Consider the Obvious! -- Credo XVII

In the most recent dream I had of Jung, he simply roared at me, “CONSIDER THE OBVIOUS! I DID!” and I woke up. In The Dove in the Stone, I list some of Sophia’s ways of communicating with us through intuition. One on the list is etymology, the meaning of words. So I looked up the origin of obvious. It comes from ob via, on the road. This in turn, led me to an alchemical quote, I once read: The Philosopher’s Stone is lying on the road and wagon wheels roll over it. In other words, and let this sink in, nothing is hidden, it is we who are blind!

Thus began my insight that it is feminine wisdom that is simple enough to look for enlightenment from ordinary things. Masculine intellect often cries, “Oh, that’s obvious, it’s much more complicated than that!” And so it is, but it starts on the road, the ground of manifestation beneath our feet. We must remember that when the Church Fathers translated Hagia Sophia, the Holy Wisdom of the Old Testament, from the feminine into the masculine Spiritus Sanctus, which takes a masculine pronoun, the feminine left the Holy Trinity, and hid in fairy tales, I suspect, as the archetype of the Fairy Godmother. She is a benign character who mediates between the invisible and visible worlds, and always gives the little hero or heroine practical advice and the adult ones as well. The how-to of being kind and helpful to a suffering animal or a lonely beggar and so on. It is the motif of endless tales in all cultures.

The interesting thing is why is she called a God-mother? Might it not be, that she gives birth to our reborn self as the connecting link between ego and our Divine Guest and thus is the instrument to our individuation process of feeling "born again"? It is not a collective orgy but a very private process in which each individual comes to that “Vast Certainty” that there is meaning to life and an undefinable source to creation, evolution of consciousness, and the majesty of the cosmos.

So here is another gift from the alchemist Petrus Bonus, a quote I found in a footnote, I think, in M-L. von Franz’s edition of Aurora Consurgens. He says, “To find the Philosopher’s Stone, look with the eyes and see with the heart." (The ego at the circumference looks with consciousness and the heart receives understanding from the Self or Divine Guest through the radius of Sophia’s intuition.)

Just a few weeks ago, I was lighting a candle and looked down at it. It was a circle and had a wick. As I lit the wick, I had an Aha! Metaphorically speaking, each of us is a separate candle with an individual wick. But the flame on every candle is the same flame!

Fire comes to us from the Sun; fire is the only element of the symbolic four that leaps up, gives light and warmth, and can be shared without being diminished. So when we realize that each of us living has an inner flame and we see it with the heart, we add the mystery of Love.

As Christmas and Hanukah and Diwali all take place in Capricorn, ruled by Saturn (manifestation), life begins in Aries and nine months later, we celebrate the rebirth of the Sun, which, in the darkest night of the year in our hemisphere, appears to move north at the solstice. As John wrote, "the Light that lighteth every man ...” is the Collect for Christians on Christmas Eve. Light in the darkness, the "dazzling darkness," is also the Light that Jung must have had in mind when he counsels us: One does not become enlightened by seeking figures of light but by making the darkness conscious.

lovingly,
ao