William Samuel & Friends
Sandy Jones
Literary Executor
William Samuel & Friends
Sandy Jones
Literary Executor
William Samuel & Friends
The following is a brief excerpt
The Child Within Journal Notes
Summer 2003
SOME BITS AND PIECES OF 1975 WOODSONG NOTES, LOOSELY CONNECTED ABOUT INTELLIGENCE
For 30 years I’ve witnessed human theories of education and intelligence smashed to bits and proven wrong. I can confirm experiences like the one Lillian DeWaters records in one of her books when she tells of passing from a novice’s knowledge of music one moment to the sudden ability to play the piano very well. I have seen a man progress from shaking physical clumsiness to steady-handed sculpting in no longer than the instant he determined to do it. In four hours he produced his first work, one that glistened with such talent it served to produce a commission to make statuary for a public building only two weeks later.Some of the mystical groups lead one to believe that occasionally a mysterious and mighty Cosmic Finger reaches out of the Unknown and touches someone on the forehead, bestowing a sudden insight and wisdom that wasn’t there before. I might have believed the "pond experience" was just such an event for me. In abject turmoil and misery, I bent down to drink from a pond one day. I stood up and saw the world differently. A new mode of mentation began for William Samuel that day long ago-—just down the ridge from Woodsong here, at the Indian pond in the field below.
Had I begun to shout hosannas and write of the clearer vistas this unaccustomed "mode of mentation" permitted, it would surely have sounded like one claiming a personal experience of transfiguration, like a statement that "Where before I was stupid, now I’m able to understand a few things," and another Jeremiah would have been loosed on the land.
But worse, whatever I might have written from that untried new awareness I found myself "with" that day long ago, it would have been 99% certain to be as misleading as correct, more hurtful than helpful.
Listen: We have had it ground into us from the beginning of the human scene that we are born stupid and will spend the rest of our lifetime attempting to get smart. Most of us don’t get very far. On occasion we hear someone, somewhere, has had a transcendental "visit of the Light" which, they say, has made them more intelligent than before. This is a lot of stuff and nonsense. There is a great difference between MacBeth being prodded from the wings and suddenly appearing more intelligent with his lines and the actor who suddenly remembers there is another world and another identity outside that theater, an identity the vicissitudes of the play are incapable of touching.
Each of us has an astounding intelligence and an amazing capacity to understand the world, the universe, humanhood and whatever else is necessary. This capacity is honed and sharpened by formal education only to a relatively small degree—and exists as certainly for those who have never gone to school as for those who are presidents of them. The intellectual capability of Awareness, as it pertains to the people, places and things of tangibility, is virtually unlimited. There is a divine imprint of wisdom and intelligence already present within all of us. That "imprint" doesn’t depend on long years of study and struggle. Its emergence comes with the letting go the belief of a stupid identity who must struggle to get smart! It comes when the mortal sense of identity is put aside, allowing conscious awareness to take note of God-Identity.
This mode of mentation, and the natural action it engenders, is like stripping away layer after layer of old think, prejudices, judgmental opinions, likes and dislikes—like removing the opaque sludge we have allowed to cover the pristine pearl of awareness. Identifying as the bright pearl, letting go the nonsense of an illegitimate identity who must put himself through the rigors of hell to get smart, quickly proves efficacious and correct in our affairs. Furthermore, this method proceeds with exponential speed, freed of the diminution of mental clarity the former identification attributes to disease and age.
I, and many others, have found it faster and easier to let go the sludge of belief than to struggle through the academe’s halls of hypocrisy attempting to educate an ego, a me-sense, that doesn’t even exist outside the mistaken belief it does. Most of the academe and its institutional hierarchies would cease to exist if the me-sense and its desire for a place in the pecking order were abandoned. The entire edifice of human education is built around this mistaken identity and its not likely to be heard voicing a truth which threatens to expose the real.
For years, philosophers have shunted solipsism to a back burner in favor of more popular theories. But now the new particle physicist, the new mathematician, et al, have also discovered that awareness is viewing mind’s own qualities and attributes. For them it is not just theory and speculation, but fact. Lo, even some of the grand philosophers are beginning to re-examine the one mind, one identity premise of solipsism. This time around their conclusions will be different. There really is but one mind; God Mind and its Self-awareness.
William Samuel, (Woodsong 1975)
