Thank you, Matt, for a thoughtful reflection and for sharing your powerful mystical experience. And thank you for modeling your empathic tears that incarnate that wounded state of the Divine within us whenever we also incarnate that vulnerable Love for others within ourselves, which then led you to such a beautiful de-cision for incarnating Love.
From an integral spiritual view, as a philosopher-mystic-healer, I would suggest that we have three stages of "othering" that we humans need to overcome: othering others, othering Nature, and othering the Divine. Each level seemingly entails its own powers of and limitations on evil, and its own level of interconnectedness with humans/beings/entities of similar energy-consciousness-intention. Of course, there is also the extremely depressed option of "othering" our own selves. Out of the darkness of the void, as in the quantum vacuum, new energies of Light and Life are always possible for healing all our wounds, so that we can incarnate Love once again. Thank you for inviting our reflection on such essential understandings of our own nature as part of Nature.
Your introduction to Whiteheadean thinking has enabled me to grow beyond myself and allow compassionate passion to participate in developing resolve to bring peace in all my actions.
Thank you Matt. I need to be with where we are today. Your words open a
door. We recovered in the closest church that we could find in Krakow after experiencing Auschwitz. Do you just go to dinner after that? No. You have no place to go to unsee what you just saw. You cry as you said not for sad but for the incomprehensible enormity of cruelty carried out for the fun of it. “Auschwitz” in German for “Swiss Alps”. “Birkenau” is German for “Meadow of Birches”. So that’s where they told they were going. Wink, wink. So yes. Evil A-listed as fun. Good dull boring woke.
Thank you Matt for reposting this deep reflection on a difficult truth. Years ago, in a talk at a church breakfast, I talked about “decision.” I brought out a loaf of bread and a knife to demonstrate “decaedere,” the Latin etymological origin of our verb, which means “to cut off, leave behind. If you want the “good” piece of bread, you have to employ the “evil” weapon. If you want to go to college, you may have to leave your loved ones behind. Twenty-five years ago, at age 52, I was fortunate to visit the miniature model of Jerusalem followed by a visit to Yad Vashem. There was peace in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Tel Aviv. Now it’s not possible to decide where to look for goodness. The only thing to do is extend an intention of compassion to everyone involved.
You write: "Our humanity depends for its existence on the abyssal depths of nature, the same groundlessness that first called even God into consciousness." That last bit is an idea I have played with some. Can you say more what you mean by it? Does it entail that God is not eternal in the past direction?
I'm alluding to Whitehead's idea (that I think is also present in Schelling) that God's primordial nature, while eternal, is unconscious. God only becomes conscious in consequence of relationship with the physical world.
So God has existed forever, at least God's primordial nature. But God's consequent nature might have been dormant (and God unconscious) until he physical world existed. Do you think the physical world has always existed, in which case God's consequent nature was always conscious, or the physical world started existing at some point, in which case God awakened to consciousness some finite time ago?
Puts me in mind of a notion I came across somewhere, that it was only at the Baptism in the Jordan, that the Word, on entering into the body of Jesus (and in relation to the physical world) becomes the Son...separate from the Father. "This is my Son, my Beloved, on whom my favour rests) Thanks Matt for the powerful post.
Thank you, Matt, for a thoughtful reflection and for sharing your powerful mystical experience. And thank you for modeling your empathic tears that incarnate that wounded state of the Divine within us whenever we also incarnate that vulnerable Love for others within ourselves, which then led you to such a beautiful de-cision for incarnating Love.
From an integral spiritual view, as a philosopher-mystic-healer, I would suggest that we have three stages of "othering" that we humans need to overcome: othering others, othering Nature, and othering the Divine. Each level seemingly entails its own powers of and limitations on evil, and its own level of interconnectedness with humans/beings/entities of similar energy-consciousness-intention. Of course, there is also the extremely depressed option of "othering" our own selves. Out of the darkness of the void, as in the quantum vacuum, new energies of Light and Life are always possible for healing all our wounds, so that we can incarnate Love once again. Thank you for inviting our reflection on such essential understandings of our own nature as part of Nature.
Your introduction to Whiteheadean thinking has enabled me to grow beyond myself and allow compassionate passion to participate in developing resolve to bring peace in all my actions.
Just saw a Hyundai ad that said: “Deal so good it almost feels wrong.”
Thank you Matt. I need to be with where we are today. Your words open a
door. We recovered in the closest church that we could find in Krakow after experiencing Auschwitz. Do you just go to dinner after that? No. You have no place to go to unsee what you just saw. You cry as you said not for sad but for the incomprehensible enormity of cruelty carried out for the fun of it. “Auschwitz” in German for “Swiss Alps”. “Birkenau” is German for “Meadow of Birches”. So that’s where they told they were going. Wink, wink. So yes. Evil A-listed as fun. Good dull boring woke.
Thank you Matt for reposting this deep reflection on a difficult truth. Years ago, in a talk at a church breakfast, I talked about “decision.” I brought out a loaf of bread and a knife to demonstrate “decaedere,” the Latin etymological origin of our verb, which means “to cut off, leave behind. If you want the “good” piece of bread, you have to employ the “evil” weapon. If you want to go to college, you may have to leave your loved ones behind. Twenty-five years ago, at age 52, I was fortunate to visit the miniature model of Jerusalem followed by a visit to Yad Vashem. There was peace in Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Nazareth and Tel Aviv. Now it’s not possible to decide where to look for goodness. The only thing to do is extend an intention of compassion to everyone involved.
Could complexity be ‘’Abraxas’’?….(asking fot a friend)✌🏻…☯️
In a Carl Jung view..
Wow that's deep! And amazing.
You write: "Our humanity depends for its existence on the abyssal depths of nature, the same groundlessness that first called even God into consciousness." That last bit is an idea I have played with some. Can you say more what you mean by it? Does it entail that God is not eternal in the past direction?
I'm alluding to Whitehead's idea (that I think is also present in Schelling) that God's primordial nature, while eternal, is unconscious. God only becomes conscious in consequence of relationship with the physical world.
So God has existed forever, at least God's primordial nature. But God's consequent nature might have been dormant (and God unconscious) until he physical world existed. Do you think the physical world has always existed, in which case God's consequent nature was always conscious, or the physical world started existing at some point, in which case God awakened to consciousness some finite time ago?
Puts me in mind of a notion I came across somewhere, that it was only at the Baptism in the Jordan, that the Word, on entering into the body of Jesus (and in relation to the physical world) becomes the Son...separate from the Father. "This is my Son, my Beloved, on whom my favour rests) Thanks Matt for the powerful post.