Time and Doing Justice to the Person - Toleration and Peace

Summary

In the previous inspiration we arrived at the insight that both the soul and the world are real and that the realm of illusion is in the mind lodged in between the two. The world is temporary, characterized by time phenomena in constant flux, while the soul is unaffected by time and unchanging. The sense impressions give rise to identification so that there is a mind running along the changes occurring in the outside world. Thus we have a cloud of thoughts that screen the soul off from outer reality. The material world is not an illusion but illusory, it gives rise to illusions or mental misrepresentations. These illusions are fed by our material motives in service of our bodies. Because of issues of ego and control, we tend to run into conflict with other persons, our own person and the world at large that we also learned to recognize as the integrity of the great person. The person is everywhere, inside of us, around us and outside all of us. In order to be free from illusion, not to be confused in our subjective experience of the person, we are careful with identifying any person to begin with. And thus for starters we, contrary to our objective, do not directly do any justice to the person we are ourselves, the persons around us in the form of society and the integrity of nature at large that is also unmistakably one living, coordinated integrity we may and do call a person. We resorted, to begin with, to an impersonal order, the order of time, the time as being the doer in the previous inspiration. This time could be natural in the sense of the relative phenomena of the passing sun and moon and it could be cultural in the sense of clocks and calendars that do not quite scientifically follow the tempo of the natural phenomena as determined by natural law. So even at the impersonal level we turn out not to do justice. For pragmatical reasons we have mean days, linear weeks, time zones and summertime schedules that violate the validity principle of science.
So despite putting science first in our educational systems, we do not do so in our societal order of time. Like with the Big Person of the Universe that is real and the person - or Person - of the inner soul being real, who both are complemented with a troubled mind full of illusion in between, we also have a true time of natural events in the outside world and a pragmatically created change of moments we call the cultural time, that are complemented by an experienced sense of time we call psychological time, a time that is renown for its instability - if not for its neurosis, its authority conflict. This state of being caught in illusion, we alas legally enforce nationally and internationally. Thus in fact, for pragmatical reasons, we are in a way neurotic culturally, we may enjoy a neurotic culture or cultural neurosis, with so now and then a bout of psychotic warfare in the sense of a collective mutual destruction, as a consequence of the collapse of reason in diplomacy, politics and other departments of human ego. Evidently our human ego of time, the I-awareness of material identification not matching with the soul, may lead to a so-called de-compensation, a fall back into chaos, for the sake of a natural order we did not really want. But of course, nature always wins. Our culture of time is not mature. The façade of honor cannot be kept up because we ran all together into a big lie of keeping up appearances, while being tormented by neurotic, psychological discomfort. That being said, the question is, how to do justice to the person in all his departments of being big, medium and small. We already suggested that with the duality of the personal/impersonal dimension, working at one problem automatically leads to doing work for the other extreme. Impersonal clarity might very well lead to personal clarity, since the impersonal confusion of psychological - or pathologically speaking neurotic - time, the uncertainty of the authority over time, being unresolved, leads to a troubled person misconceiving or wavering in between the natural and cultural command. So yes, the impersonal department has the same problem thus of lacking in receiving proper respect, even though that department seems to be simpler to handle - or deny. Thus seen it does not matter whether we approach the problem of doing justice from the personal or the impersonal side. Solving the problem at the impersonal side automatically leads to solving the neurosis of the person at the other side - that is to say, for a part, for we must say that there is more to authority conflicts than the issue of time of course, however fundamental that psychological issue might be of father Time unconsciously - out of jealousy? - being killed by the 'son' of a cultural ego.

Living a natural sense of time - we now can say - contributes to a better respect for the person, the natural person, the Original Person. When we meditate regularly, we detach from the outside influence altogether by, for a while, giving up our identification with physical actions, with the body thus. The mind then appeases to a stand-by position - provided we do not fall asleep in counting our beads. So now then, from a more detached point of view with a better respect for the person, what to say about doing justice? As said, justice, as for the person, can be divided in three departments to cover the complete, the 'Absolute Truth', that is the filognostic purpose. It is about doing justice to myself, to the others and to the supreme, the ideal person. The latter one is both within me and outside of me. As for me, matters can be divided, one step further, in a physical department - the body - , a mental department - the spirit -, and an ethereal department called the individual soul or true self. As for the others we the same way can speak of the other selves of other physical people like me, of the selves, the discourses, of their culture - that might not be mine, and of the selves of the rest of the living beings that are not cultural at all, but ruled by the laws of nature, at the level of the instinct. As for the Great Person inside and outside of us, we may also speak of three visible and knowable departments, namely the cosmic integrity, the universal integrity and the local integrity of nature. Concerning this latter distinction we deviate a little from the standard modern astronomical terminology in assigning the local order to planetary and smaller spheres of life, the universal order to galactic spheres of life, and the cosmic order to the total integrity of all galaxies in the cosmos (also a kind of sphere). The concept of universe we thus limit to a galaxy. More about this later.
So first, let us see what doing justice to our self entails. Not talking about others we can be kings and queens in our own adult kingdoms. The rules we follow in that kingdom are learned of course and consist for a great part of internalized rules and mind-sets. Our parents and other important others modeled them in our education and we adopted them by identification. Ideally these different influences fit together like a jigsaw and create our sense of self. But in reality many pieces are missing. The first interest is our body, our physical health. For that purpose we learn throughout all of our life what it means to follow a certain diet, training routine, hygiene and the like. This is also part of a collective evolution of discovering how to lower the costs of the healthcare system. Soon in our life we learn that we can drop familiar patterns and experiment with other patterns. Strangely enough we are in that experimentation irresistibly drawn to a certain arrangement of personal order and identification, activities and propensities, we cannot fully explain rationally. This means there is a certain spirit we have to identify with and take responsibility for. It is a sense of integrity, an awareness of personality that seems to be there from our earliest days. It is also evident to others what kind of personality one has or is.  One is known by one's appearance, character and mentality. One soon bases one's sense of self or identity on it. This identity evidently is not the same for different people, even though there are also generational and cultural tendencies arranged by the flow of the evolution of our human association. Some souls feel attracted to risky behavior, while others want to play music all the time. Some talk all the time while others like to tinker about all day. There seems to be an innate propensity for certain matters that cannot be fully explained by one's education or by one's gene pool, one's family experience. Soon this unique personality, that seems to drop out of the sky, is ruling one's life entirely. Repressing or suppressing this uniqueness will easily lead to serious problems. It seems to be so that each individual needs to be himself, in order to save the world his own way. It is not beneficial to the world, or to any society, to deny this and force the person into a simplified scheme of societal functioning. But limits are required also, for a person by his innate nature and education might not directly be adapted to the others, in an evolving, dynamic society, culture and eco-system. The spirit is equipped with a type of conscience, a moral consistency, that refers to the third position of self-interest, the individual soul. The individual person cannot project the personal order of his own adult kingdom upon society and expect the same respect for it as seems to be natural to himself. The soul has to supervise this so as to keep in touch and have peace with social reality. One tends to be a god inside with one's soul that can have all the quality of the Supreme Person, but one is easily a fool outside not being quite oneself in compromising with others and with bodily needs. One's self-respect and the respect of others needs tuning, and that is a process that can be very frustrating. One needs a super consciousness to oversee the entire complex of human personalities in function concerning this. Thus we, with our threefold doing justice to ourselves in the first place, arrive at the first insight of a collective duty to have a society open enough to allow great individual differences, but with enough rules and regulations to fine-tune all the dynamics of the unique person keeping in touch with others. A denial of this personal freedom and character at the one hand and a lack of fine-tuning in one's adaptation to others at the other hand, will result in great difficulties; such a double denial constitutes a great obstacle in our individual, but also collective human evolution. For freedom tolerance is required and for fine-tuning one needs the full control of a peaceful existence. Tolerance as we know is a great human mission, just as a peaceful co-existence is. We tend to be intolerant because of conflicting material and cultural interests and we tend to lack in peace because of all the stress we are subjected to in our complex local societies and even more complex mondial cultural association.

Secondly there is the justice we need to afford others. The other must be respected the way we want to be respected ourselves. This implies agreements of both a formal nature and an informal nature. The former option is collectively organized in extensively debated articles of law. By law is settled how we should deal with the physical presence of others. This is expressed by exercising reason in traffic rules, human rights and criminal law to protect our property rights, physical health and safety. Thick law books characterize any evolved culture, for many rules are needed. Justice must be done. There must be sanctions and the state needs the monopoly in this. Maintaining injustice leads to social unrest and derangement. Complete cultures fall down because of it. Secondly, at the informal level, we leave each other room for our unique character and take care we get the same room ourselves from that other person. We speak of love and friendship in this and we all know that we cannot share that love and friendship as easily with everyone. This is the informal notion of the others. Rules are associated with it, values that are fixed in cultures, for without them it is easy to lose one another. Therefore one seeks a common ground of preferences shared. Lacking such a common cultural ground, a certain fixation of reason or discourse, tolerance may run out and demands may be too high. Problems one has with oneself at the psychological level will reflect in the relation and thus for instance the inability to be alone may result in an inability to be together. In agreeing about a common set of rules, one may learn culturally that one cannot derive from a double standard, as with a sexist vision e.g., for such an unfair approach will soon lead to a break-up of one's intimate relation or to a more serious form of social derangement. There is the rule of reciprocity e.g. that, being violated, will result in a problematic relationship, that sooner or later will end because of the exhaustion of one of the partners. Toleration is a nice ideal, but it also means that some things cannot be tolerated. The truth lies always in the middle and thus a lot of fine-tuning is needed to speak of a good - and dynamic - relationship with other persons. Common ignorance about the problems imported from the culture, may also result in collective troubles of disturbed relationships. When one forgets that a most important part of the others consists of non-human living beings that, living freely without any consideration of reason, are controlled by instinct, such forgetfulness will guarantee the fall-down of whatever culture. Cultures come and go historically but nature continues. A culture cannot be a natural misfit. Destroying the planet and its living beings is like sawing off the branch one sits upon. What fool destroys his own conditions for life? We cannot survive without the natural diversity of animals and plants and many a biologist is warning against the destruction of it. Also what we do to other species - not only to our fellow man thus - is what we do to ourselves. Any healthy society therefore has a strong ecological heart, a healthy, nonviolent love for nature, natural food and natural living, for we cannot and must not forget the purpose of paradise, that we all may live in harmony on a beautiful planet teeming with life. As one may expect, the common ground stabilizing personal relations and collective relationships with other species is often found in the same culture of respecting the ideal person, the greater Personal Integrity of the Complete of Nature, one cannot live without.

So thirdly we need to do justice to that Ideal Person, that great Person, the actually Unknowable Person. The ideal Person cannot be fully known, for there are always aspects of reality one has not learned to know yet, one is not familiar with. Many animals that are also part of the Great Person e.g. have much better senses than we humans have. They see reality completely different with better hearing, smelling, coordination, communication and orientation. The talents are divided in the Great Person. We may compensate this with sensors and other technology, but cannot walk around all day with such gear fixed to our bodies. This is true individually, socially and impersonally. At every level of the Greater Person we are limited in our abilities and thus should be modest in our claims and actions. Because of the unknowable nature of the Great person, we are therein bound to be believers. Impersonally we entertain many theories that are not proven. Socially we entertain many political philosophies that do not work in the end because they do not cover the complete, and we also have belief systems to keep us together, united and connected, that do not tolerate other belief systems and thus head for their own downfall for being non-inclusive and thus ignorant by their foundation. We always fall down because of these limiting fixations of culture. As fallen souls we then cannot do without our ideal concept of the Perfect Person. We even carve images and develop mythologies for this necessity, like in the modern cinema, just as we have constellations we identify with in astrology and cosmological theories to cover all the facts we know. We are fascinated by the existence of other planets around other stars in other galaxies that are all part of the same cosmos, we are fascinated about the microcosmos that seems to answer to different laws of physics and we are fascinated by the 'mesocosmos' of the endlessly intricate interaction of cells and biochemical processes of our bodies. The person lodged in between the macrocosmos and the microcosmos is positioned there like in a cosmic sandwich, being puzzled about himself as a mediator or as an ideal of cosmic coherence. The ideal is all inclusive, but our fixations are not. We can only know so much about the world around us as is permitted by our senses - or instruments - of observation. Not only individually but also collectively we, in relating to the Big person, are filled with illusions facing all the possibilities that life offers. When we are young we dream of so many things, and later on in life - or in the evolution of our societies - we still have many dreams that mostly are illusions. Just consider the many stories of Science Fiction hoping for a life on another planet, while evidently all planetary gene pools are absolutely exclusive, making it impossible to break the so-called 'primary directive' for non-interference, even if we manage to create 'wormholes' in space. Yes exo-cultural activities observed on this planet are probably all exo-astrological missions of probes sent to observe. They are alien astronomy, that is all. Nothing else will ever happen, nor has happened ever. One may be glad to take one step ahead in life in relating to and evolving with the Supreme Person, even though one dreamt of taking a million ones in one's life time. The 'others' force you back into your system, for evolution goes slowly, personally, collectively and also naturally. So as believers, we keep on dreaming as a duty, and maintain the justice that must be done, at last locally on the planet, meanwhile always looking ahead curiously for what our collective evolution will permit on the level of the universe in the form of a galaxy we are part of and the complete of the cosmos that all these clustering universes belong to.

The latter threefold division concerning doing justice to the great person leads back to where we started with this discussion. The subject of time. The local, universal and cosmic aspect of the Original Person is associated with three forms of time. The local order is the material order that, according to modern day physics, is characterized by spin. All material particles have spin. One also speaks of curved space in this connection because universal and cosmic space seem to constitute an opposite dimension of another dual nature. That sounds complicated but it is not. Time is known to be a fourth dimension and the mental representation of it is quite simple. Matter has hight, width and depth. This three dimensional world is spinning in the form of galaxies, stars, planets and electrons. One considers the electron to be spinning around the nucleus at different levels of energy just like planets do around a star. The fourth dimension is simply the path inside out / outside in. There is the expansion of the universe, the outward direction, that is considered to move on dark - not directly perceived - energy, and there is the opposing - resisting - contraction of the universe, known by the force of gravity, that is likewise considered to be moving by the force of the contraction of dark matter. Our material universe is the result of a balance between these three forms of time: the cyclic time that is local, the outward directed time of the cosmic expansion and the inward contraction of gravity that holds together atoms and universes. This is the cosmological vision, a theory of everything, derived from our filognostic logic. Matter and space constitute two forms of time, the cyclic and linear form. In the end we now have tree different threefold divisions of time: 1) the past, the present and the future of time as a linear arrow, 2) the natural, the cultural and psychological of our personal times and now, 3) the three forms of [space or] dimensional time that consist of the cyclic direction, the outward and the inward direction of time as stereo-metrically easily is displayed by vectors, arrows pointing in different directions that point the way of the movement of the one force of Time. The Great Person thus is also known by His expansion, by His all-powerful attraction and by His different material forms. That is the classical personalistic notion we hereby subscribe to. He next to that is also known as a destroyer of obstacles, as a creator who conditions or shapes our lives, and as a maintainer of order. These time related actions are the personifications of the three impersonal qualities of nature as were discussed in inspiration 2. But more about that addition to the argument of completeness later. It may be clear that doing justice to the Universal, the Cosmic and the Local Person entails a very conscious policy of time. This policy we called the backbone of our culture; it is the engine of our devotional service to - and coherence and connectedness with - the Unique, Ever Changing Personality of Nature we are all part of.

Source for this Inspiration:
S.B. Canto 1, Chapter 7