Insight and Abstraction: How an Ancient Technique of Ecstasy Became a Hobby

The final sentence of Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy states that lyric poetry is the sole remaining vestige of Shamanism in the West (and wherever West has traveled), “But that is a topic for another book . . . .” I read that sentence when I was living alone in a tiny cabin on Sequim Bay off the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I taught four hours Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. The rest of the time I was alone, at least in human terms. I had plenty of companionship. I had elk, eagles, otters (the PNW kind, the ones that hold paws as they nap-float), seals, a young racoon I named Sophie, a sea lion, an actual family of partridges, a large buck, and seagull I named Jason. I was working toward my MFA in Creative Writing at Warren Wilson College’s low-residency program. This meant I had to compose and revise poems every three weeks, as well as pages of a nearly one-hundred page essay due at the end of term. We weren’t supposed to do research. We had to come up with every single idea on our own. Eliade’s tome wasn’t research so much as explanation of what what happening between me and the natural world and poetry.

Ah, a cabin in the woods writing poetry. No more than three channels on TV, no internet (It existed, I just hadn’t entered my own life into it). Just my books, the sea, and the moon. Everyone’s dream. That is, until dream and reality lose their distinguishing properties, before you and the consciousness of all of it becomes one ceaseless dream lasting months. That is, until we discover “realness” in events and things deemed “unreal.” That is, until you no longer can sleep because even in dreams you are being instructed and encountered.

These things happen still, regardless of what Sir Isaac Newton’s Scientific Method and John Locke’s Doctrine of Empiricism tell us. I was never told about an alternative. It wasn’t like the Monroe Doctrine which you learn about alongside competing Doctrines. Doctrines were rules of action. That was okay. As rules of perception, though? That thing so many feel is wrong about the world but worry what happens if we speak it? You must be crazy, we think to ourselves. I’m losing my mind, we worry.

As one of Civilization’s Discontents, I and the millions and billions like me—emotional, sensitive, creative, kind—masked heavily. I saw beauty and life in everything. There were moments that didn’t make any sense. There were instances of encounter beyond five senses. I had always used the phrase “just my imagination.” I didn’t buy fully into the “just” part. It all came out as poetry, so I decided to be a poet. What an odd profession to choose. Back then, in the 1980s, we got divided in two kinds of thinkers. Artist or Scientist. As my father, the doctor, told me when I said I was going to be a poet, “Wanna know how to end up millionaire after a life as a poet? Start with five million.” It was clear, one path led to poverty—no money, no jobs, no actual recognition, no respect. And still, I chose that path.

When I was having difficulty finishing my essay for the MFA, I called my father and told him he would be happy, that I was changing my path, I was going to be a doctor. By then he had moved to Bermuda where he had a small one-room practice.

“Don’t do it,” he said. “It will break your heart. Poetry is the finer means for finding the truth.”

A few nights after that, I had a dream. In the dream were the poems I was analyzing for my essay. They appeared before me in three dimensions in the dream. Three (there had been a fourth, but I’d ditched it) poems were suspended in the air, in space. I was the observer of the dream. I knew it was a dream, and I knew I was both in and outside the dream. I waited for something to happen to these spirals of words. I couldn’t command it to start. I had to wait. When the movement started, it was as though each word of the poems was high-diving backward with elaborate flips and spins. The poems all went back flipping, and they had a destination. The destination, I understood upon waking, was an origin. An origin of all words. After that dream, I could write my essay in one swift go. My essay astonished my frustrated and often verbally abusive advisor. This shut him up. A member of my defense committee even published a book in which I could see my ideas at play. I didn’t mind since all I wanted was those ideas out and in the world. That’s the thing with dreams. They belong to all of us.

A lot more was going on, both in and out of dreams. I communicated with nature. I saw a word in the clouds that turned out to be an actual word in both Hebrew and Arabic. I found “rhymes” among experiences and beings. I wrote poetry by candlelight learning that poetry composed by the deep imagination reveals aspects of the subject the “controlling” brain can’t perceive. Candles self-extinguished when I broke this rule. Things manifested instantaneously with a thought of them, so closely I wasn’t sure which came first or if there was any distinction: are words world? All the wondrous aspects of life on earth had been opening to my perceptions. I’ve kept a lot of it to myself because, remember, poetry isn’t a valued thing in this culture, madness even less so. I felt it was always possible to stop the insights from happening. All I had to do was think the way I had been taught to think. Straightforward. No imagination. No emotion. No sensitivity. I had even chosen this boring path in college, but I un-chose it after a month of everything making sense, which did not interest me. Poetry, I learned, was viewed as a hobby since nobody viewed it as perception achieved through Creative Imagination. I could see all the words in the clouds. My entire life was at best figure of speech, poetry only a hobby.

Scientific Method and the world it proves, Empiricism, is the consensual reality we were never told was optional. Those of use born into a much more magical world or who were moved into it by circumstance, possibly trauma—we were deemed mad, psychotic, delusional. We learned, therefore, not to tell anyone what we have seen. Except in poetry. In poetry, we burned our truths.

My essay was complete, and summer soon would begin along with higher rental rates, I left my cabin and, with it, my extraordinary communion with the unseen through the seen, the realm of poems. When I teach poetry, I share the value of describing, of putting words to what the Buddhists term the ten thousand things. Along with all the other poets teaching poetry (because we did not choose financial solvency) I teach that an abstraction is an asserted truth drawn from the behavior of the mundane. We teach our students to observe, to pay attention, to listen, to develop the eagle’s eye for what is, that this is where we meet our readers, here, in the world that is. The world behaves as a vehicle of translation, our discovery, the insight, woven through the world as the tenor’s thread.

I think I am wrong about that, now that I know that Empiricism is just another construct. I am wrong in this teaching constructed of that construct— one that has cost us our connection to the earth which is in no way empirical. In every way contrary, earth is alive and vibrant with meanings and revelations we can slow down and perceive.

Trees communicate with us. The blue ghost fireflies mean as much as the polar bear and the albatross. Nothing is small or large in the eyes of this other, vaster, non-empirical reality. Cause and effect expands to hold stunning chains of incidence from seventeen moments of my life at once, all summed up in one bird calling from its branch. Every second. Filled like the Tibetan monks’ mandala that they destroy happily after days or weeks at work. Life is like a massive LP record, its grooves deep and shallow, singing us our lives in perpetuity.

Now it isn’t about the poem. Now it is only about the perception. We describe the surface appearance because that is the only pathway to the interior of what we see. Poetry facilitates this act. This act is the most valuable of acts because in the interior of one thing lies the interior of all things, what matters inside matter. This is insight. It is different for each of us, much as when two people stand in front of a mirror, they see themselves, not someone else, which would be unsettling. We each have our own direct line into experience. By paying attention and slowing down enough by describing, by singing the part of us that matters, our hearts merge in recognition with the same in what we see.

I picked up Galway Kinnell, the Poet, at the Greenville train station at 3:30 in the morning when he came to read at the poetry festival I used run. He is truly the only person on the planet, living or dead, I would do that for. Having gathered him, I had trouble locating the exit of the parking lot. Galway asked a man who must have also risen early to meet someone. The man pointed to a road, “See that road there? That road is mulberry. When mulberry turns to stone . . . .” While in reality I did hear the rest of that sentence, in memory, all I recall is, once the man had continued on his way, Galway and I each looked at each other. We had the exact same thought.

He summed it up, “Are you going to write the poem about mulberry turning to stone, or shall I?”

We both did. We wrote entirely different poems because mulberry turning to stone occurs in a thousand ways yet only one for each of us, our own mulberry, our own stone. This is true for every single thing. Every teensy blue ghost firefly. Every star in far-fetched space. Every whimper of the dog. Every whisper of the wind. The rose that blooms year after year in the garden you barely had to try to create. The position of the cup on the table. It isn’t all for someone else to write poems about these. Everybody is invited to do so in our own way. Our job is to find meaning in everything and to create meaning from anything.

Creative Imagination is the perception. The abstraction is the insight that emerges from within perception. It’s the thing we are supposed to know about, the information of the wonder, the report of the unspoken, the transcendence of the seen. It is listening in its revelatory state. It is the world inside the grain of sand, as Blake says, and eternity within an hour.

I am not saying that we should jump the empirical ship entirely. No, we need both. We need to see what we see on the surface and we need to commune with what it conceals. In Hinduism—the vidya conceals the avidya. In Christianity, we are sent a strong delusion that Empiricism upholds.

Three hundred years is not a long time in terms of life on earth. That thousands of years of life on earth did not destroy it suggests a barren truth about these recent centuries. Something was cut off. It was something we really needed. Without it, though, we were free to destroy because we were the only things that mattered. Apex Predatorship seemed a good idea at the time. And poetry? The first science textbook of the West, de Rerum Natura, was composed in poetry. Poetry was the chosen—valued—form of discourse right up to the latter 17th century. Its instruments enabled us to see both the phenomenal and the temporal, the sacred and the profane, the real and the unreal in one sitting. After that, though, only the temporal, profane, and the real were accepted as truth. Anyone who remembered and perceived that big R Reality, had to be sequestered, called crazy and criminal, burned at the stake. Cultures that had survived 30,000 years on community, animals, plants, and stories were erased from the earth or worse.

I recall reading a passage when I was exploring alchemy as sacred science as well as healing. The passage referred to the practice of chemistry’s parent. The author states that the teachings would be set down upon a river that runs through time, promising that when the river reveals its treasure, humanity will be better equipped to handle its wisdom. As I watch empiricism falter at the thresholds to deeper knowledge physicists create as they perceive it, I picture that river. I picture that gift.

“I have arrived,” it whispers. “Open me.”

And who knows? If poetry is the remaining vestige of shamanism in the West, we can maybe use it to evolve back into what we were when we were perfect.