Thursday, October 14, 2021
6:20 a.m. Alcott gets easier to read and understand. Is it that his prose is less clotted, or that I am more familiar with his phrasings, or is it that we are entering easier into his thought? In any case, slide-switches set to maximum focus, clarity, receptivity, and presence. Saying 75:
[LXXV. RESURRECTION. A man must live his life to apprehend it. There have been few living men and hence few lives; most have lived their death. Men have no faith in life. There goes indeed a rumor through the ages concerning it, but the few, who affirm knowledge of the fact, are slain always to verify the popular doubt. Men assert, not the resurrection of the soul from the body, but of the body from the grave, as a revelation of life. Faithless and blind! the body is the grave; let the dead arise from these sepulchres of concupiscence, and know by experience that life is immortal. Only the living know that they live; the dead know only of death.]
This one became clear only as I read the one following – but then it became very clear.
It is as we suggested: Read these things in connection with one another, if you are to understand them, just as in a book or a conversation you link preceding and following sentences and thoughts to follow the flow of ideas.
So, here. If you were to quote number 75 to someone, without context, we doubt they’d make much of it. It would seem inflated unsupported assertion, little more. This – we suggest gently – is how his sayings struck you originally, until you got into the stream of his thought.
With your help.
With our help, but at the prompting of something within you in the first place.
Which still amounts to “with your help,” does it not?
Yes but no. Instead of ascribing ownership to ideas and impulses, let alone teleology, let us stick to examining Alcott’s argument. So let us cite 76 before we look at 75 alone.
[LXXVI. MIRACLES. To apprehend a miracle, a man must first have wrought it. He knows only what he has lived, and interprets all facts in the light of his experience. Miracles are spiritual experiences, not feats of legerdemain, not freaks of nature. It is the spiritual sight that discerns whatsoever is painted to sense. Flesh is faithless and blind.]
So, taking the two together, what do you see?
He says, seeing is believing, or, let’s say, experiencing is believing. But experiencing depends upon context if it is to be properly understood.
We smile. You’re going to have to go much slower than that, if you are to come to a clarity that will be independent of mind-to-mind connection with us at the moment. What is clear at the moment will be inexplicable later, like remembered dreams and their inexplicable lost clarity, unless you construct the logical connections to anchor it. This is the proper use of logic, you understand, to anchor a new perception to context. So begin with the sentence in 75 that first began to clarify his meaning for you.
He said, “Men assert, not the reincarnation of the soul from the body, but of the body from the grave … Faithless and blind! The body is the grave….” It struck me as Monroe writing, so many years ago, that “there is here” to explain the coexistence of worlds at different vibratory rates.
Say on. Your thought process will be an example for some others, and in this case it is the experience of the journey more than the destination that illumines.
If you say so. Well, isn’t it clear? He makes several related points, all together, with Thoreauvian concise juxtaposition:
- Few people have lived life rather than death, in the sense that few people have experienced the 3D life they lived in its full context. They have lived it as if it were unconnected with non-3D.
- You don’t have faith in what you’ve never experienced at some level. This sounds contradictory, but that’s the fault of words.
- The few who claim to have direct knowledge of the real context are not really believed.
- Indeed, he says, they are slain, because their testimony if believed would show the popularly accepted view of life to be false, hence would falsify men’s lives (that is, would force them to realize the falsity).
- Instead, people misinterpret the testimony to refer to a direct contradiction of everyday experience (resurrection of the body, which no one sees happen) which they can accept as a miracle. That is, it’s easier to accept a miracle because it doesn’t really have anything to do with their everyday life.
- Life is immortal, not 3D life in any one body. But if you can’t get this sense of it, you cannot get the everyday quite practical application of all this. You can continue to be Sunday morning Christians, living a functionally atheistic life six and a half days a week.
- But if you have lived a miracle, you know what it is and isn’t. It isn’t a magic trick, nor an interruption of reality. It is a result of a clarity of sight and insight.
Very good. Do you suppose those connections would have remained with you, if you had merely accepted them rather than spelling them out? You have said more here than he said, though not more than he meant and thought he said.
However, not more than he meant.
We said very good. So, proceed.
[LXXVII. FACT AND FABLE. Facts, reported, are always false. Only sanctity and genius are eyewitnesses of the same; and their intuition, yet not their scriptures, are alone authentic. Not only all scripture, but all thought is fabulous. Life is the only pure fact, and this cannot be written to sense; it must be lived, and thus expurgate all scriptures.]
And here it says merely what you have come to know well: What can’t be said, can’t be said.
And it can’t be whistled, either. I do have that, by this time – despite the fact that we continue to try to say it! Interestingly, perhaps the only word here whose meaning may be obscure (though scarcely so, in context, I’d think) is “fabulous,” mostly because the meaning of the word has changed over the decades from “of the nature of a fable” to “tremendous, great, wonderful.”
[LXXVIII. REVELATION. Revelation is mediate or immediate; speculative or intuitive. It is addressed to conscience or reason,—to sight or sense. Reason receives the light through mediums and mediators; conscience direct from its source. The light of one is opake; of the other, clear. The prophet, whose eye is coincident with the celestial ray, receives this into his breast, and intensifying there, it kindles on his brow a serene and perpetual day. But the worldling, with face averted from God, reflects divinity through the obscure twilight of his own brain, and remains in the blindness of his own darkness, a deceptive meteor of the night.]
Nothing new here. We get things either through senses or intuition; either indirectly or directly. I think Alcott is separating the process as if by individual, rather than seeing us as a mixture of functions, but at the same time I get that I’m not quite doing his thought justice.
No, not quite, because he is in midstream of his argument. For the sake of his argument he is separating the prophetic function from ordinary reason, as if a prophet were a prophet 24 hours a day, every day, and the worldling, as he calls him, were living with never an inkling of higher truth. However, within the limitations of his argument, what he says is true, and for that matter, there is a sense in which a given man or woman may become a prophet and serve as example. Thus their lives thenceforth are seen as models of prophets, not as the individual 3D beings that they also are.
All right, I see that.
[LXXIX. PROPHET. The prophet appeals direct to the heart. He addresses the divine in the breast. His influence is subtle; the reverence he inspires occult. His words are winged with marvels; his deeds mysteries; his life a miracle. Piety kneels at the shrine of his genius, and reads his mystic scriptures, as oracles of the divinity in the breasts of all men.]
Thus he considers the effect such inner transformation has on the prophet’s fellows. You will notice, there is no implication here that the true prophet seeks any of these effects. (Nor could he generate them if he wished to, though false prophets are quick enough to find ways to simulate them.) They follow the connection, not the 3D individual’s personality or charisma.
[LXXX. TEACHER. The true teacher defends his pupils against his own personal influence. He inspires self-trust. He guides their eyes from himself to the spirit that quickens him. He will have no disciples. A noble artist, he has visions of excellence and revelations of beauty, which he has neither impersonated in character, nor embodied in words. His life and teachings are but studies for yet nobler ideals.]
Here, think of Emerson, or of Alcott himself.
Yes, I remember Emerson saying somewhere in his journals that after 30 years of teaching, he has no disciples because he didn’t seek to have any. “I sought to call them not to me but to themselves,” he said, or something to that effect.
It wasn’t sour grapes, but straight fact. And the better the teacher, the more danger of the student accidentally losing sight of the teaching; it is a hazard the teacher must mind, because the student is far less aware of it.
There is your hour, but you might as well throw in “Experience,” as it is self-explanatory.
[LXXXI. EXPERIENCE. A man’s idea of God corresponds to his ideal of himself. The nobler he is, the more exalted his God. His own culture and discipline are a revelation of divinity. He apprehends the divine character as he comprehends his own. Humanity is the glass of divinity; experience of the soul is a revelation of God.]
Nothing here we haven’t been saying right along. If we were to add a caveat, it would be, be a little careful about ascribing your experience of higher states and higher beings to God. Maybe you don’t have any real idea what God may be, ultimately. Maybe we don’t either. We can feel effects. Does that mean we know causes?
And that’s enough for the moment.
Our thanks as always. See you Saturday, probably.