The Kybalion (book of purported ancient wisdom teaching 7 basic alchemical principles leading to mental transformation) was perfect because it put into total context all the things I had experienced on acid. The universe is a creation entirely within a being that is outside time & space, and dreaming what we are. Everything is connected, because it’s all being created by this one consciousness. And we are tiny reflections of the mind that is creating the universe. That’s what alchemy says.
Owsley Stanley, Rolling Stone, Jun 2007
The Maker is one who is part of what he makes. Alvin ran to the bellows and pumped up the fire till the charcoal was glowing hot enough to drive any regular smith outside into the night air to wait till the fire slacked. But not Alvin. Instead he walked right up to the forge and climbed right into the heart & the flame. He felt the clothes burning right off his body, but he paid no mind. He curled himself around that plow & then commenced to healing himself. Not piecemeal, not bit by bit, but healing himself by telling his whole body, all at once, stay alive! Put the fire that burns you into this plow!
And at the same time, he told the plow, “Do as my body does! Live! Learn from every living bit of me how each part has its purpose, and acts on it. I can’t show you the shape you’ve got to be, or how it’s done, cause I don’t know. But I can show you what its like to be alive, by the pain of my body, by the healing of it, by the struggle to stay alive. Be like this! Whatever it takes, however hard it is for you to learn, this is you, be like me!”
It took forever, trembling in the fire as his body struggled with the heat, finding ways to channel it the way a river channels water, pouring it out into the plow like it was an ocean of golden fire. And within the plow, the atoms struggled to do what Alvin asked, wanting to obey him, not knowing how. But his call to them was strong, too strong not to hear, and it was more than a matter of hearing him, too. It was like they could tell that what he wanted for them was good. They trusted him, they wanted to be the living plow he dreamed of and so in a million flecks of time so small that a second seemed like eternity to them, they tried this, they tried that, until somewhere within the golden plow a new pattern was made that knew itself to be alive exactly as Alvin wanted it to be; and in a single moment the pattern passed throughout the plow and it was alive. Alive. Alvin felt it moving within the curve of his body as the plow nestled down into the coals of fire, cutting into it, plowing it as if it were soil. And because it was a barren soil, one that could bear no life, the plow rose quickly out of it and slipped outward, away from the fire toward the lip of the forge. It moved by deciding to be in a different place, and then being there; when it reached the brink of the forge it toppled off & tumbled to the smithy floor.
In agony Alvin rolled from the fire and also fell, also lay pressed against the cold dirt of the floor. Now that the fire no longer surrounded him, his body gained against the death of his skin, healing him as he had taught it to do, without him having to tell it what to do, without need of direction at all. Become yourself, that had been Alvin’s command, and so the signature within each living bit of him obeyed the pattern it contained, until his body was whole and perfect, the skin new, uncalloused, and unburned.
What he couldn’t remove was the memory of pain, or the weakness from all the strength his body had given up. But he didn’t care. Weak as he was, his heart was jubilant, because the plow that lay beside him on the ground was living gold, not because he made it, but because he taught it how to make itself.
-Orson Scott Card, Prentice Alvin
It was never about transforming substances. Those were all allegories. The lead and the gold is the lead of the primitive nature into the gold of the enlightened man. Alchemy didn’t talk about lead into gold until it had to deal with the church in the early Middle Ages…
-Orson Scott Card, The Tales of Alvin Maker
In every seed is the promise of thousands of forests.
Deepak Chopra, Seven Spiritual Laws
But the seed must not be hoarded;
it must give its intelligence to the fertile ground.
Through its giving, its unseen energy flows into material manifestation.
Space Case 