Page 7 - Quaker News & Views Nov 25 - Jan 26

This belief in the whole sacred earth is found in Aborigines and Native Americans among others. In recent
decades, there has been a much wider appreciation throughout the so-called developed countries of the
fundamental need to protect the ecology of earth, water and air to ensure the survival of all forms of life.

To move on, circles are widely used physically and metaphysically as symbols across places and time. They
echo the apparent movement of the cosmos around the earth but actually the rotation of the earth and its
orbit around the sun. The sun and the moon appear as circles from the earth. Neolithic people built huge
stone circles and danced within them. A circle is a pleasingly egalitarian shape to Friends. Circles also contain
a space in the middle: this can represent an emptiness of infinite capacity, or akasha as Sufis might call it.
Buddhists revere the prayer wheel. Dervishes spin into peace and ecstasy. A ring is a symbol of eternal love.

We could say that music is an aural symbol. It is carried by air waves and enters our bodies through our ears.
Seeming to bypass our thinking brains, it causes vibrations which are picked up by the heart’s emotional
receptors. It can be joyous, poignant, stirring, stilling, transcendent. In Hinduism, there is the image of Krishna
playing his flute to create divine music. Rumi pointed out that the reed has to be hollowed out before it can
be made into a flute, and have holes created in it to make the different notes. This is another symbol of how
a spiritual being needs to be emptied before she/he can be used to play the divine melody. St. Francis prayed:
Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace. In a choir or an orchestra the singers and instrumentalists may
be producing different notes in different octaves but the overall harmony is a delight.

Before we move on to allegories, let’s take a moment to look at some personal examples of symbols. Father
Christmas – a kindly cheerful old man, appears at Christmas, has an infinite supply of presents, but judges
whether children have been ‘bad or good’. Only the good will be rewarded. It’s not too difficult to understand
that symbol.

The tooth fairy – after the pain of losing the tooth comes the compensation: it used to be sixpence, but that
was before inflation. After suffering there will be pleasure, and new growth.

King Arthur – the boy who does not know who he really is. His kingly – which symbolises divine – nature only
becomes apparent after he frees the sword from the stone. He raises it from the earthly level in which it has
been stuck. Arthur is the model for Harry Potter, who will go on to marry Ginevra. The orphaned only child
thereby joins the numerous and warm-hearted family he has always yearned for.

And finally, the whole concept of magic. It fascinates us, but what is it but imagining beyond the mundane
to what we cannot rationally explain but often relate to intuitively?

So we can go on to look at allegories, where an outwardly simple story is trying to convey deeper truths.

Probably, most of us know the famous Indian story of the blind men who are confronted for the first time
with an elephant. The men stand at different points around the animal. They are asked to say what it is like.

One touches its ear and says: An elephant is like a fan.
One touches its leg and says: An elephant is like a tree.
One touches its tusk and says: An elephant is like a spear.
Another one touches its trunk and says: An elephant is like a snake.

Each one is partly correct but none of them has a true understanding of what an elephant is. They need to
pool their knowledge. So, by humbly sharing any insights and learning we have, we may gain a better though
not full, understanding of the Truth.

Let’s look at a very familiar story originally from China but via Arabia: Aladdin. Our hero is a poor, fatherless
boy who is offered the chance to make some money by performing a task for his ’wicked’ uncle. Aladdin has
to climb down through a narrow opening into a cave, which is full of gold and jewels, but his task is to find
and bring out an old lamp.

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