1 result for (book:ur2 AND session:724 AND stemmed:flat AND stemmed:earth)
[... 8 paragraphs ...]
“What would a Roman soldier be doing up there?, I wondered. For below, on the flat ground outside the wall, were the hordes4 of the Roman army. I don’t know whether they were preparing for an attack, or had some other reason to be assembled there. I saw only a forest of helmets and spears pointing upward, with light glinting dully on metal here and there. I write ‘saw,’ yet it would be just as accurate to note that I sensed these figures. They were turned toward the soldier on the tower.
[... 11 paragraphs ...]
You have heard terms like “The Brotherhood of Man,” or, as Ruburt might say, “The Brother-Womanhood of Women” (humorously). But at any given time, in your terms — at any given time — the population of the earth is made up of counterparts … and so when you kill an enemy, you are killing a version of yourself … For as you are members of a physical species, you are also members of a psychic kind of counterpart reality; and this membership straddles races or countries, or states or politics.
You form your history. You form your reality, and so no one is thrust into a position which first was not accepted as a challenge. So you work out your problems and challenges in whatever way you choose, historically. In your terms, again, you and the Roman are connected; and the Arab and the American; and the African and the Chinese; and so are your identities intermixed with others who may seem to be strangers, but others who speak with your own voice — others who communicate with you in their dreams as you communicate with them. You have comrades, and you come to this earth at a given time and place of your choice, and so do you reap and form the great challenges of your age.
[... 13 paragraphs ...]
4. A literal interpretation of “flat ground” and “hordes” would be very questionable, however. I discuss what I mean in Note 6.
[... 3 paragraphs ...]
As best I can interpret the objective information at hand, the physical locale of my subjective experience is a precarious one, since outside the eastern and southern boundaries of Jerusalem the terrain quickly drops away into valleys close and steep enough to protect the city from large-scale attack — with hardly enough room there for the “hordes” of Roman soldiers I saw on the “flat ground.” I cannot explain my terminology or choice of locations, except to say that I expressed just what I wanted to. I trust the elements of those perceptions, and my reactions to them, but their conscious understanding and integration remain beyond my abilities at this time. Obviously (as will be explained), I think it wise to ascribe as much of the episode’s validity to its symbolic meanings as to its physical ones.
[... 11 paragraphs ...]