Eyes of Sophia: A Dream Come True

By Donna May and Alan Chien

Eyes of Sophia is a true love story which confirms the multi-dimensional nature of our existence. This story shows us that we really do co-create our lives in concert with a loving and organizing Divine Presence, Sophia, which speaks to us through our hearts. Too often we are easily intimidated by the authority and advice of the outer world and cease to trust these tender feelings which offer us continual and perfect guidance.

The magical tapestry of events we experience when reading Eyes of Sophia is given credence by a series of extraordinary photographs and we are blessed with the revelation that, indeed, we can attain our hearts' desires.

"This book is an extraordinary account by two extraordinary people. Given the premise that Sophia's world lies hidden and invisible within this one the continual synchronicities abounding in this true story make
sense, if not serving as proof of its existence. Though the account is extremely personal it touches the universal and thus becomes meaningful to anyone reading it. It's Donna's loving and enthusiastic eye that reveals it and Alan's charming and rational acceptance that gives it form. I marvel that I had the privilege of playing a small part in this unusual drama!"
-Alice O. Howell
Author of The Web in the Sea and The Dove in the Stone

"You and Donna have experienced, certainly at a feeling state, at least one other cognitive band of this total reality and you appear to have some space-time cognitive data in the form of your pictures to confirm that something extra-ordinary was happening."

-William A. Tiller, PhD
Author of Science and Human Transformation
(written after viewing the photographs, September, 1995)


"This is a truly spiritual book, in which the presence of divine love allows the experience of human love to flourish. It can be read as a romantic story like Bridges of Madison County, but here the romance is
allowed to flourish and lead to a sustained relationship, and there is an experience of divine grace as well as human passion."

-Harvey Honig
Jungian Analyst

"Exceptionally written by two brilliant souls, one who--although already knowing she was on her perfect path--still continued to question the symbols along the way; while the other's eyes were slowly beginning to focus on truth and authenticity instead of the superfluous. Each overlooked the external to follow the twisting, winding path that was filled with intent and purpose. It is a rarity to find individuals so willing to lovingly examine and absorb the many messages the rest of us ignore as we go about our lives on 'auto pilot.' A wonderful, refreshing true love story that affirms the closer we get to our own authentic selves, the more blissful our joy--joy that flourishes in the knowledge that there are no accidents and that cause never was the reason."

-Kimberly Largent
Managing Editor
The Health Strategist

Eyes of Sophia is a love story...a grand and wondrous love story about the authors, and their relationship with Sophia, the Spirit in their hearts. Further, Donna May and Alan Chien have given us a story about synchronicity and destiny...and the ability to listen to, and the courage to follow our hearts.

Abundant synchronicities (events that on the level of cause and effect are amazing coincidences) brought Donna May and Alan together, and together, and together...each time deepening their relationship. Included in the synchronicities are a series of intriguing photographs which give credence to the story.

Eyes of Sophia is a transformational story that teaches the creative use of metaphor in understanding the relevance and significance of coincidences. Creatively woven together in the events in this story are spiritual metaphors of the Wizard of Oz, the Tree of Life, Kabbala and the dynamics of the life-force and chakras, including the splenic chakra. One important lesson Eyes of Sophia teaches us is that we must listen to our own hearts...and not yield to the rules that others inflict upon

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Apr 26, 2007
• ISBN: 9781412240949

Donna May

Alan Chien was born in Shanghai, China in 1930 and moved to New York State shortly after the Japanese invasion in 1937. There he spent most of his life until his recent move to the Midwest. He graduated from Wesleyan University with BA and MAT degrees, served in the army and taught art at public schools for 30 years. He now enjoys putting his energy into his art work. Donna May was born in 1952 and grew up in Southern Wisconsin. Donna has been a metaphysician in private practice for over 15 years. She continues to facilitate healing in others through utilizing her unique understanding and highly developed skills in bio-energetic healing and spiritual astrology. It was Alan's background in art and photography which attracted the attention of Donna May, who was preparing to write a book. They became partners in this venture and in life. They are married and live in Southern Wisconsin where their home is filled with love--Alan's art and photography, aromas of their latest joint cuisine efforts, continuous music, their dog and three cats. June 2000 Mailing Address: May Chien PO Box 8024 Janesville, WI 53547-8024 Call or Text Donna and Alan at 608-758-0405 or email [e-mail]

Book preview

EYES of Sophia

A dream come true

Donna May & Alan Chien

Trafford Publishing

Suite 6E, 2333 Government St.

Victoria, BC

Canada V8T4P4

Eyes of Sophia

A dream come true

by Donna May & Alan Chien

© 2000 by Donna May & Alan Chien

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without written permission except for quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

The authors may be contacted through the publisher or by writing directly to P.O. Box 8040, Janesville, WI 53547-8040, U.S.A.

Edited by Benjamin Hugh Lewis

Graphic Design by Trish Muir Graphic Design

Cover Design, Illustrations and Photography by Alan Chienexcept where otherwise noted.

This book is autobiographical. However, some names and identifying details of family and friends have been changed to protect privacy.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

May, Donna, 1952-

Eyes of Sophia

ISBN 978-1-5521-2349-2 (softcover)

ISBN 978-1-412-24094-9 (ebook)

I. Chien, Alan, 1930-II. Title.

PS3563.A8873E93 2000         813’.6            C00-910283-3

Image361.JPG

This book was published on-demand in cooperation with Trafford Publishing.

On-demand publishing is a unique process and service of making a book available for retailsale to the public taking advantage of on-demand manufacturing and Internet marketing.

On-demand publishing includes promotions, retail sales, manufacturing, order fulfilment,accounting and collecting royalties on behalf of the author.

Suite 6E, 2333 Government St., Victoria, B.C. V8T 4P4, CANADA

Phone: [phone]  Toll-free: 1-888-232-4444 (Canada & US)

Fax: [phone]  E-mail: [e-mail]

Web site: www.trafford.com

TRAFFORD PUBLISHING IS A DIVISION OF TRAFFORD HOLDINGS LTD.

Trafford Catalogue #00-0013

www.trafTord.com/robots/00-0013.html

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Foreword

1 The Tin Man

2 Enter Eucaladon

3 The Black Book

4 The Dream

5 The Arrival

6 The Letters

7 A Leap of Faith

8 The Message

9 Suddenly Love

10 Miracles Follow

11 The Pictures

Epilogue

For Sophia, Holy Wisdom—

"She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her:

and happy is every one that retaineth her."

—Proverbs Chapter 3, Verse 18

Tin Man

Sometimes late when things are real and

people share the gift of gab between themselves,

Some are quick to take the bait and

catch the perfect prize that awaits them on the shelves.

But Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man

that he didn’t, didn’t already have,

And cause never was the reason for the evening

or the Tropic of Sir Galahad.

So please, believe in me, when I say

I’m spinning ‘round, ‘round, ‘round, ‘round;

smoke glass stain bright color,

Image going down, down, down, down;

Soap sud green like bubbles.

Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man

that he didn’t already have,

And cause never was the reason for the evening

or the Tropic of Sir Galahad.

So please, believe in me, when I say

I’m spinning ‘round, ‘round, ‘round

smoke glass stain bright color,

Image going down, down, down, down;

Soap sud green like bubbles.

No, Oz never did give nothing to the Tin Man

that he didn’t, didn’t already have,

And cause never was the reason for the evening

or the Tropic of Sir Galahad.

So please, believe in me.

Words and Music by Dewey Bunnell

America Holiday Album—1974 WB Music Corp.

Acknowledgments

Our deepest gratitude and love to all who are part of this story.

Abiding thanks to Alice O. Howell, Jean Scott Honig and

Harvey Honig who listened with their hearts as well as theirminds early on and continue to support us. Special thanks to

Trish Muir for her friendship and her graphic design assistance;

to Ben Lewis for his great patience and sense of humor throughthe editing process; and to our friend, Janet Allen, for her unsurpassed enthusiasm and creative input.

Additional thanks to:

Alex Grey—Sophia, by Alex Grey, 1989, From Book Sacred

Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey, Inner Traditions

Publishing, 1990.

Warner Bros. Publications—Tin Man, Words and Music by

Dewey Bunnell, American Holiday Album-1974, WB Music

Corp.

William Tiller, Ph.D.—Photograph viewing and comment.

Victor Mansfield, Ph.D.—Synchronicity quote.

Preface

In September of 1994 I took a photograph of Donna May and in the picture there appeared several extra eyes on her forehead. What led up to that event and what transpired afterwards is pure magic. We have come to know that the world is enchanted and that enchantment is what people seek to give meaning to their lives. This story was a gift to us which we now pass on to you.

Foreword

This is a book that has drawn me in. I am on the fringes of the story, a minor character, and heard the outlines of the story the first time I met Donna and Alan. As many people would be, I was skeptical and cautious about the meaning and validity of this story. However, as I came to know Alan and Donna a bit more, I experienced them as people of intelligence and integrity, and the story began to draw me in more. However, I still remained somewhat distant until Donna and Alan sent me a copy of the completed manuscript. In reading this manuscript, I was drawn all the way in, as I think many people will be, and it has stimulated much thought and interest on my part.

There are different layers to this story which I find engaging. One level, perhaps the one that intrigues initially, is the level of the many synchronicities that drew Donna and Alan together and that draw this story together. Synchronicities are events that on the level of cause and effect are amazing coincidences, but for people who experience them and pay attention to them they are signs which point to events of great significance for our lives. These coincidences pull us into a different world than our normal reality, a world which people like Carlos Castaneda and James Redfield have talked about, in which oureyes are opened to see a different level of reality. However, in this story, the world we enter is not an exotic world of different cultures and strange events, but the ordinary world that all of us inhabit as experienced through a wider reality than we normally allow ourselves.

However, amazing coincidences can only sustain our interests if there is something of depth into which we are drawn. In Eyes of Sophia, this depth is provided by a profound love story, a story of two people who were truly drawn together, but were able to experience this profound union only because they were open to allowing the truth of this reality to break through their normal defenses. Because of their openness, love is able to break through fear and constriction. At another level, this is a story of following truth as well as love, of following truth until it leads to a dimension where we enter a different reality, in which we recognize the presence of the Tao, or the Kingdom of God, or the Divine Matrix. In that sense, this is a truly spiritual book, in which the presence of divine love allows the experience of human love to flourish. It can be read as a romantic story like Bridges of Madison County, but here the romance is allowed to flourish and lead to a sustained relationship, and there is an experience of divine grace as well as human passion.

This book can also be read as a contemporary reenactment of the myth of Psyche and Eros. In this version both Psyche and Eros, or Donna and Alan, have their journeys to complete and tasks to fulfill to achieve union. For both of them the outer journey of love is mirrored by an inner marriage, in which Alan finds his heart and opens up to love and inner reality, and Donnaworks to integrate incredible intuitive and feeling events into a matrix of meaning and understanding.

In this sense, their story is a larger story than that of two people. It can also be read as the return of the repressed, the return of that intuitive knowing and deep loving, which is so absent in the rational, materially focused culture. However, it is not a return to a prerational world view, but an integration of eros and logos, of meaning and being.

In Julian Jaynes’ book, The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, the great linguistic scholar speculated that there was a time in which we were all once living in a matrix of collective unconsciousness, in which we all heard the voices of the gods. This consciousness is still found to some extent in aboriginal cultures, which seem to be in touch with a larger and more collective mind source.

In order to develop our individuality and rationality, we evolved through a period of development of the left brain, the rational intellect. We were cut off from the realm of the gods, but we were able to develop individual consciousness and world mastery, which led to modern democracy and technology. However, as in individual development, that which has been repressed culturally eventually needs to return and become part of the wholeness of being. There are many signs now that the intuitive/feeling/experiential knowledge that is often experienced as coming from within or above, of being connected with larger realities than our individual egos or everyday consciousness, is returning in our culture. However, it is returning, as in this story, in a new integration of intellect and intuition, ofmasculine and feminine, of scientific understanding and spiritual awareness. All this is embodied in the story of Alan and Donna, and it touches us because it becomes a mirror of and opening to our own journeys and struggles. Most of us do not experience it in this unique way, but we all have the possibility of entering this dimension of reality, and experiencing our own truth and inner journey. We are all touched by this current story of the coming together of Psyche and Eros; Donna and Alan have worked hard to integrate this story into their own world of meaning, and have told it very well. Alan’s drawings and pictures help a great deal to bring this inner reality into concrete form. Eyes of Sophia performs an important service for us, and brings a healing dimension to our culture.

Harvey Honig

Jungian Analyst

Regarding synchronicity—

I suggest that the greatest challenge presented by synchronicity is neither its spacetime transcendent nature nor its acausality nor its implication of unity. Instead, it asks us to reevaluate affliction and appreciate that our greatest healing often springs from our deepest wounds.

—Victor Mansfield

Author of Synchronicity, Science, and Soul-Making

1

The Tin Man

Image368.JPG

In July of 1994 Donna May told me I was the Tin Man. The Tin Man I’m referring to here is the character in L. Frank Baum’s beloved fairy tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was first published in 1900, but is widely known today through the 1939 movie starring Judy Garland. Most of us are familiar with the adventures of Dorothy, who had a dream in which she and three cohorts, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion, went on a quest to the land of Oz. Each had a need and they hoped the Wizard of Oz would help them. Dorothy wanted to go home to her aunt and uncle’s farm in Kansas, having been transported to Oz in a cyclone. The Tin Woodsman was once an ordinary man of flesh who was in love with a beautiful maiden. A wicked witch had cast a spell upon him that caused his axe to cutoff a body part each time he went to chop a tree; first one leg, then the other, then each remaining part. Each time he lost a part, a tinsmith replaced it with a new tin one, eventually making him tin from head to toe. However, the tinsmith forgot to give him a heart and he was no longer able to love the maiden. He wanted very much to have a heart so he could feel love again.

When Donna told me I was the Tin Man, she meant it as a metaphor, but I wasn’t really sure how this metaphor applied to me, nor did I suspect at the onset of my journey as the Tin Man, that in less than six months I would be with Donna and writing this book. How was I to know that all the candles I had lit at my old shrines would flicker, expire and give way to a search for an inner self of which I was almost completely unaware. My horizons have expanded and I am learning and experiencing things which could not have been possible before I met Donna May.

The incident which seemed to start the ball rolling was my writing her a note in May of 1994 to thank her for sending me the book, Sacred Mirrors, The Visionary Art of Alex Grey. With the book she sent a note:

Dear Alan, Where is your heart today? I’msure I left so much of mine in the Berkshires.

Mind you, this was someone I had just met a couple weeks before. I had spent a total of three hours, maximum, with her when I chauffeured her from Albany, New York to the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts and back.

In her note she went on to explain why she decided to send me her used copy rather than the new one she had purchased for me.

You see, I believe that each time someonegoes into any kind of poetry, picture, whatever; that traces of the vibrations of their experienceswith it are left within the piece of work. Perhapsthat is why so many artists and poets acquire fameposthumously—it takes some repeated exposuresbefore the cumulative ‘vibrations’impact themasses and not just a sensitive few.

The significance of her words didn’t register at first; perhaps my mind had grown lazy. I had been an artist, photographer and art teacher for thirty years and had shared and experienced the wonders of art with hundreds. After I retired I shifted my energy and attention into the mysteries of the golf swing, monitoring my hypertension and weight and planning travel. Mine was a cocoon-like existence and fascination for the splendors of the world of creative expression was put on the shelf to gather dust.

Donna was considering the prospect of writing a book and because of my background, we had discussed the possibility of my doing some pictures for her. The nature of her potential book was not an easy subject for her to explain nor for me to understand, as we were worlds apart in our experiences. She had sent this book in hope that the visual, artistic representations would convey more than her words had. This lovely and mysterious person from the Midwest was a sudden, bright arrival in my life. I read on with wonder:

The spiritual, psychic and universal systemsportrayed here are familiar to me in a sentientway, also the matrix of eyes you’ll find in thepicture, ‘Sophia.’

Not knowing what she meant, I turned to the page of that painting. Sophia shows a voluptuous female in centered frontal view, hands down with palms facing forward. She is fair skinned and her head glows from a halo, which according to the text symbolizes wisdom beyond traditional understanding. She is encased in a skin-tight outfit, the bottom of which looks like a mermaid’s tail. At first glance it has the texture of fish scales; upon closer observation, however, these scales are eyes. In fact, eyes permeate the entire picture surface. Lines of light radiate from the figure. Beneath her hands are two encased scenes, one showing the life giving nurturing mother and the other Kali, the dark mother of time, birth and death. Above her

Reviews for Eyes of Sophia

[caladood · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Amazing true story!
"This book is an extraordinary account by two extraordinary people. Given the premise that Sophia's world lies hidden and invisible within this one the continual synchronicities abounding in this true story make
sense, if not serving as proof of its existence. Though the account is extremely personal it touches the universal and thus becomes meaningful to anyone reading it. It's Donna's loving and enthusiastic eye that reveals it and Alan's charming and rational acceptance that gives it form. I marvel that I had the privilege of playing a small part in this unusual drama!"
-Alice O. Howell
Author of The Web in the Sea and The Dove in the Stone

"You and Donna have experienced, certainly at a feeling state, at least one other cognitive band of this total reality and you appear to have some space-time cognitive data in the form of your pictures to confirm that something extra-ordinary was happening."

-William A. Tiller, PhD
Author of Science and Human Transformation
(written after viewing the photographs, September, 1995)