Rebirth of Wonder

*Rebirth of Wonder*

An Anthology of Epiphanous Literature					Selected by Michelle Mairesse and Norman Livergood
The meaning of "epiphany" has expanded beyond its Greek origins - the manifestation of a god - to include special and sudden raptures. In this anthology we're using the term epiphany to refer to an episodic mystical experience. These raptures occur to men and women from virtually every nation and culture. Throughout the ages, humans have undergone harrowing experiences, braved drug intoxication and risked madness to experience intense altered states of consciousness. Until recently, only mystics have described these encounters with another order of reality. If they talk about their experiences at all, mystics use words like ecstasy, illumination, and exaltation--after confessing that words fail them. Protesting all the while that their sensations cannot be explained, mystics, psychedelic explorers, meditators, and contemplatives of all stripes describe experiences of inspiration, peace, serenity, and all-rightness with the universe; of moving into another order or dimension of consciousness; of fusing in oneness with God, the universe, others, everything, eternity; of transcending time, space, and ego; of being infused with knowledge, recognition, awareness, insight, certainty, illumination; of having a sense of endowment, of gaining more from the experience than they can intellectually understand. William James's classic psychological study, The Varieties of Religious Experience, isolates the family resemblance between mystical experiences and epiphanies. The simplest rudiment of mystical experience would seem to be that deepened sense of the significance of a maxim or formula which occasionally sweeps over one. Single words, and conjunctions of words, effects of light on land and sea, odors and musical sounds, all bring it when the mind is tuned aright. We are alive or dead to the eternal inner message of the arts according as we have kept or lost this mystical susceptibility. When the psychologist Abraham Maslow set about to discover the makeup of a healthy psyche, he found that these rapturous experiences were more common than anyone had realized. From interviews, he learned that healthy, unneruotic persons had powerful experiences of meaning, unity, and harmony. Maslow referred to such events as "peak-experiences." He assembled statistical data to bolster his claim that peak-experiences were widespread and salutary. He maintained "peakers" learn from such experiences that "joy, ecstasy, and rapture do in fact exist." Unlike mystical experiences, epiphanies do not necessarily require prolonged preparation. Unlike peak experiences, epiphanies can be actively sought--through reading inspirational literature, viewing illuminating art, or listening to enlightening music, among other ways. Epiphanies break through our ordinary consciousness from "out there," from nature, from the arts, from another dimension. In this anthology we concentrate on literary selections which we have found can occasion higher states of mind, unusual inspiration--epiphanies. Since each person's tastes are different, we can only offer these selections with the hope that they transport you into another dimension as they have others. We proffer these jewels of illumination with a profound sense of humility, for they have a reality and a power of their own which cannot be owned by any single person. They are a part of our common spiritual heritage and a part of a wider reality. We hope you find these selections as enchanting, disturbing, and consciousness-expanding as we have. To gain the full effect of the selections within this anthology, the reader must have kept alive what James called the "mystical susceptibility." The readings cast their facets into the mind only when read in a mood of quiet, unhurried, reverent openness--a willingness to hear strange, new messages and be affected in ways beyond past experience and present anticipation. There are worlds within worlds in these literary pearls and sapphires, which a surface reading can heedlessly overlook. The receptive reader, approaching these jewels with reverence, will experience infusions of illumination beyond our ability to describe. John Keats On a Grecian Urn Thou still unravished bride of quietness! Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our thyme: What leaf-fringed legend haunts about they shape Of deities or morrtals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone; Faire youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal--yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu; And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new; More happy love! more happy, happy love! For ever warm and still to be enjoyed, For ever panting and for ever young; All breathing human passion far above, That leaves a heart high sorrowful and cloyed, A burning forehead, and a parching tongue. Who are these coming to the sacrifice? To what green altar, O mysterious priest, Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies, And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? Wht little town by river or sea-shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its fold, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou are desolate, can e'er return. O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede Of marble men and maidens overwrought, With forest branches and the trodden weed; Thou, silent form! does tease us out of thought As doth eternity; Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Sir Edwin Arnold from The Light of Asia If he who liveth, learning whence woe springs, Endureth patiently, striving to pay His utmost debt for ancient evils done In Love and Truth alway; If making none to lack, he thoroughly purge The lie and lust of self forth from his blood; Suffering all meekly, rendering for offence Nothing but grace and good: If he shall day by day dwell merciful, Holy and just and kind and true; and rend Desire from where it clings with bleeding roots, Till love of life have end: He--dying--leaveth as the sum of him A life-count closed, whose ills are dead and quit, Whose good is quick and might, far and near, So that fruits follow it. No need hath such to live as ye name life; That which began in him when he began Is finished: he hath wrought the purpose through Of what did make him Man. Never shall yearnings torture him, nor sins Stain him, nor ache of earthly joys and woes Invade his safe eternal peace; nor deaths And lives recur. He goes Unto Nirvana. He is one with life Yet lives not. He is blest, ceasing to be. Om, Mani Padme, Om! The Dewdrop slips Into the shining sea! Percy Bysshe Shelley from Adonais The One remains, the many change and pass; Heaven’s light for ever shines, Earth’s shadows fly; Life, like a dome of many-colored glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity, Until death tramples it to fragments.--Die, If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek! Follow where all is fled!--Rome’s azure sky, Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak Thy glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak. Dante Gabriel Rossetti Sudden Light I have been here before, But when or how I cannot tell. I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell, The sighing sound, the lights around the shore. You have been mine before,-- How long ago I may not know; But just when at that swallow’s soar Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore. Has it been thus before? And shall not thus time’s eddying flight Still with our lives our loves restore In death’s despite, And day and night yield one delight once more? Walt Whitman Who Learns My Lesson Complete? Who learns my lesson complete? Boss, journeyman, apprentice, churchman and atheist, The stupid and the wise thinker, parents and offspring, merchant clerk, porter and customer, Editor, author, artist, and schoolboy--draw nigh and commence; It is no lesson--it lets down the bars to a good lesson, And that to another, and every one to another still. The great laws take and effuse without argument, I am of the same style, for I am their friend, I love them quits and quits, I do not halt and make salaams. I lie abstracted and hear beautiful tales of things and the reasons of things, They are so beautiful I nudge myself to listen. I cannot say to any person what I hear--I cannot say it to myself-- it is very wonderful. It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe moving so exactly in its orbit for ever and ever, without one jolt or the untruth of a single second, I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years, nor ten billions of years, Nor plann’d and built one thing after another as an architect plans and builds a house. I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or a woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me, or any one else. Is it wonderful that I should be immortal? as every one is immortal; I know it is wonderful, but my eyesight is equally wonderful, and how I was conceived in my mother’s womb is equally wonderful. And pass’d from a babe in the creeping trance of a couple of summers and winters to articulate and walk--all this is equally wonderful. And that I can think such thoughts as these is just as wonderful, And that I can remind you, and you think them and know them to be true, is just as wonderful. And that the moon spins round the earth and on with the earth, is equally wonderful, And that they balance themselves with the sun and stars is equally wonderful. Elizabeth Barrett Browning Sonnets from the Portuguese How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace. I love thee to the level of everyday’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise. I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints,--I love thee with breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life!--and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death. As once the winged energy of delight carried you over childhood's dark abysses, now beyond your own life build the great arch of unimagined bridges. Wonders happen if we can succeed in passing through the harshest danger; but only in a bright and purely granted achievement can we realize the wonder. To work with Things in the indescribable relationship is not too hard for us; the pattern grows more intricate and subtle, and being swept along is not enough. Take your practiced powers and stretch them out until they span the chasm between two contradictions. . . For the god wants to know himself in you. Ranier Maria Rilke (translated by Stephen Mitchell) Sailing to Byzantium W. B. Yeats That is no country for old men. The young --Those dying generations--at their song The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, command all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect. An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium. O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity. Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. Who Says Words With My Mouth? Rumi All day I think about it, then at night I say it. Where did I come from, and what am I supposed to be doing? I have no idea. My soul is from elsewhere, I'm sure of that, and I intend to end up there. This drunkenness began in some other tavern. When I get back around to that place, I'll be completely sober. Meanwhile, I'm like a bird from another continent, sitting in this aviary. The day is coming when I fly off, but who is it now in my ear; who hears my voice? Who says words with my mouth? Who looks out with my eyes? Who is the soul? I cannot stop asking. If I could taste one sip of an answer, I could break out of this prison for drunks. I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way. Whoever brought me here will have to take me home. This poetry. I never know what I'm going to say. I don't plan it. When I'm outside the saying of it, I get very quiet and rarely speak at all. Translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne Peace Alfred North Whitehead The peace that is here meant is not the negative conception of anaesthesia. It is a positive feeling which crowns the "life and motion" of the soul. It is hard to define and difficult to speak of. It is not a hope for the future, nor is it an interest in present details. It is a broadening of feeling due to the emergence of some deep metaphysical insight, unverbalized and yet momentous in its coordination of values. It's first effect is the removal of the stress of acquisitive feeling arising from the soul's preoccupation with itself. Thus Peace carries with it a surpassing of personality. there is an inversion of relative values. It is primarily a trust in the efficacy of Beauty. It is a sense that fineness of achievement is as it were a key unlocking treasures that the narrow nature of things would keep remote. There is thus involved a grasp of infinitude, an appeal beyond boundaries. Its emotional effect is the subsidence of turbulence which inhibits. More accurately, it preserves the springs of energy, and at the same time masters them for the avoidance of paralyzing distractions. The trust in the self-justification of Beauty introduces faith, where reason fails to reveal the details. The experience of Peace is largely beyond the control of purpose. It comes as a gift. The deliberate aim of Peace very easily passes into its bastard substitute, Anaesthesia. In other words, in the place of a quality of "life and motion" there is a substituted their destruction. Thus Peace is the removal of inhibition and not its introduction. It results in a wider sweep of conscious interest. It enlarges the field of attention. Thus Peace is self-control at its widest, - at the width where the "self" has been lost, and interest has been transferred to coordinations wider than personality. Here the real motive interests of the spirit are meant, and not the superficial play of discursive ideas. Peace is helped by such superficial width, and also promotes it. In fact it is largely for this reason that Peace is so essential for civilization. It is the barrier against narrowness. From Adventures of Ideas Think how it is to have a conversation with an embryo. You might say, "The world outside is vast and intricate. There are wheatfields and mountain passes, and orchards in bloom. At night there are millions of galaxies, and in sunlight the beauty of friends dancing at a wedding." You ask the embryo why he, or she, stays cooped up in the dark with eyes closed. Listen to the answer. There is no "other world." I only know what I've experienced. You must be hallucinating. Rumi (translated by Coleman Barks with John Moyne) I look for the way things will turn out spiralling from a center, that shape things will take to come forth in so that the birch tree white touched black at branches will stand out totally its apparent self: I look for the forms things want to come as from what black wells of possibility, how a thing will unfold: not the shape on paper - though that, too - but the uninterfering means on paper: not so much looking for the shape as being available to any shape that may be summoning itself through me from the self not mine but ours. A. R. Ammons					Robert Browning from Paracelsus Truth is within ourselves, it takes no rise From outward things, what'er you may believe. There is an inmost centre in us all, Where truth abides in fulness; and around, Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, This perfect, clear perception - which is truth. A baffling and perverting carnal mesh Binds it, and makes all error: and to know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape; Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without. William Blake The Tyger Tyger, Tyger, burning bright In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes! On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire? And what shoulder, and what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand? and what dread feet? What the Hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? what dread grasp, Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears And water'd heaven with their tears; Did he smile his work to see? Did he who made the Lamb make thee? Tyger, Tyger burning bright, In the forests of the night; What immortal hand or eye, Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? from Proverbs of Hell The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Eternity is in love with the productions of time. If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. One thought fills immensity. You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough. Damn braces. Bless relaxes. A Memorable Fancy If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. Ah Sunflower Ah Sunflower, weary of time, Who countest the steps of the sun, Seeking after that sweet golden clime Where the traveler’s journey is done-- Where the youth pined away with desire, And the pale virgin, shrouded in snow, Arise from their graves, and aspire Where my sunflower wishes to go! Eunice Tietjens The Most Sacred Mountain Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven, And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow six thousand steps of climbing! This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy. Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth stretches away to blue infinity. Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their slow curves against the sky, and one black bird circles above the void. Space, and the twelve clean winds are here; And with them broods eternity - a swift, white peace, a presence manifest. The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end. Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus into timelessness. The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that says: On this spot once Confucius stood and felt the smallness of the world below. The stone grows old, Eternity Is not for stones. But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white peace, this stinging exultation; And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the rhythm of the daily round. Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and always I shall feel time ravel thin about me; For once I stood In the white windy presence of eternity. William Shakespeare Sonnet CXVI Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, And bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. William Wordsworth from Intimations of Immortality Ye blessed creatures, I have heard the call Ye to each other make; I see The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee; My heart is at your festival, My head hath its coronal, The fullness of your bliss, I feel--I feel it all. Oh evil day! if I were sullen While earth itself is adorning, This sweet May-morning And the children are culling On every side, In a thousand valleys far and wide, Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm, And the babe leaps up in his mother’s arms-- I hear, I hear, with joy I hear! --But there’s a tree, of many, one, A single field which I have looked upon, Both of them speak of something that is gone: The pansy at my feet Doth the same tale repeat: Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy, But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the man perceives it die away And fade into the light of common day. . . . Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song, And let the young Lambs bound As to the tabor’s sound! We, in thought, will join your throng Ye that pipe and ye that play, Ye that through your hearts today Feel the gladness of the May! What though the radiance which was once so bright Be now forever taken from my sight Though nothing can bring back the hour Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind; In the primal sympathy Which having been must ever be; In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind. And O, ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves, Forebode not any severing of our loves! Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might; I only have relinquished one delight To live beneath your more habitual sway. I love the brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they; The innocent brightness of a new-born day Is lovely yet; The clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take as sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality; Another race hath been, and other palms are won. Thanks to the human heart by which we live, Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears, To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears. from Tintern Abbey Five years have past; five summers, with the length Of five long winters! and again I hear These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs With a soft inland murmur, --once again Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs, That on a wild, secluded scene impress Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect The landscape with the quiet of the sky. The day is come when I again repose Here, under this dark sycamore, and view These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves ‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees! With some uncertain notice, as might seem Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods, Or of some hermit’s cave, where by his fire The hermit sits alone. These beauteous forms, Through a long absence, have not been to me As is a landscape to blind man’s eye: But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din Of towns and cities, I have owed to them In hours of weariness, sensations sweet, Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart; And passing even into my purer mind, With tranquil restoration:--feelings too Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps, As have no slight or trivial influence On that best portion of a good man’s life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust, To them I may have owed another gift, Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood, In which the burden of the mystery, In which the heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world, Is lightened:--that serene and blessed mood, In which the affections gently lead us on,-- Until, the breath of this corporeal frame And even the motion of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body, and become a living soul: While with an eye made quiet by the power Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things. If this Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft-- In darkness and amid the many shapes Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart-- How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee, O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro’ the woods, How often has my spirit turned to thee And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought, With many recognitions dim and faint, And somewhat of a sad perplexity, The picture of the mind revives again: While here I stand, not only with the sense Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts That in this moment there is life and food For future years. And so I dare to hope, Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, , by the sides Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, Wherever nature led: more like a man Flying from something that he dreads, than one Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all,--I cannot paint What then I was. The sounding cataract Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock, The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood, Their colors and their forms, were then to me An appetite; a feeling and a love, That had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, nor any interest Unborowed from the eye.--That time is past, And all its aching joys are now no more, And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur; other gifts Have followed; for such loss, I would believe, Abundant recompense. For I have learned To look on nature, not as in the hour Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes The still, sad music of humanity, Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power To chasten and subdue. And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognize In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being. Henry Vaughan The Retreat Happy those early days, when Shined in my angel-infancy! Before I understood this place Appointed for my second race, Or taught my soul to fancy aught But a white, celestial thought; When yet I had not walked above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back, at that short space, Could see a glimpse of his bright face; When on some gilded cloud or flower My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity; Before I taught my tongue to wound My conscience with a sinful sound, Or had the black art to dispense, A several sin to every sense, But felt through all this fleshly dress Bright shoots of everlastingness. O, how I long to travel back, And tread again that ancient track! That I might once more reach that plain, Where first I left my glorious train; From hence the' enlightened spirit sees That shady city of palm trees. But ah! my soul with too much stay Is drunk, and staggers in the way! Some men a forward motion love, But I by backward steps would move; And when this dust falls to the urn, In that state I came, return. I Am Waiting by Lawrence Ferlinghetti I am waiting for my case to come up and I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder and I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail and I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier and I am waiting for the American Eagle to really spread its wings and straighten up and fly right and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety to drop dead and I am waiting for the war to be fought which will make the world safe for anarchy and I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the Second Coming and I am waiting for a religious revival to sweep through the state of Arizona and I am waiting for the Grapes of Wrath to be stored and I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American and I am seriously waiting for Billy Graham and Elvis Presley to exchange roles seriously and I am waiting to see God on television piped onto church altars if only they can find the right channel to tune in on and I am waiting for the Last Supper to be served again with a strange new appetizer and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for my number to be called and I am waiting for the living end and I am waiting for dad to come home his pockets full of irradiated silver dollars and I am waiting for the atomic tests to end and I am waiting happily for things to get much worse before they improve and I am waiting for the Salvation Army to take over and I am waiting for the human crowd to wander off a cliff somewhere clutching its atomic umbrella and I am waiting for Ike to act and I am waiting for the meek to be blessed and inherit the earth without taxes and I am waiting for forests and animals to reclaim the earth as theirs and I am waiting for a way to be devised to destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody and I am waiting for linnets and planets to fall like rain and I am waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the Great Divide to be crossed and I am anxiously waiting for the secret of eternal life to be discovered and save me forever from certain death and I am waiting for life to begin and I am waiting for the storms of life to be over and I am waiting to set sail for happiness and I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America with its picture story and tv rights sold in advance to the natives and I am waiting for the lost music to sound again in the Lost Continent in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting for the day that maketh all things clear and I am waiting for Ole Man River to just stop rolling along past the country club and I am waiting for the deepest South to just stop Reconstructing itself in its own image and I am waiting for a sweet desegregated chariot to swing low and carry me back to Ole Virginie and I am waiting for Ole Virginie to discover just why Darkies are born and I am waiting for God to lookout from Lookout Mountain and see the Ode to the Confederate Dead as a real farce and I am awaiting retribution for what America did to Tom Sawyer and I am perpetually awaiting a rebirth of wonder I am waiting for Tom Swift to grow up and I am waiting for the American Boy to take off Beauty's clothes and get on top of her and I am waiting for Alice in Wonderland to retransmit to me her total dream of innocence and I am waiting for Childe Roland to come to the final darkest tower and I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live arms at a final disarmament conference in a new rebirth of wonder I am waiting to get some intimations of immortality by recollecting my early childhood and I am waiting for the green mornings to come again youth's dumb green fields come back again and I am waiting for some strains of unpremeditated art to shake my typewriter and I am waiting to write the great indelible poem and I am waiting for the last careless rapture and I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on the Grecian Urn to catch each other up at last and embrace and I am awaiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder
The Man With the Blue Guitar Wallace Stevens I The man bent over his guitar, A shearsman of sorts. The day was green. They said, "You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are." The man replied, "Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar." And they said then, "But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are." II I cannot bring a world quite round, Although I patch it as I can. I sing a hero's head, large eye And bearded bronze, but not a man, Although I patch him as I can And reach through him almost to man. If to serenade almost to man Is to miss, by that, things as they are, Say that it is the serenade Of a man that plays a blue guitar. The Most Sacred Mountain Eunice Tietjens Space, and the twelve clean winds of heaven, And this sharp exultation, like a cry, after the slow six thousand steps of climbing! This is Tai Shan, the beautiful, the most holy. Below my feet the foot-hills nestle, brown with flecks of green; and lower down the flat brown plain, the floor of earth stretches away to blue infinity. Beside me in this airy space the temple roofs cut their slow curves against the sky, and one black bird circles above the void. Space, and the twelve clean winds are here; And with them broods eternity - a swift, white peace, a presence manifest. The rhythm ceases here. Time has no place. This is the end that has no end. Here when Confucius came, a half a thousand years before the Nazarene, he stepped, with me, thus into timelessness. The stone beside us waxes old, the carven stone that says: On this spot once Confucius stood and felt the smallness of the world below. The stone grows old, Eternity Is not for stones. But I shall go down from this airy space, this swift white peace, this stinging exultation; And time will close about me, and my soul stir to the rhythm of the daily round. Yet, having known, life will not press so close, and always I shall feel time ravel thin about me; For once I stood In the white windy presence of eternity. Siddhartha Hermann Hesse ...Vasudeva...took Siddhartha's hand, led him to the seat on the river bank, sat down beside him and smiled at the river. "You have heard it laugh," he said, "but you have not heard everything. Let us listen; you will hear more." They listened. The many-voiced song of the river echoed softly. Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. ... The river's voice was sorrowful. It sang with yearning and sadness, flowing towards its goal. "Do you hear?" asked Vasudeva's muted glance. Siddhartha nodded. "Listen better!" whispered Vasudeva ... Siddhartha listened. He was now listening intently, completely absorbed, quite empty, taking in everything. He felt that he had now completely learned the art of listening. He had often heard all this before, all these numerous voices in the river, but today they sounded different. He could no longer distinguish the different voices - the merry voice from the weeping voice, the childish voice from the manly voice. They all belonged to each other; the lament of those who yearn, the laughter of the wise, the cry of indignation and the groan of the dying. They were all interwoven and interlocked, entwined in a thousand ways. And all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. Al of them together was the stream of events, the music of life. When Siddhartha listened attentively to this river, to this song of a thousand voices; when he did not listen to the sorrow or laughter, when he did not bind his soul to any one particular voice and absorb it in his self, but heard them all, the whole, the unity; then the great song of a thousand voices consisted of one word: Om - perfection."Do you hear?" asked Vasudeva's glance once again. Vasudeva's smile was radiant; it hovered brightly in all the wrinkles of his old face, as the Om hovered over all the voices of the river. His smile was radiant as he looked at his friend, and now the same smile appeared on Siddhartha's face. His wound was healing, his pain was dispersing; his Self had merged into unity.					Kinship With All Life (1976) by J. Allen Bone With their unclouded wisdom and their ability to define things as they truly are, these spiritual pioneers made clear-cut distinctions between the realities and unrealities of existence. From their pinnacles of discernment they recognized physical phenomena as not the real facts at all but merely counterfeits of the divine. And illusory, temporal, human concept. A mass-mesmeric distortion. "Such stuff as dreams are made on," as Shakespeare phrased it. They had various names for the inner capacity by means of which they were able to distinguish between the real and the unreal. Some of them called it "the faultless eye of Truth." Others preferred "the eye of the Soul," or "the eye of the Mind," or "the eye of the Understanding." The American Indian, with his simple, direct approach to the great verities of being, calls this valuable faculty "in-seeing," or "in-hearing," or "in-knowing." This is the kind of faculty that I finally had to come to use with Strongheart [a German Shephard dog who had starred in many movies] in order to begin actually seeing and knowing him as he really was in the great over-all plan and purpose of life... Our escape into these larger certainties began the day that I started hunting for his character qualities with the aid of the book of synonyms and the dictionary. The more I did this the more I lifted my concept of Strongheart out of the physical and into the mental, and out of the mental into the spiritual. Thus I was constantly translating him into what he really was back of his physical appearance - an illimitable idea... Then just for fun I decided to interview the dog ahead of me as though he were a distinguished but difficult-to-understand foreigner. I went to work on him as a reporter, talking across to him mentally in order not to disturb the sanctuary stillness in which we were both sitting, aiming all that I soundlessly said at the back of his head. I asked him questions having to do with his most intimate life, with me, with us, with human-animal relationships... Suddenly, and without the least sound from me to attract his attention, Strongheart swung his head around and began staring at me, and right through me, with those big eyes of his. It was unexpected - and startling. I do not know how long he kept those x-ray eyes focused on me. It may have been only a few minutes; it may have been much longer. My situation was something like that of the fabulous monk of long ago who, you may recall, went out one unusually fine spring morning to listen to meadow lark sing, and when he returned all his friends were gone; three hundred years had passed by. Such things as time and space disappear in the presence of greater realities. Presently Strongheart turned his head back to its original position and calmly resumed looking off into space. And the - as easily and naturally as though such things were a regular part of everyday experience - I knew that Strongheart had been silently talking back to me. And I had actually been able to understand what he had said to me! The proof was that I had answers to practically every question I had asked, answers that were subsequently verified in every detail. Sitting there on the ledge with his back in my direction, Strongheart had heard the questions I had mentally asked him. When I went into that blank state of mind, without knowing what I was doing I had become mentally open and receptive. Then, turning his head in my direction so as to get my full attention, he had silently answered my questions. I had spoken to Strongheart in the kind of speech which does not have to be uttered or written, and he had replied to me in the same language. Without the exchange of a sound or a gesture between us, each had perfectly understood the other. I had at last made contact with that seemingly lost universal silent language which, as those illumined ancients pointed out long ago, all life is innately equipped to speak with all life whenever minds and hearts are properly attuned... What made our silent conversations so easy and so rewarding was the invisible Primary Factor that was responsible for the entire activity. In order to understand this deeply hidden secret, it is important to know that what actually went on in those communion sessions of ours was not the hit-or-miss exchange of thoughts between the "larger and more important brain of a human" and the "smaller and less important brain of a dog." Not at all. Brains as such had no more to do with it that ribs. It was something far more authoritative. And that something had all the immensity, all the power, all the intelligence, all the love of the boundless Mind of the Universe moving back of it and in it and through it. Neither Strongheart nor I was doing any communicating as of ourselves. Neither of us was expressing himself as an original thinker or an independent source. On the contrary, we were being communicated through by the Mind of the Universe. We were being used as living instruments for its good pleasure. that primal, illimitable and eternal Mind was moving through me to Strongheart, and through Stongheart to me. Thus I came to know that it moves through everything everywhere in a ceaseless rhythm of harmonious kinship. I was privileged to learn from my dog instructor how to get my human ego and intellect out of the way, how to blend my best with Strongheart's best, and how to let the Universe express itself through us, as the Universe with its wisdom and long experience well knows how to do... I would ask him a specific question. When the answer came, it arrived with the gentlest kind of impact. It came as a "still small voice" whispering the needed information within...or a sudden awareness...or a revealing suggestion...or swift enlightenment...or a clear direction for solving a particular problem. I was never conscious of having to make any particular effort in these transitions from not-knowing to knowing. I simply became as still and as receptive as possible - and listened. Sooner or later it just happened. It was like suddenly remembering something I had always known but temporarily had forgotten in the fogs and confusions of human experience. Thus did Strongheart and I share in that silent language which the Mind of the Universe is constantly speaking through all life and for the greater good of all life. Thus did we make use of that wondrous inner route from mind to mind and from heart to heart. Thus did we cross each other's boundaries, only to find that there were no boundaries separating us from each other, except in the dark illusions of the human senses.
Analysis of a Theme Wallace Stevens THEME How happy I was the day I told the young Blandina of three-legged giraffes . . . ANALYSIS In the conscious world, the great clouds Potter in the summer sky. It is a province-- Of ugly, subconscious time, in which There is no beautiful eye And no true tree, There being no subconscious place, Only Indyterranean Resemblances Of place: time's haggard mongrels. Yet in time's middle deep, In its abstract motion, Its immaterial monsters move, Without physical pedantry Or any name. Invisible, they move and are, Not speaking worms, nor birds Of mutable plume, Pure coruscations, that lie beyond The imagination, intact And unattained, Even in Paris, in the Gardens Of Acclimatization, On a holiday. The knowledge of bright-ethered things Bears us toward time, on its Perfective wings. We enjoy the ithy oonts and long-haired Plomets, as the Herr Gott Enjoys his comets. The Walled Garden of Truth Hakim Sanai The Garden of Reality ..... All mankind is asleep, living in a desolate world; the desire to transcend this is mere habit and custom, not religion--idle fairytales. Stop bragging in the presence of men of the path: better consume yourself like burning chaff. If you yourself are upside down in reality, then your wisdom and faith are bound to be topsy-turvy. Stop weaving a net about yourself: burst like a lion from the cage. Melt yourself down in this search: venture your life and your soul in the path of sincerity; strive to pass from nothingness to being, and make yourself drunk with the wine of God. From him forgiveness comes so fast, it reaches us before repentance has even taken shape on our lips. He is your shepherd, and you prefer the wolf; he invites you to him, and yet you stay unfed; he gives you his protection, yet you are sound asleep; O, well done, you senseless upstart fool! He heals our nature from within, kinder to us than we ourselves are. A mother does not love her child with half the love that he bestows. His kindness makes the worthless worthy; and in return he is content with his servants' gratitude and patience. Translated and abridged by D. L. Pendlebury I live my life in widening rings which spread over earth and sky. I may not ever complete the last one, but that is what I will try. I circle around God, the primordial tower, and I circle ten thousand years long; and I still don't know if I am a falcon, a storm, or an unfinished song. Rainer Maria Rilke					Let us now meditate on the fundamental outlook which from time immemorial has induced Indian thinkers to experience all beings not as something made from the outside, but as something appearing, emerging, growing from within as beings released out of Brahman into existence. They have not seen beings as things to be represented in the consciousness of an ego-centred human subject in the forms of inner-psychic pictures, but as things revealing themselves directly to the human existence. This approach can not be a mere astonishment and amazement at the fact that something is-and how it is. Nor can it be a doubting of the reality of the world. Only a human being who is deeply moved by awe and who remains in a state of reverence does not fall prey to the will-to-explore-and-dominate that which shows itself to him, but remains all ears and eyes for the summons of the awe-inspiring phenomena. The awe-inspired person does not want to get hold of or to possess what he reveres, with the aid of his intellectual concepts. He seeks only to get himself into the frame of mind appropriate to the revered object--one which renders him open to its summons and makes his vision clear for its beckonings. He knows: if he manages to comply with the phenomenon that is worthy of his awe so perfectly that he catches sight of its entire truth, he has succeeded also in releasing himself from the chaos of all delusions. My dear friend, never succumb to the temptation of wanting to take conceptual possession of this 'brahman' or 'sat', to concretize and stratify it, to conceive of it as an 'Id' or as the 'collective unconscious' and to give it a structure by means of abstractions of pictorial images and ordering powers. All these are definitions from the restricted viewpoint of an intellect that fragments reality, calculates it and objectives it. Only for such an intellect is the ultimate reality of man something assembled from disparate individuals or psyches, something collective and something of which it, the intellect, can know nothing and can not be conscious. It is, however, more in accord with the facts to speak, not of a 'collective unconscious' but, rather, of an undivided, all-inclusive knowledge. But let us drop all this pinning of labels, and let us follow the far greater and wiser course exemplified so often by India's best spirits. Let us master ourselves to the point of, for once, not wanting to take possession of anything. Let us, rather, allow 'brahman' simply to occur, in the pristineness of its mystery, and let us adopt the course of enduring it as such and of keeping ourselves open to it. The whole game is lost from the outset if we seek to manipulate 'brahman' by means of our concepts. To be sure, something has to happen, not with it, however, but with us. We have to open up our selves and allow our being to become clear-visioned. We must do this to such an extent that our spiritual constitution becomes truly worthy of the 'brahman' nature and is in accord with it. Then it is 'brahman' or 'sat, for its part, that addresses and grants us the truth of its entire reality, without our having to do anything further about it. For this reason the Indian thinkers have never tried to work out qualitative definitions of 'brahman' or 'sat'. They have always stressed that at the very most our thoughts should circle about it on the 'neti-neti path', i.e. by the negation of its substantiality and qualitativeness, by saying: 'It is not that, not this and not that other thing.' The utmost they ventured to say on this subject was the mere demonstrative pronoun 'tat', which means 'that'. However, the really fitting human approach is just the noble silence that is prepared to 'hear'. Buddha two and a half millennia ago most impressively exemplified this noble silence for us as the only behaviour worthy of the real truth. Yet even today, every spiritual teacher in India will from the start subdue the loquacity of his pupil, lest from the outset the pupil dissipate 'brahman', with mere talk. 'Brahman' or 'sat' permits the mysterious arising of being out of not-being. It always originally occurs as an illumination. To this India gives the name 'chit'. Judge for yourself now how disastrous for an understanding of the Indian science of man is its translation by the modern term 'consciousness'? If modern psychology says 'conscious', it is always, by that very fact, inquiring as to the 'whom', as to a subject, which has a 'consciousness', to which a 'consciousness' belongs as a property. Or, of course, psychologists may think of 'consciousness' as a kind of intellectual receptacle in which a human subject stores the ideas it forms of itself and of the mental representations of the objects of an external world. The basic Indian term 'chit', however, has nothing to do either with a subject or with a 'mind' and their psychological functions. It does not depend, either, on a representational content nor on a thing at all. According to the Indian insight, 'chit' is the non-objectifiable occurrence of the primordial, emergent, opening-up illumination, which can happen per se, without necessarily requiring the agency of the least thing. Can not the sunlight shine, even when there is nothing at all in space? Of course, there was in India also a preliminary stage leading to this insight, to the effect that the primordial illumination could be represented only as the perception of something in the light of the being of man. This doctrine was also fond of using the old simile: being and thinking belong together like two bundles of reeds leaning on each other. If one bundle is taken away, the other one too falls down says the relevant Upanishad. More advanced Indian thought, however, regards this view as still undeveloped and crude. It always experiences the ultimate truth about reality as a primarily 'contentless' lighting-up. At the same time, this emergent illumination is a 'free' and redemptive' opening-up. Therefore, it is also said of it that it is 'ananda', or bliss. 'Sat-chit-ananda' is thus the threefold ancient Indian term which points in the direction of the truly disclosed, ultimate reality. I trust I no longer have to fear that you will misunderstand this 'sat-chit-ananda' as having some kind of substantive existence. Nor is it meant in any attributive sense, as a designation of properties intended to define a thing qualitatively." Medard Boss. A Psychiatrist Discovers India, London: Oswald Wolff, 1965 (translated from German into English by Henry A. Frey) The Celestial Fire Yannai (6th century) Now an angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a blazing fire - a fire that devours fire; a fire that burns in things dry and moist; a fire that glows amid snow and ice; a fire that is like a crouching lion; a fire that reveals itself in many forms; a fire that is, and never expires; a fire that shines and roars; a fire that blazes and sparkles; a fire that flies in a storm wind; a fire that burns without wood; a fire that renews itself every day; a fire that is not fanned by fire; a fire that billows like palm branches; a fire whose sparks are flashes of lightning; a fire black as a raven; a fire, curled, like the colours of the rainbow! Translated by T. Carmi