D.H. Lawrence on Vital Consciousness
Our consciousness is crippled and maimed, we only live with a fragment of ourselves.
— D.H. Lawrence
Apocalypse, D.H. Lawrence’s final book, was written while he was dying. In this book, he unleashes a fierce, Lawrence-style criticism of modern civilization, and also a powerful declaration of man’s potential to create “a new heaven and a new earth” through a rebirth of the soul.
“This whole consciousness,” states the writer in the introduction, “what Jung termed 'integration', was the attainment of inner harmony and balance and a sense of living connection with the greater universe. Like Jung, Lawrence saw the human psyche poised between two worlds – the objective material universe, and the subjective inner world – with an equal need to relate to both, to integrate them for the enrichment and development of the psyche.”
In the following passages, Lawrence simply asks the reader—are we more vitally alive now than our ancestors were long ago? Is it possible to “restore the balance between the spiritual and sensual planes of existence?”
I hope you enjoy it.
Culture and civilisation are tested by vital consciousness.
Are we more vitally conscious than an Egyptian 3000 years B.C. was? Are we? Probably we are less. Our conscious range is wide, but shallow as a sheet of paper. We have no depth to our consciousness…
We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients.