The Raven - A Reprise

I have used this picture before and I like it a lot.

Originally posted: 2/28/2009 07:59:00 PM
You get your help where you can find it. I am posting a poem about waking up. Charles Tart is one among others who points out that we live in a consensus trance, that we don't know it for a trance because it is normal to us, and that breaking away is quite uncomfortable for most of us. I am not going to argue whether this is all true or not, but I will point out that this is one way to describe the challenge laid at our feet by every mystical tradition on the planet.

Dr. Charles T. Tart (born 1937) is an American psychologist and parapsychologist known for his psychological work on the nature of consciousness (particularly altered states of consciousness), as one of the founders of the field of transpersonal psychology, and for his research in scientific parapsychology. He earned his Ph. D. in psychology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1963.

His first books, Altered States of Consciousness (1969) and Transpersonal Psychologies (1975), became widely used texts that were instrumental in allowing these areas to become part of modern psychology.


The mystical traditions all agree as well that the solution happens only in solitude at some point, because in order to see you have to wake up and make peace among the dreamers. They mostly agree that you need a guide. That guide might be a guru, as in the eastern traditions, a spirit guide as with the vision quests of the First Nations, or the Holy Ghost as encountered within the Christian monastic traditions. Every tradition as well allows for the possibility that the spiritual heart of the world can erupt in you at any time, should there be a need for that to happen.

This is nothing to fool with. There are people who do, though. Be careful who you might choose to follow. One of the worst lies is the one told by the false prophet, the person still asleep who claims he is awake.

The mystical traditions also claim that if you waken unprepared you will try your best to go back to sleep but once awake this attempt and every attempt thereafter becomes more and more unhappy and miserable. You can run but you can no longer hide.

Oh yes, and as Zen says of this business of waking up, when you achieve enlightenment, what you do next is the next right thing, like chopping wood for the fire, like carrying water for the bath. Like loving and forgiving as many times as necessary.

The Raven

You perch on my head,
Pluck at my eyebrows and talk
To me like my Lord.

I am shaken by your voice
As you speak clearly to me.

I mean you shake me.
My eyes are clean. Parasites
Eaten, you depart.