The Shackles Of Fallen Men

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but meditatively, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorted lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us.

Nature, art, persons, letters, religion,—objects, successfully tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast. The street is full of humiliations to the proud. As the fop contrived to dress his bailiffs in his livery, and make them wait on his guest at table, so the chagrins which the bad heart gives off as bubbles, at once take form as ladies and gentlemen in the street, shoppers or barkeepers in hotels, and threaten or insult whatever is threaten-able and insult-able in us.

Tis the same with idolatries. People forget that it is the eye which makes the horizon, and the rounding mind’s eye which makes this or that man a type or representative of humanity with the name hero or saint.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1844 essay, Experience opens a door of awareness and the light of self responsibility comes crashing through our colored lenses of ritualistic beliefs and judgmental tomfoolery. We are the creators of our reality not the Fallen men who believed that some perverse God picks and chooses good over evil. We do the picking and we create the evil as well as the good. As Emerson mentions God is an idea. God is a thought that serves our purpose. We measure God in a world of measurability, but there is nothing to measure. Our religious beliefs create a God worthy to kill for so we battle to overcome the our own creations. We believe we must be disciplined and reconfigured into a ritualistic fiend in order to be saved.

We are never lost. We are never disconnected from the portion of the conscious mind that is not connected to the brain. That portion of the self may not be obvious, but it exists. That portion exists in a creative brew that overflows with energy.

Beneath our usual awareness the unconscious mind’s eye sees a horizon where the self dances without believing in the shackles of Fallen Men.

Psychic Patterns

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works; and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most unexpected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of the forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain summit, and the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the rock. There are men whose manners have the same essential splendor as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the books of all age

If anyone will but take pains to observe the variety of actions to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the chain of affinity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1841 essay, History reminds us that nature manifests physically in order to teach us something about the self. The consciousness of nature has incredible beauty and an awesome imagination that keeps creating new examples of what our inner world is like. It shows us our multiplicity as well as our innate beauty. The delicacy, strength, and expansion found in nature are expressions of a quality of consciousness that has the desire to be physical without restrictions.

When we are in touch with our psyche we experience direct knowledge. Direct knowledge is comprehension. In dreams we experience direct knowledge in a different way, and that way is much more similar to nature’s way of expressing the self.But our indirect knowledge may or may not lead to physical comprehension. The psyche functions using associative processes and those associations are tied together with emotional experiences, which defy time. Nature does not express emotion the way we do physically, but it does express it through an innate associative process. In our psychic areas all patterns of knowledge, civilizations, cultures, sciences, religions, personal and mass accomplishments, and arts and technologies exist in a timeless emotional pattern that run counter to many of our accepted core beliefs so they may appear super-normal to us.

At birth there is a pattern for a complete adult body in place, and in nature a similar pattern exists. The private psyche is aware of that pattern so there are certain probabilities and inclinations present in our biological structure, which are triggered by our intents and desires. We usually believe that this information comes from outside of the self, but just like an rose or a hibiscus, our beauty comes from the psychic patterns that express themselves as they move through different regions of consciousness. We are more like that young dogwood sapling, or the blooming lotus than we realize, and we are much more transparent than amoebas that enjoy the essence of a single cell.