Tea at the Palaz of Hoon
by Wallace Stevens
Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.
What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:
I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.
Tea at the Palaz! The quirky spelling tells us we are not talking here about anything so conventional as a Buckingham Palace garden party. I love this evocative poem with its exotic imagery of… what, exactly? The flash of purple and gold, the oil-anointed beard, the chanting of hymns (to what god?) suggest a scene from an ancient civilisation, as seen through the eyes of a god-like king. As if in a dream or a distant memory, he ‘descends’ (implying from on high) with all the solitary majesty of the sun sinking in the west. The poem does not tell us who he is, nor who he means by ‘you’; and is the phrase ‘the loneliest air’ referring to a place, a status, or an attitude?
So what has all this to do with A Course in Miracles? ‘All that I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself’ echoes the Course: Projection makes perception. The world you see is what you gave it, nothing more than that… It is the witness to your state of mind, the outside picture of an inward condition.’ (T21 intr)
The world that seems to be outside and around us – happening to us, existing independently of us – has no reality in itself apart from the mind that reports it. This is not a problem for us to understand in relation to the world in which we walk nightly, in dreams. Every time we wake from dreaming, we experience again a jolt of disorientation as the inner reality is contradicted by waking consciousness. We realise only by that comparison, only with the clarity of hindsight, that all the time we thought we moved through landscapes and conversations in our dreams, we were not there at all, but lying in our beds hallucinating. The same kind of mental process is happening in our waking consciousness, too, the Course tells us; we wake from one kind of dream into another. And everything we see or hear or feel is only happening within the dreaming mind.
How can this help us to lead effective lives? As far as we are concerned, the world is real, and we must relate to it or disintegrate. But it is a way of thinking that unifies all our perceptions and relaxes our many anxieties. If I am the cause or dreamer, and all the figures in my dream are aspects of myself, why would I take sides with one against another? Or fear for my own safety? Or believe one situation has any more to offer me than another? When you know you are dreaming, there is no longer anything to prove, or feel ashamed of, or angry about.
Awareness of dreaming is the real function of God's teachers. They watch the dream figures come and go, shift and change, suffer and die. Yet they are not deceived by what they see. They recognize that to behold a dream figure as sick and separate is no more real than to regard it as healthy and beautiful. Unity alone is not a thing of dreams. (M12 6.6)
It means your thoughts do make the world what it is, you are responsible for how you think, you can let go of guilt and pain, and there is a sane and compassionate way to live even in this illusory world. To know yourself as a creative mind in communion with all you see – because all you see lives wholly in your mind – frees your thinking of fears, judgements, superstitions. It is a heart-lightening process.
As a man thinketh, so does he perceive. Therefore, seek not to change the world, but choose to change your mind about the world. (T21 intr)
