POETRY IS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
Writers are Witches (series)
The ultimate goal of most spiritual practices is to achieve unity, that is, wholeness. We want to connect with the source of everything, to become one with all. You might even say (Einstein-like) that we want to understand the mind of God.
Unity with God Itself (Herself, Himself, Themselves), that oneness with everything, is the ultimate way for us to flourish.
But along the way toward oneness, mystics and witches and physicists (and sometimes poets) begin to sense that the material world is mostly illusion, and as such, one can shape or interpret the meaning of the details of the world. You can pray to God for something, or cast a spell if you’re a witch, or send out an “intention” if you’re a capitalist (ha ha) and what you want suddenly appears in your life. I have known many religious people who have prayed for a job or an opportunity, and then it happens, just like they asked. They believe God altered the universe to provide what they asked for, and humans have believed this for thousands of years.
It’s happened to me countless times when I was worried about money, and I let it go, with the faith that everything would be all right, and I get an unexpected check in the mail. If you are willing to search deeply into your memories, you would know this is true, because it has happened to you. Maybe you call it luck, maybe serendipity, but if this experience has happened to all of us, how much more does it happen when one is focused on a spiritual practice, especially religion or the occult, because unconsciously or not, they are using the structures of energy and motion in the external world to align with the internal world. As above, So Below means not only what is true in the upper worlds is true in the material world, but it also means that what is true inside our bodies is true outside of our bodies, that we are a microcosm for the cosmos.
Vitruvian man much?
The practice of religion or witchcraft requires focus, dedication, and the willingness to accept non-material realities. When we practice magic or deep prayer, we are accepting that our souls or consciousness can enter into different realms, higher levels of reality, and sometimes we leave our bodies behind. The apostle Paul talks about being caught up in “the third heaven,” an extraordinary visual experience that does not exist in this realm. This could very well be what Carlos Castaneda experienced with “the second attention.”
This experience of shaping the material world is a physiological process that any human organism is capable of practicing, and this is what poets often arrive at in the writing process.
When a creative writer is focused on a work, they can enter into a landscape different from our own, where beings appear from nowhere, images appear, symbols populate the visual space --or if we are writing a poem or anything based on rhythm, incantation, sound --we can enter into non-material landscapes, wormholes or portals through which only the imagination can travel. We are like alchemists bent over our desk studying equations, examining the secrets of the universe. When writers are good at what they do, readers can enter into their language and follow it into an alternate reality.
This is a spiritual practice.