Shards of the Fall

Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece, by Hilma Af Klint, 1915

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained” ― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

"He that trusteth in his own heart is a fool: but whoso walketh wisely, he shall be delivered." 

- Proverbs 28:26 (KJV)

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

We live in a universe that is explicit in its brokenness, one in which shards of some greater structure still circle the sun, and yet we like to see this as natural. What story lies behind this destruction? The story of the human heart! 

Now that nature and human nature are not united, we must ply the human heart for the meaning of the universe, and find unification in the search for God through religion. This is the opposite of what we have been told by science for the last two hundred years, which insists man’s inner reality is an illusion, a form of madness, and that the only thing we can believe is that are human natures are developed from the natural processes of the universe, but are not reflections of that universe. This worldview contradicts itself in its own defense, declaring that man must use his mind to explore, discover, compare, and formulate, but then reject any meaning for the human mind, consciousness, or the ways in which it touches reality through the imagination. The rejection of the imagination is a hilarity, in that what science teaches can only be understood or applied through the use of the vehicle that it seemingly rejects. When man’s imagination is enslaved, however, everything else is captive too, because man cannot differentiate the process of projecting mental pictures with the experience of realizing the self. Mankind is defined in contrast to animals, more than by any outward traits or physical correspondence, through his ability to reconstruct the universe in his mind, manipulate it, create sequences with it, and ultimately to play god to himself! 

The world that we see around us, if it is not compatible with the human condition and the human heart. If what is “in here” is not “out there,” then the entire human experience must give way to meaninglessness, and meaninglessness is the basis of suicide. Human Life itself is dependent upon the reality of the imagination, for the only way that we survive is to predict what will happen, showing how close the world inside of us mirrors the world outside. When we tear away the place of the imagination, saying that it is not important, we also rip away the basis for our lives, and emotional and physical death follow. It is not just a process of disappointment with ourselves, but the unwillingness to tell ourselves what should happen next, which is the death of the Western Cultural Dream that we see in the Postmodern age, which is the collapse of motivation and direction within a whole population. 

When we deny the importance of the imagination, when we cease to study it, take it seriously, and mechanize it and manipulate it to make money (as the myth‐makers of media do so often now), we cease to realize its core place in our psyches. The center of the human experience is “narrative,” tied to time and place, and the path through which we all come to “selfness.” There is no other way, and yet we have the “transhumanists” and the “futurists” rallying to change mankind into the unconscious machine, rallying to be defeated by the unthinking, un‐breathing, the un‐living, so that we no longer have to live with the friction between what we feel in our hearts to be the necessity and the world that we continue to destroy and pillage, lacking the basic tools to curb our own broken nature.

Group IX/UW, No. 25, The Dove, No. 1, by Hilma Af Klint, 1915

Our brokenness is an “aside,” something that we can all deny or all accept, but something that is the recurrent subtext of all human civilization. We congratulate ourselves as the empires rise, and we scream in horror as we watch them topple again, under the weight of our scandal, horror, war, and recreational fornication. The arch of history, so aptly described by the Chinese poets, who envisioned an eternal cycle of dynasties, is driven by the weight of human flesh, raising in a righteous cause to head the voice of some prophet, and falling to the gravity of our own depravity, and the rejection of the natural courses we all know to be “ideal.” Where is that break, from one stage to another, and why do we follow this predictable path over and over? The answer is obvious, but in this age, we are forbidden to utter those fateful words, which would wrench man off of his shoddy throne, and plunge him back into the “Dark Ages” (where men waged holy wars because they were not afraid to call themselves holy, and even more, not afraid to die for an abstract point of philosophy). We are terrified of the terrorist, afraid of the fundamentalist, and determined that our empire will not collapse to the hordes of untrained, unthinking, religious rats that dress in black and robe their women. We are convinced that our ways, our brilliant sciences, will lift us to the skies, as the rest of the world falls away, but are unwilling to address the problem that once our civilization has been scanned into a computer, we have nothing to do, and experience will ultimately lose its luster. Perhaps we can shoot a giant gaming machine into the stars, filled with the scanned consciousnesses of billions of enlightened secularists, leaving behind the plight of earth, the coming wars between Christianity and Islam, and wait the millennium in a Greek pleasure garden, until the ship reaches some undiscovered planet, to populate the land by reincarnating the computer’s list of game characters into human flesh. While it might be fun for those involved, and reads much like what “primitive” cultures have believed for centuries, it would not solve the problem. Instead, it would only continue the course on which humanity has been set, the contradiction between our natures and the natural world. There is only one way to get around this conundrum, and science is not apart of this solution. We can turn to the idea of a God, but then find ourselves, again, involved in a religious war. But, can we avoid it? Is it one of those things that we can so easily avoid, if only everyone would be tolerant, live for the moment, and content themselves with material success? Unfortunately, we have never found a solution to what happens after a “golden age,” a time when everyone gets away with doing what they please. Unfortunately, these periods are becoming rarer, and their costs are increasingly high as the world fills us with the less fortunate. The West, recently, has had one of these cultural experiences, but all too quickly has maxed out the world’s capacity in every area, and has opened the tidal wave of the Third World’s appetite for the finer things in life. The world will not survive one generation of Indians and Chinese living like Americans. Neither will Americans survive living as they do currently, even if the rest of the world could be repressed, and the world’s resources stretched to their maximum. There is simply not enough to go around, of oil, lithium, and silicon, and the heavy nuclear elements. Fortunately, we could all go back to dirt farming and be none the worse for wear… the only problem being that we would have to abandon the atheistic humanism that declare man’s ascent into heaven, and that tries to extend our wretched lives longer than we, morally, can extend them. 

The world cannot be separated from man’s consciousness of the world. Reality cannot be questioned without sentiency. Yet, humanity knows nothing about this process, and contents itself with empty promises of a “ghost in the machine” and a “purely physical cause for mankind’s experience.” Even if it were purely physical, why would that change anything? How would proving that cortisol or oxytocin changes one’s attitude change the way in which the attitude can change reality? We live in an elaborate world, full of filigreed rules of being, consciousness, and interplay. We have made the disturbing discoveries of information science, and have ventured to the borders of the Quantum world. The only thing that they show us is that everything is related, that consciousness changes reality, and that we know nothing. We are just as dependent on faith and a numb deference to authority now as we ever were at any time in human history. Now, however, we no longer have an authoritative Western Magisterium of individuals who have taken away all conflicts of interest while discussing the realities of life and culture, and now we listen to groups who sell us things by molding our beliefs, all so that they can reach a goal of economics and power. This is far less ideal, far less human, and far less accountable than anything we’ve seen in history. Instead, we are told not to look at history, and given a variety of entertainments to keep us from looking. Meanwhile, we are isolated from nature, from family, and from any larger sense of self, and become masturbating, single, game‐playing, image‐ruled, consumer‐oriented class that looks astonishingly like a Roman slave. All the while, we declare our Greek Vase-like servitude as the highest form of liberty, and continue to put our backs to the wheel of a commerce that dehumanizes.

Group X, No. 2, Altarpiece, by Hilma Af Klint, 1920