Monday, October 25, 2021
8:55 a.m. I’d like to finish with the Orphic Sayings. Slide-switches: maximum clarity, focus, receptivity, presence.
[XCVII. IMMORTALITY. It is because the soul is immortal that all her organs decease, and are again renewed. Growth and decay, sepulture and resurrection, tread fast on the heel of the other. Birth entombs death; death encradles birth. The incorruptible is ever putting off corruption; the immortal mortality. Nature, indeed, is but the ashes of the departed soul, and the body her urn.]
Nothing much needing to be said her, is there?
No, his meaning is plain and it is for the reader to accept or reject his premise – but what the premise is, is not in dispute.
I wonder did he believe in reincarnation? This suggests it, though other ideas may have been in play.
Does it matter what he thought? The spark is the spark.
Okay.
[XCVIII. OBITUARY. Things are memoirs of ideas; ideas the body of laws; laws the breath of God. All nature is the sepulchre of the risen soul, life her epitaph, and scripture her obituary.]
Clear and succinct.
Perhaps less so than you think. Paraphrase it.
“The breath of God” creates laws, which form ideas, which in 3D result in things. This is Plato’s idea of archetypes. I admit, I didn’t see that, at first glance. And the second sentence says that the soul is our life, or course. What we see in 3D is properly oriented to the soul, not to itself.
That may not be as transparent as your present state leads you to believe.
What’s obscure about it? He says that nature, life, and scripture are the shade, the epitaph, and the obituary of the soul. In other words, don’t take the 3D as the important thing, but the non-3D visitor who lived here awhile.
You may be surprised, rereading that later. But yes, that’s the sense of it.
[XCIX. ETERNITY. The soul doth not chronicle her age. Her consciousness opens in the dimness of tradition; she is cradled in mystery, and her infancy invested in fable. Yet a celestial light irradiates this obscurity of birth, and reveals her spiritual lineage. Ancestor of the world, prior to time, elder than her incarnation, neither spaces, times, genealogies, publish her date. Memory is the history, Hope the prophecy of her inborn eternity. Dateless, timeless, she is coeval with God.]
This one, we can use some help on. What is clear is that he is saying the soul is as timeless as God. But what does all that detail say? It’s the kind of thing that it’s easy to skip over, but deserves a careful look.
It does indeed. What does he mean by saying that memory is the history of the soul’s “inborn eternity”? what does he mean by saying that hope is the prophecy of that inborn eternity? These are the questions to consider here.
- You don’t remember where you came from nor how you got here. Yet somehow you know.
- Nobody really thinks he is going to die, and in that, he is not deceived. The body will die (and of course you should be glad for that release) but your soul will not because it cannot. Whether you consider yourself as if individual or as part of a community, you know you will continue. Your belief-system inculcated by your society may persuade you otherwise, but still you know.
And the “celestial light” that he refers to?
That is a way of saying that the 3D resources paint one picture but infusions from non-3D paint another.
All right. So we come to the final saying, somewhat comically titled Silence, after all these words.
[C. SILENCE. Silence is the initiative to wisdom. Wit is silent, and justifies her children by their reverence of the voiceless oracles of the breast. Inspiration is dumb, a listener to the oracles during her nonage; suddenly she speaks, to mock the emptiness of all speech. Silence is the dialect of heaven; the utterance of Gods.]
There is a lot here:
- The initiative to wisdom. What does that mean? Must it not mean that silence not only precedes wisdom but is the way to wisdom? That silence predicates wisdom? And what is silence but the absence of words? To put it into terms Alcott would not have recognized, silence is the receptivity to the gestalt rather than procedure through the sequential (words). And, put in these terms, surely you can see that he is quite correct. “Words are a prison. God is free,” is another way of hinting at the same reality. An entirety cannot be comprehended by sequential iteration and analysis. Analysis is not the same thing as perception: It is the opposite half of the reciprocating process. Thus, sequential thinking – words – can only examine, they cannot explore or receive.
- Wit “justifies her children.” Wit, here, means, in a way, your own higher intuitions and instincts. That is, part of you knows enough to shut up and listen. People go to some pains to learn to silence the association-machine, the drunken monkey, so that they may begin to receive more clearly. Once we learn to listen to “the voiceless oracles,” other things become possible.
- Inspiration is dumb [meaning mute, of course] and listens until suddenly she speaks. Notice “during her nonage.” In other words, for a long time it may seem to you that your powers are failing, that you can do nothing more than listen to other voices. Then one day you surprise yourself; inspiration breaks through, turning gestalt into sequential presentation – that is, putting words around knowings.
- Silence is the dialect of heaven. Surely this is obvious by now. Speech can express (to some extent) what has been given. That’s what we have been doing here, after all. But it cannot generate messages from heaven. Speech explains, it does not originate.
Well, thank you for all this. It has been quite a ride.
And now a bit of work for you. Summarize 51-100 as you did 1-50, then put the two together and try to come up with an approximation of what people may find in Alcott’s words. Clotted words, often enough, but valuable wise words, and more valuable thoughts behind the words.
Again, our thanks.