AtD translation: atonement

[David Morris]

I completely agree with everything Mike says below. And just adding some
small bits:

1.  The word, “Atonement,” is most commonly used in a Christian-religious
sense in Western culture, and I’m sure you can find MANY volumes of its
explication.  Most simply I think it’s used to describe a form of PAYMENT
made to an authority to achieve a state of RECONCILIATION.  It’s a
*vehicle* *back* to a previous state/status.

Preachers sometimes explain to the flock that it means:
“AT-ONE-NESS”, meaning back to being “at one” (unified) with God.

David Morris

On Tue, Mar 8, 2022 at 1:57 AM Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
wrote:

> P688.7-14   The first step in our Discipline here is learning how to
> re-acquire that rarefaction, that condition of light, to become once more
> able to pass where we will, through lantern-horn, through window-glass,
> eventually, though we risk being divided in two, through Iceland spar,
> which is an expression in crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes
> through the Æther, altering dimensions, and creating double refraction. . .
> .” He paused at the door. “Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the
> journey. Do have something to eat, there’s a good chap.”
>
> In what sense is "atonement" used here?
>
>
>
> Hmm - good question.
> Just to ramble on about context might be helpful & fun - Context is Lew
> just realized that Neville and Nigel are only pretending to be idiots &
> that they know that Werfner and Renfrew are the same person, bilocating.
>
> Lew realizes that a lot of the Twits know this. Miffed at being left out.
>
> Spends the day in the Twit library stacks reading up on bilocation.
>
> Talks with Dr Ghloix, a Swiss alienist he met in the Twit mess-hall (!) who
> mollifies him by saying it’s traditional for people not to learn stuff
> until they’re ready for it.
>
> He characterizes Werfner- Renfrew as
> “afflicted … by a deep and fatal contradiction—deeper than consciously he
> can appreciate, and
> as a result the conflict has no other place to go but outward, ejected into
> the outside world, there to be carried out as what technically we call
> Schicksal—Destiny—with the world around him now obliged to suffer the
> disjunction in himself which he cannot, must not, admit . . . so pretending
> to be two ‘rivals’ representing the interests of two ‘separate nations’
> which are much more likely secular expressions of a rupture within a single
> damaged soul.”
>
>
> Lew then lights a Welsbach unit (lantern using rare earth wick - Welsbach
> company is still around) sitting on the table, as night falls.
>
> https://digital.sciencehistory.org/works/hliewun
>
>
> The Cohen brings him some vegetarian supper, and to Lew’s lantern light he
> adds greatly by having Lew help him light up a ceiling lighting arrangement
>
> (“…Plafond Lumineux, a modern mixed arrangement of gas-mantles and electric
> incandescent bulbs arching across the entire library ceiling and covered by
> a pale translucent canopy of some proprietary celluloid which smoothed
> these sources, when at last they had all been lit, into a depthless dome of
> light somehow much brighter than their sum.“)
>
>
> - which is a little reminiscent of the light in the pool area of the
> Deseret in BE -
>
> - and also, the guru aspect of adding light
>
> Then the Cohen, shedding more intellectual light, on the subject of light -
>
>
> “Of course it helps to have some allegiance to light.”  “How’s that?”
>
> “As if imparting a secret Lew could not help thinking he had somehow,
> without knowing how, become ready to hear, the Cohen said, “We are light,
> you see, all of light—we are the light offered the batsmen at the end of
> the day, the shining eyes of the beloved, the flare of the safety-match at
> the high city window, the stars and nebulæ in full midnight glory, the
> rising moon through the tram wires, the naphtha lamp glimmering on the
> costermonger’s barrow. . . . When we lost our æthereal being and became
> embodied, we slowed, thickened, congealed to”—grabbing each side of his
> face and wobbling it back and forth—“this. The soul itself is a memory we
> carry of having once moved at the speed and density of light. The first
> step in our Discipline here is learning how to re-acquire that rarefaction,
> that condition of light, to become once more able to pass where we will,
> through lantern-horn, through window-glass, eventually, though we risk
> being divided in two, through Iceland spar, which is an expression in
> crystal form of Earth’s velocity as it rushes through the Æther, altering
> dimensions, and creating double refraction. . . .” He paused at the door.
> “Atonement, in any case, comes much later in the journey. Do have something
> to eat, there’s a good chap.”
>
>
> Which is a nice speech; and isn’t it kind of similar to the credo at that
> convent Cyprian joins?
>
> But as to “atonement” - could the Cohen be referring back to Lew’s original
> “upstate-downstate” guilt in Chicago?
> Major guru action: foretelling an eventual solution, if Lew cleaves to the
> path and progresses, for problems the guy himself has forgotten about.
>
> Anyhoo, that’s my analysis.
> Urinalysis may differ (-;
> --
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>