Thinking takes courage if it is our aim to think ideals into real deeds.
Courage must be found to confront with the real, abstractions and things estranged from reality, to set against them full reality and therewith the spiritual reality. http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/AncientMyths/19180108p01.html
The exercise of thinking the way someone else thinks is a very worthwhile up-building practice that enables us to visit other mansions in the house of ideas. Tom’s work with Human and Cosmic Thought is a great way to discover whose shoulders we may be rubbing up against in the dark. When a flashlight clicks on, we are lit up for a moment where time stops as we see ourselves anew. But who switched on the light and where are they now we are blinking and rubbing our eyes? Does it matter who threw the thought we caught?
Without the aid of prejudice and custom I should not be able to find my way across the room. -- William Hazlitt
So we have received from some primeval benefactor this wonderful gadget called thinking. Now what does it do if we leave it to do its own thing? What can we do with it once we have got the hang of how it operates?
We can create a new world in our heads and think it into active deeds that build us all a New Jerusalem. We may think that our contribution is small, and we can think that it is needed. But no matter how sub-atomic or unnoticed we experience our thinking to be it is a collaboration with other thinkers. Some folk, such as Carl, have a clear recognition of the faces of the thinkers of yesteryear who rooted the thoughts that flower in our enlightenment. There are also others who have no faces, who will write no books, who breathe spirit-life and purpose into thinking not our own. Are these Inhabitants of the Realm of Ideals our friends? Are they the wise teachers of the New Jerusalem? Maybe they are tricksters, spiritual property developers raising buildings that they have no intention of using themselves. Are they the architects of the New Babel?
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent.
-- William Blake
Blake was an interesting craftsman artist working tirelessly at the forefront of the technology of his day. He was not known for his sociability yet he created a monumental legacy of an imaginative cosmos through enlightened imaginative thinking.
In Century 21 our tasks are to bring to birth the new within the mansions of the past and to build new mansions that will devour the redundant ones.
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?
And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?
What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?
When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?
-- William Blake (Songs of Experience, 1794)
“To understand "The Tyger" fully, you need to know Blake's symbols. One of the central themes in his major works is that of the Creator as a blacksmith. This is both God the Creator (personified in Blake's myth as Los) and Blake himself (again with Los as his alter-ego.) Blake identified God's creative process with the work of an artist. And it is art that brings creation to its fulfilment -- by showing the world as it is, by sharpening perception, by giving form to ideas.
“Blake's story of creation differs from the Genesis account. The familiar world was created only after a cosmic catastrophe. When the life of the spirit was reduced to a sea of atoms, the Creator set a limit below which it could not deteriorate farther, and began creating the world of nature. The longer books that Blake wrote describe Los's creation of animals and people within the world of nature. One particularly powerful passage in "Milton" describes Los's family weaving the bodies of each unborn child.
[…] “Blake's Jesus liberates people, though by providing visions rather than focusing on political activism.”
-- Friedlander ER (1999) Enjoying "The Tyger" by William Blake. Retrieved from http://www.pathguy.com/tyger.htm
So let us weave the body of the Tyger, atom by atom, and may it turn round and devour us. Who wants to join the spirited celebrations in the belly of the Tyger?
Leaf by Niggle
Hi John,
Here is another piece of synchronicity... two days ago I found a copy of a little story by J. R. R. Tolkien called "Leaf by Niggle".
It's easier if you've read it, but if not here's a brief synopsis:
Niggle is a painter who has dreams of painting "big" pictures but he's best at painting individual leaves - he has to work really hard to draw bigger landscapes with trees in them. But he's always working at it.
He has a neighbour who is lame and is always asking for help, thus drawing Niggle away from his life's work. His neighbour thinks all Niggle's paintings are rubbish and doesn't even bother looking at them.
Niggle dies leaving his "big" picture unfinished after helping his neighbour one last time - very grumpily and reluctantly - by trying to go and fetch the doctor for his neighbour's wife in the middle of a big storm. Niggle is soaked to the bone and takes to bed when he gets home and never gets up again.
Anyway, the really nice bit of the story is that Niggle has to go through a kind of Purgatory experience for a while (Tolkien was a Catholic so that is expected of course :-) but then he is taken by train to a beautiful valley. After walking around it for a while Niggle realises it is the valley he had always striven in vain to paint while alive.
Then Niggle starts to think about his neighbour and has a yearning to have his neighbour there, who has now also died. The neighbour turns up eventually, rather perplexed, and then the two of them realise that a house needs to be built.
They work together building the house - very happily - for a long period, then eventually they develop two different yearnings - Niggle desires to go and explore the distant mountains which were always part of his painting, and his neighbour realises that he wants to stay in his house and share it with his wife, who turns up soon after. So Niggle and his neighbour part, and his neighbour thanks him because he realises that none of this would have been possible if not for Niggle and his creative striving on the earth.
There's a little bit more at the end back on earth but that's the core of the story - a little bit twee perhaps but I think it's relevant to what you're calling us to here.
Blake of course was a kind of a "Niggle" in that he did not receive much recognition and was thought a madman by manyof his associates in his lifetime. But subsequent generations have realised the value of his work. He also was a talented painter but literally restricted in that his initial training was in engraving tiny pictures for printed works - some have commented that his painterly talent might have been better suited to painting large oil canvasses or similar, but that was not his destiny I guess.
Jerusalem - William Blake
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.
I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.
Riding the Unicorn
I have seen an imagination where each human soul learns to ride the unicorn through practising transcendent love. It is not quite the same as being eaten by a tyger of one’s own production (Valdi – that word is especially meaningful for you) yet it speaks of the same anthroposophical path.
Gendlin suggests a starting point that feels really close to the place that Tom is unfolding with his current inspirations for PoF. Do check out Jeffrey’s reference links to http://www.focusing.org (only a single s folks).
Steiner concludes a lecture recently commended by Caryn: Today mankind is burdened with the karma of the dream life of the past centuries. This mystery must first be grasped in its depths; then it will be easier to understand our sorrowful present and also to understand how humanity must gradually prepare a different karma for the future. http://wn.rsarchive.org/Lectures/InnerImpul/19161001p01.html
I warmly recommend that the previous four paragraphs about the Isis cult are also read. This manifests the link to the Sophia… Oh go on, sit down with your favourite beverage and read the whole lecture!
Here is a poem written 14 years ago called The Presence:
A moment of becoming –
Each soft touch
Tells a new tale of living –
Lays bare a look
Forever remembered.
This is a time
When hands are too brutal,
Smudging the still warm snowflake image.
Only the heart may
Shape the future now.