My PCC Journey

CIIS-SF, California, Spring 2015

Life works in very mysterious ways. How did I get here? This is still a question that puzzles me, amazes me and always makes me smile.

Before being here my life was so radically different, much more settled, defined, restricted, predictable… The path that I was seemed so much clearer, arranged and safe. I come from a Mexican Jewish traditional family in which the values are not really set in studying, developing a career or becoming and independent woman, but in forming a family. And my identity was very much immersed in that mindset.

But in the course of my own development something within me started shifting, some unknown courage was making me take the decision of embracing my life more fully. To allow myself to believe that I deserved to keep studying, to keep learning, and that it was time for me to take seriously what I really wanted. I got to a point where had the sense that I could not stop, but keep searching and discovering things about this life, nature and human consciousness. My curiosity was too big and the will to know posses me. So in a moment of lots of courage and bravery, I allow myself to believe in the values that my passion and love for knowing had, and to trust that maybe if I follow my calling and deepen in knowledge I could find a way to transform my community and myself.

My first steps that led me specifically to PCC was when while studying “Herbal medicine” I found out that the world was indeed very alive, full of intelligence and in desperate need of care and recognition. That shift of awareness happened to me by acknowledging the active properties of plants and the complex process of growth and relationship they have with their environment. Then in the 21st of December 2012 in an indigenous ceremony, celebrating the end of the world predicted by the Mayan prophecy, without really understanding why I let myself be carried away by the certainty that I had to be here. And when I say here I really mean here, in San Francisco, In CIIS and in PCC. So that was what I did. And here I am.

My first hours in San Francisco were the absolute confirmation that I was where I supposed to be. I arrive from the airport to the hotel and I instantly receive the message that a friend, who was here for the summer, she was with two friends that lived here and that I should meet. I left my things unpacked in the hotel and went to meet her and those girls and since that day they became the best friends and the best company that I have ever had in my life. This is how my journey started.

My first semester in PCC was absolutely fantastic. I refer to it like the best six months of my life. Since the beginning, everything seemed so enchanted so enlightened, so intense. The first and most significant experience that I had is that I found a group of friends that love and admire me for who I was, and I love them too. With them I shared my visions, my ideals and my concerns. By being with them life was so much fun and exciting as if we were all discovering the world and ourselves from the depths. Together we wanted to know everything about the world, we wanted to create a new life, transcend the limitations of our time and transform our reality. We wanted to experience our lives as fully as possible and to make every day count and be as great as we could make it… They were for certain the best that could ever happen to me in me in San Francisco.

Even before starting the program I felt in the right place, I felt comfortable and energetic and even my house reflected for the first time in my life what I truly felt inside, who I was and what I wanted to be, it has been a very healing and transformative experience since the beginning.

The first time I met the faculty was a life changing experience, before meeting them I still had this idea of what philosophy was for me until then, all the courses that I had choose were in order to continue what I left incomplete in my undergrad and my past, but when I met the faculty all of that change. They were so different, they seemed so engaged, so important; a completely different kind of professors. At the end of the meeting I ask them what were the job opportunities after finishing the PCC masters program, and Brian responded me with his deep voice and a very serious look, “the universe is in such a profound change, it is so complex and so mysterious that I am sure that if you use your creativity you will find a way to participate in it in just the right way”. He left me completely astonished, I never expected a response like that, it was the first time somebody talked about the universe and link it to my own personal experience and life. I instantly knew that I needed to take a course with him.

In my first semester I took Cosmological Powers, Karma and Biography, A Brief History of Western Thought and Intro. I cannot explain what happened to me then, everything felt so perfect, life so giving and abundant, and myself so lucky; I did not expect it. I did not expect any of it, and all of it was just amazing!

In Karma And Biography we talked about the spiritual dimension of existence and how some mysterious energies were present and working through all our lives, how if we look at ours and other peoples lives close enough we could see how every life was guided and filled with spirit, how there were certain callings and invitations that if assumed could change that life forever. It also make me realize by reading other biographies and autobiographies the absolutely coherence in the tapestry of a life stories that I learned, how everything that happens to a person can be seen as having a deeper purpose even if sometimes is hard and very complex. In this class I had to write my own autobiography and confront and make sense of who I was and how spirit was showing me my own path, the things I needed to work on and the sense that my life did matter and was being taken into account by higher dimensions.

The Cosmological Powers course was one of the most dramatic shifts of worldview that I have ever experienced. It changed entirely my vision of the universe and of reality. I realize how little I knew about our place amidst the immensity of the Universe, before I did not know about galaxies, black spots of the Sun, black holes or any of these things. I was lucky enough that when I found out about them I find it with someone like Brian that makes all of that information become alive and full of meaning and emotion. I felt absolutely perplexed by the knowledge that Brian was offering me, I could not believe that we were star stuff or that we were part of an evolutionary process of a universe that has that amount of agency and creativity, and it was even crazier to think that the universe could be trying to know itself through our experiences. I have never felt this excited about being alive and so intimately connected with the universe. This class made me feel the real enchantment of the Universe, it made me look at the stars and reconstruct my worldview and the values of life and knowledge. I realize that I needed it in order to become a person with an awareness of its relationship with the whole; a project that I still feel working inside myself.

In Brief History of the Western Mind I read for the first time Passion of the Western Mind by Rick. In that class we went through the history of the western thought since the Pre-Socratics to our time in order to understand what happened in that process to better understand our present moment. In this class my whole knowledge of philosophy made sense for the first time, Rick gave me the wider context and vision of the unfoldement of though, were every thinker had a role and its place in history, and the task that each had, represented something that was bigger than himself, that encompass a mind set and a evolution and complexification of human consciousness. In this class I understood that every philosopher I knew before was not but a part in the whole movement of human transformation and evolution. Rick provided me a sense of telos that allow the whole history and the current paradigm be much more clearer and full of meaning and new possibilities.

In Intro, the spectrum of PCC possibilities just keep growing each class, as the whole project of the program became more cohesive and integrated, we were shown so many amazing possibilities of inquiry and so many things to know and do, that It was here where my anxiety of all the changes that I was having in my life came forth.

I choose to take the time to talk so much about my first semester because it shows how the PCC journey became right away in this transformative experience that touched every aspect of my life, allowing me to dive deep into the interiorities of the universe, to be a witness of the magnificence, complexity and mysterious unity this universe is and taking Brian advise and start looking for my own way of participating in this great unfolding.

The rest of my PCC journey has also been also very exciting and each semester full of new experiences. Looking back I realize that each course I took became the energy field and a certain precondition to the other aspects of my life, bringing to my awareness and my life something special and new, like the people I meet or the different situations I find myself in.

In my second semester the idea of sacrifice and reverence to all life forms became very present for me, especially in Next of Kin class, where we talked about our relationship to non-human animals and how our life style and current state of consciousness leaves very little room to integrate them and give them their right place. That class was so important that I even change the way I relate to food and consider my actions with much more awareness in order to bring more coherence to my way of living and thinking, but it also brought me to get in touch with wonderful and mysterious people that have live in tree houses for a big period of time, with healers that had the power to communicate with animals, and with shamans that had the power to bridge our world with other presences; totally new experiences for me.

With Rick class Archetypal Women I had was my first encounter with the Women movement and all that it brought forth. Tai Chi class in the other hand was just so fun and deep, and being able to have a class like that as a subject in higher education open my eyes to understand what really is an integral education. But Nature and Eros really transform my soul, the experience of reading the books for the class and getting in touch with the deeper parts of your being in relationship with nature, and the nature that we are, opened a whole new dimension of how a life can be lived in much higher levels of awareness and communion. In that semester my contact with nature became very important and hiking my favorite activity.

In the third semester taking I Ching, Jung and Radical Mythospeculation was quite an experience. I got myself so captivated but Jung’s thought and vision, his psychology brought so many spiritual questions, but it also gave me so many answers that I got completely hook in his vision. The ideas that most captivated me of him where the idea that in essence all human beings have the God Archetype that makes them look always for ways to reconnect themselves with their source of being, and how that way in which they have been looking for God has been evolving in religion and spiritual practices.

In the I-Ching class I discovered that I have a Chinese soul and that their worldview makes me feel at home. The I Ching is a magical book full of wisdom and with a real connection to the divine wisdom.

And in Radical Mythospeculation I learn the power of meta-narratives and importance of knowing our history, to be aware of the stories we are choosing to live our lives by. Now here I am in my fourth and last semester, tacking more classes than ever, completely different but the same as always trying to understand more about the universe, trying to rise myself into a new awareness and a new consciousness and very scared of leaving this program. A program that has become the core of my life for more than a year now, where I have discovered so many things to do, to think, to experience, where I found out a big part of who I am, but also a program that have brought a new language and vision about the world, a new perspective sometimes hard to share with more people, hard to fit in the structure of society as it is now. But I trust and surrender myself to the bigger forces working in my life that Robert teach me to see and wish to find my next place in order to keep not only exploring, but using what I have learned in PCC to transform our world and bring more joy and enchantment to our everyday life.