You know how you sometimes have those experiences of coincidences, or deja vu, that thrust two seemingly completely different aspects of your life together? I love those moments. Finding ways that I can draw all the different experiences of my life into a common theme helps me make sense of the insensible and find purpose in those, at first random, little day-to-day happenings. I try to search out these moments but have found time and time again that they are revealed to me always when I least expect them. As I've been stumbling across many of them recently I feel compelled to share them.
I spent a good portion of last evening catching up on some reading, particularly 'The Power of Myth' by Joseph Campbell. A fascinating book, but I don't have time to expound upon it's great importance right now. In this particular section, Campbell is talking about the changing in the importantce of spiritual principles as society grows and progresses forward in technological advancements. He says, 'You can tell what's informing a society by what the tallest building is. When you approach a medieval town, the cathedral is the tallest thing in the place. When you approach an eighteenth-century town, it is the political palace that's the tallest thing in the place. And when you approach a modern city, the tallest places are the office buildings, the centers of economic life.' Not only is this a representation of technology overcoming spiritualism, but it is also a mark of man overcoming nature, a paradoxical mistake as we cannot control nature nor can we survive without it. As we thrust ourselves further away from nature and spirituality, we slowly lose the meaning of their purpose in our lives and our lives become purposeless.
Not more than an hour later, I watched a lesser-known movie I came accross on Netflix titled 'Spring Forward' (to be honest, I partly chose it because I thought it would be ironically hilarious to watch such an aptly titled movie on the eve of Daylight Savings Time), made years ago and starring Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber. The two play an older and younger man whose relationship evolves throughout the course of the movie through examining their interaction as they work together. A lot of the conversations include interjections by Liev's character with musings on mysticism and how the spiritual, or unconscious, plays into the conscious man's world. Really just a fascinating movie; I highly recommend it. Anyway, Liev brings up the same exact thing Campbell did, practically verbatim. He ends saying, 'There's no room in society for spiritualism now... Maybe that's why men feel empty at their jobs.' What are the odds that I would come across the same motif in such seemingly random, unconnected ways?
This afternoon, I was continuing my reading in a different book, 'Alchemical Psychology' by Thom Cavalli, and came accross a section in which he talked about Aristotle's belief that 'the world is borne out of one archetypal form from which all things enter into palpable manifestation when they have multiplied four times. One is the absolute reality represented by stone, two is the level of opposites, three brings us outside the parameters of ordinary time, and four returns us, renewed and aware, to the realm of reality... in which consciousness returns, fully integrated, enlightened and filled with light.' I was immediately reminded of St. Augustine's Four States of Human Freedom, a concept I learned about a few weeks ago in my World Religions class. These are the four states:
1. The Innocent Man: Humans were able to sin, and not able to sin. This was the state of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden before the Fall. Remember that Adam was formed from the earth, and he was in one accord with God and nature.
2. The Fallen Man: Humans are not able not to sin. This is basically Original Sin: since the Fall, every man is born into this state in which we are definitively separated from divinity through sin, and sin is the opposite of all that God is.
3. The Regenerate Man: Humans regain the ability not to sin. This is the Christian, who has the presence of the Holy Spirit in his heart. Though we do not become sinless at this state, we have entered into a state of enlightenment which cannot be attained by the Fallen Man.
4. The Glorified Man: Humans are unable to sin. This state happens when you enter Heaven, as sin does not exist in Heaven. The second coming of Christ will bring about a new Heaven and a new Earth, which I see as the return to the first state but fully integrated and enlightened, ergo us being back in the Garden of Eden but unable to sin.
Though Cavalli does not allude to this connection and connects Aristotle's theory to different principles, I couldn't help but see the correlation. There is also an adverse correlation between these two examples of coincidence that I have just realized. The first one examined humanity's regression from spirituality and purpose, while the second example examined humanity's progression toward spirituality and purpose. The decisive factor is the salvation that was won through the act of Jesus Christ dying on the cross and the acceptance of this salvation into our hearts.
I find this over-arching theme simply fascinating and can't but marvel at the way in which God works. As I continue along my path, I will strive to keep learning as much as I can whilst keeping my mind and heart open so that I can recognize the ties that bind the randomocity of my life together in increasing awareness of God's plan for me.
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