Book1

Inspiration 1


Questioning wisdom



Summary

First of all there is the matter of the human predicament of being caught in time. The person is what continues from the past into the future. Fixed inside, the person loses his grip and fixed on the outside, he is beset with fear because of the dynamics of time that change everything and undermine all material certainties until one's death. Thus we realize the need of the idealist perspective of a stable person inside who is still in touch and effective in the outside world. This person, whom we are not just like that, we then call the Ideal Person, or the Supreme Person we cannot do without. Thus the need to meditate on this Original Person is realized as also the need to find and respect that ideal of stability and completeness in the outside world. For that purpose one needs to be devoted, that thus becomes a necessity. We must be complete with Him, comprehensive.

With all our science, modern inventions, political and scientific philosophies and spiritual strategies we, in this time and age, are in dire need of a most important basic ingredient to be happy and healthy with in our modern lives. This ingredient is respect for the person. It is a subject that constitutes a serious problem, for it proposes ourself as the object and subject of study. Self reference is not an ideal scientific perspective. It is a very shaky ground to work on, a scientific taboo even, facing the scientific duty of validation, the duty by the law of relativity to refer to something or someone outside of us in order to make sense. Thus we, from our modern scientific belief, instinctively tend to turn away from this problem concerning the integrity, cohesion, respect, control and identity of the person, we, after all, do not want to end up in invalid subjectivist egocentrism and irrational emotionalism. Still we are all persons in need of respect and self-respect like plants that need water and have an emotional term for it: love. Love makes the world go round they say and when we discuss the problem of this difficult subject of the quality of our respect for the person we also have to deal with the problem of the contrary: the systematic denial of the person called impersonality. The counterpart of the problem of personalism or subjectivism is the problem of impersonalism, a term that, peculiar enough, is not even found in the Oxford dictionary. In fact this primary duality constitutes a most fundamental problem. There is the awkward situation of by a system, out fear of subjectivism, being reduced to a number, a statistic, a pawn, a functional agent, without a further identity like a soldier in an army of uniformed people, and there is the ego problem of looking at ourselves and each other while being identified as agents of control that cannot and do not want to be controlled by any other agent than our free will, whatever the latter might be.
So we, first of all, have questions. Assuming that we cannot live without respect for the person because we are a person ourself, which person or persons are we talking about then? Is it a religious or political matter or should we rather keep it philosophical or psychological? Concerns it me, my history, my expertise, my physique, what I possess or what I stand for, concerns it the personal characteristics and interests of someone else, or should we be working for the sake of a common ground in this? Or must we, instead of this me/you/us affair, be more spiritual and consider a more abstract notion of the person of a culture of the past we want to remember as a perfect example and lead in this problematic matter? Or would it else have to be someone of a culture in the future we expect to become like such an example, like an idealized person, a great leader or personal beacon of moral and spiritual, individual and social integrity we can believe in and become ourself a part of? And also, what kind of respect or love are we talking about? As persons we are of both a formal and informal nature, of both a public and a private sphere, of both a general and specific interest, of both an individual and collective identity, of both a spiritual and a material presence. What is wisdom in this?
Of course we as normal people are very hard trying to live in respect and love, and engage in relationships for that purpose. We want to love someone and be loved by someone, individually and collectively. We abhor to sink away in impersonal faceless strategies. We write postcards, personal emails to people we know, make phone calls, use the social media, invite people, get married, live together in one household (or more), have family meetings and meetings with friends, join clubs, associate with colleagues, meet regularly with co-believers and join in submitting to a common culture that provides us an identity. We commit ourselves to causes and purposes and do our best to be good natured with our relations, friends, kin, neighbors and everyone else we know and live with. We want to do good, be good and feel good in enlightened self-interest.
But still our lives are full of strife, conflict, disasters, threats, quarrel, distrust, disrespect, partiality, envy, anger and enmity. We have problems with each other about it. The respect we all want - not even for ourselves - is not that easily achieved and maintained at all. Relationships tend to be temporary and superficial. Practices and policies tend to corrupt. We tend to use each other, offend each other and betray each other, we have ulterior motives and fail in reciprocation. Unrequited love, forgotten love, unacknowledged love. We neglect and fail to respect and suffer disrespect and neglect from others. We get disappointed in life, get sick, suffer diseases mentally and physically and ask ourselves who can be trusted and who would deserve our love and respect, not to mention our money. Missing this respect for others and from others we suffer a lack of self-esteem, we cannot find stability in our lives, have an identity crisis and are getting confused about the purpose of our lives naturally and culturally. Our wish to be happy is easily replaced by a wish for possessions, sense gratification, status, wealth and other substitutes. We develop false pride, false ego and false hopes. Gradually we out of despair may fall into unrighteous actions and become bad people that do not deserve the respect we indeed cannot find or give. We start to confirm ourselves in negativity dividing the world in friends and foes. What should we do? We cannot keep complaining about our individual and collective failures, nor can we accuse others all the time of the same or blame it on the genes or the weather; disoriented in life everything becomes a blur and our lives become stressful without even understanding the causes and the symptoms of sleeplessness, drowsiness, neurosis and psychosis. We become opinionated, unhappy and quarrelsome. We engage in personal and collective wars. What went wrong? What is the evil we should fight? Where should we start to tackle these existential problems?
Is love the way? Just live in love and all problems are solved? But as said, it is difficult to confide, even in oneself. What does that love mean we crave so badly for? Love can be demanding! Love is so intricate and vulnerable. Who should answer our questions when we as adults are on a mission of self-realization? What is wisdom in these matters? How can we find lasting happiness? Clearly we are looking for the person we are ourselves in the first place and secondly for the person that deserves our love and can answer with his or her love to our satisfaction. To be deserving though means that there are conditions that need to be met and questions about wisdom that must be answered and cannot be tackled without content, without meaning, without reference. We have to discuss the problems we have with ourselves, with others and with the greater context of nature and culture we are engaged in.

There is an ideal person of the past, there is an ideal person of the present, and there is an ideal person of the future. This book is about the realization of that person of threefold time. The ideal person of the present is the continuation of the ideal person of the past into the ideal person in the future. The person in the present is what we know as real, the past of that person is gone and the future of that person is not there yet. But the present makes no sense, has no meaning, without this continuation of the person who is not bound to any of the forms of personal appearance existing in the past, present or future.
There is no meaning thus without a proper perspective of time. Forms are temporary, what continues is what we have to realize as that what gives meaning to our existence. Names there are many for this person of all answers, but most commonly we speak of the soul as the continuing ideal and conscientious person who should not be judged by his (and/or her) form, but by his spirit, his content. From accepting this insight we then may speak of this eternal person omnipresent in every time and place, in capital letters. We may speak then of the Soul, the Person. This is the One we have to learn to relate to in our lives, this is the One to answer our questions. About the person we are by definition of a split, dual - and indeed possibly sick - mind. Is that bad? Not exactly... Without this duality of the normal ordinary striving person of a limited realization and the ideal self-satisfied Person of full realization, we are doomed to have a life filled with depression and misery, envy and despair. Accepting this duality as inevitable and necessary we are spiritually healthy, we have a path, a goal, an ideal to work for and to relate to. Accepting this reality, this Reality, we also are sobered up instead of being bewildered, our illusions evaporate, because thinking of the past we were not complete, thinking of the present we are not complete and thinking of the future we know we will never be complete. But the depression of missing the person will not be there once we are accepting the Person of the Soul who is our better self, our Self, neither will we then be envious, of false pride or of enmity. Hence there will be peace and thus prosperity in our lives if we manage to submit ourselves to this one and only reality of the Supreme Person we can never know or be fully but have to believe in.
This is the final formula for humanity. Respecting the Person of Transcendence we will not despair or live in the falsehood of a conceited self image, we will not have a wrong estimate of our position in the here and now and we will not have a false perspective for the future. Conceited with a wrong position having a false perspective there will be war, for every soul is tuned to - and emancipated with - this truth of the Ideal Person residing within, and will fight against its counterpart that is the great Lie. No religion of this form therefore will ever defeat a religion of that form. No political party of this person will ever eradicate a political party of any one else. Fighting religions and contesting political parties belongs to the domain of illusion. Know who you are, know your position and know your perspective, individually and collective. Stand firmly rooted in the reality of this primal duality that is the root of all the peace and prosperity we want and need to survive on the planet. We, all of mankind.

This book is not meant to exclude or condemn anything or anyone, the purpose is rather to assign everything and everyone his/her/it's place. One can say however, something about being focussed on the Original Person or not. Rather than being connected with persons like family members, friends, colleagues and relatives this account aims at being connected to the One Omnipresent Person who is the repository of wisdom, happiness and continuity. In this sense being focussed on the Authentic Person means one is - or will be - liberated from being attached to each other and to material things. It is that attachment after all that is not only the source of a lot of love, pleasure and happiness, but also of its counterpart of hatred, disapproval and unhappiness. Therefore the connectedness we want to defend in this book is defined by the quality of one's consciousness rather than the objectivity and diversity of the material reality we are aware of and/or control. This is not so much about national and cultural differences and ego, about freedom and status, about religion and standards and values or about this or that membership of this or that club. This spirit of living for the True Person does not make us transcendentalists opposing materialists. This understanding is rather about recognizing the materialist and transcendentalist position we all have in our own life. The purpose of being in touch with the Person of Happiness is comprehensiveness, to be complete in one's - or in our - understanding and practices. It is not to become a one-sided specialist and moralist in transcending matters and living with a detached view condemning those who do not do so or those moments you do not so it yourself. The engagement in material affairs is inevitable as long as one is embodied. So we do not propose here a spirituality of non-involvement and other-worldliness. On the contrary, we want to define the essence of simultaneously being embodied as responsible, loving and also attached people at the one hand and being liberated in our focus on the Person of our Ideals at the other hand.
In the end there remains a distinction between people in their focus. Those obsessed with material affairs who abhor meditation, transcendence and the practices of respect for the Person of Love are simply one-sided bewildered escapists who sooner or later in their life will arrive at the inevitable conclusion that the external world cannot be confirmed at the cost of an internal world of reflection and motivated connectedness in being focussed on the Ideal Self that is the Person we all want to be but never completely will be. This inability to perfectly meet the ideal is the frustration we have to accept as normal people, the modesty that is the first condition for peace and mental health to prevent us from running into conflicts of power, wealth and esteem. The ones who, caught in considerations of individual and collective ego, are missing the focus on the Person of Truth one may call bewildered, illusional, estranged or simply poorly integrated. These people in their ego mindedness exclude all kinds of matters. Our determination to begin with is the firm resolve of not being denied any walk or perspective of life, be it personal or impersonal, spiritual or material. It is all about the integrity of covering all interests, all perspectives, all fields of action, human, animal and plant-like, macrocosmic, microcosmic and the 'mesocosmic' in between.

Source for this Inspiration:
S.B. Canto 1, Chapter 1






The Person

De Persoon

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