Thor Among the Giants: Part IV
/A Something Lost
Depression is a lamenting that something has been lost; anxiety is fearing that it will become lost, and compulsions/addictions are trying to make up for the fact that it has already been lost. But what’s lost?
Some traditions call it the garden of Eden, others say it’s our Buddha nature, while others again might argue that it’s personal authenticity or even mental hygiene; we all just know that something very important inexplicably went missing in the mail between me and myself. In this essay we’ve looked at a few models that offer a description of what went awry for the human condition. The chemical imbalance theory of mental health says that what was lost is the proper amount of serotonin in the brain, get that straightened out and you can be happy again. This turns out to be the brainchild of the pharmaceutical industry and just a fable to sell more product.
The trauma theory holds that our emotional well-being was damaged after devastatingly painful things that happened to us. This certainly is true, but it does restrict our thinking to the personal domain, and with that, just like Thor, we are wrestling with the world-size Midgard Serpent while taking it to be a household cat. Herbert Marcuse broke out of this limitation by showing us that nobody can be at ease with themselves in an alienated society, even one with unprecedented wealth and comfort. We have put ourselves in a candy floss hell of our own making, and only the Great Refusal of no longer participating as compliant consumers can get us out. Marcuse points out that we get our hearts broken not just by the families we come from but by the world we live in.
William Blake takes it up a notch, from the societal to the cosmic. Blake envisaged humanity as one single person, who he names, in rather inbred English fashion, as Albion. Albion has a problem: he has fallen into spiritual sleep, and each one of us, as an individual cells in Albion’s body, suffers from the self-same ailment as the giant we compose. With our wounds of individual trauma and ancestral inheritance, and the inevitable spiritual doziness of living in an alienated society, we are dissociated from our feelings and from contact with spiritual vision, the Human Imagination. Our doors of perception are a mess. Blake saw this as a “fall,” like the fall of Adam and Eve, but Albion did not fall because he disobeyed the laws of a crabby and pedantic God, his discomfiture came when his dominant reasoning powers began to lord it over his other energies of emotion, sensation and imagination. In the moment of its fall, humanity entered the “one-fold” dimension of Ulro, so strikingly similar to the world of Marcuse’s one-dimensional man.
In Blake’s longer prophetic works, Albion’s resuscitation involves a somewhat dizzying host of characters battling it out in various ways, and in the end, he revives into a new heyday of wholeness that will live inside us individually and between us socially. When he is all well, Albion is reunited with his female self who, oddly enough is the city of Jerusalem as well as being his girlfriend. It’s that kind of an epic, and you and I can urge the process of Albion’s awakening along right now, when we lie down with an eye-mask, listening to a playlist, taking a little something for our brain, and sinking into the great unconscious mind.
Seeing our personal problems from the societal and the cosmic dimensions helps us better understand what’s going on, as we work on healing ourselves and unclogging the doors of perception, not just for us as individuals, but for everybody. We don’t have to feel bad if it turns out to be a bigger job than we first thought. But while Blake saw the spiritual journey as a revival of an Edenic state we once had, another thinker much closer to our time saw it as an evolving into a something that has yet to emerge into existence. That thinker was Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.