Wednesday, February 15, 2012

A language all its own

Metaphysics has a language all its own.  It has generated new words.  It has given new shadings to familiar words.  It is poetic.

In many passages in the Edgar Cayce readings, there are words that we’re sure have a meaning just beyond our grasp.  It’s at that point that I’m most likely to hack away verbiage and distill what I hope is Cayce’s intent. 

Whether or not we recognize it, that’s what we do when we read Cayce.  We have to.  We take the sentences apart, rearrange them and put them back in a way that makes grammatical sense.  It’s language; it’s the tool we have. 

I can’t imagine translating the readings verbatim into Spanish or German without first paraphrasing them, saying to ourselves, “in other words,” or “he means,” or “what he’s saying, is.”  For the most intuitive among us, the string of words has immediate meaning – but then tell someone else what you just read; you have to resort to subject, verb, and voice.

See? 

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