Sensing the recent raging exchanges on The ECC email discussion group about Religion, Science, the Meaning of Life, The Universe and Everything, Edward turned in his grave, smiled and began to quote from the conclusion of his book PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: Their Origin and Meaning.....
"…..this idea of ultimate separation is an illusion, and in truth we are all indefeasible and indestructible parts of one great Unity in which "we live and move and have our being." That being so, it is clear that there remains in the end a self-consciousness which need by no means be abandoned, which indeed only comes to its true fruition and understanding when it recognizes its affiliation with the Whole, and glories in an individuality which is an expression both of itself and of the whole.
"The human child at its mother's knee probably comes first to know it has a 'self' on some fateful day when having wandered afar it goes lost among alien houses and streets or in the trackless fields. That appalling experience – the sense of danger, of fear, of loneliness - is never forgotten; it stamps some new sense of Being upon the childish mind, but that sense, instead of being destroyed, becomes all the prouder and more radiant in the hour of return to the mother's arms. The return, the salvation, for which humanity looks, is the
return of the little individual self to harmony and union with the great Self of the universe, but by no means its extinction or abandonment - rather the finding of its own true nature as never before……
"…..As a kind of rude general philosophy we may say that there are only two main factors in life, namely, Love and Ignorance. And of these we may also say that the two are not in the same plane: one is positive and substantial, the other is negative and merely illusory. It may be thought at first that Fear and Hatred and Cruelty, and the like, are very positive things, but in the end we see that they are due merely to absence of perception, to dullness of understanding. Or we may put the statement in a rather less crude form, and say that there are only two factors in life: (1) the sense of Unity with others (and with Nature) - which covers Love, Faith, Courage, Truth, and so forth, and (2) Non-perception of the same - which covers Enmity, Fear, Hatred, Self-pity, Cruelty, Jealousy, Meanness and an endless similar list. The present world which we see around us, with its idiotic wars, its senseless jealousies of nations and classes, its fears and greeds and vanities and its futile endeavours - as of people struggling in a swamp - to find one's own salvation by treading others underfoot, is a negative phenomenon. Ignorance, non-perception, are at the root of it. But it is the blessed virtue of Ignorance and of non-perception that they inevitably-if only slowly and painfully - destroy themselves. All experience serves to dissipate them. The world, as it is, carries the doom of its own transformation in its bosom; and in proportion as that which is negative disappears the positive element must establish itself more and more…….
"…….The first condition of social happiness and prosperity must be the sense of the Common Life. This sense, which instinctively underlay the whole Tribal order of the far past - which first came to consciousness in the worship of a thousand pagan divinities, and in the rituals of countless sacrifices, initiations, redemptions, love-feasts and communions, which inspired the dreams of the Golden Age, and flashed out for a time in the Communism of the early Christians and in their adorations of the risen Saviour - must in the end be the creative condition of a new order: it must provide the material of which the Golden City waits to be built. The long travail of the World-religion will not have been in vain, which assures this consummation. What the signs and conditions of any general advance into this new order of life and consciousness will be, we know not. It may be that as to individuals the revelation of a new vision often comes quite suddenly, and generally perhaps after a period of great suffering, so to society at large a similar revelation will arrive - like "the lightning which cometh out of the East and shineth even unto the West" - with unexpected swiftness. On the other hand it would perhaps be wise not to count too much on any such sudden transformation.
"Dr. Frazer, in the conclusion of his great work The Golden Bough, bids farewell to his readers with the following words:
"The laws of Nature are merely hypotheses devised to explain that ever-shifting phantasmagoria of thought which we dignify with the high-sounding names of the World and the Universe. In the last analysis magic, religion and science are nothing but theories [of thought]; and as Science has supplanted its predecessors so it may hereafter itself be superseded by some more perfect hypothesis, perhaps by some perfectly different way of looking at phenomena - of registering the shadows on the screen - of which we in this generation can form no idea."
"I imagine Dr. Frazer is right in thinking that "a way of looking at phenomena" different from the way of Science, may some day prevail. But I think this change will come, not so much by the growth of Science itself or the extension of its 'hypotheses,' as by a growth and expansion of the human heart and a change in its psychology and powers of perception.
"Gradually, out of an infinite mass of folly and delusion, the human soul has in this way disentangled itself, and will in the future disentangle itself, to emerge at length in the light of true freedom. All the taboos, the insane terrors, the fatuous forbiddals of this and that (with their consequent heart- searchings and distress) may perhaps have been in their way necessary, in order to rivet and define the meaning and the understanding of that word. To-day these taboos and terrors still linger, many of them, in the form of conventions of morality, uneasy strivings of conscience, doubts and desperations of religion; but ultimately Man will emerge from all these things, free - familiar, that is, with them all, making use of all, allowing generously for the values of all, but hampered and bound by none. He will realize the inner meaning of the creeds and rituals of the ancient religions, and will hail with joy the fulfilment of their far prophecy down the ages - finding after all the long-expected Saviour of the world within his own breast, and Paradise in the disclosure there of the everlasting peace of the soul."
Offered in Love
Timkerbel
x
Big Love to Simon Dawson for The Edward Carpenter Archive without which we might never have known.....
http://www.edwardcarpenter.net/ecpcc17.htm
