Love and Honesty

“This story begins in New York City on Christmas Eve, 1984, the night my life ended. It happened very fast—and it happened like this. I was walking on a dark street on the upper eastside of Manhattan, on my way to a Christmas party at my sister’s house, when I noticed that squeaking sounds were coming out of my mouth. Seconds later I started to lose control of my body and in my last, desperate remnant of consciousness before blacking out, I knew that I was dying. I came to, being lifted onto a stretcher. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance attendant explained to me that a bystander had observed me convulsing. I had had a seizure.

The next three months or so were taken up with trying to find out why I had had a seizure. My neurologist attributed it the selenium I had been taking to control my allergies. A naturopathic physician I consulted attributed to it to my inorganic diet. And a fellow psychologist attributed it to the stress of my recent divorce. This wild and free period of speculation was arrested by the event of a second seizure, which was followed by a series of more probing tests, including a second CAT scan.

The CAT scan revealed a large, shadowy mass, which was thought to be an area of bleeding on the first CAT scan. Now the real diagnosis descended like a dark cloud over my life…a meningioma, a nonmalignant tumor of the meninges, the outer covering of the brain…in short, I had a brain tumor. Well, the good news was that it was not cancer, and it was on the surface of the brain, not deep inside; so, theoretically at least, it was operable. The bad news, however, was that it was very large and clinging to my brain, rather than nicely separated. More to the point, it was clinging in areas that were responsible for many higher functions, including speech. So, although it was operable, sort of, my surgeon wanted to try a less invasive approach first. This less invasive approach was plenty invasive in its own right. It consisted of threading a catheter through an artery in my groin until it reached the blood supply of the meningioma, at which time a gobbet of crazy glue was shot through it. The idea was to embolize the blood supply to the tumor, so that it would die and be absorbed by my body.

The procedure was only half successful. It did embolize the tumor, but unfortunately, not completely. And as we followed its progress over the following weeks, the blood supply started to come back. So we would have to operate after all. Dr. Ranserhoff would supply the operation; I would supply the tumor. In the meantime, there was also an unfortunate side effect. The blood supply to the nerves controlling my face was successfully embolized, and the left side of my face became paralyzed. It would probably come back, sort of. But in the meantime, I had to sleep with my eye taped shut, so that it wouldn’t dry out.

I was operated on in the early spring, right before my book Power Talk was published. I went into the operation afraid, and I came out with my fears realized. My right arm and leg were paralyzed, and I was utterly unable to speak. Power Talk caught on instantly, particularly with women, and excerpts appeared in all the women’s magazines. Simon & Schuster wanted to put me on the road for a publicity tour. There was only one difficulty, me. I couldn’t smile. I couldn’t shake hands, and I couldn’t speak. I was also terrorized. While formerly I was a confident, almost cocky guy, I had become ridden with anxiety. I had lost trust in my body. Although I was walking almost normally, my speech was gradually returning, and I was even regaining use of my right arm and some crude functioning in my hand, I was always afraid of having another seizure. This anxiety was partly psychological and partly neurological. When I expected any degree of performance from myself, it precipitated an anxiety attack that would render me almost completely unable to speak.

I had to give up both teaching and my psychoanalytic practice. I just couldn’t function. My world collapsed into my family, i.e., my mother and sister, and my girlfriend Debbie. While Debbie stood by me, it was extremely hard for both of us. She was used to my making the decisions. When she had to take the lead, things became very stressful for her. Also, she had been attracted to me because of my strength and confidence, and when I lost that, she lost her respect for me and hence her attraction. After about a year, when I was more or less able to live alone, we separated. If you think you have your life together, both psychologically and spiritually, and want to put it to the test, try what I did. Get a brain tumor with all the trimmings and tell me how you come out. I would be interested to know.

Before my first seizure I was well on my way to becoming an authority on matters both psychological and spiritual. I had a Ph.D. and was a trained psychoanalyst and psychosynthesist. I had students, I had clients, and I wrote books. People listened to me. I even listened to myself. Now a little bit of adversity had come into my life – well, perhaps not so little - and everything collapsed, not only my outer life, but my inner as well. I became demoralized, despairing and depressed. My life as a man, a therapist, and spiritual authority was over. I had come from living fully to just existing and had discovered that great American occupation – hopelessly killing time.

There are a lot of stories out there about people who have been moved to a spiritual realization through sickness and adversity. This is not one of those stories. Any little measure of spiritual progress I had made in my life was lost when I got sick. However, time does heal, and in time my ordinary abilities to walk, talk, and chew gum returned, although perhaps not simultaneously. What didn’t return, at least not then, was my self-confidence, my verve and, most of all, – my spiritual connection. Life had become all about fear and survival. I had entered the dark night of the soul.

Gradually, my life became more normal. However, it was not the normalcy that I was used to. It was a kind of stepped-down normalcy, in which I wandered about the city amusing myself, but not really progressing in my life. Not teaching, not seeing clients, not writing. Finally, I did something to change my life. I went to Miami and bought a sailboat, one big enough for me to live-aboard. Actually, this was not the first time I had visited Miami. The first time was about six months after the operation when I went down with Debbie to recuperate in a kinder climate. We rented a little apartment in Key Biscayne. While there, I had seen a 41-foot sloop for sale at a cheap price, and on a whim made a ridiculously low ball offer. I had forgotten all about it when, out of the blue, months later, I got a phone call in New York that my offer had been accepted. Five days later I was at Key Biscayne sleeping on my new yacht.

The next thing to get me out of the postoperative doldrums was meeting Jeanie, the woman who was to become my wife. There was something about Jeanie, some combination of emotional presence and vulnerability, that touched my soul, and brought out the healer in me that had gone dormant in the years AO (after operation). It was co-dependency at first sight. Jeanie found in me the personal psychotherapist that all of us think should be our due in life, while I clutched at Jeanie’s sweet, accepting nature as if she was a lifeline thrown from God. It was a disastrous combination from the get go.

Within months I was proposing, and Jeanie was running away. The problem was not only did I want Jeanie to marry me; I also wanted her to give up her tenured position as Associate Professor of Anthropology at New York University and move to Miami with me. Some chutzpah for someone in my shoes… But somehow, as Jeanie says, “our destiny was sealed”, and our relationship grew into marriage and parenthood. Jeanie moved to Miami with me, our daughter Ariel was born there, and we continued the hero’s journey, each of us wielding both “our stuff” and our good intentions. [For our wedding, Jeanie wrote me a song, “Who is this stranger I’ve known forever?” and I wrote her a poem, “Jeanie, ever cheery, ever teary”.]

The “stuff” we were up against looked something like this. I was paranoid, perpetually frustrated, demanding, and distrustful. I was deeply afraid of losing Jeanie to motherhood the way I had lost my last wife, and Jeanie was my lifeline to normalcy! Jeanie, on the other hand, was a pleaser who was married to a man she couldn’t please. She found herself increasingly overwhelmed by the reality of simultaneously meeting my needs and the needs of a baby, trying to stay connected to her profession, and feeling like a failure. Despite the co-dependency dance, an intellectual and spiritual kinship grew between us. This took the form of a deepening dialogue, a questing to understand the nature of spirit and reality in all of its guises. That dialogue fanned the embers of my spiritual life and got me to asking the big questions once again. One sultry, Miami night I put this question to myself…“what is duality?” Almost immediately, I got the answer…“duality is Oneness perceived!”

Although this answer seemed obvious, it also seemed to have great portent, and I immediately started to make some notes. Over the period of the next 10 years or so, these notes grew into the book Oneness Perceived: A Window into Enlightenment, which was published by Paragon House in 2002. Oneness Perceived was one half of my spiritual journey. It was a chronicle of inquiry that took me into a deep understanding of enlightenment. The other half of my spiritual journey has been my relationship with Jeanie. Although we came together, almost casually, out of mutual and dimly understood personal needs, there gradually emerged and is still emerging, a deeper movement, a deeper significance. I don’t know whether it came out of some accidental combination of our personal needs and gifts, or as Jeanie would put it, the universe had a plan for us and put us together for one another’s enlightenment. But I do know that the combination of our essential incompatibility and our love for one another kept us trying to work things out. It provided the impetus for the hard psychological and spiritual work that enlightenment requires.

By enlightenment, I don’t mean the old, ivory tower kind of enlightenment, only sustainable by withdrawing from the world. I mean the kind of in your face, every day, here and now, fully committed to this life ordinary enlightenment; the kind of enlightenment that strives to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way, full of love and honesty, nonreactive and nonpositional.

Out of the streams of my life I have formulated the Clearing Path of PsychoNoetics™, the transformational, healing technology that I’m presenting in this book. My relationship with Jeanie is one of these streams. Without Jeanie I don’t think I would have developed the Clearing Path, and without the Clearing Path I don’t think I would be nearly the person I am today. And I don’t think Jeanie and I would still be together. PsychoNoetics is a way of letting go of those positions or identities that all of us hold, both in our bodies and in our psyches. The technique can be applied to the entire gamut of identities from the allergic identities of the immune system to the emotional identities of the ego. PsychoNoetics has improved my physical health to the point where I can function almost normally in every aspect of my life and has improved my psychological health to the point where I can resume what seems to be my true destiny as a psychological healer and a spiritual teacher… To be continued…”

~ Jeffrey S Eisen, Playing 20 Questions with God: A Cosmic, Self-Repair Manual