Alienation

Alienation is a technical term utilized in Marxism to refer to existential angst experienced by the proletariat worker, or in existentialism, how the individual feels alienated in a strange, absurd, unsympathetic, cold universe. I have elsewhere defined alienation as alienated from one's authentic self, while the state of mind accompanying that authentic selfhood, is belonging with comfort and happiness with full awareness accompanying the (the found, not lost soul) found worshiper of the Divine Couple, exhibiting his real self as he maverizes. I was rereading John Macquarrie's seminal book, Existentialism, this morning. On Page 136 he follows the thinking of N Berdyaev, who denounced the rise of the objective, rational conscious state of man as equivalent to our fall from grace in the garden of Eden: "The awakening and development of the conscious state of mind was accompanied by division and alienation." Berdyaev deconstructs the conscious, reasoning mind as apart from God, alienated from Being, and from God. Adam and Eve were unconscious, happy, content, blissful children in the Garden of Eden, innocent. Once they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, and became awake, worldly, powerful, potentially very evil and knowing about reality as a place where good and evil are ever contesting for control and victory, they were alienated from being absorbed back into nature and Being, back to sleep, like instinctive animals now fully regulated once more by the laws of nature. In that non-alienated state of being, there is no separation of subject and object. To be alive, from my point of view is to be alienated from nature and Being. Only as rational subject, apart from the objects, nature and Being, do humans come alive, with the potential to love, create, to serve the Divine couple as living, maverized angels. Without coming awake or coming alive, as now alienated egos, separated from Being as atomistic, conscious observers and actors in the world, only then are humans potentially full human, not just another beast, asleep and content but unfulfilled, wandering the meadows and forests on the natural world. As conscious subject, apart from and ruling and recreating nature, maverized humans can still harmonize the objective and subjective world in a way that alienates from God, completion, love and satisfaction for all.