by Richard Westlake
I got the notion for this article while I was down at Williston doing my checkout dives at Blue Grotto. I was struck by the feeling of going through the exercises, the classroom lessons that led to the pool lessons, and of finally diving into that deep hole and hanging out with the local fish— WOW! It seemed the scuba course experience mirrored some of my Avatar Course experiences, and I decided to explore the notion. Here’s the result, and I hope you’ll enjoy it.
I am wearing a genie in a bottle...a powerful, yet invisible presence that will soon admit me to a beautiful, perilous world that I have only barely glimpsed before today. If I am careful to follow the lessons of the past weeks, I will fly through a dreamscape that I could never reach unaided, in an environment so foreign to my body that it could kill me, swiftly or slowly but in any case horribly, if I make too great a mistake.
The genie is really compressed air, six pounds of it in a sturdy aluminum flask. Its weight on my back, together with the heavy lead on my belt and the thick rubber diving suit I wear, make my movements clumsy as I sidle to the edge of the dock. My instructor watches as I grasp the scuba mouthpiece in my teeth, cover it and my mask with one hand, then with one giant, frog-footed stride, I plunge into the chilly waters of Blue Grotto. Tiny fish swim up curiously as I bob to the surface and signal “I’m OK” to the dock master.
After thirty years, I’ve finally made an old dream come true. It took weeks of study, training, and practice in a swimming pool before I was ready to step off that dock and swim through the deep waters as a scuba diver. It adds a new dimension to my life. It’s a turning point.
Life is full of turning points, of moments and choices that define who we’re going to be and what we’re going to do with our lives. The possibilities are endless enough to numb us, which is why most of us see only the choices our family and friends have made, or the ones sold us by popular culture: Saturday night in the happening place, the right college, the right job, the right house, the right spouse, all are supposed to add up to the good life. But it can be strangely empty when we see our shining dreams pass by out of reach.
But how can we see the path to our own dreams, when our eyes are shaded by the ideas and beliefs we’ve picked up from our parents, our friends, our culture? Is there really something beyond society’s picture that we’ve bought from friends, family and TV?
A bit of cold water seeps into my wet-suit as I swim away from the dock. My instructor’s body hangs below the mirror of the surface. I put my head up, and he gestures, “OK?” I answer by repeating his gesture, “OK!” Then he turns his thumb down. “Let’s descend.” I signal my agreement, and we sink toward the platform where we’ll do my skills test, thirty feet below.
We see our lives as shaped by our environment: our childhood: our parents, our teachers, our peers, our community. But how does the shaping take place? How do personality patterns become contagious? How are they passed on (or not)? How do they change?
The simplest shaping mechanism is that our beliefs, the habitual ideas about self and others and life that we pick up unknowingly from others around us and develop for ourselves, change our personalities and our lives. They form the framework of the self.
You can prove this to yourself by examining your own motives, by observing something you do or say and asking yourself, “Why did I do that? Why did I say that?” If you’re honest with yourself (not necessarily critical of yourself), you’ll start to become aware of your own self-structuring beliefs. In fact, you’ll be traveling a part of the path that has led many, many people to that level of awareness that mystics, philosophers and Eastern religious masters call enlightenment.
There’s a practical value to this. If you understand yourself, if you’re aware of your motives and of the beliefs that shaped them, you can get beyond life’s programming and actually discover your own dreams. And the sense of clarity you’ll feel in yourself will help you make them come true.
I pause every few moments to clear my ears, and my instructor waits patiently for me to reach him. Once I’m standing in front of him, he pulls the regulator from his mouth and we start buddy breathing, each of us taking a couple of quick breaths from my regulator, in turn, as we might need to do in an emergency. After a few exchanges, he recovers his own mouthpiece. I look up briefly and watch our bubbles flow up to rejoin the sky, so far above us.
He taps my mask for the next item. I pull my mask away from my face, flooding it with cold water, and then blow the water out with a breath. Some of my exhalation traps itself under my hood. “OK?” he signals. I respond, “OK.” Then the third step: I discard my regulator, as if I’m out of air, and he gives me the one he’s using and fumbles for his spare regulator, or “octopus,” until I grab it and press it to his mouth. His eyes twinkle; had he “lost” it on purpose? No matter; we gently follow our bubbles to the surface.
The Avatar Course, for me, was the doorway to enlightenment that I’d sought all my life. The insights, the new realizations of existence, the new perspectives, brought me beyond my old life-programming and let me re-structure myself and my life. Even better, the Avatar Course wasn’t built to give me someone else’s answers; it helped me develop the tools to find my own answers, my own perspective, my own enlightenment, and my direction toward my own dreams.
Avatar starts from the simple premise that your beliefs shape your life. The materials invite you to explore this for yourself, with exercises in self-discovery and an experienced Avatar Master (course facilitator) who gives you just enough help that you can find your own way through. As you progress, you dive deeper and deeper into the essence that is you. You find you can discard, or choose to use deliberately, the old ideas and programming you’ve had in your life. Finally, you learn how to create yourself as the person you’d like to be, and you can actually feel your life shift into the new mold you’ve created.
I reach the submerged stage at the end of the dock and swim alongside the ladder to take off my fins and let my instructor precede me out of the water. Still weighted, we plod up the ramp to the shore and take off our tank-packs and weight belts. “How did it go for you?” he asks.
“Well, okay...except that my buoyancy control is still pretty poor. I’m up and down all over the place. Is there a chance I could work on that some more?”
“You’ll have plenty of time,” he smiled. There was a little blue card in his hand, and he was offering it to me. “Congratulations. You’re now a certified scuba diver.”
What do we find in enlightenment? For me, it’s the new discoveries that delight me, the ease with which I can examine new perspectives, stretch my mind’s limits, learn and grow. The happening place is always there with me, and the joy of life gets greater with every new viewpoint, every new discovery, every new day. I swim like a dolphin through infinite seas of awareness, and it’s as if I’m diving closer to the light.
I wouldn’t have gotten to that without Avatar, or so I believe.
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