The passions of the soul work magic

 

The passions of the soul work magic. This observation, attributed to Albertus Magnus (and loved by Jung) is practical counsel for living fully and creatively.

Our passions can lead us into madness. They can also give us the creative edge to do our best and most original work and the magnetism that generates extraordinary opportunities and serendipity.

The stronger the emotion, the stronger the effect on our psychic and physical environment. This may reach much further, in our nonlocal universe, that we can initially understand. It can generate a convergence of incidents and energies, for good or bad, in ways that change everything in our lives and can affect the lives of many others.

The great French novelist Honoré de Balzac, who knew a great deal about these things, write that  “ideas are projected as a direct result of the force by which they are conceived and they strike wherever the brain sends them by a mathematical law comparable to that which directs the firing of shells from their mortars.”

There are two conditions for working positive magic with the passions of the soul.

The first is that we must choose to take the primal, pulsing energy of our strongest passions and direct it towards a creative goal. The passion that is throbbing and surging inside us may be love or lust (or both), the fierce desire to give birth or the desperate wish to end it all. The passion may be wild rage or terrible grief. Whatever its origin, the strongest passions of the soul produce the energy to remake our world – if we choose to direct that energy. Imagine a vast body of pent-up water, engorged by a pounding thunderstorm, that is going to burst through a dam with irresistible power. We can choose to harness that force, turning into hydroelectric power that can light our city and warm our homes. Or we can let it swamp everyone and everything in its path, bringing misery and devastation.

The second requirement for letting the passions of the soul work magic is that we must seize the moment when they are running strongest and give ourselves completely to acting in the power of that moment. The time is always Now; but when the passions of the soul are at work the time is also GO. 

I know this as a writer. Often my best work is done when I am in a state of great turmoil, when my passions are running strong but my heart and mind are also conflicted. Such moments give us an edge. I know, from experience, that my best and most original work can come through now – if I use that edge and make myself available to the work any time it is coming through. In these states, like Balzac, I often write for fifteen hours a day, fueled only by coffee, and sleep only a couple of hours out of the 24 – and stream into joy, the joy we all know when we are in the zone whatever our field of endeavor, and are giving our best.

Balzac was a master in his literary depiction of the workings of passion and desire. He understood the fundamental unity of mind and matter, and that there is a law of spiritual gravitation as well as a law of physical gravitation. His view of reality - and his prodigious literary production - were driven by a vitalist belief in the power of will and imagination. His early novel Louis Lambert is a tale of the strange life of a young explorer in consciousness who is awakened by a precognitive dream to the fact that the world is much deeper than can be explained by the reason and Newtonian physics. He comes to believe that man can become a creator by concentrating a whole reality - even an entire world - inside himself, re-visioning it, and then projecting the new image to fill his environment. But he comes unstuck and unhinged because he can’t ground his understanding in the physical world.

   The Balzacian hero is a man of desire and imagination who must also ground his passions in the body, in healthy sex, in social engagement with the world - or else  go mad.

    Balzac's version of what becomes possible through exercising the passions of the soul is wonderful. Acts of mind, fueled by passion, abolish time and space. “To desire is immediately to be where one desires to be, instantaneously to be what one desires to be." Time is devoured by the moment; space is absorbed by the point. “For the man in such a state, distances and material objects do not exist, or are traversed by a life within us.”

     What kind of desire makes these things possible? “A desire is a fact entirely accomplished in our will before being accomplished externally.”

     The passion that works magic is "the will gathered to one point" so that "man can bring to bear his whole vitality."

     The man who carries a great desire is surrounded by a certain “atmosphere”, a “magnetic fluid” that moves in waves, like sound and light, and touches others. He produces “a contagion of feelings”.

    Passion of this kind magnifies sensory abilities; we can see and hear and sense things vividly across distance. Women, says Balzac, are especially good at this. Watch out for a woman whose passions are high, because she can see and sense things at a distance very clearly.

     Coincidences multiply around such a person, because things now happen through “sympathies which do not recognize the laws of space”.

Text adapted from The Three "Only" Things by Robert Moss. Puiblished by New World Library.

Photo: RM with Balzac's doppelganger at MOMA in New York City

 

Your Own Will Come To You: Spiritual Gravitation

 

 "Man attracts spirits according to his own temperament," as William Butler Yeats observed. To "the sanguine, the spirits of fire, and the lymphatic, those of watery nature, and those of a mixed nature, mixed spirits." While observing that like attracts like, Yeats was also fascinated by the way that opposites may be drawn together, to complement and complete each other, and to spark that creative friction that brings new things into being.  

 Yeats' friend, the Celtic visionary artist George William Russell (whose pen name was "Æ") defined the key principle at work here as "spiritual gravitation", and described how it spills over into the play of synchronicity or objective chance. 

Your own will come to you. 

Æ summarized the law of spiritual gravitation in this phrase.  I find this a vital practical truth. He also wrote: 

I found that every intense imagination, every new adventure of the intellect [is] endowed with magnetic power to attract to it its own kin. Will and desire were as the enchanter’s wand of fable, and they drew to themselves their own affinities. ..One person after another emerged out of the mass, betraying their close affinity to my moods as they were engendered. 

In our lives, this plays out through chance encounters, through the dreamlike symbolism of daily events, when we turn up the right message in a book opened at random or left open by someone else on a library table. If the passions of our souls are strong enough, they may draw “lifelong comrades”.

In his beautiful little book The Candle of Vision, Æ gave a personal example. When he first attempted to write verse, he immediately met a new friend, a dreaming boy “whose voice was soon to be the most beautiful voice in Irish literature” This was of course William Butler Yeats. “The concurrence of our personalities seemed mysterious and controlled by some law of spiritual gravitation.”

In his later life, Æ found a soul companion in the Australian writer P.L.Travers, the author of Mary Poppins and also a deep student of the Western Mysteries and a world-class mythographer.  AE wrote to P.L.Travers about a further aspect of spiritual gravitation: “I feel I belong to a spiritual clan whose members are scattered all over the world and these are my kinsmen.”

By the way, it deserves to be better-known that the inspiration for P.L. Travers'  idea that Mary Poppins came from a star was the author’s childhood vision of her dead father transforming into a star. Another case of spiritual gravitation, working beyond the apparent barrier of death.

 

The Magnet in the Book

Sometimes, beyond the play of the shelf elves who make books and papers appear and disappear, I sense other minds and other hands. In the early hours one morning, I found my copy of Yeats' Autobiography off its shelf, on a table where I had not placed it. There was no occult reason for this; it had been moved, with a small pile of other books relating to the poet, as part of a house cleaning.

I accepted the invitation to revisit Yeats' life through his words. Opening the book at random, I found myself reading a lively chapter on his mixed relations with Æ. 

Later that morning, I opened another book in that pile. It is a collection of occasional pieces, mostly literary and art criticism, by Æ, titled The Living Torch and published by Macmillan in 1938, that I found in a used book store near Mount Vernon in Washington State a couple of years ago. I had placed it in my forest of books without examining it closely.

This was evident, because when I opened The Living Torch at random, I found five loose pages hidden inside the book. They are written a fine lady's hand from an earlier time. They are fair copies of five of Æ's poems. The lady who made these copies was meticulous. She noted the publication date (1926) of the edition of Æ's Collected Poems from which she borrowed the lines she copied, and the number of the pages where these poems may be found.

I sat very still as I read the poem on the top page. It is titled "Magnet" and it begins as follows:

I had sweet company
Because I sought out none
But took who came to me,
All by the magnet drawn.

For me, in the final stage of completing a book on the workings of synchronicity, this was quite, quiet perfect. Within the past week, I had actually borrowed a line from A Candle of Vision as a section title in my own book: "Your own will come to you." It develops the idea that we draw people and situations to us magnetically, through the energy that is with us. I did not know that Æ had written a poem on this theme until just now.

The later part of his poem, I must note, develops a darker tone. It seems that Æ (described by Yeats as first and last a "religious teacher") is reflecting, ruefully, on an affair of the heart which tempted him to set aside the austere spiritual discipline he imposed on himself. I wonder whether, in her secret heart, the unknown copyist was stirred by her recognition of herself in a similar drama to make "Magnet" her own, by putting it in her own hand.

Art: Æ, "The Bathers"