Cross the Gap with Poetry

Poetry acts like a madelein and with happy remembrance can make a day bright.

Do you have a pet in mind for your relaxation ? A cat's purr has a restorative effect on bone & soul (21-44 hz freq.)

On Eagles' Wings

Law demands—grace gives. Law says “do”—grace says “believe.” Law exacts—grace bestows. Law says “work”—grace says “rest.” Law threatens, pronouncing a curse—grace entreats, pronouncing a blessing. Law says “Do, and thou shalt live”—grace says, “Live, and thou shalt do.” Law condemns the best man—grace saves the worst man.

–Author unknown​

Struggle of a Saved Soul

"Run, run and do," the Law commands, But gives me neither feet nor hands. Better news the gospel brings, It bids me fly and gives me wings.

–Author unknown

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me, Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeoning of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds, and shall find, me unafraid. It matters not how strait the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.

–William Ernest Henley

God nothing does, nor suffers to be done, but what we would ourselves—could we but see through all events of things, as well as He.”

–Author unknown

TREES

My favorite trees are many.

I love our tree out there.

I think it is a maple.

It smells soft

as washed clothes.

How high can you go up in a tree?

Feel the bark,

it has texture and feels heavy,

tastes icky,

looks beautiful,

The shape is beautiful,

a monument and a statue.

I can hear it talking.

I always hear trees talking.

Hello and welcome

and please do come sit on me.

–Karen Barreau

I wanted to go, He said stay; I wanted to do, He said pray; I wanted to work, He said wait; I wanted to live for His sake; Love me, child, He softly said; Yes, Lord, I bowed my head; I want Your way, I am your son; Not my will, but Thine be done.

–Author unknown

When You Read the Bible Through

I supposed I knew my Bible, Reading piecemeal, hit or miss, Now a bit of John or Matthew, Now a snatch of Genesis, Certain chapters of Isaiah, Certain psalms (the twenty-third), Twelfth of Romans, First of Proverbs, Yes, I thought I knew the Word! But I found that thorough reading Was a different thing to do, And the way was unfamiliar When I read the Bible through. You who like to play at Bible, Dip and dabble, here and there, Just before you kneel, a weary, And yawn through a hurried prayer; You who treat the Crown of Writings As you treat no other book– Just a paragraph disjointed, Just a crude impatient look– Try a worthier procedure, Try a broad and steady view; You will kneel in very rapture When you read the Bible through!

–Amos R. Wells

Grandfather Twilight

Grandfather Twilight lives among the trees

When day is done, he closes his book,

combs his beard, and puts on his jacket.

Next, he opens a wooden chest that is

filled with an endless strand of pearls.

He lifts the strand, takes on peal from it,

and closes the chest again.

Then, holding the pearl in his hand,

Grandfather Twilight goes for a walk.

The pearl grows larger with every step.

Leaves begin to whisper. Little birds hush.

Gently he gives the pearl to the silence above the sea.

Then Grandfather Twilight goes home again.

He gets ready for bed.

And he goes to sleep.

Good night.

––Barbara Berger

“Paracelsus”

All things are made by imagination's power. Nothing begins except in the imagination of man. “From within out” is the law of the universe. . . .

Truth is within ourselves; it takes no rise

From outward things, what e'er you may believe.

There is an inmost center in us all,

Where truth abides in fullness. . . and to know,

Rather consists in opening out a way

Whence the imprisoned splendor may escape,

Than in effecting entry for a light

Supposed to be without.”

––Robert Browning

Who is Your Imagination?

“Imagination, the real and eternal world of which this Vegetable Universe is but a faint shadow. What is the life of Man but Art and Science?

“in heaven the only Art of Living Is forgetting and Forgiving Especially to the Female. (Art of revision) Thru ignorance of the law of revision those who take to warfare are perpetually defeated. We are led to believe a lie when we see with, not through the eye.” Don' t blame only revise. It is not man and the earth at their lovliest, but you practicing the art of revision make paradise.

“I rest not from my great task

To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes

Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity

––William Blake

Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.”

Imagination is the very gateway of reality. “Man,” said Blake, “is either the ark of God or a phantom of the earth and of the water.” 'Naturally he is only a natural organ subject to Sense.” “The Eternal Body of Man is The Imagination: that is God himself, The Divine Body, Jesus we are his Members.”

I know of no greater and truer definition of the Imagination that that of Blake. By it we can be anything we desire to be. Through Imagination w disarm and transform the violence of the world. Our most intimate as well as our most casual relationships become imaginative as we awaken to the “mystery hid from the ages,” that Christ in us is our imagination. We then realize that only as we live by it can we truly be said to live at all.

(Jesus is a symbol of the coming of imaginatin to man, that the test of His birth in man was the individual's ability to forgive sin; that is, his ability to identify himself or another with his aim in life. Without the identification of man with his aim the forgiveness of sin is an impossibility, and only the Son of God can forgive sin. Therefore man's ability to identify himself with his aim, though reason and his senses deny it, is proof of the birth of Christ in him. Christianity cannot be inherited by the mere accident of birth but must be consciously adopted as a way of life. Christ is sufficient for all things.

Jerusalem Wm. Blake

Visionary Fancy

“The Nature of Visionary Fancy, or Imagination, is very little known, & the External nature and permanence of its ever Existent Images is consider'd as less permanent than the things of Vegetative and Generative Nature; yet the Oak dies as well as the Lettuce, but Its Eternal image and Individuality never dies, but renews by its seed; just so the Imaginative Image returns by the seed of Contemplative Thoughts.”

Blake

Imaging Creates Reality

“Man is all Imagination

God is Man and exists in us

and we in Him. . .The Eternal

that is, God, Himself.”

Blake

The world in which we live is a world of imagination. In fact, life itself is an activity of imagining. For Blake the world originates in a divine activity identical with what we know ourselves as the activity of imagination. His task being “to open the immortal eyes of man inward into the worlds of thought, into eternity, ever expanding in the bosom of God, the Human Imagination.”

Objective reality is solely produced through imagination. Objects seem so independent of our perception of them that we incline to forget that they owe their origin to imagination. The world in which we live is a world of imagination, and man—through his imaginal actvities—creates the realities and circumstances of life; this he does either knowingly or unknowingly.

Blake

“.....all you behold, tho' it appears Without, it is Within. In your Imagination, of which this world of Mortality is but a Shadow.

Blake

There is no stopping the man who can think from the end. Nothing can stop him. He creates the means and grows his way out of limitation into ever greater and greater mansions of the Lord. It does not matter what he has been or what he is. All that matters is 'what does he want?' He knows that the world is a manifestation of the mental activity which goes on within himself, so he strives to determine and control the ends from which he thinks. In his imagination he dwells in the end, confident that he shall dwell there in the flesh also. He puts his whole trust in the feeling of the wish fulfilled and lives by committing himself to that state, for the art of fortune is to tempt him so to do. Like the man at the pool of Bethsesda, he is ready for the moving of the waters of imagination. Knowing that every desire is ripe grain to him who knows how to think from the end, he is indifferent to mere reasonable probability and confident that through continuous imagination his assumptions will harden into fact. Life is a controllable thing. You can experience what you please once you realize that you are His Son, and that you are what you are by virtue of the state of consciousness from which you think and view the world.

Blake

“Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine.” Luke 15:31

Blake

The Coin of Heaven

“Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?' And the prophet replied “All poets believe that it does. And in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.” - Marriage or Heaven and Hell - Blake - “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.” (When man has the sense of Christ as his imagination, he sees why Christ must die and rise again from the dead to save man—why he must detach his imagination from his present state and match it to a higher concept of himself if he would rise above his present limitations and thereby save himself.

Make your inner conversation match your fulfilled desire. What you desire to hear without, you must hear within. Your inner speech is perpetually written all around you in happenings. Learn to relate these happenings to your inner speech and you will become self-taught. These are mental conversations which you carry on with yourself. You put on the new man when

ever ideals and inner speech match. In this way alone can the new man be born. It is the speech of fulfilled desire. In every event is the creative sound that is its ife and being. All that a man believes and consents to as true reveals itself in his inner speech. It is his Word, his life. To change your life you must change your inner talking for LIFE said Hermes

“is the union of word and MIND.” When imagination matches your inner speech to fulfilled desire there will then be a straight path in yourself from within out, and the without will instantly reflect the within for you, and you will know reality is only actualized inner talking.

Hermetica

Trans Walter Scott “I AM THAT” “There are two gifts which God has bestowed upoon man alone, and on no other moral creature. These two are mind and speech; and the fit of mind and speech is equivalent to that of immortality. If a man uses these gifts rightly, he will differ in nothing from the immortals....and when he quits the body, mind and speech will be his guides, and by them he will be brought into the troop of the gods and the souls that have attained to bliss.” “The Word,” said Hermes, “is Son and the Mind is Father of the Word. They are not separate one from the other, for life is the union of Word and Mind.” (The circumstances and conditions of life are out-pictured inner talking solidified sound.)

W. B. Yeats (Greatest poet of the 20th Century) “Ideas of Good and Evil” “If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men, must be forever casting forth enchantments, glamour, illusions, and all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful egoistic life, must be continually passing under their power.”

Imagined acts on the human level need a certain interval of time to develop but imaginal acts, whether committed to print or locked in the bosom of a hermit, will realize themselves in time. Test yourself, if only out of curiosity, You will discover the “Prophet” in your own imagining and you will know “there is no fiction.”

The Law and the Promise

“We should never be certain that

it was not some woman treading

in the wine press who began that

subtle change in men's mind. . .

or that the passion, because of

which so many countries were given

to the sword, did not begin in the

mind of some shepherd boy, lighting

up his eyes for a moment before it

ran upon its way.”

W. B. Yeats (Greatest poet of the 20th Century)

“Ideas of Good and Evil”

“If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we should rewrite our histories, for all men, certainly all imaginative men, must be forever casting forth enchantments, glamour, illusions, and all men, especially tranquil men who have no powerful egoistic life, must be continually passing under their power.”

Imagined acts on the human level need a certain interval of time to develop but imaginal acts, whether committed to print or locked in the bosom of a hermit, will realize themselves in time. Test yourself, if only out of curiosity, You will discover the “Prophet” in your own imagining and you will know “there is

no fiction.”

The Law and the Promise

“We should never be certain that

it was not some woman treading

in the wine press who began that

subtle change in men's mind. . .

or that the passion, because of

which so many countries were given

to the sword, did not begin in the

mind of some shepherd boy, lighting

up his eyes for a moment before it

ran upon its way.”

William Butler Yeats

There is no fiction. Imagining fulfills itself in what our lives become. “And now I have told you before it takes place, so that when it does take place, you may believe it.” The Greeks were right: “The Gods have come down to us in the likeness of men.!” But they have fallen asleep and do not realize the might they wield by their imaginal activities.

Man is free to imagine whatever he desires. This is why, despite all fataliists and misguided prophets of doom, all awakened men know that they are free. They know that they are creating reality. Is there a scriptural passage to support this claim? Yes: “

And it came to pass, as he interpreted to us, so it was.”

W. B. Yeats must have discovered that “there is no fiction: for after describing some of his experiences in the conscious use of imagination, he writes: 'If all who have described events like this have not dreamed, we be forever casting forth enchantments, glamours, illusions, and all men, especially tranquil men, who have no powerful egoitistic life must be continually passing under their powers. Our most elaborate thoughts, elaborate purposes, precise emotions, are

often as I think, not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of hell or down out of heaven......”

Wise imagining identifies itself only with such activities that are of value or promise well. However much man seems to be dealing with a material world, he is actually living in a world of imagination. When he discovers that it is not the physical world of facts but imaginal activities which shape his life, then the physical world will no longer be the reality, and the world of imagination no longer the dream.

“Does the road wind uphill all the way?

Yes, to the very end.

Will the day's journey take the whole long day? FROM MORN TO NIGHT, MY FRIEND.”

Our future is our imagining in its creative march. Use your imagination for a conscious purpose representing life as you desire it to be and thereby affecting life instead of reflecting

When you can call up at will whatsoever image you please, when the forms of your imagination are as vivid to you as the forms of nature, you are master of your fate – captain of your soul. “On Sail On” Columbus.

Visions of beauty and splendor,

Forms a long-lost race,

Sounds and faces and voices,

From the fourth dimension of space--

And on through the universe boundless,

Our thoughts go lightning shod--

Some call it imagination,

And others call it God.

Columbus By Joaquin Miller

Then pale and worn he paced his deck And ah that night and then a speck........

Laurence Housman

“Losing thy soul, thy soul

Again to find;

Rendering toward that goal Thy separate mind.”

A change of attitude is a change of position on the playing field of life.

The game of life is not being

played out there in what is called space and time;

the real moves in the game of life take place within,

on the playing field of the mind.

“Losing thy soul, thy soul Again to find;

Rendering toward that goal Thy separate mind.”

Keats

Keats on Acceptance

Whenever you become completely absorbed in an emotional state you are at that moment assuming the feeling of the state fulfilled. If persisted in, whatsoever you are intensely emotional about you will experience in your world. These periods of absorption, of concentrated attention, are the beginnings of the things you harvest

You have something in imagination with such vividness that you now wonder whether the evidence of your senses can now be believed and like Keats you ask,

“was it a vision or a waking dream?

Fled is that music. . .Do I wake or sleep?”

The Lord of hosts will not respond to your wish until you have assumed the feeling of already being what you want to be, for acceptance is the channel of His action. Acceptance is the Lord of hosts in action.

Essentials

Intense yearning, burning desire is mainspring of action. “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.” Here the soul is interpreted as the sum total of all you believe,

think, feel and accept as true, in other words, your present level of awareness. God means I AM, the source and fulfillment of all desire. This quotation describes how your present level of awareness longs to transcend itself. RIGHTEOUSNESS IS THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF ALREADY BEING WHAT YOU WANT TO BE.

Secondly, cultivate physical immobility, a physical incapacity not unlike the state described by Keats in his “Ode To A Nightingale.” “A drowsy numbness pains my sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk.”This state increases your power of concentration

“Be still and know that I am God.”

It is when your feeling of reverence is most intense that you are closest to God and when you are closest to God your life is richest.

“Our deepest feelings are precisely those we are least able to express, and even in the act of adoration, silence is our highest praise.”

The third and last thing to do is to experience in your imagination what you would experience in reality had you achieved your goal. Imagine that you possess a quality or something you desire which hitherto has not been yours. Surrender yourself completely to this feeling until your whole being is possessed by it. This state dffers from reverie in this respect: it is the result of a controlled imagination and a steadied concentrated attention whereas reverie is the result of an

uncontrolled imagination – day dream.

Desire Physical Immobility The assumption of the wish already fulfilled.

Righteousness - The kingdom (entire creation) of God (Your I AM) is within you.

:Righteousness is the awareness that you already possess it all.

The time it takes your assumption to become reality is proportionate to the naturalness of being it.

“Man surrounds himself with the true image of himself. Every spirit builds itself a house and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. Know then that the world exists for you. For you the phenomenon is perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth. Caesar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of land, or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine name. Build therefore your own world. As far as you conform your

life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportion.” Emerson

Incarnate, incorruptible four-fold wisdom, clothed in purple –Love and Truth- the purpose of man's experience on earth. Song of Sol 3:9-10

Love is the sage's stone;

It takes gold from the clod;

It turns naught into aught,

Transforms me into God.” Angelus Silesius

Downpour - Billy Collins

Last night we ended up on the couch

trying to remember

all of the friends who had died so far.

And this morning I wrote them down

in alphabetical order

on the flip side of a shopping list

you had left on the kitchen table.

So many of them had been swept away

as if by a hand from the sky,

it was good to recell them,

I was thinking under the cold lights of a supermarket

as I guided a cart with a wobbly whell

up and down the long strident aisles.

I was on the lookout for blueberried,

English muffins, linguini, heavy cream,

light bulbs, apples, Canadian bacon,

and whatever else was on the list,

which I managed to keep grocery side up,

until I had passed through the electric doors,

where I stopped to realize,

as I turned the list over,

That I had forgotten Terry O'Shea

as well as the bananas and the bread.

It was pouring by then,

spilling, as they say in Ireland,

people splashing across the lot to their cars.

And that is when I set out,

walking slowly and precisely,

a soaking-wet manifestation bearing bags of groceries,

walking as if in a procession honoring the dead.

I felt I owed this to Terry,

who was such a strong painter,

for almost forgetting him

and to all the others who had formed

a circle around him on the screen in my head.

I was walking more slowly now

in the presence of the compassion

the dead were extending to a comrad,

Plus I was in no hurry to return

to the kitchen, where I would have to tell you

all about Terry and the bananas and the bread.