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, Yeats observed, when we choose to attempt “the
hardest thing among those not impossible.” Jung put it even more bluntly in Memories, Dreams, Reflections: “A creative person has little power over his own life. He is not free. He is captive and driven by his daimon.”
In an important and difficult essay, Yeats suggests that we can develop a co-creative relationships with minds operating in other times or
other dimensions. He gave this essay a Latin title borrowed from Virgil, Per Amica Silentia Lunae ("Through the Friendly Silence of the Moon"). Here he describes how, when he was passionately engaged in certain esoteric studies - of alchemy, of Kabbalah - previously unknown resources were given to him as if by hidden hands. When he speaks of "fellow-scholars" (in the first line of the excerpt) he is talking about minds he felt reaching to him across time, from other dimensions, called by mutual affinity.
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.
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, Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Mythologies
(New York: Macmillan, 1959) 345-6.
Picture: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss
Picture: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss
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