After the first substance with a connection to the Spiritual Life and the Heavens, a new question might naturally pose itself: What does this mean for one’s own understanding of Reality, and one’s one place within it? This is at the core of what superbia and pride distorts earlier.<\/p>\n
The second carving the Pilgrim sees is the following:<\/p>\n
Era intagliato l\u00ec nel marmo stesso\u00a0<\/em> Roughly: “It was carved there in the same marble the chariot and the oxen, pulling the holy Ark, for which one is concerned of a duty one might not have chosen or commissioned”<\/em>.<\/p>\n The implications here are enormous. Dante has gone straight to the biggest implications possible: first he opened the channel to overall reality of the living spiritual life (through “Gabriel”<\/a>), and now he presents its consequence. If the spiritual as the Ark is a growing and moving process within oneself, as in the oxen pulling the chariot, and the chariot is connected to the dual perception of reality itself, as that which contains and expresses the deepest reality, then this aspect of reality is present and living and infinitely bigger than the secular reality one might have assumed earlier.<\/p>\n This breaks any earlier fixed assertion about the basics: what reality is and your relationship with it. Which could likely be the deeper meaning of the “officio non commesso”, the reaction that this brings a role and duty to one’s life – that one has not chosen nor is in control of. For the superbia instinct this is almost intolerable. It implies a bigger picture one can never be fully in control of. And at first it could also give a sense of loss of agency (which we will see later is the opposite, one can then finally exercise one’s Free Will, for a much higher purpose instead).<\/p>\n If correct, this also implies something broader about the image of the Ark: that it can represent an inner vessel and a new journey, after a first deeper spiritual experience of one’s own “Gabriel” inside. It will set you on a new path, with a new understanding of Reality and being pulled forward by natural forces.<\/p>\n This would also likely correspond to Dante’s own experience in his early 40s, through rediscovering the spiritual, having to admit his own superbia and partial frameworks posing as full cosmologies, and needing to “scale back” his own ego: that he might have a role that he himself had not commissioned.<\/p>\n But again, these are the very first and initial steps in opening the spiritual path. Perceptions are still mistaken, reactions are still based on wrong assumptions.<\/p>\n But this is exactly how it has to be, if the old cosmology was indeed distorted. The healing process has begun, and by nature it will be complicated at first.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After the first substance with a connection to the Spiritual Life and the Heavens, a new question might naturally pose itself: What does this mean for one’s own understanding of Reality, and one’s one place within it? This is at … Continue reading
\nlo carro e \u2018 buoi, traendo l\u2019arca santa,\u00a0<\/em>
\nper che si teme officio non commesso.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n