Please, please come.
At Red Coast Senior Center, of course.
Where else?
At the Red Coast Senior Center on Saturday, March 10th.
March 10th.
At 7 o'clock.
In the evening.
Approximately free.
Open to the public, but donations are always welcome to keep this place open so you can
have people like me.
You betcha.
You betcha.
Please, please come so you can learn more about the Middle Realm.
The creative imagination where stories like Harry Potter are born and created, where our
gods are born and created and die and are regenerated.
It's really in a sense, it's the place where story is real.
Yes, where stories are real.
And the lofty and the mundane are more like fiction.
Are more like fiction.
They're almost, it's an inversion almost, isn't it?
It's almost an inversion.
Yes, our life.
Pure creative arena.
A pure creative arena where God, where one of the plots within this book is that Sophia
has a confrontation with Ialdabaoth, the one the Gnostics called Yahweh, Ialdabaoth, who
confronts Sophia.
And so there, because we are talking not about the ultimate source God, but the story, the
interpretation, the languages, the images and the emotions of the story that was created
for us by the priests and the interpreters and the story, including the Bible, that is
included within this realm of the imagination where stories are created.
That's why this is such an important book.
I introduce readers from the age of 13 or 15 all the way up, all the way up.
Older women love it too.
To introduce...
Two evenings ago, I don't even remember who it was I was reading, the age old answer,
the question, why would God make a world?
Why bother?
What's the point of all this?
And I love the way this answer was posed because it's always the classic deep answer.
And that is, nobody to read to, no stories to read to them.
No stories.
Had to create a world.
No stories.
No stories.
And the first story, I've got to give credit to Doug Fortier quickly.
He showed me the logo for the writers of the Mendocino Coast.
Oh, yes.
It's called the Phaistos.
It's called the, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing it right, the Phaistos Disc.
It's the first story.
And I had this brilliant insight and I don't mean to mess up anybody else's interpretation
of this incredible and extraordinary logo, but I want to give credit to the writers of
the Mendocino Coast and Doug Fortier.
It's called the Phaistos Disc and it's interpreted, Molly, the originator apparently of the writers
of the Mendocino Coast, or one of the former starters.
Phaistos Disc is the first story.
And I knew it.
I thought immediately, and I said that's Sophia, the first story.
She represents the personification of Jung's collective imagination, or what Hillman or
Joseph Campbell would call the archetypal imagination.
And so that's why the stories of Yahweh, the stories of the Bible, the stories of Harry
Potter, this big soup, and that we need to know the landscape and the language and the
geography and the topography of that realm of the creative imagination, or we will be
doomed because they shape our world.
They come first.
They shape our world.
And we make war or we make stories, depending on our knowledge and our capacity to understand
that creative imagination.
And it seems to me that war, that side of us, is ignorance and Sophia wisdom is story.
Yes.
Is story.
She's the knowledge that what occurs.
That's why I had to stop being a professional philosopher, because they're not so into
story.
They're not into story.
They let it get too abstract.
And so the wisdom isn't there.
The learning is there.
Right.
And the sharpness is there.
But the wisdom isn't there because they've given up on story.
Exactly.
And once you understand that these are stories within the human psyche and that whatever
God or ultimate source is, lies beyond the human psyche.
We don't have access to that unless it comes to us within language, image, form.
And so Sophia is the gateway to what Plato would call the noose, the principles of compassion
and truth and beauty.
And so she is, so to speak, the boundary.
And once you understand that she's the fabricative function of the psyche, of the collective
imagination, then you got it.
She's the portal to the noose.
To the ideas and the principles of noose.
So here's the deal.
That's why it had to be fiction.
It had to be.
These are stories.
The Bible.
The Gods.
And you know what's going to happen?
In 23 seconds we're going to have to stop.
And we better learn about it.
And so we've got to stop.
Okay.
The other website.
15 seconds.
Say it.
15 seconds.
Where are we going to go?
The other website, mollydragonslayer.com.
Please, please blog with me about this.
Okay.
And come to the longer, please come to the Senior Center to the longer.
Maybe you'll invite me to sit at the table and we'll continue the conversation with you.
Oh please, please.
Come to the Senior Center.
Please come learn about this.
Come to the Senior Center.
Because the survival, the 99% where we share in common is this collective imagination.
We've got to learn about it.
Thank you for being with us.
And you can learn about it in this book.
On Senior Perspectives.
Yes.
Yay.
And we're going to see you at the Senior Center shortly and we'll continue this conversation
Monday.
March 10th.
Saturday.
7pm.
Thank you so much and goodbye for now.
See you at the Perspectives Gone for another week.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yippee.
Thank you.
Yippee.
Yay.
That was good.
Was it good?
Yes.
Oh yeah.
Thank you.