What is the Material World and is it Dead?
Dear Friends,
In William Blake's long poem, "Europe," he writes of a human who catches a fairy in his hat. He asks the cheerful entity a question:
'Then tell me what is the material world, and is it dead?'
and the fairy gives a remarkable response:
He laughing answer’d: ‘I will write a book on leaves of flowers,
If you will feed me on love-thoughts, & give me now and then
A cup of sparkling poetic fancies. So, when I am tipsie,
I’ll sing to you to this soft lute, and shew you all alive
The world, where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy.’
This passage has much to teach us about our whole situation here -- what is the earth, how we can approach it, and who we are ourselves.
In keeping with Pema Chodren and the lojong slogans, I want to emphasize the tender aliveness of the whole passage. Pema doesn't talk about such elemental encounters (though these do exist in Tibetan Buddhism), but she talks a great deal about the tender aliveness that lives just beneath, behind, in front of, or right in the midst of our tricky emotional stuckness, our deceptions and self-deceptions, our trouble as selfish and scared and angry and sorrowing humans, even our physical pain. As soon as we accept these things, instead of fighting them, and also allow for ourselves as greater-than, as including-but-not-limited-to, then the world opens up in its first-ever aliveness. It can become startlingly fresh, and shot through with beings as well as intensities of being.
Notice how the fairy wants to be fed on love-thoughts and poetic fantasies. This is the diet that could bring it to eloquence on the nature of this supposedly meaningless world, so that the human, too, could perceive the joy in every particle of dust. We can bring ourselves into resonance: love and fantasy in us would allow us to perceive a background and permeating joy in the world.
There is a simple way, in a group, to develop our capacity for love and fantasy and also -- be forewarned! -- to find out what prevents us. We'll make our experiments at 11am today.
wishing you joy in all you do,
Michael
