Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Discovering the Anatomy of My Soul


I walked into work to find that my coworker had been kind enough to get my mail for me from the main building. It’s a long hike from the small, stuffy rooms above the auto shop to the overly air-conditioned and cavernous main lobby of the school, and I hate making the trek. I put my things away in the locked drawer, so as not to tempt my students, and turned to my stack of mail to sort out the inevitable junk.

Yes, junk mail. We get a ridiculous number of catalogs as teachers—often for subjects we don’t even teach—along with the occasional flyer from a local business that hasn’t yet figured out that teachers don’t have the sort of money they’re looking for. Normally, I toss all of it out with barely a glance. But this morning there was only two pieces of junk and I couldn’t help but notice them: one was a medical catalog for anatomy models like the ones you see in doctor’s offices and the other was a local spa advertisement with a big picture of a lotus on it.

This is why omens can drive someone crazy—they are subtle, but just noticeable enough to impinge on your normal reality even in moments when you least expect them to appear. It would have meant nothing if not for an earlier hint, but in the context of my current situation, it was unmistakable. But to understand why, you need some background.

I have always associated the image of the lotus with “spiritual things” especially with matters concerning the soul. (I think that’s mainly UPG— and if it is sourced somewhere, I do not recall the source.) To find the image of a lotus next to images of human anatomy is telling, because I have been inadvertently poking at the cross-section of those two things, when pestering Bast— asking insistently what she did to me that night after I went to the ER and why she keeps going on about this mysterious “foundation” thing.

Knowing I am still obsessed with double confirmations, she didn’t give me long to contemplate the omen. She spoke softly to me in my mind, ignoring the students starting to file into the room.

If you want to understand what I have changed, you will first need to understand the anatomy of your soul, Bast said, watching from behind me with steady, unblinking eyes.

I realize now that She was the one who prodded me to pose the question about souls to the Nisut (AUS) during the final beginners chat. Though I didn’t recognize the prodding at the time—the question just popped into my head out of the blue—I did recognize that the answer I got was significant. I correctly identified it as a puzzle piece even though I had not been able to identify the puzzle it went to. Now I knew in no uncertain terms.

I played with the concept all day in idle moments, scribbling on a small notepad during my prep period and contemplating the nature of souls over my lunch. When I got home, I started the process of checking terms in the indexes of the various Egyptology books I own and gathering snippets here and there. I hopped online and looked through the UPG of countless Kemetics in their blogs and their forum posts.

I was frustrated by the apparent lack of consensus: academic sources didn’t match with people’s UPG and neither matched exactly with what Hemet (AUS) had told me during the chat. In fact, after a good while searching under different terms, I came across an earlier post in the Ask the Nisut (AUS) forum in which she seemed to directly contradict part of what she had just told me! However, I soon discovered that things are more cohesive underneath then they appear on the surface.

I keep forgetting that Kemetic thought is inherently polyvalent and that opposite truths can co-exist in reality at times. It was when I remembered the importance of duality, and the nature of things to be balanced through duality, that I realized the comprehensive picture I was looking for was hidden not in the pieces but in the connections between them. The answer was not in the dissecting, but in the process of reassembling. I got a sudden feeling that, if I could only draw all of what I knew—all the contradicting seemingly unrelated pieces of it— into a single image, I would be able to learn what I needed to from that image.

Eventually, I managed to create one which, once I had fitted it together properly, proved to be quite wide of scope indeed. I realized immediately that it would take several posts to describe and explain the thing (along with a few hours in Photoshop just to make it recognizable—my drawing skills leave something to be desired). Still, I’m willing to make the effort because putting it into words is a good exercise in making sure that I really understand what I have discovered and because if it might prove useful to even a few others than it ought to at least be available to the community at large.

Understand that this will be 98% my UPG and intuitions about things, and a lot of that remaining 2% is the UPG of others. I have few academic sources to back any of this up (read: almost none to back it up). But…yeah, that never stopped me ;)

 Next time I post it will be the first in a new series: An Etheric Anatomy of the Kemetic Soul.

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