Poetry and Levels of Consciousness

Sacred music, poetry, and art is intended to transport the pilgrim into an expanded, heightened state of consciousness. The grand vaulted halls within Chartes cathedral, for example, serve this goal. Or glorious sacred art and its symbols --- they are doorways to transcendent mysteries. Music, as we all know, can change the consciousness. Poetic rhythms come in many shapes and sizes, but we are mainly familiar with a standard 4/4 or 3/4 rhythm. Epic poetry as sung by the ancient bards or runo wizards of Finland could, it was believed, transport listeners to other times and places. This is the essence of the poetic hex or spell that survives as a quaint echo in fables of witches and warlocks.

The spoken word does have power. Language, rhythm, consonants, rhyme, vowels, inflection, performance --- all have power to manifest imaginal spaces, to create new realities. This is a mantric magical power known to the most ancient shamans and mystics, the Vedic sages who composed (or channeled) their visions into Sanskrit verse, the Vedas.

The Kalevala of the Finns, a wonderful National Epic that utilizes the trochaic tetrameter, can induce trance in both chanter and hearer. It is this induction of an altered state, a bardic opening to a sacred space, that is an underlying potential of the tryptagonal poems. And they open up doors to strange dimesions since the rhythm is not 4/4 or even 3/4, but an odd trimorphic syncopation that blends short and long in twos and threes, resolving in the third rhyme on the sixth line, after two short hops in lines 4th and 5th. Tryptagonals are magic doorways.