Why do I experience myself as a spiritual entity? Why does “being good” make people so nasty? Why are poor people often more spiritual than rich people? Why are children often more spiritually perceptive than adults? Why do nice people fail as politicians? Why do we shut ourselves away behind such high walls?
1. Why do I experience myself as a spiritual entity?
D.H. Lawrence realizes that the “voices of my education” are inadequate when we are confronted by a certain intensity of experience. In his poem The Snake, he explores how beauty and threat paralyze him from killing the snake that comes to drink at the well, which he should have done according to commonsense and cultural expectations. But somehow the inner nature of the moment disturb him and he realises that there is much more to existence than what he has been formally taught.
We have been formally taught, fairly strictly, that there is a material world – a world of cars, money, homes and fashion – that matters to everybody; and that there is a subaltern world of feelings and preferences that only matters to only us, personally. Our preferences should be indulged as far as possible, but they do not define our significance.
Post-modernism can be read as a scream of defiance against this “voice of my education”
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