"I of my own knowledge…"

 How many of us, hope and passion kindled by the 1960s, learned this the hard way! How many have still to learn it! W.B. Yeats, speaking of his youth in the section of Autobiographies titled “Four Years: 1887-1891” (pp 148-149)

Then gradually the attitude towards religion of almost everybody but Morris, who avoided the subject altogether, got upon my nerves, for I broke out after some lecture or other with all the arrogance of raging youth. They attacked religion, I said, or some such words, and yet there must be a change of heart and only religion could make it. What was the use of talking about some new revolution putting all things right, when the change must come, if come it did, with astronomical slowness, like the cooling of the sun, or it may have been like the drying of the moon? Morris rang his chairman’s bell, but I was too angry to listen, and he had to ring it a second time before I sat down. He said that night at supper, “Of course I know there must be a change of heart, but it will not come as slowly as all that. I rang my bell because you were not being understood.” He did not show any vexation, but I never returned after that night; and yet I did not always believe what I had said, and only gradually gave up thinking of and planning for some near sudden change for the better.

“The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”
William Butler Yeats

Yeats at 43, in 1908 (from the Wikipedia article on him)

(more…)

I got a pleasant surprise this morning when I went to my friend Rich Spees’ blog –

http://the-sacred-path.com/2008/03/05/our-life-as-a-tapestry/

– and found that he had used a painting I did (or TGU did, but they were using my fingers and I had paid for the canvas and paint!) to illustrate a concept that had been growing on him, the concept that our lives are tapestries.

I am not going to attempt to re-say here what he said very well there. Go read what he has to say. (And while you are there, take a look around. You’ll find it a very interesting site.)

Sunday, June 15
Call it dream or nightmare, whatever. A recurring dream, back again.

I must get away because I have killed someone. (I think that’s what I’ve done.) In this one, I take a practice shot and am told by my sister, “I cannot undertake to explain contravention of the 1919 Firearms Act,” or words to that effect. She sort of knows I intend to use the rifle but doesn’t want to know.

Then I’m hiding, across the street from the house I grew up in. But I’m bad at hiding, and keep being caught by members of my family. Who don’t realize I’m really trying to hide. I try to figure out where to hide, how to make a place to hide.

(more…)

Saturday, June 14
It isn’t quarter to eight yet and I’ve been up, dressed, hung around the pier to get more of my fill of sea and waves and early morning; I’m entirely packed and waiting first for breakfast, then for the ferry – which isn’t due til 9:30. Better early, I suppose.

>From last night:

1) A sort of indescribable experience. I was in the middle of a dream. My wife in the dream and I were living separate. She came to me for comfort. I was in bed, under the covers, naked. She came into bed naked, and as she fitted her self against me, backing into my front, like spoons) my body got intensely charged with energy (not sexual energy), my hands especially. As I moved from being in the dream to realizing that I was awake, I can’t find the words to describe it. One moment I was in the dream; the next, I felt myself move out of that dream state into the waking state, my body remaining unmoving. It was the strangest transition, from dream to waking. I think the fact that my body didn’t move made it more tangible somehow. (And now, transcribing this later, I remember that in a Monroe program eight years ago I once transitioned from an altered state to a normal waking state in just that way, and it was just as memorable then.)

2) I thought I was going to retrieve dad – which was confusing, since I’d seen him in Focus 25 in 1995 and had seen later that he was gone. I did go looking but can’t find him. There was something else, but I can’t remember it.

In recording these dreams, I get a sense of how actively our internal life goes on with us mostly not aware of it.

(more…)