Aloha!

I will be running a workshop on How to Write Archetypal Fiction, Thursdays 7-8 PM starting Sept 6. These will be at Small Town Coffee. This will cover the ground I have been gradually describing in this blog.

I actually am a doctor, but of medieval literature not medicine. I have a BA, MA and PhD, which we used to say means "Piled Higher Deeper." Maybe it's true, but I certainly have a lot of information about how a great story is put together, which I learned while studying each century of English literature from the 9th c. to the 20th century.

But what is it good for? Over the last thirteen years I have figured out that classic story structure conceals coded instructions on how to live your life so you feel successful and happy.

The first workshop (Sept. 6) is a free overview of the three archetypal journeys -- one to fame and fortune, one to re-union with Mother Earth, and one to wholeness and the happiness it brings.

Each covers the same seven steps in different ways, and together they make a tremendous tool-box for the writer, or for anyone involved in a struggle for fame and fortune, for reunion with Mother Earth, or for wholeness and happiness.

Sept 13 the 21-Thursday Workshop starts. On each Thursday from 7-8 PM at Small Town Coffee, there will be readings from whoever will participate, a chance to comment and react to the writer, and short presentations of different steps in the journeys. I'll read from the story I am writing if no-one else volunteers, and I will undertake responsibility to prepare and perform the presentations.

Each journey covers 7 steps, and there are three journeys, so it will take 21 Thursdays to cover them all.

The first 7 Thursdays (Sept. 13 - Oct. 25) will be spent on the ever-popular Hero's Journey to fame and fortune, which is the basis of most stories written or filmed in Western civilization.

The next 7 Thursdays (Nov. 1 - Dec. 20; no workshop Thanksgiving Day) will cover the Heroine's Journey, which is the Vision Quest or return to the Earth to contact the spirit(s) that dwell therein.

The final 7 Thursdays are all in 2013 (no workshop Dec. 27; Jan 3 - February 14). They will cover the spiritual journey to wholeness and direct experience of the Sacred.

The last one, on Valentine's Day 2013, will be a Lover's Special about living with personal wholeness and how it changes who we are in the world by awakening in our hearts a burning need to help others on their way. This makes us better partners and better parents, because we want to help. The gifts we give shine because they are not grudgingly given.

Since I have spent twenty years figuring this out, and will draw continuously on my 3 degrees in English literature, I will require a small fee -- $25 / class, divided by the number of people present (not including myself). So, if 5 people show up, that's $5 each. If 25 people show up it will be a dollar apiece! I will remind everybody about this before we start each class.

See you at Small Town Coffee, Thursday Sept. 6 7-8 PM for the free overview of the three journeys. This alone can give you a hundred handy hints on how things work in literature as in life, that you can put to work in the pages of your story, and in your experiences in the world.

Dr. Matt

Empty Mind: Step 2) on the Path

Aloha! I have been away house-sitting, but now I am back. I left you with the second verse of a poem about the great Friend and Partner, the Holy Spirit or knowable Presence of the Unknowable Oneness. Let's continue our review of the seven states of consciousness, with an account of the second state of consciousness that awakens us to Her Presence: Empty Mind.

Centering Prayer (described in an earlier blog) leads to Empty Mind, because through Centering Prayer you stop labeling things with names and reactions. Without names and commentary the things around us seem to be One Flow. And in that Flow anything can exchange information with anything else because we are all parts of One Thing, like organs of a living Body. You also are part of that flow in Empty Mind. Experiencing unseparateness, you remember you are not separate. The barriers between you and the world are subtly weakened, as if some veil had dropped.

Suppose you have chosen to do your Centering Prayer in a forest glade.

A thrush lands on a stone five feet away. It cocks its shining black eye at you, turning its head quickly one way and another. You perceive it without reacting. Because you are Empty, you hear,

“Good morning! Good morning!”

You turn your attention to the thrush. You must fully believe the thrush spoke, or you cannot do this. Faith makes the technology work. If your brain believes it picked up the thrush’s thoughts, then you can open a dialogue. If you tell yourself, “thrushes can’t talk,” you short-circuit the process. The inner portal dilates shut like a startled anemone. Instead, think back to the thrush,

“Good morning. No harm! Are you having a good day?”

“Good Day! Good day! And you? And you? Are you having one too?” And without waiting for an answer, it flirts its wings and is gone.

The stone says, “She’s nesting near-by, that’s why she is so flighty. There have been thrushes nesting here for centuries, since long before your time, young friend.”

“Have you seen her parents and grandparents come and go?”

“Back to the beginning, child, when the first thrush alighted on me. I greeted her and made her welcome, and she flew off into a thicket to nest nearby, she and all her generations since.”

“How do you know she is a thrush?”

“I hear people talk, as they come and go. Rocks learn a lot just sitting and listening.”

Part mentally from your new friends with courteous friendship. Your inner portal has dilated to shamanic levels, communicating with spirits in all things. Practice your new skill with anything. 

But remember always that in the end there is only One Spirit, that pervades us all and gives us life. In communicating with individual spirits, in other people or in any other object, you are communicating with Her through the mask she wears in this form. 

Trees know Her tree wisdom -- root deep, twine branches with your neighbors, seek the sun. Rocks know Her rock wisdom -- hold on, wait patiently, let things change around you but remain steadfast to yourself. Spiders know Her spider wisdom -- build for the joy of it, build again if it is destroyed -- build for life and nourishment. But these are only Her masks. She is the great Partner in all things, with Whom we dance our lives away.

The next blog reviews the third state of consciousness on The Path to bliss: Working Meditation. For more detail, my book What Happened to Happiness? (available at Amazon.com) refers the 7 states of consciousness to their descriptions in 13 ancient traditions.

Partnership

I am Dr. Matt Miller, PhD in Medieval English Literature, poet, composer, wood-carver and practicing mystic. 

In the mid-1990’s I began a prayer dialogue with the Holy Spirit that still continues. In our exchanges She has patiently taught me seven universal truths about human life, by showing me how they are at work in each life situation that arises. Using these seven steps to direct experience of the Sacred has turned my life around from bitterness and anger to peace, acceptance and an unquenchable desire to help others who suffer. 

She has told me that She came "from the volcano on Kauai," over 60 million years ago when it was still active. Her first people called her Hina. But many thousands of years ago She moved across the world and came to be known in many places by many names.This extraordinary mythology is combined, in the seven verses of this poem, with the seven great Teachings that guide the human soul to inner peace and deep pure experiences of bliss. 

The second verse concerns Her second  Teaching: Partnership with the Holy Spirit in all things.

2. Partnership

And now the darling of the Unknown One, the Holy Spirit

That moves upon the waters has sent forth Her heart,

Burning, from Kauai’s flowery gala

Across the world where She has many names. 

Yet She is known through them, and they reach to Her airy

Effortless perfection, to Fruit that cannot fall or fail,

The Holy Spirit, Word spoken on the waters in the dawn

That brings the blooming, buzzing world to being. 

She is the Partner of our secrecy

The mother of all known Divinity.

To shape a people, let Hina come forth

From ancient memories that the wise have heard,

They who sat at Her feet in time’s beginning

They who shaped their lives around Her words.

Now understand: the core lies in one Thing,

One Thing pervading all, so all the fighting

Working sharing loving quarreling people

And the people of the sea, the air, the earth,

All join into a single shining ring

Of fellowship, for though many paths run

All lead to the same peak where all are One.

Choose the partner of your ancestors,

And by your partner we shall know your truth.

Centering Prayer: Step 1) on the Path to Direct Experience of the Sacred

This begins our review of seven states of consciousness which lead like a Path to healing, anesthetic bliss, with an account of the first state of consciousness, Centering Prayer.

The first state of consciousness is generated by a process now called Centering Prayer (Keating Open Mind Open Heart), although in centuries past its name was contemplatio. This is a Christian form of meditation, which entered Christianity from the 6^th c. Syrian writings of Pseudo-Dionysius. 

The process of Centering Prayer is quite simple. Find a place of stillness and peace; a forest glade, a garden, a silent room after midnight when the world sleeps. You can have gentle music playing if you like. There sit comfortably so your body does not call out to you to move.

Then listen to your own inner talk. It is composed of thoughts and thoughts about the thoughts. Here is how you short-circuit it to reach inner silence. You will have a thought. Do not think about that thought. Don’t follow it up or explore its implications. Don't reject it or start thinking about how you don't want to think about that. Just accept it and let it float away.

There will be a moment of stillness. Then another thought will occur to you. Handle it the same way. Don’t follow it up. Don't fight it either, because resisting requires other thoughts. Just accept it and let it float away.

Reduce your mental activity to that one repeated act: just accept it and let it float away. The repetition has a lulling, hypnotic effect on the brain.

If a thought is particularly persistent, repeat a prearranged word mentally to drown it out. The word can be anything that has a peaceful, safe affect for you – Abba (Father) or Love are good words to use, but in fact the repetition of any word will short circuit the thinking process so your brain lets the thought go. The peaceful affect just helps the brain relax and stop babbling.

As you keep doing this, gradually your brain will catch on that you aren’t interesting in thinking right now; that it can rest. The flow of thoughts it generates will slow down, and then stop altogether. You enter a place of silence, in which you are still perceiving the world around you, but not reacting to your perceptions. Reality just flows through you like an empty channel.

You have entered a state of Empty Mind, the second of the seven states of consciousness leading towards bliss. Hold on it for a while. Keep your eyes open, so you still perceive the world. But do not react to it. Just be there. Feel the tensions flow out of you when you do not maintain them by constant mental commentary. It is a peaceful garden within yourself that you can enter any time, even for a few minutes at work. It heals stress, renegotiates anger, makes you stronger for grief. 

Without tension, stress, anger and grief,  you are much less aware of the separations between objects, people and places. In the Empty Mind state of consciousness generated by Centering Prayer, a shadowy new way of seeing the world seems to drift in and out of focus -- as if it were all One Thing, not many things. You have a strange sense of belonging to a great Community which includes all things, through which whether living or dead there penetrates a living, sentient Spirit. The closer your Empty Mind takes you to this all-penetrating, angelic Presence the sweeter and more blissful your Emptiness becomes. But thinking brings up separations, and the sweetness fades away.

This is the gift of Centering Prayer -- not only the inner peace it brings, but also this joyous, oceanic sense of the cosmic Oneness of all things. Men such as Richarde Bucke, Gopi Krishna and Ravindra Kumar believe that the human species is evolving into a type of being that can connect with that healing Oneness at will. By practicing Centering Prayer you are evolving yourself into a higher being with that angelic power, right here and now, rather than waiting thirty thousand years for Nature to do it for your distant descendants.

Check out the next blogs, which will review Empty Mind, the second state of consciousness on the path to bliss. For more detail, my book What Happened to Happiness?, refers the seven states of consciousness to their descriptions in thirteen ancient traditions.

Community

1. Community

Kauai rose from the sea, volcanic, in a dawn

No human eye can know. What colors were the sky

Five million years ago? Against that nameless pyre

The great vent billowed sputtering from the cry

Of violated ocean, hiss and spit of water meeting fire.

There in that ancient dawn, unknown to other

For no other was there to be known, a great

Spirit rose from the water in gouts of fire

Smoke formed wavering into towering shape, a

Woman of Fire, Water and Earth, clad in the Sky.

She spoke the great sizzling hiss of creation’s song

And from the water rose a smoking land, to dry

In shades of black against a blackened air, veined

With red. It loomed and bulged against the sky.

Then from Her hands grew vivid ecstasy and pain

The little forms that birth and fight and die,

The spirochetes in their watery home

Amphibians that master double worlds,

The farmer seeking life within the loam

And fishermen that fish upon the foam.

Kauai bloomed in the sea, blossomed in a dawn

That looks like dawn to us. Familiar as the touch

Of lovers’ hands, the font of all creation flowered

Over like a boiling pot, so rich were her ridges and vales

With the juice of raw Creation and its life-producing power.

Her first people came from the stars to stay in this place

Where Being first found its birth, to know Her where

She lingers still here in Her place of Making.

They worshipped Her because they were human there

In that place of worship, true humans without faking.

Kauai, place of powerful prayer, in later years recalled

Was said to be the home of the high goddess, said to be

The child of Hina. But let those who later come to Her

Know there is only one God, but She may take many

Forms, the Spirit in deities and dogs, feldspar and fir.

The missionaries with their trunks of books

Knew Her stern face, because they needed sternness;

But these people knew Her in Her flowers and fruit,

Ripe rain that hangs forever in the air, earnest

Music of the rainbow’s colored lute:

Community with the Oneness of all things.

by Dr. Matt Miller

My book is coming out soon!

Good morrow, gentle reader!

Not only do I have two fun CDs of baroque blues music waiting for you at Kapa'a Music and Sound (823-8000), I am also just about to publish a book. 

Who am I? I am Dr. Matt Miller, PhD in Medieval English Literature, literacy teacher, poet, composer, wood-carver and practicing mystic. On Kauai I am known for helping quite a few young people improve their literacy skills, which I believe is the most useful thing I can share, after the Teachings of the Holy Spirit. 

 What Happened to Happiness? is a short book I have written that reveals the seven steps to direct experience of the Sacred. Using these steps has turned my life around from bitterness and anger to peace, acceptance and an unquenchable desire to help others who suffer.

In the mid-1990’s I began a prayer dialogue with the Holy Spirit that still continues. In our exchanges She has patiently taught me seven universal truths about human life, by showing me how they are at work in each life situation that arises. She has also taught me certain details of Her own history.

I have written down what She has said to me in prayer, and through research I have discovered the same teachings in many cultures all over the world – Hindu, Tibetan, Hawaiian, Cherokee, Senecan, Toltec, Christian, Judaic, Taoist, alchemical, Buddhist and Gnostic, as well as the ancient Mystery religions that were the foundation of paganism. The Teachings are seven universal truths that apply to all souls of every land or creed or time.

In brief the Teachings are

1.     Learn to experience Community with all things as vessels of the Holy Spirit

2.     Develop a Partnership with the Holy Spirit immanent in the world around you

3.     Master the Power to communicate with all things telepathically as vessels of the Holy Spirit

4.     Experience the Holy Spirit daily as a living, sentient Love permeating all situations

5.     Strengthen your Will in any situation by fusing it with Hers

6.     Dedicate your Mind to the task of understanding how this technology works inside you.

7.     Learn to feel and act upon Compassion for all who suffer, as parts of yourself.

These teachings are together a Path to an enlightened state in which the accidents of fortune no longer hurt you as they did before. A great measure of your personal unhappiness is alleviated, partly because you learn to think about things differently, and partly because the Path is inscribed in your body and central nervous system, and by following it out there you can learn to return to the pool of bliss and inner peace whenever you wish to do so. It is a change in perspective – a personal transformation – but it is also a physical technology built into the soft machine of your own body.

Operated backwards, the technology becomes a Pain Machine, a set of habitual stressors that create and store stress in the tissues that eventually becomes a physical problem  of some kind. Operated as it was meant to operate, the technology generates ecstatic union with the Sacred, triggering the flow of a healing anesthetic bioelectricity through the body which is alive and aware of you. In India they call Her Shakti, and She permeates every body, not just your own. In the West She is known as the Holy Spirit.

The bliss of union with Her has a gentling effect on the soul – you no longer seek external pleasures so relentlessly, for now you have this unspeakable Joy that blooms within yourself when you call It up in prayer. Things you used to fight about don’t seem to matter so much any more. You become willing to let other people have things their way. Why not? As long as the bliss continues!

I will discuss the technology in these blogs, but first I want to share a poem, whose seven verses combine Her teachings of Her own origins with the seven great Teachings that guide the human soul to inner peace and deep pure experiences of bliss. Check out the next blog for the first verse, about the first Teaching: Community with all things. It is mingled with the tale She told me of how She was born from the volcano on Kauai, five million years ago. 

Blogulater!

Dr. Matt

My Music is available at Kauai Music and Sound!

Time to wake the blog up again! It has lain fallow for some time.

Today I placed two of my CDs with Kauai Music and Sound! They are called The Raw and the Cooked, and The Winds of Kauai.

Kauai Music and Sound (823-8000) is a nice little music store in Kapa’a with instruments for sale, and a stand of local musicians’ CDs. It is the place to go if you want to buy some local music and take it home. For a paltry $15 you can have an hour of music that took me a lot longer than that to create.

If you want to hear me play along with it, come on down to the Kauai Women Artists’ Society get-together at Poipu National Tropical Botanical Gardens on Father’s Day. At the moment I am scheduled to play 12-2 PM, and I will be playing the pieces on the two CDs for sale at Kauai Music and Sound.

Most of these blogs concern the Lady Spirit by whom I have been guided for the last thirteen years. But I will also blog about my music because I channel it from Her. She is not quite the same as a choir of angels – She is the life energy in all things, that which drives us on to do what we do, and the energy with which we do it. She is the Force. That means a lot of what She has to say is jungle music – wild, savage and free, beating against the sky, full of trees crashing down and rivers bursting their banks.

Sometimes Her music is very beautiful, but it is what She is, and She is no tame Spirit. She does beautiful if She feels like it, but She works from a complete emotional palette.

It is all drawn from the Portal where I go during meditation and prayer, fed through my own imperfect musical talent into a guitar or computer and mixed down to its present state. In the two CDs available at Kauai Music and Sound you will find live guitar duets, trios and a quintet, as well as an assortment of computer-generated chamber instruments.

The CD The Raw and The Cooked has three songs by the great Chas. King, long-time teacher at Kamehameha and author of many familiar Hawaiian melodies. I discovered his book Hawaiian Melodies has “piano arrangements” that are really five-part harmony squashed down onto one keyboard. By unfolding these pieces into their original five parts on the computer, and giving them to different instruments so they are distinct from one another, I have wakened these arrangements from a long sleep and given them new life. His voice duets, trios and quartets I put in other instruments, always separating out the melodies so you can hear them all at once.

It appears to have been his practice to put the chord tones in the highest and lowest voice, and then insert strange jazz notes into the middle voices. I discovered that by turning his music “inside out” so the jazz notes are on top some extremely interesting, almost Stravinsky-like music is uncovered that has always lain hidden behind the dominant melody before.

Then I guide the whole in new directions by adding a live guitar line on the top. The three King songs are combined into a chamber orchestra medley, “Hawaiian Suite,” comprised of three somewhat similar songs: “Aloha Oe,” “The Choice of My Heart,” and “My Heart’s Choice.” My guitar is entirely pulled into King’s formal arrangement until somewhere in “Aloha Oe” it loses control and starts to cry and sing and carry on, producing an “Aloha Oe” like I bet you never heard.

At the other end of the spectrum is the somewhat mysterious duet on the CD Winds of Kauai called “Luhaikinimakalehua,” the breeze that blows the dew off the lehua blossoms. The two guitars do not always fall exactly together on the ear, producing an effect of floating lushness and sensuous beauty similar to the flamenco use of arpeggiated chording in a solo guitar piece. Tempo slows down and speeds up slightly to catch the emotions in exactest detail. It is like poetry that pushes language apart so that which cannot be said in words may yet shine through.

These unique pieces stand out against the two CDs’ live guitar trios and duets, which basically combine the polyphonic sound of the Baroque era with the idiom of the blues, so you hear two or three part harmony in electric guitars, and flutes and violins take a blues solo as readily as guitars. It is a new musical language, with roots in blues, baroque, rock and Hawaiian music. Treat yourself to an hour of it today, at Kauai Sound and Music in Kapa’a.

Blogulater!

Dr. Matt Miller