Light Seed Truth

By Jnana Hodson

In human experience, God isn’t the only “thing” that can’t be measured or otherwise scientifically proved. Our worlds are filled with essential things that are neither matter or energy, among them thoughts, memories, sensual delights, and gut-level feelings. Think of hope, desires, love, the sound of music, the taste of food or wine, the thrill of victory, sensations of comfort or pleasure itself. Just what is the size of any of those, anyway? The list becomes nearly endless, even before getting to physical causes.
Across the ages and cultures around the globe, people have turned to a figure of speech known as metaphor to give voice to these, receive confirmation, and find guidance. “You are my sunshine,” speaks of far more than dawn or a getting a tan. It may even lift your day or lead to marriage. For the early Quaker movement in mid-1600s Britain, the three metaphors of Light, Seed, and Truth opened an innovative path for personal and societal transformation.
This in-depth examination of metaphor in their hands will enhance your own awareness and spirit as well.
As I explain, metaphor embodies qualities, principles, and values — secular and sacred — as well as feelings and emotions.
Metaphor, in going beyond the mere comparison of two different encounters, brings a less brainy way of thinking into our awareness. It can even become a means of unifying and renewing. There is never a final answer in its mysteries, but rather opportunities for individual and group ongoing discovery, renewal, and connection.
This close look at the writings of the original “Children of the Light” and “Seekers After Truth” in turbulent mid-1600s Britain finds fresh insights for application in our own times. Psychology, after all, didn’t exist when the radical movement became better known as Quakers or, more formally, the Society of Friends, spread forth with an alternative Christianity that reshaped their personal lives, daily actions, and tight-knit communities of faith. Given the deadly consequences of the blasphemy laws of the period, they dared not voice their perceptions fully. What they did express was shocking enough to provoke harsh persecution.
The Light, Seed, and Truth they voiced weren’t physical objects we would know — nouns, especially — or even energies, as verbs, although they reflected real-life aspects. Metaphor, at its best, instead compresses overlapping layers of thought and experience into a universalized image — just what light or seed we want to envision is, after all, left open to personal choice. All of these enrich the metaphor and its applications.
While those everyday understandings apply here, by extension, our Light, Seed, and Truth are not like anything but rather stand uniquely in their uniqueness. Their understanding of Light, for instance, became infused with the ancient Greek philosophy of Logos. As you will also see, the three metaphors form an interlocking system, ultimately blending into a oneness. It’s what Quakers came up with in place of a systematic theology.
I’ll admit that while Light and Seed conjured up many visual images to draw on, Truth was more challenging to perceive as a metaphor. In some group exercises I led, fascinating representations did come forth. While they lacked a natural fit, they added to the content of the metaphor. Seeing Truth as a verb, meanwhile, led to amusing reaches, such as “I truth you!,” the expletive “Truth you!,” or “truing” a situation, all of them softening the monolithic static concept where we began. You will likely be startled to find where we landed. Let’s just say this Truth is one that nobody can claim to “own.”
The findings aren’t confined to history, either, as the metaphors present keys to today for personal development, self-awareness, mindfulness, ethical fidelity, relating to others, conflict resolution, spiritual practice, focal points for meditation, and well beyond.
Imagine how they’ll work for you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jnana Hodson
• Release date: Jun 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224179695

Jnana Hodson

It’s been a while since I’ve been known by my Hawaiian shirts and tennis shoes, at least in summer. Winters in New England are another matter.For four decades, my career in daily journalism paid the bills while I wrote poetry and fiction on the side. More than a thousand of those works have appeared in literary journals around the globe.My name, bestowed on me when I dwelled in a yoga ashram in the early ‘70s, is usually pronounced “Jah-nah,” a Sanskrit word that becomes “gnosis” in Greek and “knowing” in English. After two decades of residing in a small coastal city near both the Atlantic shoreline and the White Mountains northeast of Boston, the time's come to downsize. These days I'm centered in a remote fishing village with an active arts scene on an island in Maine. From our window we can even watch the occasional traffic in neighboring New Brunswick or lobster boats making their rounds.My wife and two daughters have prompted more of my novels than they’d ever imagine, mostly through their questions about my past and their translations of contemporary social culture and tech advances for a geezer like me. Rest assured, they’re not like any of my fictional characters, apart from being geniuses in the kitchen.Other than that, I'm hard to pigeonhole -- and so is my writing.

Book preview

LIGHT SEED TRUTH

Metaphors of radical faith

………………….

By Jnana Hodson

………………….

Copyright 2024, including earlier sections in 2019, 2009, and 2008, by the author

Eastport, Maine, USA

Cover design by the author

Cover image by Pete Linforth, TheDigitalArtist

Thank you for selecting this collection. Please remember this ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please order an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

………………….

CONTENTS

In case you were wondering

Dealing with the reality of ‘no-thing’

Thinking in metaphor

Decoding incantatory language

Minding the Light

Starting from Seed

Seeking after Truth

Metaphorically speaking, indeed

Credits, bio, and more

………………….

In case you were wondering

YOU’VE HEARD PEOPLE SAY they believe something and time after time even think they do, yet when it comes to their interactions in everyday life, they all too frequently do quite the opposite. You see it in politics and religion, in business affairs and romantic relationships, even in personal spending or health care. Often, it occurs shamelessly with no awareness of the contradiction. When there is, their rationalizations are endless. Are they crazy?

Or should I say us, you and me, too?

It’s all too easy to see fault in others while overlooking it in ourselves.

I came at this believing that belief had to do primarily with what’s considered holy but am now seeing it’s all around us. And, for that matter, also deeply engrained within each of us.

For instance, perhaps you believe in ghosts or angels or Elvis and UFO sightings (not that I’ll contest any of that) or even, as happens living here in New England, believing the Sox will win the next World Series or the Patriots will triumph in another Super Bowl. The Stanley Cup and NBA championships seem a bit more tempered by what we think of as reality, though the Bruins and Celtics have their diehards, too.

As for where you live? Maybe it’s a college team instead.

Of course, it’s not just bigtime sports. Here’s another example. Keyboarding away here on my laptop, I believe I’m pretty computer savvy, something the people closest to me would promptly correct, should you meet them. Not that I have the jargon to interact easily with online tech support or any in-the-shop repair staff, mind you, but I do manage to do quite a range of things on this machine. At least I have some in-house techies to turn to when I run up against a problem. They are tolerant of my deficiencies, by the way.

Are you getting a sense of how slippery a sense of belief can be? Let me confess I also believe I should be eating more fruit and vegetables, not that what I put in mouth often reflects that. My actions would say I believe more in cookies or chips. Ones of a snack food nature rather than high technology.

Either way, I believe that belief itself is very important in our lives, even in our cynical consumerist and causality culture. Belief infuses how we work and behave and chart our futures. It enriches our very existence while also, in other ways, limits us. It expresses our highest ideals but also infuses our prejudices.

Don’t tell me you don’t have prejudices. We don’t have the mental capacity to be open to everything all the time. How do you feel about that driver who just ran the stoplight and almost hit you?

As a disclaimer, I should note that I approach the concept of belief with a built-in assumption that it somehow connects with what we see as higher or better ambitions, as progress or self-improvement, or even as what some in Zen Buddhism translate as big Self in contrast to little Self. We can and will disagree on what those grand objectives are or even their ultimate morality, especially when we get into specifics, though that’s not something I plan to delve into here. Should you be interested in that, you should have no trouble finding great philosophers or psychiatrists or self-help gurus. For now, let’s just note that it is possible for people to believe in evil and then act accordingly, as well.

Yes, my mind and influences range widely. So, to further clarify the subject at hand, do note that beliefs come in a wide variety, from ideas and opinions to views and preferences to verdicts and partiality to certainty and conviction. Some of these are purely mental, even speculative as in what if, while others are so deeply rooted that people willingly die for them rather than recant. In the discussion that follows, I’ll lean on that sense of knowing something deep in your bones or blood rather than a mere passing fancy.

What you’ll engage in these pages will confront belief in its conventional aspects. I want to take you around or under those into something more subversive and exciting.

The part we’ll investigate is neither pie in the sky nor navel gazing. It even expands understanding exponentially. Trust me.

THIS PROJECT ORIGINATED in attempt to answer a question, What do Quakers believe? The inquiry grew into something much broader in ways that may benefit anyone open to spiritual or philosophical or psychological curiosity. Let us continue to grow right up to the end of our earthly lives, right? After that? I’m open to revelation. This life, as I’ve experienced it so far, is remarkable enough in its own. Like all of this is an accident? Give me a break.

Ultimately, I’ve come to recognize that believe is a misleading verb here. It imposes blinders that prevent perceiving a much broader mindset across religious traditions, not just Quakers, and cultures and probably many other fields as well. What comes into focus for me is the importance of the alternative ways of thinking that we humans rely on, not all of them of a mental nature.

In the first half of the 20th century, Russian philosopher and esotericist (I’m not inventing that identity) P.D. Ouspensky built a detailed teaching and method based on the various levels of our awareness and thinking. I love his illustration of placing your finger on a hot stove and how quickly but very unconsciously you withdraw away. Heaven help anyone standing close by. Instantly, your entire hand flies away, a response of what he saw as mechanical thinking built into the lower hand and arm nerves and muscles, well before the signal arrives in your neck and you cry out Ouch! or something more graphic and primeval. The sequence continues as the alarm runs to your mental command post, and you realize, I’ve been wounded! or injured! — a response to another level of physical thought. And soon after that, you’re reeling with various degrees of physical and emotional pain. How dare that hot stove do that to me! Or, how could I have been that stupid? Or perhaps someone else you love dearly who was trying to reheat a delicious leftover. The internal dialogue will continue long after the initial injury as you ponder aspects of the incident and its continuing hurt for days or weeks later as the finger itself heals.

Feel free to observe ways your own mind runs along such multiple and sometimes conflicting lines.

American poet Robert Bly furthered this line of thought with what he called Deep Image, including his look at what he explored as the Three Minds — or the way the human brain evolved and how that impacts us. Add to that the right brain/left brain dichotomy I’ll assume you’ve already encountered.

As I was saying about levels of belief?

For now, let’s return to the prompting question.

The word Quaker, I’ll confess, stirs up a host of misconceptions nowadays. For one thing, as a movement, we weren’t celibate. Quite the opposite, actually. The celibates were the Shakers, a fascinating monastic sect that came along later and made beautiful furniture and danced in their worship. I do love singing their hymns in my amateur community choir. While those Shakers are extinct, except for a handful here in Maine, we Quakers were long rooted as families and rather prolific, at that. Randy doesn’t quite show up in the official minutes, though to be candid as I see delving into our archives, I’ll attest to its existence. In fact, despite our peculiarities, we’ve survived, contrary to those elementary school teachers who try to correct our children when touching on our history. We continue to worship and practice our faith, albeit in some outwardly very different yet vibrant branches as I’ll demonstrate as this story develops. Also, despite our many business innovations and successes, a different story in itself, we didn’t start an oatmeal company — that was by some folks who admired our reputation for honesty and high quality and decided to cash in. We do sympathize with the Amish who are undergoing a similar branding problem today. The Amish, by the way, adopted much of their distinctive dress from our now historic testimony of Plainness, which we’ve largely replaced with the concept of simplicity. As for testimony or witness, we see those as embodiments of how you live rather than what you say. Are you consistent? I’ll leave it at that, for now. Also gone is the quaint thee and thou accuracy of older English. It did have an intimacy I encountered with some of the last of the old-style Friends. Frankly, I do miss that, from the period when I was within its circle.

And, back to the matter of randy, let me mention a coworker who claimed the closest spiritual experience he had was in having sex with his wife. And he