Living in the Liminal Flow
Liminal Life Lessons and Confessions of a Hollywood Golden Boy
Introduction
The following is a lived inquiry self-reflection of a significant series of deeply transformative life lessons I experienced at the peak of my being a Hollywood Golden Boy. Sometimes life lessons seem to come one at a time, other times they are experienced as part of a string of lessons that make up a bigger and deeper collective lesson. This string of life lessons led me to one of the most profound experiences and lessons of my life. The whole arc of this journey gave me an embodied taste of living in a liminal state of being and the wonders it can bring.1
In this moment I am feeling called to revisit this journey and its lessons because of the major civilization-wide transition humanity is currently going through, what anthropologists call a liminal phase. It is my hope that sharing this journey re-minds me and all of us of the potential beauty of embracing a liminal way of being. I believe that this kind of embrace of the liminal is our best chance of getting through this phase with as little suffering as possible and more potential for finding our way into a more healthy and thriving reality.
The form of synthesis I am using to revisit this journey includes four major streams of reflection and expression:2
Narrative synthesis: The story of my journey
Meta-Perspectival synthesis: Self-reflection footnotes to bring out the liminal processes I was experiencing during each phase of the journey, seeking to explore a deeper and bigger perspective on my journey.
Visual synthesis: An image which I created to symbolize the central metaphor of my journey that emerged along the way (see below).3
Mythopoetic synthesis: I end my story with a short mythopoetic expression that sprung from me when I first completed my journey and attempted to reflect on it for the first time.
The Journey Begins…
The journey, though in one sense a hard pilgrimage, up and out, by the terraced moment and the ten heavens to God, in another is the inevitable rush of the roving comet caught at last, to the central sun…like gravitation, it inevitably compels every spirit to its own place. - Evelyn Underhill
It was the spring of 1985. I had just completed my graduate work at the American Film Institute. I was their new “Golden Boy.” My graduate film, Voice in Exile, was winning awards all over the world, and I found myself in a whirlwind of meetings with studio executives, agents, and producers.
During this time period, a friend of mine who had become a famous television star asked if I would house sit for him while he was on location in London for three months. The house was a beautiful wooded twenty-five-room estate in the foothills with a screening room, tennis court, swimming pool, gym, and rose garden. Within a matter of weeks, I went from being a struggling film student to a “hot property” with all the physical elements of fame and fortune.4
The Liminal Revelation
One hot spring day I was sitting in a lounge chair by the pool of the estate talking to my agent on the cordless phone. We were discussing something we both knew was not true as though it was real. As our conversation unfolded, I sipped on a margarita and surveyed the lush landscape of the estate through my new hip mirrored sunglasses. Surrounding me was a manicured rock grotto with two swimming pools, a hot tub, and waterfall. A beautiful young woman I had just met was swimming in the pool. She smiled at me, blew me a kiss, and seductively moved her naked body through the glistening water.
Suddenly I felt totally empty. Everything felt like an illusion. I looked around me, and nothing seemed real. It was as if my life had become a Hollywood movie. My agent was telling me how great I was, and a woman I hardly knew looked at me with the eyes of an intimate lover. It seemed as though no one was really seeing me. They were seeing my talent, my title, the car I was driving, and the estate I was living in, but they were not seeing me. Then I realized I did not even know who I was.5
First Taste of Original Gravity
Several weeks later I accepted an award in front of a large audience. I looked out at the sea of unknown faces. The sound of the applause danced around the emptiness I felt inside as I asked myself “What does it all mean?” That summer I put everything I owned in storage, bought a backpack, and boarded a plane for London in search of the meaning of life and love.
On my first day in London I met a sixty-year-old British postal worker in the Duke of Wellington Pub in Soho. He bought me a bottle of barley wine and told me it had a very good original gravity. I asked him what he meant by original gravity. He explained that it was the British method of expressing the alcoholic strength of a beer. He winked and said I should always make sure I’m partaking of strong original gravity. As he spoke these words he seemed to momentarily transform from an intoxicated postal worker into a sparkling eyed mystic. In my mind, the phrase original gravity blossomed into a metaphor for living life to its fullest.6
Finding Flow
I spent the next three months backpacking through Europe. During my journey I started to notice myself falling into two distinct patterns of experience.
One pattern seemed to consist of periods in which everything flowed smoothly. Things would unfold effortlessly and seemed to work out perfectly. I would meet people who would point me in the right direction where I would in turn meet others. I would have the sense that I was in the right place at the right time and that there was a grand intelligence guiding me. All the elements of my life and the life of those I met seemed to be in some kind of beautiful synchronized orbit held together by some strange unseen force … and life felt rich and full of “original gravity.”
Then, suddenly, I would find myself in another pattern of experience. Everything seemed to go wrong, and I was out of the flow. I sensed that I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Places I wanted to see would be closed or inaccessible. People seemed distant and cold. I felt isolated and alone. Every step was an effort, and I felt out of synch with everyone and everything.
Slowly I began to realize that there were certain thoughts and perceptions that seemed to precipitate and support these two different patterns of experience.
A surrendering of my plans, expectations, and past memories preceded the periods in which I experienced a sense of flow and effortlessness. During these periods of flow I would tend to be totally in the present moment. I seemed to naturally accept things and people as they were.
The periods in which I experienced everything being out of balance seemed to coincide with planning, expectations, and/or following a past idea, suggestion, or desire. A flood of past memories and future concerns also marked these times.7
The qualities of my flow experiences are very similar to those described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his writings on flow. These qualities include the loss of self-consciousness, a sense of being part of some greater entity, and an altered sense of time. This experience of flow is "… like being carried away by a current, everything moving smoothly without effort.”
At first I tried to manipulate myself into having these flow experiences, but that only seemed to send me farther into the other experience. I began to see that each pattern of experience was related to the other. My periods of flow seemed to come from the surrender produced by the culmination of the frustration of the “out of the flow” experiences. And inevitably I would end up trying to control something while I was in the flow, which then would lead to loosing the flow. I finally surrendered to the whole process.8
Going with the Flow
I was riding on a train bound for the city of Rome. We stopped at the train station in Rome, and my mind began to blur. My body felt heavy and warm. My stomach was churning with tension. I felt a strange all-encompassing force holding me in my seat. An inner voice told me not to get off the train. This inner voice felt like it was coming from both a deep part of my own being and from beyond my self. I just sat there watching people get on and off. Then the train slowly pulled out of the station, and headed south out of the city to parts unknown. My head flooded with memories of mistakes from my past and fear thoughts of possible negative outcomes to my riding that train into an unknown future.
Suddenly, all my regrets and worries seemed so trivial, and my mind fell into a deep emptiness. All my muscles went limp. I felt as though I was floating through the beautiful Italian countryside. Out the window were rows of beautiful tall trees with white-washed trunks. Their branches were covered with tiny golden leaves that sparkled in the waning light. As the sun softly set over the rolling hills of old farms and ancient ruins, the past seemed to recede in the distance behind me. I thought of trying to find out where the train was headed, but the voice inside me said not to ask. It said to ride the train to its final stop. Suddenly, I felt free … released from my past and strangely at ease with the thought of heading to an unknown destination.9
I rode the train till the end of the line, the town of Salerno. It was late at night as I walked out of the station onto the quiet city street. I walked across the street to a hotel where I could see a light on at the front desk. I knocked on the door. The young man at the desk let me in and gave me a room. The next morning I rode the bus down the Amalfi coast. I was enthralled by the scattered stone ruins, the sleepy villages nestled into the cliffs, and the beautiful clear blue ocean waters swirling into emerald coves of powerful jutting rocks. Along the way the driver would stop the bus and yell “hello” in Italian to some of the farmers working on the hills beside the road. As I watched people engaged in friendly conversations, I prayed to find some wonderful people to spend some time with.
The next day I met Bill and Diane, a middle-aged couple from San Diego. We started talking, and they invited me to come with them to the island of Capri. We spent the next few days exploring the island together, meeting fellow travelers, and having deep conversations about life.
The Gift
One afternoon, while Bill and I were talking about the trials and tribulations of romance we both suddenly realized that my last girlfriend in the States happened to be his estranged daughter. We both sat in awe of the unfathomable coincidence of our meeting.
Bill told me that he hadn’t seen or heard from his daughter in years, and had been yearning to know if she was all right. Tears came to his eyes as I told him about his daughter, and his yearning was fulfilled. As he spoke about his memories of his daughter I received the gift of understanding more about her, and gained greater insight into our relationship. That night I sat alone looking up at the stars above Capri. I felt blessed by the gifts I had received, and in awe of the great mystery of my experiences.10
The rest of my journey was filled with miracles and blessings. I felt guided at every step by a loving and compassionate force beyond my comprehension. Though I had explored spirituality and caught glimpses of this force prior to my trip, none of my previous experiences compared with the combined depth, magnitude, duration, and everyday integration of my experiences in Europe.
The Return
When I returned from my trip overseas I was unable to retain my deep and continual connection with this force, yet somehow I felt as though I had awakened from a deep unknown sleep. Everything seemed different; old familiar people, places, and experiences had a different quality to them. It was as though my center of gravity had shifted.
It is a disturbance of the equilibrium of the self, which results in the shifting of the field of consciousness from lower to higher levels, with a consequent removal of the centre of interest from the subject to an object now brought into view: the necessary beginning of any process of transcendence. (Underhill, 1961, p. 176)
Before my journey, my life was centered on career and finding romantic love, with short excursions into the realm of spirituality. After my experiences in Europe, the center of my life seemed to shift toward becoming the best human being I could become, and to find a way of reconnecting with the experience of being in the flow. I began to explore, more deeply and earnestly, the world’s spiritual and religious systems for knowledge and practices that could aid in my journey. And ultimately, I was lead to this process of self-reflection and synthesis, to deepen my quest to understand this strange and wondrous experience of living in the liminal flow.
When I surrender to a higher and deeper Source
Within and beyond my self
I transcend and include the different levels
Of my inner and outer life,
And enter into a glorious and miraculous
Kosmic dance,
Divinely guided,
In harmony with all that is within
And all that is without,
From the tiniest atom
To the greatest expanse of the universe,
I am held and impelled
By an original gravity,
A force of ancient origin
And of a continually unfolding newness,
Unique and original,
Universal and collective
And together,
You and I
And all of creation
Are balanced,
Integrated,
Connected,
And complete,
At home
In liminal orbit
Around the sphere
Of all being-ness.
Acknowledgements
Special Thanks to all the wonderful human beings that helped me along this path. To name a few: Kat Allen, Robert Aston, Sandra Bertelle, Gregg Fienberg, Jean Firstenberg, Edwina Follows, Phil Gersh, Lillian Gish, Arthur Grant, Thure and Carrie Gustafson, Jack Lemon, Wendy Jewel, Judy MacDonald, Barbara Myerhoff, Daniel Petrie, Steve Rabineau, Robert Rehme, Sam Shepard, Elizabeth Taylor, Daniel Travanti, Robert Wise — and all the other countless nameless souls that I met along the way.
And thank you for reading these words and taking the time to explore this work. I hope it touched you in some way. I try to make as much of my work open source as possible. If you would like to support this work more directly, I would be deeply grateful for whatever form you feel called to offer…be it through likes, shares, comments, being a subscriber (free or paid) or through direct donation to help me continue this work.
NOTES
A version of the story of this journey was originally published in my book The Search for a Divinely Guided Life.
The liminal state of being refers to the state of being an individual or a society experiences when they are going through a major transition. Individually it’s that experiential state of unknowing that happens when we are in-between states of beingness. This includes major life transitions where we are no longer who we were and yet we are not fully who we are becoming. Collectively, societies go through liminal phases as well. Major system changes like major cultural or industrial revolutions, like the one humanity is going through right now.
In order to deeply synthesize this string of life lessons I used multiple modes of synthesis including writing the story of this lived learning journey, trying to capture the central metaphor of the lessons with the creation of the image at the start of this post, as well as attempting an emotional-poetic synthesis with the final poetic verse above.
My drawing of an OG symbol captured for me the visceral sense of the liminal flow state I found in my journey. As I created the symbol I played with the letters O and G and discovered a placement that captured for me the nature of the experience. For me, the center empty space between the O and the G is the in-between state of liminality…the pure presence of living in the present in-between past and future thought. I tried to capture the simultaneous sense of flow and groundedness of the experience, like an atom or a planet that is held together by strong and weak forces, like the forces of gravity and centrifugal force.
The transition from student to professional is a major life transition in and of itself. The added dimension of me being a “Hollywood Golden Boy” made the transition phase more extreme in my experience. It felt like a transition to a whole new reality as I attempted to find my potential place among the Hollywood elite who were looking my way and opening their doors.
Looking back at that moment by the pool I realize that I was experiencing a kind of liminal awakening. It was the first moment where my being went into flux and my sense of self was no longer tied to the reality I lived before but I had not yet stepped fully into a new reality field…the sense of being in-between perfectly describes the experience I was having. There were a lot of contributing factors that brought to this point in my life, some of which I explored in a previous article.
The metaphor of original gravity helped me hold the liminal space within and around me without getting caught in the limitations of naming. My mind in that moment latched onto it because somehow it helped me see the in-between-ness of the liminal state as something beautiful.
This series of experiential life lessons of going in and out of flow is a great example of what Albert Alschular called “transcendent education,” whereby the universe appears to be sending lesson after lesson trying to teach us things.
For me, this process of learning to surrender into the liminal flow is a surrendering of past and future constructs and opening into a beautiful dance between the states of being, belonging and becoming within each unfolding and flowing moment. In essence my experience of the liminal state of being is this sense of flow.
The release I was feeling at that moment riding the train out of Rome on my way to parts unknown was part of the liminal states “in-between-ness”. In that moment I found the flow state of a beautiful and wondrous present that lived in-between the past and future thoughts that normally haunted me.
The long string of synchronicities that led to this final amazing moment resonated deep within all dimensions of my being. In that moment I had a kind of sacred (liminal) conversion process; suddenly life became more mysterious and wondrous than I ever imagined. Well, actually, I imagined it but did not truly fathom or “grok” it. After this moment, living in the liminal flow became the central goal of my life.
Post-publication note: Once I published this piece I experienced a deep re-membering of this state of being. I entered the liminal flow state and so far I am still in it after over 48 hours.