I
hope that my work will demonstrate effectively that the recorded
history of humankind upon the earth is the direct result of the
fallen condition of the human intellect. The work is, therefore,
essentially, a poetic thesis in which I attempt to demonstrate that
this fallen condition is elemental and has existed throughout
recorded history. In my demonstration the present human condition is
seen as the fruit of what has been termed by Cardinal Newman “an
aboriginal catastrophe”, depicted within conceptualized time as the
fall of man. Without this catastrophe there would be no history, a
history of conquest and death, the fruit of an act of murder, the
killing of Abel by his blood brother, Cain. The archetypal stories in
the Jewish scriptural canon will be seen to record this fall with
astonishing psychological insight and I will use them in my poetic
attempt to guide the unhindered soul into the consciousness of
absolute being and the promise of eternal life.
As
a Catholic philosopher I am constantly seeking the answer to the
puzzle of my existence, an answer I can find only within my own
consciousness. Through reflection on my own experiences of the
universe in which I exist and the study of others’ reflections and
experiences I draw a map of my actuality while seeking its
relationship to an ultimate reality. The puzzle of why I exist
supposes a knowledge of where I exist. The accumulation of knowledge
of my environment is, therefore, a necessary step, but my goal is to
understand. Discovering that, within the universe, all things are
relative but that my own being is not relative, since thought follows
being and I am before I think, I become a passionate searcher after
the absolute and a seeker after wisdom, which cannot, I believe, be
defined except by those who have gained it. Wisdom lies in immediate
being and reflective thought is, therefore, a distraction. Herein
lies a paradox, that an ultimate reality must be accepted, must be
believed in, before it can be known. Faith in the absolute is an act
of being. I therefore pursue in darkness a far light.
That
far light is an image of both the beginning and the center of the
physical universe in which I apparently exist, a light which has
traveled from a seminal point in space and moment in time outward in
every direction at an immense, yet relative, speed for millions upon
millions of solar years to reach my observation, a solar year being
an arbitrary measurement by an earthbound observer’s intellect of
the time in which the earth completes one orbit around the sun, a
relative moment of time. This light has then traveled past my outpost
in the universe for millions upon millions more solar years,
apparently gathering speed, until it has reached the outer limits of
its expanding material domain and has either regained the material
formlessness of energy with which it began its journey among the
stars or has spiraled back into the formless, absolute void into
which the physical universe is expanding.
Time
and space are products of the rational human mind, conceptual
artifacts inextricably intertwined within a reflective intellectual
consciousness that embraces duality. These concepts are then
projected as a repetition, a reflective actuality, upon a universe
that can no longer be apprehended immediately but only reflectively.
This loss of immediacy is precisely the fall from innocence. My
existence is as a moment of consciousness within this projected
actuality of space and time, this physical universe. I was
conditioned, while young, to accept this reflective actuality as
reality and then indoctrinated into a false value system which
accepts only a rationalistic interpretation of events and sets me on
a course of acquisition of material possessions. I am surrounded by
form, which I perceive to be energy of decreasing velocity. This
informs me that the material of the physical universe is in decay.
Decadence, entropy, rules the physical universe! The possessions that
I devote my life to gain today are worthless tomorrow. There are no
absolutes within this universe, everything is relative, making it
accessible to my reflective and rational mind, which is searching
for, but cannot comprehend, the absolute.
The
physical matter of the universe appears to be moving in two
contradictory directions in time, both decreasing in speed as it's
energy decays, and increasing in velocity as it expands in space,
which presents another paradox for me to attempt to understand. My
bodily movement, too, slows as I age, yet my consciousness, building
upon an ever increasing pool of experiential knowledge, increases in
acuity. To confront this paradox requires wisdom, which I have yet to
attain but which may now be partially defined as a qualitative
increase in consciousness. An increase in knowledge without
understanding does not give wisdom. Only a correct understanding of
the knowledge that I have gained will make me wise and the
acquisition of this understanding requires diligence over time, and
patience.
The
schools of learning in civilization, the academy and the university,
do not teach wisdom or own wisdom, despite their claims, and, insofar
as they are a part of the worldly establishment that founded them,
they cannot ever possess wisdom. Since understanding is a
prerequisite for obtaining wisdom, they reveal by their claim to
authority and their service to those who hold power and who claim a
larger authority, that they do not even possess understanding. There
can be no legitimate authority, intellectual or otherwise, on the
earth. Authority represents power and all power exhibited on the
earth is merely the power of the negative in existence which is
discovered by an intellectual reflection the use of which involves
the loss of immediacy and innocence, thereby rendering the authority
holders guilty. All power and authority have, as their base, the fear
of the ultimate power of the negative in existence, which is death.
Therefore, the knowledge that the academy and the university have
gained and holds in trust of necessity becomes perverted in its
application, destroying the natural world and filling the
intellectual void with the works of progress, a euphemism for
entropy. Always marching forward, to a dubious destination, these
powers can never stand still. Always becoming objectively, they can
never simply be subjectively. All such authority, power and progress
may be seen as artificial constructions of the fallen human
intellect.
The
environment formed by civilization, an artificial actuality which a
misnamed homo sapiens is
constructing across the Earth over time, obfuscates human
perceptions of reality and truth. Youthful minds are conditioned to
accept this unnatural actuality as reality and are then indoctrinated
into a set of false values which contain a misrepresentation of the
world of phenomena. A materialistic and mechanistic worldview is
foisted upon each budding consciousness as the only reality.
Conformity to this worldview is rewarded while nonconformity is
deemed eccentric and erratic. The laws that govern
societies
are always framed to protect the interests of those who claim
authority and exercise power over others, while the weak and the poor
are fed from the scraps that fall from the tables of the greedy and
the powerful. Men are encouraged, like Esau, to sell their
birthrights for a bowl of soup.
Before
the physical universe began to exist I surmise that there was only an
infinite void, formless and empty, absolute and eternal, a great
immaterial Zero. It is within this vast emptiness that the physical
universe came to exist and and into which is expanding. The One, the
universe, is an attempt to negate the Zero, the void, with something
instead of nothing. But when the One appears and confronts the Zero
the Universe of relativity is formed, a bubble within the Void. This
universal bubble expands within the void but can never become
absolute since everything within it is relative. It had a beginning
in time so can never become eternal since it must also have an end,
and it is finite so can never become infinite.
Whatever
caused the material universe to exist must be extraneous to the
universe, and the totality which is outside the universe is precisely
the immaterial void into which the universe of form that confronts
the conscious mind is expanding and which, I believe, is a spiritual
and conscious being, infinite, absolute and eternal, present within
the material universe as the soul of every individual being. It is
the effort of human beings to fill this void without acknowledging
its spiritual and conscious reality which leads to the development of
the material civilization that is now spread, like an infectious
scab, across the earth.
The
soul of each man and woman may be defined as a single moment of the
eternal consciousness of the void, the spiritual void of absolute
being, a moment that can freely choose to be determined spiritually
or materially, as being or as existing, as a moment of eternity or as
a moment of time. When the soul moves to express its self as a moment
of time it falls from being into existing, from unity into duality,
from absolute into relative, from the infinitude of the spiritual
void into the finitude of the material universe.
The
highest work of the individual soul within the universe is to express
in consciousness its own absolute being, a transcendent being of the
absolute, subjecting its own existence to the reality of being. The
physical universe now appears to human consciousness as an expression
in lower dimensions of the higher dimensions of being and a
consciousness of the absolute is the highest form of consciousness,
revealed as transcendent to the physical universe and thereby
infinite and eternal. The seed of consciousness implanted in the
universe transcends the physical limitations of form that delineate
existence and which is passed on through generation. The expansion of
consciousness becomes the direction of the evolution of life within
the universe.
Increased
consciousness is not therefore a means to an end but an end in and of
itself. It is not to be achieved in order to manipulate the physical
universe, but in order to transcend the physical universe. That
universe has a beginning and therefore will have an ending;
everything within it is relative. It is finite and temporal and
designed to decay. All movement in time and space is the movement of
decay, time being most precisely defined as the measure of entropy.
Absolute consciousness, on the other hand, the consciousness of
absolute being is infinite and eternal and so is not subject to the
great law of physical entropy. It is transcendent to the limitations
of relativity and to their rational interpretation. The innumerable
forms of philosophy and the rationality of logic, however, capture
the fallen intellect in their nets and hinder it from acquiring
knowledge of the absolute categories, bringing the mind into the
bondage of rationality subject to the ills of the flesh. In
this light, the limitation of dialectic is obvious, although the
dialectical method can bring us to the borders of the absolute, which
can be comprehended only by a transcendent, spiritual consciousness
of faith in an absolute being.
