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

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.

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.

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