Mental Illness? or - Salvation                                                               Copyright ©2014 Hazel Gay



Hazel Gay's To Heal the Broken-Hearted (Chronicle of a woman's 18 year journey through "mental illness" to healing, wholeness and transformation.)

How did I get the name “On the Eighth Day?”

Eighth Day was in a poem I wrote at the beginning of spring altered state,  ’76.  I really didn’t understand it when I wrote it. 

       March 10, 1976

How’s this for a fantasy?

               Come with me 
                       We’ll climb a mountain peak that holds up the sky 
                                 and discover the strings the sky uses to hold up the mountain 
                       We’ll sail uncharted purple seas at the far edge of the world 
                                 with a compass of instinct making our map as we go 
                       We’ll wake to an eighth weekday without a name and name our creation 
                       We’ll wonder at the sight of Atlantis rising again from some timeless depth 
                                in the middle of our hearts 
                       We’ll walk a fresh path following an exquisite light from 
                                 a farther star just beginning to touch our sight 
                       We’ll probe the inner space of our souls and meet with infinity 
                       We’ll become architects for the new city of a schizophrenic dream

                       Hand in hand we’ll struggle thru hell and come out on the other side
                       Then we’ll stand in the end of the rainbow and taste each and every hue 
                       And I’ll give you times’ most beautiful love song that has not a sound.        

                                            (The letter to the Mayor of Hiroshima?)         

        I had no idea how prophetic it might be. As the years went by I understood more and more of it. By allowing, analyzing, and incorporating my altered state (i.e. psychotic) experiences I was led to the place in the mid/late 80’s of being able to start to verbalize the knowledge that had been so abruptly and overwhelmingly dropped on me during my first “altered state” experience in 197l. “On the Eighth Day…” were the best words I could come up with to begin to try to express what I got in touch with; the eighth day of creation when we become aware We are co-creators on this planet.   
        In 1985 I ran across a book by Elizabeth O’Connor, Eighth Day of Creation, that I highly recommend in which she validated some of my thinking.

 Where did my star come from?  From someplace so far back inside me I can’t explain it. When I doodled it during the altered state ’74, I knew it fit.  The sides are not rigid and unbending, it “gives.”  It’s interlocked; it can’t be taken apart without destroying it.  It’s perfectly balanced.   It’s against a black background, black being the everything and beyond, the unknown that is beyond the comprehension of the feeble human intellect, the unknown that CONTAINS the human mind. 

Nov. 1, 2018: To my surprise, I seem to have evolved beyond the adapted Star of David, 
a good symbol for many years of my journey. But now I seem to be so far beyond physical symbols. 
feel even more strongly with my being a connection to The unknowable, the unnameable. 

INNER PERCEPTION DIMENSION

I had doodled the words and the star during the altered state, ’74. I made this drawing during the altered state, Fall, ’76. The star was added as kind of an afterthought to this picture. When I added it, I felt I had “crossed a bridge.”  The vertical bars represent societal attitudes toward inner depth experiences.