Heraclitus gave the West this image before Plato had the chance to refine it into something more comfortable: a fire that does not warm from outside but burns through everything, and the individual soul not as a vessel receiving illumination but as a spark genuinely of that fire's substance. The appeal is immediate and real. Here is the pneumatic ratio at full intensity — the assurance that the soul's deepest nature participates in the cosmic order, that suffering belongs to the periphery and fire to the center. It works. That is what makes it worth staying with rather than simply accepting.

Notice what the image requires you to believe: that the logos seeds are already adequate replicas, that the world soul's essence is *in* you intact, waiting to be recognized. The dream imagery Edinger points to carries this same structural confidence. But dreams do not always confirm the spark; sometimes they show the spark guttering, or burning the wrong things, or mistaken entirely about what it illuminates. The Stoics built an entire ethics on Heraclitean fire and arrived at apatheia — the dry soul perfected into stillness. That destination was already implicit in the image's logic. What the fire cannot account for is the soul that keeps getting wet.