sdi

ποιμένες ἄγραυλοι, κάκ᾽ ἐλέγχεα, γαστέρες οἶον,
ἴδμεν ψεύδεα πολλὰ λέγειν ἐτύμοισιν ὁμοῖα,
ἴδμεν δ᾽, εὖτ᾽ ἐθέλωμεν, ἀληθέα γηρύσασθαι.

"Boorish shepherds—you disgraceful wretches, nothing but stomachs!—
we know how to say many convincing lies,
but we know also, when we please, how to sing true."

(The Muses of Mount Helikon speaking. Hesiod, Theogony 26–8.)

I have been thinking a lot lately about the spiritual process.

I have studied, and continue to study, a lot—but truth is simplicity itself: ἕν τὸ πᾶν "all is one." The closer one can actualize that notion, the closer to divinity one is. No amount of study can add to that.

And yet the study is not for nothing; one often needs much scaffolding to build a tower, even if it all gets pulled away and torn down thereafter. This was called to mind forcefully today as I began my attempt to reread Hesiod haltingly in Greek and read the above lines. (He's much harder than Homer, since while Homer has an elegance about his speech, Hesiod is coarse and takes, shall we say, tremendous liberties with his grammar to make the verse work. Simonides said that Hesiod was taught by the Muses, while Homer was taught by the Graces, and this seems about right to me.)

Who are Hesiod's Muses? Well, recall our fourfold schemata of consciousness, and note that light is truth. In Air, light is transmitted clearly, so all there is true. In Earth, light is not transmitted and only received, so all there is false. (Indeed, this is why there is no "user manual" for life here in the world of Earth, and why we need to grope about in darkness.) Water is translucent, just as Air is, but unlike Air, the light there can be reflected and refracted: when the Water is calm, the light passes true, but if the Water bends on itself cleverly, it can distort the light in whatever ways it pleases—even seeming true when it is quite false. So the Muses are clearly daimons, beings of Water, shepherding the shepherd—inner-plane initiatrixes, we may say, rather than the guiding angels I am so fond of. (Thus while one may learn from them—and from Hesiod!—great care must be taken, as they can't be trusted to be Good, just as they warn us.)

This identification is very useful, I think, and was effortless to make, but it must be noted that I've studied Empedokles with at least some care for something like six years, ever since I first took up geomancy. It took so much effort and contemplation to finally penetrate the proper simplicity of the model, so that now I can easily use it as a map and identify something from it. Now that I comprehend the model in it's simplicity, a lot of what I studied is now redundant... but it cannot be said to be "wasted," since without the complicated I couldn't have gotten to the simple.

So it is with spirituality. It is perhaps best to just clear the mind and sit in zazen; but without a koan or sutra or some other material for the soul to work on, the leap may never come, just as you may have all the reagent in the world, but without catalyst, the reaction can't occur.

The end may be utter simplicity, but there are long miles of breadcrumbs we must follow that we may appreciate it.