for it cannot serve as a means of explaining philosophical truth.
Dogen instructs that no matter how elegant prose might be,
"they are merely toying with words and cannot gain truth".
Language only obstructs the understanding of Zen Buddhist teaching..."
- Zen
Words produced by the intellect and appealing to the intellect cannot, of themselves, lead anyone to Eden. Via renunciation of the intellect during meditation, once one has said "farewell" to the "temple master's bells" and his "words", "Eden" (Enlightenment) is "guaranteed".
egosense, prana, etc. Hence its abandonment alone is total renunciation. Once it
is abandoned, the truth is experienced at once."
- Dying and being reborn (Quotations from Vasishtha)
And here we arrive at one of the meanings of the album cover painting. The fundamental concern of the Crimson King was presented on the cover of the first album: the shadow of (or the "monster" that is) modern man. One of the concerns of Lizard is attachment to dogma, the Word. During the Medieval era, the idea of the word as sacred was expressed by the illuminated manuscript.
"At the pre-Renaissance period, Bibles and other Sacred books were copied by monks in "carols", small cubicles set up in the cloisters of the monasteries and great cathedrals in response to the unprecedented need for copies of books. It is of interest that the monkish copyists traditionally spoke the words aloud as they wrote them. This oral "chewing" of the text was closely associated with the act of prayer, also helping to identify words whose meaning might be otherwise obscure in the original MSS due to misspelling or excessive use of contractions. The reading of the Holy text was also considered a form of meditation in which the scribe savored Divine wisdom directly from his books, which retained the mystical aura of miraculous objects at this period."
- History of Illuminated Manuscripts
"The Book was the final authority on God's intent. Nothing else was ever permitted to supersede it. And since most of the population could not read even their native tongue, let alone the Latin or Greek of the Bible, no one could ever question the selective readings the priests used to convince the masses of one point or another. For those of us today, living surrounded by the printed word, it is almost impossible to imagine the credibility given in earlier days to anything that had been written down, no matter how nonsensical it was. The very fact that someone had taken the tremendous trouble to create a book gave an automatic assumption that what it contained was true and important. Skepticism about the written word was almost nonexistent until Gutenberg and his partners made books an accepted and unremarkable fact of daily life.
For much of the duration of Christianity, to be a monk, a seeker after god, meant to be a preserver and copier of the Word of God. Thousands of monks spent the greater portion of their lives copying pages of the Bible; this was literally one of the holiest works one could perform. Writing and religious vocations were inextricably linked in the public mind. Thus the term "cleric" or "clerk", originally applicable only to priests or monks, came to be a generic term for anyone whose occupation involved writing."
- The New Aeon: A Consideratioon of the Astrological Symbolism
"Hermes...
("who says one thing but is secretly thinking another.")
...is the God of language, hence the inspiration of all writers."
- The Magician's Dictionary by E.E. Rhemus
In Phaedrus 14, Plato discusses the invention of writing .
This, said Thoth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and the wit.
Thamus replied: You who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing, they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality."
- The Theuth is Out There
site index
"For now Prince Rupert's tears of glass"
"Glass tears" are not real and, in the case of actual Rupert's Tears, if even a very slight pressure is applied in the right way, they are easily shattered to dust.
"...if you take a fourteen-pound sledgehammer and try to smash it on a forge.
You cannot.....
For although it is strong enough to withstand the sledgehammer, the tail can
be nipped with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers. It takes a little effort. And once it
is done it is as if you have taken out the keystone, removed the linchpin,
kicked out the foundations. The whole thing explodes. And where, a
moment before, you had unbreakable glass, now you have grains of glass
in every corner of the workshop--in your eyes if you are not careful--and what
is left in your hand you can crumble--it feels like sugar--without danger."
- from the novel Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
- The Prince Rupert Drop as Central Symbol
"Prince Rupert's tears of glass" are a symbol of his ego. "Tears" also represent the pain caused by ego attachments. The ego, like a Rupert's Drop, is practically indestructible unless a particular sort of pressure is applied. It is the task of the divine child, Prince Rupert (whose name means "destroy by means of"), to annihilate his ego.
"Common to shamanism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, Gnosticism and
Sufism is a state of illumination characterized by descent into archetypal
cosmic consciousness variously described as moksha, enlightenment,
samadhi, gnosis, the void, or the self. Several traditions have been
enriched by the use of natural evolutionary sacraments which induce
visions... Such a state has common elements of ego loss or ego death,
disembodiment and union with the divine source."
- Conceiving Genesis Part 2
"Ego is the "perceptual organ" of the whole body considered by itself,
autonomous, complete, and needing nothing. Here comes the paradox,
crashing in, de-re-mystifying: ego is body-image, not the organ (eye,
ear, skin) that perceives, but the organless imaginary being which moves
thinking through timespace and decides or does not to execute certain
movements efficacious of desired result."
- Fluidentity
"The light of the body is the eye: if therefore your eye is single, your whole body will be full of light, but if your eye is evil, your whole body will be full of darkness."
- Jesus
"We are too ego centred.The ego shell in which we live is the hardest thing to outgrow...When the ego shell is broken...
(When the "glass tear" is shattered.)
...and the "other" is taken into its own body, we can say that the ego has denied itself or that the ego has taken its first steps towards the infinite."
- Suzuki
Worldly affairs slow their pace
A flowing brook amidst the grass
Flowing tears his face shall trace
His ego is shattered glass..."
- Rumi
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