Beneath The Visible

I was an English major in college.  I'm not sure I would be again, now that I know it's one of the "Top 10 Worst Majors For Getting A Job".

Who am I kidding?
Yes I would.

I switched to English (from photojournalism) after taking a survey course in literature from
Professor Lunine.  He was chubby and bald and nerdy, and made me aware that ideas are sexy. One in particular.

Each period of literature is given a name to characterize it, and who cares, that's boring.  There's the Romantic Period, and the Medieval. There's the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Victorian. There's Naturalism and Realism and Modernism and Post-Modernism.  There are my favorites, Transcendentalism, and Existentialism.  Plus a few more.  Ho Hum, and Night-Nite.

One day, quite randomly, I asked Professor Lunine about it.  "What's up with these guys getting together and assigning titles to themselves like first-graders?  Hey! We'll be the Romantics okay? And you guys be the Victorians, and let's pretend we don't like each other and we'll have a big fight and then become friends.  Okay?"

His answer revived a part of me I'd forgotten I had.

He explained that they didn't name the period in which they wrote, we did, centuries later.
We named them after noticing that during certain periods, throughout history, the human mind seemed to be in sync with itself.  The symbols and shapes and sounds it created to represent it's art forms were relatively uniform across cultures.  Even if those cultures had never had contact with each other.  This obscure similarity happened with each period whether it was Transcendental, or Modern, or Real.   And it was consistent.

There appeared to be two levels of consciousness:

1. The one Humans occupy physically, and...
2.  The one the Mind occupies.  The one outside the influence of Personality.  The one  flowing like an underground river beneath all of us.

From our perch here in the twentieth century we saw that the human mind seemed to have a singular objective that exists outside of culture.  We could look beyond one culture, beyond it's geography, and see that the world's art forms, and how they were represented within historical periods, was oddly alike.

We could see that somewhere beneath the visible, we're connected.

Finger Puppets

If you compare the themes, and symbols, and devices in the literature of one region with the literature from another, and you do it with works produced from the same period on the timeline, you'll notice similarities that aren't easily explained.  There are variances, of course, but the observation stands.  It prompts consideration of a single, unseen fabric that's attempting to make itself known to each individual piece pressed upward into consciousness, and taking shape from it. Like a spool of cloth reminding finger puppets what they used to be a part of, and where they came from.

People crash and burn and begin again, in part, because 'personalities' are products of invention.  They're kindergarten self-portraits hung on the fridge for display.  You can make a sound argument that the personality's need to identify with specific positions, or tastes, or opinions, in its effort to establish a cohesive identity, does more to create distance between individuals, than it does to create unity.  

 Humans have never succeeded in aligning their individual countries with an exclusive purpose, or objective, that serves all of them.  Not for a day.  Yet there are extensive periods of circumstantial evidence that suggest the primal mind, the beneath, has been writing a single, inclusive, human narrative for centuries.

Until we admit that the personas we're so proud of (the ones developed to procure love and attention, the ones designed to give the appearance of being unique) aren't real, we'll continue to ignore the message coming from the source.  The one asking us to remember that we're in this together. The one reminding us that if you deny one, you deny all.

Authenticity is the individual acknowledgement of that source within you, and the refusal to ask another put theirs down, to serve yours.   It's far less complex than personality.  And infinitely more terrifying.