FROM MY JOURNAL - SEPTEMBER 20, 1984

From my journal – September 20, 1984

In the occult tradition, the eye that ‘sees’ must be washed in the blood of the heart. --Dane Rudhyar

It’s 3:30 a.m. Through the window in the east study I see the moon, a silver crescent held there like a cup. Oh Moon, night goddess who comes to balance and make round the glinting spears of light from rational day; we, poor creatures, crawling on the earth here, are we abandoned here until we all find the heartpoint…flashpoint!! flashpoint!!? Where the horizontal plane of rationality intersects the vertical plane of emotionality, the heart is born. The heart is born on the cross. And moment by moment I must reconcile myself to that crosspoint-flashpoint-heartpoint, the luminous center.

Has Christ really done it for us? Have we only to bring ourselves up to the ‘risen’ vibration that he has brought in for us? Stretched as he was there, he chose to monitor, moment by moment, his attitude and response toward his pain: He chose love. Father, forgive them. I will not give my soul, even in a moment of despair and pain, over to the power of darkness. Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. I will not give my soul…the existential ordeal of choice. Flashpoint! A new threshold of luminescence glows in the web of existence called earth, vibrating outward from that birthpoint, shaking the web, even dangerously shaking the web.

I am with you all days…and wherever we are in this web, we are henceforth affected by this new vibration. I can choose this vibration out of all others and my attunement begins. Lo, I am with you all days, even unto the end of the world.


Suddenly I am remembering an exercise from our movement group. Working with a partner, one partner says ‘cookie’’ and the other is silent. ‘Cookie, cookie, cookie’…the silent partner listens carefully to the sound in order to learn to distinguish it from all the other intonations in the room. Then everyone goes into motion and the room becomes an arena of movement and varying tones of ‘cookie cookie’ as the task of each of the silent partners is to locate the tone of the original partner and find the way back to the dyad, all this with the eyes closed, attuning to the special sound, a sound which has become special, as a guide. The task is to focus only on that one sound in order to succeed in the exercise. Atonement, attunement.

The existential Jesus whispered “This is possible for me. I can choose forgiveness. This is possible for a human being. This is possible for the human race.” Flashpoint! Flashpoint! The fabric of existence is forever altered. The historical Jesus whispered ‘cookie, cookie’ and that sound vibrates forever through the web of time.

Out of the phantasmagoria of sounds, refractions, reverberations, and echoes, will come those, inevitably, who shape the sounds into words. Saint John says simply, “God is love.” T.S. Eliot says, “Love is God.”

Carlos Castaneda has written six long tales of power and has not mentioned the sound of love. His “cookie:power” permeates our living web of morphic resonance now in 1984 as did the dark tones of William Golding in the 1960s with Lord of the Flies, that darkest of echoes from the great war where power became so completely divorced from the heart…the heartfires of the world had gone out …and then erupted in a great conflagration in the bake ovens of Dachau and Buchenwald. Yet the pervasiveness of clouds seeded by this darkness drifted through the minds of masses of students as they read Lord of the Flies, which was assigned to them by their teachers of literature, to be read and studied and commented upon while their ears were yet full of the drums of war…ears unable at that point to distinguish the gentler sound, “cookie”love.” Into that rumble and din, we now have Castaneda generating sounds, words, echoes into the morphic web and the drums of power drown out the sound of love. The minds of students sift for seeds of wisdom in these dark clouds of words while their ears are muffled by the modern cacophony of television and dystrophic music. Only in the gentleness of the heart can the gentler sounds be heard. Only in the heart. Body, mind, soul, spirit…where is the heart?

“Oh! Beat the world with heart of song!” Where can the sounds of the heart be heard if not through the voice of the poet, the artist, who prays, “O! Mythical father of Icarus, stand me now in good stead as I go forth to forge within the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race!” Can the modern ear be attuned to the voice of the artist?

Hoc est enum corpus meum. The artist makes the bread of life and holds it out to us in holy communion. I will pass by the dark bread and choose that which has more light. I hold out my hand for the white hyacinth. Oh, where are we going with these light bodies?

There are those today who shape sounds into gentler words: William Irwin Thompson says “Time Falling Bodies Take to Light.” Oh, where are we going in this body of light? We breathe in light; we breathe out love. I breath in light, I breathe out love, I breathe in light I breath out love breathe in light breathe out love breathe in love breathe out light breathe in light breathe out love breathe in love breathe out love breathe breathe breathe…and so the heart of the earth breathes and the heart of fire is kindled within.

--Barbara Smith Stoff