Winter Solstice 2008

Winter Solstice is the start of the new year.  The sun, having completed his descent toward the earth, begins to rise back heaven-ward, to look up.  And, like him, we feel renewed as the residue of the old year settles down into the sleeping grass, the cold rock, enveloped in a transformative cloak of white snow.  It becomes the fuel that feeds the living year.

But, like the Solar King, we don’t look back, we look up and we raise ourselves towards a higher goal, pushing against
the past as a counter-balance to keep our forward motion stable.  The past informs, but need not bind.

And with each year, the weighty cloak of personal history grows less troublesome, as the body of the Now grows stronger, exercising its developing skill to navigate the challenges of life while drawing from its further wisdom the power of the Philosophers’ Stone, converting all experience to Golden Grace.

Simple Sound Solution

Start with principle
     And understanding,
End in love and
     Reconciliation.

The Soul of one must be the soul of reason

The logical conclusion of Reason’s March is to remove the burden of living. As a surgeon uses a scalpel to cut out cancer, we tend to employ reason to incise the perceived troublesome aspects of life. How successful has that been?

Sages from the past, who perhaps had more time to contemplate fundamental principle (they didn’t have cell phones and instant messaging, or video games, or constant politics to upset their attention to deeper principles), had so much to offer. Much of that we have disregarded in our modern arrogance as either superstition or early iterations in a vast progression of evolution and manifest destiny. Nevertheless, we have in the image of the many-headed hydra, the perfect metaphor that embodies our present and persistent use of reason. As reason slices out from nature one concept or another, one formula or syllogism, many others suddenly sprout into place that were not active before. And then we go about cutting into those, only to continue the spontaneous multiplication of complexity. It’s like pruning a pear tree back to the trunk. Suddenly all manner of sprouts erupt from unexpected places all up and down the tree, creating an ugly and disturbing spectacle. The beauty and form of the original tree is lost, having been sacrificed to a concept of purpose that has only increased the need for further action to in turn counter the complexities that were created. Thus proceeds the bizarre caravan of Reason’s errant children in our modern world.

The Tower of Babel is another apt metaphor for these challenges. In an effort to ascend Man to the Gods by use of Man’s own abilities (his reason), a giant many-roomed tower was built. The complexity of the task proliferated as the chores were partitioned and delegated and soon individual workers and worker groups couldn’t understand each other having become so far removed from each others’ work. Thus it is now. As biological science evolves, and electronics, et al, in their separate spheres, the dissonant feedback from each goes unresolved because the two separate disciplines are so out of touch with each other, and further, with their own effects upon the larger web of life. Reason dictates discreet results, but nothing in the world is discreet. All of it is integrated. Cause and Effect is a web, not a line. In fact, it is a multi-dimensional sphere.

Wisdom is not merely logic or reason. It is the application of Reason within the unbounded sphere of fundamental truth. To know Truth, one has to silence the on-going waves of the mind in its effort to capture with thought the rules governing nature. This is necessary because such an effort is subject to the purposeful balances of the universe: if you cut away a thing here, other things must re-emphasize their place in the larger, encompassing scheme, in order to balance that action of cutting away. To gain real understanding, Reason must serve the Whole that lies in wisdom and beyond thought itself, and within the Self that Socrates spoke of, the Soul of the individual. The Soul of one must be the soul of reason.