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,

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.

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

Heroic Tales Class Coming Up!

Thursday February 21^st, 7-8 PM at Small Town Coffee, I will kick off my Heroic Tales class. This will be a hum-dinger of a roller-coaster ride through some wild genres of story-telling. We will use the seminal works of a genre as a spring-board, and look at how their structure was imitated by a host of later works, creating the genre as we have it now. Students will each write an essay or a story related to one of the genres we discuss. I will co-edit it with them to bring it to a finished form.

After this basic training in literary reading, any time we see a work in that genre we will recognize it as a genre work, and know more or less what to expect. Then we become active readers, observing and enjoying how this particular work follows the genre pattern, and how it violates or alters the pattern in surprising ways.

Come join us at this feast for the heart, mind and soul! You’ll walk away with a story or essay in hand, and a head full of knowledge about the amazing forms taken by the Heroic Journey in literature and in life. There will be a sign-up sheet in the Blue House bookstore at Small Town Coffee in the Kapa’a Fairgrounds. Students will pay $80 (cash or check) at the end of the first meeting if they want to go on with the whole set of 8 meetings. Contact me if you want to reserve a seat by prepaying (mahopmi@gmail, or come by Small Town Coffee Saturday 10-2 when I work in the bookstore).

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.