The elegance of the past, influencing a common day sense of spirituality.
Every so often my thoughts take a turn toward the rear of histories days and they remember the days of the past. For the sake of those with very long memories this is in reference to the age of a very long past not the more conveniently uttered short past that’s usually brought up in a conversation about “how wonderful those days were when the Buick’s had wings and the roller skates squeaked.”
There was an age once upon a time, where those who found themselves looking for a sense of a spiritual self, could find themselves looking beyond the crock-pot of pre-boiled and simmered spiritual beliefs and values drawn by a few with a complete side order of hors d’oeuvre’s to compliment the meal for the soul, all meant to satisfy ones hunger for what lay beyond the Isle of Avalon in everyone’s mind.
There was once an age of Renaissance when thinking began to move outside of accepted paradigms and those with extraordinary vision leaped through the hoops of restriction into new realms of wonder bringing everyone else along with them. Those days were of the fabric that shifted people’s very cores and lit the fires of what would become known as a new way of thoughtful perception of everything that surrounded them in the world. From the Earth to the apple in that proverbial tree, from the paintings on stone and on canvas to the surreal statues that breathed virtual life. From the dresses and the coats that communicated ones respect for ones appearance to those meandered skills of abstract vision that reformed the function and the life of the sky and the universe, to the very constructions that made up the buildings and the houses where people would exhibit their love of life and their love of society. Life shifted from a way of being as what was then, to what later became known as what was the now of their understood then.
Shifts in being can come from the strangest of places and certainly can cast the strangest of movements in the styles of life. Of course no change in any manner of being comes without its burps and eddy’s in the currents of any of life’s rivers. People as a whole tend to be a bit resistant to the idea of shifting change and especially when these changes are accompanied by vastly different approaches of thought. Let’s face it, any advanced thinker who would push the envelope of common thought asking others to consider the greater perspectives of being, eventually came to understand that they weren’t exactly the most welcome of souls in the company of many. As we all know there were those who found themselves at the bit of an unfortunate end, only to be exonerated for their beliefs long afterwards sometimes to the order of centuries. Then there were those who just reached that pinnacle point of thought that just cut right to the chase and presented concepts in such a way that they skewed the course of resistance in the most novel of ways. A great time to respect for sure and such a time again is right here and right now on this little world of ours.
It seems that many consider the more colorful and novel way of spiritual thought to be an attractive source of strength in their life today. There have always been those for sure with the habit of reaching outside of their comfort zones for those previously discovered countries of being where the furniture is well worn and the paths well broken down. Then there are the paths that haven’t seen the tread of too many feet, and still retain the scent of virgin oak and pine, and haven’t seen the twill of any kind of mechanized being. The paths that just for the vision, speak to the dreams of being in a new way and for the experience of reaching beyond the windowsill of comforts glance. Here in this now accepted age of being, there are many souls who are discovering that something is afoot and with much happening if even more still behind the scenes that make up this play. An avenue of being seems to be emerging outside of more commonly accepted windowsills of thought, and is reaching into the realm of what will be, instead of what had been. The virtue and the details of these exist in the minds and the souls of those who have the capability to stop and to breath and to open their eyes to the dawning sun that seems to be spiritually encompassing so many.
Take if you will for a moment, the usual course that’s been trodden in the past by a world comfortable with its past voyages. Most great journeys have been taken while either dragging along the baggage of a past ill-conceived or with ones trunks filled to the brim with every piece of clothing and what-not brought along to draft a familiar setting before the eye, instead of reminding oneself of what was of true value to the nature of life while also recognizing that every great journey of self-discovery brings with it new and wonderful ways of recognizing the fabric of life as well as bringing with it newly crafted and yes, unrecognizable features to the curves of ones soul. These are the sorts of adventures that some of the greatest novels have been written about, with many even reading them absorbing them into some fabric of their own life in so many ways. This is the nature to a new spiritual age that is unfolding before the consciousness of so many people today and in the witness of so many others with blindfolds on.
The eloquence of any age carries with it the recognizable outward appearance of color and in style and in the appearance of people’s thoughtfulness. The elegance of an emerging age such as the one taking place right now however, brings with it a greatly expanded consciousness that benefits from a previously unavailable and vast body of knowledge to compliment everyone’s thoughtfulness. Never before has there been such a grand number of thinkers all focusing their spiritual energies in the direction of inner and outward growth. The effects of the decisions for a common change of being in the lives of so many people bring with it the sort of energy for growth and for change that might just have been witnessed in the days of what was known as a Renaissance age of the past. Even then, along with the eloquence that had for some become the daily fare of life, so different than all that had come before it, brought with it permanently shifted modes of being and because of that change in the creative energies of so many people, the world itself changed. The variance in thought and in the way people saw and began to interpret their world differently brought about great differences in the physicality of their world and in-kind the spiritual sources of these differences. The same sort of change in the manner of life and of consciousness for people seems to be taking place today. The difference now apart from the enormous ability for the transfer of knowledge on a whim, is the amount of energy being increasingly focused in the direction of a shifting of ones personal consciousness that eventually will have a creative effect on the world remaining a witness to it.
I recall watching an account of the detailed restoration of a tapestry at a palatial four hundred year old Elizabethan house in Great Britain called Hardwick Hall. What I found a fascination was the manner of the size and the grandeur that each of these tapestries exhibited. They had been woven with the most intricate stitch in such vivid and artistic color to detail many various activities and modes of life and belief of that country in the days of that time. The mask that age had cast over those creations however seemed to leave a grey haze between the cloth and the eyes that now looked upon them still with wonder and admiration for what they must have looked like when they were first hung on those gargantuan walls.
After the threads had been cleaned, repaired and brought back to life and then re-hung, it was as if the shade of fog had drawn back from the heat of the daytime sun over a large lake. Again, with the help of a few visionaries who took a leap outside of the box of convention, one could be witness to some of the wonderful brilliance that these creations were meant to provide. As I watched this process of creation and the ensuing re-creation brought to another life, I couldn’t help but to wonder about the removal of the haze of grey that so many people in today’s age have cast across their own gazes in life and of their own spiritual selves. In a glorious and in many ways, a much more colorfully sewn life in an age so long ago, people lay their fingers onto many various divisions of a creation of their own making and now after such a long time, once again, these creations made anew could help people to revitalize themselves and to envision a re-realized if not a recreated life. Could this in fact be the manner of a renewed and a realized emergence for so many people today? Are the many spiritually based individuals of the world today of so many various styles and fashions, all acting as those artisan’s cleaning and lovingly helping to draw back the haze and the fog of what makes up the spiritual tapestries of existence as everyone experiences it today and in the days to come?
Much could be realized and experienced in such a time couldn’t it?
Its rather unbelievable you know, to think of respecting such past habits as courtly behavior, respect, brilliant visioning of a spiritual manner of thought and of unmasking again the color and the brilliance of life as so many once did so long ago. It sort of reminds one of the days when elegant dress was the fashion and not the exception. When the observance of reaching ones mind beyond the usual, was actually more fashionable in many circles, than was the restriction of a manner of belief simply based upon the looks of a society’s outward crust and not toward ones inward spiritual core where things are rarely cast in an untruthful light.
Can the elegance of an age long since past beyond today’s vogue fashionable quirks of soulful personality be drawn back from the sunset of everyday life? Can a rather new spiritually marked conscious and creative decision on the part of people still somehow realize expression into the spiritually eloquent visions that so many seek to carry within themselves in a transitioning age such as this? If the answers to these questions can begin to define the experiences that so many are finding themselves at the head of now, then it remains quite possible that the so called advanced consciousness that is spoken of, exhibited by and marked by so many various works of art, writing and depiction of film and speak could be emerging right before everyone’s eyes and before their minds. These mindful expressions do provide just cause for one to consider that this all might just be the case as it’s really akin to the previously acknowledged shifts and changes that were witnessed in any previously observed age of great change for mankind.
It was Albert Einstein who said:
“When you examine the lives of the most influential people who have ever walked among us, you discover one thread that winds through them all. They have been aligned first with their spiritual nature and only then with their physical selves.”
Amazing that the words of one of the worlds foremost influential scientists, a man of numbers and of the mathematical expressions of the form and the function of the universe, would by himself acknowledge the very creative nature of spiritual thought and its effects on the physicality of peoples experiences. It stands as no little wonder that he probably wasn’t the first of his kind to allow such a commonly held irrational belief to be precisely opposite of that description in his own mind. The path that the world takes to recognize the physicality of creation would seem to be the very same, at least in finer concept, to that force of the creation of peoples spiritual selves. This is the tapestry that we all weave on a daily basis, stitch by stitch and yard by yard with each thread presenting another colorful aspect of ones experiences with the final work never truly being completed but only a transitioning expression of the self.
Interesting bit of eloquence this life allows for, isn’t it? If one would only look…
As Always,
WD
© 2009 WD Allan, spiritualitymoment.com
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