Step 9: Ways of the Luminary - Lanterns, Beacons, Lode-Stars

"If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover those precious values - 

that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control."

 -Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers and warriors." -Hunter S. Thompson

"All human beings are dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together." -Jack Kerouac

Telling stories has always saved the planet. Consider one of the most legendary stories of all time: When Martin Luther King, Jr. took the stage on the March on Washington, the world would never be the same. His opening words are a decree to the levels of power and magnitude his speech steadily conjures and ignites:

"I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice."

It is not long before his heart-clutching rhetoric reaches its heavenly-charged climax. It is at this point when he shifts from addressing grievances of oppression to igniting depth-charges of power in an attempt to destroy racial prejudice once and for all. King cries:

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream!"

Luminaries (derived from the Latin word for light "Lumen") are purveyors of stories, ideas, knowledge, words of wisdom, justice, light and peace. These are messages that requiring feeling and cognition. Martin Luther King shook America's very foundations by invoking the decrees of the Founding Fathers and enforcing it with a dream to signal our souls by, a testament to revolutionary ignition. His vision has yet to be completely realized because of the effort required to meet its magnitude. He awakened, solidified, and reinforced the call for freedom, becoming embedded in the cultural fabric of legends and lore. His dream of Moses-proportions transcends time to fuel the patriotic masses.

Ideas are not stationary; they are transported through observable expression. As the ideas (light) gather more and more adherents (lanterns) - the power of the idea increases. Founding father and revolutionary Samuel Adams said:

"It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds."

A bumper sticker on Willy Street in Madison reads: 

According to "A Dictionary of Symbols," the symbolic method of 'traveling' means "To move, by exercise of the imagination and awareness, away from one world and towards another." In one of his most famous lectures, ethnobotanist Terrence McKenna said: "And I think that we cannot understand the history that lies ahead of us unless we think in terms of a journey into the imagination." If day commands the waking hours, then night gives the dreamworld in which we frequently travel. When dreaming, the right brain and left brain work in harmony. Consciousness may be considered the 'waking' state, and according to Modern Mythologist Joseph Campbell, the unconsciousness "sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors, and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight, or insanity. [When] dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain, they are fiendishly fascinating, for they carry keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of the self."

Santana's Third Album

The symbol of the lake relates to personal depth, but the symbol of the ocean is the collective realm of story telling and mythic imagination.  "A Dictionary of Symbols" says: "The ocean is equated also with the collective unconscious."

In the movie Waking Life, the main character Wiley can not escape the cartoonish dreaming state, and begins to question his original ideas of "reality." He meets a dream-explorer named Guy Forsyth, who tells him:

"The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything."

His imaginative travels take him through various kinds of guides and philosophical checkpoints. One encounter is with a train-hopper who represents the active call to imagination. He asks Wiley: "Are you a dreamer?" He answers that he is. The train-hopper:

"I haven't seen too many around lately. Things have been tough lately for dreamers. They say dreaming is dead, no one does it anymore. It's not dead it's just that it's been forgotten, removed from our language. Nobody teaches it so nobody knows it exists. The dreamer is banished to obscurity. Well, I'm trying to change all that, and I hope you are too. By dreaming, every day. Dreaming with our hands and dreaming with our minds. Our planet is facing the greatest problems it's ever faced, ever. So whatever you do, don't be bored, this is absolutely the most exciting time we could have possibly hoped to be alive. And things are just starting."

Many schools of psychology, however, do include the teaching of dreams. One such psychologist of the Jungian school is Donald Lee Williams explains the preparation: "In both the dreaming and active imagination, the conscious personality actively participates in the unfolding of an unconscious process, either by introducing consciousness into an ongoing dream or by bringing up the unconscious while awake. In both methods, one is expected to act in a dream or fantasy as one would in any other time."

Traversing through the ambiguities, absurdities, and insanities of dreams requires a wide range of "Novelty," or the psychology term used to describe the discovery of things that are new. Creativity is also measured in terms of tolerance to Novelty, with more tolerance giving greater range of communication. Dreams are also rife with symbolism. Williams writes:

"The mediating through symbols has gone on since the beginning of history, ever since consciouness emerged from the unconscious. Jung calls it the process of individualization"

"A Dictionary of Symbols" explains the basic ideas: "Symbols in whatever form they may appear, are not usually isolated; they appear in clusters, giving rise to symbolic compositions which may be evolved in time (as in the case of the story-telling [Lanterns]), in space (works of art, emblems, graphic designs [Beacons]), or in both space and time (dreams, drama [Lode-Stars])."

Lanterns are the story-tellers of any generation. In the ancient Mediterranean, lyres were used by Bards to accompany hours-long recitals of epic poetry, written in a meter commonly called "Dactylic Hexameter." Rather than heartbeat-rendering rhythms of the Shakespeare-era Iambic Pentameter, this type of verse was conducive to the telling of epic tales with its intricate syllable patterns, often inconsistent. These bards were the primary story tellers of their time, giving them a significant role in culture. Bards shed light on human morality and virtues (myth), and spread the news of discoveries.

According to "Symbols and their Meaning," Lanterns are symbols of spirit, truth, and life itself. According to "A Dictionary of Symbols," "like all 'lights' that are independent of the Light – the lantern symbolizes individual life in the face of eternal truth."

During Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven," Jimmy Page encounters such a lantern:

The movie The Song Remains The Same shows the wizard wave a multi-colored collage of swords, transforming Jimmy into a seasoned old lantern/prophet/guide himself. With an abundance of folk medleys (see Led Zeppelin III), the band has captured the subtle nature of telling tales and spinning yarns. Scribes, dancers, musicians, artists, and bohemian scallawags are also Lanterns, as Kerouac was. In his The Dharma Bums, a line of dialogue goes:

"But what did people think about you hitchhiking around with a bare shaved head?"

Kerouac: "They thought I was crazy, but everybody that gave me a ride I'd spin 'em the Dharmy, boy, and leave 'em enlightened."

Other bands that have captured the bard or "minstrel" spirit are Jethro Tull (Minstrel In The Gallery: He brewed a song of love and hatred- oblique suggestions-and he waited), The Grateful Dead (Ballad of Casey Jones), Simon And Garfunkel ("The words of the prophets/Are written on the subway walls/And tenement halls/And whispered in the Sounds of Silence"), The Doors (Roadhouse Blues), Bob Marley ("There's a Natural Mystic blowing through the air/if you listen carefully now you can hear"), Creedance Clearwater Revival (Fortunate Son), The Beatles (A Day in the Life) and any band that travels the expanse for the sake of music and uniting the masses. 

Another type of encounter Wiley faces is the elusive prophet (Beacon). On his way to a Kwik-E Mart, an old man brushes past him and delivers the following riddle:

"As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough."

In dreams, these snippets of wisdom are delivered by Archetypes, or people whose characteristics or ideas are embedded in dreams. "A Dictionary of Symbols" eplains that archetypes are "all embracing parables: their meaning is only partially accessible; their deepest significance remains a secret which existed long before Man himself and which reaches out far beyond man."  According to psychologist Carl Jung, archetypes do not "Stem from various forms or from figures or objective beings, but from images within the human spirit, within the turbulent depths of the unconscious." 

Those who convert their life into a pursuit take the form of a beacon of light, accumulating greater and greater energy. The mythic quest of seeking some kind of glory - and becoming completely epic - has not been extinguished from the modern stage. All around us are the prophetic instructions and riddles of short-lived dreamers embedded into our culture. Alexander Supertramp, who hiked to Alaska where he succumbed to starvation, as captured in "Into the Wild" said "Nothing is more damaging to the advantageous spirit within a man than a secure future."

Rogue Journalist Hunter S. Thompson is one of the most interesting people who ever lived. His life was indeed a pursuit, albeit one of pandemonium: "All my life, my heart has sought a thing I cannot name." He followed the instinctual call to exceed all limitations, a servant to forces of chaos: “The greatest mania of all is passion: and I am a natural slave to passion: the balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase." His love of passion made Hunter S. Thompson into a sheer archetype. On his mythic quest to find the American Dream in the heart of Las Vegas, he tore through police conventions, hostage situations, lechery, and oblivion with the mantra "Buy the ticket, Take the ride" and "He who can make a beast of himself can escape the pain of being a man." His ventures were so unusually-charged that they could only be captured by the frantic, fraying sketches of the twisted Ralph Steadman:

While Hunter S. Thompson was a talented capturer of vivid experiences, he was also a flagrant outlaw, which is very ill-advised. Friedrich Nietzsche writes: "To live alone one must be a beast or a god, says Aristotle. Leaving out the third case: one must be both -- a philosopher."

The book "The Mystic Lake Sioux: The Sociology of the Mdewakantonwan Santee" by Ruth Landes, describes the particular roles of the Shamans, or medicine healers, in Native American tribes:

"A Shaman became a village leader upon evidencing supernatural powers for organizing the village or villages, for chasing deer, buffalo, or enemy. A Shaman in a Santee community projected his gifts and views as large communal acts.

Shamanistic inclinations were lonely ones; the shaman sought and fulfilled his god alone. A man or woman, seldom a child, knew by intuition that he was a mouthpiece, servant, and protege of a supernatural, and then proceeded to encourage the acquaintance in sacred ways. Individuals linked to the same international might join in a public ceremony, as an aggregate of persons paralleling activities; the relationship among them held deep rivalry, however."

Beacons are the self-appointed sentinels of society. They are the scouts that venture out into the unknown, foraging for any glimpse of precious nectar. At the end of his Las Vegas fiasco, Thompson prophetically writes:

"And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."

By breaking through the barriers he did, Hunter S. Thompson exemplifies what H. H. Sri Sri Ravi Shankar means with: “Many can cross with the help of One who has crossed.”

In dreams, beacons of hope are often accessible. Usually, the words require decoding to understand. Descriptions of bewildering visions cannot be dictated literally: art is needed. As the English Poet Blake wrote:

 "The roaring of the lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword, are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man"

Willy Wonka, as played by Gene Wilder in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," gives the following glimmer:

"Shnozberry?! Who ever heard of a Shnozberry?"

Wonka: "Shh. We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams."

It's not long before the voyage of madness down the chocolate river breaks their sanity that they can enjoy the bewilderment of youth.  The following drawing is a dreamworld version of a beacon, a living room sketching by MIAD student Ben Grauer:

For those who cross the threshold on the Hero's journey, writes Joseph Campbell:

"The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists in a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, a retreat from the desperations of the wasteland to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within... the infantile subconscious. It is the realm that we enter in sleep; for such golden seeds do not die. [...] That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within."

To withstand the Blake-esque Madness of such situations, Terrence McKenna gives the guidelines that "Reality is not stranger than you suppose, it is stranger than you can suppose." Hence, a balance of delicate tolerance to Novelty is needed. Slater Brown in The Heydey of Spiritualism writes “It is rarely true that the firmly sane, the resolutely normal, make outstanding seers, poets or prophets. It is indeed probable that a slight rift in the mind, a narrow crack, is needed for divine truth to shine through. Or, as Socrates remarked, ‘Madness is a special gift from heaven and the source of the chieftest blessings among men.'"

Mark Twain remarked that "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." 

Finally, Lode-Stars are the Moses-like figures planting ideals through history. They are the brightest: “Transient” (Literally "Going Across") means “Not lasting, transitory; existing briefly.” Transients are those overzealous characters living life close to the edge and arousing the spirit of adventure in every person they come across. Before being destroyed by the robots he created, Dr. Tyrell in "BladeRunner" exclaims: “The candle that burns half as long burns twice as bright!"  Jack Kerouac was in constant search of other transients when hitch-hiking through America: “The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”

Luminaries like Martin Luther King, Jr. can easily become Lode-Stars. To further his epic dream, he foresaw his early (transient) death by saying: "I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!"

 According to "Symbols and their Meaning," "Stars were a particular symbol of guards and guardianship." A Dictionary of Symbols explains: "As a light shining in the darkness, the star is a symbol of the spirit. As far back as in the days of Egyptian hieroglyphics it signified 'rising upwards toward the point of origin' and formed part of such words as 'to bring up,' to educate,' and 'to teach.'"

Lode-stars are also known as pole stars, like the North Star. "The pole star was the symbolic axis of the wheeling firmament. It was of enormous importance in navigation, and many traditions revered it as the zenith of a supernatural pole or pillar linking the terrestrial and celestial spheres." 

Jim Morrison left especially wielded great power of wild adventure and freedom. In Soft Parade, he says:

"There's only four ways to get unraveled
One is to sleep and the other is travel

One is a bandit up in the hills 

One is to love your neighbor till 
His wife gets home"

Dreamers and minstrels are not organized units like Fight Club, they're birds of a feather. Let the words of Hunter S. Thompson be heeded: "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used." 

Inside gatefold of the Doors' "Soft Parade"