Sunday, October 24, 2021
3:35 a.m. Setting slide-switches to maximum focus, receptivity, clarity, presence. Shall we resume with Orphic Sayings? I get the feeling we have already gotten most of what we will get, but let’s finish.
You don’t know that. Let’s proceed.
[LXXXVI. CARNAGE. Conceive of slaughter and flesh-eating in Eden.]
Anything more than meets the eye, here?
Doesn’t the reference to flesh-eating give you pause? Do you suppose that Alcott was advocating vegetarianism?
Well, actually, I don’t know. I mean, no, I don’t think he was saying that specifically, and while I don’t know that I’ve ever read about the Alcott family being vegetarian, I’m pretty sure his friends the Emersons and the Thoreaus (Thoreau’s parents and children) were not. So, you tell me. Was it just said in passing?
Connect the saying with what came before and what comes after.
Hmm. In effect: Mankind may live this way now, but after purification, it won’t. Something like that?
His point is implied in the next saying.
[LXXXVII. TRADITION. Tradition suckles the young ages, who imbibe health or disease, insight or ignorance, valor or pusillanimity, as the stream of life flows down from urns of sobriety or luxury, from times of wisdom or folly, honor or shame.]
I get it. It’s up to us what we take from the situation we are born into.
Concisely said. Next.
[LXXXVIII. RENUNCIATION. Renounce the world, yourself; and you shall possess the world, yourself, and God.]
And here is mankind’s opportunity, you see. If you work to “possess the world, yourself, and God,” you will renounce the things – the attitudes, the appetites – that lead elsewhere. You could put it, “Your shared subjectivity, your civilization and its traditions, is broad enough to offer you choice. Follow its ways downward, if you choose, or upward, but you can choose upward. Only, it is a choice, not an inevitability. Leading to the next.
[LXXXIX. VALOR. Man’s impotence is his pusillanimity. Duty alone is necessity; valor, might. This bridles the actual, yokes circumstance to do its bidding, and wields the arms of omnipotence. Fidelity, magnanimity, win the crown of heaven, and invest the soul with the attributes of God.]
Seems pretty straightforward. The language is high-flying, but the message is clear enough. We’re helpless if we think of ourselves that way.
It occurs to me, in considering the previous point, we slid right by Alcott’s saying we could “possess God.” What did he mean by that? Was it as simple as if he had said, “You will be –“ Well, what did he mean?
No need to complicate things. He said “the world, yourself, and God.” He meant each in the same way. So, what does it mean, to possess the world, or to possess yourself? Especially, what does it mean in the context of your having renounced the world and yourself?
I notice he doesn’t say renounce God. Well, I guess I have assumed that he meant we will identify with them by distancing ourselves from them.
Poorly put. Very poorly put, given that you have the idea. Tr again, please.
Yes, I see. I mean to say, by ceasing to identify ourselves with the world and with ourselves – by getting a perspective on them – we will crystallize our own consciousness around ourselves (as if we were individual) and will thus become conscious of – will in effect obtain power over – what until then we have been enmeshed in.
Congratulations, Mr. Alcott Junior. You are becoming as opaque as he was.
Yes, I see it. Frustrating. When you try to put words around these things, it’s easy to become incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t already have the idea.
However, righteous persistence, etc. Try once more.
Okay. Slowly, this time. What we are not conscious of has power over us; we are in effect helpless vis a vis the things that affect us beneath the range of our awareness. But if we make the unconscious conscious (as Jung advised us to do), we obtain power over them. Power not in the sense of being able to crack the whip, but in the sense of having our own independent place to stand. By deliberately deciding to renounce the world and our own going-along-with-the-tide nature, we give ourselves the psychic distance from them to make them conscious. That is, resisting the flow makes the existence of the current more evident. And once we have freed our consciousness from unconscious identification with the 3D, we gain not only leverage but the ability to identify in a very different way.
Yes, you become “in the world but not of it.” And that means you are aware of your identity with that which is so much greater than yourself, which Alcott calls God. Very good. It required work to express this, you see. That kind of work Alcott could not do. His genius was social, as yours is solitary. He could convey what he could not express. His listeners caught the spark from his personal purity and energy and conviction. But there were few enough who could get to his essence, beneath his many eccentricities.
Thus, a better man than he appeared.
Not exactly better than he appeared. Even those who thought he was a crackpot never doubted his virtue or his integrity. But a better perceiver than he was thought to be. A better thinker, we might say, only a thinker unable to translate from the language of the soul to the language of his peers. Or – not peers. He had few peers. His contemporaries, say.
Yes, as we go along, I am more and more conscious of the archangel, and less conscious of the tediousness.
[XC. MEEKNESS. All men honor meekness; and make her their confessor. She wins all hearts; all vulgar natures do her homage. The demons flee, and the unclean Calabans and Satyrs become menials in her imperial presence. She is the potentate of the world.]
The truth or meaning of this one is not immediately obvious, to put it mildly. Preceded by Valor, followed by Gentleness. What is he meaning to say?
He says it clearly enough, for him. He says the meek shall inherit the earth.
I am reminded of the line from “Camelot,” where Mordred says, “It’s not the earth the meek inherit, it’s the dirt.”
Yes, that is how it seems to the once-born eye.
Ouch!
We smile, but it is true. To the eye that sees the world as chance and coincidence, as conflict and peril and outcomes that were not inherent in their genesis, yes, the meek get trampled and the strong rule the roost. But what does it look like when you see everything as the somewhat-real working out of one’s personal destiny via confrontation with one’s unconscious elements as represented by the shared subjectivity?
All is well, all is always well.
Exactly. So why shouldn’t it be true for the meek? No, it doesn’t look that way, but how able is anybody to judge another’s life, or his own?
I see your point.
So there is your hour, and one or two more sessions should bring us to the end of the Orphic Sayings, and then it will be up to you to do the active work of summarizing the two sections. You can see already that your understanding of and appreciation of Alcott has been changed by a closer, slower, examination.
I can, yes. Very well, till next time, and as always our thanks for this and all that has preceded this