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

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.

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.