Wednesday, February 17, 2016

He's Getting Ready to Fly

When I went into my hermitage, my poustinia to confront the Unconscious and listen to my thoughts, I had no other human presence to give me escape.  No heat, no electricity, no running water, no bathroom or shower.  A small log cabin at 10,000 ft elevation in the middle of a Colorado February.  In April, I had a visitor.  A fly.  At first, typically, I annoyed myself at his appearing.  Gradually, I allowed him to befriend me and we became companions.  This was long before I discovered J. Allen Boone's Kinship with All Life, Letters to Strongheart, and The Language of Silence.  He talks about his friendship with "Freddy the Fly."  And of the amazing things he learned by communing with "Freddie."

When I returned to my "real" life, as rooky retreatants were want to call it, and related my story of my friend the fly, my "friends" laughed at me comparing me to St. Francis of Assisi (the famous garden statue) who befriending all Nature was swarmed with birds; only I would be swarmed with flies someday if I kept it up.  Sure enough I was.  I was swarmed with all the little annoyances of everyday life. But the annoyances weren't coming from Nature.  They come from the usual human point of view; the self-important self-opinion of the "common sense" crowd; the crowded mind.  I wonder what Freddy the Fly would say about my "friends".

My favorite Allen Boone book is still You Are the Adventure, in which he states his idea of the purpose of Life:  "Virtually all...outstanding men and women whose lives have been recorded attributed this inner beam-voice to their God source, to that creative and governing Intelligence and Energy back of all manifestations of real being and life...this beam-voice, you will observe, if you study their lives, communicated with them in simple, understandable, soundless language, telling them just what to do about every detail of their lives and how to do it effectively; success or failure in each instance, you would also observe, depending on their individual receptivity and willingness to follow instructions.

What you call your particular beam-voice is, of course, a matter for you and you alone, to decide.  The wise thing, the experts say, is to call it what best helps you to grasp and to understand how it operates in all its relations with you.  The great spiritual achievers usually spoke of it on such terms as The Voice of God, The Christ, Revelation, Illumination, Insight, and so on.  The American Indian, with his keen sense of practicality of the Big Holy, calls it in-hearing and in-knowing.  The fellow with the diploma tags it with such terms as intuition, perception, inspiration, impression, awareness, immediate knowledge, discernment, instinct, comprehension, and so on.

(The common man)... may not know...or understand in the least how the hunch gets from its source to where he can recognize it and use it to do some good for himself.

At which point the entire situation again reverts to you, and to your unavoidable cosmic adventure of having to find more of YOU...know more of YOU...be more of YOU...and share more of YOU.  And it reverts to you in that inner self-consultation chamber of yours, where you ask yourself, or at least I hope you do, HOW, from this point on, YOU CAN BEST MAKE CONTACT WITH YOUR OWN INNER BEAM-VOICE, AND LET IT GUIDE YOU INTO LARGER AND MORE SATISFYING AREAS OF YOU. In the earsplitting clatter and din or the world's brawling and bawling, and especially with the widespread and growing effort by both seen and unseen agencies to get you off your beam, rob you of your individuality and its expression, and force you to think and act as others want you to think and act, it isn't easy.  But it can be done, and sooner or later, you will come to find out, it has to be done by each one of us."

Allen Boone, You Are the Adventure, pg. 219-221)