The Man With the Universe Inside- Founding Essay @TheOrphanMan
There is a trauma embedded in the human species as we know it, that I believe we are on the cusp of overcoming- but first, we need understand it. We have sought to resolve it in our mythology, our religion, cultures, and societies, in our art and literature.
The trauma I speak of is the essential character of the personified idea I call the Orphan Man. I am arguing that at the beginning of civilization, humans had evolved into a place where the ego took over. The Orphan Man is so, because he views himself as Separate from Nature by his own egotistical tendency to place himself somehow above the environment around him, and even disdain his animal self. He is an Orphan from the universe, which is his true home.
God in league with evolutionary circumstance had given him a higher sense of self-awareness, but with that self-awareness came a sense of separatism from the universe. The growing pains of this transition still manifest. He is an Orphan from the Universe.
This is exemplified in the way the practitioners of earliest mythos viewed their gods. In Sumeria and Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Greece, and Israel the gods personified weather and their wrath was spelled through a natural disaster, terrible floods and the burning of cities.
Any mythos or perceived culture, and I would argue any piece of art or literature should be seen as projections of the ego. They are all argument’s and are therefore aggressive; art shares its first two letters with the argument. Art and advertisement become linked together because they both seek to grab the eye. Similarly, literature seeks to shed lite on things.
Early myth, in particular, is an extension of the Orphan Man or ego, to nature. Nature has always been the key to heaven. Why else would the Orphan Man depict Gods in the image of man and attribute to them elements of nature, celestial, geographic or abstract?
It is because however, shrouded in the ego humanity was at this time self-awareness had still given him the capacity to see himself reflected in nature, that is the power of taking a Microcosmic perspective and relating it to something larger, such as divinity.
The Orphan Man saw himself in the mood in the rushing waters of the Euphrates or Tigris, or Nile or Indus rivers. He saw his lifespan in the movements of the celestial and he saw his body in the trees and animals around him.
He only expressed this through the divine, because at the time he was not in a place of self-love. Instead, he had to see himself through the image of the divine. It is interesting to point out, again, how cruelly destructive these ancient gods of flood and fire could be.
This is a projection of self-hate the Orphan Man had on himself, but why does he hate himself?
The object of his hate, in myth, is often directed towards his sexuality. This is because the sexual parts remind him he is not separate or special from the Universe, that he is not truly the only Orphan in the Universal, Orphan Mission of this guideless universe. This entire journey of life, existence itself is a virgin mission, just like every moment time passes virgin territory.
The Orphan Man was to the first animal, so far as he could see and understand that the universe gave self-awareness. Depicted in the bible when God comes to the garden- Adam and Eve having eaten the fruit of enlightenment at Satan’s behest; they rush to try and cover up their animal parts. Now with self-aware to a higher degree, they want to hide their animal parts, especially from the divine. God says,
“Behold, the Man is now as one of us, to know good and evil; and now, let he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life. And eat, and live forever.” If we go back to Mesopotamia, we find that they had people had no why answers. In this stage, the Orphan Man was still on the questions of who and how.
Creation myths. Although we were creating religions and culture we still found this truth in the nature of many of cruelest gods of early mythos- the god of Abraham burning down human sexuality and flood myths from around the world.
We know that in Sumer the relationship of man to the gods was one of enslavement. This original philosophy even persists till today and helped to form the cradle with which the more evolved and encompassing philosophy of fatalism formed- in which all events-human or otherwise are essentially enslaved to the divine will. The same is true in Judea-Christian and Islamic theology.
The reason I use the Bible is because I believe, in The Fall of Humanity, is rooted the best depiction of the trauma of the Orphan Man. If you’ve ever read genesis- you will know what I mean. It’s an extremely tragic book with depictions of original sin and a god that hates humanity. This God, however, is a depiction of the self-hate that human felt and still feels towards the animal part of itself.
I want to make it clear that I am not making the assertion that animals do not have self-awareness; quite the opposite, I am making the assertion that the plight of the Orphan man was, and still is that he is so invested in the ego he believes other beings are not as alive as he is. Therefore he is lost in the ego and doesn’t have a respect for life outside of the family, and the society he extends his ego to. He is the man who has Orphaned himself from the universe, and art will be his therapy
Not all cultures were as hateful to themselves as those that worshiped the God of Abraham, or the cruel gods of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Ganesha was a Hindu god with and elephant head, and the Greeks-in particular, exemplified an acceptance of themselves in nature, depicting half animal half men races and personifying gods as rivers, trees, planets, and Helios the sun.
Prometheus, the trickster titan of ancient Greece is accredited for stealing the secret of fire and giving it to man. Prometheus- that trickster God, who like Satan in the bible, stole from the Father God his cherished thing- through trickery.
The only distinctions in the story of the ancient Greek’s Prometheus and the story of the snake in the tree are that the object to be possessed is fire, and fire cannot be punished as Adam and Eve could. Instead, when Prometheus stole the secret fire and gave it to man- Zeus punished him and humanity. Satan had already been punished and named devil.
Zeus also punishes Prometheus and unleashes Pandora’s box on man (the same basic ailments that were given to Adam in Eden), yet the Greeks showed great love for Prometheus, as opposed to our image of Satan, Prometheus was remembered as a friend to man, and in later oral tradition the hero Heracles set him free.
The Greeks may have been more comfortable with themselves and their role in nature than the sons of Abraham, but theirs was a newer more highly evolved theology. Even still, there is a trauma embedded in Greek mythology around the conception of the Orphan Man.
Our self-awareness is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its philosophical rationalizations can lead us to live from the ego, but on the other, it can help us take the Microcosm of our human lives and apply it to the Macrocosm of Collective Existence. It can help us take the Microcosm of any situation and apply it by comparison to a Macrocosm of any other situation. I call this process Microcosmic Scaling.
Microcosm and Macrocosm are words as old as Plato. Microcosmic to Macrocosmic thinking is what enables us to compare history past events in our lives, to pick out patterns and see grander schemes reflected into smaller realities and in our own personal lives.
This is a Concept Essential to the Orphan Man. The Orphan Man is the man with the Universe Inside Him. This literally means that in his journey you can see reflected the universal journey.
The four elements are reflected in his (or her!) character and in the character of his numbers and symbols, and he has become aware of it. To say that he is made in god’s image is to say that he is made in the image of the universe, which is to say that he is a microcosm of the universe and he is aware of it.
But when and how did the Orphan Man figure this out? It began with religion.
Gods were depicted in human form and the words ‘made in God’s image’ were written but these were an only human projection of the ego at the time. The error of the Orphan Man is that he mistakes the fact that his journey was a reflection of the universe to mean his journey was the universe’s center.
In this state of consciousness, he cannot use microcosmic and macrocosmic intuition because he can only see himself and never meditates outside. We should understand God then, as the opposite of this hell- as a state of consciousness which contains all another state of consciousnesses. This is what I think we mean when we say God is all-knowing.
No matter what god you are speaking of, no matter what your religion or belief system you can listen to those arguments. If you are a person of a specific faith let me reiterate and say, your god is the highest state of consciousness- and heaven is the dead let into that consciousness.
‘Made in God’s Image’ is an example of macrocosm-microcosm in the bible- but the Christians only go so far as to express that in the human narrative. Most other cultures, however, showed signs of higher states of conciseness in that the depicted their gods as animals and plants- which meant that they had extended the significance of Microcosm Macrocosm to the nature around them.
But this is true for all people. To be given consciousness as we are being to be blind to all but our perspective, and yet by this very virtue, we can imagine the infinite.
I would suggest, that from this vantage of highest consciousness- it would be possible for the eye of god to look at the smallest possible piece of matter in the universe- and from its contents glean the secrets of the entire universe.
This is the essence of Microcosmic Scaling. The idea that any one single perspective can hold the truth as equal to any other in the grand scheme of things. Whether it be a person or an atom, or any moment in time because it all holds the same infinite truth.
This is an idea that stems from interdependency and it places an equality on all life and all perspectives- and should now realize that the journey of the smallest atom is as infinite as the macrocosm itself. This is how to leave the ego that is The Orphan Man behind and make equal all perspective truths of a human race, leaving the ego alone.
Imagine that, as you are reading this, you have a complete identity wipe. In this wipe you forget how to read these # and symbols, you forget your past where you come from.
All you are aware of is that you are you and you are placed in time and space. This is the perspective of the Orphan Man in the evolutionary and cosmic shift that brought unique human identity.
Now imagine that you could translate your feelings into words for us to read here, even though you have no conception of what words are. What would be the first three questions you would ask?
Who am I? What is this place? Why am I here?
These are essentially the questions the Orphan Man would ask, and is still searching for the answers tens of 1,000s of years later.
Who and why. Constructed so similarly, but in these two words, there is an interrogative duality. Why, is subtle, by its very nature as faint as the where to which it questions; the word why contains within it an energy of extroversion.
In this sense, the interrogative who is a microcosmic antithesis to why, because it is- via its own nature, the most introverted question. But what does this have to do with the Orphan man?
Why, is the favorite word of philosophers in the Socratic tradition. The ancient creation myths that came before them had focused on who and what, but philosophy would now begin asking the third question which would help us refine our place and be, no longer Orphan Men.
Like the nature of philosophers in society, the nature of the question why is ethereal. They live omnipresent among all human nature, why only coming from the mouths of children and intellectual circles- the philosopher’s unknown by many, recognized by some, understood by less, and applied by few.
Their questions, though they sit alone to write them, are the most extroverted, and by that virtue, they become, no longer individual, or dualistic anti-theoretical statements, but supporting the spiritual argument for why.
Literature thrived alongside philosophy in this regard. How we fit the works of Plato into philosophy is of an utmost importance because he wrote philosophy unlike any other. He inspired Aristotle, he would then go on to form the more scientific qualitative school of thought that philosophy has become today. Aristotelian Essay is a far cry from Plato's dialogues, and a cry still further from the meandering questions of Socrates. Benefit's and problems were gained from Aristotle's new evolution to philosophy.
Plato's Dialogues were fictions-if based on true people- they did at least admit their own rhetoric by the virtue of the genre of the work. Aristotle however, as he is speaking from the cut and dry of philosophy, which fails to admit the narrowness of its own perspective without the disclaimer, or, in Aristotle's case- much theory and logic. Plato, or at least the way we read Plato cuts all of that out by rendering his work fiction. The result is a more curated piece of work-all-be-it less all encompassing.
Plato's was a fiction whose very theme was the philosophical inquiry- whereas today storytellers put single specific enlightenment at the end of their stories, they of Plato's story is infinite enlightenment itself. Where should we place Plato then?
To me, Plato is a man who will forever stand at the balancing point between what we call fiction and philosophy. When we look at when he lived in time, all the written works before Plato had been myths like that of Homer.
The philosophical world carries on his tradition of using the themes of enlightenment in their works, and because of his pupil Aristotle- the scientific world has adopted a theme of admitting its own rhetoric. Fiction has accumulated its own truths, but rather more slowly and with much more garish titillation and objectively unhelpful content than philosophy and science.
The Trinity of Interrogatives. Those innate three questions that I presented early in this short-form are the solemn duty of the Orphan Man. Why do we write and make art? From philosophy to poetry and fiction- mythology and religion and even math and science are all rhetorical, perspective pieces. What are we searching for? The Orphan Man came into this with none of it.
It is time to stopping viewing history as opposing sides fighting against each other, but rather a tapestry of information that holds secrets far greater than ourselves. Science and religion can support each other. Embrace every culture he creates in attempts to reconcile with our past and future and all duality and conceptuality of self-understanding. A type of therapy for the Orphan Man, if you will; to find out who he is.
The truth is that he is a man of endless complexity, as infinite as the world he lives in, the Man with the Universe Inside.