Upgrown & Overblown: Sloppy Seconds  



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the first thing third degree yearn






"No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding, or believing, that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of any one's soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought; - these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity - are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul is inferior to another - that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul - that each soul is, in part, its own God - its own Creator: - in a word, that God - the material and spiritual God - now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.



"In this view, and in this view alone, we comprehend the riddles of Divine Injustice - of Inexorable Fate. In this view alone the existence of Evil becomes intelligible; but in this view it becomes more - it becomes endurable. Our souls no longer rebel at a Sorrow which we ourselves have imposed upon ourselves, in furtherance of our own purposes - with a view - if even with a futile view - to the extension of our own Joy.



"I have spoken of Memories that haunt us during our youth. They sometimes pursue us even in our Manhood: - assume gradually less and less indefinite shapes: - now and then speak to us with low voices, saying: "There was an epoch in the Night of Time, when a still-existent Being existed - one of an absolutely infinite number of similar Beings that people the absolutely infinite domains of the absolutely infinite space. (See previous paragraph, 'I reply that the "right," in a case such as this...')



"It was not and is not in the power of this Being - any more than it is in your own - to extend, by actual increase, the joy of his Existence; but just as it is in your power to expand or to concentrate your pleasures (the absolute amount of happiness remaining always the same) so did and does a similar capability appertain to this Divine Being, who thus passes his Eternity in perpetual variation of Concentrated Self and almost Infinite Self-Diffusion. What you call The Universe is but his present expansive existence. He now feels his life through an infinity of imperfect pleasures- the partial and pain-intertangled pleasures of those inconceivably numerous things which you designate as his creatures, but which are really but infinite individualizations of Himself. All these creatures - those which you term animate, as well as those to whom you deny life for no better reason than that you do not behold it in operation - these creatures have, in a greater or less degree, a capacity for pleasure and for pain: - but the general sum of their sensations is precisely that amount of Happiness which appertains by right to the Divine Being when concentrated within Himself. These creatures are all too, more or less conscious Intelligences; conscious, first, of a proper identity; conscious, secondly and by faint indeterminate glimpses, of an identity with the Divine Being of whom we speak - of an identity with God. Of the two classes of consciousness, fancy that the former will grow weaker, the latter stronger, during the long succession of ages which must elapse before these myriads of individual Intelligences become blended - when the bright stars become blended - into One. Think that the sense of individual identity will be gradually merged in the general consciousness - that Man, for example, ceasing imperceptibly to feel himself Man, will at length attain that awfully triumphant epoch when he shall recognize his existence as that of Jehovah. In the meantime bear in mind that all is Life - Life - Life within Life - the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit Divine."

-Edgar Allan Poe, 'Eureka'







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the first thing third degree yearn




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