Household Fire Of Consciousness

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifestations of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this communication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the following of the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central commandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the performance of a great action, which comes out of the heat of nature.

In these communications the power to see is not separated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obedience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. Every moment when the individual feels himself invaded by it is memorable. By the necessity of our constitution, a certain enthusiasm attends the individual’s consciousness of that divine presence. The character and duration of the enthusiasm varies with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and prophetic inspiration, which is rarer appearance, to the faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and makes society possible.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote those words in his 1841 essay The Over-soul. Our cells have a personal kind of memory. Every experience is etched in our atoms and molecules, and when we are in a certain states of awareness mass memories can be activated. These memories may not just involved our personal experiences. All memories and experiences in our life are written in the expanding memory of the universe. In specific states of awareness these memories may be animated in an entirely different framework.

At certain points in linear time we may spontaneously experiences these mass memories. We search our beleif structure and find the appropriate belief and then label the experience. If there is no past memory of an experience, we usually rely on religion or our faith in the unknown to interpret it. These experiences are a natural part of our psyche, but we tend to label them unnatural. The unnatural warms our household fire of consciousness and eventually these experiences become natural. There is nothing unnatural about the nature of the psyche. It is the wave that hits the wall of reality in our sea of life.