The Pure Mind

The pure mind contains within it all the civilizations of the earth and all its periods of development. The 'sky' of mind overarches everything physical, from the deepest ocean to the highest mountain-top. This is something a poet can feel - but he has to align himself with his most exalted Muse to know it in truth. The body - and in particular the brain - is just the merest shell of a housing for this mind. Life on earth is a wearisome delight which death can't deny. Its basic condition is the interplay between higher mind and stages of development: the seven ages of man. Thus life is at one and the same time a playground of innocence and a gruelling field of experience. Death can't take this away because the higher mind is fully committed to these phases: it takes an equal interest in the baby in its cot and the old person on their death-bed. This fact is highlighted by the extraordinary planetary dances of the stars and constellations: there is delight and despair, numbing contraction and noble expansion in their movements. But the stars are still physical - if you step into the counterspace of mind you find their cycles inextricably linked with everything that takes place in human life, without exception.

My bed on earth is made by the stars and the level fields. The world affords me home but in my mind I'm called back to the deep that housed me when no word had yet been said. My words can be world-makers too, knowing as they do where stars were born - where fields were once unlevelled in the blue and faces that I wear had not been worn.

Jay

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

The House of Art

The house of art is built with many grants - and there are those who value their new extensions more than the art itself. Therefore I must ask where does the value really come from? Am I alone in thinking that the artist is the higher mind which is housed in no facility at all except its sphere of truth? I approach this artist with trepidation because he is really myself and yet I cannot claim his glories as my own. This is because the higher mind - the artist within - defies classification; his name cannot be put on an application form. He belongs to the pure realm of ideas which no one can identify except in a conscious dream, a higher transport of creativity. It causes a kind of pain, like a dazzling by a brilliant light, to hold that crystal sphere in your hands - even if such a thing were possible. Therefore an artist will stop talking and create.

And yet it becomes necessary at a certain point to say 'I am that' - I can't deny authorship any more than I can say authority is given to me. No true writer will derive his or her credibility from grants or publications. You know if you are what you have been given - given in a higher sense, as the angels give their light. I know the angels are there - they border on the area where the true self lives. They will find their way into earthly creativity because they are a first power, a potent force. They don't need to be acknowledged except in the artist's originality and truthfulness. But they would like us to come to the point of saying 'I am that' - I am one of you: a being among beings who derive their shining from the realm of the eternal and from their own efforts to get there.

Yes, we live in a world of grants and tenureship and publication - and there are many who would like to throw me and people like me out of their extensions. Those are the ones who would populate the world with stylistic abstractions. They admire and acclaim each other; they review each other's books. But their efforts are not works of the flawless deep; they are jewels of the human mind as it exists purely on earth - not in the higher sphere.

Inevitably one looks foolish saying this. I might be accused of being jealous of the glittering prizes. But in the end the glittering prizes amount to nothing more than a sack of earth - and I will not flout my talents for that. Have I earned the right to speak? The only judge of that is one born blind who sees with sightless eyes what's bought and sold.

Jay

©landar 2011. All rights reserved


Image: Angel from Madonna of the Rocks by Leonardo da Vinci

 

The Burning Arrow of Our Times

If you ask me to peer into the future I can only see a cavernous darkness. No sound, no light, nothing resonating. Indeed, how far can I see into the present? I see crowds gathering at different corners of the world, I hear the sounds of now. Are they the present, are they creating the future? There are so many people now, standing in a moonless night, waiting. There is a time to gather - which is now - and people respond to it. But do I see into the future? No. The future must blaze across our skies for us to see it.

How is this possible? How is it possible for the future to blaze across our skies? Is the future not a dark, cavernous night? Ah! but there is no such thing as the future unless it is forged in the foundry of the present. And here we are talking about concepts and metaphors. The future is being, the present is being. What sort of being has the power to blaze across our skies in the future? How will eyes be able to follow it and be guided?

Only a light which has lived through the deepest night can form a path to the dawn. Is there a light like that inside you? If there is you can take it up like a burning arrow and fire it high into the cavernous darkness. Its shaft will be true, its light will burn brightly for all eyes to see. It will be a future, and people in times to come will be able to guide themselves by it. They will say, This is what we are.

That Being of the future is one which is housed in us now. It is not an idea or a metaphor. It is the only being which is strong enough to be visible in the night sky above us, where we gather below under the moonless dark.

I did not think to write this except that I see a future - and feel it and know it - which is more than the sounds and the light and the crowds gathering.

Jay

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

The Pure White Lily Flower

The search for the intangible is a delicate process. It takes you to the very edge of what you're capable of perceiving - to the twilight hours, to the crepuscular borders of sleep. It leaves you frustrated with the ordinary light, the daylight hours which seem to only exist to lead you towards those hidden pathways. Included in this is the path to love - to the ideal of love and to the perfect picture of the loved one which is all that love exists for. No twilight is long enough to let those images come close to the soul.

And here I confess I lose my way because I find only the intangible purity of the soul itself, which bears the image of the loved one. In that region the only form of converse is prayer - prayer to the being of purity who occupies that space just on the other side of twilight. In a sense that being is the finest part of the soul as well as being the pure image of the loved one. And in my world that being - she - steps forth from the shadows into the most delicate process of searching. The intangible becomes alive -alive with the pure white lily flower as it contemplates the night; with the birds who know what song means to the evening.

I can find the golden smile I seek; together we can soothe away the thousand tears of day. And though I lose my way I know there is always someone who stands close by.

Jay

©landar 2011. All rights reserved