The Waking by Theodore Roethke

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me, so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

Song: If You Seek … by Thomas Merton

If you seek a heavenly light
I, Solitude, am your professor!

I go before you into emptiness,
Raise strange suns for your new mornings,
Opening the windows
Of your innermost apartment.

When I, loneliness, give my special signal
Follow my silence, follow where I beckon!
Fear not, little beast, little spirit
(Thou word and animal)
I, Solitude, am angel
And have prayed in your name.

Look at the empty, wealthy night
The pilgrim moon!
I am the appointed hour,
The “now” that cuts
Time like a blade.

I am the unexpected flash
Beyond “yes,” beyond “no,”
The forerunner of the Word of God.

Follow my ways and I will lead you
To golden-haired suns,
Logos and music, blameless joys,
Innocent of questions
And beyond answers:
For I, Solitude, am thine own self:
I, Nothingness, am thy All.
I, Silence, am thy Amen!

A Course in Miracles

I am at as loss in terms of knowing what to write about this because I am finding it all so confusing in my mind. But since starting this blog, I have found it good just to start writing about what I am experiencing as I get to know some of my thoughts about it. Having to express it in a way that makes sense is good mental discipline and almost makes me feel like I am gettin back in touch with my creativity.
I have been pretty much faithfully doing the course for twenty-three days now, reading the daily chapter and doing the exercises that go with it. I don't hugely enjoy reading the chapter. I find it difficult to penetrate the meaning of what is said, even more so to apply it to my everyday life. Not understanding makes me feel a bit stupid at times and that is somewhat uncomfortable for me! Sometimes what I read one day clarifies what I have struggled with before, but overall what irks me is that I really don't know what I think of it all! Is that the product of a mind that has become somewhat lazy - in the sense of avidly reading so many ideas and just taking them in with out seemingly processing or wrestling with them - or am I just going through that inner confusion which heralds true learning? Or is it all just a loada bollocks???
See, having read "A Return to Love" and most of "The Gift of Change" by Marianne Williamson, I really cannot agree with the last statement. But Marianne Williamson's books make so much more sense than "ACIM". At times I ask myself, is this book just contradicting itself? But I don't have a good enough grasp of the material to answer that. I feel so far behind it. I wish I could bring up some of the cases in which I thought this happened, but I am sorry to admit that alot of it just goes over my head and does not commit to my memory. The basic gist of the Course comes across and I am familiar with it from Williamson's writings - it fits in with the mentality of the lovely Florence Scovel Shinn books which got me through some very difficult times - and I like it. I think it is a positive way in which to use my mind.
It's just got me panicking a little because I begin to think "Oh God what have I done wrong to cause this?" when something negative happens or I have a bad day in spite of all my hard work. These things pass of course, but instead of feeling mentally empowered, at times sometimes I feel at the mercy of the power of my mind, if that makes any sense! I think it good to take responsibility for my thoughts and how they manifest in my life, but at times it is a huge pressure and terrifies me. My faults and shortcomings become clearer to me and they just seem endless! How can I ever sort them all out? If I have an uncharitable thought or react badly to something that upsets me, I always pray afterwards and say to God "Please help me to see this differently" I try to bless those people and situations I am having most difficulty with, I ask God to remove the thoughts which are unworthy of my better self. But at the moment it is tiring and disheartening to say the least. I wanna go back to my ignorance and have a good old moan or bitch, but that feels uncomfortable too!
Ach, this is probably a part of the process and transformation will occur subtly and for the best. I find the exercises easier to access than the readings. I do them with as open a mind as possible. Sometimes the premise is a little obscure like, "What I see is a form of vengeance", but then on the obscure days weird little insights come to me, seemingly unrelated to the central lesson and on the days where the exercises seem to make sense, I don't really seem to get anything out of them. And sometimes I disagree, "Is this the world I really want to see?" is supposed to be answered in the negative, but at times I am happy with looking around and seeing things just as they are.
And what confuses me too...should I have no dreams or plans whatsoever in case they have nothing to do with God's Will for me? Sometimes I feel guilty when glimmers of fantasy of ambition arise and other times I get worried that this course will cause me to lapse into some form of apathetic fatalism. All of this seems to be contributing to some form of spiritual lethargy.
I think I have had my surfeit of spiritual books for the present. I have a few to finish of course and I am really enjoying them, but my brain is becoming so overloaded with all that stuff, it's having no chance to process. I need a bit of fiction in my life! I read Jane Austen's "Persuasion" on a complete whim the other week and it was a breath of fresh air!!! And the other night, for the first time in almost a year, I picked up a book that had to do with theatre "The Complete Stanislavsky Toolkit" and I am enjoying the little bit I have read so far...
Of course I will stick with ACIM but I need to relax...

To begin at the beginning...

Do you know, it's very strange...I never know what title to put on a blog post, at least I rarely do and this one just popped into my mind. As I tried to recall what it was (they are the opening lines from Dylan Thomas' wonderful play for voices Under Milk Wood), I then had a fuzzy remembrance of dreaming about that play last night, or at least those lines. I have no idea what else happened, but I am wondering how much of our nocturnal wanderings shape what goes on in our day. How much do we dream? How significant is it in our lives? I don't know the answer, but it has excited my interest.
I've had really vivid dreams in the last few months. I don't remember them all very clearly, just moments or impressions. Often they are impressions of great richness, in the way you get the sense of a mythology as being very rich - and you know what they say about our dreams being part of the great collective unconscious!!! Sometimes I want to just keep sleeping so I can inhabit this fantastical world, even if it is at times scary, because it seems so much more. It is nice for the brain not to be limited by the "realities" of the everyday world, to be part of fairytales and magic and adventure.
And often it is the sense of the deeper truth is coming across through these very resounding images and sensations. Sometimes you know you have grasped this truth when you wake up even though you don't know it with the part of your brain that you use throughout your waking hours. I used to think that all these truths were lost as soon as you awoke, but now I think differently. I don't think we store all our knowledge in our immediate consciousness, I think we learn differently from the way we are taught to, if that makes sense! We don't always need to understand things immediately, we simply take them in and they are processed and assimilated without our conscious effort. Our interior lives change beyond our conscious perception, through living, through practice.
And sometimes you wake up and you know exactly what God or your higher self or your unconscious (whichever you choose, tis not the main point of distinction here!) has been trying to tell you. I had a really interesting dream just over a week ago. Normally I don't recall dreams in enough detail to be able to make a huge amount of sense of them beyond the feelings they leave me with (which I suspect at times act alongside my intuition), but this one, perhaps for the first time in years, I wanted to write down because I had a really strong feeling I knew exactly what it meant when I woke up.
I was stuck alone in this scary house and I knew there were two rooms in the house I was terrified to go into because they were haunted, there were horrible things in there I didn’t want to encounter. And I don’t know if there were things I was scared of outside and maybe I was waiting for people to arrive, but I knew I had to be alone for a spell of time. So to protect myself, I started going through the house systematically turning on all the lights, but I couldn’t go near those two rooms. However, I thought the rest of the lights would keep me safe. The thing is I am not sure if it was to keep me safe from what was outside or what was in those rooms or both...
When I think about this dream, especially in the context of what happened the day before, when two unpleasant things happened that raised ugly ghosts from the past, bringing me back to an old way of seeing myself that I had thought I was finished with and I was a state for the rest of the day, the first thing I realised was that the house was my soul. It's what they generally say, isn't it? And it was strange cause I had only imagining my soul as a house the day before and had pictured all the different rooms it would need as I was falling asleep.
I have been reading alot of Marianne Williamson lately and of how she says we need to bring light to the darkness inside of us, to confront it with light rather than staying in the dark and over-analysing it. And it seems I am doing that, but the dream seemed to show me there are more rooms in my soul that I need to be brave enough to go into in order to heal. There was a strong message that I need to be brave enough to bring light in there.
I am not speaking today as an expert on dreams, or even an enthusiast. I wasn't even going to write about dreams until the title of my post brought me into this territory which I hadn't even realised was interesting me as much as it has been, but I want to keep this blog to muse over things more and explore what is going on in my head as I don't really have the opportunity right now, or perhaps am just unwilling to share it in everyday conversation. I haven't written in ever so long and I just took this up as an impulse after reading the thoughts of a friend on his blog without a clue what to write about.
I mentioned the notion of practice earlier and the notion of practising even when you don't fully understand yet. I am speaking in relation to A Course in Miracles which I have taken up recently. In general, I have been faithfully reading one chapter a day and doing the accompanying exercises. I find the text difficult to penetrate and some of the exercises quite obscure, but I find as I go, the text is revealing more and more and the exercises provide some supreme moments of insight which flicker for a moment and then disappear back into the swirl of my thoughts, my ego. But, like with my dreams, I know they are working. They just are.
I realised when I studied abroad in Moscow and Bali, when I overcame my resistance to the truth inherent in contradiction and the my need to have information delivered to me as it were on a platter, beautifully presented and ready to digest, that this where what you need sinks in at a deeper level. It becomes part of you and because it creates a certain amount of mental conflict, it individualises what you take in, thereby neutralising the danger of a generic learning experience or, even worse, a brainwashing effect. It helps us to learn with our intuition.
And it helps you to realise, no matter how much you learn, you don't know much!