Woolf
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Playing on the title
of a book by Virginia Woolf, Barfield
uses this phrase to designate the interior, separate mental world--"the
null point between original and final
participation" (SA 178)--which we now as Camera
Men accept as a given but which is, in reality the end-result of the
process of interiorization working throughout
history
and the evolution of consciousness.
On the occasion
of the Fall . . . Lucifer
induced man to begin hiding and hoarding his inner life, and to take pride
in it--as a 'room of one's own"--making it into something separate and
detached alike from its own outward manifestation (nature) and the inner
world of Spirit-Beings. In the inner-life1:
instead of the old "being filled with Spirit-Beings"--Egotism. In the outer
life: instead of the old experiencing of nature as one's own manifestation--a
complete falling-apart of Man and Nature. Man is now started on the long
road which ends in his present normal relation to nature, wherein nature
is not merely his own outward manifestation, nor that of the higher Spiritual
Beings who shine through him; wherein nature is not a manifestation at
all, but an object--a finished work. (RCA 213-14)
Taking up residence
in a room of one's own, we fall victim to a grave epistemological mistake:
"It is a mistake that we nearly all make all the time, and we all make
nearly all the time--to imagine that inward and immaterial component of
the totality we call 'the world' as being a sort of something located and
confined inside our heads" (HGH 66).
See in particular
"The Fall in Man and Nature" (RCA 205-222). |
1The
New Testament records an awareness of our occupation of a room of one's
own, as Barfield notes in Saving the Appearances:
This subjective emptiness-which was perhaps
also the 'wilderness' or 'lonely place' in which the Baptist is described
as calling for 'repentence'-seems to be the psychic condition which is
brought about when the elimination of participation has deprived the outer
'kingdom--the outer world of images, whether artificial or natural--of
all spiritual substance, while the new kingdom within has not yet been
realized.
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