On Friday, September 2, 2022, I had my first session of the second part of my Ensoulment Process with Veronica Anderson. I had completed a six-month journey in the first part of the Ensoulment Process starting in February and ending at the end of July. Then, I injured my ankle. You can read some of that story in my post about the Design Science Synarchy.
One month into my recovery from my ankle injury, I met with Veronica. That day, I felt inspired, and the seed of an idea was planted through the conversation we weaved together.
A T-shirt design proposal based on Shelby Bennett’s suggestion for a line of merchandise featuring the words of Jesus, “Why are you bothering her?” This is the red letter edition. Photo by Anomaly on Unsplash.
Stephen Bau
I sent a little snippet of what was interesting today about the word “apocrypha”.
My word of the day (there is something beautiful, powerful, sacred, mysterious, and feminine about it—and the patriarchy is so afraid of it. I feel like there is a novel in this word): apocrypha.
Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. The word apocryphal (ἀπόκρυφος) was first applied to writings which were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered too profound or too sacred to be disclosed to anyone other than the initiated. Apocrypha was later applied to writings that were hidden not because of their divinity but because of their questionable value to the church. In general use, the word apocrypha has come to mean “false, spurious, bad, or heretical.”
I was listening to a podcast called Almost Heretical (100: Woman - Men wrote the Bible). It’s about exvangelicals trying to figure out how to understand the Bible now, as they no longer believe as they once did. One of the hosts, a linguist and Bible scholar, is a woman who was training to be a missionary to go to an unreached people group and to translate the Bible into their language. This has never been done before, in their language, so she was going to learn all she could to be able to do this work. But, the more she learned about the history of the church and about how the canon was formed, she thought, “I cannot translate this. It does not represent me as a woman; 1% of it, maybe, represents the voices of women.” She still honours the fact that we have something like this as literature. There’s some value to this. But it’s different than we thought, or what we were taught.
In this podcast called Almost Heretical, this woman, Shelby Bennett, is talking about her background in linguistics and Bible scholarship and she’s discovering there’s a whole lot that’s been left out of the canon. And why is that? So, as she’s delving into which books have been left out, she realizes it’s whole books about women like Susanna and Judith. And these are really amazing stories. Why were they left out? “Well, because they didn’t have any Hebrew originals. So we’re going to leave those out.” Because scholarly ways of thinking about what the origins of Scripture are, “Well, it needs to be in the original tongue of the chosen people,” would be one of the criteria. And so, “Well, we don’t have the original, so let’s put that into what we’ll call the Apocrypha and we’ll just kind of splice that in the middle of the Old Testament and the New Testament in our Protestant version. So that came about during the time of Luther. In the time of Luther, he’s like, “Well, I don’t really like this book. I’m gonna take it out.” Because it’s the way they’re pushing back against the Catholic Church. “You think you have authority over all of this and what goes into this canon and we’re skeptical about what you’ve included here.” So, it’s the original deconstruction movement that evangelicals, now, are pushing back against—and it’s ironic, because that’s how they started. And so, when we look into apocrypha, it means to hide away, and it has to do with these hidden secrets. And so the original meaning of Apocrypha is about this knowledge that is just too dangerous for the uninitiated. So you need to kind of hide those things away from people who are dabbling with this secret knowledge because if it gets into the wrong hands or it’s used in the wrong way, then things can go very awry. But then the church gets a hold of this idea and says, “Yeah, there’s some things that actually need to be hidden away. Those things we’ll just exclude from the authorized versions of what we’re going to copy.” And so that double meaning of the word, it just feels like there’s a whole novel there around, Why were those things excluded? Who was excluded? Whose voices were involved in deciding what was something that was safe and something that wasn’t? And so now it’s just opening up this huge world of well… now everything outside of the Bible seems way more interesting.
Veronica Anderson
I love that. How would you describe those two meanings, in summary?
Stephen Bau
I’m quoting it from Wikipedia.
“Apocrypha are works, usually written, of unknown authorship or of doubtful origin. But the word Apocrypha was first applied to writings which were kept secret because they were the vehicles of esoteric knowledge considered too profound or too sacred to be disclosed to anyone other than the initiated. Apocrypha was later applied to writings that were hidden, not because of their divinity, but because of their questionable value to the church. In general use, the word Apocrypha has come to mean “false, spurious, bad, or heretical.”
So, that, to me, feels like the same thing that Trump did with the phrase “fake news.” First of all, it was a charge against him, like, “You’re just throwing out fake information.” And then he just turned around and said, “No, you’re fake news.” So now, the mainstream media is considered fake news by all his followers. It’s that kind of thing that the patriarchy does: it takes a word and then turns it into its opposite.
Veronica Anderson
Powerful. And that’s inspiring you today? In your transformation process, in your creation process, where is that leading you, do you think?
Stephen Bau
It was in The Artist’s Way. I’m doing this practice: I do my meditation, and then I do a kind of written meditation where I’m getting three Morning Pages out of the way, and that’s where, well, I was inspired by what I was listening to on this podcast beforehand. And then I just went into a rant for three pages. Yeah, I could write write a whole book about this.
Veronica Anderson
Yeah, that’s amazing. And rich—a very rich idea.
Stephen Bau
Yeah. And the interesting thing is that as I’m looking into other connections it goes into… Rudolf Steiner was exploring theosophy, and, then, reading a little bit about that… He has connections to Atlantis and… Okay, now there’s all these rich connections that are coming out of that. And, it’s also sort of connected to the experience that Mark and I had with meeting up with Della and Dale in Nanoose Bay on Sunday. So, this was the first in-person meeting that I experienced with some Design Science Studio people, and they were delving into like, “We’ve been on this 30-year druid quest.” Or, I think it’s been longer than that. It’s been since the early 70s. So kind of as long as I’ve been around. Yeah. There’s a lot of interesting connections cropping up there. It’s opening up a lot of curiosity about about the idea of how mystery lures us towards our creativity. And then it’s answering the question, “Well, why? Why is everything so hidden?” And if I was divine, I would maybe have a game where I invite people into a kind of treasure hunt. And it’s, everything is just hidden in plain view. But you have to have the ability to perceive it to see it. And so, it’s actually a lot of times getting out of the human bias of the sense of sight and then going into all of the body sensations and the emotions and, you know, all those things that… So, part of the story was recognizing that here’s this woman who doesn’t have a name, who comes to Jesus with a bottle of perfume and anoints him. And so, Shelby Bennett is noting that, “Well, isn’t this interesting that Jesus has been anointed by a woman?” And what does Messiah mean? The Anointed One. So there’s so much meaning wrapped up in this act that the men are oblivious to in that room, and they’re questioning this man’s authority. And here’s a woman who believes everything and is willing to make this huge financial sacrifice, noting that Jesus is a king but also he is going to his death. So this is also like preparing him for his burial in one act. And so, one of the phrases that comes out of this story is Jesus saying to the men, “Why are you bothering her?” And they say, “This should be embroidered on a pillow or something. Yeah, we should make merchandise—maybe a hoodie.”
“Why are you bothering her?”
— Jesus
Veronica Anderson
I love that so much!
Stephen Bau
Yeah. I think it should happen.
Veronica Anderson
I see a whole body of work in this spark here, and it feels so resonant with who you are and your experiences and your expertise, your gifts. And I just really appreciate the way that you honed in on what it is that the Divine Feminine does—to sanctify, and it is simply seeing, acknowledging, believing. That’s it. That’s all that she had to do. It wasn’t some like mystical act of witchcraft. It was just, “No, I believe you are the Messiah.” And thus, you are. And we all have that power, just as we all have that feminine energy. And what that is is self-creation. We are all creators, right? And it’s through that act of belief, through the bringing to the light of conscious awareness that we’re creating. I was thinking about when you’re introducing this idea of apocrypha, how there’s this hidden knowledge that’s too dangerous for the uninitiated. And it made me think about how often when we’re children, we have this light, this brilliant innocence, and we don’t know how to relate to it, because nobody teaches us, sometimes. And, you know, all the adults around us have forgotten their own light and so they can’t recognize our light as something precious and holy and sacred. And so they go about, just the factory-producing adults and just, you know, mechanically shipping us down the line of industrialized capitalist society. Like, “Okay. Quick! Grow up! Quick! Get a job! Hurry up and wait for death.” There’s this sense, I think, of, “The knowledge of self is too dangerous for the uninitiated.” And so we do this thing where we push ourselves into the shadows. We push our true self away, because it doesn’t fit in this world. This love, this pure light of our true self, this essence of innocence and purity and divinity that exists in every human being as the soul and the spirit which animates that soul connects us to that light. It’s like, in order to survive in the world, we have to push that away. It’s too dangerous. It would destroy the whole world. So I feel you, you know, looking at this powerful truth in a really unique way, and I am so happy to hear it. I really, really want to support you, bringing this exploration into manifestation.
Stephen Bau
And that’s why I’m here.
Veronica Anderson
Bravo!
Stephen Bau
Yeah, I’m really excited about what can emerge from this collaboration.
Veronica Anderson
And you did something really potent, too, which is you’re starting to talk about the game of the divine treasure hunt, and how those with eyes to see, those with the ability to perceive will see. And then you did a really beautiful thing where you went into body sensations as a form of sight. And I think that is the real—in business terms—differentiator, because so many people will talk about the light and the Christ and the mystery and the divinity and the game and being able to see. But man, it’s that body. It’s this body that we have not woven back into this story. And it’s time, right?
Stephen Bau
There’s gotta be a reason why we have these kind of game pieces. Because we’re not using the full faculties that we’ve been given. And then it’s also part of what I was writing this morning was connecting to the other living beings around us, recognizing that they’re part of this game as well. And they’ve been learning the language, the secret language, for billions of years. They’re holding the secrets, except we’re destroying them by what we’re doing with our industrial society. The secrets are disappearing with them. What if that shift in awareness about what’s actually going on here means that the value that we’re putting in these “so called” inanimate gold and precious metals, and so on, they’re precious in other ways that we have no idea about. But we’re just starting now to recognize: Oh, the fungi are communicating; the trees are communicating. What else is communicating? And what messages are we missing?
Veronica Anderson
I love that so much! I love that you’re going into the mineral consciousness, like that geological scale of intelligence. And that feels like a beautiful chapter. The inner being with the mineral kingdom, with the fungal kingdom, with the animal kingdom, with the plants, and then you can circle back to the fact that in this body, in these cells that make up this body, is the maternal haplotype. That’s the DNA from the original mother of my lineage 150,000 years ago. I still have material that connects back to a single being 150,000 years ago. And that’s a kind of memory. Those secrets are still here somehow. Yeah. And so what I feel in this subject is how much that says, without explicitly having to say it. You know what I mean here, that the wisdom of the new paradigm of the free thinkers, of the self-creators, of the self-governed, self-organizing organism, planetary organism, it’s unspoken, right? I don’t know what it means that I am 150,000 years old. But I am and that that must mean something. I can feel it. There’s a subtlety that’s present. And that’s the mystery luring us toward creativity.
Stephen Bau
Yeah. And so, this embodied practice, you know, of meditation where I’m breathing in and out. “I’m enough. And I’m infinite.” There’s so much in there that I know I’m getting something different every time I’m going through that process of recognizing, “Oh, it’s kind of gravity pulling in, but also radiation expanding outward, and then draws me to the heart of Mother Earth.” Recognizing, “Oh, there’s been an ongoing communication here at the cosmic level going on for billions of years, as this earth has been in formation. And what secrets must be held in all of these relationships that are just there, everywhere around us for us to notice. But, we’re too busy surviving to notice the magic of who we are and where we are. So, it almost feels like this is such a rich vein of storytelling that there’s got to be somebody who’s already doing this. That’s where I was exploring Rudolf Steiner. It was just through a quick search of the Akashic record this morning, trying to understand what that is, and then recognizing, “Oh, that’s the quantum entanglement.” Um, so when we’re asking the questions, What is time? What is energy? What is matter? It’s the medium that our presence is… It’s like the brush tip on the substrate of the rice paper—that’s our life being drawn across the surface, and that’s what we’re experiencing. But, it’s the whole medium of all of it happening at once, and all of it is inseparable. You can’t separate time from space. So, at the quantum level, it becomes nonsensical to try to do that. What you’re left with is we’ve been so busy studying the parts we didn’t notice the whole. And, now, we’re discovering a new way of sensing.
Veronica Anderson
Wow. That is so big. And it makes sense. And you said there’s gotta be somebody who’s done this—and I really want you to hear this with all certainty: that all of being has needed you, and that nobody has done this. This has never existed—a completely unique expression of consciousness in this very moment. In the same way that it’s not, right. Yeah, nothing is original. Right. But I love this: discovering a new way of sensing. I really feel like that gets at it. But, that’s a really powerful seed here. That is a contribution. And so revolutionary, so holistic. And it makes sense, right? We’ve been looking at the parts so intently, going through this process of evolution, where our intellect is expanding super rapidly and technology is shooting off exponentially into, who knows what’s going to happen, right? The singularity or something like that. What if that’s the singularity, this new way of sensing? What if this dawning of 150,000 years of intelligence being activated and available to us, if the sound of the voice of the Earth and the scale of geological time is available to us? Those things are all new ways of sensing. Oh my God, I want to read this.
Stephen Bau
Yeah. Well, that’s what this is. I feel like this is totally a co-creation. So, it’s not so much reading as much as writing it together. And I think that’s kind of the invitation of the Design Science Studio, or humanity, is the Creator saying, “Hey, come play! Let’s co-create!” And part of that is the vulnerability of the Divine going, “You’re going to change me through this relationship, and it’s going to hurt. But it’s going to be worth it, because amazing things are going to come out of this co-creation when you realize the power that I’ve granted you here is this opportunity to play. And it’s going to take some time to get to that place of knowing this: who you are, who we are.” Right? But what’s going to happen with that realization of, “You mean, all these limits we placed on ourselves were just in the mind? And it’s only because we thought that was the extent of who we were?” I feel like I’ve been walking into bookstores and going, “Why is the imagination so small here?”
Veronica Anderson
Makes me think of a few years ago, like 2018 I was on a bus going to the Caribbean, and just had this flash. Time is the petri dish that we humans created in order to observe creation. We needed something to put life into an order to get it under the microscope of our conscious awareness and observe it. times not real. We created it to serve our purposes. This really I think, gets at why the imagination is so small, because we wanted to go to those levels. We wanted to understand something about the experience of separation and the utility of separateness and individuality and the function of the part. And I think we’ve really gotten at that we’ve really mastered separation over the last 7000 years, perhaps if we think about, you know, separation as a polarity to union and we think about union as the circle as the feminine as the matriarchy, where we started from, and then we went down this halt this this path of the line of discrete entities of the masculine of the patriarchy, right. And so now we get to like, come back, or rather it’s not coming back. It’s completing the circle. It’s going around the spiral and we can look down as now both of those polarities together and transcend those limits and move past those self-imposed rules.
Stephen Bau
Yeah. So I’ve been looking out at the sky thinking, as it’s changing depending on the light that’s coming in and being bounced around in the atmosphere, and then it turns and then that light goes away long enough that you can see what’s beyond it. And then we’re going through the cycles of different ways of seeing but recognizing that the atmosphere is a lens. And so, it becomes a kind of metaphor for it’s just something that we’re recognizing, you know, within the last 500 years, and maybe more so within the last 100—that’s a very thin sliver of time where we’re just discovering, “Wow, this is way bigger than we thought!” And so, the imagination’s just firing, like, “Now what? What are we doing here?” And then to have this crisis that we’re living through. It’s heartbreaking to know that now there’s 30 million people in Pakistan who have been displaced. Now, what do we do with that? So there’s a sense of urgency around all this potential. Of all this human life that could be sensing what an amazing world this is, except we were focused on the wrong thing, to the point where we’ve caused a climate crisis and how are we going to respond to that? So I feel like this becomes a huge part of the story of the Apocrypha is what we thought was what we were supposed to pay attention to is just this miniscule thing of the economy, is something we imagined into existence. And if we believe that thing that we imagined into existence, what if we recognize the reality that we’re in and responded to that? How would that change us?
Veronica Anderson
The balance is so profound. And I really see the train of thought carrying us around to wholeness, to union, to love, to peace, joy—and the way that our crises are urgently calling us back to the whole. And that feels like the message here is we are discovering a new way of sensing ourselves as the whole, as the whole of Mother Earth, as a whole of humanity, as the whole of the cosmos. And this idea that what we thought we were supposed to pay attention to, turned out to be this imaginary thing that we created. It’s so profound to think about it through this lens of Apocrypha, because there’s grief there. There’s self-forgiveness. “Oh my god! This whole time, I was looking the wrong way. And what have I been doing? I’ve I’ve been wasting my life. All my time and energy and money and attention, all of this was for was for nothing?” Right? There’s that sense in the collective now. I think you’ve got medicine for that, Stephen. You are the medicine for that.
Stephen Bau
That’s a lot of responsibility.
Veronica Anderson
I could see that.
Stephen Bau
But, also, it’s an invitation to play. Then it’s still being part of the “How do I notice? How do I be aware of those clues all around me?”
I think the level of responsibility goes away when I know that it’s co-creation. Like it’s not all dependent on me. And we are all doing this together. So then it’s like, “Oh, now it becomes an invitation for all of us to discover this together.” So that brings me to the question of “Okay, I’ve been talking a lot What are you inviting me into into this Ensoulment Part 2?”
Veronica Anderson
Love it. Yes. Oh, skillful! I feel your evolution there in that shift. Thank you for asking.
There’s a tool that we talked about in the transformation section. It’s exercise number five, and it’s the Wheel of Life. And that Wheel of Life is still a powerful tool that I want to invite you into a practice with, because this work is so profound. And it is a great responsibility, in a sense, right? Although it’s not yours alone. It is a co-creation. It’s as much responsibility as a child. It’s a life, it’s a being. And it’s yours to nurture and create. Or help to create itself, maybe. So that turn of phrase is really important as to what this invitation is. You’re not creating this book. It’s creating itself through you. And so your actual task now is to take care of your life, to really hold yourself and your life in the most tender, nurturing, playful, and wise way that you can. This is an amazing intention that has been set here.
And I’ll send you my notes. I think during this phase, it will be helpful if I give you my notes from each session, so that you can really feel that feedback and get the reflections, really, into your inner architecture, and continue on this self-creation process. And the invitation here is really to look at the wheel of your life, the mandala of your being and be so present with it that this book writes itself.
Stephen Bau
Yeah. And part of that, I think, has been… Thank you for the message yesterday: the celebration of my continuation. I love the way you you express that as… That’s really resonant with what I’m feeling now of the birth and the death being kind of like the “no birth, no death.” I am a continuation of a lineage. I was exploring that idea of what what is lineage? And we usually think just in terms of a genetic lineage but I started leading into the nonlinear reality of the networks, the relationships of energy that we are. Even the books that I’m reading are a continuation of someone’s being that has been translated into textual form that has been absorbed into my life in some way. I was thinking about the evolution of the written language that allows us to connect with those beings, who, like the princess of the lake, or the queen of the lake. And how that kind of esoteric knowledge, that Apocrypha within the Christian context of… Well, that’s also informing who I am now because of a different kind of lineage. And it’s just changing the way I’m thinking of, What kind of legacy am I leaving as well? Within this short window of time? It feels like that sense of time scarcity then starts to go away. Yeah, there’s a limit. And that’s part of the design constraints of this particular iteration. But I don’t know what has come before, what comes after, because it’s just not part of my memory or my current knowledge. But, actually, it’s there for us to perceive. And we happen to be in a place where we get to perceive it in real time as human experience. Now that’s such a gift.
Veronica Anderson
I feel something really powerful there, which is that the future is not here yet. The past is gone. There’s only here and now. And when you write from that place, when your life is an offering to Presence with a capital “P”, what you say will be so much bigger than the words that you write. So you will be writing as Stephen Bau or Luna Solterra, but the words will resonate as your entire lineage. It will resonate as all of humanity speaking through you, because you know that. And so, you’ll be holding this awareness of—you know, I’m using the word “I” and, you know, maybe, “writing”, or maybe writing in the third person, whatever it is—but all of it will say, “This is not me. This is us.” And that will create that sort of timeless literary essence that speak, you know.
Stephen Bau
Yeah, yeah. Well, Struppi was inviting me into thinking of pronouns differently. He’s learned English as a second language, so he has this interesting perspective of it, where, what if you use the pronoun “one”? Because it can be individual, but it can also speak to the oneness of all at the same time. And, I thought that was a pretty profound way of thinking about that. I’m not sure how that would weave into our narrative yet, but…
Veronica Anderson
A beautiful meditation for sure.