I’m taking a break from posting. I can’t say when or if I will return. (In terms of further reading, I suggest my Voice of the We of Divinity post.) My conversation with the Devil comes to an end here. The devil, in all this, has been my creative attempt to give voice to the ~b of ~bb in freedom’s dialectic at the level of b~b~bb, and, as such, “soul” in my story becomes the equivalent of that which connects human beings to God. The problem is that what connects God to humans also separates humans from “self” (self as the implicative affirmative of the not-me-self) and God. Free will and self-consciousness, however, follow from this separation. We have the “option to choose,” and, of course, choice carries with it a lifetime of baggage which determines “how we choose.” Nevertheless, choice falls between good and evil and if per chance it should land in the neighborhood of evil, civilization provides law and order to counter harm and mayhem. Again, in terms of freedom’s dialectic, the ~b of ~bb at the level of b~b~bb is the source of meaningful symbol creation, which, in turn, opened the door to the creation of language, myth, religion, art, theoretical knowledge, and the rest of the civilizing processes that we call civilization. This ongoing self-liberation is not only embedded in civilization, it is also embedded in the aesthetic continuum and it is here that the true meaning of life will ultimately be found. The gorgeous sunset that sometimes swells our eyes to tears is not just a product of the spinning earth; it is also part of the spontaneous, pulsating, emotion that flows from the whole of the aesthetic continuum. Inspiration for the poet, painter, and musician comes not from cerebral musings, but rather from the empowering emotion that inspires life, imagination, and awe. The strength and resolve necessary to create a better world is not found in analysis and calculation, but rather in the empowering emotion that calls us to love, beauty and truth. The immediately grasped, emotionally moving ground out of which all things arise–the aesthetic component of our experience–beckons us to seek the impossible, express the unspeakable, and imagine the inconceivable. The ~b of ~bb at the level of b~b~bb, -- or the voice of the devil in my story—is the voice of Divinity made whole in consciousness, and, as such, this voice is not the traditional voice of Lucifer, Satan, or the Devil. This soul-stealing demon of tradition, rather, was the imagined product of wandering nomads lost in the desert many millenniums ago, or so says Randy Newman in his Rock Opera Faust, and I agree. However, imagination itself is a product of the ~b of ~bb, so, to put a more wholesome spin on the plight of the wandering nomads, one could say that the voice of Divinity, via the imagination, was admonishing consciousness not to stray from the divine path. Again, self-consciousness and imagination are component aspects of the voice of Divinity, but in general parlance of dialogue the word typically used to reference that voice is “conscience.” However, Divinity has a more direct and powerful voice. Divinity (when it truly speaks) speaks through the language of love. This post ends with an epilogue concerning God, love, and my description of what I have concluded to be the ultimate meaning of life.
I Surrender To The Endless Love That Binds Us All
In Your Darkness I See The Path Of Refuge-The Path To The Loving God That Beckons
Future Time Ten Concluded
“Ahhh, finis, what a sweet sound,” said MV. “Let us be off then!”
“Not so fast,” I replied, “where could I possibly go? In your darkness I see the light that shows me I have already arrived. It’s you who have kept me apart from the Lord. Nothing is separate from God, nothing except this ‘sense of separateness,’ which is you. If indeed I was separate from the Lord, I could not exist. As long as you do your work, that is, spread hate, vindictiveness, jealously, cruelty, and uncaring ways, there will be no reconciliation, no communion, no God-connectiveness. ‘Self-centeredness’ opens the door to everything except the Divine. Ego forces the Divine out of existence. That law, although not found in any textbook, says it all. As Heaven’s fallen angle, your boundary, your horizon, not only shows me how I am connected to God, it also shows me how you are kept apart from God. That is truly the mark of Satan, -- the mark you are powerless to change. However, without you there would be no questioning, no progress, and no success; without you I could not ask: How can I do God’s work? With the answer to that question, though, you become a mere shadow presence. Over those who can ‘walk the talk,’ you have no power. I have paid my dues. It is your darkness that illuminates the path before me now. Your darkness points towards the refuge where you cannot trespass, toward the liberated and liberating condition of the loving God that beckons!”
“Aren’t you forgetting something? You’re dead,” MV replied. “It wasn’t out of kindness that you murdered yourself. It wasn’t love that drove you to suicide.”
“But it was,” I said. “I could not live without it. It was just a flicker, but a flicker of the real thing was, for me, a flame all-consuming. My vision was limited back then; it was simply a girl—that girl, and I didn’t understand, but that did not and will not make me your slave, and besides, slaves love, too!”
“Just think,” said MV, “if you knew back then what you know now you could have lived a different life, a real one. You do have blessings to count, though. Your memories are real. You will need them where you’re going. If you’re lucky, those memories may be consoling.”
“You poor fool,” I said. “If only you could long for beauty, yearn for completeness, or feel the need to be free, then you wouldn’t be so quick to judge me or anybody else. I have found God in the Absolute Affirmation of existence, but you can’t do that! What I see and feel you cannot see and feel. I know, like I have always known-- but even more so now--that God is love. Love is what the Absolute Affirmation is all about. It is love that must be affirmed. You are not the liberator. The real liberator is love. Lover and beloved become as one in love. All opposites come together in love. Love is where real liberation takes place. There is no substitute for it. Separation does not exist there. Love is the greatest apperception. You have no power before love. Freedom, beauty, and completeness are embedded there; the psychic and the cosmic are embedded there. It is the same in death as in life, and I know that you know that, even if it is beyond you! You cannot change the unchangeable! If you want me, take me; that is… if you can. In either case, I am going home. You’re nothing compared to the eternal baptism of love! To consummation I surrender; to the unending love that binds us all, I surrender!”
Epilogue
The Word Of Revelation Is: I Am There As Whoever I Am There, Nothing More
In Truth, There Is No God-Seeking Because There Is Nothing Where One Could Not Find Him. How Foolish And Hopeless Must One Be To Leave One’s Way Of Life To Seek God: Even If One Gained All The Wisdom Of Solitude And All The power Of Concentration, One Would Miss Him
God And Love
Since the Enlightenment, minds at the cutting edge of intellectual development worship at the logic and reason alter. Emotional disturbances are either irrelevant to intellectual progress or worse-- prohibit it. Our emotional nature, particularly in this Age of Reason, has been relegated to the irrational part of the animal brain. But not here—not in God’s love attribute!
Factual data, hypothesis, generalization, judgment, all the signs and symbols of language originate in and are part of our sensuous and emotional experience, our aesthetic experience. Words have histories and, if traced back far enough, those histories end in the participatory process that occurs between consciousness and the aesthetic continuum. As I have described in an earlier post, the participatory event reifies conscious objects (language being one of them) and, in the process, the environment becomes objectified. In the end, whether in metaphysical thought or discursive reason’s manipulation and formulation of signs, symbols, and ideas, it is all about the participatory event that sees, feels, understands, and acts.
For many of us, affirming God is easy. Getting to know the meaning of the relationships behind that affirmation is the all-important next step however. Fortunately, Martin Buber was there first, so I’ll let him do most of the talking here. Affirming God, for Buber, is no more difficult than affirming the ground out of which duality arises, and Buber understood this. In his book, I And Thou, he alludes to the spiritual significance of this affirmation when he says:
"Dimly we apprehend this double movement --that turning away from the primal ground by virtue of which the universe preserves itself in its becoming, and that turning toward the primal ground by virtue of which the universe redeems itself in being --as the metacosmic primal form of duality that inheres in the world as a whole in its relation to that which is not world, and whose human form is the duality of attitudes, of basic words, and of the two aspects of the world. Both movements are unfolded fatefully in time and enclosed, as by grace, in the timeless creation that, incomprehensibly, is at once release and preservation, at once bond and liberation. Our knowledge of duality is reduced to silence by the paradox of the primal mystery" (1970, p. 149).
In freedom’s dialectic, double negation, life, and the implicative affirmative of the not-me-self may be thought of as representing Buber's turning away from the primal ground, while double negation, death, and the physical event may be thought of as turning toward the primal ground that conserves and redeems being. Affirming a transcendent God then becomes no more difficult than affirming the ground out of which duality arises, but in doing so, one is also affirming God’s immanence—God’s thou-ness.
In the human being the I-thou, I-it, aspects of the world arise. It is in “presence,” a presence other then I-it, that the eternal You achieves the power of articulation—the God-presence that occurs in and through human relationships. In, I And Thou, Buber illustrates this point often and with elegance:
“…in every You we address the eternal You, in every sphere according to its manner. All spheres are included in it, while it is included in none.” (p. 150)
“Of course, God is ‘the wholly other’; but he is also the wholly same: the wholly present. Of course, he is the mysterium tremendum that appears and overwhelms; but he is also the mystery of the obvious that is closer to me than my own I.” (p. 127)
“…in truth, there is no God-seeking because there is nothing where one could not find him. How foolish and hopeless must one be to leave one's way of life to seek God: even if one gained all the wisdom of solitude and all the power of concentration, one would miss him.” (p. 128)
“The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more.” (p. 160)
“The encounter with God does not come to man in order that he may henceforth attend to God, but in order that he may prove its meaning in action in the world. All revelation is a calling and a mission.” (p. 164)
“God embraces but is not the universe; just so, God embraces but is not my self. On account of this which cannot be spoken about, I can say in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this there are I and You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is, and there is, in eternity, the word.” (p. 143)
The bottom line here is that communication occurs "between" God and the infinite regress of Being. God is there in my relationship with nature and God is there in my relationship with human beings, but it is in that relationship, my relationship with other people, where the highest order of communication resides, where the eternal You communicates, --in the I-thou relationship. That said, one question remains: Why all this communication? Why anything at all as opposed to nothing at all?
Language Development Follows From The Need To Express Complex Emotions
The Passionate Need To Express And Understand Life’s Meaning Drives (For Some) Their Mental Life
God And Love Continued
For me, the God qua God idea is totally incomprehensible. Emotion is another thing all together, though. Without emotions consciousness could not exist. Thinking and feeling are so entwined in consciousness that some have argued language development follows from the human need to express complex emotions. William James held that “stream of consciousness” is comprised of both thinking and feeling elements. Feeling, for James, participates in knowledge and understanding. Echoing this sentiment, in his article, Reason and Feeling, Professor Creighton explains:
“In the development of mind, feeling does not remain a static element, constant in form and content at all levels, but…is transformed and disciplined through its interplay with other aspects of experience…Indeed, the character of the feeling in any experience may be taken as an index of the mind’s grasp of its object; at the lower levels of experience, where the mind is only partially or superficially involved, feeling appears as something isolated and opaque, as the passive accompaniment of mere bodily sensations…In the higher experiences, the feelings assume an entirely different character, just as do the sensations and other contents of mind.”
(Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy In A New Key, p. 100)
Of course, there will remain an inefficacy concerning emotion and language. Language is after all a poor medium for expressing one’s emotional nature. But, when looked at holistically, it is certainly possible that myth, ritual, art, language, and the abstract logical necessities encountered in mathematics and science are products of one’s passionate need to express and expand meanings. One might even go as far as to say that the passionate need to express and understand life’s meaning drives one’s mental life. But, if true; that is, if mental life is all about discovering life’s meaning, then we will forever remain frustrated. Professor Northrop tells us why when he says:
“Now it is precisely this ineffable, emotional, moving quale that constitutes what is meant by spirit and the spiritual. Thus in order to do justice to the spiritual nature of human beings and of all things it is not necessary to have recourse to idle speculations, by means of which one tries to pierce through the glass beyond which we now see darkly, to supposedly unaesthetic material substances behind, or into some unreachable and unknowable realm where mental substances are supposed to be. On the contrary, the spiritual, the ineffable, the emotionally moving, the aesthetically vivid—the stuff that dreams and sunsets and the fragrance of flowers are made of—is the immediate, purely factual portion of human nature and the nature of all things. This is the portion of human knowledge that can be known without recourse to inference and speculative hypotheses and deductive logic, and epistemic correlations and rigorously controlled experiments. This we have and are in ourselves and in all things, prior to all theory, before all speculation, with immediacy and hence with absolute certainty.” (The Meeting of East and West, p.462)
The Need To Share The Sublime-Share Love-Answers The Question Why Exist
You Are Not The Liberator-Love Is The Real Liberator
God And Love Concluded
Staring into the heart of the Milky Way galaxy on a warm summer’s night, it is impossible not to feel the emotion. Or, again, picture yourself perched on a mountain peak, the setting sun’s soft yellow rays illuminating the range of peaks before you. In very special moments like these something happens, something sublime! What could possibly be more sublime? Perhaps sharing the sublime with others! It is, I believe, the need to share the sublime that answers the question Why Exist. But even on this mountaintop Buber was first:
"That you need God more than anything,” says Buber, “you know at all times in your heart. But don't you know also that God needs you--in the fullness of his eternity, you? How would man exist if God did not need him, and how would you exist? You need God in order to be, and God needs you for that which is the meaning of your life." (1970, p. 130)
Sadly, for me to really appreciate Buber, I had to read him through the prism of freedom’s dialectic. Somehow that bites! But, on the other hand, look at all those people who read Jesus; how many really experience the meaning of the words: Love God with all your heart and do on to others as you would have others do on to you? Probably not many! I want to end this post by describing a relatively recent event (the meaning of which I am still struggling over). Maybe I should call it a revelatory event, or maybe not. Like the people who read Jesus but don’t hear, I’m not exactly sure how much of a revelation this was/is! Anyway, the actual event I’m about to describe took place a very long time ago. I’m going to let the woman in the event do the talking here. At the time, she was advocating a particular mystical tradition and when I begged off her invitation to join the group, she stood up and walked away. From afar I continued to watch her meander down the beach as she stayed in and out of the clinging ocean surf, but, while watching, I reached for my bag and took out pencil and paper and began to write down the highlights of our conversation. She was a strong woman, very impressive, as you can probably tell from my notes:
“Love, propelled by the beauty it creates,” (I’m paraphrasing somewhat here), “burns through the senses in music, poetry, literature, painting, dance—all artistic forms of expression follow from it. Love animates and grows. Without it, there would be no work ethic, no survival. Perhaps, someday, you will have the inclination and the time to look beyond yourself, to that world where creativity and love burn brightest. If that day comes, I dare say you will come to know that love is what the Absolute Affirmation is all about. It is love that must be affirmed. You are not the liberator. The real liberator is love. Lover and beloved become as one in love. All opposites come together in love. Love is where real liberation takes place. There is no substitute for it. Separation does not exist there. Love is the greatest apperception. You have no power before love. Freedom, beauty, and completeness are embedded there; the psychic and the cosmic are embedded there. It is the same in death as in life, and I know that you know that, even if it is beyond you! You cannot change the unchangeable!”
In freedom’s dialectic, where self-consciousness, life, and duality—the affirming structures of God—become transparent to mind, divine love emerges. Love is, according to the great mystic sage from India, Aurobindo (1892-1950), “a union of self with self, soul with soul, and spirit with spirit.” In freedom’s dialectic this union is already achieved, but experiencing the immediacy of this union in the here and now is a very rare experience indeed. For me, this experience remains only an idea, but for others, few to be sure, love is all there is!
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