...Real poetry is the side effect of poïesis. In ancient Greek, poïesis meant “making.” What is made in poïesis? The soul. What is the process of poïesis? It has various names, but in the Western tradition it’s been widely known as alchemy. This alchemy is a deep work of collective and personal transformation and evolution. It is the mysterious union of the conscious with the unconscious, of the pure witnessing faculty of the mind (Shiva) with the electric energy of the subtle body and heart (Shakti). It’s the way that genius stops being a source of suffering and becomes a source of joy.
...Any painting or piece of writing or house or garment or nation that was made by a person or group of people who used the occasion of making it as a chance to imaginatively work out evolution, collective or personal, is poetry. It is alive; it has a restless, provoking energy, a soul of its own. Looking on it, enjoying it, teaching it, reading it, hearing it, living in it can stimulate our own souls and launch us further on our own alchemical trip. The result of successful alchemy in any human life is abiding, grounded, ecstatic bliss; creative potency; and joy.
That which creates is that which is created. Should this surprise us?
1. The only reason to read or write poetry at all is to be helped on your own trip toward becoming a poet in this strong sense.
2. A poet is not an insipid person who writes nice verses in the company of polite professors and gets them published to wide-spread approval in pretentious magazines.
3. A poet is a soulmaker. She’s a dynamic force that radically changes the movement of thought and imagination within her generation. A real poet is a shaman and a healer, a warrior and a scientist, a philosopher and a living dream. She might write some verses or she might not. The verses might be published or they might not. This has exactly no consequence or bearing for the poet’s actual purpose and mission, which is to bring soul into the world, by whatever means available and necessary.
...Becoming a true poet, a lucid dreamer in this life—that is not easy, and that is not safe at all. ... It’s vital, intimate, demanding, and thrilling work. It’s an adventure into the depths of the unconscious, into the life force of the body. It’s a descent into the underworld whose outcome is uncertain.
... Recognize that there’s no use in anyone reading the written stuff called poetry or attempting to write it unless that someone is herself on a journey of poetic evolution, a journey to become a soulmaker and to stop suffering.
... Participate in a course of adventure ... the one that the famous mythographer Joseph Campbell observed as the underlying movement in all myth and folktale. This adventure is widely known as “the hero’s journey,” but ... I prefer to call it “the mythic journey,” ...
When we consciously, deliberately enter the mythic journey, we begin the work of joining our conscious with our unconscious, and so we become much more alive to symbol and metaphor, allusion and story, character and drama—all this stuff is the stuff of dreams, and it is also the stuff of poetry and myth.
The mythic journey is a labor of answering our heart’s call to evolve by deliberately engaging with and taking on the challenges offered by our own unconscious.
It stirs up stunning synchronicities, omens, and mysterious forces in our lives. It is a symbolic and imaginative process but not “merely” so—because as we do it, we find the symbols and the imaginations we meet in our fantasies and dreams becoming living realities out- side of us.
What Happens Once You Start This Journey
When we dreamers start to adventure into unknown and magical territory, we become hungry for the poetry of others, wanting guidance and confirmation that the path we’re walking can be navigated. We also become eager to create poetry—in verse or in action. If we’re not actively traveling this path, the poetry of others and the poetry that we ourselves generate is dull and irrelevant. Furthermore, we suffer.
... [It is a] process of becoming a soulmaker. Soulmaking, as John Keats noted, is the work of creating our unique bliss. In this process, we liberate our creativity and our joy, our power and our purpose. We become imaginatively rich and spiritually vibrant.
The interesting thing about soulmaking is that everyone craves it—an enlarged imaginative perception of themselves and the world, a deeper emotional connection to their own hearts and to the hearts of others, a wilder capacity for joy—and yet we have almost no societally sanctioned space for this endeavor.
Soulmaking is the rightful province of humanities education, as the depth psychologist James Hillman pointed out—yet in the present-day scrupulously secular academy, the word “soul” creates a scandal. Depth psychology itself makes room for it—but how many people have access to their very own archetypal analyst? In my work as a teacher, I brought soulmaking back to the secular humanities classroom—and in the present work, I offer soulmaking to the world at large.
No matter who you are or what you do, if you’re drawn to the dreamy side of life and you long to create a better world, you have genius within you that demands to be brought forth. It is not too weird, too useless, or too fluffy to go about the labor of transmuting your suffering to ecstasy.
...The soul will have its way with us, whether we will it or not. Our resistances to the process of undergoing deep adventure are just our fear and clinging to the surface stabilities of life.
If you’re clinging to the surface, if you’re afraid and tired and empty and see no lightning bolts of passion in your life, it is possible that you can liberate yourself and those around you by taking up the tools and processes this book offers.
This world, as the poet John Keats told us, is not a vale of tears. It’s a vale of soulmaking: a place to flame the little sparks of divinity that we are into roaring fires capable of our own unique bliss. Keats suggested that we make our souls by learning to read the terrors of the world through the expansive wisdom of our hearts. This process is an inevitable one—it can happen very slowly, over a mil- lion lifetimes, or it can happen right now, in this one, if the work is undertaken.
"How charming. is divine Philosophy
Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose
But musical as is Apollo's lute"
The Gift World as the Point of Creativity
What is the gift world? It’s a subjective experience of life in which your genius is fully supported and welcomed in its expression, and in which your needs and authentic preferences are joyously met by a provident universe.
Interestingly, the subjective experience of the gift world is brought about when you put your creative power to work in the project of fully supporting the genius of yourself and others through undertak- ing the mythic journey, and when you seek to joyously fulfill the preferences of others in a manner that delights you.
So the gift world is a bit of a paradox. It’s a subjective experience of life that comes about in part through your making it objectively real for others via your offering of your gifts. No one can be forced to enter the experience of the gift world, since participation in it requires deliberate action, but everyone can be invited to it via generosity, kindness, and the sense of sublime wonder (i.e., awesomeness) that our genius manifests through her work. Another way of thinking about the gift world is that it’s a world that is completely ensouled, a world where connection, love, warmth, and joy are everyone’s dominant experiences.
http://www.realitysandwich.com/enter...ey_making_soul
Reply With Quote
Originally posted by norman
Bookmarks