Guard Thy Ears And Thy Tongue

"A Soul-man is a person who speaks little and does not lend his ear to much talk. He who spends time in arguing and listening to arguments fights against shadows. For God, the Father, The Good, cannot be verbalized, nor understood by the sense of hearing" - Twelfth Book of the Corpus Hermeticum, verses 28-29

[QUOTING]

The head sanctuary of the human being is one powerful organ of creativity, in a negative as well as a positive sense, in a receptive as well as a creative sense. This is still not sufficiently understood. Our intellectual considerations arise in the head sanctuary. They are rendered dynamic by the will and then expressed by the larynx, or written down by the hand. All our manual activities, all our hand movements are, as you know, related to the functions of the head sanctuary. In this way, our deeds of higher creativity are rendered visible and clearly demonstrable.

Now let us consider the second aspect of these things: someone speaks to you and you listen. In other words, you open your sensory faculty, the receptive aspect of your organ of higher creativity, for the other person, and that is not without results as far as you are concerned. For something along the lines of a coupling, a binding, can occur, because the other person discharges his creative energy over you, and you lap it up, you receive it. And this is in most cases extremely destructive and dangerous indeed, it may often prove lethal to Soul development.

For what is it that makes a person chatter away day and night like a machine gun? Aren't there people who are absolutely bristling with problems and tensions, and who seek to discharge them by chattering endlessly with their fellow human beings? Children, whose lower procreative organs have not yet developed, and older people, whose procreative organs no longer function as such, are often full of chatter.

Young people, as we know, are highly talkative. Words babble out of them in an almost endless stream. This, however, is generally not at all harmful, because what they say is in many respects still unsullied, although of course it is often rather tiresome for their audience!

Old people, on the other hand, have much of their lives behind them. Their karma is fully active, nature is manifested in them to the full extent, and the results of their existence have taken root in the blood. And when their procreative functions begin to decline, everything that stirs and boils in the blood, all those fiery results of the retrograde movement, always seek a way out via the head sanctuary, via the larynx. That is why the Bible says "It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles the man, but what comes out of it". What comes out of the mouth is often a deadly danger.

That is why Tat, who represents the sincere, liberation-seeking individual, is told by Hermes that a virtuous Soul is: a person who speaks little and does not lend his ear to much talk.

Note what is said here:..a person who speaks little and does not lend his ear to much talk... So you should not carry these things to extremes. We have been given the power of speech as an aid. We have, for instance, our social conventions, and a variety of words with which we can express everything required by ordinary life in society. Hermes certainly did not have in mind a community of people who remained absolutely silent at all times.

But when all the pressure, the tension, the divideness, the complexity and the hopelessness under which a person lives come out in the spoken word, then please be careful. If someone has messed up his life and is filled to the brain with tensions, then be careful.

From "The Soul-Man" - The Egyptian Arch-Gnosis, Vol. III - Jan van Rijckenborgh

[END QUOTING]

The above is in keeping with the theme of recent posts. Speech is a sonic representation of one's thoughts. What others say to us, or what we allow ourselves to hear, can be harmful to the Soul on a deeper level than just words. The speaker is sharing his or her astral state with us. If that state is one of darkness and negativity, we are going to be exposed to those vibrations. If we are not careful, our own astral state will be negatively affected, thus impeding the work we are trying to accomplish on the Path: the purification of the mental and astral vehicles.

The next post will try to offer a solution to this problem.

~ g
.