A Lay of Yuletide (Sketch)

O Tree of Wisdom, Tree of Light,
O Great Tree Yggdrasil
Tree of Life

Whose leaves the heavens graze
Whose trunk's the world embraced
And roots the deepest stones
Of Neifelheim

Perch of the Old One's yielding
Himself to Himself
The mysteries receiving
Carved in the shaft

And the cauldron at thy feet
The clarion waters
Of Lady Cerridwen
Vessel of all knowing
Past and Future

And whose fingers dare touch the waters
Save those of Gwydion the Fool
In whom our madness lingers

And blessed Son of Odin
The shining day-star
of Baldur's rays

Whose sacrifice shall bring
The end of days

The Treasures of the Dead

What follows is an original translation of the first three verses of Preiddu Annwfn (Commonly translated as The Spoils of Annwn), a 6th century Welsh poem from the Book of Taliesin.  There is much scholarly work on this poem, including that of R.S. Loomis, Robert Graves, Marged Haycock, and John Koch.  The aforementioned works set out to be scholarly, objective, and as technically precise as possible with regard to the extremely obscure language and phrasing of the original, but in so striving they have sacrificed poetic fluidity and coherence.  The present effort aims at incorporating past scholarly work as a guide, while preserving poetic structures of the original, including rhyme scheme, internal rhyme, alliteration, and meter.  There is also an intention to preserve a particular interpretation, placing the value of coherence somewhat above technical or scholarly concerns.  The interpretation adopted is that of the hero's journey to the underworld as understood by C.G. Jung and Joseph Campbell, within the mythic framework of the Arthurian Cycle as preserved in Welsh and French medieval literature, and in the English work of Thomas Mallory.  I hope to address the remaining verses in sequence.





I.

Homage to the ruler,
The King of all the land

O'er the wide strand of the world

His sovereignty extends.

Complete the captivity of Gwair
In the Keep of the dread Elven

In the book of Pwyll and Pryderi
Is recorded this legend

Before him there was no man
That ever entered in.

The steadfast youth was bound there
In dark and daunting chain

Before the treasures of the Land of the Dead
He wept and did lament

And thenceforth till the day of doom
A bard he shall be kenned.

Thrice the crew of Prydwen were we

When we entered in

Seven, no more, returned to our shore

From the Keep of the dread Elven.

II.

Honor be and praises

For the song it could be heard

In the Keep of Four Towers

Four times it turned

Came forth from in the cauldron

The first poetic word

By the breath of maidens nine

its fire began to burn

The Chieftain of the Land of Shades

How was his cauldron turned?

A dark rim around it

And in the rim are pearls

To cook the food of daunted men

'Tis not destined to serve

The falchion of fair Lleawch

Has flashed before the urn

And it was fetched by Lleminawch

In his hand it returned

Before that dread portal
Eternal lamplight burned

When we went in with Arthur

Our hands hard honors earned

Seven, no more, returned to the shore

From the Keep of Drink-rapture

III.

Honor be and praises
This song is heard of yore

At the Keep of Four Pinnacles
In the Isle of the Steadfast Door

Edge of day and edge of night
They blend in tincture pure

Effulgent wine their wassail
The winsome host before

Thrice the crew of Prydwen

The wide sea ventured o'er

Seven, no more, returned to the shore

From Keep Rigor.

Forgiveness

I am questioning the notion of forgiveness. It is “the attribute of the strong,” says Gandhi, it is the necessary condition for love, says Martin Luther King, it is pervasive in the teachings of Jesus and the prophets. But I am beginning to feel that it is an empty concept. What does it mean to forgive? Forgiveness assumes that there has been a wrong, a betrayal. It assumes that we have been hurt by another. It is said that we forgive in order to escape the bonds of victimization, and that we must forgive ourselves as well as others.

Forgiveness implies that we are changing our relationship to victimization, to perpetration, and to our own pain that arises from betrayal. In some cases, this something that I must do apart from the perpetrator, apart from the perpetuation that may be ongoing. Because that other who perpetuates harm is beyond my reach, outside of any possibility of influence or interaction.

Do I forgive you? I say neither yes nor no. I say forgiveness has no meaning for me. I choose to come into a constructive relationship with my pain. I choose not to perpetuate victimization, neither in the role of perpetrator, nor victim. I am not your victim. You are your own victim, and your own perpetrator, as long as you choose to perpetuate those roles.

I choose instead to forsake those roles, to incorporate my pain into my authentic being, to manifest myself in loving compassion with myself, my family, my community, my work, and my world. Is this forgiveness? Is this the light that drives out darkness (yet, how can it be, for the darkness remains)? Call it what name suits it, but I choose to live in fullness and in love.

A Dream of Incarnation

A Dream of Incarnation

In this dream I become interested in following the path of the Buddha in New England. I am thinking of how Trungpa Rinpoche came to Newfoundland, Connecticut and New York, and how many other Buddhists came in exile and diaspora to New England, creating there a new dharma, with its own language and sutras.

Why did Bodhidharma make the journey to the East Coast?

I think of making a pilgrimage to all of the towns, the shrines and sangas where this new Buddha came to Plymouth Rock. In the dream, there is a new word for “pilgrimage,” but I cannot now remember what it was.

The words of a poem begin to float across the limitless blue sky, written in broad white letters. I read with an “Oh!” I try to remember the words of the poem.

I spend the rest of the dream seeking ways to remember a single verse of the poem. I keep thinking I am waking up, having successfully remembered, but then find I have only awoken to another level of the dream. At one point, I am in a park with an apple. I try to bite the words of the poem into the skin of the apple so that I will be able to read it after I wake up.

At another dream level, I am wandering in a large park, and I see an elderly woman sitting cross-legged, writing poetry. She is surrounded by baskets full of notebooks, paper, pens, pencils, paint and crayons. She says she is there to encourage children to wrote poetry. I am thankful to have found her, and sift through the notebooks, looking for a blank page. I finally find paper and pen and begin to write. I am immensely relieved. But this is only another level of the dream.

I finally manage to bring myself fully awake. I find I still remember most of the verse. I move downstairs, find blank paper and a purple pen. Touching the pen and paper is delicious. I write the verse. It is 2:30 AM.

To wander in this world

Requires physical presence

A close, sheltering sky

Until even that is unremembered.

The bold words are the ones of which I am absolutely certain. Of the others, I have certainty about their sense, but the words may be inexact.

Interpretation

This dream, like others I have had (“This is how you are all the time”) are about incarnating. They speak of a vast, euphoric existence in another type of reality... the dream state. They bring a message, and this message is that we have a fuller and richer existence than that which seems to surround us in the waking world, the material and conscious world. These dreams seek to convey a message of grave import, but one which is extremely difficult to retain and bring into the conscious world. The message is simply the existence of that world, and our nature in and relationship to it. Our material incarnation is a voluntary and restrictive delimitation of that broader existence. The purpose for which we undertake this project of incarnation is that described in the verse of the poem: To be wanderers, tourists in a material world, to experience self, other, relationship, growth, and understanding; to express love, feeling, thought, physicality, and divinity in it. A condition of this incarnation is an inability to remember that we come from someplace vaster and brighter. Among the consequences of this unremembering are agency and autonomy, but also fear and hopelessness; so sometimes our dream-spirit being sends us this message to reassure us.

Is it part of that need and intention of incarnation to be in a condition of exile, of diaspora?

• From Africa
• From Egypt
• From India (“Why did Bodhidharma come from the West?”)
• From Europe

And weren't even the First Peoples of the Americas in diaspora from Siberia?

Dreams and Transpersonal Psychology (draft notes)

The psychoanalytic theories of Freud and Jung were the first to view dreams as conveyors of meaningful content. Their analytic frameworks were primarily restricted to the structures and processes of the personal psyche, although Jung anticipated the work of transpersonal psychology in his recognition of a collective aspect to the personality: the collective unconscious. It remained for him apart from conscious content, but connected to mythology and catharsis, the domain of the veiled and autochthonous archetypes.

Transpersonal psychology recognizes elements of the psyche that go beyond the personal to include the transegoic, that which extends beyond the boundaries of the individual and touches the collective, not merely of the unconsiousness of humanity, but of the collective anima and the soul of the world. Completing and complementing the Jungian collective unconscious, Janet Adler added collective consciousness. Here, collectivity is not only mythic, but also immediate and transcendental.

But transpersonal psychology has had little to say about dreams. The work of Carlos Castaneda is one effort that seems to bring a transpersonal approach to dream theory. Is it in the Travistock Lectures that Jung speaks of the dream of the world-clock? That is a dream interpretation that borders on the transpersonal. But there is certainly room for further development. How shall we write of this daily process of re-incarnation? This is about connecting to a dis-incarnated state; there is no “pre-trans fallacy” because in that dis-incaranted world, there is neither “pre” nor “trans” – neither before nor after, above nor below, within nor without.

The Upanishads speak of the three states of being – waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. They say that the state of dreamless sleep is the same as the state of death. Is that also in the Baghavad Gita?

It is Robyn Hitchcock who writes of it most clearly and explicitly:

I'm going back into my body
While it's in my control
Back into my body
Playing a role
I'm going back into my body
Back out of my dream
Back into my creature
Where have I been? What did I see?
I've been on the etheric plane
Above all pleasure and all pain
And it feels so bizarre looking down on where you are
I think I'm going back again
I'm going back into my body
Back into my heart
Back into my lifeline
Playing a part that I call me
I've been on the etheric plane
Where there's no dog and there's no chain
And it feels so bizarre looking down on where you are
I think I'm going back again