Doris Lessing: "It is the Storyteller, the Dream-Maker, the Myth-Maker, that is our Phoenix ..."

Doris Lessing (Photo Credit: Roger Mayne)

Doris Lessing on writing, books, education, life:

You can only learn to be a better writer by actually writing. I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer. (The New York Times, April 1984)

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme... If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge (All Things Considered NPR, October 2007)

There are no laws for the novel. There never have been, nor can there ever (Writers on Writing, 1986)

Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: "You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society."  (Golden Notebook, 1971 Edition)

You should write, first of all, to please yourself. You shouldn't care a damn about anybody else at all. But writing can't be a way of life - the important part of writing is living. You have to live in such a way that your writing emerges from it. (A Small, Personal Voice, 1975)

The storyteller is deep inside every one of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is ravaged by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise. But the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us -- for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative. That poor girl trudging through the dust, dreaming of an education for her children, do we think that we are better than she is - we, stuffed full of food, our cupboards full of clothes, stifling in our superfluities? I think it is that girl, and the women who were talking about books and an education when they had not eaten for three days, that may yet define us. (Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 2007)

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:

• Planetary Emergency/Personal Emergence: Path of An Evolutionary (2014) 
• User's Guide to Human Incarnation: Yoga of Primal Reality (2013) 
• Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality In An Age of Global Peril (2012)
• Between Shadow and Night: The Singularity In Anticipation of Itself (2010)

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)

The Night I Met Nietzsche and How I Journeyed On to Behold the Triune Goddess

Dionysos riding a leopard, 4th-century BC mosaic from Pella

I started reading Nietzsche at the age of eleven. By the age of fifteen, I had devoured his entire body of work, and absorbed its nutrients into my psyche. He was my first "guru."

Edvard Munch - Friedrich Nietzsche (1906)

Nietzsche initiated me into philosophy (as Yeats had already initiated me into poetry). He taught me to wield the sword of mind in the service of ravishing beauty and ruthless truth. He gave me the strange medicine I needed to survive my journey to the surface of the earth.  I had, after all, been born in hell.

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster," he told me. "And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you." (Beyond Good and Evil)

But it was not until many years later, in my thirties, that I actually met Nietzsche. In a "dream." It was the 19th Century. His time, not mine. We were both visiting Vienna.

In a grand ballroom, with waltzing in the background, an older gentleman came up to me and said, "Have you met Heir Nietzsche yet? Oh, you haven't? You must, you simply must!"

And he led me to a small circle of people nearby, and brought me face to face with Nietzsche. There he was. Looking up at me, staring into an abyss. With blood orange moons in his eyes, and that mane of a lion in his mustache. And there I was looking down at him. Staring into an abyss.

Then I realized, wow, here I am with my first guru, the great warrior philosopher, the savior of my adolescence, but now he was younger than me, frailer than me, smaller than me.

I wanted to put my arm around him, and offer him the solace of my friendship.
I wanted to protect him, as he had protected me.

Waking, I could feel the distance that I had come already in my life, and I saw how I had moved beyond where Nietzsche had fallen. I could feel all his profound insights, and all his brilliant autopsies, I could feel all of his genius. And I vowed to protect it, to keep it sacred, and to someday somehow celebrate his unspeakably sublime message.  

"The 'Kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death,' he wrote, "the 'kingdom of God' is not something one waits for; it has no yesterday or tomorrow, it does not come 'in a thousand years' - it is an experience within a heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere..." (The Antichrist)

Looking back on that night I met Nietzsche, from this vista twenty five years or so farther on into the vast wilderness,  I can trace the timeline of my life so clearly.

That dream encounter was one the great demarcation points.

Within the Embrace of the Triune Goddess

For me, all of Nietzsche's works are laid out on an arc between two great revelations.

There was the revelation he began with, in which he articulated the Apollonian and the Dionysian, two great opposing forces within the human psyche: sacred and profane, orderly and anarchic, chaste and lustful, light and dark, straight and stoned.  And there was the unfinished revelation he ended with, in which he had just begun to articulate the Will to Power as the engine that drives all human life. The exploration of these revelations (and how they play out for the artist and the mystic) had consumed much of my life until the demarcation point signified by that dream.

But for the next twenty years or so after, my journey into the wilderness led me deeper and deeper into a vast region of the psyche ruled by the Divine Feminine.

This is the region that Nietzsche had glimpsed in his tragic love for Lou Salome. But she had other appointments to keep, and could not take him there.

It was in that long stretch of the inner Gobi that I fell into the embrace of the great Triune Goddess.

John Bauer - Freja

And it was within that all encompassing embrace that, for me, the ceaseless struggle between the opposing forces of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, as well as the Will to Power itself, were brought into balance. They continue to play out, but now they play out within this greater context.

The great Triune Goddess has three aspects: Mother, Lover and Warrior, and these three aspects womanifest in countless names and forms, in all stages of life (e.g., both maiden and crone) and in all aspects. She is both Kali Ma, the Dark Mother, and Our Lady of Guadalupe, the Bright Mother. She is both Freya, the Blonde Lover Goddess and Morrigan, the Raven Warrior Goddess. She is the great goddess Tara in all twenty-one of her emanations.

She is the truth of the ancient future trinity.

She gave birth to us, she sustains us, and she is devouring us even as I write this note. And the greatest of her names is whichever one arrives on your lips in the moment, whether that moment is one of dire extremity, sublime pleasure or simple peace.

Yes, Nietzsche's bones lie far behind me, high on a promontory, in the vastness of this wilderness. Generations of broad-winged vultures have served as their guardians. Bleached in the blazing sun, those bones emit a brilliant light in the indigo blue of the desert night. But his laughter traveled on with me, and still permeates the swirling pillars of this psyche-temple.

"I know my fate," Nietzsche declared, near the end. "One day my name will be associated with the memory of something tremendous — a crisis without equal on earth ... I am no man, I am dynamite."  (Ecce Homo)

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Mysterium

Leonor Fini - Voyageurs au repos,"Travelers at Rest" (1978)

Grateful for another 24-hour cycle of life.

Grateful for food, shelter and clothing.
Grateful for relative health and freedom.

On this day.

Ever-present with the suffering of sentient beings.
Ever-cognizant of the potential for suffering in one's own life.

On this day.

Leaning forward into the mysterium that is the path of love and awareness.

Yes.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Written

 

Edward Curtis - Invocation (Sioux)

What is, is. What isn't, isn't. 

What has been, has been. 

What wasn't, wasn't. 

What will be, will be. What won't be, won't. 

All of it is written. 

Some of it is written in stone, some of it in sand. 

Some of it is subject to change, some of it isn't. 

The best of it is written on the wind. 

Too many of us miss it.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com. 

Vultures

Salvador Dali - West Side of the Isle of the Dead (1934)

If you want to arrive at utter stillness, sink into the heart's ceaseless beating. 

If you want to hear the voice of the silence, sing from the heart's core.

 If you want to drink soma, pour from the deep pools of the heart's emptiness. 

This heart is not "something" inside of you. 

It is not the Anahata chakra or some bundle of emotions. 

It is the lotus blossom of creation itself. 

If you want to journey to the end of this endlessness, follow the vultures. 

That darkness ahead is actually a blinding light. The sun itself is its shadow. 

Look deeply into that blinding light and you will see the universe with new eyes.

-- Richard Power

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com. 

Palden Llamo Knows What Chen Quanguo Doesn't

Palden Lhamo, Protectoress of Tibet

You cannot silence the voice of the silence. -- Richard Power 

China’s ruling Communist Party aims to silence the voice of the Dalai Lama in his Tibetan homeland by tightening controls on media and the Internet, a top official said on Saturday. The party’s top-ranking official in the Tibet region Chen Quanguo vowed to “ensure that the voices of hostile forces and the Dalai group are not seen or heard,” in an editorial published in a party journal called Qiushi ... China has worked for decades to control the spread of information in Tibet, but some Tibetans remain able to access non-official sources of information including from exiles abroad by using radio, television and the Internet. But the party will attempt to stamp out access to such sources by creating party cells in some websites, confiscating satellite dishes and registering telephone and Internet users by name, among a host of other measures mentioned in the article. China vows to silence Dalai Lama in Tibet. Agence France Press, 11-2-13

My new (ninth) book User's Guide to Human Incarnation, The Yoga of Primal Reality is available now from Amazon.com.

Anais Nin: "Ordinary Life Does Not Interest Me."

Anais Nin (Photo Credit: Irving Penn)

A Spy in the House of Love. First Edition, 1954.

Profound insights on creativity, intimacy and life from the great Anais Nin:

"You are like a person who consumes herself in love and giving and does not know the miracles that are born of this."
― Anais Nin,  A Spy in the House of Love (1954)

"I have an attitude now that is immovable. I shall remain outside of the world, beyond the temporal, beyond all the organizations of the world. I only believe in poetry."
― Anais Nin, Diaries, August 22, 1936 Fire

"Love is the axis and breath of my life. The art I produce is a byproduct, an excrescence of love, the song I sing, the joy which must explode, the overabundance — that is all!"
― Anais Nin, Diaries, Oct. 21, 1934

"Ordinary life does not interest me. I seek only the high moments. I am in accord with the surrealists, searching for the marvelous."
― Anais Nin, Diaries, Winter, 1931-1932

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."
― Anais Nin, Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934

"Why one writes is a question I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art."
― Anais Nin, February 1954 The Diary of Anaïs Nin Vol. 5 (1947-1955), as quoted in Woman as Writer (1978) by Jeannette L. Webber and Joan Grumman, p. 38

"The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. Most of the writing today which is called fiction contains such a poverty of language, such triteness, that it is a shrunken, diminished world we enter, poorer and more formless than the poorest cripple deprived of ears and eyes and tongue. The writer's responsibility is to increase, develop our senses, expand our vision, heighten our awareness and enrich our articulateness."
― Anais Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 5, as quoted in Moving to Antarctica: An Anthology of Women's Writing (1975) by Margaret Kaminski

If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:

• Planetary Emergency/Personal Emergence: Path of An Evolutionary (2014) 
• User's Guide to Human Incarnation: Yoga of Primal Reality (2013) 
• Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality In An Age of Global Peril (2012)
• Between Shadow and Night: The Singularity In Anticipation of Itself (2010)

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)

Joan Didion: “I Know What 'Nothing' Means, and Keep On Playing.”

Joan Didion (Malibu, 1976) Photo Credit: Nancy Ellison.

Profound insights on life and writing from the great Joan Didion:

“I know what 'nothing' means, and keep on playing.”
― Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

“See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do... on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there...”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"Was there ever in anyone's life span a point free in time, devoid of memory, a night when choice was any more than the sum of all the choices gone before?"
― Joan Didion,  Run, River

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be…”
― Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live."
― Joan Didion, "The White Album", in The White Album
 
If you resonate with the content of this site, and would like to support my work, all four volumes of my Primal Reality quadrilogy (listed here in reverse chronological order) are available from Amazon.com in both soft cover and Kindle editions:

• Planetary Emergency/Personal Emergence: Path of An Evolutionary (2014) 
• User's Guide to Human Incarnation: Yoga of Primal Reality (2013) 
• Humanifesto: A Guide to Primal Reality In An Age of Global Peril (2012)
• Between Shadow and Night: The Singularity In Anticipation of Itself (2010)

-- Richard Power, Author, Speaker, Yoga Teacher (RYT500)

http://words-of-power.blogspot.com

http://twitter.com/wordsofpower

http://facebook.com/wordsofpower
https://instagram.com/rgpoweriii/

https://soundcloud.com/wordsofpower/

See Also

Richard Power's Primal Reality Quadrilogy Available Now from Amazon.com

Great Song: Life and Teachings of Joe Miller - Available Now Via Kindle (Amazon) and Nook (Barnes and Noble)