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.

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

A Class in Magic Sword Stories

We had to back my Heroic Tales class off until March 7, so if you haven't signed up yet, it isn't too late! We will meet at Small Town Coffee in Kapa'a, at the Products Fair.

I just finished the Magic Sword class -- stories about Magic Swords and the heroes who wield them. If you're a writer, this class is for you!

 Each class teaches a different writing technique, using the works that gave birth to a genre to illustrate it. Magic Sword stories illustrate the way to handle your internal monologue when you are writing.  It's a great technique!

Creating the Heroic Tales Classes

Aloha again!

I am working away at the classes for my Heroic tales course, starting Thursday Feb. 21 @ 7 PM at Small Town Coffee, Kapa'a Fairgrounds. I have completed the first class, which is an introduction to seven different genres of Heroic Tale. The third class on Utopias is already prepared.

I also have most of the Magic Sword tales class ready to present. Now that's an interesting one! When you cross Excalibur, the sunny, positive sword of kingship, with the dark Viking sword of doom called Tyrfing, with its three vile deeds, you get the Sword of David in the Queste del Sainte Graal, which is a sword of kingship that also commits three vile deeds. Countless magic-sword stories have been told that use aspects of these three seminal magic-sword tales. Tolkien makes gentle fun of the whole idea in his Farmer Giles of Ham, where the sword Caudimordax, or Tailbiter, is the terror of the local dragons.

I am noticing that my different Heroic Tales classes kind of support each other. Explorer Fiction is a lot like Utopian fiction, but the explorer who finds a Utopia observes and records social customs as a way of reflecting on the author's own time. The explorer in Explorer Fiction just records wonders -- monsters and strange people. The Woman's Journey, which goes beyond fame and fortune to quest for wholeness, seems to lead naturally into the Spiritual Quest, which goes beyond personal wholeness to fusion with the Sacred. And Magic Sword Tales, which usually involve the irony that using the sword on others leads to you getting killed yourself eventually, bear a complicated relationship to the Dystopias.

The whole thing is becoming so interesting I am thinking of making the eight classes I am creating into a book.  These are genre studies, really, so each chapter would sail across the centuries picking out examples wherever they may be found. The Utopias class starts with the Garden of Eden and ends with a 20th century Shangri-La, so that one really covers some ground. Woman's Journey stories track back into the timeless mists of folklore. Explorer Fiction can start with the 12th century voyages of Marco Polo, and continue into the 21st century space program. Spiritual Quest stories have been with us since the Descent of Inanna 4000 years ago.

Time melts away, when you look at story telling this way. Come melt away some time with us, Thursday Feb. 21 7-8 PM at Small Town Coffee, Kapa'a Fairgrounds. The first class is free!

Dr. Matt

Preparing the Heroic Tales Class

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I am having way too much fun creating my Heroic Tales classes for delivery at Small Town Coffee Thursdays 7-8 PM (Kapa’a Fairgrounds). The first meeting is February 21^st. I get to talk about all my favorite books!

I just finished prepping the Utopias class, our 3^rd meeting. We will take an hour looking at Utopias from the 12^th to the 20^th century, starting with the astonishing legend of Prester John.

The Magic Sword class will start with tales of Tyrfing, the Viking sword that always killed someone once it had been unsheathed.

And the Woman’s Journey – ! Well, I don’t want to give it all away. There will be a hatful of great ideas at every class, for students to develop into a story or an essay. I will co-edit student writing with the student, to develop it to its highest potential.   

We will sail past so many great books in an hour! Blue House bookstore will order any book that you hear mentioned in the class, at a 20% discount to the student. Each class will also have a keynote work that is available for sale at the class with the same discount. We will spend a week each on

1.     Structure of the Heroic Journey

2.     Magic Sword stories

3.     Utopias

4.     Explorer Tales

5.     the Woman’s Journey

6.     Dystopias

7.     Visits to the Future

8.     Hawaiian Tales 

Hope I'll see you there!

Dr. Matt

The Monks on the Stair

I was raised to believe “community” meant myself, my friends and family, and our domestic animals. All other living things were outsiders. And of course, you can’t be in community with inanimate objects.

But very rarely something would happen that suggested to me that there was a much larger community which I could be entering into if I only knew how. This community included things so different that it was many years before I saw they all belonged to the same community – a community, it seems, of all things. My first revelation about this community, in 1960 when I was seven years old, was that it also included things that I had been taught were “dead” and so could not communicate.

My family spent that year in Europe. We visited an abbey whose name I have forgotten. After going down into the crypt to see the tombstones, we climbed up a long shallow flight of stone steps, with stone walls on each side, to a distant door that opened into the cathedral of that abbey.

I had been feeling very strange in the crypt – not physically strange, exactly, and yet it was physical, too.  Something compelled me to linger behind. I wanted to feel that strangeness alone. I lagged back, and my parents and sister went up without noticing I was no longer right behind them. They passed into the upper church, a bright rectangle of sunshine – and the door closed. I was alone in the semi-gloom of the cold stone staircase. The strange feeling closed around me. But I was not afraid.

I reached out a small hand to steady myself against the damp stone wall. When my fingers touched the stone, I suddenly saw a line of hooded men walking slowly up the stairs in single file. They were singing, all together on one note, a lugubrious tune in an unknown tongue. They were so close I could have touched them.

Startled, I removed my hand from the stone. Immediately I was alone in the echoing stone stairwell. I did not run. I understood it was not necessary. But I did not linger either, and I was very careful not to touch the stones of that wall again. I moved quickly up the steps and into the lighted church. There I stood with my family, but very much alone, remembering. I said nothing of what I had seen.

I knew they would think it was a ghost. I would not be able to explain how I knew those hooded men were not ghosts. But I understood clearly that the stone of the wall I touched had shown me something it remembered from long ago. And it stayed in my mind that the stone was alive, and could think and remember just like me.

Coming soon!  Blog 3: The Parting of the Veil