Yeats on the Daimon and the Mingling of Minds

 

When we are passionately engaged in a creative venture - love, art or something else that is really worthwhile - we draw support from other minds and other beings, seen and unseen. According to the direction of our will and desire, and the depth of our work, those minds may include masters from other times and other beings. - We draw greater support the greater the challenges involved in our venture. Great spirits love great challenges.

Whether we are aware of it or not, all our life choices are witnessed by the larger self that Yeats called the daimon. The daimon lends or withholds its immense energy from our lives according to whether we choose the big agenda or the little one. The daimon is bored by our everyday vacillations and compromises and detests us when we choose against the grand passion and the Life Work, the soul's purpose. The daimon loves us best when we choose to attempt “the hardest thing among those not impossible.”

There is a passage in Yeats’s essay Per Amica Silentia Lunae (“The Friendly Silence of the Moon”) that may explain how we can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times or other dimensions. It should be understood that when Yeats refers (in the first line) to "fellow-scholars" he is not thinking about people of his own time, but minds that are working and reaching out from beyond time and space: 

I had fellow-scholars, and now it was I and now they who made some discovery. Before the mind’s eye, whether in sleep or waking, came images that one was to discover presently in some book one had never read, and after looking in vain for explanation to the current theory of forgotten personal memory, I came to believe in a Great Memory passing on from generation to generation. But that was not enough, for these images showed intention and choice. They had a relation to what one knew and yet were an extension of one’s knowledge. If no mind was there, why should I suddenly come upon salt and antimony, upon the liquefaction of gold, as they were understood by the alchemists, or upon some detail of cabbalistic symbolism verified at last by a learned scholar from his never-published manuscripts, and who can have put it together so ingeniously?...The thought was again and again before me that this study had created a contact or mingling with minds who had followed a like study in some other age, and that these minds still saw and thought and chose. 

– W.B.Yeats, Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959) pp. 345-6.

 

 Drawing: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss. From a vision.

Breathe in, breathe out: be inspired and aspire

  

Inspiration is breathing in, as in inhalation. Drawing in the wind of creative spirit is like drawing breath down into the lungs. The Japanese speak of fu-in, "wind inspiration".

Aspiration is breathing upon, blowing, panting after something. To aspire is to send out the breath of soul.

Etymology, as in these examples, can be quite inspiring.

In his spiritual classic, The Quest of the Oversoul, Paul Brunton suggested that the optimal condition for inspiration is "self-forgetfulness through complete concentration." Inspiration is what we can breathe in when we clear the ordinary self and its preoccupations out of the passages, and open to something beyond all that clutter. This can lead to that blessed flow state we all aspire to, when we are awakened and conscious. It can be invited, but not programmed or controlled. As Brunton observed:

Man is capable of connected thought but not of connected inspiration. The genius who struggles to give birth to great things lives fitfully, warring sporadically with his own self, sometimes blocking and unconsciously interfering with the inspiration which woos him.

When we are truly inspired, we can become vehicles for fresh creation that comes to us whole and complete. Brunton maintained that "all inspired work is delivered to us whole and complete before even the first movement of hand or head has been made."

As a book writer, I must pause for a few deep breaths, because although I know exactly what this means in the inception of a new book, I also remember that bringing through what may be complete on some other level of reality may be a long and bumpy process, requiring perspiration as well as inspiration.

Aspiration, in contrast to inspiration, means sending out the breath of your wishes and yearnings. I think of how, when we still wrote letters the old-fashioned way, some of us might breathe on the envelope to send love to a loved one or in the hope that our missive would bring happy results.

I am cheered by Brunton's confidence that when we truly aspire, we mobilize a response from invisible helpers:

To send out repeatedly into the universe a silent or vocal call, desire or yearning for spiritual truth, peace or guidance is to set stirring into action certain intelligent forces that exist in the universe and that ultimately respond, in exact proportion to the degree of intensity of the aspiration. The universe is not a blindly working machine, but a garment worn by a hierarchy of conscious intelligent beings.

Action plan, for any day: breathe in, breathe out, and be conscious of what you are calling in and sending out.

Graphic: "Mountain Breath" by RM with AI assistance

When Great Owl gave an author the breath of creation

Jeffrey Eugenides' novel Middlesex is a triumph of creative empathy. It accomplishes what the best novels do, which is to expand our humanity by transporting us inside the lives and perspectives of others. It also shows us how we can do this for ourselves, by using active imagination to enter the lives of ancestors or the body of a person of a different gender, even a gender not commonly recognized.
     So I was delighted, though not surprised, to find Eugenides' revelation that it was a dream, simple but shockingly direct and numinous, that gave him the power to finish Middlesex. He was living in Berlin at the time, struggling to keep food on the table through a modest fellowship, often sleep-deprived because of an infant child, drinking a good deal of German beer in an effort to loosen up.
     He was seized by a dream. His entire dream report reads as follows:

An owl, descended out of nowhere, seized me in its talons and blew into my mouth a single breath tasting of blood. 

The one-sentence report describes a dream that lasted (he says) all of four or five seconds. Yet he sensed that the owl's visitation "originated not from my mind at all but from a source outside of me". The owl was gigantic, "and not particularly realistic". Its plumage reminded him of paintings by Klimt, with lozenges of color running up and down the wings and over the  breast, and "a large helmeted ceremonial head".
    The owl's eyes were fierce and bright yellow. When the owl dipped its beak to Eugenides' lips, he opened his mouth, unresisting. The owl exhaled one long forceful breath. With a whoosh, his lungs inflated. This inspiration had a taste: "the mineral, meaty flavor of a predatory diet".
    The writer awakened with the deep knowing that a power had been conveyed to him from a greater source: "the great Owl in the Sky had taken a personal interest in me and my book. The owl had come to give me the power to write."

Art: René Magritte, "The Companions of Fear"(1942)

Brigid's flame

I dreamed overnight that I found and posted six images and blessings of Brigid beyond what I offered here in my last post. I just composed one more:

Brigid's Flame

May the radiance of her blue mantle
surround you and protect you
May you burn with her fires:
fire of seership,
fire of craft,
fire of inspiration,
fire of healing,
fire of transformation
fire of heart.
May you always stand ready
to wrest the killing irons
from evildoers and oppressors
and to take up the Sword of Light
in defense of the weak and the just
May you always be a lover of poets
and commit poetry every day.

- Robert Moss, Imbolc 2020

Icon of Brigid

One of the most powerful experiences of my life at a place of worship was at Solas Bhride in County Kildare, where the eternal flame of She who is both Goddess and Saint, joining the old religion and a newer one, is kept burning. She rose from her icon, suffusing the whole space with the blue aura of her robe. She plucked the sword from under her feet and held it up. She said, with blazing eyes, "I have kept the sword here not only to deny it to killers and evildoers but to offer it to those I call to be warriors for the Light." How can I not love a Goddess who born at a threshold in the fire of sunrise and is patron of those who work with the fires of metalwork and healing and poetic inspiration?

Ganesha’s Tusk

As many as are the aeons, so are the ways in which Ganesha's story is told.

      - Shiva Purana

How do you get a god to write down your stories?

   It is said, Lord Ganesha, that you agreed to take dictation from the sage Vyasa after he set his mind on you in deep meditation.
   Did you agree because you knew that what was coming was a thing of epic proportions? Or did you suppose it would be something short, a poem to pleasure a goddess floating in a lotus pool?
   Were you persuaded because the declared aim of the Mahabharata is to turn human minds away from war, to demoralize demons and soothe angry nagas? Or were you eager to binge on action movies, with the clash of armor, the delight of rounded dancing bodies, the tricks of war magicians?
    When we think of inspired writing, we picture the human with pen or laptop as the one with the tiring fingers and aching buttocks, and the god – or muse – as a refined being fluttering overhead, whispering lines.
    Here the situation is reversed. The human inspires, the god takes it down.
    There was a deal, and a deception.
    You made it your condition that Vyasa must never pause in his recitation. He must deliver the whole epic, verse by verse, all the way to the end. No room for hesitation or contemplation or even a snack or a pit stop.
    He agreed, but then he tricked you. He requested that you should only record his lines when you had grasped their meaning. Being a god, you thought this was a meaningless condition; how could you fail to understand the mouthings of a mortal?
     Vyasa was subtle. When he needed a break, he gave you verses so exquisitely complex and opaque that you had to stay your hand until you figured them out. Sometimes this required you to survey a hundred worlds in the knots of Indra’s net.
     So Vyasa never lost his thread.
     He went on so long that your tools were exhausted.. When the last feather pen snapped in your fist, he was still singing the doings of gods and demons, ascetic kings and lascivious maidens. You kept your side of the deal. You broke off a tusk to write down the last lines.
     So tell me, Ganesha. How do I call a god to write my story? Must I allow my hand to be your hand? Must I sacrifice something as precious as your ivory tusk to complete the work?
     I bring you sweet cakes and ripe fruits. They say your mother Parvati molded your body from sandalwood paste. I am dabbing sandalwood oil over my collarbones, and at my third eye. If I become you, Divine Scribe, then whose mind will dictate what I record with my hand?

Image: Bronze Ganesha holding his tusk in RM private collection

In the treasure cave

On the shortest day of the year, I am down in my creative Cave, once more engaged in reading, transcribing and harvesting from my journals over many decades. There are fantastic dramas here, mythic trouble (and delight) and tremendous trans-temporal adventures in which sometimes I enter the situation of my counterparts in other times, and sometimes they join me in mine. We bring each other gifts and challenges, allies and adversaries from other times and other worlds.
     When I read a report of a dream or vision recorded long ago, it comes alive and I am often able to reenter it fully, and make sense of its nature and context with the benefit of what I have learned. Thus I am able to track continuous lives, being lived by my parallel and counterpart selves in other realities, remembered and recorded as dreams. From the viewpoint of those parallel selves, my life in ordinary reality is the dream, or the ghost trail.
     I feel sympathy and compassion as I monitor how younger Roberts tried to make sense of all this while lacking any really helpful mentor in this reality, and how they struggled to keep body and soul together on the roads of this world. I wonder, as I consider how “past” and “future” aspects of myself looked in on each other and sent each other mental texts, whether my present acts of observation are changing things in, say, 1987-1988.
     That thought quickens my interest in those journals that aren’t really old. I am in a treasure cave. But as in the Indiana Jones type of adventure where the floor gives way and the roof starts to fall when you touch a precious object, there are rather strict limits to how long I can safely remain in the cave, and how much I can bring out, on each visit. So I move softly and slowly, tiptoeing around the floor in a kind of hopscotch rather than plodding up and down, taking a little from the chest over there, then something from the one on the other side. A raven’s feather, an ancient treatise on the imagining spirit, a Celtic cloak pin, a flying carpet.

Solstice blessings!

Photo of Deinkuyu from buzzworthy.com

Beethoven practices dream reentry

Dream reentry is one of the core techniques of Active Dreaming. We use a remembered dream as the portal for a conscious journey. This may be undertaken in reverie or in the shaman's way, with the aid of drumming. The principle is simple. If you have been somewhere in a dream, you can go there again, just as you might revisit a place in the ordinary world.
    Why would you want to do this? Maybe there was something fearful or challenging in a dream, and you know it is time to face that issue and seek to resolve it on the ground where it presented itself. Maybe there was someone in the dream - a departed loved one or a possible inner guide - with whom you would like to have sustained conversation. Maybe there is romance and adventure you would like to continue, or a mystery to be resolved. Maybe you want more information. Perhaps there is treasure in the dream, a creative discovery that you did not manage to bring into waking memory but which you sense may still be there, on the other side of the doorway.
    Beethoven reentered a dream to bring back some music his dream self had composed, but which eluded his waking memory.
    He recounted the episode in a letter from Baden dated September 10, 1821, to his friend Tobias Haslinger, to whom he dedicated the canon.*

Best of friends,

When I was in my carriage yesterday, on the way to Vienna, sleep overpowered me, the more so as I had scarcely ever had a good night's sleep (because of my early rising here). Now, as I was slumbering, I dreamed that I was travelling far away, no less far than Syria, no less far than India and back again; to Arabia, too, and at last I came even to Jerusalem. The Holy City reminded me of the Holy Scriptures; no wonder, then, that I thought of the man Tobias, too, and naturally this led me my thinking also of our little Tobias...now, during my dream journey, the following canon occurred to me :

Yet I had hardly awoken when the canon was gone and I could not recall a single note or word of it to my mind. However, when on the next day I returned here, in the same carriage (that of a poor Austrian musician) and continued my dream journey, though now awake, lo and behold, in accordance with the law of the association of ideas, the same canon occurred to me; now, waking, I held it fast, as once Menelaus held Proteus, and only granted it one last favour, that of allowing it to transform itself into three voices.

Perhaps the rolling rhythm of the horse-drawn carriage, which had drawn him into sleep and creative dreaming on the outward journey, helped Beethoven reenter his dream in a lightly altered state of consciousness, to bring back the music.

* Canon, O Tobias, WoO 182

Source:  Michael Hamburger (trans) Beethoven, Letters, Journals and Conversations (London: Thames and Hudson, 1984) p.177.

I want my new book in my arms

For me, the genesis of a creative work is both tactile and magical. It involves the urgent desire to touch and caress, and the sense of bringing something into manifestation from the imaginal plane where it already exists. I want to share the feelings, keen as the desire for a perfect lover, that helped to bring one of my most adventurous books (Dreamgates) into my hands, and then into the hands of its readers.

The feeling comes in strong. I want to touch it, stroke it, leaf back and forth through the pages, linger over details of typesetting, the pleasure of rereading an especially felicitous passage. Stroking my previous books, reading over drafts, letters, journal entries, won’t hack it. I want the real thing, the finished thing, bound and sewn.

     I know it’s there.

I have known for quite a time (well over a year) that my new book already exists. This is confirmed when I go through my journal and commonplace book. A paragraph here — and here, and here — a page or two there, are leaves from the finished product. Sure, I have recorded them out of sequence and need to figure out how to shuffle them to match the pagination of the actual book. There are big gaps where material had been left out in transmission. But these are not drafts, despite garbles, typos, and screwups by the filing clerk in my brain. They are the book — the actual, finished book — coming through. 

     I think of a bronze by Ipoustéguy in a sculpture garden in Washington, D.C., that shows a man moving through a solid door. An arm is coming through, up to the elbow. A leg is jutting through, up to the knee. A face bulges round as a moon, penetrating the membrane that only impersonates a solid barrier. My book has been coming through like that.

     Now I want its whole body in my hands.

     I could pause and give myself a lecture on the laws of manifestation, of bringing things into the surface world from the imaginal realm in which they are born. But I am not in the mood for a dissertation on Platonic forms or the Mundus Imaginalis of the Persian philosophers.

     My need lives in my body — in my loins, in my gut, in my nerve endings. I want to cradle and caress, to touch and be touched.

     Can I write from this?

     I can do better. I can deliver.

     My naysayer has nothing to say. My brakeman can’t stop the train. (The brakeman lives in the logical mind, as anyone knows who remembers his Greek; phren, “logic,” is related to phrenon, which means “brakes” — and “damper.”) Coming through!

     You could call my condition relaxed attention, or attentive relaxation, as my fingers trip and skirl across the keyboard. I don’t mind what you call it. As the screen fills and refills, as pages spill from the printer, I am simply bringing a book from my dream library into my physical space, to enjoy it with all of my physical senses.

Text adapted from Dreamgates: Exploring the Worlds of Soul, Imagination and Life beyond Death by Robert Moss. Published by New World Library.

Photo at top: "Man Passing through Door" by Jean-Robert Ipoustéguy in the Hirshhorn Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.

You don't give a haircut to a lion

I spent the whole night, while my body slept, helping people to find and shape stories. With some, this meant helping them to find their voice, to speak in front of others, free of text, and to release their stories from the clutter of biography and explanation. First the adventure, later the discussion. With others, it meant getting the right words to line up together on a page. So many pages! Some beautiful creamy art paper, others veined like parchment, some ruled in composition books, others quite unruly.
    Some of the stories came from dreams. Some grew from the slightest wisp, the merest snippet from the night. Some were necklace stories, strung like bright beads on a string of incidents from the speaking land: the caw of that crow, the fall of that card, the vanity plate that read Camelot. Some were the work of literary privateers, given permission to steal a little from others. Some were inspired by shelf elves who arranged for a certain book to turn up or vanish at a creative moment.
   The unstoppable stories were the ones that had been seeking the teller for years, even a whole lifetime. I helped people shape these wild ones too, but only a little. You don’t give a haircut to a lion.

When I left my bed to walk my dog in the morning sunlight, I felt deeply satisfied, with the kind of satisfaction that comes when you have done a job that you chose to do as well as you can. Helping people find their best stories, and tell them so well that others want to hear them, is one of my greatest pleasures. And one of the greatest gifts of the Active Dreaming methods I have created is that we are forever encouraging each other to become both storytellers and story makers.

Lion Man on brown bag (c) Robert Moss

When Owl gave Jeffery Eugenides the breath of creation

Jeffery Eugenides' novel Middlesex is a triumph of creative empathy. It accomplishes what the best novels do, which is to expand our humanity by transporting us inside the lives and perspectives of others. It also shows us how we can do this for ourselves, by using active imagination to enter the lives of ancestors or the body of a person of a different gender, even a gender not commonly recognized.
     So I was delighted, though not surprised, to read Eugenides' revelation in a recent article that it was a dream, simple but shockingly direct and numinous, that gave him the power to finish Middlesex. He was living in Berlin at the time, struggling to keep food on the table through a modest fellowship, often sleep-deprived because of an infant child, drinking a good deal of German beer in an effort to loosen up.
     He was seized by a dream. His entire dream report reads as follows:

An owl, descended out of nowhere, seized me in its talons and blew into my mouth a single breath tasting of blood. 

The one-sentence report describes a dream that lasted (he says) all of four or five seconds. Yet he sensed that the owl's visitation "originated not from my mind at all but from a source outside of me". The owl was gigantic, "and not particularly realistic". Its plumage reminded him of paintings by Klimt, with lozenges of color running up and down the wings and over the  breast, and "a large helmeted ceremonial head". The owl's eyes were fierce and bright yellow. When the owl dipped its beak to Eugenides' lips, he opened his mouth, unresisting. The owl exhaled one long forceful breath. With a whoosh, his lungs inflated. This inspiration had a taste: "the mineral, meaty flavor of a predatory diet". 
    The writer awakened with the deep knowing that a power had been conveyed to him from a greater source: "the great Owl in the Sky had taken a personal interest in me and my book. The owl had come to give me the power to write."

Graphic: René Magritte, "The Companions of Fear" (1926)

Because

Snoqualmie Falls, photo by R.M.

She says, "I am here because
I got stuck in a garden hose."
He says, "I am here to free my ancestors
from the stories that bind them."
She says, "I am here to find my home star."
He says, "I am here because you showed me paradise
and then told me I could not stay with you forever."
I am here because peregrine falcons
love to live on the edge in the spray of the falls.


There are dreams you should not follow;
there are pictures you should let slip from your wall.
There are memories of the future you can change.
There is one dream you must follow
so you can say to your Death, next time he calls,
"I did not leave that undone.
I did not let my courage fail me.
I did not obstruct water when it should flow."


Time rushes towards you from the future
through the teeth of a savage god.
Don't freeze in the pie-shaped office,
don't leave your body in the pizza oven.
Jump down the hole to the secret of life
before the lion comes. Find an answering flame,
play with the young girls on the pier,
keep the lively dead on speed dial,
carry Midwest mermaids to water.
Mail love apples, juggle the twelve lights,
smell the burning when rain falls through red cedars.


- Mosswood Hollow, April 2012

Meeting my boy authors in the Dead Poets' Library

One of the places I love to go for creative inspiration is a Secret Library. The books are alive; open any one and you are magically transported into the realm for which it is a record and a key. Some of the books fly around on their own when not leashed to a long table or placed inside the fine mesh of bird cages of exquisite design.
     This is a place of dead poets who are very much alive. I have had many encounters with W.B.Yeats in the Secret Library. I was reckless enough to describe some of these in detail in my Dreamers' Book of the Dead on the principle well stated by Mark Twain (who is also no stranger to these premises) that "I don't want to hear about the Moon from someone who hasn't been there."
     The doors to the Secret Library open in dream, and through memory, and are oiled by the practice of going there and bringing back gifts and doing something creative with those gifts. I wrote the last phrase a little nervously, because I am aware I have yet to fulfill assignments given to me by the fiercest of the mentors I have ever encountered in my Secret Library.

I go up the stones steps and through the glass doors on a fine spring day when the fruit trees are in flower and the street is full of cheerful bicyclists in bright colors. I nod to the Librarian. I notice an unusual stir of activity in the lobby and the main reading room. These spaces are crowded with people, some familiar. I see Yeats in the distance, and Tolkien and C.S. Lewis with their pipes and pots of beer, and RLS romantically attired in Scottish dress. I see Jung, with a flash of kingfisher blue in the field around his three-piece woolen suit; and the bard with the silver brooch; and Borges in the corner, with a jeweler’s glass.
    I would love to consult with all of them. I'm not going to waste a second questioning whether they are real figures or figments of my imagination, as long as they can give me some good stuff, maybe the makings of a new book.
    But three boys block my way, clamoring for my attention. I would guess their ages as six, nine and twelve. They are very familiar. I have seen them in family photo albums, and in dreams.
    "What do you want?"
    "We've been telling you," says the six-year-old.
    "We've told you again and again, in dream after dream," says the twelve-year-old.
    "And you wouldn't listen," says nine-year-old Robert. Did I really have that many freckles when I was nine?

 "I’m listening now," I tell them. "What do you want?"

“I want a train,” says Six.

“I want toy soldiers,” says Nine

“I want girls, but not the yucky kind, and Nazis to fight,” says Twelve.

“I want a Bear,” says Six.

“I want a Lion,” says Nine.

“I want an Eagle,” says Twelve.

“I want my father,” says Six.

“I want my sister,” says Nine.

“I want the Mage of the Purple Mountain,” says Twelve.

They tell me, as a chorus: “You should listen to us much more than you do. We are the ones who can help you write the best book you have ever written, the one that everyone will want to read."
     I'm listening now.

The dream secret of Celtic inspiration

Awen - inspiration - was, as Caitlin Matthews reminds us, "the supreme preoccupation of Celtic poets, especially among those who had inherited the ancient prophetic and visionary arts of the ovate or faith - probably the earliest form of Celtic shaman." [1] The word awen derives from the Indo-European root -uel, meaning 'to blow', and is kissing cousin with the Welsh, awel meaning "breeze". In contemporary druidism, awen is depicted as three rays emanating from three points of light.

We have a precious twelfth-century account of the importance of dreaming in the access to awen for the ancient Celtic poets and prophets. The source is Gerald of Wales (Giraldus Cambrensis) in his Itinerary of Wales. Gerald describes the practice of the awenyddion, or "inspired ones". In a key passage, he writes:

Their gifts are usually conferred upon them in dreams, Some seem to have sweet milk or honey poured on their lips; to others [it seems] that a written document is applied to their mouths, and immediately on rising up from sleep, after completing their chant, they publicly declare that they have received this gift. [2]

1. Caitlin Matthews, "The Three Cauldrons of Inspiration" in Caitlin & John Matthews, The Encyclopaedia of Celtic Wisdom. Shaftesbury, Dorset and Rockport MA: Element, 1994, p. 219.

2. Translation from Gerald of Wales in Nikolai Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin. : Little, Brown, 1985, p. 140.