The Great Separation

One of the greatest mis-perceptions of the human condition is the division between objective and subjective reality.  While this mis-perception is indeed real to us living in the physical domain, the division is abolished only through initiation and death.  Only then is the fullness of reality and the depth our own humanity revealed to us.  This division, which is an artifact of decay, has lead not only to modern philosophy, but modern philosophy’s inevitable conclusion, reductionism.

Long before modern science and so-called modern “philosophy” stole the human soul and reduced it to an abstract reality or a possibility, human beings didn’t possess the division between objective and subjective reality.  This lack of division caused humanity to experience the divine as an integral part of life.  God spoke to men and women and there was no abnormality involved in that exchange.  There was no distinction between the mind and the landscape, reality was free to have distinctions in divine unity without contention.  Under those terms, a being was truly immortal and so was the world he or she was living in.  The great mystery, however, is that that divine and immortal world is still there, still immortal–but physical humanity being at heart divided, cannot penetrate the great mystery in order to return to its divine seat.  We are therefore forced to mold these ontological secrets into a mythology or a psychology, or we wrap them up in some type of initiatic riddle saving it for the day we have finally prepared ourselves to face that startling truth of what we really are.

In those immortal days the angels, heroes, gods and divine worlds didn’t merely exist in the imagination of the individual.  There was no petitioning between fallen men and women and God. Reality was pristine and present everywhere at every moment, free and immortal.  Today, we can only vaguely touch that world in our dreams when our waking mind conditioned by modern culture is quieted by sleep.   If we go back to the writings of the  historians of the ancient world like Strabo and Josephus, we find a world filled to the brim with things we cannot understand.  Today most scholars simply overlook these writings and say that these men were victims of an overactive and superstitious imagination.  Strabo writes of physical beings traded among the Egyptians that by all accounts shouldn’t have existed.  Josephus near the time of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70AD tells us about chariots and divine armies being projected onto the sky.  What is one to make of such stories?  Could it be that the further the physical domain extends into time and space, the more ephemeral these strange realities become until humanity is forced to deny them altogether?

I do not believe that this division of objective and subjective reality happened all at once. The last 6000 years of recorded history have shown us that this was a gradual separation from the divine.  To be clear, even today this separation is not entirely complete and if it were we could rightly say:

Yet we have not yet lost hope that our memory might return to us some day. Had this separation happened all at once, the world would have perished long ago.  The separation between the objective and subjective reality was facilitated by two very distinct currents inherent in nature.  One is the current of Tradition and Archetype.  And the other is the current of modernity and “going forth”.  How and why these currents emerge from that pristine whole state is something that cannot be known on this side of the grave while we are yet divided and incomplete.  All that can be said, but never actualized, is that this great separation is only an appearance, and that by undergoing a sometimes long and laborious process of self-cultivation and inward purification, a person begins to see this pristine world reflecting in the physical to the extent that the worlds may at certain moments unite through the individual.

While I may be oversimplifying these currents, this is all very important to understand. There has always been the current of tradition, which sought to keep objective and subjective reality whole in a divine unity.  And then there was the current of modernity and reductionism that sought to rip it apart. Standing at the Sun Door are two Cherubim with flaming swords to block the entrance to all beings who are divided.  In other words, unless a being through deep self-exploration uncovers this division within themselves and mends it, they can never fully return nor can they ever come to that consuming realization of what they truly are.

It is important to realize that the battle between these distinct currents isn’t merely happening in the physical domain, but also within the soul of the individual.  Those that are victims of the modern age tend to be the ones whose personal ethos follows with the popular opinion of the times in which we live.  Abraham Lincoln is good because the state tells us so.  Mussolini was evil because the state tells us so.  The sacred cows of the modern world must be toppled if one ever hopes to ascend beyond the mundane.   The state sponsored ideas of good and evil and the cults of personality broadcast through television, books, and the Internet must be cast aside.  This world is not nor has it ever been what it appeared to be.