Poetry is intrinsically connected to meaning. Poetry is the record of an explosion of inner experience, a momentary convergence of meaning in the mind that, if not recorded, vanishes back into the restless pool of consciousness. At a deeper level, poetry is Being turning to regard Its own qualities and processes.

Paul Klee had it right when he said: "All art is a memory of age-old things, dark things, whose fragments live on in the artist."

The images tap our race experiences of fireside ritual, magical incantation, and shamanic contact with the vast, unseen and ultimately powerful forces. There is a spirit of awe and veneration at work, and something stirs in modern man, beneath his layers of skepticism, rationality and pragmatism, to connect him with primitive man's world of mystery, in which all things are alive and interconnected. The twenty-first century and its psychological deadweight are lifted. Time itself is suspended, as well as the laws of physics and the mentality that created them, and we float weightlessly in a magical universe beyond individuality.

SOULCOLLAGE AND THE IMAGINAL REALM

Contrary to the American consensus view, reality is a many-layered phenomenon. There are inner realms of reality atrophied in modern consciousness because they don't exist in the consensus reality framework. One of the inner realms is the Mithal, the realm of images, a rich storehouse of experience. Meaning is encoded directly into the images, symbols, and archetypes that live in this realm. Images are dynamic, that is, they cause things to happen. They operate according to their own rules. They almost always arrive laden with deep meaning.

Joseph Campbell said that there are two periods in life when the images of the imaginal realm are important. The first is the period from 4-12 years, when images and archetypes teach the young person what and how to be. The second important period is in older people, when mythological images help to carry one through the last phase of life and out the door, the "grand egress."

Older people have finished with hectic outer life, with its focus on children, success, relationships and material well-being. They increasingly turn their focus from the outer world to the inner realms. Jung said that, as we age, we naturally withdraw from life and slow down. This creates excess libido that is available to work in the inner realms. The shift is toward contemplation, and can yield depth, richness and meaning. Progressively less interested in achievement, older people begin to look intently at their lives for meaning, as they try to make sense of what they have experienced. It is natural to turn to the imaginal realms, where that meaning resides.

The science fiction image would be that there is a vast mysterious Being, quite unlike any other being that you've ever thought about. It is invisible. Its nature is pure, infinite potentiality. The Being is as big as the universe. It cannot Itself be seen, but Its nature is to spin off galaxies and worlds. Like a cornucopia, It pours forth life and life-forms in endless profusion. It has effortlessly populated the Cosmos, and continues to do so.

This Being exists on many different levels. The metaphor of radio frequencies is apt. As you move up and down the radio dial, you encounter many different stations or realities, all simultaneously unfolding, each on its own frequency. This strange Being is similar. Many different layers of Reality are expressing themselves differently and simultaneously. The material world, with which we are most familiar, is the most dense frequency. The undeveloped mind will look the material realm and say: "This is all there is." But this is only one frequency, only one level of reality. It is the most apparent to us because we have physical senses that are designed to operate at the material level. However, there are other, inner senses that parallel the physical senses, but whose purpose is to perceive the immaterial, inner realms. Through lack of use over generations, these senses have atrophied in the Western mind. We are currently trying to regenerate them. They are very much a part of the human being. They can be a part of your life experience. If you can expand yourself past the reductionism of the Apollonian mind, the rich experience of these inner senses becomes available. It's not a matter of growing something new, but of remembering something that has always been there, that we have currently lost in our evolving civilization.