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

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.

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

The Parting of the Veil

The parting of the veil first happened for me in 1964, when I was eleven years old. I was coming home from school. It was a long walk for me, but I was old enough to walk it alone. Often I stopped at the library, and I had done so today. I was holding my new library books and practicing whistling. The sky overhead was a magnificent red and orange sunset of ragged clouds and torn gaps full of dark and light. An unearthly glow hung over all. I watched it unfold as I walked, drinking it in.

            Suddenly the whole skyscape looked like a movie being projected onto a veil. I saw the curtain it was shining onto quivering as if in a breeze. Then the veil parted, and a beautiful Lady looked through it at me. Our eyes met, and I felt she loved me more than I had ever thought possible – more than anyone could, more even than my mother. I realized that I loved her too. And then quite suddenly I was just a small boy staring at a sunset. The veil closed, its swaying folds stilled and vanished, and I saw only the familiar solid forms of my own world again. But I remembered afterwards that this world is like a movie projected onto a veil, and there are Other People who live on the other side of the veil, who know us and watch us with love shining in their eyes.

            In this blog I will tell many stories of my strange encounters with love at the heart of the Natural world. But I will finish this post with a tale from 2011, now I am 58, of watching my wife Peggy have such an encounter. No doubt hers was nothing like mine, but in each case we went into Nature deeply and there Something or Somebody touched us. My first blog story, of a stone in an abbey wall that showed me its memories, is another variant on that same moment of direct contact within the physical world. Peggy's story illustrates what happiness can lie in these encounters.

            Peggy’s feet don’t like to twist, or come down hard on rocky ground. Sounds like no big deal in the city, where the earth has been artificially flattened for your convenience. But that means she can’t enjoy mountain trails. And she’s a gardener! No fair, especially when you live on the “Garden Island” of Kauai and can’t get out into the great lush tropical garden that flourishes everywhere on the island, where people do not interfere with it. It’s all twisty, uneven ground! 

            So she went to the shoe store the other day and got some great shoes – they are fairly rigid and lace up tight round her ankles. We took them out for a spin the other day – their maiden flight. We went to the trailhead at the far end of Olohena and hiked up it. It is a gentle grade but certainly “rocky ground,” since it is also a watercourse. For once, no trucks are to blame; the water alone carves deep ruts in the mud. The shrewd traveler follows the footprints of those who have gone before, sometimes still soft and sometimes frozen like little concreted way-signs.

After her first cautious steps, Peggy was transformed! She could walk the trail! Her feet were fine inside their safe high-tech armor. And the joy of it was that she simply forgot about her feet. She was deep in the little flowers that make wedges and scarves of color over the green hedge – the erosion patterns that shape old fence posts into works of art – the shape of a stone by the trail – the winged clouds that flighted overhead in bunches and the deep sweet long-eyed view to the sea. Over us and between us and through us played a music too lovely to name or even hear, felt and known by feeling, like blind souls in the dark, who come to the Feeling and follow it like children. Aloha ‘aina, the locals call it. And I loved her in that land-love, and we walked hand in hand up the path of wonders and were, for a little while, children ourselves.

At the top of the hill she kissed me and we looked down the long canyon to the tiny village, houses shining in the sun like a train set lodged in papier-mache mountains, and beyond the blue triangle of the metal sea. It was like being giants above the world of men.

All the way down the mountain side Peggy’s eyes shone like she carried the sun within her. Her step was completely different. She was almost dancing from rock to rock. And I realized my life-wise wife was gone, and a beautiful young woman walked beside me. There was no wrinkle on her face, and her eyes were the clear eyes of a young adult seeing the world for the first time. I would have said she was in her early twenties.

Feeling my almost 60 years, I walked in her light and felt her freedom. I was afraid the first time I saw her do this, coming home from Ke’e Beach years ago. But now I know we are Protected and she will be allowed this joy. As we neared the trailhead and the car her years seemed to return to her. And I was reminded once more that I live with a white magician, a kitchen witch – someone whose magic is strongest, because it is of the heart. I am a lucky man. 

Watch the next post for another story of magic contact with Nature! In that one the heroes and heroines are named Lilith, Twinkle, Tigger and Blackie.