The Promised Land Project: In the Realm of the Prophets: Seeing through the Lens of the Soul

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.

Thursday, September 9, 2010

In the Realm of the Prophets: Seeing through the Lens of the Soul

For the poet, it's less about attaining knowledge of the soul so much as being impressed by it in a deep and profound revelation of sympathy, a recognition of the human desire to love and be loved at the core of our being. Whitman, through his poetry, subsequently strives to provide vision and validation to his democratic brethren (in contrast to validation, the deeply wounded Rimbaud lashed out in derision). As the circumstances of my own situation enabled me to see, on some level, what I believe Whitman saw, so I became acutely conscious of the limitations of poetry as art to achieve those ends. Subsequently I've created a poetic framework through which the arts can be injected.

The soul is the key to vision because through its lens one can make sense of the present and project a greater future. Putting a more secular spin on it, one can make sense of the present and project a greater future through the lens of the primal past. Use of the word primal soul draws from a little bit of both the mystic and the scientific. At any rate, both heaven and hell on earth are projections of either extreme social-emotional climate based on models of human nature.

Our attempts to progress through education and reason often fail to take into account this dynamic of our collective nature. Our ability negotiate through reason becomes impaired by the myriad of collective possibilities of group identity; in addition, there is also the threat -- real or perceived -- of invalidation and the human tendency to acquire knowledge not to question but reinforce one's viewpoint.

Through the lens of the primal soul, human history appears in a flux between the individual and the collective. The arc of human history appears as follows: on one end, the collective spirit of a hunting and gathering society with the individual acting in harmony with others and nature; then following the course of human history, through its tragedies and triumph, to arrive at the other end, toward the eventual triumph of the human spirit in a global society of individual freedom acting in harmony with others and nature.