Necessity

Necessity
Then back once more, to what the stars had fated:
Conditioning and law; and wish from willing
Can only come since we are obligated,
Our will then all our fitful fancies killing;
Its dearest from the heart is extirpated,
Hard ‘Must’ prevails, both will and fancy willing,
Thus, though we seem free, yet constrictions bind us
More closely still than those that first confined us.

The fourth stanza of Goethe’s poem, Primal Words Orphic, is interesting not only for its meaning but for its innate message. Goethe wrote the poem to identify different stages in life and to sense the perceptions created by those stages. This stanza is about adulthood and what we believe about it. Goethe realized that the word freedom is not free in the act of experiencing it physically. Conditioning and laws create a distorted sense of freedom. Freedom dances in and out of our life as we move through these stages. Adulthood is a state of wishing and willing, where we live for the future, not the present.

Obligations taint our perceptions. Our choices vibrate in a sea of fitful fancies that manifest as we create them. We tend to believe in fate until we sense our own ability to change the cause and effect of our destiny. There is no prophetic declaration that says we must conform to rigid linguistics that affects our efforts to be truly free from the insipid rationality of duality. We are the oracle, as well as the audience, as we move through linear illusions. Believing in our extirpation, we look at the heart, and not the organs that support it. We wallow in sickness until we find the desire or willingness to open another door of awareness in the ruble of our self created contrast.

Goethe’s 18th and 19th century world was filled with a churning and knurling of consciousness that consistently opened portals of energy that magically appeared. They were labeled fate or destiny, and was extirpated in the bowels of unawareness. Restless and groping for new awareness, the energy of consciousness expressed adulthood in bondage with no relief or extradition. The solution or ultimate change was the unacceptance of death.