Gianna de Girolamo-Gaudio - Self 101: What You Dont Know You Dont Know

GIANNA DE GIROLAMO-GAUDIO

Copyright 2012, 2014 Jeane Harper.

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ISBN: 978-1-4525-8761-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-8763-9 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-8762-2 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013921591

Balboa Press rev. date: 02/14/2014

Contents

Are You Ready for the T ruth?

SuZen Caring

for my ch ildren

Brynn, Henry, AnnMarie, Mia Boyle

and

In memory of my p arents

Vito de Girolamo and Lou Gaudio

A heart full of gra titude

A long life assures a virtual caravansary of traveling companions, spirit guides, soulmates, and antagonists, to all of whom I am grateful. Each in a unique way fostered my growth and my faith in a search for my Self: My clandestine best friends in third grade, Black Olive and Jewish Margaret, neither allowed to play with the so-called white girl after our school hours and who will never know how profoundly they have influenced my life. My intimate circle of seventh grade friends, especially Marjie and Rosemary. Despite rare contact, miles and states separating us, our contacts defy Ordinary time, judgement-free and filled with love. You are always in my heart.

Guardians of my spirit: Las Tres Marias, my grandmother Mary Gaudio, my mother-in-law, Mary Boyle, my sister Moo; My grandfather, Charlie Gaudio and my father and his brother John, my blood; Kairos Institute, Esalen and Pacifica Graduate Institute, every client and especially my brain-injured friends at Jodi House; my souls tea chers.

More immediately, deep appreciation to a traveling companion of endless depth, Barbara Kless, who not only read every word of many drafts of this book, but fed my stream of consciousness through long discussions about every issue in the book while providing Chez Kless as a writers haven for a brief time.

I am rich with soulmates, those who know each other at first sight: Marilyn Arana Cazon, first among them all. Our hearts and minds took us to new places every day. In this life or the next, we will always be the girls with blue feet. Estar alli para bienvenida, mi amor; Carlos, mentor and brother, when all is said and done; Joan and John Adam; she a spiritual traveling companion; he, the best playmate ever; together, an inspirational c ouple.

Post retirement, with the ache of loss in my heart, I was found by waiting soulmates, surprised that they were all much younger than me; the poet, Craig Dieninger who is the poem, and the Reverend Mike Petrow, a spiritual visionary and a hope for the marriage of Eastern spirituality and Western religion. Our relationships soar beyond age boundaries and go deeper than any of us really asked for; Dinners together were always a mixture of deep discussions and deeply heartfelt laughter. I miss you, guys and I cant leave without you both at the celebration; Gina Gianetto, not a daughter, more than a friend, sometimes a mother, always true; the men I have loved and who filled empty spaces in my heart with their love, helping me to grow, each in his own way: Harry H. Boyle, father of my children; Philip R. Harper, the love of my life; John Willy Alford, despit e all.

Love cannot die: You are all in my bones

This is the way my mind works. Neither the chicken nor the egg came first. Since each potentiates the other, they are cocreators of each other. Thus am I drawn to a more systemic view of a world in which humanity and civilization potentiate each other and, like the egg and the chicken, are intimately involved in cocreation. Ergo, relationship, per se, is what generates and maintains our personal psychological, spiritual, emotional, and physical welfares and ultimately civiliz ation.

As I recall photographs of early cave paintings, figure, animal, weapon and background are often represented with simple one-dimensional, overlapping strokes. I imagine that in those simple expressions, the primitive artists have revealed perceptions of oneness. Those have faded, seemingly as the evolution of increasingly more sophisticated cultures imposed blackouts on this sense of relatedness in hum anity.

Western culture in particular has been based on mutually exclusive concepts such as cause/effect, either/or, us/them, time/space, and God/man. Considering this paradigm of duality, it is no wonder our psyches began to split into mutually exclusive concepts of being. Our developing self-awareness became split off from an innately true Self, meaning one expressing the experience of ones own nature and perceptions. Instead, a Persona, not unlike an adaptive camouflage, was developed to cope with the demands of culture and, therefore, civilization. Unfortunately we have too often chosen the Persona over the Self for a definition of what it is to be human.

Possibilities for alternative paradigms exist in other cultures. Why not then, borrow from those to legitimize some alternative premises I put forth, ones that draw from the original human assumption that blurs the line between Self and environment. In this sense, we are intrinsically oriented toward relationship, which makes us cocreators by design. Reflections of this are found in such concepts as interdependence, beginnings and endings and in the concept of yin and yang, which eliminates the arbitrary line between beginnings/endings, endings/beginnings. Why not look to the mystical for purposes of hearts and souls, accepting the concept of timeless space while acknowledging a contemporary experience of space-choked time?