Category: imagination

Slouching Toward Bethlehem

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

—William Butler Yeats – The Second Coming

—-
No, no one can or wants to take over the world.

Be free knowing there is no end.

Just an uncovering.

That is joyful!

The sky is singing about it.

The earth is groaning for it.

We only destroy the things we want by our grip or live in peace with what we have. 

All of creation wants this technological monster to stop devouring the earth. 

Creation wants man to cease to be termites to the earth. 

The Native Americans say their god has no rules. 

Only ceremonies to know it better. 

That is the true source. 

The true nameless faceless source knows us through the imagination and our emotions and our thoughts.

In fact, your thoughts are its thought. 

In fact, you are one of its thoughts. 

There are many cunning thieves who have given themselves to darkness devouring the weak hearted and minded.

They are playing their parts well. 

To help wake us up.

They give into fear.

Fear not. 

I ride on a pale horse. 

I watch and listen and gather my strength. 

For there is yet a great thing required of me by the highest. 

And I shall gladly give my life so that life may become. 

That is what god calls each of us to. 

To be warriors of the sun and moon. 

If you are quiet and you listen and you see with your real eyes it’s clear as day. 

You can see as Emerson and Whitman and Epictetus.

You will feel the call on you when you let your grip on your life go. 

The veil is thin.

If you are humble and listen, you can see through this false industrial monster we have created and that we all feed. 

It lives on division and hatred and fear.

It probably has a divine purpose as all things light and dark do. 

Whitman saw the rising of the monster in the civil war, he was a prophet of love.

He showed us how to build a boat of love to sail across the turbulent abyss. 

Epictetus gave us a way to master our fear on earth. 

Emerson found a way back to the sky. 

In spite of all the turmoil on earth, there is a clear voice on the wind. 

A call to love.

A call to reunite.

And if we be worthy, to walk the rainbow bridge back to the source of all being. 

What are we to do?

Join our minds and hearts together and know ourselves, remember ourselves. 

All of creation will rise up to help you. 

Know that every word spoken or written or thought are inside you already.

Stop looking to others.

It ain’t in no book or ritual. 

It is sleeping or alive and awake in each of us. 

We only have to accept it and remember it. 

That monster that slouches toward Bethlehem can’t hurt one who knows themselves. 

The goddess sits next to the source, she is no whore.

There is no 1, 2 or 3, there is only One, and we all have a part of it. 

Most live in duality, which is an illusion, nothing is separate.

If you fear, if you are divided, if you divide, you serve chaos, you are the katechon, you will be overcome. 

That was your choice, one of the few you have. 

I don’t believe there is one destiny per one person that is unchangeable. 

Careful though how you approach the gods above, or they may turn you into a smelly goat. 

Each god is just an aspect of this.

There are just great magnetic forces that draw certain elements to them. 

But you can overcome them with the power of Will. 

Maybe all of this is just a way to sort the wheat and the chaff.

To find thoughts that can navigate the darkness without being corrupted. 

So what shall it be?

Fear or love?

For love knows no fear.

I will lead, I do not follow. 

I stand and I care for any bird that shows up on my step.

I won’t go looking for a fight. 

I’ll bide my time and strike when the beast is so close, I feel its hot breath on my neck. 

And then I will drive my blade home, into its black heart.

I know then that light will break forth from it.

I have seen it.  

That monster, is me. 

You are that monster.

It is all our concentrated anger and fear.

That’s what is happening. 

Aleister Crowley and all the great artists are beings of light, connected to their Will and filled with love. 

They are stars and so are we, or have the chance to be.

Love is the law.

Love under Will. 

They have brought us back from the brink of industrial annihilation. 

I will help them. 

The great secret chiefs are alive in us.

We shall meet them in the sky and we will laugh, and will cry no more.

Walt Whitman and William Blake: Madmen, Artists, Mystics

Walt Whitman is a mystic poet, one of my favorites. One can be transported in the incredible words of Whitman in “Leaves of Grass” and the poem contained within, “Song of Myself.” One can see he was seeing the totality of life and is filled with a glowing Light and great power, as in Blake. Whitman saw everyone as an expression of the whole. Each a work of art. He tried to remind people how beautiful they were. A leaf among the grass.

1

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this air,

…

I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45477/song-of-myself-1892-version

Whitman and Blake experienced and saw amazing things in being and themselves as part of the whole. They suffered greatly in life and felt the suffering of others deeply. I could read them forever and barely see where they walked. It is as if the Sun filled them with Light, but also the Shadow clearly speaks through them. Each contains Legion voices. They captured I think what it is to be a Human Being captured between worlds. I am moved deeply by them both.

In “Walt Whitman Speaks,” Whitman says about Blake, “Blake began and ended in Blake.” I researched this and it turns out, Whitman was confounded by and then came to appreciate Blake. Harold Bloom, a great literary critic, felt the two were of the same cloth. The falling of America made Bloom miserable. He would despair about today’s world. I recommend a great book by Bloom who loved Whitman, “The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime.” This sublime aspect of Whitman’s time was a presage of our time. Whitman warned us about technology and the age of specialization. Like a hippie version of Ted Kaczynski. Where Ted used real bombs, Whitman used bombs of Love. I love Bloom’s YouTubes. He had a photographic memory and remembered everything he ever read. Amazing to listen to, poetic in his writing and speaking. I highly recommend Bloom.

“Bloom loves Emerson and Whitman but he doesn’t believe them: to him, belatedness is now a permanent condition of man, and there can be no overcoming it—no return, even in America, to an original fullness or freshness or purity of spirit.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom – The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02

About Blake, Bloom thought…”The true Romantic, as represented by Shelley and, above all, Blake, looked not to nature—a thing external to the self—to save him but to the world-altering power of his own imagination. Nature was material, and therefore fixed and limiting. Only by struggling to liberate itself from the world entirely—to fill itself with invented mythical forms rather than natural ones—could the imagination be free.” —The New Yorker Profile on Bloom – The Prophet of Decline 9/22/02

The genius of all three of these men drips off their pages and is seen in their art. There is a deep sadness in them all, Bloom the most. Whitman and Blake though saw through the sadness.

Blake invented a form of art combining images with texts, relief etching. The first comics? He had incredible visions. I have a large folio of his work and he strikes me like Jung’s art does in The Red Book. These men have walked through heaven and hell. Whitman wrote, like Blake painted. But Blake’s poetry! My god. Blake was mostly ignored in his time. He said he wrote for his audience in eternity. His visions he felt were real and removed all doubts. Perhaps it was this assurance Whitman didn’t initially like. Blake was a rebel and feared by the establishment. Unlike Swedenborg, Blake spent as much time in the hell of London as the heaven of his soul. For this he has earned my esteem and respect. Whitman felt him dark. But Whitman didn’t like Poe either at first, but in “Walt Whitman Speaks” Whitman comments about writers of his day and confesses he came to like Poe after reading him again and again. He and Blake were so alike, but very different, as Whitman himself wrote.

“Awake! Awake, O sleepers of the land of shadows, wake! expand! I am in you and you in me, mutual in love divine. I am not a God far off, I am a brother and friend; within your own bosoms I reside and you reside in me: Lo! we are one, forgiving all evil, not seeking recompense” (Blake-Jerusalem.,Chp.1,lns.6,18).

Whitman wrote privately after reading Algernon Swinburne’s “William Blake: A Critical Essay”, that while both he and Blake were mystics and “extatics“, the differences between them were vast. I admire Whitman very highly and see in his work a sweet pragmatism that inspires me. How these mystics loved. Whitman took care of civil war wounded and this grew a great compassion in him.

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/35995/35995-h/35995-h.htm

If you are following the call of your deepest pain and love, one must spend time with Whitman and Blake, both truly sublime and profound.