Friday, 8 March 2019

Dialogue ~ 13


In my previous blog, I wrote, “Heraclitus, Parmenides and Plato might have had differing perspectives or ways of communicating about an origin of knowledge and truth, but the reality of what they were conveying was remarkably similar; it is not any of our constructs of knowledge and truth that should be prized as expressions or forms of the highest good, so much as an illumination or aspect of consciousness which reveals knowledge and truth to us. 

I had also quoted Carl Jung, “No rules can cope with the paradoxes of life. Moral law, like natural law, represents only one aspect of reality” with my concluding that “the same could be said of any doctrine, whether it is religious or political, in which its fundamental tenet is to prescribe the highest good.”

Okay, so it would appear that ‘the form of the good’ or ‘the highest good’ is not about any ‘landmark on a map’; it’s not a destination. A person can’t point towards a particular virtue and say ‘that’s the highest good’, nor can they ring-fence any goals or actions on the pretext of serving a majority over a minority or indeed vice versa. 

It is true that there is nothing to stop a person doing these things, simply that as with all choices that are made, there are consequences. If what we are looking for is ‘an illumination or aspect of consciousness which reveals knowledge and truth to us’, then it is pertinent to ask, ‘is there an aspect of our nature which is paying attention to what is being perceived of life and is changing course as necessary (beyond will)?’ The crux of this being that if we don’t know where we are going, how can we know how to get there? 

Joseph Campbell, amongst other works, the author of ‘The Hero with a Thousand Faces’ wrote that, “Life has no meaning. Each of us has meaning and we bring it to life. It is a waste to be asking the question when you are the answer.” And also, “If you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

“Follow your bliss”, well that seems innocuous enough. But then, bliss is defined as ‘perfect happiness; great joy’ and also, ‘a state of spiritual blessedness, typically that reached after death’. So I am given to understand that bliss is a navigational tool rather than an end-product – and ironically, that it is of a spiritual nature and may not be attained until after death? Doesn’t this suggest that in trying to bring meaning to life, a person is inevitably at cause of their own death? This being so, surely there is something odd going on in the midst of life, something alarming which is not being revealed through Western culture? Could this be its potency, not residing in an exoteric, but in its esoteric nature?

Recall what I wrote in February of last year, in the blog ‘Interlude’: 

Does compassion gaze into the eyes of angst and does sorrow know its nature as it alights upon the face of its Beloved? Illumination is present in this veil, of where the creator is co-twined with the created, of where Being and Becoming are one. For where else would it be possible to know for certain 'one's truth'? It is not the ground or distance covered, so much as an inclination which opens a doorway to revealing. 

To ‘Be still and know that I Am’ is not a request to listen and to be attentive to life for clarity, to gain something more for oneself through that act; it is an invitation to enter into the unknown and to be willing to ‘surrender all one’s worldly goods’, to give up one’s life in effect. For in that moment is death revealed as illusion, even as all else that is seen falls away. Revelation is a threshold which is perceived as the greatest terror for a human and is also life’s greatest joy.

In a previous blog, I quoted from an extract from the novel ‘Of Time and the River’ by Thomas Wolfe,At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being—the reward he seeks—the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
 
Also from the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, "One is All and through it is All, and by it is All, and if you have not All, All is Nothing.

Imagine revelation as occurring in a flash of light, like lightning or a ‘thunderbolt of Zeus’, a moment of stillness or as similar to the imagery in Michelangelo’s artwork of ‘The Creation of Adam’. Is this the glimpse we are looking for in the course of daily life, ‘an illumination or aspect of consciousness which reveals knowledge and truth to us’?

Of course, this ‘glimpse’ will mean differing things to different people, according to what has been moving through their field of awareness at that time. One person might describe the glimpse as ‘simply knowing what to do in the moment’ or ‘perfect synchronicity (perhaps of speed and movement)’ or the experience such as the astronaut Edgar Mitchell described, “I had completed my major task for going to the moon and was on my way home and was observing the heavens and the earth from this distance, observing the passing of the heavens. As we were rotating, I saw the earth, the sun, the moon in a 360° panorama of the heavens. The magnificence of all of this, what this triggered in my vision, in the ancient Sanskrit, is called Samadhi. It means that you see things with your senses the way they are, but you experience them viscerally and internally as a unity and oneness, accompanied by ecstasy.” 

Reading into the narratives above, it would appear as if it is the very complexity or unending movement or activity of life which is given to obscure or create a sense of a veil as existing between the ‘kernal of eternity’ or transcendent reality and everyday human awareness. If we are seeds of potential and are growing into all that we can become, why is it that we might yearn to and experience such a sense of rapture through a retreat into the innermost reality of our being?

Is it because that it is within our being that is a storehouse of wisdom of where we are able to make sense of the information that is gathered through an act of living? At the same time as we are contributing and as we enter and receive, do we feel bliss? Or are we like bees in a hive, with attention or everyday awareness focused more on the gathering and dissemination of information than on what it has potential to reveal? Perhaps time will tell or will reveal to us what it is that we have been looking at.

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