Aesop's fable of the Lion, the Mouse, and the Blue Butterfly

On December 22, I posted "Happy 85th birthday, Jerry Pinkney," a post which was occasioned by my discovery of that artist's version of Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse. This was in the middle of a flurry of blue-butterfly syncs, which began on December 1 -- see "Synchronicity, symmetry, and Menelaus blue morpho (and blue Mormon) butterflies" -- and is still going strong.

This morning I was asked to read an English story to children at a local preschool. The school would provide the book. When I arrived, I found that it was Aesop's fable of the Lion and the Mouse. In this version of the story, the lion spends most of his time on the plains but sometimes goes to his cave in the jungle to sleep. The mouse explores the cave at a time when he thinks the lion will be out on the plains, but the lion returns earlier than expected and catches him.

The page that introduces the lion's cave prominently features a blue butterfly -- not biologically accurate enough to be any particular species, I think, but certainly suggestive of a morpho.

In addition to the fable itself and the blue butterfly, the cave got my attention. Back in June of last year, as recounted in "Étude brute?," I had a vision in which I was in a cavern with the Holy Family and then passed into a larger cavern that was full of books. In a second post the same day, "This episode is brought to you by the letters G and L," I linked this vision with the L page in Graeme Base's Animalia, which has two lions in a library, since my vision had also featured two large golden animals and a "library" in the form of a cave full of books.

I had actually just been revisiting that vision just hours before reading the story to the preschoolers. I've just started reading Denver Snuffer's book The Second Comforter, which is supposed to be a sort of how-to manual for receiving a personal visitation from Jesus Christ in the flesh. On p. 4, Snuffer writes:

This involves having the heavens open to you, just as they have opened to others before you. It is the culminating part of Christ's Gospel, in which Christ ministers to you as He has ministered to others before.

That "heavens open" was a major red flag for me, a suggestion that the "visitation" might not be as literal as advertised. In my July 14 post "Visions as irruptions of dreaming consciousness into waking life," inspired largely by my cave vision of the month before, I had written:

The language about the heavens opening and closing never had any specific meaning for me before, but now I recognize it as a very natural way of describing visions like my own. There is a sense that the visual field "opens up," as if one is seeing behind a backdrop, and when I read Smith and Cowdery's language [in D&C 110] about a veil being taken away and the heavens opening, it seemed to me that they had to be describing the same kind of experience.

In other words, I was recognizing that Smith and Cowdery were reporting a vision, not a literal visitation by Elijah and company. I concluded the post with this:

I'm not discounting dreams and visions, of course, but vision is not reality. I mean, I myself have had a vision of the Holy Family, but I would never presume to say that I have seen Jesus Christ with my own eyes or anything like that.

Visions need to be clearly distinguished from actual events. Visions are symbolic. 

So Snuffer's language about "having the heavens open" made me suspect that he had after all just had a vision of Jesus, perhaps not qualitatively different from my own. Of course I'll keep reading and see if that suspicion if borne out. Anyway, the point is that his language had brought back the memory of that cave vision.

I read the "heavens open" reference last night. Then just this morning, before going to the preschool, I read this on p. 28 of Snuffer's book:

In contrast with those who have seen God through their obedience to Him, there is no example of anyone who has used their reasoning to bring them face to face with God. Since no one has returned from the library and reported they met God there, we won't attempt that course.

This made me smile, since my own vision -- which I had already hypothesized might be the same sort of thing Snuffer is writing about -- had involved a "library" in a cave and had also taken place, in terms of real-world location, in my own personal study, or library.

And really, Denver, don't be so quick to assume where people can and cannot come face to face with God! Maybe read some Edna St. Vincent Millay sometime.

There were no lions in my vision, but I had almost immediately associated it with Base's "lions lounging in a library," and so the lion in the cave seemed significant, especially when accompanied by the syncs of the Aesop fable and the blue butterfly.

I went and got my copy of Animalia, intending to look at the L picture again, but I didn't get past the cover. The front cover, which I have already posted about in "The horrible hairy homeward-hurrying hogs of Hieronymus" (which also features Dürer's picture of St. Jerome, Jerry to his friends), has lots of different animals on it, but the lion is by far the most prominent:

And what's that by the lion's right front paw?

I'd never specially noticed the back cover of Animalia before, but it sure got my attention today:

Many things are indeed "of a kind," but I think I lost track of the score long ago.