A Vision [Paperback]

W. B. Yeats (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1972

From the front cover: ". . . the most ambitious attempt made by any poet of our time to set up a myth." - Cleanth Brooks From the back cover: "The system of supernaturally revealed images of A VISION gave Yeats both a method by which he was able to categorize humanity and a method for dealing with history. Eventually, too, Yeats did find in these communications the metaphors for poetry he had been promised. Explaining as it does the sources and significances of such recurrent images and themes such as "the anti-self," "gyres," and "phases of the moon," A VISION is essential to any understanding of many of his most notable poems. It also contains some of the most penetrating and beautiful prose Yeats ever wrote. This Collier edition contains all of Yeats' final revisions, including the major addition of the second edition, "A Packet for Ezra Pound."

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Collier (1972)
• ASIN: B000PRTRNE
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #666,928 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars W.B. Yeats' A Vision, June 28, 2011

By 

Bob Makransky (Guatemala) - See all my reviews

This review is from: A Vision (Paperback)

One of the most remarkable channeled documents of the past century is Nobel Prize-winning poet William Butler Yeats' A Vision. Yeats explains how he obtained A Vision as follows: "On the afternoon of October 24th, 1917, four days after my marriage, my wife surprised me by attempting automatic writing. What came in disjointed sentences, in almost illegible writing, was so exciting, sometimes so profound, that I persuaded her to give an hour or two day after day to the unknown writer, and after some half dozen such hours offered to spend what remained of life explaining and piecing together those scattered sentences." Yeats spent the next twenty years on this project, and in the end produced a masterpiece which contains an all-encompassing system of symbolism which has geometrical, astrological, psychological, metaphysical, and historical components - a model of the entire universe: "all thought, all history and the difference between man and man."

The problem with trying to read A Vision is that it is incomprehensible to the intellect. The reason for this is that it is a message from the spirit world, and as such it is couched in "spirit language", which is far less linear than human language. A Vision is more like a Bach fugue or a Van Gogh painting - or a poem, if you will - than it is a linear discourse. It means multidimensional things because it expresses feelings rather than concepts.

Yeats' theory of reincarnation as described in A Vision represents a novel view of the subject: that reincarnation does not take place within a matrix of linear time. It's not as if e.g. you had a life in ancient Greece and then you died; then you had a life in ancient Rome and then you died; then you had a life in the Middle Ages and then you died; etc. Rather, all of your past and future lives are going on at once, in an eternal Now moment. The linearity of time is an illusion, a falsehood, which Yeats termed Deception (and which Eastern philosophers term maya or samsara). It is this Deception, the false appearance that there is such a thing as an objective reality out there which is unfolding in linear time, which animates the striving of all sentient beings and keeps the wheel of reincarnation, of life and death and rebirth, turning.

The basic geometrical symbol in A Vision represents the unraveling of time as two interpenetrating, rotating, heliacal cones (which Yeats terms gyres): "Incarnations and judgment alike implied cones or gyres, one within the other, turning in opposite directions." In Yeats' symbolism one of the rotating gyres represents Concord, or unity; the other gyre represents Discord, or desire. "Without this continual Discord through Deception there would be no conscience, no activity; Deception is a technical term of my teachers and may be substituted for `desire'". What is being symbolized by the two gyres is the driving force behind reincarnation - the descent into matter (Discord) and the return to spirit (Concord). By "Deception" Yeats means striving. Striving is not striving after something; desire is not desire for something. Rather striving and desire are movements, motions, for their own sake. It isn't really the objects of their desire which sentient beings seek but rather the hunger, the state of desire itself. The objects of desire - thought forms, the phenomenal world - don't have any objective existence. This is what is meant by the statement that "reality is but a symbol"; and this is the Deception. Another way of saying this is that waking consciousness is but a more highly evolved form of dreaming, but it is no more real than dreaming. The belief that what we do when we are awake is somehow "real" - more real than what we do when we are dreaming - is what motivates all our striving and traps us in the revolving wheel of birth and death.

In Yeats' symbolism the cone or gyre of Discord (which he also terms the "Antithetical tincture") is our imaginative, striving side, which separates man from man. The cone of Concord (also termed the "Primary tincture") is our detached, intellectual side, which brings us back to the mass where we began. That is to say, we need sobriety and detachment to truly perceive the nature of the universe. "The antithetical tincture is emotional and aesthetic whereas the primary tincture is reasonable and moral. Within these cones move what are called the Four Faculties: Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate."

The Four Faculties are actually four levels of human memory. It has been pointed out that all of our past and future lives are occurring at once in an eternal Now moment. By "all of our past and future lives" is meant the memories which go all the way back to the very first cell from which all life on earth is descended. All life on earth evolved from one single, primordial cell; and one way of looking at it is that all life on earth is therefore one single organism, which merely has different ramifications. Each of us individual sentient beings on this earth are like different fingers on the same hand. And each of us individuals has a body of memory that goes all the way back to the beginning: one-celled memory, multi-celled memory, animal memory, vertebrate memory, mammalian memory, and human memory. All of this memory presses upon and shapes the present moment. Memory is the weight of the universe on the shoulders of each individual sentient being - the record of every decision that's ever been made. Of course, some lines of memory are more important to a given individual than others; some have a more direct bearing upon a given moment or a given lifetime than others. But it must be borne in mind that the entirety is weighing upon each individual human, animal, plant, cell all the time. And each individual organism selects a piece of the whole to emphasize, and that piece is everything the organism considers this lifetime. This is what Yeats termed the Faculty of Will - the memories of this present lifetime.

"The stage-manager, or Daimon, offers his actor an inherited scenario, the Body of Fate, and a Mask or role as unlike as possible to his natural ego or Will, and leaves him to improvise through his Creative Mind the dialogue and details of the plot." Daimon is Yeats' term for the person in his or her totality, "the ultimate self of man", or the Oversoul which is the sum of all of the person's lives in different realities. The human part of this totality, or memory inventory, can be arbitrarily divided into four categories, and these are the Four Faculties (excluded from this analysis is the part of memory which is above the human level - i.e. primate memory and mammal memory and vertebrate memory etc. all the way back).

Will is the socially conditioned person, the robot which is wholly governed by routines and knee-jerk responses; which has given up personal feelings and choices to do what is expected by others and to submit to the daily grind. Will is the Daimon's level of approval and approbation, of reflection in the eyes of other people. The 28 lunar phase types refer specifically to Will: the socialized person, the one who has asked no questions but has bought into society's ready-made solutions willy-nilly. Will manifests through a conviction of rectitude; hence it is completely self-centered and self-important. Decisions made on the level of Will usually do not take into account other people's viewpoints, or much sense of responsibility for ultimate consequences.

Body of Fate is the sum total of this present lifetime together with all of its probable realities. Probable realities are parallel lifetimes which branch off from this one at each point where a decision, large or small, is made. We believe that all we are is Will - a linear personal history, a series of events which began at birth and led up to where we are right now; and from here we will have a linear future. And there is one "me" who has had this personal history and who is going to have this personal future. In fact, there are infinite number of "me's" who had an infinite number of probable pasts, and there are an infinite number of "me's" who will have an infinite number of possible futures. The probable reality level of memory is Body of Fate. In everyday life Body of Fate is the person's wistful longings, ideals, and romance; his or her daydreams and fantasies. Body of Fate refers to openness to new experience, willingness to take into consideration hunches and intuitive guidance - echoes from other probable realities - and also other people's points of view. When Body of Fate predominates over Will people are willing to take risks and to fly with their impulses.

Mask is the sum total of all of a person's past and future life memories in all realities, which includes all the probable realities in all of those lifetimes. Note that each Faculty subsumes the previous ones: Body of Fate includes Will (the sum total of one's probable realities includes this present life history), and Mask includes Body of Fate (the sum total of one's past and future lives includes all the probable reality branches in those lives). The memories of the Mask are what we access in past life regressions. In quotidian life Mask is the Daimon's sense of personal significance: whatever dreams, hopes, ambitions the person holds in his or her heart of hearts Where Body of Fate operates on a level of mind, Mask operates more on a level of feeling; where Body of Fate connects the person to other people in individual relationships, Mask connects the person to other people in group relationships. Mask is what you discover when you run a lot of past life regressions and come to know the feel of who "you" are in your totality; of what you keep coming back in human form to accomplish; the overall mood which informs the totality of your past and future lives.

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