Arab Americans -- Fiction; Immigrants -- New York (State) -- New York -- Fiction
"I say with psychologists, as the organism, so is the personality.
The revelation of the Me is perfect in proportion to the sound state
of the Medium. But according to the Arabic proverb, the jar oozes of
its contents. If these be of a putridinous mixture, therefore, no
matter how sound the jar, the ooze is not going to smell of ambergris
and musk. So, it all depends on the contents with which the Potter
fills his jugs and pipkins, I assure you. And if the contents are
good and the jar is sound, we get such excellence of soul as is rare
among mortals. If the contents are excellent and the jar is cracked,
the objective influence will then predominate, and putrescence,
soon or late, will set in. Now, the Me in the majority of mankind
comes to this world in a cracked pipkin, and it oozes out entirely as
soon as it liquifies in youth. The pipkin, therefore, goes through
life empty and cracked, ever sounding flat and false. While in
others the Me is enclosed in a sealed straw-covered flask and can
only be awakened by either evaporation or decapitation, in other
words, by a spiritual revolution. And in the very few among mortals,
it emerges out of the iron calyx of a flower of red-hot steel, or
flows from the transparent, odoriferous bosom of a rose of light. In
the first we have a Cæsar, an Alexander, a Napoleon; in the second,
a Buddha, a Socrates, a Christ.
"But consider that Science, in the course of psychological analysis,
speaks of Christ, Napoleon, and Shakespeare, as patients. Such exalted
states of the soul, such activity of the mind, such exuberance of
spiritual strength, are but the results of the transformation of the
Me in the subject, we are told, and this transformation has its roots
in the organism. But why, I ask, should there be such a gulf between
individuals, such a difference in their Mes, when a difference in the
organism is a trifle in comparison? How account for the ebb and flow
in the souls, or let us say, in the expression of the individualities,
of Mohammad the Prophet, for instance, and Mohammad the camel-herd?
And why is it in psychological states that are similar, the
consciousness of the one is like a mountain peak, so to speak, and
that of the other like a cave?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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