The mingling of minds and the creative daimon

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. 

– W.B.Yeats, Per Amica Silentia Lunae in Mythologies (New York: Macmillan, 1959) 345-6.


Picture: "Yeats in the Magic Cottage" by Robert Moss

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 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 the Irish mystic, artist and writer George Russell, who used "A.E." as his pen name.
    This morning, I opened another book in that pile. It is a collection of occasional pieces, mostly literary and art criticism, by A.E., 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 A.E.'s poems. The lady who made these copies was meticulous. She noted the publication date (1926) of the edition of A.E.'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.E. (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 A.E. 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 A.E. (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.

Better for your engine to blow on the ground than in the air (and the reward may be sex with the Infinite)

En route to Istanbul

The four-hour wait at Newark airport for my second flight to Istanbul, the long one, was not so bad. The educated, quietly humorous man from Galway on the seat next to me at the airport bar had a fine way with words. He described someone who gave fake smiles as "looking like he had a coat hanger stuck in his mouth."
    We boarded the 767 on time and I was delighted to find that I had more legroom than I had ever enjoyed on a plane, even in first-class. I helped the woman who took the seat next to me with her bag, and commented on our luck. But her mind was somewhere else. She started complaining that she could not see the screen where she could watch her personal choice of movies, and this was not okay. "I paid for this seat," she snapped at an airline person, 'and I can't get through the flight without movies."
    She calmed a little when she was shown how to extract the screen that had been fitted into the arm of her seat. It seemed that our legroom was due to the fact that we were seated in what was once an exit row. The exit was gone, but not the other features - no fold-down table, but all that space.
    I could not resist teasing my rowmate a little over losing her cool when in fact the world and those around her were treating her notably well. She spoke of the stress she'd been under. I gently observed that the universe responds to the attitudes we project, so we want to check those attitudes and choose where we put our energy. I said, "This is one of the things I help people to see." She turned a bit chilly, but a few minutes later she asked me to explain what I do. I told her, "I help people to be choosers in life." She allowed that she basically agreed with what I had said about choosing our attitudes; she practiced meditation and had studied with Zen teachers and others.
    "Our personal truth," I said, "is what we remember and act upon."
    She readily agreed. She was now eager to talk about everything from our favorite books to how she could improve her dream recall, to methods of conflict resolution, about which she proved to be highly knowledgeable. I started to look forward to an interesting conversation.
    Our big plane taxied down the runway. Then there was a pop like the cork coming out of a bottle of champagne, except that this was no cause for celebration. The lights went out, the AC died, and the plane came to a total and silent stop on the tarmac.
    As the heat rose and the cabin turned into a sweat lodge, there was precious little information. We were finally informed that the auxiliary engine had crashed. It controls all the electrics on the plane, including AC and ignition. Maintenance were coming to make a report. They would have the plane towed back to the gate where they could hook up some power and give us back lights and AC. My rowmate was resourceful. She used a miniature flashlight to get to and from the restroom without incident.
    Next problem. When we were pulled up to the jetway, it was found that it wasn't working properly. So, no lights and no AC. They brought up a truck to deliver AC, but all that produced was the warm heavy air that makes you feel you are under damp laundry.
    By the time I had lost two pounds in sweat, they told us we would have to deplane because the auxiliary engine could not be fixed that night. As we disembarked, I heard this exchange between two airline personnel, "What are they going to do now?" "No idea." Not confidence raising.
    As we milled around in the gate area, waiting to see whether we would be given another plane or be re-booked and made to stay in airline motels overnight, a fellow from my flight started talking loudly about how we would not be able to leave because of FAA "time out" regulations, which limit the number of hours airline crew can work. "Excuse me," I hailed him. "Could you put all that eloquence and imagination into talking about how magic will happen and we will get another plane tonight?"
    He turned out to be a sport. After only a moment's reflection, he declared vehemently, "They are doing magic. They got us a new plane and we will take off tonight."
     He shrugged, not sure about what he had just done. Then he rushed back to the boarding gate to check. He shouted, jubilantly, "They did it! They've announced we will now depart at 9:45."
    "You did it," I said. "You are a magician. You just changed the world."
    There were a few more cliffhangers. They got us boarded just before the time window closed. Now my previous rowmate and I were back in what appeared to be the same seats, the ones with impossible legroom. The new 767 seemed identical to the one we were on before. Had we simply jumped event tracks?
    Our conversation quickly became rich and often wildly funny and deeper than the ordinary world. We talked about magical realist fiction, about how the Ottomans gave sanctuary to the Marranos when they were expelled from Spain, about soul loss and the shaman Rx for it. My rowmate turned out to be a very smart and gifted woman, doing good work all over the map to resolve conflict and promote community healing. She had explored many paths in consciousness. Her Jewish tradition had led her to study with rabbis, like David Cooper and Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, who have explored Eastern and mystical paths and sought to marry the findings of neuroscience to the understanding of how the mind works to interpret larger realities.
     I found myself marshaling my own (limited) knowledge of Kabbalah and Judaic mysticism. We were soon talking about Schachter-Shalomi's "Dream Assembly", stories of the Baal Shem Tov, of Abulafia and Aryeh Kaplan. She spoke with passion and knowledge about the importance of toning in Jewish mystical practice, and did not stop there. She started toning the YHVH, which is not only the Hebrew name for God but - in some versions of Kabbalistic tradition - the secret code of the universe, the key to making or unmaking worlds.
   "Hold on," I half-joked. "You don't want to un-make the world by mistake."
   "Oh, this is such great stuff. You do this for long enough, and it's like having sex with the Infinite."
    She started toning again. It was now 1:30 a.m. back on the East Coast. A woman on the far side of the cabin yelled across the sleepers nested under their airline blankets. "Stop the talking over there! It's enough already."
    I have never heard anyone yell across an airplane for people to stop talking. I noted the distinctively Yiddish turn of phrase, "enough, already." Now whispering with my rowmate, I speculated that the protester had been mobilized by the content, more than the volume of our conversation. "Maybe she has a point. This is high-explosive stuff. We don't want to blow up anything else tonight."
    Then I was struck by an amazing life rhyme, echoing across 17 years. At the end of 1996, I entered a series of extraordinary inner dialogues and visionary travels with a guide who started talking to me in the liminal state between waking and sleep. In my book Dreamgates, where I record some of these episodes, I call him, half-jokingly, "G2". He seemed to speak with profound knowledge of a Western Mystery Order that incorporated some elements of Kabbalah. He introduced himself by telling me that we needed to begin our study sessions with the correct toning of the Tetragrammaton - an esoteric name for the four letters YHVH - including the hidden vowels. 

I have had great conversations through "chance" encounters on planes, often mediated by screw-ups like lost connections. I opened my book The Three "Only" Things with five narratives of this kind. The conversation on my redeye flight to Istanbul is up there with the greatest of these encounters. How often have you heard someone tone the YHVH and talk about "sex with the Infinite" on a plane?
    Now I am thinking about time loops and reverse causation. Did the engine crash because of what happened later? Now that would be an interesting story idea.
    

Taksim street car (c) Robert Moss

What are you doing?

Madison, Wisconsin

"What are you doing?"
     A woman in my Madison workshop told me she hears this question, put by an inner voice, many times a day. Sometimes it rattles her and saps her confidence. But she readily agreed that this may be a salutary question for us to put to ourselves, in the midst of any activity, or inactivity.
    It helps us to see our situation from the standpoint of an observer.
    What we look at what we are doing or not doing from this perspective, we are able to get a clearer view of what use we are making of our time and energy and our skills. Most important, we may now be able to recognize what we are attracting or driving away through our behavior and even our thoughts.
     This has to do with the law of attraction (though I can hardly use that phase since the travesty of The Secret), which I sometimes like to call spiritual magnetism. We draw different events and energies towards us, or send them away, according to our actions and our intentions. With our thoughts and fantasies, even before action, we grow dreams of life, and then walk into those dreams in the physical world. What we feed our minds and our bodies attracts or repels different parts of ourselves as well as different classes of spirits.
     I have noticed in my own life as a writer that when I am seeking to create something new, and taking the risks involved, I draw the interest of greater powers. More of my own creative spirit becomes engaged, lending me abilities beyond those I possess when I am doing something small and safe or quite absent from the larger venture. I notice this as a teacher and healer. When I am willing to give more to others, to do my very best to bring the light or spirit into their eyes or to wrap them in the healing embrace of Great Mother Bear, I draw powers far beyond my ordinary self – and now it can be very important to let the ordinary self stand aside while a Greater Self operates.
      I don’t want to sound too solemn about all of this. I find I do much better, and that those around me feel better too, when I approach life’s assignments in a spirit of play.
     What are you doing? says that persistent inner voice.
     I’m having a little fun, playing with an old and ever renewing idea. Glad you asked.

Image: "Dream Path II" by Dorothy Englander.