Aloha!
The part of teaching from the Light that is hardest to express is that it cannot divorce the student's brain and soul. I am no longer comfortable with leaving the spiritual aspect of the world out of teaching about the world. The humanities, the sciences, mathematics -- these are information about the human soul. Literature should be taught for its lessons about ourselves. Then it is useful. Science should be taught for what it shows us about how we look at things.
At heart, when you divorce spirituality from the rest of education, you create a dried-up information base. Since it is dried up, it is easy to divide any object of attention into smaller pieces and analyze the pieces separately. We then conclude that we have "understood" the object.
But we have not, because we have missed the Spirit that imbues it. We know what the object is made of, but we still do not know what it is.
This separatism pervades human thought because the immanent Spirit is left out of our perceptions. Teaching from the Light puts the pieces back together. We write from our reading, read to our writing. We encounter math, science, physics, story-telling, art and music in their original wholeness on the beach, in the forest, wherever we go. If we understand what we see as expressions of the One Spirit, we understand these things in their wholeness, not separately.
The result is systemic thinking -- making choices and reacting for everyone involved, with the knowledge that all things are imbued with a living Spirit and so "everyone" also means "everything." In the terms used by alchemy, the leaden human soul sees only divisions and categories. The golden soul sees a single Body that includes all things. We are Its arteries, Its vessels, Its nerve ganglions. Our word for it is God.
We connect to It at the deepest place of our own soul, and this is where creative inspiration comes from. By daring to connect to the God inside ourselves, we hear the Sacred energy in words, in music, we see it in art. And we are so stricken and pierced by the beauty of it that we dare to
disturb the sounds of silence. We find our voice, because it is the voice of the Sacred, and now we allow It to speak through us.
A Light
Teacher, then, would teach music composition by first training the student to go to this God-place inside his or her own soul, and listen at that Portal for the music of the world. A Light Teacher of
literacy skills would start from the same skill, and guide the student to listen for a flow of words at the Portal. The art student will watch for visionary perceptions, visual aspects of that glory.
Then and only then, can the act of creation begin. Your independence as a creator expresses through the way you bring what you have seen and heard to fruition. That is, I hear music at the portal and I render it as best I am able with my limited skills. It comes out sounding like blues polyphony, because that's what I play.
Mozart might listen at the same Portal within himself and produce a classical symphony, because his skills were different from and greater than my own. The final result is entirely personal, but it is driven by a universal Flame that others recognize and are drawn to, like hungry moths looking for that Light.
The Flame conveys emotion to the observer, and Eric Clapton said the ability to communicate emotion is the difference between a good guitarist and a great guitarist.
Dr. Matt
Wednesday, August 14, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
Teaching from the Light
Aloha again, mysterious readers!
Following on the heels of my last blog is the question, so how do you teach the arts once you have learned to enter the Light? This is the great experiment unfolding Thursday nights at Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a.
The Light changes teaching a lot. I'll write about the first change in this blog.
First of all, if I and my students are parts of the same thing, as the Light has taught me, then they draw from the same pool of inspiration as I. Jung called it the collective unconscious.
But we think of our minds as closed boxes that only we can access. Why did Jung think the unconscious is collective rather than personal? Random events reflected his patients' psychological breakthroughs so frequently he concluded that the archetypes were affecting physical reality, and must therefore be separate realities, not just thought patterns. They must, therefore, exist in a collective space that we all can access.
We know now that thought patterns can and do affect physical reality, so his reasoning is not inevitable.
But the idea that there is a collective space we all can access at our deepest psychological level is thousands of years old. It is called immanence. Creative inspiration comes from this all-permeating Consciousness. That means we access inspiration by going down through our own issues and finding the collective patterns that underlie them. We do this by creating an unguided fiction (writing with no initial outline or plan). Because it is unguided, our own deep patterning will organize it, thereby revealing itself. It's the same principle as a Rorschach ink-blot test.
This uncovering of the deep patterns underlying reality is what drives the reader on through a story. It may look like seeking the solution to a problem, or solving a crime, or courting and winning a beloved. But always there is something covered up in the beginning which is gradually uncovered.
How do I get my students there, teaching from the Light? By going where they are. Every human consciousness is a portal into this collective space of human wisdom. I give my writing students enormous, vague writing topics like "create an island" so they can create from their own hearts. They reach down through their own psychological issues to the collective unconscious we all tap into, producing islands that reflect their own inner depths.
In essay-writing classes also, I give students very large topics -- community, partnership, any successful exertion of personal power, any dramatic act of charity -- so they can find themselves in the topic. The results are personal statements which use the formulas and devices of the essay-writer to express the writer's own access to the collective depths of wisdom. That, to my understanding, is a successful essay.
But the trick is the same as with fiction -- give yourself room to explore your own opinions, and you will find they lead down into deep collective patterns of thought. My classes are designed to give my students room to discover themselves inside the essay, because that's what makes an essay work.
So the classes become student-driven -- I am a facilitator, a traffic cop, a library of information and a fount of enthusiasm so they can write their hearts in essay or story format.
The second change that teaching from the Light brings about in the classroom, is that we need to abandon our anxieties about excellence, and treat the act of creation as a human birth-right, not the domain of a privileged few. We are creative animals like giraffes have long necks. What other animal tells stories or draws pictures? But publication has brought the greatest creations of the human race so vividly before us that we have lost our lip, like an old trumpet player, and now we are afraid to blow our notes. This is the "sound of silence" Paul Simon sang about,
In my next post I will say more about the second change -- daring to disturb the sounds of silence -- and apply both changes to how a Light Teacher teaches music composition, as well as to the Light Teaching of literacy skills.
Following on the heels of my last blog is the question, so how do you teach the arts once you have learned to enter the Light? This is the great experiment unfolding Thursday nights at Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a.
The Light changes teaching a lot. I'll write about the first change in this blog.
First of all, if I and my students are parts of the same thing, as the Light has taught me, then they draw from the same pool of inspiration as I. Jung called it the collective unconscious.
But we think of our minds as closed boxes that only we can access. Why did Jung think the unconscious is collective rather than personal? Random events reflected his patients' psychological breakthroughs so frequently he concluded that the archetypes were affecting physical reality, and must therefore be separate realities, not just thought patterns. They must, therefore, exist in a collective space that we all can access.
We know now that thought patterns can and do affect physical reality, so his reasoning is not inevitable.
But the idea that there is a collective space we all can access at our deepest psychological level is thousands of years old. It is called immanence. Creative inspiration comes from this all-permeating Consciousness. That means we access inspiration by going down through our own issues and finding the collective patterns that underlie them. We do this by creating an unguided fiction (writing with no initial outline or plan). Because it is unguided, our own deep patterning will organize it, thereby revealing itself. It's the same principle as a Rorschach ink-blot test.
This uncovering of the deep patterns underlying reality is what drives the reader on through a story. It may look like seeking the solution to a problem, or solving a crime, or courting and winning a beloved. But always there is something covered up in the beginning which is gradually uncovered.
How do I get my students there, teaching from the Light? By going where they are. Every human consciousness is a portal into this collective space of human wisdom. I give my writing students enormous, vague writing topics like "create an island" so they can create from their own hearts. They reach down through their own psychological issues to the collective unconscious we all tap into, producing islands that reflect their own inner depths.
In essay-writing classes also, I give students very large topics -- community, partnership, any successful exertion of personal power, any dramatic act of charity -- so they can find themselves in the topic. The results are personal statements which use the formulas and devices of the essay-writer to express the writer's own access to the collective depths of wisdom. That, to my understanding, is a successful essay.
But the trick is the same as with fiction -- give yourself room to explore your own opinions, and you will find they lead down into deep collective patterns of thought. My classes are designed to give my students room to discover themselves inside the essay, because that's what makes an essay work.
So the classes become student-driven -- I am a facilitator, a traffic cop, a library of information and a fount of enthusiasm so they can write their hearts in essay or story format.
The second change that teaching from the Light brings about in the classroom, is that we need to abandon our anxieties about excellence, and treat the act of creation as a human birth-right, not the domain of a privileged few. We are creative animals like giraffes have long necks. What other animal tells stories or draws pictures? But publication has brought the greatest creations of the human race so vividly before us that we have lost our lip, like an old trumpet player, and now we are afraid to blow our notes. This is the "sound of silence" Paul Simon sang about,
people writing songs
that voices never share
no-one dares
disturb the sound of silence
In my next post I will say more about the second change -- daring to disturb the sounds of silence -- and apply both changes to how a Light Teacher teaches music composition, as well as to the Light Teaching of literacy skills.
Sunday, June 2, 2013
The Teacher's Journey
What a life it is! For forty years I woke up in the morning, got dressed, went to work. I thought that was all there was.
Then I woke up inside.
Now by focusing I can enter a space where my whole being seems to peel back in layers, and Light that is alive and speaks to me approaches and fuses with the Light inside me. I enter into a pool of bliss in which there is only One, and it is both God and me. It is the classic mystical experience, but it has become immediately available to me.
How can we understand the changes that brings on? I used to be an English teacher. I am still a teacher - a good one. But the Light experiences change one's agenda. I am a different person now, than I was before I knew such ecstatic fusion with the Sacred was even possible. You can't move in and out of bliss experiences regularly without losing your murderous edge.
I stopped fighting with people. That made it hard to be a teacher. Teachers are under constant pressure from parents, students and administration. It is a continuous battle for all of us, which we win by staying calm. But I am no longer interested in fighting. I think it is a basic failure to comprehend the situation, and that basic failure permeates education.
What is the situation? There is only the Light. There is just One Thing. We are all pieces of it. If I hit another, I have hit my mother, my father, myself. It is better, then, not to hit. That's what the Light taught me. It is simple and direct and nobody understands it. We just keep fighting.
So after a period of shock during which I departed from one teaching job and stopped seeking a career position with the other, I am rebuilding the whole "teacher" idea, to offer the classes I am able to offer now. They are different in three important ways.
One is that they will be conducted in the world, not in a classroom. I am presently blessed by being able to use Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a as an evening venue. Thank you, Anni!
Another difference is that they are all about how to do something. Literary studies are strangely unreal -- they don't do anything but produce more literary studies. In private classes at Small Town Coffee during the last school year I have been making my literary PhD useful by using it to help people do their own creative writing. My book How to Write Heroic Tales, which has evolved from those classes, should be available at Amazon some time soon. Thank you, students!
Since I am also an active composer who has produced about twenty hours of classical-blues polyphony in the last 3 years, I am going to teach people how to write polyphonic pop music, expanding the principles of twelve-bar-blues into larger patterns. And since I have 20 years of training and experience as a woodworker, specializing in wood ornament, I am going to teach people to make carved / veneered boxes. Every course has to result in a useful product of some kind.
The third difference is something I have established through years of experiment and observation: creative inspiration comes from the Light. My creative life has spiked sharply upwards as I learned to contact and communicate with the Light. And I will teach my students how to contact the Light themselves and use it either for prayer or creative inspiration. Kauai is a very strong place for the Light experience, which is why I am here. That will be a part of every course.
I doubt if I could teach that in any school but my own. Perhaps deep post-graduate work always brings one to such distant outposts. But so it is, at any rate, for me.
Dr. Matt Miller
Then I woke up inside.
Now by focusing I can enter a space where my whole being seems to peel back in layers, and Light that is alive and speaks to me approaches and fuses with the Light inside me. I enter into a pool of bliss in which there is only One, and it is both God and me. It is the classic mystical experience, but it has become immediately available to me.
How can we understand the changes that brings on? I used to be an English teacher. I am still a teacher - a good one. But the Light experiences change one's agenda. I am a different person now, than I was before I knew such ecstatic fusion with the Sacred was even possible. You can't move in and out of bliss experiences regularly without losing your murderous edge.
I stopped fighting with people. That made it hard to be a teacher. Teachers are under constant pressure from parents, students and administration. It is a continuous battle for all of us, which we win by staying calm. But I am no longer interested in fighting. I think it is a basic failure to comprehend the situation, and that basic failure permeates education.
What is the situation? There is only the Light. There is just One Thing. We are all pieces of it. If I hit another, I have hit my mother, my father, myself. It is better, then, not to hit. That's what the Light taught me. It is simple and direct and nobody understands it. We just keep fighting.
So after a period of shock during which I departed from one teaching job and stopped seeking a career position with the other, I am rebuilding the whole "teacher" idea, to offer the classes I am able to offer now. They are different in three important ways.
One is that they will be conducted in the world, not in a classroom. I am presently blessed by being able to use Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a as an evening venue. Thank you, Anni!
Another difference is that they are all about how to do something. Literary studies are strangely unreal -- they don't do anything but produce more literary studies. In private classes at Small Town Coffee during the last school year I have been making my literary PhD useful by using it to help people do their own creative writing. My book How to Write Heroic Tales, which has evolved from those classes, should be available at Amazon some time soon. Thank you, students!
Since I am also an active composer who has produced about twenty hours of classical-blues polyphony in the last 3 years, I am going to teach people how to write polyphonic pop music, expanding the principles of twelve-bar-blues into larger patterns. And since I have 20 years of training and experience as a woodworker, specializing in wood ornament, I am going to teach people to make carved / veneered boxes. Every course has to result in a useful product of some kind.
The third difference is something I have established through years of experiment and observation: creative inspiration comes from the Light. My creative life has spiked sharply upwards as I learned to contact and communicate with the Light. And I will teach my students how to contact the Light themselves and use it either for prayer or creative inspiration. Kauai is a very strong place for the Light experience, which is why I am here. That will be a part of every course.
I doubt if I could teach that in any school but my own. Perhaps deep post-graduate work always brings one to such distant outposts. But so it is, at any rate, for me.
Dr. Matt Miller
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Creative Writing Class Starts June 6
My next Creative Writing class will start June 6, Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a at the Kapa'a Products Fair!
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Wednesday, March 13, 2013
Morning Prayer
Morning Prayer
I wake, and fragments of yesterday
plunge through the tunnels of my soul –
But I let the light wash them away
and I let its sweetness make me whole.
I float in a pool of ecstatic light
Sweetened to stay soft in the fight –
Warriors whose wars will never cease
Will lie amazed in my place of peace.
Ladler in soup kitchens, tired but true,
I’ll pass out bowls of light to you.
Thursday, March 7, 2013
See you at Small Town Coffee, 7 PM tonight!
Well, it's not too late to get yourself down to Small Town Coffee to enjoy my first class on Heroic Tales -- the free one! It starts 7 PM Small Town Coffee @ the Kapa'a Products Fair. I have a great little overview planned of the ground we will cover in the next two months and how it all hangs together. I hope to see you there!
Dr. Matt
Dr. Matt
Tuesday, March 5, 2013
Class in the Woman's Journey
Hard to keep writing when life wants so many things from me but I stagger on. I am deep in the Woman's Journey class for the course I have proposed. So many ideas and research of the past have come together in this!
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