The Soul's Code

Perception bestows blessing—as the stories sketched in this chapter attempt to demonstrate. Perception brings into being and maintains the being of whatever is perceived; and when perception sees in “the holiness of the Heart’s affections,” again as these stories say, things are revealed that prove the Truth of the Imagination.

Revenge is not one of Necessity’s daughters. Necessity, in fact, refers only to that which could not be otherwise, or that which you could not escape. Escape is not a sin, because Necessity is not a moralist. Escape can belong just as well to your soul’s lot and its pattern as can facing the music and taking the arrows in the chest.

Then, and up into modern times in French and English poetry and painting, this Arcadia of the ur-acorn was the imaginal landscape of primitive nature, similar to Eden or Paradise, where the untrammeled natural soul lived in accord with nature. Therapy has transplanted Arcadia to childhood; the natural being, feeding on acorns, therapy has christene

Organic images of growth follow the favorite symbol for human life, the tree, but I am turning that tree upside down. My model of growth has its roots in heaven and imagines a gradual descent downward toward human affairs. This is the Tree of the Kabbalah in the Jewish and also Christian mystical tradition.

Before the souls enter human life, however, they pass through the plain of Lethe (oblivion, forgetting) so that on arrival here all of the previous activities of choosing lots and the descent from the lap of Necessity is wiped out.

Aristotelian logic cannot think in threes. From Aristotle’s law of contradiction, also called the law of the excluded middle, to the binary logic—0 or 1—in our computer programs, our mind sets up its systems in pros and cons, in either-or’s. Descartes did concede a tiny space for a third, right in the middle of the brain. He placed the soul in the

Wisdom in Greek was sophia, as in our word “philosophy,” love of wisdom.

In fact, the Buddha had begun the process of growing down early in his life, when he left his protected palace gardens to enter the street. There the sick, the dead, the poor, and the old drew his soul down into the question of how to live life in the world.

Besides these questions, which can be found in the endless arguments about IQ and its scores and tests, there is one that derives particularly from this book. If there is an acorn or daimon, and if this factor often resists compliance with socialization, as the stories of the eminent often show, could such resistance frustrate IQ test achievement?