Forest Man

Lars Larsen's blog

What if you slept... (Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge). And my comments.

Publicerad 2022-10-28 19:02:00 i Arthur Findlay, Atheism and materialism, Death and resurrection of Jesus, Healing and other miracles, Heaven, Nature mysticism, Nature romanticism, Paradise and Paradisism, Paranormal phenomena, Plants, Poems, songs and music, Resurrection, Richard M. Bucke, Silence and meditation, Spiritualism, The Bible, The environmental movement, Visions,

Lawyer and spiritualist Victor Zammit's wonderful homepage (I really enjoy it!) and spiritualist philosopher J. Arthur Findlay's wonderful book "On the edge of the etheric" (1931) remind me of Coleridges famous poem "What if you slept":

 

“What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?”

by Samuel Taylor Colerigde (1772 – 1834)

 

My comment: The day it finally dawns on us that the Spirit World and the afterlife and God is a reality, a living, undescribable reality, as real as the thing you are holding in your hand right now, the day this fact finally is rooting itself deeply in our innermost being, that day is the day we have the flower in our hand from the spirit world, metaphorically speaking. This day is the day of our enlightenment, when we finally trust our lives to God, and never worry any more about anything. It is the day when we wake up from our sleep in the cultural mythology of godforsakenness and gloomy materialism, the day we are really born again. A mystical, otherworldly experience (like that Richard Bucke had *) can be enough to make us awake, and make us never sleep spiritually any more. And this can happen at any time, like it happened to Bucke. 

I feel myself sleeping still. Although I have had mystical experiences of communion with angels (2012) and a Jesus vision (2011). Why is this not enough? I don't know. But I try to meditate day and night upon the fact that the Spirit World is proved to exist beyond any reasonable doubt by spiritualism. But... "Daughters of Jerusalem, I charge you by the gazelles and by the does of the field: Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires." (Song of Solomon, 3:5) My heart wants to awake in its own time, when it is ready for it. Until that time comes, I just go on meditating and contemplating the reality of the Spirit World, letting it slowly sink in. I want to bathe in the literature of spiritualism and in the Bible and in the resurrection of Jesus, which are the areas where this reality is most visible and tangible, in my opinion. And one day my turn to wake up will come, and then I will stop worrying for the future of the earth, and for my own health problems. The existence of a higher world will not just make us good and moral environmental activists, it will make us hopeful environmental activists, hopeful, not with "hopium" (hope like opium), but with the real hope, the only real hope there is, the hope that a higher world will intervene in the end times, and give us a new world. And it is hope which gives us the real strenght to work. When I read the news about the climate and Peak Oil news, this dimension is usually lacking, the journalists and bloggers speak like God and the afterlife do not exist, they almost never mention God or the Spirit World. Here a revolution is really needed among environmental activists. We have to wake up to nature beyond nature, the nature which is even more nature, more natural than nature itself. 

 

* 

In "Cosmic Consciousness" from 1901 (it can be read here, for free), Bucke describes his vision, which is the most lovely one and wonderful one I know of:
 
"All at once, without warning of any kind, I found myself wrapped in a flame-colored cloud. For an instant I thought of fire, an immense conflagration somewhere close by in that great city; the next, I knew that the fire was within myself. Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe. Among other things, I did not merely come to believe, but   I saw that the universe is not composed of dead matter, but is, on the contrary, a living Presence; I became conscious in myself of eternal life. It was not a   conviction that I would have eternal life, but a consciousness that I possessed eternal life then; I saw that all men are immortal; that the cosmic order is such that without any peradventure all things work together for the good of each and all; that the foundation principle of the world, of all the worlds, is what we call love, and that the happiness of each and all is in the long run absolutely certain. The vision lasted a few seconds and was gone; but the memory of it and the sense of the reality of what it taught has remained during the quarter of a century which has since elapsed. I knew that what the vision showed was true. I had attained to a point of view from which I saw that it must be true. That view, that conviction, I may say that consciousness, has never, even during periods of the deepest depression, been lost."
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Lars Larsen

Born 1984 in Finland. Norwegian, lives in Stockholm, Sweden. Poet, ecotheologian and ecophilosopher (though not an academic such in both cases, although he studied theology for almost three years at Åbo Academy University), is also called "The monk" ("munken", he is monk in a self-founded monastery order, "Den Heliga Naturens Orden", "The Order of the Holy Nature"), he calls himself "Forest Man Snailson" (Skogsmannen Snigelson) because of certain strong ties to Nature and the animals, founded among other things through many years of homelessness living in tent, cot, cave and several huts in the Flaten Nature Reserve, the Nacka Reserve and "Kaknästornsskogen" outside of Stockholm. He debuted as a poet in 2007 with "Över floden mig" ("Across the river of me"), published by himself, he has also published an ecotheological work, "Djurisk teologi. Paradisets återkomst" (Animalistic theology. The return of paradise") on Titel förlag 2010. He has published the poem collection "Naturens återkomst" (The return of Nature) on Fri Press förlag 2018 together with Titti Spaltro, his ex-girlfriend. Lars's professions are two, cleaner and painter (buildings). Before he was homeless, but right now he lives in Attendo Herrgårdsvägen, a psychiatric group home for mental patients in Danderyd, Stockholm. His adress is: Herrgårdsvägen 25, 18239 Danderyd, Sverige. One can reach him in the comments section on this blog. His texts on this blog are without copyright, belonging to "Public Domain". He is the author of the texts, if no one is mentioned.

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