Sacred Experience - Ivan Granger

I know it is a challenging time in the world.  Things might feel
off kilter.  But this is also a holy time, a time to recall what
is sacred.  It is a time to reconnect with what illuminates our
minds and awakens our hearts.  We enter the cave of interior
awareness during this darkened period of the winter and
discover and rediscover the light within ourselves,
renewing ourselves...

Mystics write poetry, universally, Saints and sages, shamans
and seers, wise women and medicine men - they sing songs,
they riddle, they rhyme...  

Numinous experiences are not easily communicated through
words.  The sacred can be witnessed and participated in, but
not conveyed through limited concepts.  Any attempt to
communicate what is perceived in states of encompassing
unity and mental quiet is necessarily an act of translation.
Poetry is well suited to the sacred, enabling language to
relay experience...

Sacred experience is beyond word and form, yet the limited 
mind, in trying to understand what it has witnessed,
reflexively interprets its experience in terms of the world known
to the senses.  What emerges is a primal language of metaphor,
a rich and spontaneous pidgin that develops between the 
limited mind and unlimited awareness.

The fiery rising of the Kundalini inspires verses on the moth's
ecstatic annihilation in fire.

To the seer, enraptured by the holistic vision of reality as
fluid interconnectedness, one thing truly is another.
Metaphor ceases to be a literary device or a dramatic
mode of expression; it is observed reality.

It is from this visionary metaphor that sacred poetry is born.

Ivan Granger
excerpts from the Introduction to his book
The Longing in Between
Poetry Chaikhana

~

Photo - Mystic Meandering

Fire and Ice