75. 22 March 2019
Evening. You are sitting at the dining room table at Linda and Bill's in South Tampa near MacDill Air Force Base. Bill is sitting at the table opposite you reading a book. Carol has just headed off to bed to continue reading and Linda is taking a break from reading and watching a favorite TV program that started twenty some minutes ago. - Amorella
2121 hours. We arrived Wednesday afternoon after two good days on the road from Westerville. Today we six (niece Jean and James also attended) had lunch at The Columbia in Ybor City. Very tasty as usual. I've been too busy in the everyday world to think much about spiritual matters; yet last night I had a 'flash' thought on what it would be like to be actively conscious with the soul's skin, as it were, with heart on the left and mind on the right. The imagery was very much cave-like but without stalagmites and stalactites. The interior soul membrane appeared slick and intestine-like, oddly enough.
You forgot to mention the space between the membrane and heart and mind was greater than between the left and right sides of the brain within the skull. - Amorella
2212 hours. It was. So, what I was doing in the flash thought was dropping a smaller heart and smaller mind substitute for brain hemispheres. -- Such silliness on my part. I would be embarrassed for my lack of forethought if were within conscious thought. In ancient days the dove sometimes represented the soul, I suppose this was because it could fly away on its own command.
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Doves as symbols
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Doves, usually white in color, are used in many settings as symbols of love, peace or as messengers. Doves appear in the symbolism of Judaism, Christianity and Paganism, and of both military and pacifist groups. . . .
Judaism
According to the biblical story (Genesis 8:11), a dove was released by Noah after the flood in order to find land; it came back carrying a freshly plucked olive leaf (Hebrew: עלה זית alay zayit), a sign of life after the Flood and of God's bringing Noah, his family and the animals to land. Rabbinic literature interpreted the olive leaf as "the young shoots of the Land of Israel" or the dove's preference for bitter food in God's service, rather than sweet food in the service of men.
The Talmud compares the spirit of God to a dove that hovers over the face of the waters.
In post-biblical Judaism, souls are envisioned as bird-like (Bahir 119), a concept that may be derived from the Biblical notion that dead spirits "chirp" (Isa. 29:4). The Guf, or Treasury of Souls, is sometimes described as a columbarium, a dove cote. This connects it to a related legend: the "Palace of the Bird's Nest", the dwelling place of the Messiah's soul until his advent (Zohar II: 8a–9a). The Vilna Gaon explicitly declares that a dove is a symbol of the human soul (Commentary to Jonah, 1).The dove is also a symbol of the people Israel (Song of Songs Rabbah 2:14), an image frequently repeated in Midrash.
Christianity
The symbolism of the dove in Christianity is first found in the Old Testament Book of Genesis in the story of Noah’s Ark, “And the dove came in to him at eventide; and, lo, in her mouth an olive-leaf plucked off: so Noah knew that the waters were abated from off the earth.” Genesis 8:11 And, also, in the New Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke, both passages describe after the baptism of Jesus, respectively, as follows, “And Jesus when he was baptized, went up straightway from the water: and lo, the heavens were opened unto him, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove, and coming upon him.” Matthew 3:16 and, “And the Holy Spirit descended on him in bodily form like a dove. And a voice came from heaven: “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.” Luke 3:22 The Holy Spirit descending on Jesus and appearing in the bodily form of a dove is mentioned in the other two Gospels as well (see Mark 1:10 and John 1:32).
The use of a dove and olive branch as a symbol of peace originated with the early Christians, who portrayed the act of baptismaccompanied by a dove holding an olive branch in its beak and also used the image on their sepulchres.
Christians derived the symbol of the dove and olive branch from Greek thought, including its use of the symbol of the olive branch, and the story of Noah and the Flood. Although Jews never used the dove as a symbol of peace, it acquired that meaning among early Christians, confirmed by St Augustine of Hippo in his book On Christian Doctrine and became well established.
In Christian Iconography, a dove also symbolizes the Holy Spirit, in reference to Matthew 3:16 and Luke 3:22 where the Holy Spirit is compared to a dove at the Baptism of Jesus.
The early Christians in Rome incorporated into their funerary art the image of a dove carrying an olive branch, often accompanied by the word "Peace". It seems that they derived this image from the simile in the Gospels, combining it with the symbol of the olive branch, which had been used to represent peace by the Greeks and Romans. The dove and olive branch also appeared in Christian images of Noah's ark. The fourth century Vulgate translated the Hebrew alay zayit (leaf of olive) in Genesis 8:11 as Latin ramum olivae (branch of olive). By the fifth century, Augustine of Hippo wrote in On Christian Doctrine that "perpetual peace is indicated by the olive branch (oleae ramusculo) which the dove brought with it when it returned to the ark".
In the earliest Christian art, the dove represented the peace of the soul rather than civil peace, but from the third century it began to appear in depictions of conflict in the Old Testament, such as Noah and the Ark, and in the Apocrypha, such as Daniel and the lions, the three young men in the furnace, and Susannah and the Elders.
Before the Peace of Constantine (313 AD), in which Rome ceased its persecution of Christians following Constantine's conversion, Noah was normally shown in an attitude of prayer, a dove with an olive branch flying toward him or alighting on his outstretched hand. According to Graydon Snyder, "The Noah story afforded the early Christian community an opportunity to express piety and peace in a vessel that withstood the threatening environment" of Roman persecution. According to Ludwig Budde and Pierre Prigent, the dove referred to the descending of the Holy Spirit rather than the peace associated with Noah. After the Peace of Constantine, when persecution ceased, Noah appeared less frequently in Christian art.
Medieval illuminated manuscripts, such as the Holkham Bible, showed the dove returning to Noah with a branch. Wycliffe's Bible, which translated the Vulgate into English in the 14th century, uses "a braunche of olyue tre with greene leeuys" ("a branch of olive tree with green leaves") in Gen. 8:11. In the Middle Ages, some Jewish illuminated manuscripts also showed Noah's dove with an olive branch, for example, the Golden Haggadah (about 1420).
Selected and edited from Wikipedia
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2236 hours. This brings up a reoccurring personal question - why do I continually attempt to make 'thought/concepts' complicated when they are traditionally already simplified? A dove representing a soul rather than a bag-like immortal being holding a mortal spiritual human heart and mind is much clearer and more beautifully defined as an image of a concept.
Your focus is on the interior of the human spirit, the heartansoulanmind, so the flash-thought image from the gut is rawly honest enough, particularly from the subconscious and/or unconscious. -- Title this "birds and butterflies" -- both inaccurately suggest a vulnerability, that in here, the soul does not have. Post. - Amorella
In here, the soul is as a drop of spiritual water. Spiritual ice and spiritual steam cannot exist in the spiritual world of human beings living or dead. mh
2304 hours. An unexpected conclusion. Completely unthought until the color blue appears.
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