Waving To The Soul

When the gods come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not; Socrates and Shakespeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe of Hercules, but every tie he touched his mother earth, his strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and, in conversation with nature. The power of music, the power of poetry to unfix, and as it were, clap wings to solid nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus.

The philosophical perception of identity through endless mutations of form makes him know the Proteus. What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran. And what see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus? I can symbolize my thought by using the name of any creature, of any fact, because every creature is man agent or patient Tantalus is but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossibility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleaming and waving within sight of the soul.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1842 essay History stokes the fire of thought within us, and we experience the burning coals of remembering. We are alive because of our psychic, spiritual, and biological substructure, but we don’t adequately comprehend any of those innate structures. We are what we are because of the existence of what we are not. Our greater reality is measured in terms of intensities, and our psyche puts us together in different ways. Time is not marked in the psyche, but the consciousness of all forms of life blend there and form inner rhythms which manifest as adjacent identities. These subspecies of consciousness operate in a trans-species fashion.

Our biological body is a blend of mineral, plant, and animal consciousness, and it maintains its stability because of the give and take of the materials of the earth, which is another quality of consciousness. We are part of the world and yet we are ourselves, just like our psyche, which is part of other worlds that contains other identities besides the one we think of as our own. We contribute abilities and experience in this focus, and help form our mass reality, and that process expands our psyche. Our thoughts are energy that ripple outwards in ways we don’t comprehend, and interact with the experiences of others and form world events.

Our various identities are psychic environments not physical ones. They mix and then merge with each other, but still maintain their own focus. They interact without physical restrictions. Even though we are just a portion of our psyche, our identity is inviolate. It is never annihilated or submerged in another identity. It has its own integrity and follows its own focus and knows itself. We are Antaeus, Proteus, and Tantalus as well as other identities that hang on the vine of the psyche like grapes that continue to move through their cycle of life.

We explore these other selves and grow from that experience, but the psyche or the soul never exists as finished products like our ripened grapes. Like the grape vine our physical life implies a non-physical one. Each identity has an eternal validity within the greater reality of the psyche, and when we focus on the pauses in our inner language we can theoretically contact any of those identities. There are no impossibilities in those realities since all identities occur at once. Those worlds are full of energy, and it is always waving to the soul.