How could this correspond to places, persons, and things in my actual life?
How could I carry this out? What would it take to fulfill what my heart is asking of me here?
Can I amplify a greater meaning out of this pun or play on words?
Recognizing that we’re sleepwalking, becoming willing to dream more richly and more reverently in order to wake up, seeing the cost of our denial, beginning to practice metta cultivation and keep a common-place book, deciding to become self-defining, speaking to and listening to our heart—these are potent practices that stir the energies in our world.
As we begin to strengthen and to act upon our desire to wake up and embody our genius, to cease being defined by the perceptions of others, this world, our dream, begins to respond—but we may not yet be able to see how that response is working.
After writing the letters from ourselves to our heart and to ourselves from our heart, we may feel a flood of despair. We may realize the severity of our situation and not trust that we can evolve out of it. It can seem like our heart has asked impossible things of us.
At this point it’s tempting to abandon the path we’ve stepped onto and to retreat back to our project of trying to get by in the mad world with what we already know how to do.
The trouble is that we’re called to bring into fruition another world altogether, and in order to know how to create this new world, we need to venture far into our inner life. To refuse our call, to stay in the mad world when we’ve been invited to the extraordinary, is a foolhardy proposition that exposes us to all kinds of calamities—for the power of our genius will work on us, whether we go willingly or no.
We don’t need to despair. We don’t need to stay sunk in self-pity, because the work we’ve been called to do is seemingly impossible, because the world does not yet appear to support us. We still need to win the favor of the gods with our courage and our commitment. We can be empowered by the recognition that we’re not meant to do this work just for our own glory—we’re doing this for the benefit of everyone—and along the way, our egos will become softer and more translucent. There are selfish heroes, like Jason of Jason and the Argonauts—but those adventurers suffer consequences for their arrogance. We’re not undertaking this journey arrogantly, looking to steal something from the gods for our own glory. We’re humbly submitting ourselves to an adventure beyond our conscious design, so that through it we may bring something back to enrich everyone and alter this world.
One of my favorite mad poet-prophets, William Blake, observed that “the eye altering, alters all.” In other words, when we change our perception, the whole world around us changes. Herein lies our solution to the deep pain we can find ourselves in.
I suggest that our ability to cling to falsehood and generate stuckness and boringness in our lives arises from the fact that we’ve learned to use the opposite of poetic perception: fragmented perception. We all come into the world as perfectly honest and expressive young geniuses, but school and society beat that out of us right quick.
Our culture is dominated by what the poet Walt Whitman called “the brain that divides.” We learn to see ourselves as isolated little egos who have to fight and scrap and scrape in order to hold on to our little drops of comfort or pleasure or power.
We feel threatened by the other isolated little egos outside of us who might try to take these things away. We have to push ourselves harder and harder to continue to win, to protect what we have, to get more.
Within this perception of fragmentation, we see everything, including our own bodies and talents and the natural world, as objects to be manipulated in order to attain some end.
It’s only in this fragmented perception that a life of untruth can spring up, because falsehood seeks to manipulate the vast and messy unfolding of our lives into a neat and pretty picture that we’re confident will gain the approval of others and thus secure us our comfort, pleasure, and power.
When we are able to see ourselves and life from this perspective of wholeness, we are better able to recognize our untruth.
This honest recognition is enabled by the wholeness of poetic perception, because we create our falsehood in the first place in an attempt to deal with the fragmentation and alienation we perceive.
In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson describes in great detail someone who has a solid grasp on poetic perception—namely, the ideal poet. According to Emerson, the ideal poet has an intuition of unity that is so total that it constitutes a kind of dramatic enlightenment, a state of higher realization. Emerson refers to this unitive insight as “Imagination.” He tells us that Imagination is “a very high sort of seeing, which does not come by study, but by the intellect being where and what it sees; by sharing the path or circuit of things through forms, and so making them translucid to others.”
Yet in order to awaken our genius and become lucid, it’s not necessary to be fully possessed of this realization of underlying oneness, and certainly not necessary to “believe” in it—it’s only necessary to be willing to move toward it—in other words, to soften one’s sense of oneself as a limited, isolated entity, as a thinking subject for whom the world (including your talents and your body) is merely a mess of objects to be manipulated for socially approved ends.
We can enter poetic perception by ceasing to take ourselves and our lives so literally. We can start to take ourselves symbolically instead.
Rewrite the letter you wrote from your heart to yourself in Experiment 1 (this page), so that you turn every directive and every bit of information that your heart supplied you with into a commitment, promise, or affirmation. For example, if your heart told you in the initial letter to “Raise up the roses to the rooftops,” then you would now write a promise: “I will raise up the roses to the rooftops.” If your heart told you in the initial letter that “You smell like iodine,” then you would now write an agreement: “I will smell like iodine.”
As you write, know that these are real commitments you are making. In order to carry on your journey to ecstatic fulfillment, you will need to meet all of these commitments. “What?” you might say, “You mean I actually have to raise up roses to rooftops? But why would I do that? It’s nonsense! And why the hell would I ever want to smell like iodine?” YES. It’s complete nonsense to you, to your rational mind. But the soul is larger than you, larger than your conscious persona. It’s vast, and it has its reasons for wanting you to raise roses to rooftops, reasons that are way more than your waking, ordinary mind can comprehend. The important thing is that you resist the temptation to dismiss your heart’s instructions or to take them lightly.
In order for the alchemical process to work, you must take on profound responsibility for doing the symbolic, magical, poetic, and nonsensical things that your heart is asking of you. “But I don’t even know what some of these things mean!” you may protest. And that’s true. There may be things that your heart tells you to do that at the present just boggle your mind or even sound dangerous. What’s important now is to keep an open mind about those things. Know that as you continue in the process, more will become clear to you. You’ll gradually come to understand all of your heart’s instructions and understand ways of fulfilling them that are all completely safe and loving to you and everyone around you. Yet this understanding only comes upon your prior commitment and acceptance of the “nonsense.” The heart doesn’t reveal its truths to one who’s not serious about taking its directives. After you make your commitment to accept your heart’s call in all its apparent whimsicality, pointlessness, and danger, you’ll start to get ideas for simple, wholesome actions in the world that you can take to fulfill your promises.
The simple (yet deeply symbolically charged) actions that you will take to fulfill the instructions in your heart’s letter are the first steps of the adventure you’re commencing.
After you’ve written out your acceptance of your heart’s instructions, notice how you feel. Most of the people I work with feel a sense of wonder and excitement as they contemplate the decisions they’ve made to leave behind the surface level of reality (where they act only “reasonably”) and to enter the deeper level, where action is more than reasonable—it’s imaginative and luminous with meaning.
Now, one by one, take each promise and agreement you’ve made with your heart, and brainstorm possible ways you can do those things in the real world. For example, you’ve written “I will raise up the roses to the rooftops.” How will you do that?
This depends on your awareness of what the persons, places, and things in the agreement mean to you. Maybe a friend of yours has a roof that’s safe to access, and she sunbathes on it. You could call her up and bring her a real bouquet of roses. In this way, you would succeed in “raising up the roses to the rooftops.” We might say that this is a “literal” enactment of the commitment. Or perhaps as you’re writing you realize that “roses” to you are a code word for “beautiful things” and “rooftops” to you means “a place where everyone can see.” Maybe then you understand that your task is to put beautiful things in your life on display, to share them. We might say that this is “abstract” enactment of the commitment. Really, the distinction between the literal and the abstract can’t be very strong here, because whatever it is we’re doing when we attempt to fulfill our heart’s dreamspeak instruction is necessarily symbolic and beyond the ordinary prosaic mode of daily life.
I suggest, however, erring on the side of the literal. Don’t assume that every noun and action in your letter refers to inner qualities that you can understand right now, and thus avoid having to deal with actual roses and the actual inconvenience of finding a rooftop—don’t force a “translation.”
It may be that you will only understand at a deep level what the “roses” or beautiful things in your life are after you have taken actual roses to an actual rooftop. As much as you can without endangering yourself or others, take the instructions of your heart at “face value” and interact with the tangible material world as per your heart’s instructions.
Yet ultimately, whether you bring real roses to a real rooftop or put on display some beautiful things where everyone can see doesn’t matter. There isn’t one “right” way to fulfill your commitment to your heart. What matters is the intention and imaginative energy you put into your attempt. The point is that you don’t attempt to slack or shirk your duty, that you give it your best effort. With that intention and energy, your heart can take over and make magic happen that’s beyond your conscious will.
“What magic could possibly happen just from me bringing a bouquet of roses to my friend on her roof? That’s such a mundane, simple thing to do. I thought this was supposed to be a big dreamy adventure!”
Bringing a bouquet of roses to your friend is a mundane, simple thing to do, which becomes a thrilling adventure due to your underlying motivation. You’re not doing it because the mood struck you, or since it’s her birthday, or because you wanted to cheer her up. You’re doing it because you’ve surrendered a degree of your conscious, rational persona’s will to the extrarational demands of the heart.
Your bringing of the bouquet is an act of deep humility, of obedience to something more vast and beautiful than your ordinary mind knows. Not only that—but because the action was dictated to you by this larger and opaque intelligence, you will eventually discover that the consequences of your action are much larger and more positive than you could have ever known or predicted in advance.
You’re now participating in a web of poetry, of divine making, that’s larger than you know, and this participation is magical and full of grace. Because you are acting at the level of the soul rather than of the mind, and with the intention of positively evolving, your actions will have beautifully expansive soul consequences.
The simple gesture of bringing a bouquet of roses to a friend’s rooftop will start a chain of energies and happenings in motion, which will then themselves lead you further into the mystery of your transformation in a nonlinear and nonsensible way that you cannot know or predict in advance.
You might ask yourself these questions about each line of your acceptance of your heart’s call:
How could this correspond to places, persons, and things in my actual life?
How could I carry this out? What would it take to fulfill what my heart is asking of me here?
Can I amplify a greater meaning out of this pun or play on words?
There may be now many commitments that you’ve made to your heart that you don’t presently understand how to enact in the world. Maybe you have a solid idea about just one. Do that one thing. Trust that as you act, more will be revealed to you, over the course of these seven steps, about how to fulfill your other commitments.
It can help a great deal to memorize your commitments to your heart. This way, as you’re walking around in your life, you’ll be more likely to immediately recognize places or actions that could help you fulfill your commitments.
Here’s what my heart’s call to me looked like after I turned it around into a series of commitments and agreements and also expanded or riffed upon the puns that I noticed:
Dear Heart,
I will follow through the thorough-wood to the end of debt-doubt and find the reward. I will go to the edges of the Green House. I will find the scent of muddled plum and go to the ripeness. I will live purpled.
I will open my mouth at the jar. I will tell the longest tale. I will give the song to the shaman boy.
I will surrender what I have tried to make. I will surrender becoming grand and whole and simply live like a moth on the window.
I will stop seeking permission to live a vast art. I will respect the art that I do every moment, and give it loving attention.
I will put myself in harmony with the violin and piano of the cavern. I will dance at the end of the ledge. I will make my respect for myself as huge as the great water.
I won’t dare to doubt the art as it unfolds, though I think no one else sees it. I won’t dare to disrespect the symphony my essence broadcasts each moment.
I will claim the juicing pear, the song Hallelujah, the couch in the kitchen. I will accept the bliss of Mirabai, the visit of the flute player, the ecstasy of Rumi. I will accept my sushumna shining like a beacon.
I accept the whole freedom, the freedom of total respect.
I agree to look like the ragged meadow. I agree to sound like the piano in the cavern. I agree to smell like the honeysuckle on the city slope. I agree to sound like the silence of electric voices. I agree to feel like the inside of a hot window. I agree to taste like the newness of death.
Carolyn Elliot
Here are my brainstorming notes about concrete actions to take in order to embody my heart’s call out in the world:
“Follow through the thorough-wood”
Read Walden Pond? (“Thorough” sounds like “Thoreau,” who lived in the woods.)
Return to the woods behind my childhood house where I used to play.
Go to Bandi Shaum (a wild and hard-to-access city park, the site of an upcoming Solstice celebration with my friends) and play a game like I used to play in childhood.
“To the end of debt-doubt”
I have no idea! The place where I no longer feel indebted?
“Go to the edges of the Green House”
A house on my childhood street, Northfield Avenue?
A house on my present street? Where is a green house?
Phipps flower conservatory?
“Scent of muddled plum”
Fruit trees? Plum trees? Where can I find some plum trees?
“Live purpled”
Buy / create more purple clothes and accessories? Live in a flush of embarrassment and boldness? Take more risks?
“Open my mouth at the jar”
Drink more water? (I always drink from re-used jars.)
What is the “jar”?
“I will tell the longest tale”
Write the story about the shaman girl who is rightly educated? (This is an idea for a novel I had had the previous week.)
Write the magic book? (This is a poetry book I’d been working on.)
“Give the song to the shaman boy”
Sing to Nice Nate? (Nice Nate is the DJ name of the young man I saw playing the piano—I called him “the shaman boy” in my dreamspeak, because in dreamspeak we don’t use proper names.)
“I will surrender what I have tried to make”
My dissertation? My career as an academic, a poet?
“I will become the moth on the window”
Content to be outside, away from the light, the flame—or getting as close to it as I can and gazing at it?
“I will stop seeking permission to live a vast art”
I will start respecting myself as a shaman-artist.
“Put myself in harmony with the violin and piano at the cavern”
Join a musical group?
Start singing the next time I’m with people?
“Dance at the end of the ledge”
Dance at the ledge at Bandi Shaum, a forty-foot drop? That’s too scary!
“I will accept my sushumna shining”
I could get my friends to paint my spine gold with bodypaint at the Solstice.
I should practice metta cultivation.
Here are some simple, direct actions I took in the world in order to begin acting on my commitment to my heart:
I saw a beautiful purple rose at the market and bought it for myself—hey, “Live purpled,” right? I then proceeded to attempt to paint pictures of the rose with pastels, my first pictures in a long time.
I wore a purple top in my headshot pictures taken that week.
I was too embarrassed by the notion of just singing to Nice Nate the next time I saw him, so I decided to find a song that I thought he might like (“Diamond Day,” by Vashti Bunyan) on YouTube and post it to his Facebook wall. As I was playing the song on YouTube for myself to hear and review it, I also accidentally pressed a button on Nate’s Facebook page, which made an electronic song of his play. The two songs playing together, Vashti Bunyan’s and Nate’s, sounded like a very haunting and gorgeous mash-up. I let him know this when I posted on his wall. He enjoyed the combination of the songs too—exclaimed his amazement and thanked me.
I continued to practice metta cultivation and experienced an increasing and sometimes overwhelming flow of ecstasy in my body and energy field.
I decided that “the thorough-wood” was Bandi Shaum and committed myself more strongly to realizing a wonderful outcome for the Solstice celebration I was helping to organize.
As you write your acceptance letter, you might find yourself experiencing a momentous, luminous expansion—the realization that you’re finally taking seriously all the “nonsense” that your unconscious mind produces—taking it as serious directions for your life, and thereby surrendering some of your rational control to it. Deciding to consider the requests of your dreamspeaking heart just as prominently as that of your reasoning mind is a huge leap forward as a poet.
To take symbolic actions just because your heart has asked you to do so is to take a risk—the risk of other people thinking you’re nuts. In this way it’s an action of the dance of faith, the kind of faith that makes you more fully subjective, as Kierkegaard would say, or more fully individuated, as Jung would say. It’s an action that builds on the decision that you’ve made to stop playing the game of “I am who they say I am” because it takes you a step outside the bounded rules of the social reality we live in, the reality that says all grownups need to have logical reasons for doing what they do. In accepting the call of your heart, you eschew logic for passion and intuition. You let yourself be led by something larger than logic. You give yourself over to the mystery.
To take symbolic action in the world just because your heart has asked you to is to turn your life into a work of art, into an intuitively sculpted thing.
You may find that accepting your heart’s injunction will give you a vivid satisfaction, a feeling of interpenetrating life’s mysteries, a feeling of being at play within your life instead of just enduring it, a sense of excitement and enlargement.
As I did the exercise for the first time, I felt as if a secret, inner path to my life was being shown to me, a path I had simply not known to take seriously before. A path that would weave together the layers of dreaming that constitute my life and everyone’s life—the dream of reality, and the dreams of nighttime.
The exercise of accepting your heart’s call teaches you how to submit to the dictates of your own soul, a submission that is actually the only true freedom and one that you will need to perform again and again throughout your life.
Resentments are a major source of suffering for dreamers who have been abused. We can use our resentments toward a positive end by allowing them to point us to our limitations and show us where we are identified with a story about ourselves that’s not true. Our resentments can show us where we are allowing the negative, false perceptions of others to define us. They can do this because a resentment is really just a feeling of helplessness. We feel helpless wherever we’ve ceded our power of self-definition to others.
For a long time I felt resentful that more of my writing had not been published. I felt like my work was just as good as the stuff I’d seen printed elsewhere—so why couldn’t I seem to win the big prizes my colleagues were winning?
Tracing my resentment to its source, I realized that I was hoping for the perceptions of others to define me, to decide my quality and value as a writer. I craved recognition and affirmation, and yet at a deep level I didn’t believe myself worthy of it—precisely because I preferred to wait to be deemed “worthy” rather than taking on the radical, self-defining choice of believing that I was worthy.
I feared to make the decision to believe wholly in my own worth—what if I decided that I was a great writer with a good heart—and I somehow turned out to be wrong? My mind worried that this could happen, and that being proved wrong in such a fashion would be more humiliation than I could ever endure. I decided instead to withhold confidence in myself and wait until the outer world would confirm “objectively” that I was indeed a worthwhile author and person.
What I failed to understand is that concepts of worth and value have no objective existence and can never be proven. They can only be subjectively experienced. And what I further did not understand was that my own subjective experience of my worth as a writer and a person deeply influences others’ subjective experience of that worth and also my own future development.
This influence happens because my sense of my worth—my imagination of myself and my abilities—is part of the information that constitutes the morphic field that surrounds me and pervades me. The soul is responsive to the images and feelings that I pour into it, and it also actively creates with these images and feelings—it shapes me, and it shapes others’ perceptions of me, according to what I give to it. All fields, all souls are really just pockets of the same field, the same soul. They are all interconnected and all available to be intuitively read and assessed by others.
Everyone who meets me, through my direct physical presence or through my writing, picks up on the information in my personal field and comes to know more about me than I consciously intend to express. Those who meet me may not realize that they’re reading my field, but they are. They’re getting a sense of me, they’re seeing who I am and who I’m becoming, what intentions I hold, what possibilities.
This information is constantly broadcast and constantly received at a subtle level. It’s suprasensory information that can readily override the information provided by the physical, material senses. In this way, a physically pretty woman can appear quite dull and ordinary if she’s fed no lively sense of beauty to her own soul, and a physically ordinary woman can appear captivating if she’s cultivated her soul with images and feelings of worth and wonder.
So it’s helpful, in the project of making my soul into something vast and wonderfully magnetic, to start by noticing where I am hobbling myself and making myself small through resentments. What persons, what groups, what institutions anger me or rouse my spite? Who do I find myself willing to insult? How do I feel that these others are defining me, limiting me, controlling me?
After I can identify who and how and what I resent, I can begin the process of becoming completely willing to entirely forgive the slights and insults I’ve perceived. It’s only through entire forgiveness that I can shed my identity as a limited, rejected, put-upon person. Until I shed that identity, it lives on in my soul and designs what is possible for me. Because the soul is creative, as long as my soul holds an image of me as a rejected, hurt person, I will continue to be drawn to situations where I will be rejected and hurt.
One way to practice entire forgiveness is to pretend that I had never played the “I am who they say I am” game at all. I can do this by envisioning that I came into this world feeling fabulous about myself in all respects, with no input required from anyone else to maintain that feeling and no input from anyone else capable of taking that feeling away. I imagine what it would have been like to go through life with this buoyant feeling of fabulousness. I see myself as always having a morphic field just buzzing with this feeling, a field that others sense and respond to.
Seeing myself with a different morphic field in the past is key to changing my morphic resonance in the present. As I “remember” feeling wonderful about myself in the past, I also “remember” others being irresistibly drawn to the positive hum of my field and feeling wonderful about me too.
I become completely willing to have all memories of failure, disappointment, shame, and lack struck from my being, my soul, my field. I understand that those painful memories aren’t facts to be cherished, they’re just the tender and dangerous traces of my previous confusion, my previous attachment to the “I am who they say I am” game.
I recognize that my painful memories aren’t precious touchstones of truth that reveal my essential nature as someone who’s not good enough—instead they’re senseless and accidental wounds that tell me nothing essential about who I am. They need to be cleaned and allowed to heal through entire forgiveness, not left open and festering.
All of this requires having a fluid attitude about memory that shocks some people. When I speak about entire forgiveness, some folks think I’m talking about denial of the past or wishful thinking. But I’m not talking about denial of the past—I’m talking about what’s necessary for deep healing of our energetic fields. The past happened as it happened. We can’t change it. Yet our own memories are not the past. They are energetic traces of the past that we carry with us, traces that have a potent effect on our morphic fields today and therefore a lingering creative impact on our current and future experience.
It’s important to fully acknowledge and own what happened in the past, to never lie to oneself.
And then it’s important to free ourselves from the energetic remnants of that past by engraving into our beings new “memories” that are supportive of the expanded identities and abilities we now wish our souls to create for us. We achieve this engraving just by practicing “remembering” the past differently, again and again, as many times as it takes for us to begin feeling different about ourselves in the present.
This practice of creating new memories for oneself, simple as it is, is incredibly potent. Many new-age teachers advocate creating positive visions of our future in order to change our experience. A positive vision of the future is helpful and very important, but it’s not sufficient in order to create a deep alteration in the morphic field of electromagnetic energy all around us, which governs how we grow, how we feel, how we perceive, and which powerfully affects how others perceive and respond to us.
Visions of the future aren’t enough to effect this change, because this electromagnetic field is our own soul in physical manifestation, and the soul is made of memory, personal and collective. In order to make the soul into something more evolved and free, we need to work with it at the level of personal and collective memory (myth, folktale, and fairy tale).
Evolving the soul at the level of collective memory involves undertaking the mythic journey, which we are doing here through our experiments. To evolve the soul at the level of personal memory is somewhat more simple—it requires the radical and ongoing practice of entire forgiveness and faith.
The practice of entire forgiveness at the personal level cleanses and prepares one to undergo deeper and deeper stages of the mythic journey.
Every day for a week after your session of metta cultivation, take some time to do the following exercise in engraving new memories.
Pretend you never had a doubt in your mind about how lovable, powerful, and wonderful you are. Imagine that from the time you were very young, everyone around you responded to this radiant knowledge and treated you with celebration and deep respect. See yourself always feeling good and pleasantly excited about whatever you attempted to do, accomplish, or create. See yourself never in the least affected by the objective success or nonsuccess of your endeavors. Remember yourself always abiding in a full and delightful feeling of rich success, no matter the particular outcome of whatever you did.
You may find it helps you to then record the following decisions in your common-place book:
I decide to drop all my old memories of pain, lack, and shame. I decide to entirely forgive all those old memories, to let them be completely erased from my being, from my field. I give up all ability to access them. I don’t need them to tell me who I am. The truth about me is not contained or revealed in those memories, only a record of my previous confusion. I am no longer confused, and I no longer need or want those traces. They serve no purpose but to keep me trapped in the same patterns.
I no longer want those patterns, that identity. I am willing to completely forgive those memories by completely dropping them. I am willing to never remember myself again as someone insulted, scorned, hurt, or disappointed. I am willing to remember myself as someone who has only ever felt welcomed, cherished, loved, successful, and celebrated. I am willing to release all of my old resentments and anger. I am willing to have nothing in my heart but kindness, gratitude, and love.
Write your responses to these questions in your common-place book.
1. How do you feel after you practice metta cultivation? Do you notice yourself feeling any different toward people after you’ve practiced?
2. Read back over your recollections of dreams from this past week. Do you see any common themes? Does any particular person reappear? What has the feeling tone of your dreams been this past week? Oftentimes, as we experiment with taking symbolic action based on our heart’s call, our dreams become stranger and more intense. These intensities can propel us forward and suggest additional symbolic actions. What might your dreams be asking you to do?
3. What, of all the things your heart has asked of you, do you most resist attempting to do in the world? What seems the most silly and useless to you? Consider that perhaps that very thing may be the most important thing you can do, the long-ignored key to ending your suffering, because what seems least important to our conscious mind can be most important to our soul’s unfolding. Make it your highest priority to accomplish the most futile symbolic action suggested by your heart.