there is a shroud, a veil, cast over modern man — a blindfold shared by all, a curtain between us and the celestial, a firmament of obscurity, entirely of our own creation, inheritable, hereditary, passed down by near every lineage —
to realize the self is to realize the universe. to stargaze is to learn of the origins of humanity, for we are the progeny of the stars, the offspring of the heavens.
how blind can we be! how can the magic be right before us, permeating us, animating us, within us — it is us — and yet, be unbeknownst to us?
this world needs a spiritual renaissance. no, our spiritual sensibilities never disappeared — they merely lay dormant, hibernating. our luminous eye never disappeared — no, it is merely closed, to be opened once again if we should wish.
what is spiritual living? oh, my dear, it is but a life lived in wonder! it is but a life lived in joy, in the virtues of the heart. I see spiritual living in the dissolution of disillusionment, that is, the dissolution of the supposed barrier, illusory in nature, between us and all of nature — not just nature below, Mother Nature, but also the whole of the cosmos. it is disillusionment that is liberation. to eradicate the barrier between us and the grandeur of the whole of creation is to reclaim the grandeur of all men and women. it is the reclamation of our own potential, for to look skyward is to live skyward.
it is both utmost humility and starlike radiance. it is to recognize that we are of both dirt and stardust. we are both star and dust. we are Earth and ether. it is the making of amends with ourselves, with our benefactor, the whole of Creation. it is the recognition that the greatest anthropomorphic projection is the supposition that the cosmos is inanimate, and the recognition that the greatest act of hubris is that we are the sole source of meaning and awareness, all better put perhaps by Richard Tarnas:
“Perhaps this complete voiding of the cosmos, this absolute privileging of the human, is the ultimate act of anthropocentric projection, the most subtle yet prodigious form of human self-aggrandizement. Perhaps the modern mind has been projecting soullessness and mindlessness on a cosmic scale, systematically filtering and eliciting all data according to its self-elevating assumptions at the very moment we believed we were ‘cleansing’ our minds of ‘distortions.’ Have we been living in a self-produced bubble of cosmic isolation? Perhaps the very attempt to de-anthropomorphize reality in such an absolute and simplistic manner is itself a supremely anthropocentric act.”
Excerpt from Cosmos and Psyche, Richard Tarnas
THE CLOSET MYSTIC 