A Stoic Meditation
I have a liking for some of the late Hellenistic philosophy schools, particularly Stoicism. I wrote this following inspired by the writing of Seneca. The Stoic understanding of existence and of God was (unfortunately I think) eclipsed in the Roman empire with the adoption of a Middle–Platonist influenced version of Christianity by the imperial establishment under and after Constantine.
“Gather your mind together. Examine the underlying unity that supports experience. Journey through happy memory and re-encounter the good therein. This is the inner path to the awareness of the spirit of all religion.
If on occasion you should feel a rising in your soul to exult at a scene of beauty, or be struck by some phenomenal arrangement – moss covered rocks across a wooded track, the lights of a distant homestead, the moon above the fields, a strange copse of trees, the stars above snow lands, a beacon on the night sea- know in that instant a clarity, a sudden respite from the fog of human concerns and affairs, whereat the unity of thy own experience with that great experience which manifests as all things -all times and worlds, all gods and mortals, – is by grace exposed.
The entrance to apprehension of the universal experience is through the mind. What appears without is within. Through the appearances within, contemplate theophany. True illumination is a grace bestowed by the other-power. Preparing the mind for reception of theophany is philosophy”
And so, in verse-
‘Where is the woman,
whose eyes disclose the Sun?
In pearls, as a purple nimbus
In sable decked in sapphire
2
My life flies past me, away
like a dream between darkness and memory
Numbers rise, returning into dark
To deep earth dreaming
fast in the hill
3
What has all this been,
but fragments of a dream
Dreamed by a world
through a passing mortal form?
4
The world dreamed life,
life dreamed a body,
the body dreamed a person,
the person dreamed and died,
the dream then returned
to the abyss, as a memory,
to be brought to mind again
rising, and falling anew
5
All this, the world, -
But a dream-tide in the ocean
Unending the pattern weaving
as the hem of a great queen's gown.’