Original Song: “Astral Mother” with Prose Commentary
This song is dedicated to my beautiful mother, Helen Richardson, whose soul left the physical planet Earth at the age of 58 and now resides in the astral world. By faith and deep love, I visit her there from time to time.
Introduction with Text of “Astral Mother”
My original song, “Astral Mother,” plays out in three verse-movements and two chorus-movements. A traditional verse is a unified set of lines—often four but through innovation the number is not consistent.
Thus, a verse-movement may be any number of lines or stanzas because the emphasis in on the theme of the movement. A movement depends upon theme rather than number of lines or stanzas.
On the astral plane, souls have shed their bodies of chemicals and dust and reside in bodies of light. Although the physical body is also made fundamentally of light, the astral body is perceived as light more easily than the “mud” covering the soul on the earthly plane.
After visiting my mother on the astral plane, I bring back images, ideas, and thoughts that I dedicate to her in poems and songs. The text of the song follows, and you are welcome to listen to the song on SoundCloud.
Astral Mother
In memoriam: Helen Richardson June 27, 1923 — September 5, 1981
for your beautiful soul
You are waiting now . . . A bright star light In the astral world
You have shed the mud That covers the soul On the earthly plane . . . —
Where you were my mother, and I was your child You were my mother, and I was your child . . .
You are watching for me . . . To catch my beam In the astral world
We will live again The love we lived On the earthly plane . . . —
Where you were my mother, and I was your child You were my mother, and I was your child . . .
We will understand the Spirit-made plan . . . That kept us a while . . . In this earthly world . . . —
Where you were my mother, and I was your child You were my mother, and I was your child . . .
O, my Divine Mother, make me Thy Divine Child! O, my Divine Mother, make me Thy Divine Child!
Commentary on “Astral Mother”
A daughter addresses her mother who has departed the earth and now resides in the astral world. Through faith and divine guidance, the daughter visits the mother and creates a tribute to her mother’s beautiful soul of light
First Verse-Movement: Living as Light in the Astral World
You are waiting now . . . A bright star light In the astral world
You have shed the mud That covers the soul On the earthly plane . . . —
From the earthly plane of existence, the singer/narrator is addressing a loved one who is residing on the astral plane of existence.
The soul of the departed loved one is now existing in her astral/causal bodies—where the soul continues without its physical encasement. Paramahansa Yogananda explains this phenomenon:
astral body. Man’s subtle body of light, prana or lifetrons; the second of three sheaths that successively encase the soul: the causal body (q.v.), the astral body, and the physical body. The powers of the astral body enliven the physical body, much as electricity illumines a bulb.
The astral body has nineteen elements: intelligence, ego, feeling, mind (sense consciousness); five instruments of knowledge (the sensory powers within the physical organs of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch); five instruments of action (the executive powers in the physical instruments of procreation, excretion, speech, locomotion, and the exercise of manual skill); and five instruments of life force that perform the functions of circulation, metabolization, assimilation, crystallization, and elimination.
The singer/narrator affirms that her loved one—her belovèd mother—is now “waiting” in her body of light as it exists on the astral plane. The singer/narrator in the second part of the movement refers to the physical body as “mud” which the astral mother has now “shed.” The physical body encases the soul on the earthly plane of existence.
The physical body may be metaphorically referred to as “mud” after the Biblical description of the human body:
In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. (KJV Genesis 3:19)
But after the soul leaves that physical encasement, it continues its existence in the two other bodies—astral and causal—on the astral plane where it is perceived only as light. Thus, the daughter/speaker has perceived her mother as a body of light, which she designates metaphorically as “a bright star light.”
Second Verse-Movement: Waiting to Spot a Familiar Dot of Light
You are watching for me . . . To catch my beam In the astral world
We will live again The love we lived On the earthly plane . . . —
The singer/narrator then affirms that the astral mother is waiting for her daughter to join her on the astral plane. The daughter will become a “beam” of light after she leaves her own physical encasement, entering the “astral world.”
The singer/narrator then affirms that the mother and daughter will experience that same love that they shared when they were both on the earth together. The “lived” love and they continue to live that love, but after they both are in the same level of existence, they are likely to recognize and have a deeper level of awareness of that love.
Third Verse-Movement: Understanding and Appreciating Love and Light
We will understand the Spirit-made plan . . . That kept us a while . . . In this earthly world . . . —
The singer/narrator finally affirms that after the mother and daughter are reunited, for however briefly that reunion might exist, they will understand more about the divine plan that God has for them.
They were both maintained on the earth planet for while; they no doubt had questions about the meaning of life and all of its vicissitudes. The singer/narrator predicts that after entering the astral plane, both she and her mother will understand more about meaning and purpose then they had before.
Experience is great teacher; and God puts His children in positions from which they may learn what they need in order to meet their karmic demands. The singer/narrator holds great faith that she and her mother on the path that leads to the ultimate enlightenment of union with the Divine.
Chorus-Movement 1: A Simple Statement of Fact
Where you were my mother, and I was your child You were my mother, and I was your child . . .
In the first chorus, the singer/narrator simply states the fact that the addressee in the song was the singer’s mother, and the singer was the child of the mother. On the earth plane, they were mother and daughter.
The simplicity of the statement may be misleading. This simple fact is, however, very important. On the earth plane, they were mother and daughter, but on the astral plane they are only two individual souls that are children of the One Father-Mother-God.
The mother/daughter relationship on earth is likely quite a different one from that relationship as two individual souls on the astral plane. Despite that obvious fact, the important fact to remember is that love exists between the two; it existed on earth and it will exist in the astral world.
Chorus-Movement 2: A Prayer-Chant to the Divine Mother
O, my Divine Mother, make me Thy Divine Child! O, my Divine Mother, make me Thy Divine Child!
The momentousness of the shift from the earth relationship of mother/daughter to Divine Mother/Divine Child cannot be overstated.
By ending with a chant-like prayer, the singer/narrator affirms that through the love relationship between earth mother and daughter, she has come to understand that both mother and daughter are children of the Divine Reality (Heavenly Father or Divine Mother) or God.
And the singer/narrator then supplicates to God as Divine Mother to help her realize her soul as that “Divine Child” that she is. The same supplication is offered on behalf of the astral mother, whom the singer/narrator has been addressing.
Both former earth mother and earth daughter are children of the Divine, and they both must one day come to realize that relationship to the Divine—and the singer/narrator prays for that to happen.
Minimalist Gesture and the Aesthetics of Refusal: Fragmentation, Surface, and Postmodern Quietude in Contemporary Poetry
Contemporary postmodern lyric sensibility is often characterized by fragmentation, semantic restraint, and an explicit refusal of narrative or interpretive accumulation.
A small selection of poetic fragments disseminated via social media by Tom Koontz,* who self-identifies as working across literary and visual modes provides a concentrated example of this literary phenomenon.
Fragment as Method
This essay approaches these fragments as fully realized instances of an aesthetic that privileges gesture over development, surface over depth, and notation over argument. This aesthetic, furthermore, situates the poet’s fragments within a lineage of postmodern minimalism and considers their relationship to nihilism, Zen-inflected quietism, and the modernist critique of romantic transcendence.
Aligning with longstanding postmodern uses of fragmentation as a structuring principle, the literary fragment [1] has long occupied an ambiguous position in literary history, oscillating between ruin and revelation, failure and form. In contemporary postmodern practice, however, the fragment increasingly asserts itself not as a remainder of a larger work, but as a fully intentional aesthetic unit. Koontz’s recent poetic postings exemplify this orientation with notable consistency.
Rather than aspiring toward narrative coherence, cumulative argument, or sustained metaphorical development, these texts embrace separation as a guiding principle. Each fragment stands independently, neither demanding nor rewarding contextual integration. The resulting effect is not incompletion but a deliberate, self-contained minimalism: a gesture that simultaneously asserts presence and declines elaboration.
This study recognizes the Koontzean fragments as exemplars of postmodern nihilism [2] in which meaning is neither promised nor pursued, and the textual surface itself constitutes the work’s principal significance.
In this respect, the fragments offer a particularly instructive case of contemporary poetic practice, in which restraint, discontinuity, and aesthetic detachment are elevated into a formal strategy—allowing the reader to witness an intentional refusal as a measure of poetic method.
Theoretical Context: Postmodern Nihilism and Minimal Demand
The term postmodern nihilism is employed here descriptively rather than polemically. Consistent with observations on the digital constraints shaping contemporary minimalist verse [3], it denotes an aesthetic disposition in which meaning is neither interrogated nor dramatized but flagrantly bypassed. Unlike modernist negation, which often emphasizes the loss of transcendence, postmodern nihilism accepts absence as a neutral condition, notable in its undisciplined indifference, while remaining modest in conceptual ambition.
Within this framework, minimalism functions not as compression but as strategic substitution. Brevity replaces argument; spacing replaces development; tone replaces insight. The fragment becomes a site where poetic authority is implied through restraint rather than exercised through elaboration.
The Koontzean fragments align closely with this tendency. They do not strive to say more with less, but rather to say little and stop, achieving a consistency admirable in its punctiliousness, if restrained in expressive reach. The reader is not asked to excavate meaning so much as to register atmospheric effect and tonal gesture, themselves notable as formalized strategies.
Fragment One: Gestural Insistence and the Subtlety of Absence
She laughed. I was very blasé
The speaker in this fragment stages an interpersonal moment while declining to elaborate it. Laughter appears without context, motivation, or consequence, and the speaker’s response presents emotional detachment as a completed posture rather than an experience subject to inquiry.
The lexical choice is notable. The term “blasé” already denotes a condition of saturation or indifference, and its modification by “very” operates less as a conventional intensifier than as a tonal signal, reinforcing attitude rather than sharpening meaning.
The line break isolates the adjective visually, encouraging the reader to register the affective stance itself as the fragment’s primary content, independent of gradation or narrative cause.
In this respect, the fragment exemplifies a minimalist poetics in which expressive sufficiency is achieved not through semantic precision but through the confident assertion of mood.
Emotional detachment is treated as self-evident and complete, requiring no calibration or further qualification. The effect is one of cultivated neutrality—formally coherent, if deliberately inattentive to finer distinctions of degree or development.
Fragment Two: Composed Stillness and the Practice of Observational Neutrality
winter trees across the green of the hospital
Here, the fragment turns outward, presenting a static visual composition. The hospital—a site traditionally charged with narratives of illness, recovery, and mortality—is rendered primarily as a color field. Human presence remains implied but abstract.
The fragment’s restraint is central to its effect. Trees are seasonal but not symbolic; the hospital is visible but not inhabited. The image resists narrative activation, offering composed quietude, executed with consistency, if limited in interpretive scope.
By declining to specify circumstance or response, the fragment allows meaning to remain ambient and formally self-contained, exemplifying a disciplined aesthetic posture. Its steadiness is admirable in its precision, if modest in narrative ambition.
Fragment Three: Lyric Abstraction and Imagined Depth
love bathes
in a patch of sunlight
on the bottom of the sea
at the bottom of my heart
The speaker in this fragment reaches most overtly toward lyric elevation. The abstraction “love” appears without relational context, existing as a condition rather than an action. Its passivity suggests stillness rather than struggle.
The conjunction of sunlight and the sea floor produces a striking image of depth and illumination, despite the impossibility assigned the sun’s nature. Rather than functioning as a worked conceit, however, the image operates atmospherically, gesturing toward profundity without insisting on coherence.
The parallelism between “the bottom of the sea” and “the bottom of my heart” establishes a rhetorical symmetry that links external vastness and internal feeling. The connection is formal rather than experiential, allowing the two spaces to echo one another without narrative mediation.
The fragment exemplifies a postmodern lyricism that trusts abstraction and spatial metaphor to generate resonance independently of lived detail. Depth is invoked rather than developed, leaving the reader in a contemplative rather than interpretive posture.
Fragment Four: Composed Stillness and the Politics of Inaction
duck coming in— head up / butt down splash land
The speaker in this fragment introduces movement but maintains the prevailing stance of detachment. The duck’s landing is rendered through clipped phrasing and visual markers that emphasize immediacy over significance.
The slash in “head up / butt down” functions kinetically, mimicking the bird’s adjustment in descent. “Splash land” concludes the fragment with a percussive finality that registers the event without reflection.
As elsewhere, the speaker refrains from symbolic framing. The duck is not invested with metaphorical weight; the moment is not elevated into insight. The fragment records and releases the image with minimal demand on the reader.
Fragment Five: Domestic Sacrament and the Aesthetics of Shared Attention
a fiery goblet brimming with dew
we break fast in the orange light
my toast: you drinking it all in
This fragment stages a morning ritual that aspires to sacramental intimacy while remaining resolutely noncommittal. The image combines elemental excess with condensation, a paradox that gestures toward depth without clarifying its stakes. The image is evocative but static, functioning more as atmospheric garnish than as a vehicle of thought.
The act of breaking fast “in the orange light” situates the scene within a familiar lyric register of dawn-as-renewal. Yet the poem resists complication: the light is neither interrogated nor transformed. The conclusion redirects attention outward.
It thus converts the moment into an affirmation of the other’s receptivity rather than an exploration of the speaker’s consciousness. What emerges appears to be a polished vignette whose restraint reads less as discipline than as abdication. The poem knows when to stop, but not why it began.
Fragment Six: The Earnest Vessel and the Consolation of Illumination
I fashioned a bowl of my life, ardent with shadows
you filled it with fresh sunshine
Here the speaker mobilizes a container metaphor to frame the self as a crafted object, weighted with ardor and darkness. The gesture is recognizably confessional, yet its abstraction neutralizes the specificity such a posture typically demands. The bowl signifies interiority without permitting access to it.
The introduction of the second person enacts a familiar economy of redemption, wherein the self’s darkness is redeemed through an external, undefined presence. Sunshine functions as an all-purpose corrective, unburdened by complexity or cost.
The fragment’s appeal lies in its emotional legibility, but this legibility is also its limitation. By resolving tension through a single luminous substitution, the poem forecloses inquiry. What remains is a pleasing symmetry that unsettles rather than reassures, offering metaphor as pressure rather than as consolation.
Fragment Seven: Repetition as Contemplative Substitute
moonlight on the far fields
moonlight on the doorstep
This piece consists entirely of mirrored observation, invoking moonlight across two spatial coordinates. The repetition suggests stillness and attentiveness, inviting the reader into a posture of quiet perception. Yet the poem’s reliance on duplication substitutes structural echo for analytical development.
The shift from “far fields” to “the doorstep” implies a movement from distance to proximity, but the poem declines to register any corresponding change in perception or affect. Moonlight remains moonlight, uninflected by scale or intimacy.
The fragment’s economy is precise, but its restraint verges on evasive. By offering equivalence where difference might matter, the poem achieves a surface calm that resists interpretation. The result is a musing that gestures toward contemplative depth while remaining content to rest in visual symmetry alone.
Fragment Eight: Cosmic Undressing and the Poetics of Suggestion
undressing on the other side of the sun
This fragment relies almost entirely on suggestion, compressing its effect into a single, enigmatic image, which invokes intimacy, transgression, and cosmic distance in equal measure, yet declines to anchor these resonances in any discernible experience.
The line breaks orchestrate suspense, encouraging the reader to supply meaning that the poem itself withholds. The image gestures toward transcendence or erotic revelation, but its abstraction insulates it from scrutiny.
Such reticence may be read as sophistication, though it risks functioning as a refusal to think through the implications of its own metaphor. The poem’s power resides less in what it articulates than in what it leaves unsaid, a strategy that flatters the gesture while absolving it of responsibility.
Fragment Nine: Typographical Zen and the Performance of Emptiness
sitting empty
this zen
barn
holds nothing
tolls all
The speaker in this piece presents emptiness as both theme and technique, arranging sparse language into a vertical architecture that mimics negative space. The barn, emptied of contents, becomes a symbolic container for negation itself. The visual pacing reinforces the poem’s aspiration toward contemplative blankness.
The concluding turn introduces a wordplay that gestures toward metaphysical resonance. Yet the pun resolves too neatly, converting absence into aphorism rather than sustaining tension.
The fragment’s discipline is evident, but its emptiness feels carefully curated rather than arduously achieved. Zen functions here as an aesthetic posture, offering the appearance of depth through subtraction, while sparing the poem the labor of philosophical risk.
Fragment Ten: Witness without Transformation
i was watching, when the swans began to sing
This effusion hinges on an act of watching interrupted by an unexpected phenomenon: swans that sing. The surreal element promises rupture, yet the poem’s syntax and tone absorb the event without disturbance. The speaker remains a passive observer, unchanged by what he records.
The lineation slows the moment, encouraging a hushed attentiveness, but the poem declines to explore the implications of its own strangeness. Singing swans appear not as a challenge to perception but as an ornamental flourish, a borrowed emblem of wonder, even as it alludes to a long debunked phenomenon.
What distinguishes the fragment is its refusal to risk consequence. Observation is treated as sufficient poetic labor. In this way, the poem exemplifies a contemporary lyric posture in which the marvelous is noted rather than metabolized, and attention replaces insight as the terminal value.
The sophomoric lower case on the first person singular pronoun adds a pinch of spice to the otherwise bland misfortune of assigning swans a talent that they sorely lack. Again, the special provenance of this fragment proves worth its weight in gold as the piece represents the surface quietude of the postmodern mindset.
Zen Quietism and Romantic Misunderstanding
Taken together, these fragments articulate a coherent aesthetic of refusal. They do not seek to persuade, console, or illuminate. Instead, they model a mode of poetic attention that values blank stares, surface musing, and attachment to a misunderstood exotic.
This sensibility bears resemblance to Zen-inflected minimalism, though it also recalls T. S. Eliot’s critique of the “romantic misunderstanding” of Eastern philosophy: a tendency to mistake mere silence for profundity and absence for insight.
In these Koontzean fragments, such restraint rarely signals deliberate discipline; instead, it more often manifests as the default posture of an aesthetic content with superficial resonance.
Yet this resonance, too, may be understood as part of their achievement. As Azambuja has traced in the broader tradition of Zen’s impact on American poetic cosmology [4], such poems do not argue for meaning; they quietly decline it. Their consistency in this regard is glaring.
Exemplarity without Aspiration
These fragments offer a concentrated illustration of a postmodern poetic mode that trusts minimal gesture to stand as expression. Their significance lies not in what they say, but in how clearly they enact an aesthetic that asks poetry to do very little—executed with commendable consistency, even as it remains restrained in design.
They do not aspire to a collective reality, nor to logical development, and they definitely defy resolution. Instead, they remain faithful to an ethic of sufficiency, in which noticing replaces knowing and gesture substitutes for assertion—a practice that is as noteworthy in its formal fidelity, as it is limited in any muse-inspired reach.
As such, these pieces function less as individual poems than as exemplary instances of a contemporary poetic disposition [5]—one that finds confidence precisely in the decision to stop, executed with a restraint notable for its formal rigor, even as it remains circumscribed in execution, ambition, and imagination.
*Fair Use Notice: Fragments by Tom Koontz (@tomkoontz.bsky.social) reproduced under fair use for purposes of commentary, in accordance with U.S. copyright law (17 U.S.C. § 107).
The Lost Art of Poetic Persuasion and the Rise of Propaganda
The art of poetry, once central to cultural formation and moral imagination, has largely vanished from the public consciousness of the twenty-first century. Yet its techniques survive, not in poems, but in political speeches that seek to persuade, mobilize, and command allegiance. What once elevated the soul through truth now often manipulates the will through propaganda.
Historical Transcendence
Poetry historically functioned as a discourse for transcendent truth—or revealing shared characteristics and/or experience of the ineffable. That discourse was articulated through rhythm, rime, metaphor, image, and moral vision. Its purpose was not merely aesthetic but revelatory, offering insight into human nature and cosmic order.
In contrast, modern political rhetoric consistently borrows poetic devices while discarding poetry’s practical, etherial center. An important distinction between poetry and propaganda lies not in technique but in intent. Poetry aims to reveal truth through beauty of shared experience, while propaganda aims to impose belief through emotional coercion. This inversion inserts a profound cultural and political danger upon the culture.
The “cosmic voice” in poetry exemplifies the highest function of language as truth-telling. Poets such as Emily Dickinson and Rabindranath Tagore speak from a vantage point that transcends time, space, and merely personal, temporal interest by remaining true to their own felt experience. Their art invites contemplation rather than compliance.
Narrowing of Vision
By contrast, political persuasion narrows vision instead of expanding it. While employing supposedly elevated diction and often ridiculous, sweeping claims, it constricts thought to a prescribed moral frame. What appears poetic in form becomes propagandistic in function. It limits the world view to us vs them, even as it touts unreasonable and unrealistic visions of collectiveness and togetherness.
Aristotle distinguished rhetoric as the art of persuasion, separate from poetry, which he viewed as an reflected image of universal truth [1]. Modern politics collapses this distinction by weaponizing poetic techniques for rhetorical domination. The result is speech that sounds elevated but functions coercively.
The decline of poetry education has contributed to this confusion. Citizens no longer trained to discern metaphor, irony, and symbolic language become vulnerable to emotional manipulation. Without poetic literacy, propaganda passes for profundity.
Political speeches frequently invoke collective destiny, moral urgency, and historical inevitability. These elements mirror the cosmic voice but lack its grounding in transcendent truth. Instead of illuminating reality, they overwrite it.
The cosmic voice speaks from deep intuition aligned with self-evident moral law. Propaganda speaks from strategic calculation aligned with power. Though their cadences may resemble one another, their spiritual origins differ radically.
A Shared Humanity
Walt Whitman’s expansive voice celebrated the unity of the American soul without demanding ideological conformity. His poetry invited readers into shared humanity rather than partisan allegiance [2]. Modern political rhetoric reverses this impulse.
Totalitarian movements of the twentieth century demonstrated the lethal potential of propagandistic language. Adolf Hitler’s speeches, saturated with mythic imagery and rhythmic repetition, exemplify corrupted poetic form [3]. Beauty of language became an accomplice to brutality.
George Orwell warned that political language is designed “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable” [4]. His insight underscores how poetic devices, stripped of ethical restraint, become tools of domination. Language ceases to clarify and begins to conceal.
The American founding generation understood the moral weight of language. The Federalist Papers, though persuasive, relied on reasoned argument rather than emotional spectacle [5]. Their restraint contrasts sharply with contemporary political performance.
Prioritizing Applause Lines
Modern speechwriters often prioritize applause lines over logical coherence. Repetition, chant-like phrasing, and simplified behavioral binaries replace substantive argument. These techniques mirror incantation more than deliberation.
Propaganda thrives where citizens abandon critical thinking for emotional identification. It offers belonging in exchange for obedience. Poetry, by contrast, invites solitude, reflection, and inner awakening. The cosmic voice requires humility before truth. Propaganda requires submission to narrative. One liberates the mind; the other enslaves it.
Media amplification intensifies this danger. Televised and digital platforms reward emotionally charged language over nuanced thought. Political speech increasingly resembles performance art devoid of contemplative depth. The poet speaks across centuries; the propagandist speaks to the moment. Poetry endures because it aligns with permanent truths. Propaganda expires when power shifts, leaving cultural debris.
Spiritual Realization over Persuasion
Paramahansa Yogananda’s poems and poetic prose exemplify language joined with spiritual realization rather than persuasion [6]. His words expand consciousness rather than direct behavior. Such writing resists political appropriation.
When political speech adopts cosmic imagery, it often falsifies transcendence. Appeals to “history,” “the people,” or “the future” replace genuine moral reasoning. Abstract collectives become moral/ethcial authorities. This substitution erodes individual conscience. Citizens are urged to surrender judgment to the supposed inevitability of political progress. Poetry affirms the inner reality of awareness; propaganda suppresses it.
The labeling of persuasive political language as “poetry” obscures its manipulative intent—especially when displayed in poems. Calling propaganda poetic grants it unearned authority and legitimacy.
Precision in language is therefore a civic necessity. Freedom depends on the ability to discern truth from emotional coercion. When citizens mistake propaganda for poetry, they become susceptible to ideological captivity. Liberty erodes quietly through linguistic corruption.
Absence of Classical Rhetoric and Poetry
Education in classical rhetoric and poetry once fortified citizens against demagoguery. Its absence leaves a vacuum filled by spectacle and slogan. Cultural amnesia thus becomes a political liability. The cosmic voice unites humanity by revealing shared being. Propaganda divides humanity by enforcing ideological boundaries. Poetry heals; propaganda fractures.
Political movements that rely on constant rhetorical escalation reveal their fragility. Truth does not require perpetual amplification. Only falsehood fears silence. The recovery of poetic literacy is therefore an act of resistance. Reading true poetry reawakens discernment and humility. It trains the ear to recognize authenticity.
Citizens must relearn to ask not how language makes them feel, but whether it aligns with reality. Emotional intensity is not evidence of truth. Poetry teaches this distinction; propaganda erases it.
The survival of the American republic depends on linguistic vigilance. Freedom requires citizens capable of resisting seductive falsehoods. Propaganda must be recognized, resisted, and rejected. True poetry remains a guidepost for this resistance. Its cosmic voice reminds humanity of higher order beyond power. In reclaiming poetry, citizens reclaim freedom.
Sources
[1] Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by S. H. Butcher. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 9, 2026.
[2] Walt Whitman.Leaves of Grass. Project Gutenberg. Accessed January 9, 2026.
[3] Victor Klemperer. The Language of the Third Reich. Bloomsbury Academic. 2006. Internet Archive. Accessed January 9, 2026.
Poetry in its highest sense seeks truth, coherence, and a vision of reality that unites the temporary with the eternal, the personal and the universal.
Losing the “Cosmic Voice”
The great poets who employ something like a “cosmic voice” speak from beyond partisan quarrels and transient fashion, reminding humankind of permanent things—order, beauty, justice, and the unity of all creation [1].
My personal description of poetry has long been the following: The highest purpose of poetry is to express in deliberate, truthful, crystalline language what it feels like to experience certain aspects of human life. Thus much great poetry focuses on four subjects: truth, love, beauty, and death.
Humanity from the time of its inception (or at least since the Fall) has experienced events involving those subjects, and they have caused deep, intense feelings that the human psyche has needed to express.
The “cosmic voice” can be understood to express the universal reality of human emotion in its raw intensity through language that can be grasped and recognized—even if it must often work through paradox and other forms of literary language devices.
Such a voice does not flatter the crowd but calls it upward, inviting the soul to transcend the narrow confines of appetite and ideology. It stretches time and space, allowing the reader to glimpse a moral horizon that relativistic culture and mass entertainment all too often obscure [2].
The Decline of Poetry in Public Life
Contemporarily in the United States of America, high poetry has largely disappeared from the public square; fewer than ten percent of citizens report reading even a single poem in a given year [3]. Critics have observed that poetry has retreated into academic enclaves, where it is often politicized, trivialized, or made self-referential rather than addressed to the common culture [4].
This retreat has grave consequences because a society that no longer listens to genuine poetry loses one of its strongest checks on propaganda and ideological frenzy. When the imagination is not nourished by disciplined, truth-seeking art, it becomes vulnerable to cheaper substitutes that mimic poetic power while serving partisan ends.
Political Rhetoric as Surrogate Poetry
The vacuum left by serious poetry has been filled, in part, by political speech that borrows poetic techniques—imagery, rhythm, metaphor, antithesis—not to illuminate reality but to move “men to action or alliance,” according to Richard N. Goodwin, a prominent American speechwriter, who worked for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Speechwriters openly acknowledge that their goal is persuasion and agenda-setting rather than patient education; language is crafted to captivate attention and stir emotion in a distracted populace.
Literary devices used by poets—alliteration, imagery, parallelism, and antimetabole—appear in many of the most memorable modern speeches [5]. John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” exemplifies how chiasmus and rhythm can engrave an idea on the public mind with almost incantatory force.
When Persuasion Masquerades as Propaganda
Persuasion becomes propaganda when the deliberate, systematic shaping of perception and behavior serves the hidden intent of the speaker rather than the good of the hearer [6]. Scholars of communication define propaganda as the organized attempt to manipulate cognitions and direct behavior in a way that furthers the propagandist’s aims, often by using false or misleading information [7].
In that sense, propaganda is not merely strong or forceful speech but a corruption of language itself, dressing deception in the garments of poetic beauty. Words cease to be windows onto reality and become tools for obscuring it, fostering confusion, distrust, and cynicism among citizens.
The Poetic Surface of Modern Speeches
Because political rhetoric must compete in a noisy media environment, it increasingly relies on stylistic intensifiers that resemble poetic adornment. Emotive vocabulary, simple syntax, repetitive structures, and parallel clauses are deployed to reach inattentive listeners at an affective level.
These devices can ennoble public discourse when they express honest conviction and point toward realities accessible to reason and experience. Yet they can also serve as a velvet glove over an iron fist, smoothing over contradictions in policy and concealing the true costs of political projects.
Content Emptied, Form Retained
In genuine poetry, form and content serve one another; the music of the line clarifies rather than conceals meaning. In much twenty-first-century political speech, however, poetic form—cadence, symmetry, metaphor—is preserved while substantive content is hollowed out.
As one observer notes, contemporary cultural elites often prefer verbal display to engagement with enduring truths, elevating slogans and activist catchphrases over disciplined reflection. The result is rhetoric that sounds profound while remaining vague, elevating feeling over thought and identity over principle.
Emotional Choreography and Manufactured Unity
Modern campaign speeches illustrate how poetic devices choreograph collective emotion, producing surges of hope, anger, or solidarity on command. Through repeated metaphors, rhythmic chants, and staged crescendos, speakers offer audiences a sense of unity that may have little basis in shared understanding.
This emotional unity, grounded in sentiment rather than truth, is a hallmark of propaganda. Citizens are not invited to deliberate but to feel together, often against a demonized “other” whose humanity is reduced to caricature.
Contemporary political discourse frequently illustrates this tendency through the use of historically charged labels—such as comparisons to fascism or authoritarianism—directed at political opponents, including Donald Trump.
FromMuse to Machine
Historically, poets answered to a muse—an intuition of beauty and order that could not be fully subordinated to political calculation. Even when poets engaged political themes, they did so under the constraint of truth-telling, often placing them at odds with power.
In the twenty-first century, many of the most rhetorically gifted writers work not as independent poets but as speechwriters, marketers, and narrative technicians embedded in political machinery. Their allegiance tends to lie with electoral success or ideological advance rather than the slow discipline of contemplating what is true and good.
Propaganda as Perversion of Poetic Power
Because propaganda seeks to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior, it exploits the same imaginative faculties that poetry once honored and educated. Metaphors that ought to deepen understanding are repurposed to compress complex realities into emotionally charged images—walls, storms, plagues, and saviors.
In such language, the cosmic dimension collapses into the partisan; transcendence is traded for mobilization. Citizens are urged to choose sides in a perpetual struggle rather than contemplate the unity of all created things.
The Threat to American Freedom
Propaganda threatens American freedom not only by spreading falsehoods but by corroding the capacities required for self-government: attention, memory, judgment, and trust. Sustained exposure to disinformation fosters withdrawal from civic engagement, leaving decisions to unaccountable elites.
When citizens cannot distinguish poetic truth from manipulative rhetoric, they become susceptible to messages that flatter fear or desire. In a constitutional republic dependent on informed consent, such susceptibility opens the door to soft despotism even without overt repression.
Recognizing the Poetic Techniques of Propaganda
To defend liberty, citizens must learn to recognize the poetic devices propaganda uses to bypass reason. These include metaphor and symbol that frame opponents as existential threats, rhythmic repetition that produces unthinking assent, and emotional appeals that offer catharsis without clarity. Such analysis requires not cynicism but discernment.
Restoring Poetry as Antidote
The recovery of serious poetry is not a luxury but a cultural necessity. By reintroducing citizens to art that reveres truth and beauty above ideology, poetry inoculates the imagination against counterfeit enchantments.
Poetry trains attention, demands patience, and rewards rereading—virtues that directly oppose the habits formed by soundbites, memes, and sloganeering speeches.
Citizens as Stewards of Language
If propaganda is to be defeated, citizens must see themselves as stewards rather than consumers of language. This stewardship includes rejecting rhetorical violence, refusing manipulative content, and demanding clarity and accountability from those who seek office.
The Battle for the American Mind
The struggle against propaganda is a battle for the American mind and heart, a contest over whether language will serve truth or power. When poetic energies are monopolized by political strategists, the republic stands on dangerous ground.
Redeeming Poetic Speech
The techniques of poetry have not been lost; they have been surrendered to politics, where persuasion easily slides into propaganda. If the United States is to remain free, citizens must reclaim poetry as a vehicle of truth and resist propaganda as a counterfeit poetics of power.
Addressing a portion of the errors that have been foisted on the literary world by Ursula K. Le Guin’s faulty “translation” of the sacred text Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching, this essay seeks to redirect the narrative driving that spiritual classic.
Introduction: Translation vs Rendition/Version
This essay contrasts a translation of Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English to a rendering by Ursula K. Le Guin. Feng actually translated the text from the original Chinese, while Le Guin simply rewrote and reinterpreted from genuine translations of the text, including the Feng/English translation. In order words, Le Guin pulled a stunt akin to poetaster Robert Bly’s notion of translation.
To be fair to Le Guin, however, it must be noted that she does not claim to have “translated” Lao Tsu’s work; she merely wrote her own interpretations and reactions based on the translations of others. She refers to the effort as a “rendering” or a “version”—not a translation.
In her study and revising of the sacred text, Le Guin appears to be working out her own path of spirituality, which means that the work should have remained private and never been released on the public. Poets and writers who become widely famous—as have Le Guin and Robert Bly—often become so enamored with their own output that they seem to think that anything they write must be worthy of widespread distribution—not to mention the possibility of added revenue from sales.
The personal rendering of sacred texts may become hazardous, when the poet does not truly understand the spirit that originally motivated the work. The result in T. S. Eliot’s “romantic misunderstanding” becomes all too evident. Unfortunately, reviewers, publishers, and promoters have labeled Le Guin’s work a translation, and such labeling is grossly misleading. In her section on Sources, Le Guin lists several translations of the work that she studied; among them are translations by Paul Caru, Arthur Waley, Robert G. Hendricks, and several others.
She also mentions Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English with the comment: “First published in 1972. I have the Vintage edition of 1989. Arising from a sympathetic and informed understanding, this is literarily the most satisfying and recent translation, I have found terse, clear, and simple.”
It is this last one with which I am concerned in this essay. And because Le Guin has called the Feng/English the “most satisfying,” I wonder why she would have even taken it upon herself to engage with a text that others would mistakenly reckon to be a new translation.
And the unfortunate consequence is that those relying on the Le Guin “translation” of the Tao Te Ching as a reference for supporting their arguments will find that their claims do not age well. The inaccuracies foisted on the literary world by faulty translations cheapens the very engagement that literary scholars love and work hard to keep genuine. It is with the purpose of correction that I offer this essay.
Note: While the original text of Tao Te Ching is comprised of 81 chapters and Le Guin’s content focuses on all 81, I have excised a mere dozen or so of them for this essay. I plan to engage a larger study to include all of the chapters in future.
What follows is not a general complaint about poetic freedom, but a critique of specific departures from Lao Tsu’s meaning—departures that, when repeated throughout the work, amount to a systematic softening and psychologizing of Taoist metaphysics. In each case, I cite the Feng/English translation alongside Le Guin’s rendering and explain why the former preserves Lao Tsu’s intent while the latter obscures or distorts it.
1. Chapter 1: Ontology Reduced to Epistemology
Feng/English:
“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name.”
Here Lao Tsu asserts the ontological priority of the Tao over language and conceptualization. Telling and naming are functions of the human mind, and the human mind cannot conceive of the Ultimate Reality, the Tao, or God. Only the soul can perceive, unite with, and therefore understand the Tao (Ultimate Reality, Divine Belovéd, Divine Mother, or God).
Note that the term “Tao” is capitalized in the Feng/English work, while Le Guin lowercases it. Le Guin’s lower-casing possibly results from the mistaken notion that Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, which was heavily influenced by Taoism, is an atheistic (Godless) religion.
Le Guin:
“The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”
While the wording remains the same, except for lowercasing, Le Guin’s framing elsewhere in her text interprets the passage primarily as a comment on human linguistic limitation, rather than as a declaration about the structure of reality itself. Taoist philosophy as well as most Eastern religious philosophy is entirely judgment/evaluation free: these texts describe reality; they do not judge/evaluate the pairs of opposites. Western interpretation of Eastern texts across the board go astray by adding judgment/evaluation.
2. Chapter 2: Mutual Arising vs. Moral Psychology
Feng/English:
“When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly.”
This expresses the Taoist principle of mutual arising (相生). It engages the basic principle of maya delusion that exists through the pairs of opposites: beautiful vs ugly, good vs evil, up vs down, etc.
Le Guin:
“Everybody on earth knowing that beauty is beautiful makes ugliness.”
Le Guin’s phrasing shifts structural polarity (pairs of opposites) into psychological causation. Instead of merely expressing the fact that the pairs of opposites exist in relation to each other, this shift adds the notion that the human mind causes the contrast, and that notion is simply false, because those contrasts exist without the human mind interpreting them. Le Guin’s phrasing implies that if only we did not deem something beautiful, we would not then see ugliness. The error of that implication should be self-evident.
3. Chapter 11: Emptiness as Enabling Force
Feng/English:
“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”
Le Guin:
“…the emptiness inside that makes it useful.”
Potentiality becomes utility—again the hint of judgment mars the usefulness of this rendering. While the Feng/English simply states a fact, the Le Guin adds the human value judgment of usefulness.
4. Chapter 17: Wu Wei and Governance
Feng/English:
“When the Master governs, the people are hardly aware that he exists.”
Le Guin:
“The best rulers are those the people don’t notice.”
Governance becomes political minimalism rather than cosmic alignment.
5. Chapter 22: Ontological Paradox Flattened
Feng/English:
“Yield and overcome; Bend and be straight.”
Le Guin:
“Yielding is completion.
Bending is becoming straight.”
Paradox is psychologized.
6. Chapter 25: Cosmogony Softened
Feng/English:
“There was something formless and perfect before the universe was born.”
Le Guin:
“There is something unformed yet complete that existed before heaven and earth.”
Metaphysical priority is rendered poetic.
7. Chapter 32: The Uncarved Block and Cosmic Authority
Feng/English:
“The Tao is forever nameless. Though the uncarved block is small, no one in the world dare claim it. If kings and lords could harness it, the ten thousand things would naturally obey. Heaven and earth would unite…”
Le Guin:
“The way is forever nameless. Though the uncarved block is small, no one in the world dares make it a servant…”
Metaphysical taboo becomes ethical restraint.
8. Chapter 37: Wu Wei as Koan
Feng/English:
“The Tao never does anything, yet through it all things are done.”
Le Guin:
“The Tao does nothing, yet nothing is left undone.”
Causality becomes aphorism.
9. Chapter 42: Violence as Ontological Failure
Feng/English:
“The violent perish by their own violence. This is the root of my teaching.”
Le Guin:
“What others teach, I teach also: the violent die a violent death. This will be the root of my teaching.”
Cosmic law becomes moral maxim.
10. Chapter 48: Subtraction vs. Self-Improvement
Feng/English:
“In the pursuit of learning, every day something is acquired. In the pursuit of Tao, every day something is dropped.”
Le Guin:
“Learning adds. The Way subtracts.”
Radical existential negation becomes slogan.
11. Chapter 57: Governance and Natural Order
Feng/English:
“The more prohibitions you have, the less virtuous people will be.”
Le Guin:
“The more laws you make, the more criminals there will be.”
Taoist naturalism is reframed as modern political critique.
12. Chapter 74: Human vs Divine Justice
Feng/English:
If men are not afraid to die, It is of no avail to threaten them with death.
If men live in constant fear of dying, And if breaking the law means that a man will be killed, Who will dare to break the law?
There is always an official executioner. If you try to take his place, It is like trying to be a master carpenter and cutting wood. If you try to cut wood like a master carpenter, you will only hurt your hand.
The Feng/English version accurately captures the chapter’s critique of harsh governance and the death penalty. It directly addresses rulers who rely on threats of execution to control the people, pointing out the futility when people lose their fear of death (often due to oppressive conditions).
The “official executioner” refers to the natural order or Tao itself—the impartial force that metes out consequences. Attempting to usurp this role through arbitrary human killings is presumptuous and self-destructive, like an amateur wielding a master carpenter’s tools. This rendering stays close to the original Chinese text’s structure and intent, emphasizing non-interference and the dangers of overreaching authority.
Le Guin:
When normal, decent people don’t fear death, how can you use death to frighten them? Even when they have a normal fear of death, who of us dare take and kill the one who doesn’t? When people are normal and decent and death-fearing, there’s always an executioner. To take the place of that executioner is to take the place of the great carpenter. People who cut the great carpenter’s wood seldom get off with their hands unhurt.
Le Guin’s version introduces interpretive additions that distort the original meaning. Phrases like “normal, decent people” and repeated emphasis on “normal” behavior inject a moralistic, humanistic judgment absent from the Chinese text, which speaks generally of “the people” without qualifiers of decency or normality. This shifts the focus from a political warning against tyrannical rule to a psychological or ethical observation about consistent human behavior.
The hypothetical “who of us dare take and kill the one who doesn’t?” implies no one would dare execute even the fearless, softening the critique of capital punishment and missing the irony in the original’s rhetorical question about lawbreakers (“who would dare?”).
While poetic, these liberties dilute the chapter’s core Taoist message: rulers should not play executioner, as death is the province of the Tao (“great carpenter” or divine master who “hews” life), and human interference invites harm. The Feng/English stays truer to this anti-authoritarian essence without the added layers.
Image c: Le Guin’s Book Cover
Why Accuracy Matters
Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching is a graceful literary artifact. It is often insightful, occasionally beautiful, and sometimes moving. But it is not Lao Tsu—which she spells “Lao Tzu.” By filtering Taoism through modern psychology, ethical sentiment, and literary minimalism, Le Guin consistently narrows a cosmological text into a personal one. Feng and English, by contrast, preserve the exotic, impersonality, and metaphysical rigor of the original.
This distinction matters. Sacred texts are not raw material for aesthetic rearrangement without consequence. When a “version” is mistaken for a translation, the philosophical lineage is compromised, and later arguments built upon it rest on unstable ground. It is precisely to prevent such erosion that this essay insists on correction—not to diminish Le Guin’s literary talent, but to restore Lao Tsu’s voice where it has been inadvertently overwritten.
The Damage Done by Overwriting
Le Guin’s Tao Te Ching is often defended on the grounds that it is not a translation at all, but a “version,” a “rendering,” a personal engagement with the text. That defense, however, does not mitigate the damage done when such a rendering is repeatedly received and cited as Lao Tsu. The harm lies not in poetic interpretation per se, but in philosophical overwriting—the replacement of a coherent metaphysical system with a modern ethical sensibility that only partially overlaps with it.
Because Lao Tsu views human perceptual reality as a yin/yang play of dualities within a wholeness of Being, he does not present good and bad as moral preferences or psychological dispositions. They are structural features of manifested reality. Likewise, Lao Tsu distinguishes between a true, creative form of power—one aligned with the Tao—and a false, destructive form, arising from coercion, force, and egocentric assertion. This distinction is not ethical window dressing; it is central to Taoist ontology.
In the Feng/English translation, this structure remains intact. Power is impersonal, prior, and generative; its counterfeit is self-assertive and ultimately self-defeating. Violence fails not because it is morally frowned upon, but because it violates the grain of reality itself.
Le Guin, however, repeatedly recasts this ontological distinction in affective and evaluative language. Where Lao Tsu speaks of alignment and misalignment with the Tao, Le Guin substitutes terms such as “mysterious,” “great,” and “true” for what might be called real power, and “care” as its preferred human expression. Opposed to this is not ontological distortion, but what reads as a lesser, egocentric abuse of power—a psychological or ethical failing rather than a metaphysical one. This shift is subtle, but its consequences are profound.
Taoist power is not something one chooses to wield kindly; it is something that operates whether one believes in it or not. By recasting power as a matter of care versus abuse, Le Guin relocates Taoism from the realm of cosmology into that of moral psychology. The Tao becomes something one believes in, rather than something one must align with.
This same kind of misunderstanding is observable in Christianity, when religionists insist that one must believe in Jesus as God, instead of as a son (child) of God, who was aligned with God in ways that the bulk of humanity has forgotten, the fall of Adam and Eve being the mythological depiction of that fall. Jesus took on some of the karma of erring humanity, but individual karma still applies to each human being born of woman into this world of maya.
The impact of inaccuracies results in the damage done by overwriting. The text is no longer strong enough. Its impersonality is softened; its rigor is humanized; its metaphysical claims are domesticated into ethical preferences. What remains is graceful, humane, and accessible—but it is no longer Lao Tsu’s Tao Te Ching.
When such a version is mistaken for a translation, the consequences extend beyond literary taste. Scholars, students, and readers build arguments upon it, unaware that the philosophical ground has shifted beneath their feet. Over time, the Tao itself is subtly redefined—not by debate or refutation, but by replacement.
It is precisely to prevent such erosion that this essay insists on correction. Not to deny Ursula K. Le Guin her considerable literary gifts, but to insist that a sacred philosophical text must be allowed to remain what it is, even when it resists modern sensibilities. Lao Tsu does not need to be improved, clarified, or made more caring. He needs to be heard.
William Butler Yeats’ reputation stands him as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century poetry, a master whose lyrical skill and evocative imagery earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1923.
William Butler Yeats: A World-Class Poet
Many of William Butler Yeats’ poems, including “The Second Coming” and “Sailing to Byzantium,” reveal a profound sensitivity to the human condition, blending Irish myth with modern innovation.
Yet, beneath his celebrated poetry lies a less triumphant endeavor: A Vision, a sprawling metaphysical treatise first published in 1925 and revised in 1937. In A Vision, Yeats attempts to create a comprehensive system—a poetic ethic—that would unify history, personality, and art under a single rubric.
Despite Yeats’ stature as a world-class poet, A Vision represents a resounding failure. Far from establishing a coherent ethic, the work emerges as a cacophony of misguided notions, revealing Yeats’ superficial and often erroneous grasp of the Eastern religious traditions he claimed to have deeply studied.
Yeatsean Audacity
Yeats’ ambition in A Vision may be understood as the epitome of audacity. Supposedly inspired by automatic writing sessions with his wife, Georgie Hyde-Lees, beginning in 1917, the poet believed he had received revelations from spiritual “instructors” that offered a key to understanding human creativity as well as history.
The result was a system based on a cyclical theory of history, symbolized by interlocking gyres—conical spirals that represent the rise and fall of civilizations over 2,000-year periods. (For a discussion regarding the error of the gyres, please see “William Butler Yeats’ ‘The Second Coming’.”)
Yeats divided human personalities into 28 phases of the moon, each corresponding to a specific type, and posited that art, history, and the soul were governed by these cosmic rhythms. His goal was not merely philosophical; he aimed to craft a poetic ethic, a lens through which his poetry could be both generated and then interpreted.
This ambition, however, was challenged by Yeats’ intellectual limitations. While his poetic genius thrived on intuition and ambiguity,the success of a work such as A Vision demanded precision and coherence—qualities it sorely lacks.
Scholars such as Richard Ellmann have noted that Yeats himself admitted to the work’s thinness and opacity, famously remarking in a letter to Ethel Mannin that he wrote it “to keep myself from going mad” [1]. The treatise’s reliance on occult sources, including theosophy and Rosicrucianism, already situates it on shaky ground, but its most glaring and distressing failure lies in Yeats’ mishandling of Eastern religious concepts, which he claimed as foundational influences.
An Eastern Mirage: Yeats’ “Romantic Misunderstanding”
T. S. Eliot labeled Western misunderstanding of Eastern philosophy and religious concepts “Romantic misunderstanding.” He could have been pointing directly to Yeats in this evaluation.
Yeats’ engagement with Eastern religion was not a passing fancy. He was introduced to Hindu philosophy through his association with the Theosophical Society and his friendship with figures such as Sri Mohini Chatterjee, an Indian philosopher whom Yeats met in 1885. Yeats’ fascination deepened with readings of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, texts he revisited throughout his life.
In A Vision, Yeats explicitly invokes these traditions, particularly in his concepts of reincarnation, the eternal self, and the interplay of the pairs of opposites—ideas he aligns with his gyres and lunar phases. Yet, a closer examination reveals that Yeats’ interpretations are not only idiosyncratic but fundamentally at odds with the traditions he sought to integrate.
Take, for instance, Yeats’ treatment of reincarnation. In Hindu and Buddhist frameworks, reincarnation (samsara) is a process governed by karma, the moral law of cause and effect, aimed at liberation (samadhi in Hinduism, nirvana in Buddhism, salvation in Christianity).
The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, a key text Yeats references, describes the soul’s journey as a quest for union with Brahman, the universal consciousness or God (as that concept is understood in Western culture) [2].
Yeats, however, reimagines reincarnation as a mechanistic cycle tied to his gyres, devoid of moral progression or spiritual liberation. This watering down of the concept of reincarnation obliterates its deep, spiritual purpose in the lives of humanity.
His 28 phases of the moon assign fixed personality types—such as the “Hunchback” or the “Saint”—with no clear path to transcendence, reducing a dynamic process to a deterministic wheel.
Again, Yeats misunderstanding results in a fatal flaw that limits the Eastern concepts to mere thought experiments, not profound truths that guide individuals on spiritual paths to a definite goal.
Scholar Harold Bloom observes Yeats’ limited awareness of Eastern religious concepts by suggesting that the poet’s understanding of reincarnation amounts to little more than a parody; in Yeats system the soul is trapped rather than liberated [3].
Similarly, Yeats’ appropriation of the Bhagavad Gita’s concept of dharma (duty) is distorted beyond recognition. In the Gita, Krishna advises Arjuna to act according to his rôle as a warrior, emphasizing selfless action within a cosmic order [4]. Yeats, however, interprets dharma as a fatalistic submission to historical forces, as seen in his analysis of civilizations’ rise and fall.
His gyres suggest that human agency is illusory, a stark departure from the Gita’s call to active participation in one’s destiny. This misreading reflects not a deep study but a superficial cherry-picking of Eastern ideas to bolster his preconceived system.
A Cacophony of Contradictions
The intellectual incoherence of A Vision extends beyond its Eastern distortions to its internal structure. Yeats’ gyres, meant to symbolize the dialectical interplay of opposites (primary and antithetical tinctures, in his terminology), collapse under scrutiny.
He asserts that history oscillates between unity and multiplicity, yet his examples—such as the fall of Troy or the rise of Christianity—are cherry-picked and lack rigorous historical grounding. Scholar Northrop Frye critiques this approach, arguing that the poet’s historical cycles are poetic fictions masquerading as metaphysics, unsupported by evidence or logic [5].
The treatise’s reliance on vague assertions—for example the suggestion that the end of an age, which always receives the revelation of the character of the next age, is represented by the coming of one gyre to its place of greatest expansion [6]. Such bland unexplained statements further muddy the work’s claims.
Moreover, the 28 lunar phases, intended as a typology of human character, devolve into arbitrary categorization. Yeats assigns historical figures like Shelley (Phase 17) and Napoleon (Phase 20) to these phases, but the criteria are inconsistent and subjective.
The system’s complexity overwhelms its usefulness, leaving readers with a tangled, labyrinthine taxonomy rather than a meaningful ethic. As critic T.R. Henn has avered that the work is less a philosophy than a privately concocted mythology, a wobbly scaffolding for Yeats’ imagination that collapses under its own weight [7].
The Poetic Ethic That Never Materialized
Yeats’ stated intention in formulating his treatise was to establish a poetic ethic, a poetic framework that would elevate his art and serve as a guide those who consume his art. Yet, A Vision fails to come together as either a practical guide or a philosophical statement.
Unlike Dante’s Divine Comedy, which integrates a clear Christian cosmology into its poetry, or Rabindranath Tagore’s works that reveal the Eastern concepts as they are meant to be understood through a poetry that resonates with appropriate imagery as it reveals those concepts, A Vision remains detached from Yeats’ best poetry; its unhinged rhetoric is a like a raft let loose to the wind.
Poems such as “The Second Coming” draw loosely on its imagery—for example, the “widening gyre”—but their power lies in their ambiguity, not in the treatise’s labored explanations. Scholar Helen Vendler has suggested that Yeats’ great poems transcend A Vision, and that they succeed despite it, not because of it [8].
This disconnect underscores the work’s failure as an ethic. An ethic, poetic or otherwise, requires clarity and applicability—qualities A Vision sorely lacks. Its esoteric jargon and convoluted diagrams (the gyres, the wheel, the unicorn) alienate rather than enlighten, rendering it inaccessible.
Even the most devoted Yeatsean acolytes have struggled to reveal any logic or utility in the work. Yeats’ Eastern borrowings, far from lending depth, expose his misunderstanding of traditions that emphasize simplicity and direct experience over intellectual abstraction.
The Zen Buddhist principle of direct insight, for instance, stands in stark contrast to Yeats’ overwrought theorizing, highlighting the huge gulf between his system and the philosophies he seemingly admired.
A Poet’s Folly
William Butler Yeats’ legacy as a poet is unassailable; his poetry remains a testimony to his genius. Yet, A Vision reveals the limits of that genius when applied to systematic thought.
Sadly, intended as a poetic ethic, the work instead emerges as a cacophony of wrong-headed ideas, its Eastern influences warped by misinterpretation and its structure undone by contradiction.
Yeats’ deep study of Hindu and Buddhist concepts, so proudly proclaimed, proves shallow in execution, a veneer of exoticism atop a fundamentally Western occult framework.
The treatise stands not as a triumph but as a cautionary tale: even a world-class poet can falter when straying too far from his craft. In the end, A Vision is less a vision than a mirage—a grand but misguided attempt to impose order on a world that resists such human intervention on a grand scale.
Misreading the Orpheus and Eurydice Myth: Feminist Ideology and the Corruption of Mythic Meaning
Misunderstanding myth is a widespread phenomenon: the very definition of the term “myth” is trivialized in modern parlance, as anything from an error to a lie is often called a myth. The term myth refers to stories with universal, spiritual appeal to the heart, mind, and soul of humankind.
The current motivation to “correct” the past has become one of the more persistent urges in contemporary literary studies. This tendency is visible in the modern attempts to rewrite classical myth, from which ancient figures are called forth, not to unveil perennial truth but to recite the slogans of contemporary feminist ideology.
The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has suffered significantly from this modernizing impulse in the hands of Margaret Atwood and Carol Ann Duffy. The myth’s spiritual drama—the soul’s yearning for transcendence and the unfortunate failure of faith—has been “corrected” by turning it into a patriarchal battle between man and woman.
Atwood and Duffy
In Atwood’s “Eurydice,” from Interlunar (1984), and Duffy’s “Eurydice,” from The World’s Wife (1999), Eurydice has become a cynical voice for liberation, mocking Orpheus as the stereotype of the egotistical male artist. Duffy’s Eurydice calls the musician/poet “Big O” and accuses him of valuing his own legend above his loved one’s life.
Both Atwood and Duffy applaud Eurydice for slipping through her husband’s grasp as he looks back, disobeying his only command. This understandable failure of Orpheus, which is tragic, is converted into emancipation of his spouse by the simple wave of the feminist wand, levied against the patriarchy.
Yet this politically inspired moral conversion relies upon an act of historical and spiritual blindness. The myth of Orpheus is grounded in the sacred lore, explicating the imagination of antiquity, not to the ideological preoccupations of the current modern social climate.
In its original telling, preserved most completely in Virgil’s Georgics and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the mythic narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice is not about the sexes but about the soul.
Orpheus remains the quintessential musician/poet; his music/lyrics seeks to restore harmony between life and death as well as between the physical body and the soul. His foray into the Underworld represents the artist’s very vocation: to recover the lost beauty of the world through creative song.
Disobeying a Spiritual Command
The spiritual command not to glance back symbolizes the command of faith: trust in that which cannot be seen with the human eye. His failure as he looks back is not an claim to dominance but the revelation of human weakness facing the enigma of divine perfection. Eurydice’s vanishing does not symbolize an act of resistance; it reveals the soul’s return to the mystery, from which it had only briefly materialized.
The readings of Atwood and Duffy convert the mythic dimension from human emotional truth into the psychology of victimhood. Their Orpheus is not a mystic but a narcissist; their Eurydice is no symbol of the soul but a sarcastic wife in a contemporary petty quarrel. By revising the myth’s value, they turn the story into social allegory and thereby trivialize what they intend to redeem.
They remake the Underworld into a metaphor for patriarchy, and the danger associated with divine disobedience transforms into a parable of female self-assertion. The result remains not only tone-deaf but spiritually hollow. They have thus allowed their gesture of contemporary moralism to masquerade as mythic revision.
Readers can easily understand the appeal for such ministrations. Contemporary literary culture has come to measures significance by the degree of subversion it can produce. To “provide Eurydice a voice” is to score a moral victory for the supposedly oppressed silences of women in the past.
Yet mythic silence is not oppression; it is reverence. Eurydice’s quietness is the silence of mythic spiritual mystery, not the muteness of oppressive victimhood. To convert sacred stillness to irony is to replace contemplation with complaint.
The ancient poets comprehended well the aspects of life and creativity that their modern revisers ignore. Myth does not express itself with grievance language; instead it speaks in the language of the soul. As Orpheus sings, he does not merely effuse emotion; he reorders cosmic energy.
Orpheus’ songs are capable of charming the stones and the trees, not because they answer grievances, but because they call forth balance and harmony between the human and the divine—as does all art, rightly framed.
A Universal Tragedy
The tragedy of Orpheus’ looking back remains universal, not personal. Every human heart and mind, aspiring to attain perfection—self-realization—is required to face the same frailty of faith. Because of this universal mandate, Orpheus’ failure is our own failure: in our fallen state, we cannot help but glance back to what we love, even as love commands us to trust the unseen.
By the empty social moralizing of the myth and sifting it through modern political ideology, poets including Atwood and Duffy abandon the myth’s sacred resonance to the insipid, spiritually dry idiom of politics. They mischaracterize the myth’s silent universality as erasure and mistake its reverence for oppression.
The irony becomes blatantly clear that their “liberated” Eurydice is not free; she remains bound within the suffocating psychology of the age. Her fake, modern voice, though loud with wit, cannot move beyond self-assertion. She may have been granted parole from Hades, but she now finds herself imprisoned in ideology.
The Myth’s Endurance
Thankfully, what endures, however, is not the Atwoodian-Duffian parody of the myth but the myth itself. The songs of Orpheus continue to waft across the centuries because they sing to the immutable condition of the human soul, which longs for what it has lost and suffers as it fails to secure it.
The modern motivation to correct such myths by turning them into moral parables cannot extinguish the ancient fire of their importance. Such trivialization does remind us how some thinkers, influenced by the contemporary postmodernism of radical feminist ideology, only dimly glimpse that light.
Works Cited
Margaret Atwood. “Eurydice.” Interlunar. Oxford University Press, 1984. Carol Ann Duffy. “Eurydice.” The World’s Wife. Picador, 1999. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford University Press, 1986. Virgil. Georgics. Translated by Peter Fallon. Oxford University Press, 2006.
The Problem of Race: Junk Science, Faulty Metaphor
Scientists have revealed the fallacy of employing race to classify human beings. Still, the metaphor of color remains a strong societal force. Prejudice requires no reason—only willingness to believe despite evidence. Thus the metaphor of color continues to influence human relationships and cheapen the culture.
The Junk Science of Race
Early in the nineteenth century, Samuel Morton, a Philadelphia physician, who was considered an important scientist, formulated the theory of “race” based on his collection of skulls.
Skulls from the collection of Samuel Morton, the father of scientific racism, illustrate his classification of people into five races—which arose, he claimed, from separate acts of creation. From left to right: a black woman and a white man, both American; an indigenous man from Mexico; a Chinese woman; and a Malaysian man. —Photo by Robert Clark, Penn Museum
Measuring the skulls, Morton called his procedure “craniometry” and claimed that this procedure determined that there are five races, and each race represented a different level of intelligence:
Caucasians (white) stood at the top of Morton’s hierarchy
Mongolians (yellow) came second
Southeast Asians next (olive), followed by
American Indians (aka Native Americans) (red) with
Ethiopians (black) bringing up the rear and the lowest level of intelligence.
Morton’s racial classifications along with their intelligence markers that placed whites at the top and blacks at the bottom found favor with promoters of slavery in the United States before the American Civil War (1861-1865).
According to Paul Wolff Mitchell, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania, “[Morton’s race theory] had a lot of influence, particularly in the South.”
Morton’s pernicious legacy stemmed from the lack of scientific knowledge at the time regarding human DNA and how physical characteristics are passed on from one generation to the next. Upon Morton’s death in 1851, the Charleston Medical Journal in South Carolina lauded the doctor for “giving to the negro his true position as an inferior race.”
Nearly two centuries later, through the many gains in scientific knowledge, scientists have debunked Morton’s theory, and currently he is considered to be the “father of scientific racism”:
To an uncomfortable degree we still live with Morton’s legacy: Racial distinctions continue to shape our politics, our neighborhoods, and our sense of self. This is the case even though what science actually has to tell us about race is just the opposite of what Morton contended. [1]
The Human Genome
In June 2000, at a groundbreaking announcement ceremony in the White House Rose Garden, scientists Francis Collins and Craig Venter revealed that “the completion of a draft sequence of the human genome” had been accomplished.
The project’s purpose was to aid in understanding the nature of human biology in order to assist public health and medical professionals in preventing and treating diseases. Additionally, on the issue of race, Dr. Venter reported the following:
On that day Venter and Collins emphasized that their work confirmed that human genetic diversity cannot be captured by the concept of race and demonstrated that all humans have genome sequences that are 99.9% identical. …Venter said “the concept of race has no genetic or scientific basis.” [2]
Scientists Call for Race Categories To Be “Phased Out”
Regarding the concept of race, Michael Yudell, professor of public health at Drexel University claims,
It’s a concept we think is too crude to provide useful information, it’s a concept that has social meaning that interferes in the scientific understanding of human genetic diversity and it’s a concept that we are not the first to call upon moving away from. [3]
As Professor Jan Sapp, Biology Department at York University, Toronto, has stated, “Science has exposed the myth of race.”
In his review of two recent books on the issue, Race?: Debunking a Scientific Myth, by Ian Tattersall and Rob DeSalle, and Race and the Genetic Revolution: Science, Myth, and Culture, edited by Sheldon Krimsky and Kathleen Sloan, Professor Sapp offers the following summary of the two works:
Although biologists and cultural anthropologists long supposed that human races—genetically distinct populations within the same species—have a true existence in nature, many social scientists and geneticists maintain today that there simply is no valid biological basis for the concept. The consensus among Western researchers today is that human races are sociocultural constructs. Still, the concept of human race as an objective biological reality persists in science and in society. It is high time that policy makers, educators and those in the medical-industrial complex rid themselves of the misconception of race as type or as genetic population. (4)
Many contemporary scientists are insisting that “racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity” and are calling for categories on race to be “phased out.” The scientific community, including those associated with the Human Genome Project and other geneticists point out that most of the US population are immigrants from various “homelands.”
Thus, describing groups of people becomes a complex task. And they insist that “race”—that is, grouping folks as Caucasian, Asian or African—is not scientifically useful:
the most immediately obvious characteristic of “race’ is that describing most of us as Caucasian, Asian or African is far too simple. Despite attempts by the US Census Bureau to expand its definitions, the term “race” does not describe most of us with the subtlety and complexity required to capture and appreciate our genetic diversity. Unfortunately, this oversimplification has had many tragic effects.
Thus, these scientists are calling for the U.S. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine to assemble a group of experts in biology and social science to study the issue and formulate a better concept for addressing the useless racial category that interferes with research in genetics [5].
Ashley Montagu’s Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race
After earning a PhD in anthropology at Columbia University in 1936, widely noted scientist Ashley Montagu studied Australian aboriginal culture and in 1949 founded and chaired the anthropology department at Rutgers University. But Montagu had written and published his seminal work, Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, in 1942.
The following excerpt from that work demonstrates Montagu’s reasoning in determining that race is a social construct rather than a scientific fact:
As far as research and observation have been able to prove, the chromosome number of all the human races is the same, and all of the five, seven, or ten races (depending on who we follow) are inter-fertile. The blood of all races is built of the same pattern of agglutinins and antigens, and the appropriate blood type from one race can be transfused into any other without untoward effect. Thus in spite of the questionable physical differences between groups of people, an imposing substrate of similarity underlies these differences.
Montagu’s work was so controversial at the time that academia turned against him, but his ideas have influenced succeeding generations of scientists [6].
Even though “race” remains a strong societal influence, especially for those who have managed to gain financially through identity politics and political correctness, the world of hard science continues to unearth examples of the dangers of relying on race as reality in distinguishing differences between and among human beings.
The Faulty Metaphor of Color
The poetic device “metaphor” is employed mostly by poets in their poems. A metaphor says that one thing is another very different thing for literary effect, for example, Robert Frost’s speaker in his poem “Bereft” describes the activity of leaves with the following metaphor:
Leaves got up in a coil and hissed Blindly struck at my knees and missed.
Frost is metaphorically saying that leaves are a snake. But no human being has ever insisted that “leaves” are the same as “snakes,” yet that is exactly what has happened to the metaphor of color.
Science is demonstrating more and more clearly that there is only one “race”—the human race, and I would like to offer the suggestion that, after the metaphor of color has been correctly interpreted, it becomes obvious that there is only one skin color: brown, ranging from light brown to dark brown.
The various skin “colors”—white, yellow, red, olive, and black—are only exaggerations of the actual shades, hues, and tones of human skin. This exaggeration functions in the current vernacular as a metaphor. Human skin is never literally “white,” “black,” “red,” “olive,” or “yellow.”
From so-called “white Caucasians” to supposedly “black Africans,” the range of skin tones may resemble the color of winter grass to a deep chocolate, but no human being ever appears with skin that can be described literally by the prevailing metaphor of colors.
Skin Color: An Insidious Classification
Possibly influenced by Samual Morton’s 5-race theory, the currentrace count usually stands at three: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid [7]. But identifying members of each of these so-called races becomes impossible, as many scientists have asserted.
The most insidious as well as the most popular quality used in the attempt to classify human beings according to race is skin tone: black, white, yellow, red, olive. Yet, as I suggest, there is not one single individual on this planet whose skin color is literally black, white, yellow, red, or olive.
The skin color of all human beings, that is, members of the only true scientific race—”human race, homo sapiens“— is brown: from light brown, metaphorically called “white” to dark brown, metaphorically called “black.”
And all shades, hues, and tones in between, some of which are metaphorically called “yellow,” “red,” and sometimes “olive.” Even the lightest skin tone is not literally “white,” and the darkest “skin tone” is not literally black.
The Equator and Skin Tone
The closer the individual lives to the Equator the darker the skin tone. This fact is common sense. The stronger the sun’s rays striking the skin, the more melanin is made by the body. Melanin protects the skin from the sun:
Melanin, the skin’s brown pigment, is a natural sunscreen that protects tropical peoples from the many harmful effects of ultraviolet (UV) rays. [8]
Clearly, not all Caucasoids are “white,” that is, light brown; not all Negroids are “black,” that is, dark brown. The Mongoloid skin tone also exhibits a wide range of brown hues—none literally yellow or red.
The metaphor of color has served only to segregate and denigrate groups of people. In time, perhaps science will prevail and the metaphor of color will be interpreted to be what it is, only a metaphor.
Race Often Confused with Religion and Nationality
The terms “race” and “racism” have virtually lost meaning in current parlance [9]. However, “race” refers only to the major three classes: Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid. But as already noted, these categories of race have been debunked as non-scientific.
“Religion” refers to faith traditions of the five major world religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, [10] along with the various branches that have grown from these major categories.
By recategorizing the followers of Judaism as a “race,” Adolf Hitler and the Nazis exerted their political power to exterminate their own Jewish German citizens. That redefinition and misidentification led directly to the Holocaust [11]. The fact that the Judaic ethnicity was recategorized as a “race”—and widely accepted—offers further evidence of the unreality of the racial concept.
“Nationality” refers to the region of the earth that individuals inhabit, particularly the nation or country. Again, misidentification occurs with such claims as some “whites” are “racist” against Hispanics. But “Hispanic” refers to nationality, not race.
A Hispanic may be of any of the so-called races. The country from which an individuals originate does not dictate their “race.” Both Jews and Hispanics (or Latinos, Latinas) may be of any of the race classes.
A Negroid individual may be Jewish, if Judaism is his religion, for example, the late famous singer/actor Sammy Davis, Jr., was a black man of the Jewish faith. Also any individual will be Hispanic, if he is a native of Spain or Latin America.
The confusion of race with religion and nationality reveals the fact that human classifications, as they currently exist, are inadequate because they are too often inaccurate.
As with the Hitlerian Nazis, those classifications have foisted upon humanity worldwide holocausts [12] and other pogroms [13]. If humanity must classify itself, perhaps it should be on the look out for a better criterion for classification than that of race.
Neo-Racism on the Rise
While racism was on the wane in America, especially after passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a new wave of the racist plague has begun to increase, ironically becoming especially pronounced after the election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president [14].
The irony of deteriorating race relations in America after twice electing a black president speaks volumes for the insidiousness of the emphasis placed on race and skin color.
Also, the rise in popularity of race huckster Ibram X. Kendi and the fallacious ideology of critical race theory (CRT) have taken center stage in the identity politics area, turning the racial divide on its head, revising the history of racism with alarming and dangerous falsehoods.
As Christopher Rufo explains, “Kendi is a false prophet — and his religion of ‘antiracism’ is nothing more than a marketing-friendly recapitulation of the academic left’s most pernicious ideas.”
According to Kendi, “When I see racial disparities, I see racism.” Asked to define racism, he opined in a circular and tautological fashion, “a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas” [15].
An important rule of rhetoric is that a term cannot be defined by using the same term; thus, Kendi simply goes on a merry-go-round of word salad employing repeatedly the term he is pretending to define. He feigns a definition of “racism” by essentially saying, “Racism is racism.”
Even as Kendi has revealed himself as a lightweight in the struggle against racism, the result of identity politics taken to extremes with CRT has become the scapegoating of the “white race.”
Instead of arguing for equality for all people, CRT hucksters are demanding the abolishing of “whiteness” [16], including the goal of terminating “white” people [17], just as the Nazis attempted to wipe out the Jews.
As the so-called “white race” now becomes the target for denigration, segregation, and ultimate elimination, the unfortunate fact remains that human beings are still in the misguided process of judging, hating, and killing one another because of the misuse of a metaphor.
Image: Open AI created inspired by the lines “Noise blossoms in the mind / Bursting into a riot of sound color”
Quotations
Paramahansa Yogananda: People interested in developing their memory should avoid the regular use of stimulants such as coffee, tea, and tobacco, which contain caffeine, theine, and nicotine, respectively.* Strictly avoid using strong stimulants such as liquor and drugs. Such substances intoxicate, drug, and deteriorate the intelligence and memory cells of the brain, preventing them from recording noble ideas and sense impressions in general. Memory cells that are constantly anesthetized by intoxicants lose their retentive power, and become lazy and inert. Intoxication obliterates the functions of the conscious mind by harmful chemicals, hence injures the cerebral memory-organ. When the brain is affected the memory is impaired. — SRF Lesson 51: “Yoga Methods for Developing Memory” (*Editor’s Note: Some modern research indicates that light to moderate use of caffeine improves short-term memory for brief periods. Yogis, however, assert that continuous use over a long period erodes rather than enhances the capacity of this divine faculty.)
Paramahansa Yogananda: In the natural course of evolution through reincarnation, souls are automatically reincarnated by cosmic law in a higher form or species in each incarnation. The soul is never reborn in the same animal species: a dog is never a dog again. — SRF Lesson 78: “Conscious Evolution”
Paramahansa Yogananda: There is nothing more powerful than will. Everything in this universe is produced by will. Physiological changes may even be made to occur in the body by will power. There is no time element involved; place a thought in the mind and hold it there, and think that the thing is done and your whole body and mind will respond to it. Nor does it take time to acquire or discard a habit if you exercise sufficient will power. It is all in your mind. —SRF Lesson S-4 P-79
Paramahansa Yogananda: Remember that when you are unhappy it is generally because you do not visualize strongly enough the great things that you definitely want to accomplish in life, nor do you employ steadfastly enough your will power, your creative ability, and your patience until your dreams are materialized. —SRF Lessons and Spiritual Diary, April 22 – Will Power, Creative Ability, & Patience
Paramahansa Yogananda: The Sanskrit word for ‘musician’ is bhagavathar, “he who sings the praises of God.” —Autobiography of a Yogi
Sri Yukteswar: Forget the past. The vanished lives of all men are dark with many shames. Human conduct is ever unreliable until man is anchored in the Divine. Everything in future will improve if you are making a spiritual effort now. —Autobiography of a Yogi
Sri Yukteswar: “How can sense slaves enjoy the world? Its subtle flavors escape them while they grovel in primal mud. All nice discriminations are lost to the man of elemental lusts.” —Autobiography of a Yogi
Sri Yukteswar: Sri Yukteswar’s interpretation of the Adam and Eve creation story in Genesis—from Autobiography of a Yogi, pages 169-171, Twelfth Edition, First quality paperback printing 1994:
Genesis is deeply symbolic, and cannot be grasped by a literal interpretation; its “tree of life” is the human body. The spinal cord is like an upturned tree, with man’s hair as its roots, and afferent and efferent nerves as branches. The tree of the nervous system bears many enjoyable fruits, or sensations of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. In these, man may rightfully indulge; but he was forbidden the experience of sex, the “apple” at the center of the body (“in the midst of the garden”). (my emphasis)
The “serpent” represents the coiled-up spinal energy that stimulates the sex nerves. “Adam” is reason, and “Eve” is feeling. When the emotion or Eve-consciousness in any human being is overpowered by the sex impulse, his reason or Adam also succumbs.
God created the human species by materializing the bodies of man and woman through the force of His will; He endowed the new species with the power to create children in a similar “immaculate” or divine manner. Because His manifestation in the individualized soul had hitherto been limited to animals, instinct-bound and lacking the potentialities of full reason, God made the first human bodies, symbolically called Adam and Eve. To these, for advantageous upward evolution, He transferred the souls or divine essence of two animals. In Adam or man, reason predominated; in Eve or woman, feeling was ascendant. Thus was expressed the duality or polarity that underlies the phenomenal worlds. Reason and feeling remain in the heaven of cooperative joy so long as the human mind is not tricked by the serpentine energy of animal propensities.
The human body was therefore not solely a result of evolution from beasts, but was produced through an act of special creation by God. The animal forms were too crude to express full divinity; man was uniquely given the potentially omniscient “thousand-petaled lotus” in the brain, as well as acutely awakened occult centers in the spine.
God, or the Divine Consciousness present within the first created pair, counseled them to enjoy all human sensibilities, with one exception: sex sensations. These were banned, lest humanity enmesh itself in the inferior animal method of propagation. (my emphasis) The warning not to revive subconsciously present bestial memories was unheeded. Resuming the way of brute procreation, Adam and Eve fell from the state of heavenly joy natural to the original perfect man. When “they knew they were naked,” their consciousness of immortality was lost, even as God had warned them; they had placed themselves under the physical law by which bodily birth must be followed by bodily death.
The knowledge of “good and evil,” promised Eve by the “serpent,” refers to the dualistic and oppositional experiences that mortals under maya must undergo. Falling into delusion through misuse of his feeling and reason, or Eve- and Adam-consciousness, man relinquishes his right to enter the heavenly garden of divine self-sufficiency. The personal responsibility of every human being is to restore his “parents” or dual nature to a unified harmony or Eden.
Alexander Pope: Hope springs eternal in the human breast. —An Essay on Man: “Epistle 1”
Alexander Pope: All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul. —An Essay on Man: “Epistle 1”
Alexander Pope: And, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, / One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right. —An Essay on Man: “Epistle 1”
Alexander Pope: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of mankind is man. —An Essay on Man: “Epistle 2”
Alexander Pope: What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone. —An Essay on Man: “Epistle 2”
T. S. Eliot: Man is man because he can recognize supernatural realities, not because he can invent them.
Evan Sayet: “The modern liberal will invariably side with evil over good, wrong over right, and the behaviors that lead to failure over those that lead to success.”
The late Daniel L. Wright was the director of the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, where he also served as professor of English from 1991 to 2013.
The following message is from the homepage of the SARC site, featuring the welcome and explanation of what the center was about:
Welcome to Concordia University in Portland, Oregon — home of the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre (SARC). The SARC is an academic setting for annual gatherings that unite professors, teachers, students, playwrights, actors, directors and lovers of Shakespeare from all over the world to share research and insights into the Elizabethan world’s most acclaimed poet-playwright.
The primary goals of the SARC: (1) Determine who the Shakespeare writer was and (2) Explore why he wrote anonymously and pseudonymously.
That website also offers information regarding the numerous conferences held to discuss that authorship question.
My Gratitude to Dan Wright
From 1983 to 1991, Dan Wright and I were classmates and colleagues in the English department at Ball State University, where we both completed our PhD degrees; I completed mine in 1987 and Dan finished in 1990. We both benefited from the excellent guidance of Professor Thomas Thornburg, who directed our dissertations.
I owe Dan a debt of gratitude for the identification of the kind of interpretation that I engage in. As we attended Dr. Frances Rippy’s class in research, Dan’s response to one of my presentations offered the term “yogic interpretation,” a term I had not heard or even thought of until he said those words.
From then on, I have understood the kind of commentary, criticism, and other scholarly work I engage is indeed “yogic” in nature. I employed a “yogic interpretation” in my dissertation, “William Butler Yeats’ Transformations of Eastern Religious Concepts,” and I continue to engage that yogic concept as I comment on the poems of various poets, including Emily Dickinson, Edgar Lee Masters, the Shakespeare sonnets, and others.
Dan and I both had religion in common, even though those religious traditions are from very different perspectives: mine is from the union of original yoga and original Christianity as taught by Paramahansa Yogananda, and Dan’s was from the historical and theological tradition of Christianity as perceived through Lutheranism.
Dan’s religious training included a Master of Divinity degree from the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago, from which he graduated in 1980. After his ordination in 1980, he entered the Navy and served for two years as a Navy Chaplain.
At Ball State during our sojourn to our advanced degrees, one would see Dan walking through in the hallways wearing his cleric collar because he remained an active churchman as he studied for his PhD in the English program.
I also owe Dan a debt of gratitude for alerting me to the issue of the Shakespeare authorship. During my research for information relating to Shakespeare, I happened upon Dan’s articles at the Shakespeare Authorship Research Centre (SARC).His brilliant analyses of and excellent clarity on the issue convinced me that Edward de Vere, 17 th Earl of Oxford, is in, indeed, the real “Shakespeare,” or is, at least, the best candidate offered to date.
Unfortunately, I never had the privilege of communicating my appreciation and gratitude to Dan for his fine scholarship. I would like to have let him know that his label of “yogic interpretation” has served as a bright light for my studies, and being introduced to the Shakespeare authorship controversy has further enhanced my literary studies.
Dan died on October 5, 2018, in Vancouver, Washington, of complications from diabetes. I wish soul rest for my former illustrious classmate/colleague, whose academic career has offered his many students a fine example in scholarship and the love of learning.
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