The Goddess Waltz: Autobiography of a Western Yogi

By Brent Fidler

The Goddess Waltz is my attempt to thread whispering fragments from my past into a cohesive understanding of my soul’s journey. As I reconstructed life’s spiritual nuggets into a meaningful mosaic, a memoir reassembled from Hermann Hesse’s broken mirror of the human personality. Whenever the maelstrom tossed me into the devil’s heart, a kernel of conscious awareness always sifted its way through the darkness, slowing the plumb bob of desire from its wild swings into past conditionings. The sacred present lives in the space between each breath … a symphony of divine compassion and love conducted by the Goddess of the Cool Breeze.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781008983366

Book preview

978-1-008-98336-6

DEDICATION

Dedicated to the Goddess of the Cool Breeze.

The Ruh.

The Paramchitanya.

The Chi.

The Holy Ghost.

The Divine Rose by any other name.

HH Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE FORMLESS ONE

THE CURIOSITY OF COINCIDENCES

A CLOUD OVER INNOCENCE

THE DREADED BABY BOOK

THE STAIN OF PAIN

WHERE SHADOWS ARE BORN

ELEMENTARY MY DEAR SCHOOL

QUARKS & COMICS

ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE

HIGH SCHOOL

CONSTRUCTING THE MAN

THE EUROPEAN PERIOD

FIRST YEAR AT THE ZOO

ROASTED IN ROSEISLE

THOSE NIGGLING NARCOS

HIGHER LEARNING

TEXAS

MEXICO MAYHEM

OBLIVION

THE BIG BUST

JAIL BIRD

THE CUCKOO’S NEST

THE NATURE OF SANITY

HMS LORD AND LADYSHIP

THE BANFF SCHOOL OF FINE ARTS

DOUBLE, DOUBLE

TOIL AND TROUBLE

ONCE UPON A MIDNIGHT DREARY

ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE

THE RAVEN FLIES WEST

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

HOLDING DOWN THE FORT

BILLY THE KID & THE WIZARD

MEET FATHER MURPHY

EXPO 1986

SHAVE UP OR SHIP OUT

AIDS AND THE VAMPIRE

THE SCREENWRITER, THE PLAYWRIGHT AND THE NOVELIST

THE STOCK COCK

THE SAINT AND THE LOST BOY

A KUNDALINI SUNSET

ESTABLISHING THE CONNECTION

GODDESS OF THE COOL BREEZE

THE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS

GHOSTS OF CHRISTMAS PAST

THE PLAY’S THE THING

APRES POE

A CHIP OFF THE BLOCK

TYING THE KNOT

A GOLDEN EXPERIENCE

LAST DAYS OF THE RAVEN

DOUBLE DOUBLE

TOIL AND TROUBLE

MOVIE STARS AND ME

ACTING IN A BOX

MIRACLES

PROLOGUE

The human being is so much more than the sum total of their life experiences. Whether traumatic or joyful, dull or exciting, every moment of our lives is an opportunity to awaken and be conscious. Dark clouds of despair or the subtle illusion of pride and ego fog the soul from its awareness of Self. Our journey on this planet is to escape the malicious misconception that mental intelligence is the penultimate sum of our totality.

The truth is that we are not this body, this mind, or this ego. We are pure spirit. It is through the desire to completely surrender to that inconceivable divine force that ultimately liberates one from the karmic chains of past deeds.

I have been committed to staying in the present, trying to remain in the eternal now for over four decades. At the age of sixty-five, when I embarked on this memoir, I was required by the very nature of an autobiography to introspect the past… to comb the catacombs of my memory for any experiences that played a part in shaping my spiritual journey.

I have been blessed to have the assistance of my mother who was an enormous help in filling time/place gaps in my early childhood that were a misty plague. Her first-hand accounts of my journey are imbued with the grace and deeply precious perspective of a mother’s love.

Still so many years, not weeks or months, remained vacant rooms in the corridors of my subconscious. When I sat down to write the outline of my ghosts of Christmas past I found a natural solution – simply go into meditation, into thoughtless awareness and trust whatever came up when I asked time specific questions about my life were meant to be the significant signposts for my story.

Tell me about my days from a baby till three or What stories of my junior high days were important to my evolution? I asked these questions to my higher Self during meditation. The universe’s response embroidered a life quilt out from fragmentary echoes of time past.

It has been deliciously satisfying to find certain memories built upon themselves the more I put attention on the initial recollections. Much needed memory neurons came out of the cerebral sidelines, filling an occasional unfinished story with additional bits and pieces of memory until I actually envisioned a fully realized recollection.

The larger framework and value of these stories rests on whether they invoke a universal resonance in the lives of you the reader.

Most of the problems in our lives can be overcome by connecting and staying aligned to the divine intelligence that exists within all of us. We all derive from the same primordial Creator regardless of race, religion, or creed.

I have attempted to piece whispering fragments of my past into a cohesive understanding of the more infinite spirit... to reconstruct some spiritual nuggets as I reassembled my life mosaic from Hermann Hesse’s broken mirror of the human personality.

Whenever I was tossed willingly or unwillingly into my shadow self, a kernel of conscious awareness always sifted its way through the silt, adding more grist to my karmic mill. My journey has been to slow the plumb bob of desire from its wild swings into my dark side… to still its string so that it remains in the center. Calm. Blissful. The ever present lives in the space between each breath. In there alone lies the fount of divine compassion and love.

One baby step into the timeless.

1. THE FORMLESS ONE

Whenever spirit pulled me towards its saving light, an overwhelming curiosity to throw myself to the devil for no other reason than to sabotage my ascent cast me into a netherworld of self-doubt, only to spend an eternity crawling out of the pit in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. My story so far written in the Book of Life.

Countless discarnate entities swirled around a black hole of twisted kundalini cocoons. I was one of those coils of mystical energy. Just one. Yet I felt inextricably part and parcel of the whole. I remembered. I remember this extraordinary dream-time with the certainty of a sunrise or sunset.

The afterlife of this disembodied world I saw without eyes. Heard without hearing. Felt without touching. There was no shining maelstrom of divine light drawing me upwards into its loving embrace.

Being dead was having every one of my non-existent molecules imbued with a meta-magical awareness that spoke yet had no language.

All the ghosts of my past lives were present in this current state of ectoplasmic entropy, calling out to my last incarnation for answers. A reckoning of deeds!

But I had no confessions to unveil. No time to ponder my earthly lessons. There were too many colors everywhere… stratified layers of the light spectrum… rainbows of living consciousness… splintered prisms of varying fields of ascension moving in living quantum waves of awareness.

Countless dead souls in the red parameters were caught inside the Earth’s atmosphere. I could surf their thought-waves pounding with raw unfulfilled desires – carnal, alcoholic, or drug addictions that could no longer be fulfilled, yet overpowering in their appetite still.

Parasitic black question marks shot forth in all directions, heading towards the land of the living. I knew! I do not know how but I just knew. These souls were not seeking a rebirth! They wanted to attach their essence to a like-minded person they could influence… someone to satiate their inhuman appetites. Libido leeches able to sneak into the spinal columns of those who were under mental or emotional strains and allowed a crack in their aura to be penetrated. What a cosmic joke! I had to die to learn the true nature of possession.

The blue layers of light bore a more harmonic frequency. These were the recently deceased artists, musicians, poets, doctors, philosophers – those that had extraordinary talent, who sought out a human vessel to relive their concertos and surgeries. Instinctively they knew if they were reborn they would lose their skills and creative gifts. These bodiless Beethovens entered their hosts in a gentler, more civilized fashion either through the sweat glands, ears, or eyes. These penetrated patrons of the dead arts miraculously found that their artistic skills were inexplicably raised to new heights of splendour.

Fame and fortune remained with the human host as long as they played ball with their invisible doppelgängers who on a whim could seek new savants to ply their craft.

How arrogant of me to claim knowledge of the inner workings of the grand chess master’s divine play. But arrogance is a human quality. At that particular moment I was anything but a member of the homo sapiens species. I was undergoing my individual tribunal of truth and turnaround in the ethernet... the ultimate search engine. I was a bodhi beggar seeking a return to Terra Firma and another kick at the karma can.

Who was I before I died this time? Just this time. No idea. This universal mindset that "I" had become was unable to process individual requests. The best I could describe my previous incarnation in the midst of such an event horizon moment was that I was simultaneously the sum total of all my deeds and actions.

Those experiences were laid out on a fifty year stock chart analysed by an infinitely wise broker who would decide which parents I was to receive as my dividend and where my new orifice was to be located.

And that is the spectrum I found my essence floating within. A brilliant aqua-green holding pot for countless souls who awaited their next assignment based on the Creator’s infinitely complex set of checks and balances. Where was he or she or it anyways?

My consciousness was definitely intact and I was hyper-aware of absolutely everything around me though I was formless and without a brain. Any concepts of G-O-D carried with me into this macabre afterlife did not manifest. Did not exist.

I was water skiing on the outer ring of a black hole where matter and anti-matter collided in a spectacular light show of bliss. Yes. Bliss is the best word that described my shadow realm between life and death.

Was I in this existential limbo land for a second? A week? A century? Who the hell knows! And that is how that dream went. It was the proverbial Mother of all Dreams.

The lure of that nocturnal vision remains crystallized in my consciousness three decades later. It is a magnetic beacon that continually pulls towards its invisible shores. Whenever I lose my attention in the maya and illusion of waking life, that spiritual siren calls upon me to stay the course – to keep my moral and spiritual compass focused on the inner work…breathe and remember!

The plumb bob shifted slowly to the left and then to the right until finally its violent arc became a pitiful pendulum of wrong choices whispered by the winds of ego and lust. It is in the spiritual fiber of this lost seeker while under the influence of that malevolent maelstrom that will decide his fate. Whether to tame the bob until it completes its engineering design, that of finding a balanced stillness, or succumb to the Legions of Darkness assembled on either side of Truth.

Surrender or be seduced by the Great Deceiver. That has been my eternal question!

Dream time of the divine

The penultimate message

Death echoes of shattered egos

Rebirth, mirth… a hint of dearth

My bodhiless ode to a soulful sage.

2. THE CURIOSITY OF COINCIDENCES

One might say that moving through a womb gives one a head start adapting to the challenges of life to come. There’s a grunt and groan process that forces the newborn into their first fight or flight situation. One of many they will face in the gallant grind of day to day existence. One might say that if they had a normal birth.

I was a caesarean birth. One moment curled in a comfortable ball of liquid nourishment and the next thrust upwards into the arms of some alien creature wearing a mask. When the hands of Father Time reached 9:22 pm on the 22nd of July in the year 1954 AD, I found my self from my new mother’s womb untimely ripped.

I chose to be born in a hospital called Grace on a hot mosquito-infested sunset in the city of Winnipeg, Manitoba. The Peg owes its historical legacy as a Hudson Bay Company trading post built on the intersecting banks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers.

It is located in the center of Canada and grew into a major transportation hub. Lower Fort Garry was also the home of Lieutenant Governor Eden Colville, whom I later would portray during one summer at the Fort working for Parks Canada.

In 1871 the Fort hosted the signing of Indian Treaty Number One between the Government of Canada and the Chippewa and Swampy Cree tribes, an event which set the pattern for the other treaties, paving the way for the peaceful settlement of the Canadian West.

In the winter of 1873-74, the newly formed North-West Mounted Police received its first training at Lower Fort. A hundred years later, the descendants of those North Westers (the RCMP) would track me down in a winter blizzard and put an end to my days as a hashish dealer.

My Fidler lineage was one of working class folks from Scotland and England – no glorious royal heritage, musical geniuses, or wealthy business owners. In fact I was the first Fidler in our ancestry to graduate from a university. However there was one distinguished family member my Grannie Fidler spoke of with an air of assurance and pride.

Peter Fidler was a surveyor, courier du bois, and cartographer who played an important role in the taming of the Canadian North-West. He had worked for Lord Selkirk and Champlain mapping the geography of our fair country. In the fall of 1812 he was sent to assist Selkirk surveying river lots along the Red River.

Peter Fidler and I both spent a summer at Lower Fort Garry. I would end up playing him as an actor in a CTV series called The Canadian West, my first professional gig as an actor.

The strangest connection came with Granny Fidler’s sleuthing skills. When Peter Fidler died in 1822 he left a curious caveat in his will that allowed for residual interest in his bank account to accumulate until August 16, 1969 at which time it would be awarded to his closest living descendant… the fifth son of a fifth son.

Peter’s small fortune was built over nearly 150 years of compounded growth, The myth embellished itself along the way. Granny was positive I was the chosen one. For a couple of years leading up to that date she would always pull out her genealogy chart as evidence.

August 16 came and went and I became none the richer. Most probably the estate interest was syphoned off by British barristers or one of his eleven children over a century ago.

The fact that I was born in Winnipeg close to the banks of the Red River and that as an actor would portray these two important historical figures made that Old Fort a solid spiritual doorway to unlocking one part of the mystery as to why I chose the location I did for my debut on the stage of life.

My mother and father were 19 and 21 respectively when I was born. They were both still kids reeling in the gravity of my unexpected arrival. They had been married six months before at my grandparent’s insistence. Out of marriage pregnancies were not looked upon favorably in the global consciousness of 1954.

My mother Annette was a classic beauty of her time with the elegant, delicate features of Audrey Hepburn and the smile of Rita Heyworth. She was born into modest poverty by North American standards. Her mom Lilian Payette had little opportunity for an education. As a young girl Granny Payette lived in those dreaded Winnipeg residential schools of the early 20’s run by profiteers who often left their charges hungry and ill-dressed for the wicked Winnipeg winters.

Mom dropped out of high school to take care of Lilian, her mom. She worked full-time since she was 16, and retired at 65 to a wonderful life with her husband of Henry, her loyal husband of 45 years.

Granny Payette had been abandoned by her husband shortly after my mother’s birth and had to accept whatever menial labor she could to survive. Mom worked at a brokerage firm, hand-writing stock quotes on the boards as the ticker tapes spewed out its 1954 state of the art technology.

My father Raymond had polio when he was a young boy and overcame that affliction in his teens, yet the after-effects of the disease limited his abilities to play sports at the level he desired.

During his second marriage when I was already in high school he would sire two sons. Both would play in the Junior A hockey leagues and go on to become an engineer and an accountant with families of two children each. I have always admired them for their accomplishments, especially the cool-headed approach to living a normal and nurturing family life. My father was able to realize his sports ambitions through them.

My sports inclinations were of the solitary kind. Archery, where focus and will drove Arjun’s arrow. High jumping. Something about the grace of the Fosbury flop, exiting Earth’s orbit for a glimpse of eternity till gravity’s arc lifts you over the wooden pole. Running. Ah. Running. The breath driving through the pain of self-posed limitations. If you are fast they can’t catch you. Each footstep sprinkled with just enough arch to take its next flight.

Dad went to work shortly after high school. He remained a roofing salesman at the same company for over thirty years until it was bought out by an American concern. He was let go just before his fiftieth year and remained unemployed for the rest of his life. Dad was brought up in a middle-income family. My grandparents on his side were to play a significant role in my upbringing, who along with my mother provided some degree of normalcy in an otherwise chaotic world.

Neither of my parents had brothers and sisters. I was an only child as well. As a result I never had any aunts, uncles, or first cousins. It was only natural that as a young boy I grew up seeking family through friends and developed a more global personality as a result of those needs. I had to reach out to the world to find my community. My sense of belonging. My tribe. Ultimately it would lead to a deeper surrogate, embracing the spiritual archetypes of the divine family.

Coincidences are Creator’s way of showing us that invisible signposts exist in every moment in our lives. We just need to stay tuned to the messages of our inner guides and surrender.

Trains of dead souls grinding fated lineage

Grist for the karma wheel on solitary tracks

Fueled by coaled fear and lonely flames

Born of retribution and pain

The conductor stokes the fire of retribution.

3. A CLOUD OVER INNOCENCE

It is said that babies emit certain pheromones that create protective urges in all those who gaze upon their vulnerable cherubic cheeks. Babies often resemble their fathers at birth as a biological safety valve so that the male does not desert the female to spread his seed onto other fertile landscapes.

I must have had a low pheromone count and looked more like Mom because Dad got caught sewing his wild oats in another stable within months of their marriage. Mom had to go back to work to keep a roof over our heads. The roofing salesman provided little alimony. Nowhere near enough to survive. To be fair, he wasn’t paid that well back then.

My two grandmothers became my surrogate moms during the weekdays. I was spoiled as much as any seemingly normal kid would be by the unconditional love of good ole Grannies everywhere and never lacked the basics – always had lots of clothes and nutritional food.

Babies are emotional sponges, born absolutely pure and completely connected to Creator. They have no personalities until conditioned by their parents and environment. But slowly, inevitably, they become and identify themselves separate from the divine.

A Brent is born, rewarded when he smiles, scolded when he does something displeasing to his caregiver. We learn from how our behaviors are rewarded or punished by our parental mirrors – our mental, physical, and spiritual trustees.

My mom is one of the bravest and loving persons I know. She faced life as it was served to her, which was often a red hot empty plate of hard work and broken promises. She did what she had to do to survive and provide for the two of us. She never had a father in her own life for guidance and to provide for her basic needs.

Her mom put fear into her heart, not consciously. Just by being in a state of worry about life and providing for her daughter. My mom had virtually no support network nor opportunity for higher education. Unconsciously that sense of insecurity was passed into me.

Fear is an emotional energy. Babies lap it up as easily as they do love. Its dark influence is tangible and enters the child’s heart when they do not receive a sense of security. A child’s natural state is one of joy and connection to that all pervading primordial power of love.

My Granny Fidler did her best to provide an additional security blanket even though my mom was always cuddling and holding me when she was around. It was the broken relationship between her and my father that planted those seeds of insecurity which acted out later in my life in both aberrant and unhealthy behavior. I asked my mom to write her story of her early life before I was born. Here it is in her own words.

"I was born in the Great Depression which was well under way at that time. I wore my cousin Maureen’s hand me down clothes when I was young. I know we didn’t have much money, no work and we had to rely on welfare payments. You stood in long line ups for hours to receive them. I don’t remember having any books to read at home. Guess my parents didn’t think of that.

I remember my father Art taking me and my mother Lilian for a ride when I was around eleven or twelve. He parked on Main Street and said to me, pointing to a young woman on the street, See the woman there. She is a whore. A slut who sells her body. That was the extent of his education with me.

My father’s mother, I cannot even remember her name when I went to visit, I had to sit on her trunk while my cousin Marion sat on her knee because she was a Catholic and I was not. I remember my cousin Maureen and I used to buy penny candy when we were kids and go to the Aberdeen Hotel at Christmas time and when the men would come out drunk we would sell them the candy to help our Mother’s buy food. I realised as I got older that our way of life was different than many of the kids at school. My dad didn’t work even though he was a painter. He was drunk most of the time and often would not come home till late and would be in a bad mood and hit my mother. I was afraid when I heard him coming up the stairs whistling. To this day I hate whistling.

My mom’s sister Annie hated my dad and her sister and wrote this mean poem. Roses are red. Shoes are tan. You are the bunk and so is your old man. She was never nice to me right up until she passed in 1946. As a young girl I always felt responsible for my father’s behavior. I remember hiding behind doors sometimes when the bill collectors came for payment on unpaid bills.

I remember sandbagging during the Great Winnipeg Flood of 1950 at the Jewish Synagogue. I was fifteen. It was such hard work I passed out and had to be carried home in a truck by the soldiers. That was also the year that I met my husband Ray at a canteen on Friday night at the High School. I never went back to school for Grade 11. Money was too tight and I had to work. My first job was at the mail order department in Eaton’s. That was also the year my mom left her womanizing drunk of a husband. We got a small apartment together. Mom couldn’t work and was frail, so I supported us. I got another job cooking to supplement things.

Unfortunately, Art got kicked out by his new girlfriend