Focused Aggression

The world exists for the education of each man. There is no age or state of society or mode of action in history to which there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Every thing tends in a wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history in his own person. He must sit solidly at home, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, but know that he is greater than all geography and all the government of the world: He must transfer the point of view from which history is commonly read, from Rome and Athens and London to himself and not deny his conviction that he is the court, and if England or Egypt have any thing to say to him, he will try the case; if not, let them for ever be silent.

He must attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in the use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine and even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden, the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thence forward to all nations.

Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign? London, Paris and New York must go the same way. “What is History,” said Napoleon, “but a fable agreed upon.” This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonization, Church, Court and Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain and the Islands; the genius and creative principle of each and of all eras in my own mind.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those words in his 1842 essay History. The world exists thanks to our focused aggression at birth. The conscious mind is forever eternal. It is constantly moving and changing as we master our creative aggression in the flesh. Energy is aggressiveness in action. We create exotic adventures, and file them in a category marked history in our body consciousness. We use that history to confirm as well as change our belief structure. Normal aggressiveness flows like a stream in the action of our energy, and that stream powers our thoughts. We can restrict or restrain energy or we collect it and file it in our body consciousness, and then release it through some aggressive form of action.

Eventually we discover that everything in and around us vibrates in a magnetic field of aggressive energy. Our challenge is to recognize agressivenss when it is ignored, unexpressed and denied over an extended period of time. When aggressive energy is ignored it changes from natural aggression to explosive, and distorted repressed aggression and that energy changes our thoughts and experiences.