It is a truth perpetually, that accumulated facts, lying in disorder, begin to assume some order if an hypothesis is thrown among them. -- Herbert Spencer
Recently I had a conversation with a lifelong friend who is a professional education consultant. We were talking about enthusiastic people who want to start new schools of thought, like Montessori or Summerhill, and how they might go about the business of looking for interested or enthused enrollees. Suddenly we were smiling and found ourselves volleying similar negating thoughts: "Nothing doing! No way!" What we both intuitively understood was that if there ever were any truly new school, it is the recovered school of Self -- the sanctum sanctorum or, as masterful poet Wallace Stevens describes it, the place where "the Phosphor reads by his own light."
"Queen of Lanternois," Gustave Dore
The virtue of reading is indeed "accumulated facts" -- facts within facts -- that the mystery of consciousness holds in abeyance until a bright idea, "an hypothesis," shoots its beams of light over the limb of spherical darkness. This "first light" of enlightenment can be caught and employed by the creative eye of every earthly man, then -- Alakazam! From cultural clusters of intelligent evidence (memories and possibilities) the human counterpart of all-pervasive cosmic consciousness cries out through its fleshy megaphone the deep joy of human understanding achieved by the self-luminous solar points of learned purpose and effort. The message is to begin the soliloquy --
"Thear's under Sunne (as Delphos God did show) No Better Knowledge then Ourselfe to know." -- Saluste du Bartus
Begin the soliloquy --
Dare you see a Soul at the White Heat? -- Emily Dickinson
Begin the soliloquy --
Oh my Divinity, blend Thou with me . . . -- Katherine Tingley
Begin the soliloquy --
I screamed, and -- lo! -- Infinity came down and settled over me . . . -- Edna St. Vincent Millay
Begin the soliloquy --
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. -- Walt Whitman
Begin the soliloquy --
Lord of thyself, thou then art lord of all. -- William Blake
Begin the soliloquy --
The individual's supreme awakening . . . is the moment when the practitioner will be like one who drinks water and alone knows whether it is cold or warm. -- Marie-Louise von Franz
H. P. Blavatsky points out that "Before the soul can comprehend and may remember, she must unto the Silent Speaker be united just as the form to which the clay is modelled, is first united with the potter's mind. For then the soul will hear, and remember. And then the inner ear will speak -- THE VOICE OF THE SILENCE."
In soliloquy German poet and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe penned: "I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or dehumanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
Speaking to oneself (to the Sun of oneself) in the hall of the sanctum brings about hypotheses (something highly probable in light of established facts). It is like turning on the light switch to the bulb of human bioluminescence -- phosphor -- so that others may have the opportunity to see what you see. To engage in soliloquy is to send an electromagnetic impulse to gold's scattered ions (memories and possibilities) which brings about gold's recovery as a treasured element. This process, a mystery of consciousness, discloses the philosopher's stone (the cosmic touchstone of oneself) with its natural power to turn ionic "What ifs" into nuggets of "Ah-has!"
(From Sunrise magazine, April/May 2002; copyright © 2001 Theosophical University Press)
There is a Secret One inside us;
The planets in all the galaxies pass through his hands like beads.
That is a string of beads one should look at with luminous eyes. -- Kabin