Ron Boggs

Art of Darkness Ron Boggs

Publisher Marketing: What does a person's life look like from the point of view of soul? Why not ask soul. Go on an adventure with soul in order to live an authentic life through initiation into soul's calling. Using the technique of active imagination as rediscovered by Dr. Carl Jung, the dialogues struggle with soul, which leads to changes in the author and in soul. Soul becomes a guide. Author's initial descent into soul encounters an invitation, as it names its art. Its art makes the soul a companion that will require many heart rending sessions. The descent is also soul's ascent; in doing so the soul reshapes author's ego, identity, and life and gives him songs of soul. Refusal Man makes an appearance, being the living embodiment of the many refusals to accept life's offerings. Many issues arise on how to reduce the influence of this Refusal Man. An ancient way of being arises upon learning to trust the soul: everything is alive. A number of spiritual exercises are the result. Soul educates him on what soul is and how to build soul's home. Soul explores original life and the author's psychological "curse." Soul elaborates on how what is spiritual is practical and appears in personified form of "Laura," after long guidance from the Greek god, Hermes. Inner Guide evolves out of soul that is the dream awake. Soul delves deeper into its poetries. It makes real what happens and broadens one's horizon. Charley is an inner man who wants to kill the author, if he could. Their conversation is riveting. Shape shifting becomes a way of being. Soul takes the author deeper into love and gratitude. The adventure closes fully enmeshed in the art of darkness: proving the unprovable to soul, a perspective from Zen, and finally a celebration of soul's adventures. A brief afterword summarizes some of intellectual and spiritual ideas and practices the author learned and how they are of use in everyday life. Contributor Bio:  Boggs, Ron Ron Boggs has lived many lives. His first life was Green Boy, an absorbing color of woods and hills within which his writings blossomed. Birthed into another life at 20 from the poetry and plays of William Shakespeare and John Donne. This life matured with Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson. Another being matured me into Playwright: "April Discovery" or who better represented American poetry, T. S. Eliot or William Carlos Williams. Another existence demanded its expression through the study of history. Let's us call him Mythographer, an often silent though insistent accumulator of books, facts, theories, and experiments during the tumultuous 60s and 70s. How power and tyranny fought liberty in American, as well as, human history haunted his years of reading, research, and ruminating. He wrote a doctoral dissertation on "The Culture of Liberty." I lived as Apprentice for decades, composing my reading, writing, and living through poets and others who spoke the life that was living me. Some of these poets were Robert Bly, Clayton Eshleman, Carl Jung, Wallace Stevens, and the anthologies of Jerome Rothenberg. Imaginal Imbiber emerged from nowhere and began a 20 year journey that first immersed me into imaginative feasts of Spanish speaking poets such as Juan Ramon Jimenez, Antonio Machado, Pablo Neruda, and Cesar Vallejo. European poets such as William Butler Yeats, Czeslaw Milosz, and Rainer Maria Rilke roamed with British poets such as William Blake. I ran around with Rumi. Going east, I imbibed Chinese, Japanese, and Zen poets such as Li Po and TuFu along with Eihei Dogen, Ikkyu, Issa, and Basho. When I imaginatively returned to America after a long, long absence, I discovered a country in exile from itself. Thus was born Primal Poet, seeing through the fire, awakening one's true desire. America the land of space and unbounded time heaved with the bloat of excess and abscess on sands of escape, encapsulated in prisons of own making. How heal the rift of exile Americans were living? Living these many lives, and more, I am a writer of intellectual and spiritual adventures. The seven books on my Create Space E-Store and Amazon Author Page tell tales of some of my "interesting" lives. Spiritual, psychological, and literary analysis rubs against and absorbs the heart of the practice of Zen; life always changes.