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.