Chapter Two
"Sanctity and insanity are very near each other,” he continued. “They share an almost mimicry-like relationship. Whether it is a Batesian mimicry or Mullerian mimicry I am not sure. But, there is something about them that feels similar and redundant; but I cannot say which came first. Did sanctity imitate insanity, or the other way around? I cannot say. Not yet. They are each clearly in close proximity; and, have a deep and rich impact on the other.
“Sanctity sometimes appears as insanity and insanity sometimes appears as sanctity. Though they feel as if they are reflecting the other, they both really just flow forth from one stream. Yes, that is it, they come from a common locale. In that locus they are one. As they flow out they are two.
“They emerge from one state. Their origins are so close in proximity that people often confuse them. They have one source. And yet, we would want to say, or believe, or know that they are opposite. They are not. Not until they further themselves away from themselves.
"It is a real trick to know the difference. The person that can distinguish sanctity from insanity is a being with true discrimination. Someone who can see the difference between these two (and any pair of opposites that are one, for that matter) has tasted of the Divine Streams — from the one stream.
That one knows how to discern intention. That one is somehow an enlightened one. They have cut to the core of the soul and its power of the will.
"The notions of sanctity and insanity must swirl around each other for a bit. They must weave themselves in and out of the mind, allowing for the arising of fear and then the cessation of that arising. They must play and dance within the heart and mind and soul of an individual until they are birthed from his core.
"Sanctity and insanity not only lie close at bay to each other, they sort of share the same house. They both lie close at bay to anyone who seeks the truth. They inhabit that one – who seeks the truth. They have one source.
"They are both in there, screaming for equal time. Each wants center stage. They each want to claim the mind for its own ground. They each want to claim the heart and the soul for their own ground. Sanctity wants to eat and digest the mind and paint it with the hues of piety and power, while insanity wants to devour and absorb every social skill and quiescence to the whole. Even if it is a slow usurpation of one over another.
There was a sense that these ideas and these concepts themselves had gotten ahold of Tierney and had become the masters of his house. They ruled him – like all obsessions do. Like a set of gnomes or trolls that had fallen upon some cottage in the woods they stormed the place, took over and began guarding the door. No one in; no one out, without their say so.
He would write and write out the ideas on the page. He’d go back and reword or correct each paragraph until it sang out from the page like an opera; woven wisps of a tale from Norse mythology that had taken shape and form in song. When it had felt solid and firm, he’d move on to the next paragraph.
These writings were for himself. He was dappling and experimenting with concepts all his life and the way he found out what a concept looked like was to talk about it on paper and find out its worth, its boundaries, the stuff from which it was made. He needed to enflesh the invisible to get a better sense about it. And, it helped as he was building his momentum of word, concept, and practice for how he could teach his students.
"Knowing they are similar and somewhat commingled is encouraging and unnerving. It is encouraging in that everyone has a bit of insanity in them that they would like to feel was somehow “sanctity”. It is unnerving in that no one really wants there to be too much “insanity” in them.
“Being human and housing these two sister states within is somehow the daunting miracle of our existence. It is a great thing to be overcome by something greater than ourselves, but it is frightening as well.
“Being taken by something larger than oneself can be bliss, but it is also a battle. For the battle is not for distinction, but union.
"If both sanctity and in-sanity dwell inside of you, they are good-news and bad-news. Some days you are glad they are there; other days you wish you would have no idea, no inkling of what I am talking about."
He put down his pen.
This is what John Aaron Tierney discovered the day he unveiled the secret of the philosopher's stone; the day he stumbled on that simple seed passage; the day his life began to slowly change into gold.
These words and ideas had built up in him over the thirty-five years and poured themselves out of him and onto the page for days, until they were refined and ordered to make as much sense as he could give them.
He shaped them into what they already were – the philosopher’s stone.
Tierney knew that the philosopher's stone existed and he knew it was within his reach to uncover, master and put to use. What he did not know; what he could never have known is when he would obtain it and how.
He could not know if he would discover it on this side of sanity, if he could discover it on this side of sanctity. He knew it was in there, surrounded by these two fates - these cackling sisters: sanctity and insanity. They were it and it, they.
The philosopher's stone was one of those items in the universe that straddled two worlds. Call it a talisman, a vortex, a channel, call it what you like, but it had meaning and a piece of its identity in both worlds.
It bespoke the hidden and the ordinal. It was a receptacle of both the visible and the invisible. It held both sanctity and insanity. It was the great conjoiner of opposites of the beloved Carl Gustav Jung. The philosopher's stone brought it all together. The stone was somehow a harbinger of the primal state of union that exists before union becomes opposites.
The philosopher's stone had been rumored for centuries. Alchemical masters from the dawn of time had postulated an element that could change base metals into gold. Philosophical masters, from Zosimos of Pantopolis right through to Sir Isaac Newton, wrote about its existence, and journaled tales of emergence.
Some along the way even boasted of having found such an element, such a stone and put it to use. Today there are no proven accounts of possessors of such a stone. None to date, that is.
None, until John Aaron Tierney.
by, N. Thomas Johnson-Medland © 2015 All Rights Reserved
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