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An E-mail Interview of Eternity’s Editor, Harekrushna Mahanta with Ruth Wildes Schuler:
RUTH WILDES SCHULER INTERVIEW
“Ruth Wildes Schuler needs no introduction. The former editor of Prophetic Voices from California (USA) is adored and admired in India and abroad for her beautiful poetry, benevolence and compassion towards poets around the world. It’s our utmost pleasure to publish her interview in Eternity as an asset for the whole mankind.”
– Editor
HKM: What is your family background? How did you hobnob with poetry in your life? When and how did it happen?
RWS: I did not have the literary background of many of the Indian writers. Neither of my parents had a formal education. They were left without a father young in life and had to struggle to survive in a big bad world. There has been much sadness in my ancestral background. Back in 1690 my Grandmother Sarah Wildes (many times removed) was hanged at the Salem Witch Trials. On my mother’s side, Ku Klux Klan shot my poet grandfather in the head. He was a teacher and when his school got new textbooks, he took the old ones to the school for black children that did not have any books. The southern fanatics killed him for it, leaving my ill grandmother with four young children to raise. My mother had to drop out of school in the sixth grade to take care of her dying mother and was left as an orphan as a young girl to make her way in the world.
My Yankee grandfather died young, leaving my father as a boy to go to work to support his ill mother and raise his brother and two sisters. He worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week throughout his youth. Due to raising his family, he did not marry until late in life and he had three daughters. He was disappointed in not having a son to preserve the family name, as his brother never married, and his sisters’ children bore their father’s name. So that is why I have always used my maiden name Wildes preserve the family name for him. Although he was only able to get an eight- grade education, he read constantly and knew more about history than any person that I ever knew. He had a photographic memory for dates and never forgot any. So I developed my love of history from him.
On my father’s side, the first Wildes came to Massachusetts from England 20 years after the May flower landed. We had many famous writers and poets in our family tree. On my mother side, her relatives came from Ireland in the 1700’s. My grandfather Bryan was a cousin of William Jennings Bryan who was the Democratic presidential candidate of United States three times and served as the Secretary of State under President Woodrow Wilson. I was born in Salem, Massachusetts and spending my childhood in New England, I was amid a background of study of poetry and literary works of the many famous writers like: John Greenleaf Whittier, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson and others. New England was the center of great intellectual learning.
I wrote my first poem at eight years old about the historical greatness of the Concord Bridge and “the shot heard around the world” that started our Revolutionary War. The events of history have always moved me. Although I always wrote for myself, I did not start writing poetry seriously until I was in college. Since then I have written over a thousand poems.
HKM: Literature is supposed to have been born with poetry. Whether Ramayana, Mahabharata like scriptures; or Iliad, Odyssey: or in Chaucer’s poetry.
How come novels get center stage? We get Nobel laureates are generally novelists today?
Prose seems to take the place of poetry. What do you say?
RWS : Poetry is at a disadvantage in today’s world because it does not make money like novels do. The general public is not interested in poetry as a rule. So publishing houses are not interested in putting their money into printing it. So it is left mainly to the small presses around the world today to promote poetry and they work at a handicap. As the postage and printing cost continue to climb, more and more of the small magazines are forced to fold. I think now it will get worse due to the economic problems in the world today. With growing unemployment, people have less money to spend on luxuries like poetry books.
HKM: You are known across the world for your poetry. What issues or themes do you discuss in poetry.
Please name your published books.
RWS: Mostly I prefer to write about the various injustices in the world and poems about peace. I also like to write about famous people, and I am working on a large poetry collection about famous writers, painters, and performing artists called Pegasus’ Passage.
My published books include: Mistress Of The Darkened Rooms, Under Night’s Umbrella. Prophet’s Return From Exile, Beneath The Mushroom Cloud, An American Entering The Age Of Aquarius, Shades Of Salem. The Temporal Twilight, Beware Of the Wolves, Rhapsody Of The sand And the Sea, February’s Child, of porcupines And Death. Born Of Buffalo Bone, Daughters From The Other Side Of Drawbridge, Princess In An Ivory Tower, Portraits By A Poet Passing Through, Dreaming In The Dawn, and The Turbulent Tide. Some of my books are Poetry collections, some short stories collections, and some a mixture of both. I have also had hundreds of poems and short stories published in various anthologies.
HKM: Many of social net workings like: Facebook, Twitter, You Tube now create ripples worldwide. Can they become medium for poetry too? How important Internet is for poets, poetry lovers and common masses today? Where does the published book of poetry come in?
RWS: Yes, I feel the Internet will become the media to promote poetry more and more. I belong to the California Writer’s Club that was originally formed by Jack London over a hundred years ago. We have a speaker each month, usually an agent or publisher. They see the published book becoming more and more obsolete. Some claim except for libraries, hard back books will not be published in the future. They are expensive and they take up more room in book stores. However even paper backs will be printed less and less as now Kindle e-Books are becoming more and more popular. Then many publishers have stopped publishing regular books and have gone to publishing their books and magazines on the Internet. This way they do not have to pay for printers or postage. There are many poetry magazines exclusive on the Internet now. I feel a sadness though with the demise of regular books, as I love to read lying in bed at night. You cannot have the same relaxation with a computer.
HKM: Have you ever visited India? Tell me your idea on India, Indian poets and Indian ethos.
RWS: Although I have never had the privilege of visiting India, I have been fascinated with India since I first read Kipling’s Kim as a child. Since then I have read many books and my fascination with the country and its people have continued to enchant me. I feel a kinship with the philosophy of the Indian poets and philosophy of the Indian poets and philosophers. They are concerned more with the spiritual qualities in life rather than with materialistic acquisitions. I receive many India magazines and devour them with Interest. I have been associated with many Indian poets and found their theme of Poetry as spiritual in many of them.
HKM: Do morality, meditation, spirituality, sublimity, peace, enlightenment, revival of ancient sages and saints around the world. Eternity discusses has influence in USA and the rest of the world? Can Eternity Movement go ahead successfully in the coming days.
RWS: Yes, all of these things are important. Sadly the moral standards in this country have eroded due to our media, which shows constant violence and profanity. We do need to pay heed to our ancient sages and philosophers. We desperately need movements like Eternity to counteract the callousness that is being fostered among men today Prejudice, hatred, violence and war! Apathy is one of the greatest human crimes. We so need to care for our fellow human beings.
The Poetry and Philosohpy
THE POET AS AWAKNER AND PROPHET
Pamela Constantine
Upminster, Essex
England
We survive amid the debris of upturned values, discarded ideals and outworn thought forms. Society often seems alien to our true humanity. We exist in it like strangers, somehow shut off from a brighter, happier life whose forgotten reality still manages to haunt us. Many carry a deep feeling of loss. This has lasted so long that they no longer know what it is they have lost. It is simple. All sense of soul has departed from general culture.
As daily I go about my task of supplying literature for the comparative few who are awakening to that sense, I am aware of so many who came before me and the vital treasury which they have bestowed in their soul-infused witings. Poets in particular have left from us soul-food of great refinement and revelation, for all true poets express from the level of the Sublime, evoking with words of clay the higher World of Light where soul is sovereign.
Since soul is our spiritual essence – the divine Seed of Love – in – potential which we must steadfastly draw upon to release the inner god — poets are often the most authentic of prophets. As the illustrious Indian Master Kuthumi declared, “The true poet is always the Seer.” Even so did my early poems, written before the soul’s full immersion into the human condition, act through the ensuing years as an indicator of my own ongoing steps back into the Light.
Poetry must again become a voice for Man’s soul, for the spirit of mankind, since the soul is Love, and is not Love the real heart of life and creator of all new forms?
This is always what the high Romantic and transcendentalist poets infer by the term ‘love’. As the great German poet put it, “The world must be Romanticized. Then one would recover the original meaning. Romanticism is nothing but a raising to a higher power … In this operation, the lower self must be identified with the higher.” Such poet have always been amongst us, either in preparatory lives or actual lives as poets of soul.
As a prime example I would cite Plato, who formed one of the earliest spiritual Mystery Schools and reincarnated in the late eighteenth century as Percy Bysshe Shelley, foremost of the English high Romantics, of whom the celebrated scholar and poet Kathleen Raine wrote, “Only those lacking in all sensibility to a poetry which speaks to the soul in its own language and of its native place and state can read Shelley uncharged.” (Though I do not believe Ms. Raine knew of his earlier incarnation, pure poetic insight caused her to describe Shelley as the most Platonic of poets.)
Sisir Kumar Ghose, member of Sri Aurobindo’s Ashram, wrote, “The poetry is the soul of poetry, giving back to us the lost language of ecstasy and illumination.” It is a comment I wholeheartedly endorse. To regain this language and with it recognition of ourselves as eternal beings is to become timeless in time and thus more able to serve the race in its slow progress untoward the Light.
In our own time, Goldie L. Morales, whom readers of this magazine have already known as a lucid and skilled poet, succinctly expresses the same significant truth: “Is there a language through which the spirit of the cosmos seeks to express itself? If so, that language is poetry”.
Romantic and Transcendentalist poets are both imbued with a profound sense of soul. Sri Aurobindo was himself a poet of high calibre in this vein, expressing the Journey of Awakening from firsthand experience in a way that stirs the soul, as in these lines from ‘A God’s Labour’:
Coercing my godhead, I have come down.
Here on the sordid earth,
Ignorant, labouring, human grown
‘Twixt the gates of death and birth.
I have been digging deep and long
Mid a horror of filth and mire
A bed for the golden river’s song,
A home for the deathless fire.
As the mystical Irish poet William George Russell (A.E.) once wrote, “The Romantic imagination, equally with the mystic, releases the soul from the clog of our slower, more static nature to blossom in its own ideal.”
He goes on to quote the Seer in the Upanishads who said of the seeker, “Let him approach it saying, “This is the Mighty.” He becomes Mighty. Let him approach it saying. “This is the Wise.” He becomes filled with wisdom. Let him approach it saying, “This is the Maker of the Song’ He becomes the Maker of the Song.”
The role of such “musicians of the word” is a high calling and therefore a high challenge. Yet there is one assured path by which that role may always be fulfilled, given as the simple advice in which all Seers throughout the ages have concurred, “This above all, to thine own Self be true,”
YOGA
Yogeswar Shiv Kumar Shastri
As we come closer to the Himalayas, cold breeze starts touching our body. Similarly, as the yogi reaches nearer to the soul, the aura of peace tranquility and spiritual bliss begin to overwhelm the heart. For a while, the heart gets cold and pacified that has been burning with worldly heat and worries for time immemorial. This is the reason why everyone’s movement is towards the soul.
Never accept it that a person’s energy gets decreased through yoga or spiritual knowledge. Nor is it a fact that a man becomes unfit for any worldly activity or becomes illegible for a family. Never. When a person sleeps at night, it becomes easy for him to work in the morning and day time. He also becomes free from weariness. All his sensory organs and action organs become fresh after the rest at night, and his mind too becomes joyful. Similarly after being fully aloof from worldly worries when you engage the mind at the soul, and you reach at yoga-stage through meditation and savor the eternal peace of super consciousness…; a renewed energy, enthusiasm and a new lease of life gets unleashed through which you can discharge your duty with such minuteness and sincerity that the worldly man will get puzzled to see it. Yoga never makes man a corpse, but offers life and energy. Man’s energy never gets destroyed through yoga, but nourished. Both the physical power and mental power get enhanced by yoga, and there it is discovered the lustre of spiritual knowledge inside the heart. Only the true knowledge of yoga can offer real peace. No second path.
The bee that leaps on the honey being totally charmed by it, cannot of course taste it and enjoy it. Rather she dies there being t adhered inside the honey. Look! The bee did come to enjoy the honey, but the honey sucked her. What a strange!
But a wise bee arrives. Not being attached nor fascinated, she sits on the corner of the honey keeping totally aloof, from it. She drinks honey to her heart’s content and flies away. Therefore if you want to make your life joyful, if you are to enjoy sensual pleasures then – relinquish your attachment to them. Get detached from it very lovingly. Remain beside it in such a way as if you are in its corner.
This is not a thing of telling or listening. Begin its practice from today itself and see how wonderful and peaceful joy, bliss and delight overflowing within your soul. This swell of joy is called the overflowing surge of spiritual wisdom.
A river is a substance of joy, a place for pleasure. But the person who is swimming on the river can only savor this pleasure. It is for him who is on the surface of the river, and has kept the river under his authority and is moving on its head. In other words, he is aloof and separated from the river. But the same river becomes hell, irksome and cause of death for the person who is inside it, under it.
The river like this mundane world has the same circumstance. This world is a heaven. It is blissful and can offer nectar, but only for the person who has kept his situations under his authority, who remains indifferent to worldly affairs and gets aloof from it, and for him who moves on its head and swims over it.
Do not you know that mud exists inside the pond, but the lotus blooms above water? Why is the lotus so beautiful, graceful and odorous though created from mud and water? This is because it remains aloof and separated from the water and mud though being within it.
There are so many amongst you who have not enjoyed the world but the world has enjoyed you. There are many who have not eaten food, but the food has eaten them. Its reason is that the body and mind are not your slaves, but you are their slave. Now they are not under your control, but you are under their control. Why lamenting? All weakness, bondage, calamity and diseases have come only at your call. You yourself have invited them. Otherwise the whole world is for you. You are not for the world. Both body and mind are your slaves. You are their master.
Think over it. You yourself are the maker of this universe. You are the master, you yourself are the almighty God. You have become weak, low and diseased due to your own ignorance.
(Translated from Sadguru Shiv Muni’s Hindi Book, Shanti Dayee Bichar)
GOD
Yogeswar Shiv Kumar Shastri
Of course, I have seen God. No, not with these naked eyes; but through the eyes of spirituality and inside. I have indeed seen him within me. He is not someone else, but the soul within me. You have to understand it. Realize it. You have to feel the inner meaning of this. Within this spirituality, there lie the real peace and real happiness of life.
Indeed, the soul is God. God rather is the synonym of the soul. This divine name of God (the soul) obviously illustrates the unutterable power of the soul. And, it fills the human heart with enthusiasm, wisdom, belief, power, and bliss. So, before doing anything one must remember this divinity of the soul daily to get peace, bliss, success and prosperity in life.
Never ask God to assist you. If you like to get any favour from God, ask Him to make you so powerful that you must not have again to ask Him for help. When our strength gets increased, our difficulties will be lessened. Our strength grows automatically when we dare to combat with the powerful.
The person who has no hurdles in life, no sorrow, nor suffering in life; he also needs no strength.
Accept the hurdles of life as a brave soldier in the battle field. Curb them then and there. And, you will find peace and tranquility in the soul and happiness at heart.
Don’t blame the difficult situation in life. If you think sincerely and intimately, you can know that they were indeed necessary for you. If they had not been there, you would not have progressed this much which you had achieved so far. If many a people had not been poor, they wouldn’t have gained intellect too.
God in the form of the soul has not created anything without a purpose: whether an odd situation, an awkward incident, a failure or misunderstanding in day today life. Welcome any sort of hindrance and tough situation in life. Try to realize the inner meaning of it, synthesize it and get benefited out of it by winning it and overcoming it.
In fact you have to utilize your spiritual power and mental power. And, that difficult situation in your life will not be a poison, but nectar for you. When you understand this riddle of life, ultimately your heart will certainly overflow with an eternal peace, bliss and happiness.
Never get nervous to see the difficult situation and struggle for existence in life. Where there is struggle, there is happiness. Man having all facilities, comforts and pleasures of life without any hurdle and difficulty has indeed no feelings of life at all. He is no better than a corpse.
Knoweth the real knowledge and real truth of life.
And, this world will seem heaven to you.
The great souls and individuals as well as the big personalities of India or elsewhere in the world have achieved success not by the knowledge of this mundane world but, by dint of the inner knowledge and inner strength. Not by muscle power or money power, but by the power of the soul, the spiritual power. And, there inside the spiritual power lies the centre of all power, knowledge, happiness and bliss.
Indeed, the scientists and philosophers over the world have discovered new formula and neo-ideology: not being at the circumference but being at the centre. Whatever they have achieved is from being at the centre, at the soul and by remaining inward.
Never ask God to make your situations, difficulties and barriers easy and simple. Don’t opt for your job and work to be simple.
Better to wish for becoming strong. Do wish that you have grown enormously strong enough to combat the biggest hurdles in life.
Never have a desire to get a simple task which you can do easily. Must have a desire to be powerful and strong. Never opt for an easy job. Get ready to face any hurdle as high as a mountain. You will see yourself getting more and more mentally and spiritually powerful.
And your heart will get real peace.
You can do anything. But it seems you lack faith in you and your calibre. And, this natural disbelief in you makes you timid to do a thing, and to achieve a goal.
Know the real you within you. Be bold.
The moment you are bestowed with this spirit and will power, you are free from all sorts of difficulties and sufferings of life.
And the impossible will become possible.
(Translated from Shivmuni’s book: Shantidayee Bichar in Hindi)
LOVE-IN-US
Pamela Constantine’s Column
Solar Steps
The new edition of Eternity is once again a trip around the world. There are authors from India, Japan, Bangladesh, Mongolia, China, Mexico, Australia, USA, UK, Greece, Italy, Russia and Austria. A trip around the world that can be accomplished in just a few hours, even with careful reading. But it is also a much wider journey, a journey into the inside of oneself, not least through poetry.
Marcus Bussey from Australia says:. . . There is a place
Where sits
The Patient Soul
…..
Lorena Pircher from South Tyrol expresses it differently:
…
I am touching mywrinkles inner life when speaking to my ancestors when listening to their whispers
in the warm purple wind
Poetry in particular can comfort our innermost being, because Harekrushna Mahanta says it very clearly in his leading article: Humans are never born for sufferings, tortures, difficulties, wants and desires as generally people in this planet think. It maybe the trend in this materialistic age, but riches, reputation, fame, affluence, comforts, power and position should never be the only goal of human survival.
Sadguru Shiv Kumar Shastri put it this way: You yourself are God. The Almighty God is not outside. He is within you.
In the Najwa Brax Column on spirituality we find the wonderful picture: Shoreless is the sea of life and endless is the road of death.
I think poetry can represent a special form of spirituality, because it does not come from outside, but from within, you have to go inside first. And there can be found the real riches of the world, apart from professional position, income and honours.
Zhang Zhi from China also thinks that our wishes and ideas do not grow into the sky.
Natural beauties can also help and inspire. Valentina Meloni from Italy also describes it so beautifully.
It is particularly recommended to think about the articles and book reviews of Divya Priya Meditation Guru, Maheswar Nayak, Nandini Sahu’s Sita, Sadguru Shiv Kumar Shastri, Sri Ram Chandra Dash and the poems of SushriSangita Mishra, Panagiota Zaloni, Nina Goncharova, Pamela Constantine, Jayanta Mohapatra and all others.
That’s a brief review of the previous edition. Enjoy the new magazine now and let the articles, reflections and last but not least the poetry guide you to yourself. Naturally, as Harekrushna Mahanta says with positive thinking.
At some point the world will be all right again. It is and has never been completely OK. We know that, but there is still a lot we can do. Each of us, a little bit. What is a saying? When everyone sweeps in front of his door, the street is clean. But of course you can also sweep your own apartment or your own house. The broom for this can also be poetry.
A JOURNEY INTO THE INSIDE OF ONE-SELF
Kurt F. Svatek (Austria)
Life is an ever-changing adventure. Nothing remains the same. Perspectives are forever the altering. One must learn to ride the waves. This being so, it is wise to remain open and honest with yourself: not to take up a fixed position, but to respond sincerely to each new situation. We are all children of the Great Creator – the Creative Spirit – and as such are constantly challenged by life to bring forth that creativity which enables us to perceive a constructive way through our difficulties.
Self-honesty grants clarity of outlook and flexibility of movement through the waves of life, encouraging us to that creativity of thought and action which carries us forward at all times.
The heart-of-hearts knows the truth without need of a reasoning process, for it is already wise. When in doubt as to how to proceed, look into the depths of your heart, beyond emotionalism to the emotion of your true self. There you will find your heart-of-hearts — your very Soul itself. Live from this and you will always know how to proceed, how to react, how to move Unerringly and victoriously through all the waves of life.
This, however, is a period on Earth when attitudes everywhere are undergoing radical change and nothing seems stable. This holds true concerning both the outer environment and the inner world of values and moral standards. The Soul is Love-in-us. It is the Knower, the Guide, the Master within. To be in contact with the Soul is to know assurance, peace and comfort.
Though each of us has many spiritual assistants, ultimately it is the Soul within which must be drawn to the helm. And when the human personality fully unites with it, then truly we know ourselves as Soul at work in a human world – Soul which wears the earthly mantle to share in the human condition, so to understand totally what it is to be based in the modern world at this time of tremendous upheaval. For, in turn, we are here to assist in this global Hour of Change.
Seen from the Soul’s viewpoint, such upheaval is the result of the true spirit of humanity having been so long denied. However, in countless individuals it is now being called upon. The very Soul — the divine essence of the spirit – is being summoned up into precedence to reset the order, to present a new Love-oriented way of global living; and by its divine awareness right here on Earth capable of enabling all humanity to live from the heart-of-hearts in accordance with its own true spirit.
As that true spirit stems forth, the old ways and the results of living out of touch with the Love-natured inner life have to give way, and the shining beauty of Earth in renewal begins to replace it. Each one who draws Soul to the helm and unites with it is helping to create the new balance. For those who have eyes to see, this has already begun.
Live then from your heart-of-hearts. Be true to yourself and so to the spirit of humanity. Become Soul-aware by the means described. Thus you will not only learn to command the waves, but by gentle example will provide many others with the opportunity to achieve the same.
Demonstration gives birth to hope. Others who experience your steadfastness, your peaceful aura, your Soul-depth insights, will be inspired to work for the Bright New World even as you have been inspired.
Let your gift of inspiration be fully given that settlement and peace may come to the Earthly environment and all may join creatively to bring forward the long-awaited establishment of that Bright New World which is that of Heaven on Earth.