Remembering Dr. Peggy Zellner

I had my birthday this year at MIX in Las Vegas, remembering all of the other birthdays in Las Vegas and my friends there.  Among them, was my good friend, Dr. Peggy Zellner, who passed away unexpectedly on my birthday some time ago.  Peggy was an intuitive Naturopath who was very gifted and had a large practice in the valley.  She was also a genius of spirit, and able to speak fluently, the language of the unseen.  Over the years that I spent in Las Vegas, I watched her touch many people, professional and gifted in their own right. She led us all to the spirit we commonly share, and showed us how to express it. She taught me many things and I find myself still unpacking some of it every day.  I love and miss her, bless her soul.  Rest in Peace my friend.

A Welcome for the New Year

The Call

I stand ready

To embrace

The challenge.

I stand firm

In the truth

Of my soul.

I stand tall

As my heart

Races forward

At unimagined speeds,

Following spirit

Following the call.

I look upward

For a vision

Of my soul’s longing.

I see possibility

So sublime

That is whisks

Me away.

I fill quickly

With emptiness

And wait for you,

Quietly wait,

And wonder

What is real

In the waiting.

Excerpted from A Blaze of Light by Molly Brogan

Artwork by  Alejandro Silveira Bruno.  Many thanks.

Bright Zellner

My friend, Peggy Zellner, ND, PhD, passed away suddenly on my birthday last Saturday. I discovered Peggy (or should I say, she discovered me) shortly after moving to Las Vegas at and IONS meeting. She was giving the crowd a hands on presentation of Kinesiology, a method used in her practice as a Naturopath, and I fell in love with her on the spot. She invited me to a "group meditation," held every Tuesday evening at her office. I was skeptical, and immediately pictured craziness and woo woo. She put me at ease and I was there the next Tuesday, and every Tuesday that I was in Las Vegas afterward.

Peggy had a method of meditation that, I quickly discovered, allowed us to witness the formation of group soul. I was blown away by the process and the potential. I will never forget the beautiful feeling that was shared each week by the participants (often different). Because the participants were different, each experience was different. Peggy guided us as we each described the images that came up for us in the meditative state. As the 90 minutes unfolded, these images revealed to us, without fail, how we connect at the soul level; how the group soul forms into a cohesive connection; how we are all and each left more than before. I was fascinated and devoted to this process. I now wonder if I will ever see anything like it again.

The genius of Dr. Peggy Zellner shed a light on this world that will never be dimmed. Why she made her sudden, final exit is one of life's mysteries. Somewhere, I suspect, she is smiling. At least, I hope so. I will continue to smile whenever I think of Peggy.

The Death of a Character Gives Life New Meaning

Jim said...

I finally got around to reading your book, remember me, something I've been meaning to do for awhile. One question, why did you kill of your main character?

This is a great question, Jim, thanks for asking it. The Mary Margaret character in Remember Me died for reasons intrinsic to both the story of Remember Me and to the larger story of my trilogy of novels. Each of my three novels examines love and loss from different viewpoints, and all three together examine love, life and death, as they fundamentally effect our experience.

Because Remember Me was written as a plea for reform in US family courts, it was important for the main character to die because each year, thousands of people take their own lives or have their lives taken as a result of the ineptitude of the US family court system. To research my book, I spent countless hours in family court, listening to these stories and interviewing litigants. There is an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness in domestic violence cases because weak laws, inexperienced State's Attorneys, and burned out judges allow cases to go unresolved or perpetrators to go free, empowered to continue the violence. The death of this character and destruction of this family was a common story in US family court.

Looking at the larger canvas of the trilogy, on the journey of the spirit, the death of the ego is the first step to be taken toward enlightenment. Some say, for instance, that the Tibetan Book of the Dead is actually a manual for ego death. The Mary Margaret character in Remember Me never catches on to this process as she cannot let go of her egotistical concerns, and suffers her losses, defining herself with loss and pain. Because this is a dead end for a journey of the spirit, her death frees her spirit to begin again.

In the second novel, Chasing Twilight, the character is resurrected, and begins to understand the importance of ego death and resurrection of being – or consciousness raising. So, her journey can continue and the concept of death takes on new meaning. With death, comes rebirth and the cycle of life is felt in the soul.

This will bring up interesting questions in the third novel, Shadow Dancing: What is death? What parts of us die while we live? How is this integral to being and becoming?

I sincerely hope you enjoy the stories and the concepts. Thanks again.

Artwork by Moira Marshall Many thanks.

Personal Mythology Expressed in Dream

Callie said...
One of the things I like most about Remember Me is the dream diary. Does this have anything to do with shadow?

This is a great question, Callie. In Remember Me, Mary Margaret takes the wonderful first step necessary in understanding her dreams at a very early age. She begins a dream journal at the suggestion of her mother, who does not want to have to hear about them anymore. This is significant to the character because while it gives Mary Margaret a place to record and examine her dreams, she is also given the message that they are not worth attention. So, throughout her life, she records her dreams, but does little interpretation or integration of the dreaming process.

I see our sleep time as a time for our body-soul-spirit to relate in ways unfettered by conscious constructs. Vivid dreaming, creative dreaming, and dream analysis are all wonderful processes wherein our soul speaks to our mind and spirit in ways that allow our conscious, continual becoming. The spoken language here is symbols, devices by which ideas often too complex or highly charged to articulate in ordinary language are transmitted. Developing a personal mythology of dream symbols involves using a body of personal myths to form a system for organizing one's conception of reality and guiding day-to-day behavior. Mary Margaret’s soul was instructing her to examine shadow through her dreams, she did not understand because she never learns the language.

Writing the dream journal in Remember Me was like writing a novel within a novel. I began by establishing symbols that were related to Mary Margaret’s current age and daily events, but also her collective unconscious. I then developed the symbols in her dreams to speak to her of life unfolding – trying always to guide her into becoming through soul. It was one of my favorite parts of writing the book and you may see this device used again sometime in the future! Dreaming, and all it can offer us, is a true joy for me! Thanks for asking.

Heroes, Villains and Rudolph Steiner

Linda said...
Can you tell me about "the Opposing Spiritual Powers," and how they are like anti-heros?

Thanks for the question, Linda. I should preface the answer by saying that I have read the Rudolph Steiner teachings for several years now and find them to be mythical and complicated. I feel that whatever organization there is to life is much, much simpler, but I do admire some of his concepts. One of my favorite is his idea that humanity has a soul that influences and evolves along with our individual souls, much like CG Jung’s collective unconsciousness. Another is that our awareness unfolds, and humanity evolves due largely to the interplay of opposing forces (the tree of knowledge or good and evil.) The Steiner teachings tell us that in the course of human history, three specific opposing forces have provided our common soul and individual souls with opposition to our perfect nature (the Christ impulse) or the God within us. The dynamic of these forces are such that either we transcend the opposition and realize freedom by reconciling the forces (transcending duality) or we continue to battle.

Lucifer was the first, providing our natural, darker side. He is closely linked to nature and the mechanics of human nature so that the opposition he presents are storms or plagues or the fall of an civilization or the domination of our ego nature. His gift to humanity was free will, obtained in the choice to realize the Christ impulse and to transcend.

Ahriman was the second. His influence was first felt about 4M years ago and is still present today. He is associated with technology and materialism and prevents us from not seeing through the material to the spirit. He is also closely linked to the laws of karma, and keeps us from understanding the process of our freedom from karmic debt. But once the Ahrimanic forces have been reconciled, and we are free from karmic debt, we enter the age of Azuras. The Steiner teachings tell us that humanity is just beginning to enter this age but is still primarily ruled by Ahriman.

Not much is written on the Azuras and to research, I joined the Steiner library in New York, and read several of his books and lectures that hadn’t been taken out of the library in decades. I also joined Steiner discussion groups all over the world, talking to folks who had their own ideas about where Steiner was going with this. The forces of Azuras distract us into looking away from spirituality and convince us that our material experience is reality, not a reflection of our conscious awareness. It tricks us out of taking our objective into the subjective and becoming the creator with it, and believing the reverse is true. The Azuras has both the natural quality of Lucifer and the Ahrimanic qualities of technology and materialism. There is a bit written and much discussed about Steiner’s notion that once we give any part of ourselves to the Azuras, it can never be recovered. My (controversial) belief was that Steiner understood that once we transcend duality, mind and soul (karma), our lives and the formation of our experience is more immediately effected by universal laws. Once we consciously understand how to reconcile the opposition and realize our connection with all of life, we are distracted less easily even though the distractions become more dramatic. Ken Wilber would say it hurts more but we suffer less after the One Taste.

It’s easy to see how these opposing forces can be used as the hero/anti hero of a novel. I develop the characters of the three anti heros in my trilogy to reflect the nature of Steiner’s opposing forces. This allows me to develop the character of the heroine along a natural line of spiritual development, learning to release her karmic debt and move into a more harmonious storyline. And who doesn’t love a happy ending?

Symbols as the Language of the Soul

Dorothea said...
Without a Word is quite a play. It isn't easy to imagine the audience reception to it in the 70's. How did you work the dream chorus? I can think of many ways that it can be done because the book form leaves it open to interpretation.

This is a great question, Dorothea. Thanks for posting it. When writing the Dream chorus (a cluster of voices in echo) for Without a Word, I used the motif symbols from the play such as: night, day, sunset, window… The character Dream uses these as symbols and recreates interpretations that are not limited to linear or rational structures, just as our own dreams do for us during sleep. Ernest Hemmingway is the master of using motif symbols. He gradually defines character development throughout a story with motif, and then constructs sentences at the end of the story using these motifs that will decode for the reader, the characters’ triumph or tragedy. Motifs carry the reader along on the subconscious level and complete the story’s imagery.

I originally wrote the Dream character for Without a Word, as a chorus, with each voice expressing a different motif. This concept is obviously very complicated and while I could hear it in my head very clearly, I was never able to direct well enough to pull it off. Both of my productions of Without a Word had one person as Dream. In the Chicago production we combined the Dream and Light characters to accentuate the integration of the Word character.

I hope that the play is flexible enough to be staged any variety of ways, just as each one of us has individual characteristics of word, dream, shadow, mirror and light that make up our characters. I hope that any director could adapt the play to express their own voice, or the voice of their theatrical group. Molly Brogan

Dreams as expressions of soul and spirit

Kim said...
I very much enjoyed the dream journal entries in Remember Me. It seemed to me that Mary's dreams changed as she aged, the way an adult dreams differently than a child. How did you develop the dream journal for this character?

Thanks for your post, Kim. I liked it so much I thought it would make a great stand alone discussion. I did indeed develop the dream journal entries like a story of their own, that might reveal the maturation process and character of Mary. There are many theories about what our dreams might mean. I do think that we have many different kinds of dreams and that dreaming serves a function in our expression and development.

Like Jung, I think that sometimes our dreams can form around symbols that mean more to our soul or spirit than they do to our conscious mind. I tried to develop these symbols in the dreams throughout Mary's life to tell us the story of how her soul cried out for recognition and freedom. Mary's inability to recognize this contributed to her confusion and demise. She was not self aware enough to see the patterns in these symbols or look within herself for the direction they might give her. Her dream journal habit was, to her, like an exercise for the physical body that does not include the Zen for the rest of her. All parts of ourselves need to be communicating and integrated, and here she fell short.

Thanks again for this insightful question. Molly Brogan

Discussion of Chasing Twilight and the nuances of relationship

Eileen said...
I bought your book because I heard that it was written as an exchange of emails between two people . . . Last year I rekindled a childhood romance this way. It occurred to me that the Internet lets us relate to each other new ways. It is very different than meeting and getting to know someone. I liked the way that your characters in Chasing Twilight were able to get to know each other in so many ways. Thank you for showing me that the rest of the world does this too.

Eileen,
Thanks so much for your comments on Chasing Twilight. Indeed, the book was written to highlight the notion that the web allows us immediate access to information and relationship like never before. When two people can't be together physically, it heightens their awareness of relationship on other levels. This is like what happens when one of our senses is taken away, say sight, and the senses of smell, sound and touch become more keen. Because the Internet allows us to develop relationships with people we seldom physically encounter, many of us better understand how we relate to each other on the most subtle levels, beyond the senses. The understanding of our intellectual and emotional exchange through words over the web is most obvious. Great debates over the quality of these relationships continue. Through the ages, philosophers have given us many models for the structure of human exchange and many are more dimensional than just physical, emotional and intellectual. I am particularly interested in the exchange of soul and spirit that occurs between people in relationship, and how it effects experience. I hope Chasing Twilight was able to convey some of that to you.

Very truly yours, Molly Brogan

Discussion of PD's comment on Rudolph Steiner

PD said...
Hi Molly. I see by your company webpage that you, like me, are a student of Rudolph Steiner. Do you use the ideas of Anthroposophy in your books?

Dear pd,
It is always great to meet someone who has an understanding of the Steiner teachings. They certainly can take a lifetime to study. As a matter of fact, I incorporate these ideas into my writing in a number of ways. The most obvious, is my creation of each anti-hero in my novels. Each is based on the characteristics of what Steiner would call the "opposing forces."

In Remember Me, the anti-hero, Bob, is motivated by his own primevil nature. His tempestuous personality driven by his darkest emotions create the opposing force most like Steiner's Luciferian forces. If the Mary Margaret character was better able to look inward for the answers to her problems, she would be better able to reconcile the conflict in her experience.

In Chasing Twilight, the anti-hero, Jake, is motivated by finances and technology. Even his Scientology beliefs are based in self will and control. In this, he represents Steiner's Ahrimanic forces. By embracing and releasing this relationship in grace, Molly can fully own her soul, release her karmic debt, and move into a direct relationship with spirit.

This is not easy to understand unless one has studied Steiner. I would love to discuss this with you further and invite you to email me directly. I know some other Steiner students in LA, Las Vegas and Switzerland who dialogue with me on Steiner. We would all enjoy your input.

Best Regards,
Molly Brogan