Which threads of the warp and weft, the fabric of my life, were pulled that led to its unraveling after nearly six decades? Several stand out, but the process of psychotherapy is the most obvious. Psychotherapy, it means treating the soul.

I never thought my soul was in such ill health that it needed treatment. I was aware that I might have a few “issues” left over from my childhood but I thought I had them well in hand. I believed myself to be happy and successful.

I came into the process through the back door. My daughter suggested that we seek family counseling. We were experiencing the usual parent-teenager turbulence. It was two against one and she wanted a referee, I think.

And so I met Peter. A man who had overcome his own demons years ago and with such authority that he was now able to help others with theirs. The way he was able to reveal and restore the love and trust that was inherent between parents and child was masterful. We kept our weekly sessions going even after any sense of crisis was long past.  Sometimes we came to him as a family, but more often just my wife and I as a couple and occasionally I came alone.

In one session I told him that I was frustrated with myself in that, while I loved intellectual discussions, I too often found myself lecturing rather than having a real dialog or, even worse, becoming aggressive and overbearing.

I sought his help in the same spirit as I might call a painter to repair some peeling paint on my house’s exterior. Some months later, I am vague about how many, the house of my soul was up on jacks over a foundation that was clearly in ruins. Worse than ruins, it was a pit, a demon-haunted pit. I had fully entered into James Hollis’ Middle Passage, I was in Dante’s Dark Wood and I too had lost my way.

I had prided myself on being even-tempered over the years. So even tempered that my wife had to hit me with an emotional brickbat to get a rise out of me, something she would do with somewhat increasing frequency as time went on, to assure herself I was still there inside, perhaps. If I sensed a growing unease or unhappiness inside me, it was felt dimly, a cry heard though thick layers of stone and mortar.

Another thread. Although not the typical physical type for heart disease and without outward symptoms, I still had risk factors so I saw a Cardiologist regularly. It was strictly as a precaution, to remove that last ten percent of uncertainty and prove that my coronary arteries were clear, that we decided on an angiogram.

What he found was so unexpected that, he now says, it changed the way he practices medicine. Two of the three main arteries were thirty and forty percent blocked but the most critical one, the LDC, was ninety-nine percent blocked. He told me a clot the size of a human hair would have killed me. He told my wife, as I found out much later, that he had never seen a heart like mine before except on corpses. I had been walking around with the heart of a corpse.

Although I never felt ill before, after the stint was installed to open up my artery, I was somehow sensible of the restored blood flowing into my heart. I felt new energy and new life, yet I cannot say if I felt it physically or emotionally – or if there is a difference.

It was ten months later (in this case I am clear about the timing) that I sat in Peter’s office and told him I stood at the edge of  a pit and the demons could and did reach out and grab me without warning. My even temper had vanished. The memory of traumatic events in my childhood almost forgotten were clear and present in my everyday life and the pain of them, so long and so well hidden was as fresh and sharp as newly spilled blood.

He looked at me and said, “you have to go down into the pit and lay the demons to rest.” And then, most unexpectedly, he asked, “What is your relationship to God.”

My relationship to God, that is a thread too. I remember with utmost clarity the moment I became an atheist. I had placed a tooth under my pillow for the tooth fairy to find. I didn’t tell anyone else, why should I? It was between the fairy and me, wasn’t it?

In the morning I found neither the expected dime nor my tooth. (I probably had pushed it under the bed with my frequent checks under the pillow as I fell asleep.) This I did tell my mother about, I felt cheated. Mom was a pretty quick thinker. She told me she had had a dream that my tooth had fallen out of the bed and because it wasn’t where it was supposed to be the fairy had placed the dime in an unusual place, one revealed to her in the dream.

I accepted the dime but I didn’t buy her story, I don’t know why nor do I know why I also consigned Santa Claus and God to oblivion in my belief system along with the Tooth Fairy but I did. From that day to this I have never experienced even in twinge of doubt about the non-existence of all things supernatural.

After many years of thoroughly empirical thought and philosophical inquiry I came to realize that I was an agnostic rather than an atheist. The intellect, the part of us that knows things is of and in nature. It is a waste of time to try and use it outside of that context or so I believe.

All of which makes my immediate reaction to Peter’s question about my relationship to God more interesting. I knew exactly why he was asking and I also knew that I had something to bring to the “spiritual” table that might work. And consciously or unconsciously I began pulling on another thread, a dangerous or at least fateful one, a long one that reaches way back to some of the earliest weavings in my life.

The Dewey decimal system, it has been revised since but when I was in second grade the first rack in the school library spanned from 000 to 300 and included the entire religion section. The first rack is where you start if you are a logically minded second grader escaping the boredom and oppression of the classroom.

Christianity was a little high to reach for a second grader but there, right at eye level, was the Classical (Greek and Roman) religion section. I had found my haven. I had found something worth reading, something that gave me a reason to overcome my mild undiagnosed dyslexia instead of the stultifyingly boring Disk and Jane readers I was fed in the classroom.

Elementary school students don’t get much free time but when I did I was in the library. I read every book on classical mythology time and again and eventually expended to Norse and other mythologies such as they were represented in that meager collection.

Meanwhile my broader school experience became more and more a shop of horrors. The 1950s were not a particularly enlightened time for bright, bored kids with learning disabilities. Both my teachers and parents thought me lazy and willful.

And so it went through elementary school and into junior high. I first read Homer in the seventh grade. I found the Iliad tough going but the Odyssey was pure delight. After that I discovered Science Fiction and Fantasy and another thread was begun or maybe the same one dyed a different color.  I thought it all just entertainment at the time. Nothing like the catechisms or whatever it was other children received in Sunday school.

But if empiricism is the food of the intellect, myths feeds a different part of our souls. And they had their way with me. Outside of the misery of school and the solace of books I had another haven, another of my life’s threads, in nature, discovered in the extensive forests and streams that surrounded my home.

Sometimes as I wandered the seemly endless trails or pushed into trackless places, for no reason I knew, the hair on the back of my arms would rise or a delicious chill run down my spine. Did I sense the presence of gods and goddesses in dark green leafy glades or within the trunks of towering beeches?

I assigned no special significance to such experiences, I just knew I enjoyed being in the woods. Though I never lost my love of nature by the time I was sixteen I was thoroughly committed to yet another thread, one that would define me in my own mind for the next forty years. I would understand the universe through logic and science. Religion and spirituality were identical with superstition and not worth a second thought, or so it seemed.

Even the joy and sense of homecoming I felt as a freshman at St. Johns College with its yearlong emergence in ancient Greek and Roman culture did not clue me into the fact that while I was a modern in my intellectual sensibilities, I was perhaps an anachronism with respect to another part of my psychology, my soul as the Greeks called it. Naturally, I had not yet come to believe that part of my soul existed.

So, decades later it had to be my intellect not my emotions that lead me back to that part of myself. I found Joseph Campbell’s discovery of common themes in the myths of diverse cultures to be compelling evidence that the western notion that religion was about belief and explanation and my own take that it was all mistaken and erroneous beliefs, might itself be in error.

What if the common themes in myths were products of some hitherto unidentified or at least unappreciated common aspects of human psychology? If so it must have evolved for a reason like any other part of human nature. Maybe it was important and not just some evolutionary relics like the appendix. Maybe myths could be important in our everyday lives as Campbell maintained.

I came across contemporary writers James Hillman and Thomas Moore. Here were people using archetypes from Greek Mythology (my own myths!) in the context of psychotherapy. Without altering my opinion that metaphysics is a waste of time, my mind was now open to the possibility that there was an important part of human psychology which expressed itself via archetypal stories and patterns.

As if the human brain consists of two computers, one whose data structures were intellectual constructs; ideas and whose programs were logic, perceived as thought and the other, more ancient perhaps, whose data structures were archetypes and whose programs were myths, experienced rather than thought. Left brain verses right brain? Cerebral cortex verses limbic brain? It is tempting, almost compelling, to make such localizations but they are probably gross over-simplifications.

“What is your relationship to God?” Peter had asked. Not God but “the gods” it came to me. “You have to go down there,” he said. Odysseus travelled to the underworld and spoke to the dead. Could I do so as well, must I?

At that moment the unweaving of the warp and weft of my former life was complete and I held the unraveled ends of many intersecting threads in my hands. I do not know what I said to Peter in answer but I left his office in an altered state.

The Odyssey was in the forefront of my consciousness. I had attended a seminar at St. John’s the past summer led by Eva Braun, perhaps the foremost intellect on campus and a noted Homer scholar. I remember one of the participants raised the issue of how one should interpret the actions of the gods in the text since they were not real persons. Eva raised an eyebrow, “not real, are you sure?”

Atypically I remained silent but I thought, what about Liberty? Everyone in the room would say Liberty is something real. We do not believe Liberty is a person in spite of the statue of her in New York harbor that looks like a Greek goddess. But we do believe she symbolizes something abstract but real; something essential in the human experience.  Why not the Homer’s gods also?

One month later, it was early November 2008, I was alone in a rented townhouse hundreds of miles from home. I had come there for a month to pursue a project in the course of my professional work but the solitude made it harder to ignore my inner turmoil. I picked up a copy of the Odyssey at a book store and re-read Books X and XI: the adventure with Circe and subsequent voyage to the underworld.

Without any premeditation, I sat down at the keyboard and started writing without any clear idea of what I was doing other than “go to the underworld and lay to rest those troubling shades.” An amazing 36 hours later I had a ten thousand word manuscript in my hands. I found I had rewritten Book XI, but with myself as Odysseus and the dead from my own past in place of the Greek Heroes.

The words, images, scenes and dialogs seemed to come with very little involvement from my conscious intellect or in fact any part of me that I feel is me. Many times when I did have an expectation of what should come next, something else “happened.”

The story was dreamlike from start to finish. As it begins I am on a boat travelling over familiar waters one moment and then, by magic, walking on the black sand shores of the river Styx the next. But there is the familiar form of my father’s house and the faces of the shades that crowd around me are people I know, my own dead.

I expect a guide; Odysseus had Tiresias the blind seer to lead him. I think maybe for me Joseph Campbell would be a good choice but it is not he. My guide turns out to be a good friend, a very spiritual person, who had died tragically young just a few years earlier. I never said goodbye to her properly in life. I do remember the tears falling onto my keyboard as I typed onward.

I speak to my father and mother and others that I knew say things I did not get to say to them in life and I gain new insights about them.

I find myself in the hallway of my elementary school. I bypass the welcoming library and go into a classroom.  I speak to the ghost of my former self, the second grader. I give him comfort and support averting a traumatic incident of my real life. I visit a slightly older version of myself in my childhood home. Again a traumatic event is relived the way it should have happened.

Finally in the temple of Demeter, the Loving Mother, I am forgiven the many failures and transgressions that so disappointed my teachers and parents.

I know that over those 36 hours I slept once and must have tended to my other needs. But I remember only the action of the story, as if I were asleep and dreaming the entire time.  To this day I think about the creation of that manuscript not as an action performed but as something experienced, something that happened to me, not something I did.

What did happen? Did I tap into some deep psychological resources present in the human subconscious and effectively implant false memories, overriding or at least mitigating the memory of the actual traumatic events of my childhood? Did I have a religious experience by calling upon archetypal forms from a religion long gone from the earth but for which I had a particular affinity? Did gods whose literal existence I deny none-the-less grant me grace?

Grace. I never had an emotional referent for the word. I do now. I feel a deep humility I have never known, feel an intense gratitude. It is though I have been given a gift that could only be bestowed upon one who was deeply and completely loved.

What I do know is that that I emerged from the experience a very different person. Some of the changes were immediate and others continue manifesting themselves on almost a daily basis as of this writing a year and a half later.

Perhaps most immediate and dramatic was my altered perception of my age and inevitable death. Like most people at my time of life I had become increasing aware that I was running out of time to do the many things I still hoped to accomplish or experience in life. I felt old and was burdened by this knowledge.

In one stroke that burden was lifted from me. From the time the manuscript was completed to now I have searched my heart many times and can find no trace of it. I have no more sense of limited time than a child. I do not have the slightest worry that I will not be given all the time I require to fulfill my destiny. I feel young.

Is this why some people who have religious experiences speak of being born again? In any case I have learned not to speak too much about this aspect of my transformation to my contemporaries; they tend to find it annoying.

Another immediate and surprising change I experienced was the disappearance of guilt. It used to be that no matter what I was doing, I always felt guilty that I was not doing something else. When I was at work I felt guilty I was not with my family and when at home, guilty for not pushing myself harder, and when pushing myself, guilty that I was not taking better care of myself. All of this guilt simply vanished.  I still question my choices about how I spend my time but there is never any guilt involved.

More far reaching have been the changes in my relationship to love. My work with Peter had gradually brought me to understand that the shades of our younger selves still exist after we have grown out of them and sometimes we leave them restless and unresolved, buried alive.

Over the decades of my life, though I denied them, I sensed these deep reflections of myself, their suffering, anger and resentment unabated by time. I could not silence them but perhaps I could hide them.

I cultivated an outward persona of brittle confidence, even arrogance.  I put my energy into works of the intellect; I built a shining edifice of conscious thought with walls as tall and sound as those that girdled Ilium. Beneath I built a labyrinth to contain the monsters but unwittingly I trapped my heart, my capacity to love and be loved, there as well. It wandered through the empty corridors in fear, growing corpse-like.

All swept away in 36 hours. The ugly deformities that caused me to regard myself (subconsciously) as unloved and essentially unlovable were healed or at least healing. I awoke naked and in the open. I felt the blood flowing through my living heart. I had been forgiven, or even better, my transgressions were undone. I had nothing to hide, everything to share. That fire the ancients called Eros came to me in a torrent.

Where before, I had felt secure behind my shield wall, now I could not lower those shields quickly enough, where I had been content with few friends, and superficial relationships I now hungered for deep connections and real intimacy. For the first time in my life I sensed the incredibly attractive possibility of unconditional love.

Thus, I have discovered to my complete astonishment that it is possible to have the very fabric of your personality unraveled and rewoven even in late middle age. It is not a comfortable process, neither for me nor those close to me. And it goes on. A year and a after my fateful, dreamlike quest to the realm of the dead I continue to experience new revelations almost daily.

Many old pains, resentments and sources of anger have faded but only to be replaced with new needs and painful longings. There are times when I feel nostalgia for the damped down, almost flat-lined emotional state of the old me. But I would not go back, know I could not go back.

Painful or not I feel so much more alive than I ever have. If the experience of life can be measured quantitatively than the dry trickle I once experienced has become a flood.

It is as if I opened a door that November night. It is open to me still, at times a mere crack but at other times it yawns wide drawing me in. Visions flow from it, feelings and experiences that seem to clothe themselves in words with little or no involvement from my intellect.

At those times I see the world through two sets of eyes, one rational, intellectual, empirical, the other emotional, spiritual, mythic. Then I walk in two worlds at once. I must restrain my speech and behavior or people will think me as bizarre as a person with two heads. Which in a very real sense, I am.

The two worlds; objective-intellectual and mythical-spiritual, I mastered navigation of the intellectual world long ago.  In the realm of causality and chronological time, the rules of empirical thought create powerful, reliable models. In the spirit world time is Kairos[1] not Chronos and space and even causality seem to be meaningless concepts. There are treasures of divine worth to be found there as well as soul destroying dangers. How to find my way?

There are as many road-maps to that realm as there are and have been mystics, shaman, saints and madmen. For me, though, the answer has already been given. The gods of the classical world opened the door for me and they continue to be my guides.

As improbable as it seems, the life-long agnostic has found “religion.” I pray to my gods and I hear them answer. The fact that it was a largely dead religion and that I practice it while remaining an intellectual agnostic appear to have no bearing what so ever on its utility for enriching my life