The Numberless Places of the Heart

 

With love, you can sing, you can paint, you can draw, you can sigh, but you can never capture its essence except in your heart. Therefore, love cannot be taught, it can only be learned. And it is the delight of Love’s teaching to shape you and mould you in ever-increasing degrees into the being that it always intended you to be. Thus it overcomes your resistances, your false turnings, by exerting an influence over your heart, from within. Nothing can be stronger. All efforts to tell us that humanity will change through dramatic – even cataclysmic – events will fail. Love just needs to whisper.

One teacher of this is the rose. Traditionally the rose is ruled by the planet Venus, goddess of love. The rhythmical movements of Venus are said to live in the flower, creating the five-fold spiral of petals, the color and fragrance which are forever summed up in the word: rose. Its essence is indescribable – it can only be felt. If the far-off star can work so secretly in the rose, how much more can the power of Love transform me into the full expression of what I am meant to be? The future is not hemmed in by human or natural disasters – it is limitless. It is as true and certain as the growth of Love in my being which may, ‘ensplendor me and lead me to my throne in the numberless places of the heart’.

 Songbird  (for H)

And if you had a balcony

and I was a songbird

I’d light on some faraway briar

and chant until a snatch of melody

woke you from your sleep at dawn.

And my melody would be clear and true

as your eyes, soft as your breathing,

warm and passionate as your pulse.

So when you were alone in the hours

between dusk and first light or the long

slow morning, you would hear my song

in your head, in your heart,

like the purest dream, and know

that I would never leave you.

A Pointed Hat

Flashing lights, smoke, the speed of the hand: God himself can be made to appear in a box and then to vanish again. Such is the ambition of the brain, the powers of which are really limitless. The time will come when the human brain will have the power to create a universe - and then find that it has nothing or no one to live in it. The physical world itself is a kind of magic - it can be manipulated to perform all kinds of tricks to satisfy our curiosity or ambition. And all the time the human soul - the real human being - looks on and wonders at the emptiness: the flash, the thunder, the lights, the smoke. We live in a world which is a great magic box and the master magician is the one who can use the brain to its greatest capacity.

In contrast there is life - life which conceals its mystery and its true name, which disdains to perform tricks. Life which has no answers in a crystal ball or a spread of cards, which does not ask you to bow to the authority of a pointed hat. And whereas the tool for magic is the brain, the instrument for an understanding of life is the inner being, the hidden self, which creates an atmosphere of calm and stillness around itself, capable of becoming a true reflecting surface - a surface on which the mysteries of existence can be revealed.

The dilemma is, we need solutions. We need an answer to the problems of population, resources, ecology. So do we produce those answers out of the magician's box? The temptation is always there: GM foods, stem cells, nuclear power - because we can do it, and because the logic of the world demands it, we will do it. But will the human soul be satisfied? No, because it sees a shrinking world, a mechanized universe created in the image of the magician's brain, and it sees no place there for itself. This is why systems deriving only from the brain are always guarded by structures of power and protected by authorities - their products will not serve life. Life itself, by contrast, which hides its authority and its true name, waits only for the inner self to waken in the human being, to divulge its secrets and offer a world in which the soul can be at home. Create a universe yet be a slave, unless the Being who first created you, gives you the grace which to the world he gave, before its magic danced the morning through.

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

Spirit's Rising Fire

Though trees are green my spirit is a tomb, inscribed with letters telling of its birth. The spirit is meant to rise, it's meant to appear in every human being. All the signs are there, the 'letters' which can be deciphered by passers-by, peering through the gloom. The spirit or inner being is held at arm's length away from us - just an echo away, a gleam of light away. On its own it will never rise but is condemned to haunt its resting-place, searching the eyes of those passing strangers in the hope of detecting a divine and human Grace.

In this way I search your eyes for spirit's rising fire which can inspire my sight to live again and reach upwards, forever higher, as if in answer to the timeless question, 'When?' Without that all spirits must abandon hope here. The hope of hearing in the human name the hidden Being who speaks to every ear and is for sight and sound the living flame.

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

(Picture: Two Men Contemplating The Moon by Caspar David Friedrich)

The Four Cardinal Virtues

Modern science and contemporary patterns of thinking have obscured the fact that for a long time people navigated through life by quite different beliefs. They lived in what I would call a completely different soul-scape. Some of these points of navigation can shine through again if we let them. I believe that the Four Cardinal Virtues were essential experiences at one time and that even uneducated people breathed them in, more or less unknowingly, as part of the cultural atmosphere. Today we breathe in completely different things. At the pinnacle philosophers like Plato strove to identify and regulate life by these virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Justice and Temperance. Have they vanished completely, these lights we used to live by? Do they have a broader significance than merely personal or social functions? It's hard to imagine how much these things used to matter, whereas today they are simply words, with more or less shifting values.

I'd like to introduce a Platonic allegory here: the Allegory of the Candle. I see a candle being lit at both ends at once. This normally wouldn't happen but in a world where things really matter we might allow it. The candle burns, wax melts, light and heat are produced. There are four elements: the lights at either end, the body of the candle, and the process of burning. The elements are related through their very being. The body of the candle is the fuel for the flame, the light arises through the action it performs, the burning must be steadily maintained for the candle to perform its function. I'd like to name the parts now: the body of the candle is Justice, the burning is Temperance, the lights at either end are Wisdom and Courage. The lights are both the powers that burn and the source of illumination. The body is the given, it is right in itself, it can't be contradicted. The process of burning must be regulated, or the candle will not perform its function.

For me, wisdom and courage are like gods. They are powers which burn and illuminate but which only arise through living. In a sense, justice is a given. A just man - a just person - is someone who has created himself in the image of Justice. Life itself is justice, though we rail against it. Every single part of life is just - a fact which is impossibly hard to understand. It is the given, it exists to let us find the image of justice which is hidden, like a picture of a second human being, inside us. The act of living is temperance: it is the single most human part, the part of freedom. The way we live determines how much we make use of the true human being in us. It decides how much the virtues of courage and wisdom will arise. The light and heat of courage and wisdom are needed to live rightly but they are also the products of that living.

The purpose of all this is the idea that life really does matter. The way we live matters. The outcome of our lives matters. This idea has to be resurrected. It has taken a severe battering in our times. In some ways the ideas of the ancients were more refined, more discerning - they upheld life in a way that our present cultural atmosphere does not. Ultimately, I would say that Justice, Wisdom and Courage are real beings - I would sculpt them if I could. Temperance would be in the skill of my hand.

You can also find me on:  Evolver  

©landar 2011. All rights reserved 

The Primacy of The Unseen

We tend to think the inner is an illusion, at best a ghostly image of the outer world. And thought itself we regard as a pale counterfeit of reality. Everything is an adjunct of the brain. This despite the fact that we rely totally on thought to arrive at that, and similar, conclusions. Despite the fact that we trust implicitly these conclusions. Thought is a poor relation; feeling is a maverick - each person's wayward child; will is a surprise - we tolerate it when it is handled boldly, when it confers advantages. This is the human being in negative - the way we see ourselves as a result of habitual materialism. We fail to see that these powers of the inner life are rooted in a unity and that their reality, in the end, goes far beyond anything you can touch or feel or see. After all, everything in the material world depends on the transference of energy from one form into another to give it life and motion. The powers of the inner life are original, volatile tools of creation.

They are not merely wayward, maverick, unexpected or to be easily dismissed. They are original forces in their own right. I am arguing here for the reality of the unseen, but also for the organizing principle behind it. If you will let it be so, if you will allow for the primacy of the inner life in all its truth, then you are creating the conditions for the genuine ego - the inner self in its incontestable reality - to step forward and take the reins, not only of your own inner life, but of the conditions of the world out there. Of course materialistic thinking doesn't wish to let that happen. It has its own hidden agenda, which is precisely to prevent the inner being from coming to birth in the world. The way to do this is to perpetuate the illusion that the inner life is a mere shadow, a phantasm of the brain, a shibboleth. In that light the powers of the soul can never be more than erratic personal possessions. And that way lies depression, suicide, nihilism - because the soul can never grant itself its own validity.

And, lastly, there is no question of freedom, free action in the world, unless the inner being reaches down into your arms - right down into the fingertips. There will be no right judgement, no right word, unless the voice of the true self slips like a higher chord into your own voice. Two different voices may be saying exactly the same thing: one has unfreedom in it, the other has freedom. Listen and you will hear. Decide which one is echoing in your own voice. The greatest illusion in the world is the one which illusion itself tries to teach: that everything inside you is not real. This deception will only grow more acute with time. It will become the make-or-break principle. Be prepared!

You can also find me on:  Evolver  

 

(The image above is of: Appollo)

©landar 2011. All rights reserved