July/August 2004 Living Now
The Invisible Garment - An Interview with Connie Kaplan

by Connie Hill

"We each wear an unseen garment, woven in divine threads, which holds us, shrouds us, veils us, protects us and simultaneously connects us to every other being in the universe."
      ---The Invisible Garment

CH: Connie, how did you become an author?

CK: I was working in the television industry. I got a bizarre disease which made me sleep 15-18 hours a day for two years. During that time I encountered a number of teachers in my dreams who taught me the cosmology of dreaming. I started quietly teaching that radical information. Eventually a literary agent joined my dream circle and offered to help me publish my dream handbook. From that time on, the work has continued to get bigger. This is my third book, and a fourth is in the works.

CH: After reading the galley of your book I thought maybe this information came at your father's death.

CK: My father's death came 6 or 7 years after my illness. But it seems it was part of the process. When the universe picks you it uses any authentic, real opening to flood in new information. Most of us are just so busy with our doingness that it takes something really profound for us to dissolve into our beingness. It's only when we are in beingness that we can open to cosmic truth.

The difference in how we operate when we are do-ers and be-ers is the whole energy behind this book, The Invisible Garment. We have created a society that is so disconnected from spirit that we have convinced ourselves that what we do is who we are. And if we don't do anything that leaves us pretty empty in this external way we measure ourselves. The material for this book basically said if your doingness doesn't arise out of your beingness then it's useless. It's something that you are using to fill up time and it has nothing to do with who you are.

This is very exciting information. You are a biological being and have a genetic history, DNA, a fingerprint and a face like nobody else's. You also have a unique spiritual DNA. No matter what you do, the spiritual fabric never changes. It's the supporting and often the motivating piece in our lives. You are a certain configuration of spiritual principles and that configuration never fails you. The whole spiritual world is made up of thirty principles. Each of us contracts with eight to 12 of the principles. In eight years of giving readings using this information I've seen people completely rewrite their history. They look back at what they used to call abuse and begin to see it as a fast track to actualization.

CH: I was thinking about your comments on the midheaven or the tenth house. In Caroline Myss's work she says the tenth house represents our highest self.

CK: I'm not really an astrologer, but that takes us right back to beingness and doingness. Your ultimate beingness is reflected in the principle of your midheaven which is the way you access the soul. Your doingness or tenth house, has to be a direct reflection of your beingness or midheaven. If it's not, you are wasting time.

My midheaven is the principle of silence. I spent 35 years as a doer, finding my path, doing my thing. I loved television production and the money it provided. I was a happy doer. Then I was struck silent. When I went into silence, my real doingness showed up and said "do me."

CH: So you had no background in astrology?

CK: No, I didn't. I know the symbols, but hadn't studied it. The angels told me that the information came through me primarily because of my ignorance. I didn't know astrology. This information either fits into your field or challenges your field.

CH: You talk about soul siblings in your book. Can you tell me about them?

CK: The human soul is one living organism. It manifests in lots of different ways beyond what any of us can imagine. One way we recognize our soul siblings is they have the same midheaven principle and were born within a few years of us. And many times we don't particularly like them.

CH: Anything else you want to say about your workshop or your book?

CK: I feel the reason we are in the present global mess is because we are not operating from beingness into doingness. In our capitalist world where we think the bottom line is the most important thing, we have lost track of what the real bottom line is.

And what I'm going to do at New Renaissance is have people look at their astrological charts and show people how to work with this information and how we interface with each other from a spiritual perspective, so that we begin to understand that every conversation is actually a dialogue between your fabric and mine, your principles and mine.

CH: Thank you, Connie.

Connie Kaplan is the author of: Dreams Are Letters From the Soul, A Woman's Book of Dreams, and her newest, The Invisible Garment, 30 Spiritual Principles that Weave the Fabric of Human Life, due out in July. She will be at New Renaissance Bookshop on Saturday, July 17 for her workshop A Spiritual Look at Astrology: 30 Principles that Weave the Fabric of Human Life. Call 503-224-4929 or visit www.newrenbooks.com to register.

Connie Hill works at New Renaissance Bookshop and is a local astrologer. She can be reached at 971-244-0567, ext. 2 or gmnite@yahoo.com.