From the Narrow Desert: Doors

Showing posts with label Doors. Show all posts

Sunday, April 28, 2024

The Tinleys and the small key of David

This afternoon I was in my study, which is full of bookcases, and one of the books caught my eye: The Small Golden Key to the Treasure of the Various Essential Necessities of General and Extraordinary Buddhist Dharma by Thinley Norbu. (One can only hope that the book is as well-written as the title!)

As mentioned in my February 7 post "What's the second key?" I bought this book on February 3 because of recent syncs about pairs of keys -- particularly a gold key and a silver one. The fact that the key is specified as small hadn't meant anything in February, but it caught my eye today in the context of my April 25 post "Susan, Aslan, and dot-connecting," which included this quote from the movie Johnny English Reborn:

Now I know what you're going to say: It's a pretty small object. Well, it's often the little things that pack the biggest punch. After all, David killed Goliath with a pebble. The mighty Vortex has been slain by my possession of this small key.

Johnny emphasizes the smallness of the key and compares it to the stone with which David killed Goliath. In the post, I connect this to the "key of David," which "shutteth and no man openeth" (Rev. 3:7). Earlier in the post I had included a picture of a lion and a red door, captioned "Aslan closed the door," and said it had caught my eye "because of past syncs dealing with red doors and green doors."

Taking down The Small Golden Key now and opening it up to one of the first pages (p. 4), I found this:

Later, at Vulture's Peak in Rajgir, the Buddha taught the "Perfection of Wisdom" . . . which is the second turning of the Wheel of Dharma . . . .

This got my attention because I had just posted a dream about a vulture, in "A vulture named Odessa Grigorievna, and Joseph Smith in a spider mask."

In writing this post, I revisited the "What's the second key?" post so that I could include a link to it. The post begins with this sentence:

Ever since January 21, when a mental voice said of the Rosary, c'est l'une des clés, "this is one of the keys" (see "The Green Door finally closes"), I've been trying to figure out what the other key is.

"The Green Door finally closes." As mentioned above, my recent post about a small key featured a red door closing and gave the sync context as "red doors and green doors." Later in the February post, the Key of David also puts in an appearance:

I thought that the Rosary is centered on a woman, Mary, so maybe the other key is masculine -- like the Key of David!

My reference was not directly to Revelation and the idea of a door closing, but to Guillaume Postel's Absconditorum Clavis, which influenced the development of the Tarot -- specifically of the Wheel of Fortune card, which features an eight-spoked wheel. The post goes on to mention several syncs related to eight-spoked wheels.

The Wheel of Dharma, of which the second turning was apparently preached on Vulture's Peak, also has eight spokes.

So that's a lot of connections: Small keys. Vultures. Eight-spoked wheels. Red and green doors closing. The Key of David.

Then there's the name Thinley Norbu. I don't know much about Tibetan, but I assume from the fact that Tibet used to be spelled Thibet that Thinley could also be transliterated as Tinley.

When I was a child, I wrote an unfinished story called The Tinleys, about two knights called Sir Tinley Big and Sir Tinley Small. These were a giant and a midget, respectively, and their names were a sorry attempt at a pun, the idea being that Sir Tinley sounds like certainly. I don't know if the story has survived, and I don't remember much about it, but I believe the two Tinleys became friends after Small bested Big in a fight, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood and Little John. A very small person defeating a very big person -- what does that remind me of?

Update (7:40 p.m. the same day): I found a copy of The Tinleys. It's really awful, so I'm not going to quote much from it, but I thought it was interesting that the Tinleys' first quest together is to kill a griffin that lives at the top of a peak:

"Knights," said the king, "there's a gryphon around here somewhere that's stealing cattle."

"He lives at the top of Donchatryan Peak," said the cattle-herder.

"Donchatryan Peak?" cried the king. "Why, that's the biggest, steepest, most dangerous mountain around!"

I just posted above about Vulture's Peak and how it was a sync with a dream about a vulture that became a Russian woman named Odessa Grigorievna. I identified the vulture in the dream as white-backed vulture, which is a member of the griffon vulture genus. Russian uses the same word, гриф, to mean both "vulture" and "griffin."

Friday, December 15, 2023

Go out, believe out. Go in, believe in.

This was spoken to me in a dream last night. The meaning is that when we enter or leave a particular environment, we change not only our outer behavior but also our beliefs. In an environment where a certain thing is believed, you will find yourself believing it, too, to a non-trivial extent. This happens automatically, and the best way to safeguard against it is to be consciously aware of it.

In the dream, I caught some bees -- plucking them from the air with my fingers like Daniel-san with his chopsticks -- and placed them around the edges of doorways, where they obediently stayed.

"Do those bees live in the doorway?" someone asked. "Is their hive there?"

"No, not yet," I said. "It's just a few bees for now, but I hope they will build hives soon."

"But I don't like bees."

"Well, you'd better get used to them. They're our friends."

I meant that they were our friends because the proximity of stinging insects would make people more alert and nervous as they passed through doorways, raising their consciousness and making them less susceptible to the belief-altering effects of entering and leaving places.

Friday, January 20, 2023

"The gate is strait, deep and wide" -- and doves

The Doors song "Break on Through (to the Other Side)" has been back in the sync stream recently. I've been trying to make sense of these lines:

The gate is strait
Deep and wide
Break on through to the other side

Many lyrics sites have "The gate is straight," but this is surely an error. You might describe a road as "straight" but not a gate, and in any case the expression is pretty obviously an allusion to Matthew 7:13-14.

Enter ye in at the strait gate:

For wide is the gate,

and broad is the way,

that leadeth to destruction,

and many there be which go in thereat:

Because strait is the gate,

and narrow is the way,

which leadeth unto life,

and few there be that find it.

Strait and narrow are synonyms, as are the contrasting pair wide and broad, and notice how Jesus explicitly presents the wide gate as the opposite of the strait gate -- one leading to destruction, the other to life. So what can Jim Morrison have meant by "The gate is strait, deep and wide"? How can it be both strait and wide? And what does it mean to say that a gate is "deep"?

Of course, "deep and wide" is no more Morrison's own turn of phrase than is "strait is the gate." It's from an old Salvation Army song.

There's a wondrous fountain, filled with living water,
Flowing from the Saviour's wounded side.
There's an invitation to the heavy laden,
To this fountain flowing deep and wide.

Deep and wide, deep and wide,
There's a fountain flowing deep and wide.
Yes, 'tis deep and wide, deep and wide,
There's a fountain flowing deep and wide.

What did Morrison mean by this? Quite possibly nothing, or nothing coherent. The sync fairies, on the other hand, must have some reason for bringing it to my attention.

⁂

Yesterday, the red dove reappeared -- I mean a literal red turtle dove that had been following me everywhere back in August and then disappeared until yesterday. In my original red turtle dove post, I linked to my 2018 post on "The Rider-Waite Magician," which pairs the red dove from the Magician card with the white dove from the Ace of Cups -- and which also, I see now, includes an extensive discussion of the lemniscate symbol!

The Ace of Cups is also relevant to the song "Deep and Wide," in which the fountain flows "from the Saviour's wounded side." This is a reference to the Fourth Gospel account of the crucifixion, in which a soldier stabs Jesus in the side with a spear and both water and blood come out. The Rider-Waite Ace of Cups has five streams of water for the five wounds of Jesus, and it has water in a context where one would instead expect wine as a symbol of blood.

Yesterday, the red dove was not accompanied by a white one but by a green one. I saw the red turtle in the morning, and then in the evening I saw this:

Later that evening, I ran across this on /x/. It's a reference to the running joke that "birds are fake" and are actually surveillance devices -- but in synchronistic context it seems like a warning against "false spirits," manufactured simulacra of the Holy Ghost.

My orginal red turtle dove post didn't mention green doves, but it did pair turtles with the color green by quoting the Song of Solomon: "the voice of the turtle is heard in our land; the fig tree putteth forth her green figs." I had recently had an experience with green banyan figs at the time. That was five months ago. Now that the dove is green, I should go back and see if those figs are ripe yet. Ripe banyan figs are red. A couple of days ago, in "The invincible Lizard King," I quoted King Lear: "Ripeness is all."

First only green doors, now red and green. First only a red dove, now red and green. Is the dove linked to the door? I decided to look up the etymology of dove. The Online Etymology Dictionary says it's "from Proto-Germanic *dubon . . ., perhaps related to words for 'dive,' but the application is not clear unless it be somehow in reference to its flight." Wiktionary traces it back further, saying that the Proto-Germanic (which it spells *dūbǭ) is from Proto-Indo-European *dʰewbʰ- (“to whisk, smoke, be obscure”) -- so perhaps the original sense was "smoke-gray bird" or something? What about the possible link to dive? According to the OED, dive is "from Proto-Germanic verb *dubijan, from PIE *dheub- "deep, hollow" (see deep (adj.))." According to Wiktionary, that Proto-Germanic verb is made by adding a suffix to *dūbǭ, "dove, pigeon." As for deep, it traces it back to PIE *dʰewbʰ-, the same ultimate source it gives for dove.

So dove and deep are probably etymological cousins. The red and green doves implicitly correspond to the red and green doors, and the Doors song mentions a "deep gate."

⁂

Today, in my daily three-chapter Bible reading, I read this:

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. . . . Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep" (John 10:1-2, 7-11).

This is a bit confusing, since Jesus identifies himself both as the door through which the shepherd enters and with the shepherd himself. Note that this passage about the door is also where the Christian phrase "abundant life" comes from; this is referenced in the last verse of "Deep and Wide":

There is life abundant -- gift from God our Father --
Source, whence ev’ry need may be supplied --
It is offered freely, without price or money,
Drink from Heav’nly fountains, deep and wide.