The Promised Land Project: In the Realm of the Prophets: Restoring the Fall of Man

Turning Vision into Action....at least hypothetically

Strike up the music of the band
We're blazing a trail for the promised land
Heaven on earth is within you.

Through the writing of stories, poetry, essays, and a novel, I’ve creatively contended with the consumer culture and the problem of the ideal in the modern era. This preoccupation in time would lead to a vision of cultural transformation and where I believe our democratic society needs to go to truly progress beyond the modern era. Conceding my limited credibility, this blog provides a synthesis of recognized visionaries, poets, and writers with the objective of making a credible argument. Ultimately, it is a certain feeling the project strives to inspire and sustain on a certain level, making more vital use of poetry and the arts; consequently whether one agrees or not is less important than whether one senses it and feels it over time.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

In the Realm of the Prophets: Restoring the Fall of Man

As addressed in the previous blog, the allegory of the Fall of Man addresses broadly the problem of the human condition and specifically the dispiritualizing affects of the fall into self-conciousness. When Christ comes onto the scene and says that to follow him one must pick up the cross and deny the self, I expect he's redressing this same problem of the human condition; he is exhorting his followers to move beyond the consciousness of the self and attain the spiritual realm of a collective consciousness and the feeling of unity with God and others.

Yet it is this feeling that's proved elusive in human history. Without question, the early Christians achieved it and sustained it on such a level as to overtake the Roman Empire, despite its daunting persecutions, thus attesting to its power to transform. As reflected in the verse from the Biblical Book of Hebrews, cited in the previous blog entry of October 4, there was a sense of a new convenant where people would no longer didactically proclaim “know the Lord” but feel it, with the commandments regarding their neighbors imbued on their hearts.

But as Christianity became an institution it inevitably conforms to some degree or other to the ways of the world for its operations and thus becomes more mundane; and it's back to telling people to “know the Lord” with the peculiar addition to “know Jesus” as well. In the modern era, following the horror of the First World War with its participant nations predominatly Christian, the writer D.H. Lawrence bristled against the moral order of his day. From his book Apocalypse, Lawrence wrote as follows:

With Jesus, a new thing came into the world. And we can say with confidence, that no further thing will ever come into the world again, without a further new breath of love, and of tenderness.

It is a certain feeling that were after, one that can also be sustained. To harness it, I expect it will come through a greater role for the arts in revitalizing the moral culture. I imagine that the restoration of the Fall of Man will be an affective mix of insouciance and experience, truth, physicality, and a deep level of acceptance towards others and one's self. That all may seem quite distant from our current state of affairs. Yet we seem to get a glimpse of it from time to time, in the present and throughout human history, a feeling that maybe we're not so far as we may feel at times.