Gaining more eyes to see

After the appearance of the 24 elders in the wake of the light of the Covenant, they slowly pass by and there are new and fresh flowers visible on the other side of the river – in part meaning new spiritual wisdom and life flourishing.

And then comes a new image in the unfolding vision of the Pilgrim: four animals crowned with green foliage, feathered with six wings, and the feathers full of eyes, comparing it to the Greek giant Argos with a hundred eyes.

These animals are representing the truth of the Gospels, in part as a deeper spiritual insight building on the older biblical stories, and also having hundreds of “eyes” as new aspects into spiritual truth and wisdom. And there is a double effect suggested; the Gospels both as having hundreds of eyes, but also as giving your soul hundreds of new eyes, too.

So, the revelation is continuing; we are in transformed life (as Eden), right at the threshold to the spiritual realm (the river bank), and if you mirror the acceptance of Mary with the “genoito moi”, “let it happen” internally, your soul and connection with God will experience a tremendous new opening into the Heavens.

Again, this is only possible after the arduous climb of the mountain, the rebirth of your soul, the “earthquake” of the mountain, and a long term development of dual perception that opens up for a spiritual and material unified experience of reality. This bears repeating; one can read Dante and Purgatory hundreds of times, but unless this inner transformation has happened, these passages will remain beautiful symbols, visuals, evocative poetry – but not spiritual and mystical real experiences. Still beautiful, but nothing remotely similar to the breakthrough of cascading insights and hundreds of new aspects appearing all at once, spiritually.

And on the side, this is partly a challenge with most modern Dante commentary that treats this as an “external allegory” and not as an internal real transformative experience. Many translations express a somewhat confused and chaotic impression of the Garden of Eden, which is natural – if the anagogical level (the Soul’s journey to God) is bypassed. The gifts and rewards at offer here are infinite, but only if the real journey is undertaken as participation, and real internal growth.

And the rhythm here is increasingly becoming more celestial too, with the insights appearing as “light follows light” – come luce luce in ciel seconda – in our preparation and journey up towards Paradise, and up into the Heavens.

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Receptivity as key for the Soul’s relationship to God

As the imagery keeps expanding in the Garden of Eden, we are presented with several new key elements for how the relationship between the soul and the Heavens/God can grow and deepen, once the capacity has been developed.

Behind the seven lights moving we now see coloured bands that form a rainbow of seven colours, the symbol of the Covenant. This is essential for understanding the nature of the relationship – a “pact” and a coherent deeper reality we can align with, rather than more ancient ideas of Divinity as unpredictable and more anthropomorphic like for example the old Greek Gods or the Norse traditions.

So there is a focusing here on the spiritual, with the transformed life symbolized with Matelda, and a closing towards the threshold experience – with the river and the bank.

Dante then again evokes the symbol of God and the soul as the sun and the moon (now as Delia/Diana) –  and indicates an amplified state of the moon as having a glowing “halo”, likely suggesting your soul in a elevated state of intensity and perception.

Then the 24 people symbolizing the old biblical stories gradually appear, in part as medium, channels or instruments for deeper spiritual wisdom and connection with God.

But perhaps the strongest symbol at this point is the invocation of Mary, as the human soul and the birthgiver of spirit. At this very moment it all comes together as a radiant symbol of the connection itself – the elders in the procession give her blessings – and we are now again suddenly at the core of the whole Comedy: preparing your soul for communion with God.

None of this imagery will make any sense unless you have already developed and transformed your soul and your internal being, through the seven terraces. A rebirthed soul and dual perception are simply required. And in addition, just like Mary’s acceptance of the message from Gabriel, her “γένοιτό μοι” – “may it happen it to me” – when the opening to the Divine presents itself, is also essential. This is exactly Dante’s guiding to the reader as well; at this point in the journey you have developed the capacity, and the opening will eventually present itself; the test is then whether you will accept this or not. The fuller relationship and incarnated spirit can only happen, if you internally say the same: “γένοιτό μοι” (genoito moi) – let it happen.

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Discovering the “bank” between the Spiritual and Earthly

The revelations of Eden deepen as the Pilgrim looks beyond the Seven Lights.

After the Divine Light intensifies above the seven candle sticks, a new cascade of insights are happening for the Pilgrim. First, Virgil admits with his facial expression that he does not understand at all what is happening at this point. And then Matelda, still as the transformed earthly life, pushes the Pilgrim to look deeper, behind, “di retro” of the appearing living lights – suggesting a deeper perception of the spiritual vision is now possible.

And as the Pilgrim looks deeper, he starts seeing people led by these shining lights, which are symbols of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Reverence/Awe of the Divine.

But then Dante writes an extraordinary tercet that transforms Eden from a unified experience of Heaven and Earth, to also being a portal and a transition into the realm of pure spirit.

The tercet is this:

L’acqua imprendea dal sinistro fianco,
e rendea me la mia sinistra costa,
s’io riguardava in lei, come specchio anco.

One way to read this is:

The water took/grasped from the left side,
and rendered to me my left coast/boundary,
if I looked into it, like a mirror again.

Meaning: The spiritual wisdom and vision and insight comes to the Pilgrim on his “left side”, meaning the earthly perception, as the idea of the Heavenly shining through into the Earthly here in Eden.

Then what happens is that these new and stronger spiritual visions are making it more clear for the pilgrim where the boundaries and flows between the earthly and spiritual are; in a way he discovers more clearly the bank/threshold of the earthly perception through which at the moment the spiritual is coming to him. But this boundary is only rendered to him when he looks into the spiritual vision itself, and thus noticing the difference, and the combination of two different realms, reinforcing the idea of “dual perception” being a key capacity that has been trained and developed on the seven terraces. He can now keep both dimensions simultaneously in his mind and experience them at the same time.

And then comes an even deeper point; this apprehension of the spiritual and earthly and the flow/boundaries is like a mirror, meaning it reflects the nature of ultimate reality and the Divine itself: this new perception is in itself an alignment and reflection of being, not merely the nature of his experience. Or in other words: this discovery of the “costa” internally is a revelation of ultimate reality itself, at a cosmic scale. His new capacity for perception is aligned with how reality actually works – thus giving him at times exponentially greater ability to understand this fuller reality.

And as an extra poetic layer of beauty implicitly; The water is also reflecting the Pilgrim himself literally, adding a meta-reflection of the “self” seeing its own role in perceiving, contemplating and participating in this unified experience of reality.

In short: the Pilgrim understands both himself and the big picture in a much deeper way, and detects the shores where the purely spiritual realms begin. This will prove to be essential for his impending final ascent, into the Heavens.

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The Soul as Reflecting Divine Light

A new relationship between the soul and the Divine, as we enter the Garden of Eden.

After the combined experience of Heavenly and Earthly is to some extent established in the Garden Eden – as grounded in the Earthly but with the Divine shining through all of Creation, Dante gives us a new image of the overall journey:

Di sopra fiammeggiava il bello arnese
più chiaro assai che luna per sereno
di mezza notte nel suo mezzo mese.

From above flamed the beautiful apparatus
more clear by far than the moon serene
in middle of night in its middle month.

In a literal sense this is describing the light coming from seven candle sticks emerging out from the forest, in their brightness and pure beauty. And this is also an image of how the spiritual wisdom and reality are starting to shine more intensely through into the Earthly and to the Pilgrim’s experience.

But it expresses something deeper too; it is about the soul and God, and the relationship. Which is the overall theme of the whole Divine Comedy.

The first line describes the Divine presence and flaming reality, in beauty (“flamed the beautiful apparatus”). The second line picks up the metaphor of the moon as your soul, as we had earlier with the soul’s rebirth as a cauldron of molten fire (here: “the moon serene”)

But several important points are being made here: your soul is not shining purely by itself, it is reflecting Divine Light. The more you grow in the spiritual life, the more you can reflect. But still – no matter how much you align and grow and participate/reflect (metaphorically as “middle of the night for the full moon”), the Divine source is “more clear by far” – or “più chiaro assai“, and eternally so by nature.

So we have the source, your soul as reflecting, the beauty and eternity of this dynamic, and the growing relationship between your soul and the Heavens. And a reminder perhaps, that your ability for this is ever changing too, just as the moon can reflect in various degrees.

And this scene comes right at the moment when the Pilgrim sees “seven trees of gold”, that turns out to be seven candle sticks, and a much deeper spiritual meaning is about to be unfolded.

An overall point being this: We are preparing for the ascent to Paradiso in just a few more cantos at this point, and this insight is important. Your soul is now growing, it is reflecting God’s light, but keeping this image of the latter “assai” more clear than the former is an essential key to the further ascent – up to the endeless gifts of the Heavens.

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Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden in Dante’s Purgatory is somewhat different in the original compared to most English translations.

In Dante’s Italian it becomes more of an expression of the transformed life, and the new experience of the Earthly with the Heavenly shining through, symbolically with a permanent little “breeze” from the east.

The three poets are also to some degree symbolic of the self (Pilgrim), the rebirthed soul (Statius) and the transformed rational faculty (Virgil). All three aspects are now together entering into this state of experience and perception, and the Pilgrim’s Will has been calibrated and re-oriented through the seven terraces.

Next step is to regenerate the frame of memory, in many ways the interpretative framework that shapes our perceptions. This has two steps: first to wash out the memories of sins, vice, mistaken frameworks and human internal constructs, and second, to reinforce the good memories of virtue and truth. This is one of the main overall themes of the last six cantos in Purgatorio, as we become more familiar with the new experiences of being, after finishing the terraces and a moment of touching Heavenly Love in the final wall of fire.

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The Blessings

The Angelic Boatman approaches the Island of Purgatory. Ill: Gustave Doré.

“Fall to your knees, fall to your knees!
Behold the angel of the Divine! And fold your hands.
Expect to see more ministers like him.”

After the Pilgrim has girded his waist with a soft reed, as a symbol of the necessary humility to gain deeper insights into the world and the Heavens, he sees the Angelic Boatman approaching over the waters. The Boatman in some ways representing the first blessing on the journey of purgation. The rewards and affermations are immediate once an approach of openness is adopted. And with the promise, of many more blessings to come.

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The Greek and Roman Epics, and the Personal Journey. w/Sean Eckmann.

A new conversation with Sean Eckmann from Mythos & Logos, where we’re looking at the role of emotion, passion, and the intervention of metaphorical Gods in the Ancient Epics of the Iliad, Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid.

Sean’s youtube channel is here: mythosandlogos.net – and the first of his three videos on these great epics is coming out by the end of this month, in June.

Enjoy!

 

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Dante’s Inferno – Emotions and Rationality

A new series!

We’ll look at the first book in Dante’s Divine Comedy, with brief overviews and highlights – and how this work is relevant for understanding and navigating the world better. In this episode we’ll look at the opening, in Chapter 1.

Thanks for listening!

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Sordello’s Poem “Blacatz”, and its echo in The Valley of Princes.

A look at the Sordello’s most famous Provençal Poem “Blacatz” (c. 1240), and how Dante draws inspiration from this poem in his description of the Valley of Princes in Canto VII of the Purgatory.

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Some highlights from the Aeneid

Here’s a 20 minute Introduction to the “Aeneid Series” on the Ancient World Podcast – with a brief overview and the final battle scenes with Turnus.

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The Aeneid – A Podcast Series


The Flight from Troy, by Federico Barocci.

We’ve just finished reading (and recording) the Aeneid by Virgil – and the last episodes will be up from April 1st – April 6th on the subscription podcast! Four episodes covering the second part of the Epic Poem, with the Wars in Latium and the founding of Lavininum. Which later leads to the founding of Alba Longa, and then of Rome itself, 300 years after that.

So this has been most of the month of March – a deep dive into the Roman Epic of Virgil, and exploring the cosmology and pagan world of Aeneas. It’s already shedding an interesting new light on Dante’s Divine Comedy and the role of Virgil as the guide, at first close to all-knowing and confident, and then gradually on his own exploration and learning, with amazement, through the book of Purgatory.

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Meeting Sordello, in Canto 6

In the slow anticipation of Ante-Purgatory, Virgil and the Pilgrim meet Sordello, an Italian poet and fellow Mantuan of Virgil.

“But see that spirit stationed over there,
all by himself, the one who looks at us;
he will show us the quickest way to go.”

We made our way toward him. (0 Lombard soul,
how stately and disdainful you appeared,
what majesty was in your steady gaze!)

And with one little line, “watching like a couchant lion on guard”, Dante connects Sordello to Judah in Genesis, and the anticipation of King David, building up the expectation of the real Gate of Purgatory. The Italian is: “sguardando a guisa di leon quando si posa.”

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Focus, and Climbing the Mountain of Virtue

Here are the words from Virgil (as Reason) as they’ve started the climb, but the Pilgrim is too distracted by what the other souls might be whispering:

“Keep up with me and let the people talk!
Be like a solid tower whose brave height
remains unmoved by all the winds that blow;

the man who lets his thoughts be turned aside
by one thing or another, will lose sight
of his true goal, his mind sapped of its strength.”

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Robert Pirsig, and a blended Frame of Mind

We’ve just finished the cult-philosophy-classic novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig, an excellent read, and one of the big thoughts standing out afterward is this: that without a larger philosophical, metaphysical or spiritual frame of mind supported by or mostly based in the right brain hemisphere, the left hemisphere will gradually try to construct something on its own premises – which it is in no way capable of doing – and in Pirsig’s case this led to obsessions, mental illness and eventually years of hospitalized madness and electroshocks.

It’s somewhat unsettling to follow Pirsig’s mind journey into his deeper probing of the transcendent value questions but seemingly slowly drawn into a linguistic trap of using the LH’s compulsion for analysis and precise definitions in the process. It creates an inwards spin that consumes him. And by habit or perhaps long term cultural conditioning and pressures, even when he briefly discovers that an idea of “Quality” should not be defined, it soon glides over into the LH and becomes literalised and loses its depth, even as he is fully conscious of this process and tries to resist this change. Which might suggest an involuntary strength of his LH, that has over time grown and become beyond his control. But this is where a balanced culture might have helped with overall structures, stories, little reminders in our environment, norms, an ethos that promotes RH conditions and apprehensions of the world, and a more balanced understanding of one self and one’s mind. To some extent the ZMM sounds like a cry out of a culture where the LH has already too much control, and where this is reflected in Pirsig’s own journey and struggles through life.

This also points to a much larger historical scale, about modernity in the last 500 years, and arguably from the roots of the LH’s march towards control and dominance in the old Nominalist debates at the University of Paris in the 11- and 12-hundreds. When an insistence on literalism gradually eroded a part of the world of the RH, where concepts and ideas and intimations of the mystery and the Beyond had been referred to with metaphors and allegorical words. When this was gradually blocked through a LH dominance over words, something deep and valuable and important, if not essential, might have been lost for centuries to come.

Pirsig’s quest and endeavour for balance and unity of the two worlds of technology and humanities, or the “classic” and “romantic” worlds, seems to partly become blocked by this lack of framework or ability to include both a part that is certain and firm, and a part that is uncertain, unknown and ambiguous. Which is something that the RH is naturally very comfortable with. And the RH could also easily unite the three areas he is expressing a wish to unify: that of the Arts, the Sciences and Religion. This was already done in historical periods when the LH was not dominant. It was there before Nominalism, and it is there in an endless abundance in earlier poetic works like the Divine Comedy by Dante. But it will not be accessible through a literal LH reading of it. And it could take years to change the mind and the brain, to gradually rebalance the hemispheres and rediscover the wealth and beauty of the knowledge and wisdom we have to some degree lost, but which is still there, all along.

Pirsig’s book is a fascinating story but could also be seen as a warning about the limitations of the LH, and at the same time point to our natural inclination to try to establish a deeper understanding of the world, but in the domain of the RH. And for that, we need to elevate and learn to use the RH more. Reading Dante or learning from Iain McGilchrist could be an excellent start in that journey – both for oneself, and for the wider culture as well. It’s how a rebirth can happen.

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Pirsig, The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and The Sacred

We’re half way through the cult-philosophy-classic novel “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Pirsig now, and it’s a fascinating read, especially through the lens of the brain hemispheres and the work and research of Iain McGilchrist.

The main character in the book recounts much of his earlier life story and how there is a constant tension between the “classic” and “romantic” ways of apprehending and experiencing the world, largely corresponding to the old cultures of sciences and the humanities in the Universities.

But what makes it especially fascinating is how Pirsig by intuition and introspection also discovers the battle between his own hemispheres, and increasingly understands the natures of the two. And then we see how his aspiration becomes to try to create a balance and unification of the two worlds.

Being on page 220, Pirsig is starting to find his way into the right hemisphere by relating to concepts that can be shown to exist, but cannot be clearly defined, focussing on the word “Quality”. And in some ways this beautifully parallels so many sacred traditions where the Divine cannot be named without diminishing it. What is experienced and understood intuitively, spiritually and emotionally with the RH, cannot be grasped by the words and language of the left hemisphere, without changing it into a linguistic representation, which is something else. And arguably the way to unite and unify the worlds will go through the RH, but necessitates to some extent a relation to something Sacred, the ineffable Beyond, or at least an openness to the Mystery of existence or something Divine.

In ancient wisdom the key to true enlightenment comes through intellectual humility, as a starting point for new learning and for receiving deeper insights. And then the process of unifying could gradually start melding together the two worlds of the hemispheres and create a new whole, in something that might at times resemble the nature, of a new rebirth.

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