God, the World and the Soul

 The three realities of human existence are God, the world and the soul which is to say the inner subject, the outer object and that from which both of these derive. These can be seen as three points of a triangle with God at the apex. The tragedy of modern man is that the apex point is either denied or, if accepted, seen in the light of some part of the base line. In fact, this point is the only thing that can give meaning and reality to the other two points. Without not just acknowledging God but seeing him as the root of the other two, these two, Man and the World, amount to nothing but confusion and chaos, hence the nihilistic state in which we live even if we cover that up with all kinds of distractions.

Man can only know himself through interaction with the world of objective existence. In his early stages he remains embedded in nature and does not know himself as a free agent. He is still in the arms of the Mother, subject to her moods and seasons. It is the great achievement of Western man that he broke free of Nature and began to master it. The initial phases of this are recorded in myth as the hero fights various monsters, many of these symbolic of the devouring mother that would drag him back down to the pre-conscious state of non-individuality. The rupture with nature brought freedom but also separation and loss. What humanity has achieved is extraordinary but it comes at a cost. When Odin, who can be said to represent Western man, memorably in his guise as Wotan as depicted in Wagner's Ring Cycle, sacrifices his eye in return for wisdom, this signifies the closing down of clairvoyant faculties as the intellectual mind starts to awaken and the free individual asserts himself in subjective consciousness. This is a necessary and vital stage in the evolution of the soul and it was achieved by Western Man more than any other grouping of human beings. However, although it is an evolutionary advance, it leads to eventual calamity, the Gotterdammerung suffered by Wotan and the gods, as individuality goes too far and mastery of nature leads to destruction. Man has conquered the world but lost himself in the process.

We are at that twilight of the gods stage now and all the remedies proposed are useless because they come from within the system. Remaining where we are is alienation and death, but restoring past religion is no good either because it was religion for the herd not the full individuals we have become.  A return to nature is not feasible for the self-conscious beings we now are, and if we try that it will be fake, performative. We cannot go back to the mother and the embryonic bliss of unselfconsciousness. We cannot go back, we cannot stay where we are, we must go through and on. The only solution is to reach for transcendence which means to acknowledge God, but this acknowledgement needs to be twofold. We must see God as the transcendent Creator but also as the ground of our own being and we must align our individual self with that ground. In this way, we eventually become gods ourselves. Not in the way promised by the serpent which offered the temptation of the perfectibility of the separate self, but in and through Christ who raises the self sacrificed in his name up to his own divine state.

The world as we know it is coming to an end. The soul can follow the world or it can follow God. It can identify itself with the world and take the path the world is taking or it can start to identify itself with God and so move out of this world into divine being. This is the choice of our time.