The Mouse is Miracle Enough

The Mouse is Miracle Enough

Just as the common deck of playing cards contains esoteric messages about the four lower functions, including the mechanical part of the intellectual center, widely-known children's stories may hold hidden messages or clues. For example, Aesop’s fables are rich in double or hidden meanings. Some contain in-plain-sight but shrouded metaphors that are beautifully illustrative of human potential or foibles. This is how conscious schools hide objective information on consciousness.

We must bypass formatory mind in order to understand the esoteric message. ─ The Teacher

Many Aesop fables contain a moral or simple interpretation that feeds formatory mind, but at the same time provide a deeper way of looking at the tale. Formatory mind or the mechanical part of the intellectual center, can only add up to two, tending to see things as black and white. Formatory mind is not real thinking. The fable, the Mountain in Labour, is a good example of a tale with layers of meaning above and beyond the mechanical part of the intellectual center.

The Mountain in Labour: A mountain, being in the pangs of labour, was emitting tremendous groans, and the lands about were filled with great expectations. Then, behold, that mountain gave birth to a mouse.

The version of this Aesopic fable as retold by Phaedrus, closes with the following moral-of-the-story sentence: “This was written for you who threaten to do great things but fail to get anything done.” The moral is rather formatory, however, as you can see. You can certainly interpret the fable in this way, but it has a deeper meaning if you can get beyond this limited, formatory explanation.

Esoteric fables are famous for telling you one thing while the deeper meaning is something else. This reminds me of how another timeless storyteller, Shakespeare, pulls a similar trick on the intellectual center. The fool in a Shakespeare play is often the truth-teller. Their wisdom contains the esoteric point of the play in many instances, rather than the main characters.

In this Aesopic fable, the mountain gives birth to a tiny mammal, a mere mouse, rather than some enormous, grand creature. What a strange outcome! This is consistent with Fourth Way teachings on the nature of consciousness. When Higher Centers emerge, they are inconspicuous, according to the Teacher. My experience of higher states of consciousness is that they are more invisible or subtle than the expected progeny of a mountain. The state is high like a mountain, but small and gentle. The mouse is indeed miracle enough.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars, And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren, And the tree-toad is a chef-d'oeuvre for the highest, And the running blackberry would adorn the parlours of heaven, And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery, And the cow crunching with depress'd head surpasses any statue, And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

─ Walt Whitman

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Walt Whitman portrait, 1873