The Vision
In a meeting in late December 2006, the President of Meridian University asked me what course I wanted to teach in their Ph.D. program. "Metaphor," I blurted out. The topic was right there; there was no thinking involved. The truth was, I didn't know anything about metaphor, and I'm certainly not a linguist. Something was speaking through me that day and at that point, I had no idea what I was in for.
My research for this course gave me both a language and a way of thinking about what I am now calling third space. Teaching this course gave me the academic foundation that I needed, because unfortunately in our culture, if one cannot measure something quantitatively, it is presumed that it doesn't exist. Although I had had experiences of third space before the visionary experience I describe below, teaching this course laid the theoretical foundation. I would describe third space as a parallel world of deep beauty that is already there, but except for rare moments of heightened clarity, we don't normally tap into it. Metaphorically speaking, our everyday environment grows into a "world" when things stand for more than they are. In a metaphoric world, everyday things have a dual role: being themselves and representing something else. I believe it is our next evolution as humans to "bridge" this polarity--tapping into the transformative power of metaphor.
A couple of months after the Metaphor class ended, I had a visionary experience. At first it was an ordinary dream: I was in the basement of the house I grew up in, I stepped out of the basement door into our backyard, and at that moment the dream was no longer ordinary. Magnificent, pulsing, glorious energy was vibrating in everything around me--the trees, plants, animals, but also the clothesline and houses. Every single thing was alive with beautiful dancing energy. I became lucid in the dream at that moment.
After a few moments of gazing in wonder at this sight, my body was pulled forcefully away toward distant forests and mountains. As my body got closer to the forest, I saw that the forest was actually a "picture" of a forest, printed on something like cardboard or a billboard. I was frightened. My body was being pulled at a tremendous speed and I was heading straight toward the printed board--I was going to crash into it. And just at the last minute, my body was zipped into a train tunnel that was going through the cardboard forest. After recovering from my near miss, I looked out the train window--the train was traveling through a tunnel, but there were some windows in the tunnel, and out the windows I could see the beautiful dancing energy again. The beautiful, vibrating life energy was still there--BEHIND the cardboard. And at that moment when I saw the beautiful energy once again, a voice said "THIRD SPACE." And I bolted awake.
I believe that the vision was showing me that our next evolution as humans is to see the pulsing beauty that lies "underneath." Our ordinary, everyday world has been like living in a world of cardboard photographs. But there IS something more to see. We just need to wake up a little more to see it. It is entirely possible--I've been there.
The artist Corita Kent said that all true art is ultimately about caring. When we put things together in new ways with care, we are creating art. As more of us follow the wisdom of our creative process, we create more beauty. And beauty brings us back into our hearts, where our deeper wisdom and insights will always lie. As we shift our focus toward listening to our heart's wisdom and its creative aspirations, we start to awaken, helping to create the awakened world that I saw in my dream. This creative process (in biology, it's called "creative emergence") is our next evolution as humans.
If you're interested in exploring third space in more depth, you might want to check out my book Getting Messy (I discuss metaphor in chapter 3 and third space in chapter 6) or the workshop page on this blog. I'll soon be starting a transformative teacher training, for those who want to work with third space when they teach or facilitate groups.
