From one point of view dreams, symbols, imaginings – for example, poems or paintings – are figures, shape-shifted from our daily lives. A poem, then, might reshape a lost love affair; a painting, a phase in life. Psycho-analysis might justifiably point out the various sublimations taking place in our thoughts and images. Dreams are famous for this: not one element in a dream, down to the smallest detail, is without its transformed reference. On a larger scale a work of art might sublimate – consciously or unconsciously – a whole range of complexes. These might be individual, social, or universal human complexes, perhaps relating to a particular point of time – these are the symbols and metaphors of the national spirit or the Zeitgeist. Ultimately, a great work of art will configure divine, spiritual truths not accessible to ordinary, daily consciousness.

What does all this tell us? It tells us that we belong under particular skies, within a pattern of moon-shine, solar flares, stellar movement. We are geocentric – figures of earth, belonging to a landscape, to our own or to someone else’s portrait. In a sense we unearth our dreams from a particular position in time or space.

Is there any alternative to this? Well, we can turn the whole thing on its head and look at it from another point of view. From this perspective life itself is the dream or art-form. Our bodies, our surroundings, the earth itself are images of a higher imagination. This greater artistic power configures everything that happens to us – down to the smallest detail – according to a far wider pattern of necessity. The movements and purposes of this necessity are hidden in the formation of stars and planets not visible to our ordinary perception. This is the heliocentric position. Human life is made up of these two different frames of reference.

Our task is not merely to sublimate – although we will continue to do that as well – but to learn how to step up out of the layers of earth with free will, and consciously. No longer to be simply shaped by the silvered moonbeams and golden solar flares but – in a way – to skirt around the eye of God and to work out of our own free inner movements. I believe, then, that we can escape the two-sided necessity of dream: that in our actions we shape-shift our unconscious experiences, and that the life of our planet itself is simply the artwork in the mind of a cosmic dreamer.

It is the destiny of the human being to take a place midway between the geocentric and the heliocentric. And I find this difficult to accept because my heart hurts to leave things behind and change the shape of my dreams.

Sand

The earth embraces us, no matter what,

and guides our feet to walk upon its sands;

it leads us to the never-ending thought

that we may also tread the golden bands.

But earth must be transformed inside our stride,

with nothing left behind to fold or churn;

let every thought or feeling be my guide

to teach what feet and sand alone can learn.

Rule

Up to this body seas of spirit roar:

golden sands will turn their shoulder to it;

each grain of sand is made where waters pour:

origins they distantly intuit.

I’m born to think the thoughts that set me free

from heaven’s surge and earth’s insistent pull;

their constant echo turns me mindfully

to times and places I am meant to rule.

Design

The stars turn, the sun revolves, the moon flits

but I, an earth, remain within my layers,

and hope that given time my shapeless wits

will steer me from the silvered beams and flares.

I have my course to follow shorn of skies

and need to chart my place without their sign;

to move without their movement, skirt their eyes,

and tease out from my solitude, design.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© Landar 2012. All rights reserved

You are welcome to quote from Light on the Page on the condition that you cite the author and the source:

Author: Jay Landar

Source: www.lightonthepage.com

For other permissions please contact the author.

Grey-lit sun, miles of sky;

alone a small bird

touches lips with the wind.

Landar

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

I see that patch of blue through the mist in November and its quality is unattainable. Everything else dances attendance on it. The crooked, coiling branches of the oaks contain their dark dreaming – some leaves might fall if a gust of wind should summon itself from the centre of the earth. There are walls here confining nothing. Their shifting surfaces release thoughts into the air. Pathways, trees, superbly crafted branches – a tumbledown greenhouse, poets in circles going round and round. And crows, rising like black shades where the leaves have fallen. Their cacophony beclouds the sky.

Everything depends on that patch of blue. Its continuing light fills every thought – each hope, each confinement, each fallen shape – right down into the next gust of wind concealing itself in the centre of the earth.

Crows

Darkly coiled branches of oak

release their harvest of crows;

and all unsprung things contain themselves

within a fading evening light.

No man can paint his thoughts

in these confines, except in shining words,

which scale the walls, ascend

the trees, attempt the simple heaven

of blue, which crows besmirch

with their freedom.

Blue

No more ghosts, no more leaves

gusting like souls from their high perches.

A single raven holds his post – a soiled jewel

in the crown of the tallest oak. Stillness

gathers, coating the confined walls

with thoughts of distant light.

The unattainable is near, the noisy rooks

cloud it with their nonsense, poets

stretch their verbs ever higher into the blue.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

This article – 9 11 facts – was written on the 10th anniversary of September 11 2001. It considers the September 11 facts from a very different point of view. The full 9 11 truth may never be known. But I believe that what happened on September 11 ten years ago can be understood in the light of changes in human consciousness. The question of a 9 11 conspiracy is intimately bound up with this. Of course there are numberless September 11 stories – wonderful, tragic and moving personal accounts – which, like a mosaic, create all the 911 information we have at our disposal. However, it is the place of this decisive event in the development of human consciousness which may still turn out to be the most important truth of all. Please read on, if you will: 9 11 facts or – September 11th and Human Consciousness…

*

The events of 9/11 – brought to life again by the recent memorial – can’t help but strike questions into the hearts of people who think deeply about things. Every detail of what happened, all the circumstances, seem to be symptomatic of underlying changes in the pattern of human life. Like arrows fired in from another world the doomed planes seemed to bring to an end a millennium of history. It might be more accurate to say they brought to an end millennia of history lived under the sign of a particular form of consciousness. The attack on the very symbol of commerce and trade signaled the close of an epoch during which human consciousness was directed firmly downwards into the earth. Imagine human beings facing into the earth with the circumference of the heavens above them, like a bowl turned downwards. Then think of that bowl inverted, turned upwards, with human consciousness facing into the heavenly worlds instead of the earth. This is the scope of the change overtaking humanity today.

After ten years it’s possible to look back on 9/11 with a certain distance. The proliferation of ‘conspiracy’ theories point to the fact that people are deeply dissatisfied with explanations which talk simplistically about an ‘attack on our way of life’. They feel instinctively that the events represent something very much deeper in the course of human affairs. They want to connect to those forces of change; in fact we might feel that our very future – our survival – depends on gaining access to the hidden stream of change in human evolution. Unfortunately this is played out politically in a desperate attempt to control and destroy. And a counterforce reveals itself through this: a force which actively strives to prevent the unfolding of a new consciousness.

I relate this to another phenomenon: the apparent lack of a spiritual consciousness natural or native to the west. Is there a spirituality lacking in the west that allows us to be left with a ‘ground zero’? Is there something metaphorically rushing in to fill the gap? What is the relationship between this and, for example, indigenous native traditions? Why is it we are setting such store by a Mayan ‘Long Count’? What, in the end, is going to snap us awake?

For me, the answer cannot and will not lie in simply another religion or tradition – a new practice of spirituality. Even to talk about a ‘new form of consciousness’ falls short. I don’t seem to have the words for what I mean, just as our prevailing culture doesn’t seem to have the wherewithal to truly fill the gap. The phrase ‘the coming of the Son of Man’ seems to me to be the one that applies – if you take the ‘Son of Man’ to be a new beinghood which is both natural and native in us and yet which fulfills, for example, the Mayan Long Count and augurs in an new era.

Something which is both born in us and which fulfills the past would be an adequate memorial to those who died – and who continue to die – as a result of 9/11. In other words we need a spiritual reality to fill the hollow of our ‘ground zero’. I believe that what is meant by the phrase ‘Son of Man’ is that reality – and that it already hovers over the empty space. This represents the new beinghood which combines and fulfills the various native traditions around the world, and which also grows out of western consciousness. We all look for the sacred on our different paths and imagine we find it in formulas, wordplay, symbology and description. It’s not in these things however heavily etched into the stone the words may be. The point at which words fail is exactly the place where reality is born. Therefore I suggest we summon up the ‘minute’s silence’ to really usher in the new. No one gains entrance to the true or the sacred except by struggling for it. The ‘ground zero’ is the hollow in each of us and the ‘Son of Man’ is the beinghood which fills it. I don’t mean to be simply religious in saying this – I believe the phrase alludes to what it means to be human. Perhaps this phrase should more fairly be ‘the Child of Humanity’. Until this Child is born in us we cannot be completely human. We are still in a process of evolution.

Sooner or later we’ll need to know the full extent of the conspiring forces which lay behind 9/11 – and go beyond the childish notion of one bearded bogeyman and his cohorts who wanted to destroy ‘our way of life’. But at the same time we need to see the events and symbology of that fateful day as symptomatic of decisive changes in human consciousness – upon which evolution turns. In this way we can make sense of the trauma and terror which struck humanity ten years ago – and we can prepare for a future in which our gaze is turned upwards to the heavens instead of downwards into the earth.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© landar 2011. All rights reserved

9 11 Facts

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If you try to ‘touch base’ with the Creation in yourself, you embark on a wonderful journey. The relationship is reciprocal: self and Creation, Creation and self. Self is all you have to start with – like the contents of the knapsack you take with you. But self includes, of course, tangentially, all the contacts you’ve had with the created world since time began – including all the marks you’ve left in the earth, so to speak. Therefore, when you set off on this journey, with your knapsack, you are already affected by every part of the earth’s existence. Thus you are related to Creation in two ways: existentially, through continuous contact; and ‘essentially’, through the divine spark of the creative ‘I’ within you. Being and essence, if you like.

For me the wonderful swing of this relationship – reciprocal in nature – forms the important part of the journey. I experience it as a lemniscate – a figure of eight, the dynamic symbol of infinity. At the top – if you can say there is a top, which there isn’t really – I find the small point of the self, a divine spark, actively present and participating in the first great outpouring of Creation. At the bottom – which again you can’t really say – I feel myself as created being, sitting among the totality of existing things: the created world, in which I have scratched the marks of my existence. In the middle – at the crossing-point – I meet myself in the passing. I take hands and pass on – exchanging and sharing the impulse of creativity, the certain knowledge of being-hood.

This describes, in a few short sentences, the flowing relationship between self and Creation. To experience yourself in that dynamic can be an enormous help in breaking the bonds of creature-hood we’ve manufactured for ourselves in modern civilization. The divine spark is always there at the point of outpouring. And it always will be.

“I”

So thunderous creation makes me new

each time I hear the voice inside my mind

which utters how the world once trembled through

with thoughts of the divine and urgent kind.

And that same work continues in me now

with shafts of lightning hurtling from the sky

when I reach up to contemplating how

the highest powers live in the little “I”.

Creation

A lemniscate has caught me by my heels

and lifted me to where creation starts,

then back into my hidden self it wheels

before it lands me on my feet, and parts.

Creation’s first impression was of “I”

hiding where the springs of life abound,

and now I wander in the depths of “why”

I’d conjure up that first inspiring sound.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

The higher self within you – the inner being – can lift away clouds, can set the thunder rumbling, can reveal the secret plots of kings and can whisper, in a voice which is as true as it is small, answers to the question, ‘Why?’. This is because it is already out there in the world – its voice fully chimes with the harmony existing in water, air, earth and fire. It was a voice which was there at the time of the Creation – and still is, for the Creation is also now. This is a being whose happiness depends on you recognizing his genius, whose great sorrow lies in the fact of you listening to the plots of kings and falling to the realm where answers are banished forever.

The higher self rises up vertically, where your own being, with arms outstretched, reaches horizontally. This picture of the cross contains the plight of the world. In effect, to find and reveal the inner being in yourself is the only way to release the world from the cross. The vertical direction is the one which earthly powers conspire to keep hidden because there is no limit to how far it can go. And this is the second secret of the human being – that the scope for ascending is limitless. (Just as the vertical direction also penetrates downwards to a fathomless degree.) Therefore, once the higher self is recognized as the being which chimes with the genius of the world – arms outstretched horizontally – then the gifts and insights of the vertical can flow into life.

Each person must find their own path to reveal the voice of the higher self within them. I find it in poetry. I knock on the door of poetry and ask for the nameless one, who lives beyond questions, to let me in. I offer up my own voice, wrapped as it is in the folds of the world. I give my heart and soul – the one flying like a bird to the highest branch, the other leaping like a panther from rock to spring. Then slowly I see where the god in me walks too – where his steps of gold converge with mine, as if something was coming from an age when wiser eyes saw through the tangled roots and richness of life’s vine. Then out of that I’m able to see many footprints in the sand – and to tell with true sight which ones are small and which are grand.

So let the god be a poet in his time – when he is ready to allow his voice to speak in my tones, ready to free the secrets in his ken. Then I will sit and contemplate the rhyme best suited to his flowing hand and pen.

Nameless One

And if I come to the door of poetry,

is it a written thing? a knock? an other

side? Or is it just a dream between

the sheets of night, an act beyond recall?

Am I remembering or setting life

in train? And whose is the spirit waiting

for the accent in my words? Come to me,

nameless one, who lives behind questions.

*

For I have no other voice than this

which wraps itself in folds of world,

which leans towards its ancestors in trust -

spirits of place and time alive in me now.

I have no other heart and soul than this,

which flies as a bird to the highest branch,

which leaps as a panther from rock to spring -

creatures of the born world in their eyes.

*

But where I walk the god in me walks too -

I see his steps of gold converge with mine -

as if from an age when wiser eyes saw through

the tangled roots and richness of the vine.

Now life thins out for me its verdant growth,

revealing many footprints in the sand,

and with the eyes I’ve gained I am not loath

to tell which ones are small and which are grand.

*

So let the god be poet in his time

and free the secrets guarded in his ken -

then I will sit and contemplate the rhyme

best suited to his flowing hand and pen.

But if at last we speak with one accord

we’ll loose the rumbling thunder in the sky,

depose the plots of kings from their reward

and whisper answers to the question, ‘Why?’.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

©landar 2011. All rights reserved

To watch the stars in all their movements and gestures – their nobility, their inwardness – is to feel a part of something which is as close as it is far. Contrary to popular belief which is fond of saying that our planet and everything on it is just a speck of dust in an infinite – and indifferent – universe, the stars themselves teach us otherwise. Their very appearance burns deeply into our consciousness – their beauty and stillness, their constancy, their music. And rather than talking about signs in the stars in an abstract sense – in the manner of an external and remote force – it is better to feel what their relationships and movements mean to you by dwelling on them, dwelling in them. It’s true that the stars will tell you what is to come, but more urgently they will reveal – with very deep feeling, I believe – what you are to be, what movement is to happen in you which will correspond to theirs. Ultimately, then, their teaching is about the renewal of Light within and around us.

So when I see the crescent moon, like the edge of a silver bowl, cupped in a hand of cloud, I hear it telling of its hours of darkness, its hollowness and concavity, while silent Jupiter listens. I long for this cup to be filled, not just to dream of the light foaming at its rim, but to know that the cup is in me and of me too.

Stars reveal the space we must inhabit and fill with our own being. Their light traces our path. Everything they are lives in the human breast as well, as intimately as hopes and dreams breathing on the borders of light. Stay a little, then, with those stars – flood their regions with our names, our being, our kind.

Foaming

And like the edge of a silver bowl,

the moon, cupped in a hand of cloud,

tells of its hours of darkness,

of its hollowness, concavity -

and silent Jupiter listens.

Oh fill this cup, dream no more

of far off skies, topped with light,

which are to be yours, which are to be mine.

Let it brim with the brilliance it knows

on its silver edge, on its cup of cloud.

Tell of its darkness foaming with light.

Borders

Stars reveal the space we must inhabit,

fill with being, flood with names

of our own kind. Their light

traces our path. Stay then a little

in the moon’s honour, in Jupiter’s gaze -

their edge and incandescence

live in the human breast as well,

as close as every outlined hope,

each dream breathing on the borders of light.

Stay a little – flood those regions

with our names, our being, our kind.

Best wishes, today,

Landar

© landar 2011. All rights reserved