Tav Sparks Talks about Through Thunder

Tav Sparks, Author of Through Thunder

My first intimations of spiritual awakening involved an outflowing of poetic creativity in my later teens. At the time I was not aware that this was what was happening. I had not in any way articulated a spiritual journey, much less believed in one. Nor would I have dared call it spiritual if in fact I was experiencing something of that nature. “God” as a concept, the Divine as any type of reality, as a spirit outside or inside myself, I had ruthlessly kept at bay. So I would never have deemed this creative urge within me, this awakening that opened me to other dimen-sions of being and that clamored to be expressed through poetry, as being the Divine. Yet as I look back I realize that this is exactly what it was.

Through Thunder is an expression of that creative outflow—what I sometimes think of as a spontaneous surging of the joy of the numinous within me into manifestation. This spontaneity alone might be the sole purpose of my writing it. Yet there appear to be other levels of purpose as well. I have come to understand from the teachings of many mystics that there are levels of relative purpose and relative causality; that there is usually cause within cause and purpose behind purpose. This is probably true of Through Thunder too. It definitely springs from the need of my deepest being to express itself through writing. It is possible to see myself as being a birth channel, or the birthing mother of living words that emerge from some place within me or beyond me.

At times I have felt myself to be this birthing instrument for joy, or beauty, or truth, however it may have emerged, may have expressed the myriad colorations of my own personality, my own journey, and the lives that I have led. Of course, an under-current to all this has been the glory of being a writer, the ego of the “best-seller self.” In the early days it manifested as a desire to emulate F. Scott Fitzgerald or Ernest Hemingway. Now I would merely love to win the Oscar for best screenplay.

After many years and many rites-of-passage, my life has begun to feel like a yoga. One gift is that I perhaps understand just a little of the nature and power of the spoken and written word, and the power of symbol; and how they are evocative or invocative of deeper truths. At some point, the idea came to me that it was possible to envision poetry as a service to humanity just as other endeavors are so utilized. I had come to feel that creativity is, in and of itself, service to the whole, much in the same way that the beauties of nature serve one and all, simply by their quality of beingness. But it seemed there may be a more specific function within written art that qualified it uniquely as a yogic tool.

It occurred to me that the very reading of poetry itself, not just the writing of it, might be creative of transformation; and that it might be metaphysically linked with the science of word and vibration. For philosophic validation I went to the deep sciences of mantra and wazifa. Texts describing these disciplines have long fostered the idea that there are letters, syllables, sounds, and groups of sounds that affect the practitioner by altering frequencies of energy vibration.

The power of letters and words has been most articulately expounded on in the various texts of Jaideva Singh on Kashmir Shaivism, including the Siva Sutras and the Spanda Karikas. In his com-mentaries on the seventh sutra of the second section of the Siva Sutras, Singh says, “It is Siva, therefore, who dwells in the heart of all the letters and all the creatures and expresses all manifestation as identical with Himself.” And I never forget the first gospel of the New Testament: “In the beginning was the Word.”
If these texts were valid, then there must be some sort of yoga of “hearing” or “listening” or even seeing sound and words and vibration. It might be possible in an experience of poetry that the reader would be not only seeing and feeling images from the inner realm of the writer, but that also the combin-ation of syllables and sounds of the words being absorbed by the reader could be transformative as well.

I also realized that this power could only be tapped and further amplified as the writer grew in his or her own spiritual journey and became more intuitively aware of the power of sound. Or perhaps the writer might somehow activate a dimension in consciousness where there was inherent knowledge of the value of sound in this manner. On the other hand, what was written might be more of a channeled inspiration that did not necessarily have to be understood overtly by the writer or the instrument. In this case, the writer, or the instrument, would in fact be a transcriber of deeper truths which would contain that value of the combined letters, syllables, and sounds.

So I began to see poetry as perhaps being a yoga itself. And with great delight and wonder I read the works of Sri Aurobindo, including The Future Poetry. To my amazement I found he was describing this yogic process in different qualities of poetry that emerge from the various mental or spiritual realms. His philosophy was evidence that I was not alone in my intuition that poetry itself was of the nature of a yoga, and that words themselves contain inspirational power depending on the consciousness of the poet.

I discovered that he had written an epic poem, Savitri, and proceeded to embark on that poetic journey. He also expounded deeply on the poetics and philosophies of the Vedas, one of the most ancient scriptures we know of. My wonder grew as I learned that these works are really poetic mantras with multiple levels of meaning, including the inherent groupings of the Sanskrit letters themselves. I felt validated at that point that I was getting in touch with, or was on track with, some ancient truths. Although I was not overtly aware of the exact value of the possible combinations of syllables in initiating processes within the reader, nevertheless I was somehow intuitively in touch with this knowledge.

I began to hope that as I became more aware through my own practice, something of the power of these combinations of syllables and sounds might begin to emerge in my own writing. The power would depend on the depths or the heights of my own inspiration from which the words and images came. Poetry then became another avenue for the endeavor of service in which I found myself engaged, just as many of my peers found themselves engaged. Somehow, our purpose here, or one functional metaphor for our purpose here, seemed to be “to serve.” We serve best by creatively expressing our own being. And if I had some sort of bent toward poetic endeavors, then, yes, it was certainly possible that I could serve by my poetry.

Given this broader perspective, I found I could possibly be of service in a two-fold manner. One, I could share inspirations, ideas, and concepts gleaned experientially from my own journey. Secondly, I could also serve by presenting a perhaps veiled text of vibratory combinations which might in fact initiate transformation within the reader at subliminal or deeply intuitive levels. This could be true, even though I myself might have no clue as to what these com-binations of sounds might mean, especially in the English language. Nevertheless, this was a joyful revelation for me and was the backdrop for my attempts at poetry during those years.

Through Thunder, therefore, is a poetic journey that is an account, a diary, or a journal of some experiences I had throughout a rather trying period that lasted for perhaps two years in the middle eighties. During this time I was engaged in a deep experiential practice known as Holotropic Breathwork. This discipline, a breathing technique of the nature of pranayama, was developed by Dr. Stanislav and Christina Grof. It grew out of many years of consciousness research by Grof. It also utilized as underpinnings many experiential methods including psychedelics, shamanic practices, chanting, and various meditative systems from around the world.

It is not entirely accurate to describe Holotropic Breathing in itself as a yoga. It is probably more applicable to view this technique as a non-specific enrichener of all spiritual paths or yogas. Or we could see it as a current that flows through many practices, utilizing that most ancient and necessary function, breath. Breathing practices have certainly been a pivotal component in a wealth of the world’s mystical traditions. A simple way of describing the Holotropic Breathing process is that it is a universal strategy for accessing a natural healing mechanism within the individual whose function is to continually facilitate an evolution toward wholeness. It is a strategy, basically, of surrender, of opening to an experience of death-rebirth or rite-of-passage from one state of being or consciousness to another.

Through systematic self-exploration, and especially the utilization of a deep experiential technique such as Holotropic Breathing, a practitioner may enter states of consciousness deeper than this biographical dimension. The journeyer often accesses realms of the human psyche that have collective or transpersonal dimensions. These states have been described by Roberto Assagioli, Carl Jung, Ken Wilber, Grof, and of course by the mystics of all ages.

After committing to this process in conjunction with other aspects of my own spiritual practice, I underwent a series of experiences, a gestalt, or a constellation, that can be categorized in what Grof calls the “perinatal” band of consciousness. “Perinatal” comes from the Latin and Greek, and means “pertaining to birth.” The perinatal acts as a sort of dimension doorway between the personal and transpersonal self. It is the dimension where the individual has encoded all ideas about birth and death. We also have, at this level, access to an experience of biological birth. In Beyond the Brain — Birth, Death and Transcendence in Psychotherapy and in other texts, Grof describes in detail this band of consciousness and other dimensions as well, including the transpersonal.

Neither time nor space permit a detailed account of the extended map of the human psyche that Grof has developed. However, in order to introduce Through Thunder, it is necessary to say a little more about the perinatal dimension, simply because this manuscript is a hero’s journey into that realm of my being. The poems can be described on one level as a metaphorical journey from my biological birth to conception, into the womb experience, through various stages of the birth process, and ultimately birth. Or it can be seen as the archetypal journey of my soul, from preexistence in eternity, into the process of incarnation, entering life on the planet, and, through an evolving experience of psycho-spiritual death-rebirth, expansion into further reaches of consciousness. Both of these vantage points are true, inasmuch as they accurately articulate and give meaning to this particular constellation of processes made conscious in my deep experiential work.

The poetic journey itself tends to flow in time forward into the present and have elements of current idiom, current present day experience. It also is an open window on the deep past and on the archetypal, collective dimensions that Carl Jung described. As such it contains much mythic and perhaps archaic language. As I said, the death-rebirth journey feels like an interface between current biographical life and that part of the individual which is connected with the collective, universal dimensions of being.

This particular journal called Through Thunder,, then, is a story of my experiences utilizing the Holotropic method in the limbo between self and Self. It is an account of certain experiences in my own yoga, my own spiritual practice. It represents a very unique, powerful time in my life and, and has been profoundly significant for me, if for nobody else. It marks a significant shift of consciousness within myself over the period of the two years in which I wrote the poems.

As I began to put together this collection, I guessed that a few of them might perhaps be able to stand on their own as poetry — that as poetic endeavors they had value in and of themselves. There were obviously many that, alone, did not contain the poetic power of some of their companion pieces. However, when they were put together in some sort of sequence, they emerged as a kind of odyssey. Or, to put it another way, they represented a series of beads, perhaps, on the rosary of my being. Together they make a story, and are a flow of my own awakening through this particular metaphor called death and rebirth.

It was also fascinating that the flow of the poems from incarnation or, shall we say, conception through the womb experience, into the birth or the rebirth stage, follows the trajectory of the four perinatal birth matrices described by Stanislav Grof. The early stanzas, in what he calls the first matrix, evoke a softness, a unitive sense of undifferentiated consciousness, a oneness with the mother. As the descent into hell begins in the journey, feelings of aloneness, sorrow, and futility emerge. This is the second matrix, the soul’s dark night. There was certainly an intensely personal quality here, where my emotions connected with the unique patterns of my biographical life. But it also felt as though there was a connection with the transpersonal dimensions of these particular feeling states, or the realm of the archetypes. There was a sense of not only personal loss, separation or aloneness, but also an experience of what Grof calls a cosmic engulfment.

The imagery from the apocalyptic scenes, the last battle, in what he calls the third birth matrix, evokes a sense of aggression, of aggravated personal power, of titanic struggle, fiery apocalypse, and even a sense of the impending death of consciousness, both personal and cosmic.

In the final poetic stanzas, images of bliss and emergence, of rebirth and joy, signal a sense of release, physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Within the unfolding of these dimensions, the power of the surrender process seems to have emerged as the energetic mechanism of completion. Finally, out of rebirth, or the fourth matrix, is birthed a new earth and heaven. Through Thunder appears to flow inexorably through the seasons of transformation described by Grof and many perennial philosophers.

Now, the question emerges, are there certain strategies that can be employed by the reader in order to render the manuscript more variously accessible? In light of the preceding material, is there, perhaps, more than one way to traverse this terrain? To find answers, I had only to examine my own process of being with poetic texts. To begin with the obvious, the experience can be had purely from a literary standpoint. Intellectually and emotionally, it can be taken simply as a reading or a rendering, employing a traditional understanding of poetry.

However, there is an inherent invitation here to the reader to envision Through Thunderas an experiential journey that may be undertaken, just as I myself undertook the odyssey. Such a rendering can be approached from at least two perspectives. The first level encompasses a literary translation of my experiences themselves, interpretations of the images that are drawn, the inspirations that they invoke, and the archetypal dimensions they disclose. Or at a more subliminal stratum, a combination of words and rhythms, the organization of sounds themselves, might in fact trigger a mobilization of the forces of the reader’s psyche.

If there is an anticipation or willingness for such a connection to be made, the poems can somehow become a psychic enhancer. Or, to use a metaphor coined by William Blake and later employed by Aldous Huxley, they may become a key to unlock the “doors of perception.” This attitude of heroic openness could be the spirit, the set and setting, in which this text can be experienced, as though it were a journey into the reader’s own unconscious, into his or her personal kingdom of the fantastic.

It is also possible to envision the manuscript as a framework for guided imagery. In this scenario, the poems themselves would act as guide. An interesting and creative posture would be to somehow envision oneself as being among a group which has gathered to hear an epic tale sung.

Imagine, let us say, an ancient place, a forgotten time, around a fire, a circle of nomadic listeners, and a bard. It could be Homer or any wandering minstrel. This is the archetype of the troubadour. We can all recall ancient stories of mythical, archetypal significance and how they have been shared by the wandering bard for all time.

Invoking the theme of the storyteller here contains a certain experiential logic. The manuscript, then, becomes a story within a story. On one level the tale is one’s own. One finds oneself sitting at the fire, listening to the bard, who then passes on to the hearer her own adventures. These adventures are the poems themselves, which become the story within the story.

The reader may enter that creative, poetic space in many different ways. Perhaps one might play a piece of evocative music, breathe deep, chant, pray, or meditate. In the favorite chair, in front of the archetypal fire in one’s own living room, one con-templates the odyssey within. Perhaps the energies of transformation are invoked, or the power of gentle love and safety. Then comes the giving of oneself over to the flow of the narrative, to the words of the bard, and the possible discovery that the reader and the text can become one.

In Through Thunder the experiencer of this particular death-rebirth journey, the troubadour, speaks to the reader first. Many of the poems begin in this fashion, with the narrator speaking to the listener, or in this case, the reader. There are admonitions and directions, usually in italics, at the beginning of many of the pieces that might put the audience in some sort of meditative place or within an imaginative framework conducive of entering a particular experience with him. Once the spell created by the bard has been cast and entered, the minstrel himself will relate the experience he has undergone, his tale of death and rebirth, recounted episode by episode, poem by poem. As one surrenders to the flow of the narrative, it won’t be necessary to look for archetypal connections, or try to make something occur. There should be an allowing of whatever is within the psyche to emerge.

It might be a good idea to invoke the power of trust—that if there are insights to be gained, they will come to light effortlessly. Somehow reading and opening to the tales themselves may produce a mobilization of the reader’s own forces of con-sciousness. Whatever is present within the poetic text could activate that corresponding level within his or her own being. If this happens, the strategy then would be to trust in the inherent healing capacity of the psyche and to surrender to the outflowing of the experience. By welcoming emergence of material from within the psyche, we are cooperating with the inherent inner healing mechanism. The poems, there-fore, could become not just entertainment, but an occasion for a catharsis.

Any of the methods above can be a powerful enhancer of the reader’s imagination to evoke the essence of ancient halls of mystery, the ritual sacred fire around which the tribe has gathered to listen to the tunes of their ancestors. Ultimately, this becomes one posture, one possible set and setting, this idea of the wandering minstrel, the poet out of time, singing these tunes, this epic journey, and allowing his listeners to flow in some sort of spiritual, mental, emotional trance dance of their own. There is a keynote, a shamanic mental, emotional drumbeat, that can be sounded within us. It might possibly resonate in those realms of the soul from which the poet’s dreams have emerged, and which seem to be common to us all.

To summarize, although this is a literary journey, at the same time it could also be a therapeutic undertaking. There is a hidden reserve of healing potential within us all which can be tapped by approaching the material with certain strategies in mind. Reading the manuscript with an eye for these possibilities provides an articulate spotlight thrown onto an archetypal blueprint of consciousness. In this blueprint, what was occurring for the poet could resonate with some quality attempting to emerge from the reader’s own psyche. If this happens, and a mobilization is initiated, then a surrender to the emergence of that particular pattern could facilitate a rich transformational experience, increasing exponentially the value of the poetic endeavor.

I have discovered for myself while reading the manuscript that an attitude of wonder is advantageous — of willingness, anticipation, even expectation of the unknown. Reconnecting with mystery, the sense of infinite possibility, constitutes the magic talisman for the journey. No matter what emerges from within, a sense of joy and wonder transforms struggle into release, and suffering into bliss.

Surrender into delight seems to be a thread running through every mystical tapestry. A longing, a beckoning from the ancient past, and an echo from the future invite each of us always to celebrate our own odysseys. It seems we all have within us this story of death and rebirth. These tales, sung again and again, bead after bead, become the rosary of our lives. If anything, I hope this text can be just one example, one celebration of the journey which is common to us all.

To summarize...

To summarize, although this is a literary journey, at the same time it could also be a therapeutic undertaking. There is a hidden reserve of healing potential within us all which can be tapped by approaching the material with certain strategies in mind. Reading the manuscript with an eye for these possibilities provides an articulate spotlight thrown onto an archetypal blueprint of consciousness. In this blueprint, what was occurring for the poet could resonate with some quality attempting to emerge from the reader’s own psyche. If this happens, and a mobilization is initiated, then a surrender to the emergence of that particular pattern could facilitate a rich transformational experience, increasing exponentially the value of the poetic endeavor.

I have discovered for myself while reading the manuscript that an attitude of wonder is advantageous — of willingness, anticipation, even expectation of the unknown. Reconnecting with mystery, the sense of infinite possibility, constitutes the magic talisman for the journey. No matter what emerges from within, a sense of joy and wonder transforms struggle into release, and suffering into bliss.

Surrender into delight seems to be a thread running through every mystical tapestry. A longing, a beckoning from the ancient past, and an echo from the future invite each of us always to celebrate our own odysseys. It seems we all have within us this story of death and rebirth. These tales, sung again and again, bead after bead, become the rosary of our lives. If anything, I hope this text can be just one example, one celebration of the journey which is common to us all.