How to catch a falling star poetry and the spiritual life. Thank you who ever gave me the first half of the title. It wasn't, it's very nice, but I was talking to Neil before and we realized that it comes from a poem by John Dunn about a series of things which are impossible. So yeah, so the first half of the title comes from the series, a poem about a series of things which are impossible, so I hope I'm not attempting to be impossible tonight anyway, to by talking about poetry and the spiritual life. Another thing, if you are nervous, if you don't know much about poetry or you haven't really ever looked into it, don't worry, I'm not here to tell you that you have to read poetry or anything like that. And on the other hand though you might find it makes you curious or interested and if you do like poetry then of course hopefully this is the night for you. So tonight we're going to look at how poetry can act as an inspiration in the spiritual life and ally. So all the other things we do like meditation obviously, reflection, study, communication, friendship and so on, all those important things. I've always found poetry to be an ally on the spiritual path and I know many others do and I'll probably introduce a personal note at times about what poetry means to me in terms of my own spiritual life or even just life. You'll have noticed when you come to the West London Buddhist Center or any F.W. Buddhist Center or go and retreat that there are a few people who are introduced a bit of poetry into things and they might read a poem for a poojial or meditation or in the context of a talk or it might just pop out sometime. Paramana does a lot of that and I always appreciate that and it really works very well for me when he reads poems, weaves poetry in. And whenever I do hear a poem or whenever I hear a good poem I'm immediately in the same world, the Dharma inhabits, that's how it feels to me, the same world as meditation, the same atmosphere, even sometimes a kind of archetypal world where the spiritual and the poetic meet. So I thought tonight without over examining things we just have a look at why that might be, why perhaps poetry and the Dharma share an atmosphere. First of all of course I'm not the only person who thinks this way, it's important to say that. You'll probably realize that the arts in general are important in this movement in the F.W.O. Our founders, Sanger Akstra is very keen on the alliance of art and the spiritual life, on the points where they cross over and he has described the appreciation and for those in kind that way the practice of the arts as one of the distinctive emphases of our movement, the F.W.O. Alongside our commitment to friendship team based right live here is another important thing is he describes six emphases of the F.W.O. to distinguish it from other movements and he says the arts, so the practice and enjoyment of the arts is one of our emphases. So you'll find arts activities going on all over the movement as very much part of what we do. I can talk a bit more specifically about the kind of poetry activities that happen later on but Sanger Akstra has written and taught on the subject of art and the spiritual life quite extensively and obviously I'll be drawing on those teachings tonight. I've also had some involvement myself in various poetry enterprises around the movement as well as elsewhere. There's a look at the back that nobody ever buys or looks at which I was trying to promote once. I was kind of one of the managers of it but it's a little sad book at the back there that I'm sure. The heart is origami, that's right. It was a fantastic book. There are two copies left so if you did want to rush off and buy again. It was a publicity manager. Actually we did sell over a thousand copies which for a poetry book is pretty good going. Anyway so that's the set a bit of context for tonight's theme and it is dark and you're holding up the very volume there. It's very rare now actually there's not many copies that are around. You won't see it in rare book shops along in Chant Cross Road and things like that. So that's a bit of context for tonight's theme but just now to explain the format of the evening, the way I'm planning things. First I'll give this talk which I'm giving now and then about how poetry can link up with the spiritual life and the inspiration I take from it myself and I'll be dropping a few poems and quotations as I go along and then we'll look at a few poems together. I hope and then see how they strike us and if we like them or not and what we like in them and finally I'm hoping there'll be time for questions and a bit of general discussion. So that's an ambitious program. See if we can get through. I haven't got all that. I know this looks like incredibly thick part of no deal and it's very big type to have very big. I'm really got all that much to say. But first of all the definitions probably in order is traditional in the FWA to have us definitions but it is important. I've said tonight is about poetry and the spiritual life. So I'm throwing these terms around poetry, spiritual life and terms like dharma but what do I mean by them? There are all kinds of definitions of poetry. I like what Samuel Taylor Coleridge said that prose is words in their best order. Poetry is the best words in the best order. And William Wordsworth, his friend of his, had a very high conception of the poet and of poetry and felt that poetry was a description of the world filtered through the refined sensibility of a poet thereby revealing the significance of the world. Famously he also said it was the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. It takes his origin he said from emotion recollected in tranquility until the original provoking emotion is accessed again by the poet and transmitted to the reader. I like Emily Dickinson's typically intense definition of poetry. If I read a book she says and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warn me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off I know that is poetry. I think her definition describes best the sort of thing I'm thinking of when I say poetry. Not something merely ornamental or pretty or nice but something that is beautiful, moving, sometimes exciting, takes you deeper into the heart of things, may be challenging, may even be terrifying sometimes in its beauty. And implied in that perhaps is my belief that all good poetry is true. Any really good poem when you read it or hear it will will ring true. For me it's then the some of the best prose can reach the status of poetry as well. When you're reading prose masters like Dickens, Melville, Virginia Woolf or James Joyce for me you are reading poetry. And what about the spiritual life? What do I mean by that? For me that's an honest quest to find out what's true and live by that. Put it into practice or at least try to. It's the quest for truth, beauty and connection with the world. It's a stepping beyond the self so that we can realize our solidarity, even our identity with each other and with all things. It's finding that authenticity, that contentment within, that comes with adopting a more expansive, a more real outlook. And it's all the tools I need to carry me on that quest. For me, having looked in a number of places for that sort of meaning in life, I found that Buddhism as the best context for it makes the most sense. Buddhism for me is the best vehicle, the best raft to the other side to use to put his own expression. But I hope then that I'm a Buddhist because Buddhism makes sense in my experience approaches truth, beauty and love better than other paths, not because I'm just attached to a set of beliefs and practices called Buddhism, if you see what I mean. The term Buddhism itself is actually only a Western term for what in the East is simply called the Dharma or the way. And what's the Dharma or the way? What do I mean by that? The Buddha's own answer to this was whatever leads to calm nor distress, contentment not greed and grasping, to individuality not group mindedness, to energy not idleness. He said anything of that nature is the Dharma, is his teaching. Anything that has that flavor, the flavor of freedom if you like is the Dharma. In Sankarashtra's words the Dharma is whatever helps us to rise from wherever we are now and from whatever we are now. It's whatever the individual finds in his or her own experience does actually contribute to his or her spiritual development. And I always remember that one definition of the Dharma is simply the truth, nothing more or less than that. So for me poetry is something that can help me in all that, can help me, can help guide me, inspire me, can educate me, form my heart towards the goal of the truth and contributes towards my spiritual development. It helps to take me, if only temporarily, beyond the narrow confines of the ego and helps me identify with the world more, not just myself. Helps me see the world as it really is and all its humanity is people with love and compassion. That's the ambition anyway, the path Buddhism outlines put in one way is to indicate two great goals or works in progress if you like wisdom and compassion. Wisdom is the kind of realizational part, compassion, the active part of one and the same thing. Wisdom is understanding the way things are interconnected, though various, without anything we identify being ultimately real or lasting forever. And compassion is the response to that, to the implications of all that. But in the end we ourselves are not self-enclosed identities separate from each other. We're all part of a world of conditions of energies, a beautiful universe, no part of which is a center or the most important part. Now for me as I say poetry does inspire me on this path. It can help take me along this path. It comes from the deepest inspiration, the meditation-like expansion of the mind that leads to an apprehension of truth, beauty and love. It is challenging because it can open up to me experiences beyond my own, allow me to glimpse greater dimensions of consciousness than I normally experience. In doing so it can show me how much there is beyond the ego, the narrow ego that I cling to. Poetry and fiction and drama when they explore character and the worlds of characters unfamiliar to me can expand my sympathies and teach me more empathy and compassion. So now we can actually look at this poem and be relieved to hear. So I've got this hand out, so I was going to be certainly logistic enterprise. There's only 16 hand out so we probably need to share. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] That way I'm going to read it out. John is going to get his glasses but he'll catch up. So if you look at this poem Arcade Torso of Apollo, which is by the Austrian poet, Reelke. And he was born in 1875 and died in 1926. A really truly great poet, wrote in German obviously. So this is translated from the German. Arcade Torso of Apollo. We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit and yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside like a lamp in which his gaze now turned to low gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so. Nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur would not from all the borders of itself burst like a star. For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. So here's a poem that presents that aspect of great art and of a great poetry I've been talking about. It beckons you to such great beauty to such a more expansive way of being beyond everything we've been used to. That it challenges you to change, to grow, to try and meet the greater world or at least go some way towards it. It's that the sculpture has been created with such power and vision that actually embodies more of reality than we're used to. And the reality of this work of art is so great so the powering will possess that it's more as if it sees you than that you see it. Some great poets just have naturally a depth of soul that can expand our consciousness lead us into uncharted experience. Others deliberately set out on that shame and light task. Wordsworth saw this sort of thing as his mission and specifically set it out as his life's task in his preface to lyrical ballads. Which was an early volume of poetry that he wrote originally with college. He made me hard for us now to think of words with his young radical. He's kind of aimed at the canon as a kind of old stuffy old man so think but that's what he was at one time. He was a radical and he was radical and original and fresh as a poet. Later on he did grow more cautious and concerted and many people think his poetry declined at the same time. I don't know if it's too or directly connected. I love what the great and revolutionary French poet Graham Boyle said laying out a program for himself. A poet makes himself a seer by means of a long, immense and systematized arrangement of all the senses. Graham Boyle wanted to divest himself of all the given ideas in his life. The bourgeois view of the world he was brought up to have and see the world afresh. But his approach to that was to drink an enormous amount and take huge amounts of absanth which is a kind of a drug which was very popular in Paris and France in the 19th century and also by pushing himself beyond ordinary moral boundaries, doing his like stabbing his friends and kind of thing. He was like a sort of 19th century student, Sid Vicious. But from all this kind of male strong of his life, a very adventurous life, he did manage to write some stunning poetry. But other poets have been less extreme, a little bit less extreme while essentially trying to do the same thing. Tried to go deeper and further in their consciousness in order to be able to bring back for us the results of those psychic expeditions. Many poets say that there needs to be a lot of space around a poem, a lot of build-up contemplation. Then the poem might come out in one sort of hyper-conscious rush. I think I think of words with placing up and down in his garden. That's apparently how he used to compose. He used to walk a lot and some of his walking was in his garden just pasting up and down and as he walked he thought of his poems. A lot of people that say that explains the kind of rhythm of his poems is very, very rhythmic. I'm very quiet actually, I said very quiet poetry, being psyched for rhythmic but quiet poetry. On the other hand his friend Coleridge was a very different character. Spent more time charging around over the moors and mountains and also taking lots of opium, which means detain us very long, but he did take an enormous amount of opium. Some people say that was the origin of his visions but other people say he was a visionary to start with and they took opium to try and keep that going. He did have an extremely powerful and visionary imagination and some of his poetry looks like the result of some kind of shamanistic journey and if you don't know his poetry, if you think of the rhyme of the ancient Mariner, one of the most famous English poems, it's sort of extremely weird imagery and Kubler Khan is a visionary poem. But broadly when you think of the deep places, the deep contemplation, conscious or unconscious that the best poetry comes from, it's no wonder that sometimes it has that same fear of richness and depth and energy that meditation has. So I think it comes from the same place that the places we go and we deeply meditate and when we produce or when poets produce the great poems, I think they come from the same places. And some of it really does strike you as taking part in insight, I think, ringing true in the way I mentioned earlier. It's really as if the power of the poet's imagination is contemplation, has taken him towards the same bearer, truer view of the world, as that which spiritual searches aim for in their meditation and reflection. Seamus Heaney, for me, a great Irish poet can sometimes approach to such insights, although interestingly enough he denies having any sort of religious or spiritual general at all. Although he did recently say that having reached the age of 60, he thought he could mention the word love. And the next poem is his postscript, which is number two on your hymn sheets, postscript, and sometimes make the time to drive out west into County Clare along the flaggy shore in September or October, when the wind and the lights are working off each other, so that the ocean on one side is wild with foam and glitter, and inland among the among stones, the surface of a state grey lake is lit by the earth lightning of a swath of swans. Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, their fully grown, headstrong looking heads, tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Use this to think you'll park and capture it more thoroughly. You're neither here nor there, a hurry through which known and strange things pass, as big soft buffettings come at the car sideways and catch the heart off guard and blow it open. So I really like that poem, it's something for me about the mix of interrelated and mutually affecting energies of nature, and then moving from there into the observer and showing the observers as a hurry to which known and strange things pass. I can identify myself in that, the hurry to which known and strange things pass. And then the last line, he blows open any distinction between the interior and the exterior, when the big soft buffettings catch the heart off guard and blow it open. I think it often is at moments when they're off guard and we're deeply affected by something that the heart is, is blown open. And he's got something we all try and do, the character in the poem is trying to capture what is experiencing. It does happen, you're there in kind of Australia or something, you're trying to capture it on a camera, it's just impossible. Anyone else, did anyone else enjoy that poem? Any thoughts? Any thoughts? You don't have to say anything. Do you think it was very effective? I mean, you did actually get a really impression of the light on the water, on the lake, particularly the swans, so if language is very effective in producing a mental image. Yeah, someone over there? I was going to say it's very tactile and feeling, other than conceptual, so that feeling of the wind, property, car is very particular. Yeah. Sensation. Pump. Movement. Yeah. He's very much, the word tactile, it's good, he's very much like that shame is he, very sort of earthy, and so let's go to another one, another powerful poem, this time on a theme perhaps we can all relate to, Elizabeth Bishop, a very distinguished American poet of the last century. It's called 'One Art'. The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost, that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day, except the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn't hard to master. Then practice losing father, losing faster, places and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother's watch, and look, my last or next to last of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn't hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones, and vaster, some realms I own, two rivers, a continent. I missed them, but it wasn't a disaster. Even losing you, the joking voice, a gesture I love, my shunt have lied. It's evident the art of losing is not too hard to master, though it may look like riot it, like disaster. But what doesn't need me to explain that very much, or is something we are all familiar with? If anyone's interested, it's a villa nail, that's the pattern of it, or certain pattern of repeating lines. So as I was saying as well, it's not only that literal poets who write poetry for me, prose writers are great artists too, and their work goes to the same places as poetry. For example, any exposure to George Elliot, the 19th century English novelist, will show you what good prose is. We've got another passage. Here's a passage from what some people think is the greatest English novel ever written, Middle March. Virginia Woolf said it was the only English novel written for adults. So this is, you should have this one, this is from the beginning of chapter 27 of Middle March. An eminent philosopher among my friends who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pure glass or extensive surface of polished steel, made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinally scratched in all directions. But place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination and low, the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles around that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement. It's light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the free egoism of any person. But when I first read that, I was quite amazed actually, that she's got this perfect image I think of what it's like to be a human being. You think everything is about you, but it's not obviously. The universe goes on, it hasn't got you at the centre. But that's what we think. I think it's a beautiful image. It kind of implies what the world could be like if we didn't see it in this egocentric way. It would be a vast, beautiful mirror. I don't know what you think, did anyone like that piece? George said earlier. So in these examples we've looked at, we could call that the wisdom side of poetry. I'm making this, I go a little bit, but we could call it the wisdom side of poetry. The compassion side can be seen, you could say, in longer poems and dramas like Shakespeare's that explore character. One of the great things about Shakespeare is that he never condemns a character. He presents all his main characters as well and as fully and with equal sympathy as each other. Just as heroes like Hamlet, Othello, and Henry IV have depth of vitality and a sort of real existence and gain our understanding of sympathy, empathy. So do even ostensibly evil characters like Macbeth, Iago, and Richard III. You're probably familiar with this, you watch your Shakespeare play, you're fascinated by Macbeth, you're with him really, even though he's a murderer. This is Shakespeare's compassion to me. The opening up of one's mind and heart to all other beings without condemnation, without justice. Shakespeare has been described as having a great soul and he allows us for the duration of his plays to take part in his great soul. There are novelists too, have this love for their characters, superficially good or bad characters. I mean, not novelists. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Henry James, George Eliot, and Vladimir Nabokov, they explore their characters, they present them in a very, very deep and vivid way so that you almost know them as people, whatever they come, their traits, whatever their ethics, and you understand them. You feel that these novelists truly open the human heart and see it whole with all its frailties and even sometimes wickedness and see it and present it with forgiveness, with understanding and love. But there are shorter poems too, of course, that reflect that bigger sky as it were of compassion. Now I recently came across a tremendous poem by the Russian poet Yevkeni Yevtashenko. So that's our next one. People. No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicle of planets. Nothing in them is not particular and planet is dissimilar from planet. And if a man lived in obscurity making his friends in that obscurity, obscurity is not uninteresting. To each his world is private and in that world one excellent minute and in that world one tragic minute, these are private. Any man who dies, any man who dies, there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight. It goes with him. They are left books and bridges and painted canvas and machinery, whose fate is to survive. But what has gone is also not nothing. By the rule of the game something has gone. Not people die but worlds die in them. Whom we knew as equality, the earth's creatures, of whom essentially what did we know? Brother of a brother, friend of friends, lover of lover, who knew our fathers in everything, in nothing. They perish. They cannot be brought back. The secret worlds are not regenerated. And every time again and again I make my lament against destruction. So I hope I've given you some idea of how poetry in the spiritual life join up. And what we'll do now is, we've got a little bit of time. And first we'll look at a few more poems that are in this little handout of giving round and just read them together. And then, not all of them, it's just one or two. And then this time for questions, hopefully as well, just a few minutes of questions. I've watched my... So... [BLANK_AUDIO]
