The fact remains: In the human realm, the impersonal principles of truth must inevitably be transmitted through limited personalities to limited personalities. Both as receivers and transmitters, it is our job—our chief priority, at times—to get the ‘personal’ factors out of the way so that the clear and cleansing truth will encounter fewer obstructions and ‘coloring agents’ as it passes into and through our minds. This having been said, there appears to be a right way and a wrong way to go about this depersonalization process. Like ‘nature,’ you can throw out personality with a pitchfork, but it always seems to find its way back in through the back door. What I have learned is that it makes better sense to thoroughly acquaint myself with all the various forms and guises that the ‘personal’ can assume within me and take all available precautions against excessive vulnerability to personal prejudices, desires, righteous anger, preferences, and other potentially derailing predispositions. If, so long as I am human, I cannot entirely eradicate these drives, habits, and impulses, I can certainly learn to recognize all of them and work to moderate their power over my thinking and feeling. What I have found, of course, is that simply by acknowledging them, their power to possess and commandeer my mind is significantly diminished. If, on the other hand, I ignore or unconsciously repress them—if I try to leap over them or to tyrannically reduce them (as some conscious and unconscious moralists do) to foes on a grand battlefield—then I will soon enough be at their mercy. Dante is not permitted to climb the seven-storey mountain of Purgatory until after he has made his (guided) descent into hell—and learned the many critical lessons that are to be learned there. Thus, I have at last resigned myself to the fact that I must descend into the muck and mire of my own ‘personal mess’—and sort things out thoroughly and properly—before I can truly become eligible to abide in the paradise I have experienced in glimpses and brief stays. Those visions and brief visits powerfully inspire me—and they bolster my resolve when I am down in the pits and sulfur mines of my personal psyche—urging me onwards with my pickaxe, as I dig my way into and out of my self-created hell. As I dig, I am comforted by the certain knowledge that this work is archetypal—that there is a universal ground and basis to this path of liberation, a ground or essential truth that both transcends and, at the same time, informs all particular cultural and religious expressions of our common spiritual plight as errant, confused, and anxious human beings.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 02:25:29 +0000