Psyche’s Refracted Light Gives Ego Spark

About this poem

We are light seekers bearing refracted torchlights: As rational Homo Sapiens, we see through a cultural glass darkly, experiencing reality as particles of light refracted from its wholeness. In such a state, the world, since the dawn of time, has increasingly become our provider of a pervasive compulsive competition of cultural divisiveness, pitting the treasures of one’s national mythologies and religious beliefs against those of another’s, in stubborn opposition to our common universal heritage as Homo Sapiens. In plain ignorance of, and even resistance to, this incomparable heritage of ours, we fail to recognize that, as members of the human species, we are gifted with having the autonomous Psyche as our common source of grounding. To overcome the myopic egoistic competitive vision that is prominent in worldwide human societies, both the outer extraverted process of human rational thought, and the inner introverted machinations of the Psyche, must diligently work cooperatively in the effort to integrate and return human societies to psychic wholeness. To achieve that goal, there has to occur in the human collective system as a whole, an objective relationship of the complex rational nature of mankind with the internal subjective process of the integrated autonomous Psyche. To survive, evolve, and advance as a spiritual species, humanity must at least attempt outwardly to emulate its archetypal, inward nature; must strive to fulfill its goal of individuated oneness and completion that makes us truly human. But then again, and ironically so, the larger truth is that cultural competition is the great motivator for the advancement of human civilization and survival. Nature, after all, provides humanity an internal mechanism to pursue constantly after progress and to find balance in the measure, often reflecting the katabasis and anabasis, the descent and ascent journey of spiritual intelligence in human life; recognized as the illumination of the soul at different levels and at different interstices of understanding, as the classical poet, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), of Florence, Italy, observed and portrayed in his Divine Comedy. more »