Teaching from the Light Includes the Sacred in Everything

Aloha!

The part of teaching from the Light that is hardest to express is that it cannot divorce the student's brain and soul. I am no longer comfortable with leaving the spiritual aspect of the world out of teaching about the world. The humanities, the sciences, mathematics -- these are information about the human soul. Literature should be taught for its lessons about ourselves. Then it is useful. Science should be taught for what it shows us about how we look at things.

At heart, when you divorce spirituality from the rest of education, you create a dried-up information base. Since it is dried up, it is easy to divide any object of attention into smaller pieces and analyze the pieces separately. We then conclude that we have "understood" the object.

But we have not, because we have missed the Spirit that imbues it. We know what the object is made of, but we still do not know what it is.

This separatism pervades human thought because the immanent Spirit is left out of our perceptions. Teaching from the Light puts the pieces back together. We write from our reading, read to our writing. We encounter math, science, physics, story-telling, art and music in their original wholeness on the beach, in the forest, wherever we go. If we understand what we see as expressions of the One Spirit, we understand these things in their wholeness, not separately.

The result is systemic thinking -- making choices and reacting for everyone involved, with the knowledge that all things are imbued with a living Spirit and so "everyone" also means "everything." In the terms used by alchemy, the leaden human soul sees only divisions and categories. The golden soul sees a single Body that includes all things. We are Its arteries, Its vessels, Its nerve ganglions. Our word for it is God.

We connect to It at the deepest place of our own soul, and this is where creative inspiration comes from. By daring to connect to the God inside ourselves, we hear the Sacred energy in words, in music, we see it in art. And we are so stricken and pierced by the beauty of it that we dare to disturb the sounds of silence. We find our voice, because it is the voice of the Sacred, and now we allow It to speak through us.

A Light Teacher, then, would teach music composition by first training the student to go to this God-place inside his or her own soul, and listen at that Portal for the music of the world. A Light Teacher of literacy skills would start from the same skill, and guide the student to listen for a flow of words at the Portal. The art student will watch for visionary perceptions, visual aspects of that glory.

Then and only then, can the act of creation begin. Your independence as a creator expresses through the way you bring what you have seen and heard to fruition. That is, I hear music at the portal and I render it as best I am able with my limited skills. It comes out sounding like blues polyphony, because that's what I play.

Mozart might listen at the same Portal within himself and produce a classical symphony, because his skills were different from and greater than my own. The final result is entirely personal, but it is driven by a universal Flame that others recognize and are drawn to, like hungry moths looking for that Light.

The Flame conveys emotion to the observer, and Eric Clapton said the ability to communicate emotion is the difference between a good guitarist and a great guitarist.

Dr. Matt

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.

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.

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 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