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    Poetry of Spiritual Awakening: Reflections of Awareness
    Poetry of Spiritual Awakening: Reflections of Awareness
    Poetry of Spiritual Awakening: Reflections of Awareness
    Ebook272 pages2 hours

    Poetry of Spiritual Awakening: Reflections of Awareness

    By Hilton L. Anderson

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    About this ebook

    Poetry of Spiritual Awakening presents a collection of poetry arranged in three groupings designed to indicate levels of conscious awareness experienced by author Hilton L. Anderson. Waking up spiritually is an individual process; even so, there are common themes experienced by many people that may help others in their own spiritual journey. In general terms, the separate ego state is focused primarily on the external reality while the spiritual is more focused on internal consciousness.

    Perhaps another way of explaining this spiritual awakening is recognizing the shift from the rational mind to heart consciousness. The way in which the poems of this collection are arranged is an attempt to make this shift obvious. Through the practice of forgiveness and the awareness of love, the separate self of the ego begins to lose its hold, allowing the awareness of the larger self to become the focus of attention. This awareness heals the separation of self from others and the Divine.

    Ultimately the awareness of the unitary nature of existence becomes known. The fear of death and its resolution are prominent concerns of many of the poems. The need to face the reality of death and understand it in a meaningful way is one of the basic learning explored by the poetry.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateOct 18, 2011
    ISBN9781462056569
    Poetry of Spiritual Awakening: Reflections of Awareness
    Author

    Hilton L. Anderson

    The author is a retired seventy-seven year old who has been writing poetry for the past twenty years or so on mostly spiritual topics inspired by A Course in Miracles. He is a student of the Course since the late 1970's and a study group leader for the past fifteen years. He is a professional psychologist by training and was a practicing school psychologist for 25 years. He is married for fifty-two years to his wife Lorraine and has three adult children and seven grand children ranging in age from two to eighteen. He has been active in the Unitarian-Universalist Denomination since the nineteen fifties, and is presently active in the Unitarian-Universalist Congregation of Princeton since nineteen seventy-one. His interest in spiritual matters was awakened by his mother’s death in the nineteen seventies.

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      Book preview

      Poetry of Spiritual Awakening - Hilton L. Anderson

      Contents

      The Status Quo

      Time for a Change

      Work

      Childhood Remembered

      What Bends the Twig?

      Dawn’s Voice

      Summer Morning

      The Lake on a Summer Night

      Continuity

      The Rocking Chair

      The Nor’easter

      The Harbor

      The City

      The Parade

      War’s Ideology

      War Is Hell

      The Eve of a New Millennium

      The Three Women of Maui

      Of Trees and Men

      The Scarlet Tanager

      From Pollywog to Frog

      Hummingbirds in Maine

      The Newborn

      The New Arrival

      The First Day of School

      The Bike

      Fall

      Winter Magic

      Cycles

      On Watson Pond

      The Rocks on Pemaquid Point

      The Wind

      Winter’s End

      Transcendence

      Spring

      Spring Scene

      The Cathedral

      Florence

      Venice

      Beauty

      Bridging the Gap

      What Use?

      Why?

      Born 1896

      Hello Dolly

      An Ode to Brandy

      The Cat and the Chipmunk

      On Visiting a Florida Wildlife Preserve

      The Revolution

      Slavery, Bondage, Exploitation

      The Two-Sided Coin

      TV Culture

      Time 1

      Time 2

      2006 CE

      What Time Is It?

      Music

      Music and the Soul

      Survival’s Creed

      The Choice Is Ours

      Leisure Time

      The Family

      The Generations

      The Courage to Be

      The Law of Opposites

      The Wheel of Life

      In Defense of the Irrational

      Surrender to Salvation

      Truth

      Is Belief All There Is?

      Diversity and Separateness

      One Light

      The Risk Worth Taking

      Firstborn

      Death Watch

      A Mother’s Death

      Only the Body

      The Body

      The Ultimate Choice

      A Change in Plan

      Death

      The Graveyard

      The Holocaust Museum

      Afraid to Die?

      Choose Life

      The Fear of Loss

      Glorious Greed

      The Hard Lesson

      Transition

      The Ripples of Creation

      The Healing

      The Most Powerful Illusion

      The Transcendental

      In Pursuit of a Phantom

      The Irrationality of the Rational

      The Power of Choice

      Stress

      Is This All There Is?

      Attachment

      Life Force

      Life

      Death’s Lesson

      The Spiral Staircase

      The Dragon

      Culture’s Mask

      The Occident, the Orient, and the Mystical

      What Am I?

      Fame

      The Dream

      The Journey

      This Me

      Shrouds and Veils

      Understanding Judas

      Oh Canada

      Nature’s Gift

      The Virtues of Life

      Among Many

      A World to Choose

      Are We Ready?

      Life’s True Story

      Contradictions on the Spiritual Path

      Art and Creativity

      Beauty

      Creativity

      In Diversity One

      Arrogance

      The Zoo

      Estimating

      Home

      How Long?

      Into the Next Decade

      Thought Changes the World

      Map or Territory?

      Marriage

      A New Journey Begins

      Off the Deep End

      The Mantra

      Meditation

      A Helping Hand

      Only Love Extends

      The Dance of Life

      On the Death of a Friend

      Unknowing

      Never Apart

      Playmate

      Optimism

      Serendipity and Creativity

      The Barge Ride

      The Civil War

      Friendly Fire

      Inside Out

      Asleep, Awake, Enlightened

      Immortal One

      One Thing to Learn

      Life Center

      Awareness

      A Broader Horizon

      Thickening Smoke Screen

      We of Misplaced Faith

      A Zero-Sum Game

      The Rudderless Ship

      The Non-Birthday Celebration

      Freedom and Slavery Then, Now, and Always

      The Inner Path

      Who’s to Judge

      The Peace of SELF

      What to Do? Just Be

      A Peace of Mind

      The Great Mystery

      Being Is not Doing

      The Chicken or the Egg?

      God or Goddess?

      Anger

      I Am, Therefore, I Think

      End of an Ice Age?

      A 1999 New Year’s Resolution for All

      A Friend

      Love

      Life’s Love Song

      Love’s Promise

      Love’s Numerology

      In Peace, Love, and Joy

      Unforgiving

      Affluence

      Forgiveness, not Vengeance

      Forgiveness Is the Key

      The Spiritual Fire

      Power, Unity, Love

      One of Many

      Religions and the Religious

      The Three that Are One

      A Thanksgiving Day Prayer

      Saint Francis of Assisi at Christmas

      The Christmas Promise

      The Christmas Holidays

      Christmas

      The Climb

      The Courage to Be

      Life and Death

      Light

      The Doorway

      The Eve of a New Millennium

      The Quark

      The Truth We Deny

      The Twentieth Century

      Think Again

      Time

      Unconditional Love

      Unintended Consequences

      What Is Life?

      Whose Plan?

      Words

      Awaken

      The Message of Easter

      You Are the Plan

      Creation’s Power

      Teachers

      We are all simultaneously teachers and learners.

      We teach what we believe and learn from the beliefs of others.

      Teach from the highest awareness of Self.

      Share the truth as you best understand it,

      Because that is who you are.

      Introduction

      Poetry is wonderful shorthand for expressing your ideas and beliefs. It is compressed complexity. It is complexity expressed as we understand it in a given moment. The process of change in consciousness is not just reflected in the poetry; the writing of the poetry itself is part of the process of awakening or changing. Poetry allows one to realize in a succinct way where one’s thinking is at each point in development. Poetry is an expression of both the rational and the intuitive in a concise form that helps lead to expanded awareness.

      The poetry in this book should not be judged from a literary perspective but rather from the perspective of the ideas conveyed in the poems. Most of the poems are expressions of philosophical, psychological, or religious concepts dealing with my evolving understanding of the nature of existence and self.

      My first poems grew out of the frustration and the boredom of a meaningless job in the insurance industry, my first job after graduating from undergraduate college. I came to believe that the insurance industry, like the navy as described in the book the Caine Mutiny, was designed by geniuses but administered by idiots. (See my poems Time for a Change and Status Quo.) These poems, in addition to the simple expression of frustration, were an outgrowth of a desperate search for meaning and self-worth through self-expression, since there was no opportunity to do so at work. These early poems took various forms but never transcended the ego level of awareness.

      Later in life, my poetry became my way of trying to express what I was learning about myself and the world around me. My poetry evolved into the expression of my spiritual development as my search for meaning expanded. There were many events that prompted this interest in the spiritual, but none more powerful than my confrontation of my mother’s death. (See my poem "Death Watch.")

      Despite my professional training as a psychologist and my working as a school psychologist for twenty-five years, I realized that I understood little about the meaning of death. Many of the medical professionals in the hospital at the time of her death seemed to deny or were unable to deal with discussing her approaching death with the family. This caused me to wonder about the adequacy of science in understanding this important, life-changing event. This experience began my sustained journey of spiritual inquiry.

      You will probably notice that death holds a prominent position in my poetry. Death is a powerful teacher for all of us. Particular poems represent important turning points in my journey through life. The first of these pivotal poems is Firstborn. My wife and I had difficulty having children, and after great effort, she conceived and carried our baby to full term, only to have him stillborn. This event opened an awareness in me of the suffering of others, as many people shared their experience of having an unsuccessful pregnancy. It was an early lesson that life is suffering, as taught by Buddha in the story of the mustard seed.

      My response to this event was initially purely at the ego level, making alterations in the external world. I changed jobs, went to graduate school, and changed professions. It became manifestly obvious that death could not be avoided and that I had very little, if any, understanding of it.

      Another major event was my developing a melanoma, and my personal experience is depicted in my poem "The Healing." Spiritual development is still very much a work in progress, despite my age and the passage of many years. It is, I believe, the essential task of life. It is why we are here. Some people never awaken to this spiritual need and are content to remain at their ego level, believing that external reality is all that matters.

      It should be pointed out that the development of awareness is not a linear event. There

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