My Dearest Madeline,
It is easy for me to forget just how fast things change for the young! I wouldn’t have imagined that in the span of a single month you would go from working in a nursery and dealing with questions of love to gaining a sense from the depths of your being of what you wish to do in your life. I am not surprised by this fortunate turn of events, as I believe that this wish of yours lay in wait as a seed beneath the winter ground, waiting for the warmth of the sun to call it forth. For you, that warmth came from your vitality, no longer leaking, but rising like a fountain and freeing you to see what was hidden all along.
It is often a chance encounter over matters just mildly consequential that end up changing the course of one’s life. When Simon sent you to see the Moon Lake Woman, it was for an answer to just such a question.19 Who would have guessed at your enchantment with the rhythms of her loom? But fate is like that. It dangles possibilities before our eyes every single day, but it is not every single day that we have the strength to see these things for what they truly are. Instead, these appear as a mass of patterns, with no single part attracting the eye.20 It is only if, as Simon said, “we store sufficient strength to form an inner wish,”21 that any part of these rise in bold relief and form for us a vision, rich with meaning.
This revelation is fortunate for you for reasons beyond illuminating your path, as it has given you direct experience, as all revelations do, of what is possible when all of your buckets, including the three we have yet to discuss, even briefly become leak-free.
This experience shows that you have patched the buckets we have already covered. But it also shows that, even without a clear understanding, you briefly managed to patch the remaining three buckets that reside in your head. The fact is, one or another of these buckets is leaking almost all of the time, and they only remain patched with the vigilance of a quiet mind.
But in moments however brief, when all of the patches hold, all vitality becomes contained and beams up to heaven as a kind of silent prayer. And this becomes the channel for every kind of revelation.
It will be useful for you to learn a bit about each of these last three buckets. With a clear understanding, it will be easier to recreate this inner alignment that has enabled you to glimpse through the eyes of your soul. But first, I will tell you the tale of the king and his three doctors.
A wise, old king knew he was dying, and he was suffering greatly. He had his noblemen scour his kingdom to bring him the three doctors who all agreed were the finest in the land. One by one, the king asked each of them for their recommendation.
The first doctor was well known and well liked. He took one look at the king and said, “Your Majesty, I know just what you have; I have seen this a thousand times, and I have written about this very thing in my newly published book. I recommend that you follow the instructions in it, and you’ll be better in no time.” And he handed the king a signed copy of his brand-new book but then left so quickly that the king did not have a chance to even utter a word to him.
The second doctor was known to be thoughtful. He thoroughly examined the king and then told him, “You have a very complicated condition, but there are some experimental treatments that are showing promise. I recommend that we take you to our hospital, where we can do many tests and begin your treatment.” The king thanked him and told him that he would think about this recommendation.
The third doctor was known for her kindness and wisdom. She sat beside the king and took his wrist in order to study his pulse; she held his wrist in silence for a quarter of an hour. Was she just taking his pulse, or was she doing something else? And if she was doing something else, it could not be discerned by any of his servants; they wondered if perhaps she was doing nothing at all.
Then she put down his wrist and gazed into his eyes for a very long time and said to him, “Prepare a great feast for your subjects, and allow all who wish to, to come forward and share with you how your reign has helped them in their lives. For your suffering is nothing more than that of a lover, aching with the knowledge that soon he will depart from his beloved. You must hear from your kingdom, in the chorus of their own voices, of their love for you and their feeling that, because of you, even once you’re gone, they will all be well and will not soon forget you.”
And the king thanked this doctor, ordered up the feast, and at the height of those festivities, announced that with his passing, this doctor would reign as queen of the land.
These doctors differed in the energies they held in these three remaining buckets, and this determines what kind of imagination they could each afford to pay for. You see, my dearest, nothing illustrates the nature of the three remaining buckets better than a clear understanding of just what imagination is or what it can be.
Imagine you are away, but at a familiar place, and you begin your journey home. Hasn’t it ever happened that you arrive at home and can’t recall a thing about your journey? Your mind may have been busy, and the path you took was so familiar that it left not a trace. Here, your imagination was a kind of premade map that kept you pointed in the right direction, all the way home. In the same way, haven’t you ever found yourself telling the same story for the hundredth time, and once you start telling it, it practically tells itself? In these instances, there is an automatic retrieval of something already stored that simply plays out, with no effort or awareness on your part. The first doctor was only able to muster imagination from this lowest of the three remaining buckets.
This bucket contains the energy we use for all forms of automatic thinking. It is always the case that the activity of this energy never leaves a trace in our awareness. It is solely involved with thinking without learning; new memories can’t be made with this energy, and we can have no recollection of any action, thought, or feeling that results from the use of this energy alone. And because the use of this energy never leaves a trace, it is possible to live in a delusion, where I believe I am having an original thought—even though this thought of mine was put there, years ago, by somebody else. Or I believe that I am having an authentic feeling, even though I am only retrieving something rather dusty, from the back of an old drawer.
The energy of automatic thinking is of great help to us. It streamlines activities so we don’t need to remember how to accomplish things we’ve done many times before. In the best of circumstances, it is used often but sparingly, as one would ask a librarian for help in finding a reference. It sets the patterns for making breakfast, and walking the dog, and such. And these kinds of activities are a great refuge from intensive work. But when used to excess, this bucket is drained, and the two above it, linked tightly together as they are, can never stay filled. This happens if we live an unexamined life—a life without the hunger of curiosity or the wish for new learning. This is imagination without consciousness, and it can be a kind of hell.
This bucket also leaks when we live our lives as if we are just going through the motions. Living in this way, we can only have mechanical habits of feeling, not the true emotions that come from the heart and arrive in a flash without words or story. For many poor souls, these habits of feeling are their only experience of emotions. But true emotions are prompted from below, from instinct, or from above, from heaven, and never form from a thought. Habits of feeling are nothing more than colorations of well-worn thoughts—such as worry, anxiety, and fear, which lead to the endless ruminations that drain this bucket dry.
Now imagine that I have asked you to give me directions to your home, but I am unfamiliar with your town, and I am coming into it from a direction that you don’t often use. Also, I prefer a route that will take me past the most beautiful places so that I can take in the sights. And lastly, because of a problem with my steering wheel, I can only make right-hand turns. So though you are familiar with your town, you have to think through each of these issues, and once you have the route in your head, you’ve got to visualize the whole trip, step by step, so that you can explain it to someone who doesn’t know your town at all.
Using the mind’s eye to visualize these kinds of details and assembling them in a way that you have never done before requires a kind of active imagination that can never be automatic. This kind of imagination is paid for with energy from the middle bucket, and it was this kind of imagination used by the second doctor.
Learning anything new and creating new connections between things that you already know are actions that stem from this active-thinking energy. If you have ever spent time doing intensive learning or problem solving, you will know that this bucket will only hold so much. Once you have reached the bottom, you will not be able to visualize anything new. Instead, you will need to rest and allow more energy of this kind to accumulate. That rest can come from sleep, or it can come from activities that you can do automatically and without thinking. But one thing that you can do to help replenish this energy faster is to perform some automatic task, like making breakfast, but attend to it while you are doing it. Don’t just go through the motions mindlessly, but pay reverent attention to everything you are doing. Make breakfast as if the choreography of making breakfast were a speeded-up form of Tai Chi Chuan, and observe your movements in the ways that I described to you in a previous letter. It is remarkable how effective this exercise is in replenishing this energy.
This bucket leaks whenever you repeatedly call upon it to assemble scenarios that don’t jive with reality. Fantasies, conspiracy theories, and the like are worthwhile if you wish to write novels. And if you have a legitimate dream, this energy will put meat on the bones of it. But if you are pretending to be someone who you are not or living in a way that is inauthentic, then you are constantly calling upon this energy to visualize versions of yourself that it will diligently compare with what it knows to be true, and it will burn through its energy as it struggles to reconcile these discrepancies. This energy doesn’t come cheaply!
Simon once commented on this, telling me in his poetic way, “I apportion my surmise as a miser counts his coins.”22 So to keep this bucket from leaking, be responsible for your actions. Be consistent with who you are, and honor your commitments. Don’t be reckless with money, be current with any of your debts, value what is true and honest, and always let your word be your bond.
Now imagine that you are trying to solve a problem that is difficult in an entirely different way from giving me driving directions. For example, think of how you would inform your mother that you initiated contact with me! I’m not suggesting you do this, as it may be best to leave things as they are without burdening her with the old conflict between your father and me. But by thinking this through, you will come up against her point of view, and if you were to try and change it, you’d need to be creative. So thinking it through would only get you so far. What you would really need would be some kind of inspiration that would show you, through wisdom and compassion, a process, maybe a gradual one, where eventually it would become just a small step to share your renewed contact with me with her.
Where does that kind inspiration come from? It certainly can’t come from the same place that planning a driving route comes from. Instead it must come from the highest form of imagination that we are capable of, just short of revelation. This comes from the energy in our topmost bucket, the energy that pays for inspired imagination and this is the imagination that the king’s third doctor was capable of using.
This is the smallest bucket of all, and it only ever holds a limited quantity of energy. It is filled by what trickles up to it: some from the overall flow of the whole fountain, most from the overflow of just the two other buckets in the head and, perhaps most important, from a reverse flow of any excess traveling upwards through the root formed by the sexual energy bucket.
It is not so much that this highest bucket leaks; it is just that all the other buckets can’t themselves be leaking if there is ever to be any accumulation in it. Your house must be clean, my dearest, for there to be available to you a ready supply from this tiny upper bucket. I’ve already given you many exercises to help you clean house, but if there is a single one that is essential in accumulating in this bucket, it is practicing silence in the mind. If your automatic-thinking or your active-thinking energies are being used, there will not be a drop to spare for trickling upward. Remember in the tale of the king how long the third doctor spent, silently sensing his pulse and silently gazing into his eyes?
And so, my dearest, now you know about all of the buckets and have even had a glimpse of revelation. So I would be remiss if I didn’t, at least briefly, cover the subject of prayer. All too often, prayers are memorized as a series of words and are recited strictly from automatic thinking. No good can come from this, as true prayer must engage what is not automatic. Words alone can’t create the inner alignment needed to patch up all the buckets. Effort must be brought to bear to radiate our vitality up to heaven. Then grace will enter us with ease.
Real prayer can bring a greater synchronization to living things but also to substances, objects, and structures. And while nothing can store a spirit of healing, as it can only flow like a blowing breeze, things can be made to hold a spirit of healing in the same way that a bell holds its ring. Had I understood this years ago, I could have changed the nature of that angry loaf of bread that made me so ill. With your interest now in weaving, ponder how you might bring a spirit of healing into your workspace and into each and every piece that will come from your loom. This is a big subject, but if you are interested, we can cover it at another time.
Just one more thing—about you leaving the nursery for the better pay of waiting tables, to better help with the costs of buying your loom. I consider waiting tables to be a treasure for anyone wishing to bring a spirit of healing into their work. It educates the body to be efficient with movement, it educates the mind to be attentive and focused, and it educates one’s feelings to accept challenges with grace. Your tips will mostly reflect your success in these lessons. But when they don’t, as some café patrons could care less about the help, this lack will give you a lesson in humbleness that no one who wishes to work with a spirit of healing ought to be without.
I look forward to hearing all about your weaving!
Your loving uncle,
James