A Return to Fairyland:
Jun. 21st, 2006 12:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ferineStardust dwells within...
(from page 279 of Algernon Blackwood's A Prisoner in Fairyland):
... to be is of greater importance than to do. To think beauty and love is to become them, to shed them forth without realizing it. A Fairy blesses because she is a Fairy, not because she turns a pumpkin into a coach and four mice into horses.
(from p. 281):
For he did not realize that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life, and that desire is the ultimate causitive agent everywhere and always. Behind Will stands Desire, and Desire is Action.
"To see the whole," he reflected, "is to see it glorious. To think one's self part of humanity at large is to bring the universe down into the heart. But to see life whole, a whole heart is necessary..."
(from p. 282):
Thought is Life, and Sympathy is Living.
(from p. 287):
"... the most successful thought-transference is probably unconscious and not deliberate. Public opinion," replied Minks, after a moment's search, "which is the result of waves of thought sent out by everybody -- by a community; or by the joint thinking of a nation, again, which modifies every mind born into that nation, the result of centuries of common thinking along definite familiar channels. Thought-currents rush everywhere about the world, affecting everyone more or less, and -- er -- particularly lodging in minds receptive to them"
"Thought is dynamic, then, they hold?"
"An actual force, yes; as actual as electricity, and as little understood," returned the secretary, proud that he had read these theories and remembered them. "With every real thought a definite force goes forth from you that modifies every single person, and probably every single object as well, in the entire world. Thought is creative according to its intensity. It links everybody in the world with everybody else --"
"Objects too, you say?"
"Objects too," he replied, "for science tells us that the movement of a body here affects the farthest star. A continuous medium -- ether -- transmits the vibrations without friction -- and thought-force is doubtless similarly transmitted -- er --"
"So that if I think of a flower or a star, my thought leaps into them and affects them?" Rogers interrupted again.
"More, Mr. Rogers," was the reply, "for your thought, being creative, enriches the world with images of beauty which may float into another mind across the sea, distance no obstacle at all. You make a mental image when you think. There's imagination in all real thinking -- if I make myself clear. 'Our most elaborate thoughts,' to quote for a moment, 'are often, as I think, not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of hell or down out of heaven.' So what one thinks affects everybody in the world. The noble thinkers lift humanity, though they may never tell their thoughts in speech or writing.
That is where the inspiration of the artist comes in, for his sensitive soul collects them and gives them form. They lodge in him and grow, and every passionate longing for spiritual growth sets the whole worlds growing too."
(from p. 288)
"So that if I thought vividly of anything, I should actually create a mental picture which in turn might slip into another's mind, while that other would naturally suppose it was his own?
And, similarly, the thought I deemed my own might have come in its turn from the mind of some one else?"
"Precisely; for thought binds us all together like a network, and to think of others is to spread oneself about the universe. When we think thus we get out -- as it were -- into the medium common to all of us where spirit meets spirit."
(from page 279 of Algernon Blackwood's A Prisoner in Fairyland):
... to be is of greater importance than to do. To think beauty and love is to become them, to shed them forth without realizing it. A Fairy blesses because she is a Fairy, not because she turns a pumpkin into a coach and four mice into horses.
(from p. 281):
For he did not realize that fear is simply suppressed desire, vivid signs of life, and that desire is the ultimate causitive agent everywhere and always. Behind Will stands Desire, and Desire is Action.
"To see the whole," he reflected, "is to see it glorious. To think one's self part of humanity at large is to bring the universe down into the heart. But to see life whole, a whole heart is necessary..."
(from p. 282):
Thought is Life, and Sympathy is Living.
(from p. 287):
"... the most successful thought-transference is probably unconscious and not deliberate. Public opinion," replied Minks, after a moment's search, "which is the result of waves of thought sent out by everybody -- by a community; or by the joint thinking of a nation, again, which modifies every mind born into that nation, the result of centuries of common thinking along definite familiar channels. Thought-currents rush everywhere about the world, affecting everyone more or less, and -- er -- particularly lodging in minds receptive to them"
"Thought is dynamic, then, they hold?"
"An actual force, yes; as actual as electricity, and as little understood," returned the secretary, proud that he had read these theories and remembered them. "With every real thought a definite force goes forth from you that modifies every single person, and probably every single object as well, in the entire world. Thought is creative according to its intensity. It links everybody in the world with everybody else --"
"Objects too, you say?"
"Objects too," he replied, "for science tells us that the movement of a body here affects the farthest star. A continuous medium -- ether -- transmits the vibrations without friction -- and thought-force is doubtless similarly transmitted -- er --"
"So that if I think of a flower or a star, my thought leaps into them and affects them?" Rogers interrupted again.
"More, Mr. Rogers," was the reply, "for your thought, being creative, enriches the world with images of beauty which may float into another mind across the sea, distance no obstacle at all. You make a mental image when you think. There's imagination in all real thinking -- if I make myself clear. 'Our most elaborate thoughts,' to quote for a moment, 'are often, as I think, not really ours, but have on a sudden come up, as it were, out of hell or down out of heaven.' So what one thinks affects everybody in the world. The noble thinkers lift humanity, though they may never tell their thoughts in speech or writing.
That is where the inspiration of the artist comes in, for his sensitive soul collects them and gives them form. They lodge in him and grow, and every passionate longing for spiritual growth sets the whole worlds growing too."
(from p. 288)
"So that if I thought vividly of anything, I should actually create a mental picture which in turn might slip into another's mind, while that other would naturally suppose it was his own?
And, similarly, the thought I deemed my own might have come in its turn from the mind of some one else?"
"Precisely; for thought binds us all together like a network, and to think of others is to spread oneself about the universe. When we think thus we get out -- as it were -- into the medium common to all of us where spirit meets spirit."
