The Golden Impulse

By Jeff Turnbull

This book is an essay based on the hero's journey and well-being quest. I believe in humanities latent potential. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jeff Turnbull
• Release date: May 19, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223287018

Jeff Turnbull

I am a lifetime creative. I am Neuro-Divergent - this is my SuperPower. I see things that others miss. I then write what I observe through Prose, Essays, Poetry, and Fiction. 

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I knew that there was a force – an unknown something beyond my understanding that existed outside of me, separate from myself; and yet there was a force powerful and beautiful within myself. I was somewhat of a loner, and I spent a lot of time by myself and a lot of time not alone in my head - I had a bit of an imagination; to say the least.

As a child, I would get myself lost and spend countless hours playing in the woods, and creeks in parks near my house. I felt a pull to venture deeper into the woods – to get wet, dirty, to climb trees, rocks, and to hide under train trestles like the ogres from fairy tales. There were numerous times I would come stumbling into the house hurt, bloody, dirty and drenched to the bone. A trip the emergency room was not uncommon.

At some point about the age of nine or ten, I went from lost boy of the glen to the lost boy of my attic bedroom. I would gaze out my window through my telescope up at the moon and wonder what it would be like to travel through space and walk on the face of the moon. With my refracting telescope, I would watch the solar flares, and I was in awe at the violence and raw power and energy of our Sun. I would look through my microscope at cultures on slides and marveled at the dance of microscopic creatures as they joined and then split apart. I would take my magnifying glass out into the yard, and start a fire. I made stink bombs with my chemistry set. I would dissect grasshoppers, fish, and all type of other creatures; I bought at the hobby shop. However, my all time favorite activity was playing with the mercury I bought at the hobby shop. I would take a penny, put some mercury on it, and watch it change the color. There were beakers, test tubes, Bunsen burners going – my parents had no idea what the mad scientist was up to in the attic. I knew that life was not two dimensional, and I had a curious mind, but I was going it alone. I had so many questions, and no one to answer them; let alone listen.

When I turned eleven, I turned to books. I loved Mythology. First Roman then Greek and eventually Norse, I reveled in the ancient tales of all the world’s cultures. As I dusted off these tales of antiquity, they led me to Poetry, and then Art. I read Sir. Arthur Conan Doyle’s – Sherlock Holmes, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Mary Shelly’s – Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s – Dracula, and numerous gothic ghost stories. It was at this point that I turned my attention to matters of the spirit.

I attended Sunday school like most young children at the behest of my parents; however, I never understood why I was expected to believe and accept what I was being told about a man who lived, died, and then lived again, some two thousand years ago without facts or some hard core empirical data – let’s not forget that I was a burgeoning scientist. They wanted me to believe in what I thought to be a supernatural event, one in which I was not a witness. I believed in ghosts - I lived in a house full of them, but I had yet to except the premise of a Holy Ghost or understand the meaning of the Trinity. I needed a personal meaningful interaction – Gnosis – then only then would their Ghost Story be validated, and confirmed. I needed proof.

All this was foreshadowing for the Spiritual Scientist I would later become. Like most teenagers, I experimented with drugs – marijuana, mushrooms, LSD, and other harder drugs. Personally, I

preferred the mind and consciousness altering ones to the ones that kept one up for days. In my twenties, a friend of mine turned me onto Carlos Castenada, and the fantastical world of Shamanism. I had discovered anthropology and Shamanism was a natural next step. I studied Shamanic cultures from around the world, which led me to the study of Dreams and then Jung and his Archetypes. The path before me was beginning to lead me to other such schools of thought. Bill Moyers PBS specials and series with Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly were expanding my mind and my vision leading me to think, feel, experience, and see life in a completely new light.

In my late twenties and early thirties I began to battle depression; I did not know it at the time, for it only came on during the changing of the seasons. I continued to read and to study. I was a guitarist and poet at the time and found great comfort being creative in the writing and performing of my music and at times doing poetry readings. It was then that I discovered books about creativity by Julie Cameron; her The Artist’s Way at the time gave me great insight on being an artist and the artistic process. Angeles Arrien’s The Four Fold Way gave me instruction and direction to help heal the wounded healer that I knew I was and was meant to be. I also discovered the late great Sun Bear and he enlightened me to The Path of Power. His teachings were beautiful, straight from the heart, and so practical. My favorite quote from Sun Bear is: If if don’t grow corn I don’t want to hear about it! How simple and succinct was his message? It was then that I really began to immerse myself in Native American spirituality – like the rest of the country. I began to make a point of getting in touch and staying in touch with our Mother the Earth. Later I would feel detached and lost when I did not spend time out or, in, or commune with nature. I was also reading at that time - Henry David Thoreau’s Walden; later I would move to Massachusetts, and spend Sunday’s hiking around Walden’s pond with my wife and baby daughter. I truly felt at home in the woods of Concord. I would love to go on long walks in lighting storms, blizzards, and the like. It was back then that I began to come to appreciate the elemental nature of the material world. Reading, spiritual practices, fasting, meditation helped to keep me grounded and brought me some relief when it came time for the seasons to change and the medicine wheel to turn.

It was not until I began to take an interest in Buddhism that I began to understand the connection to the dark periods, and the activity of my mind. I begin to witness the correlation of my

various states of mind, my depression, and the pain that I was experiencing in my physical body. The pain became so bad in my lower back – it was excruciating. I developed allergies and regularly would fall ill with respiratory and sinus infections. I could not run for my life even if my life depended on it. I had trouble keeping a job, and a place to live, and friendships, and relations with my family were strained, I was mess. The worse things became the harder and more ardently, I became a seeker. The closer that I came to the light, the longer, and darker my shadow became. I thought about suicide daily, but never with a plan; that would come later with the difficult divorce, and separation from my daughter.

However, being mindful of mind and its states seemed to be a balm to my tired soul. I took the teachings of quieting the eternal dialogue from Don Juan Matus from the Castaneda books with the meditation practices and the Dharma teachings of the Buddha and was able to get through life. Although, I lived my life as if I was always bailing out a sinking canoe, I fought to stay afloat.

Eventually I would succumb to a deep depression; feeling like Atlas with the weight of the World on his shoulders, I just wanted to put the World down. I too felt like I was being punished by the The Universe, having brought back the golden apples and then tricked to continue to carry this burden, I was a mere husk, a wraith, a shade of the golden child I was in my youth. With no job and no visible means of support, I was asked to leave the living arrangement that I had with a good friend. She was concerned that she would come home one day and find me hanging from the rafters. She helped me to see that things were not right, and I sought to find some psychiatric help. My choices were either to commit myself or be put on a waiting list for an outpatient program. Committing me was not an option; the thought of being locked away scared the hell out of me. I had volunteered at a psych ward in the past. I would come, play the guitar, and sing to the patients on the high and low functioning wards, and it really touched my heart to be able to touch theirs. However, now I was one of them. The whole time, I still felt connected to an unknown force that I was reluctant to acknowledge in that fashion.

Oddly enough the more I slipped into depression, nay I say it – madness, the more connected I felt. With no other recourse, I phoned my parents, who had recently moved out of the area to see if I could once again crash land into their world. When I called and spoke to my mother, she graciously told me that she had to speak to my father to see if it was ok if I came out to stay. I had explained that I was ill, and in so many words shed light on my mental state. She put the phone down and did not return until what seemed like hours later with the good news that I had a place I could go, but with no promises or conditions made, I was instructed to – Just get here. I had been homeless before; however, in the state I was in, I could have been lost for all time. So, I packed what would fit of my belongings into the back of the almost legal truck that I had, and throwing what would not fit into the trash, and in doing so disposed of most of my past, I drove to my parent’s house. It was cathartic in a way, liberating if you will; I felt lighter. I was, I felt, a Tabula Rasa – a clean slate. Little did I know how much was written on the slate of my soul, and how much cleansing that there was to come, and how long and how much work it would take?

I crashed landed at my parent’s new house in central Pennsylvania. I was in a depression I had never experienced; I had fallen into a dark abyss. There was no real room for me, but my parents were gracious and made room for me. I slept most of the time. During the day, I crashed on my father’s bed, and at night when my parents went to bed, I crashed in the living room. After a while, the depression would turn into mania, and I would be up for days. I would read, and go for long walks; I mean really... long walks. I did not have any money so I could not go to a bar and self medicate; so I would write poetry, and work on short stories, and I started a novel; I was on fire, creatively speaking. With the mania came lucid moments and extreme highs. I experienced states of mental agility, and physic acrobatics, I had never known. I had always had very creative periods during times of change, and upheaval. Perhaps subconsciously I always lived on the edge to keep my creative juices flowing. During times of emotional upheaval, I would write songs, words and music, arrangements, etc... until I collapsed from exhaustion. If I fell in love... forget about it, there would be at least twenty or more songs. Usually, it was always some of my best work; of course my muse was always out of my league, or out of reach, and or not interested which made the music all that more passionate, and intense. I thought the intensity of passion and enthusiasm I was feeling those first months at my parent’s