There comes a point in time when some grow weary of vehemently attempting to convince others of the truthfulness of their words. Perhaps they never read Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist.” If they had, they wouldn’t have encountered such a difficulty. For Coelho’s alchemist teaches the Andalusian shepherd therein one of the most crucial lessons of life: “When you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed,” (Coelho 141). Simply put, truths are not concealed, but rejected.
To put it better in perspective, I’m inclined to incorporate an excerpt from“The Alchemist,” to convey the context in which that was said to the reader,
“The tribesman who was searching the alchemist’s belongings found a small crystal flask filled with a liquid, and a yellow glass egg that was slightly larger than a chicken’s egg.
“What are these things?” he asked.
“That’s the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. It’s the Master Work of the alchemists. Whoever swallows that elixir will never be sick again, and a fragment from that stone turns any metal into gold.”
The Arabs laughed at him, and the alchemist laughed along. They thought his answer was amusing, and they allowed the boy and the alchemist to proceed with all of their belongings.
“Are you crazy?” the boy asked the alchemist, when they had moved on. “What did you do that for?””
Thence the alchemist’s life wisdom,
““To show you one of life’s simple lessons,” the alchemist answered. “When you possess great treasures within you, and try to tell others of them, seldom are you believed.”” (Coelho 140, 141)
The imbecile is both superstitious and skeptic. Conspiracy is never an alien concept to the imbecile. The whole universe conspires against him, and is constantly at work to keep the truth from him. Or so is his conviction.
Day and night he stumbles upon truths, which he instinctively dismisses and rejects. The imbecile is wholly a creature of the base corporeal world and is incapable of transcendence. Whilst truths are sublime, incorporeal, and transcendent. Thus, they stand incompatible with the imbecile’s ideals of reality. But his reality is not reality as is: it is a hyperreality that, at best, obscures—more precisely, supplants—reality.
An imbecile comes across a diligent man pursuing his calling, and asks the latter,
“What are you on to?”
The purposive man responds,
“I’m set about saving the planet!”
The imbecile chuckles, observing that the man is only collecting trash off the shore. His feeble and uncultivated mind fails to establish the correlation between the demeaning task and the grand end. “This trash-man is trying to deceive me into believing that there is a higher purpose to his little job!” The imbecile thinks to himself.
But, there is where truths naturally lie. Truths are usually found in the little, devoted, unappealing and unnoticed, and most humane acts of altruism, genuine compassion, and strife. They are all too often rejected, nonetheless.
Sublime, transcendent, and incorporeal as they inherently are, truths are perpetual. Thus, it is only possible for an ‘instant’ to capture an insignificant abstract—a fractured fragment of any one truth—at any given time—; that is further tainted and distorted, denigrating the whole, by the authority of the predominant hyperreality which governs the life of an imbecile. The hyperreal is per se limited to definite expanses of time i.e. it is impermanent. Not only absent-minded; but altogether absent; as Jean Baudrillard put it; the imbecile takes comfort in his slothfulness, and opts for rejection in lieu of more in depth observation.
For the Master Work of the alchemists—which is, the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life—properly understood [emphasis added] is a person’s heart and its voice, respectively. Only with a fulness of heart may one receive the truths of this life; as the heart alone, of all things pertaining to the human, speaks the universal language of the world—the one spoken by the very Spirit of the World; whilst the latter being the solemn utterer of all truths.
In fine, nothing which is or must needs be is ever concealed. It is either accepted and received; or rejected and dismissed.
Reference
Coelho, Paulo. The Alchemist. HarperCollins, 2015.
