Sfaturi, Despre cunoasterea metafizica Optiuni

[shapeshifter]

THE NOBLE MAN

The noble man is one who dominates himself.
The noble man is one who masters himself and loves to master himself; the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself.
The noble man always maintains himself at the centre; he never loses sight of the symbol, the spiritual gift of things, the sign of God, a gratitude that is both ascending and radiating.
The noble man is naturally detached from mean things, sometimes against his own interests; and he is naturally generous through greatness of soul. [Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Frithjof Schuon].


Generosity
Generosity is the opposite of egoism, avarice and meanness; nevertheless let us be clear that it is evil that is opposed to good and not inversely. Generosity is the greatness of soul which loves to give and also to forgive, because it allows man to put himself spontaneously in the place of others; which allows to one’s adversary all the chances that he humanly deserves, even though these be minimal, and without prejudicing justice or the cause of right. Nobility comprises a priori a benevolent attitude and a certain gift of self, without affectation and without failing to do justice to things as they are; the noble man tries to help, to meet one halfway, before condemning or acting severely, while being implacable and capable of speedy action when reality demands it. Goodness due to weakness or dreaming is not a virtue; generosity is beautiful to the extent that man is strong and lucid. There is always, in the noble soul, a certain instinct of the gift of self, for God Himself is the first to overflow with charity, and above all with beauty; the noble man is only happy in giving, and he gives himself above all to God, as God gave Himself to him, and desires to give Himself to him.

Piety
Transcending oneself: this is the great imperative of the human condition; and there is another that anticipates it and at the same time prolongs it: dominating oneself. The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. Nobility and holiness are the imperatives of the human state.
The noble man is naturally detached from mean things, sometimes against his own interests; and he is naturally generous through greatness of soul. The pious man, for his part, holds himself detached from the things of this world — either within the framework of a legitimate equilibrium, or else by breaking this framework —because they do not lead to Heaven, or to the extent that they do not contribute to this end; and he is generous as a result of his love of God, because this love allows him to “see God everywhere”, and because “God is Love”. The fact that the two dimensions, horizontal and vertical, are linked in depth, results from the nature of things: the one conditions the other and the one proceeds from the other, and they are destined to coincide, if they do not already do so.
It is perhaps not superfluous to insist once more on the double significance of the notion of morality, that is to say on the distinction between what is good according to the law and what is good according to virtue. The two do not always coincide, for a base man can obey the law, be it only through simple constraint, while a noble man may be obliged, exceptionally, to transgress a law out of virtue, to put pity above duty, for example. [Logic and Transcendence].


Perception of the world
To have the sense of immanence — parallel to the discernment between the Real and the unreal, or between Reality that is absolute and that which is relative or contingent, or in consequence between the essential and the secondary, and so on — is to have the intuition of essences, of archetypes, or let us say: of the metaphysical transparency of phenomena; and this intuition is the basis of nobleness of soul.
The noble man respects, admires and loves in virtue of an essence that he perceives, whereas the vile man underestimates or scorns in virtue of an accident; the sense of the sacred is opposed to the instinct to belittle; the Bible speaks of "mockers." The sense of the sacred is the essence of all legitimate respect; we insist on legitimacy, for it is a question of respecting, not just anything, but what is worthy of respect; "there is no right superior to that of the truth."
It may be added that the noble man looks at what is essential in phenomena, not at what is accidental; he sees the overall worth in a creature and the intention of the Creator — not some more or less humiliating accident — and he thereby anticipates the perception of the Divine Qualities through forms. This is what is expressed by the words of the Apostle “ for the pure all things are pure”.
The noble man, and consequently the spiritual man, sees in positive phenomena the substantial greatness and not the accidental smallness, but he is indeed obliged to discern smallness when it is substantial and when, in consequence, it determines the nature of the phenomenon. The base man, on the contrary, and sometimes the simply worldly man, sees the accidental before the essential and gives himself over to the consideration of the aspects of smallness which enter into the constitution of greatness, but which cannot detract from its greatness in the least degree, except in the eyes of the man who is himself made of smallness.


Sacrificial instinct
The sacrificial instinct, which on the whole coincides with the sense of measure, enters into the very definition of nobleness: the noble man is one who controls himself and who loves to control himself; the sense not only of reality, but also of beauty demands that discipline which is self-mastery. Moreover, the impious man can never be altogether noble, whereas piety necessarily gives rise to nobility, no matter what the social milieu; the pious man is noble because truth is noble.
Especially beauty perceived by a noble man, that is: whose soul is beautiful, precisely. As Socrates said: "If there be something other than absolute Beauty, then that something can be beautiful to the extent that it partakes of absolute Beauty" (Plato: Phaedo).


Noble and Vile Man
"... man must see things according to the spirit of the Creator, not with the superficial, profane and desacralizing view of the vulgar soul. The noble man feels the need to admire, to venerate, to worship; the vile man on the contrary tends to belittle, even to mock, which is the way the devil sees things; but it is also diabolical to admire what is evil, whereas it is normal and praiseworthy to despise evil as such, for the truth has precedence over everything.
The primacy of the true also clearly implies that essential truths have precedence over secondary truths, as the absolute has precedence over the relative. The definition of man according to immortality has precedence over the definition of man according to earthly life.
The noble man respects, admires and loves in virtue of an essence that he perceives, whereas the vile man underestimates or scorns in virtue of an accident; the sense of the sacred is opposed to the instinct to belittle; the Bible speaks of "mockers." The sense of the sacred is the essence of all legitimate respect; we insist on legitimacy, for it is a question of respecting, not just anything, but what is worthy of respect; "there is no right superior to that of the truth."

Acest topic a fost editat de andra_v: 16 Apr 2009, 04:00 PM

[shapeshifter]

THE CONTEMPLATIVE

It often surprises me how deeply sunk in phenomena most men are, how much they identify themselves with their own everyday world of appearances, and how little strength of imagination they have... [Memoirs, Frithjof Schuon]
According to the Vedanta the contemplative must become absolutely ‘Himself; according to other perspectives such as that of the Semitic religions, man must become absolutely ‘Other’ than himself — or than the ‘I’ — which from the point of view of pure truth amounts to exactly the same thing.
The knowledge which man does or can enjoy is at the same time animal, human and Divine. It is animal in so far as man knows through the senses; it is human when he knows by reason; and it is Divine in the contemplative activity of the intellect. Now man could not be Divine without first being human; the intellect, in the direct and higher meaning of the word (for the reason and the senses also derive indirectly from the intellect), cannot be actualized, in the human domain, in a being lacking in reason.


Outer man and inner Man
The whole question is to know whether man possesses a “prelogical” intuition of Substance or whether he is fundamentally bound up with accidentality. In the first case his intelligence is made for gnosis, and reasonings, or imagery, confined to the accidental will in the final, reckoning have no hold on him.
For the average man, existence begins with man placed on earth: there is space and there are things, there is “I” and “the other,” we want this and another wants that, and so on; there is good and evil, reward and punishment, and above it all there is God with his unfathomable wishes.
But for the born contemplative everything starts from Truth which is sensed as an underlying and omnipresent Being; all else is only completely comprehensible through and in it; outside it the world is no more than an unintelligible dream. First there is Truth, or the nature of things, then there are the consciousnesses which are its receptacles: man is before all else a consciousness in which the True reflects itself and around which the True or the Real manifests itself in an endless play of crystallizations.
For the contemplative, phenomena and events constitute a compact and naive postulate; they are only intelligible or supportable in the light of the basic Truth.
It is necessary to make a distinction in the human being between the outer and the inner man: the former is turned toward the outward and lives in the "accidental”; the latter looks inward and lives on Substance. Spiritual life, on the one hand, awakens and develops the inner man and fixes him upon the substantial axis in order to transmute him progressively, or even instantaneously, according to the particular case, and, on the other hand, it establishes an equilibrium between the inward and the outward by determining the latter in conformity with the former.
There are here two poles of attraction; first one must look beyond the barrier of ice which man carries within himself and which is most commonly signaled by indifference toward Heaven, and discover the inward pole which draws us toward Substance; then, with this pole freed and acting upon the soul like a magnet, one must know how to keep oneself attached thereto; but by the very fact of this attachment the outward pole is transformed under the influence of the inward pole, by virtue of what we have, on several occasions, called the metaphysical transparency of phenomena. The spirit then discovers that everything is within itself and that everything is Substance.
The word "objectivity" signifies, in short, "conformity to the nature of things," independently of all interference of individual tendencies or tastes; the word "subjectivity," for its part, ought to designate the contemplative withdrawal into the "heart," given that "the kingdom of God is within you."
For man, the reason for the existence of outward values is spiritual interiorization: in the direction of the Real which we can encounter and attain to only within ourselves, in our transpersonal center. But this is possible solely in virtue of our consciousness of the Transcendent, which is the ultimate Essence of all "objective" values, while at the same time having its seat in the depths of the Heart-Intellect. Tat tvam asi: "That art thou."


Love of God
The love of God implies, not only that man should turn away from the outward dimension as such and from those things which directly manifest this outwardness, but also that within this dimension, viewed now as the mirror of the Inward, he should love certain things to the exclusion of others, that he should love, that is to say, those very things which manifest Inwardness.
In other words, the love of God must be projected indirectly upon things which are its symbols or its vehicles and which, because of this fact, may be said to prolong the Inward in the outward; and this projection is all the more legitimate in that nothing is really situated outside God and outwardness is basically only an appearance.
Thus the contemplative man will be disposed in principle to prefer the almost paradisal virginity of nature and its solitude to urban centers and their manifold human activities. If it be objected that he should also love men and human works, it may be answered that alongside his love of nature and solitude, he necessarily loves both the company of spiritual men and sanctuaries made by the hand of man.
Among human works the sanctuary is Divine: it is as if virgin nature, in all its reflected divinity, manifested itself within the very framework of human art, transposing the latter on to the Divine plane; virgin nature and sacred art may thus be likened to alpha and omega, opposing each other in a complementary manner like the Earthly Paradise and the Heavenly Jerusalem. Each in its own way manifests the Inward in the outward, and plays its part in bringing about the reflux of the soul toward the Inward.
The problem of the “love of one’s neighbor” is obviously contained in that of the “love of God,” in the sense that the first is essentially an exteriorized aspect of the second; that is to say, charity between men retraces in the “outward dimension” something of the “inward dimension.”
The crucial importance of this charity results from a certain complementarism between “God within” and “God in the world” and from the necessity of an equilibrium between the outward and the Inward. To express this in another way: one cannot enter the inward dimension through egoism; now to transcend oneself in order to meet God is to see oneself (and in a certain manner God) in others; conversely, to strive to see oneself in others in the name of Truth is to contribute powerfully to contemplative interiorization.
In the absence of other men, in the case of the hermit, for example, the ego of the contemplative becomes the ego as such and, by this very fact, includes all individualities; its deliverance is virtually that of all believers, whence a sort of analogical magic which scatters its invisible blessings like dew.
Consequently it is important to understand that the metaphysical and so to speak abstract aspects of God also suggest beauties and reasons for love; the contemplative soul may be sensitive to the immense serenity proper to pure Being, or to the lightning-like crystalinity of the Absolute; or one may — aside from other aspects — love God for what is adamantine in His immutability, or for what is warm and liberating in His Infinitude.
In our terrestrial world there are sensible beauties: those of the limitless sky, of the radiant sun, of the lightning, of the crystal; all these beauties reflect something of God. Moral beauties are analogically of the same order; one may love the virtues for their so to speak aesthetic participation in the beauties of divine Being, just as one may and ought to love them for their specific and immediate values.


To be childlike
... in too many cases the psychological potentiality of childhood never achieves its normal flowering; the necessary manifestation of this possibility is checked—most often by the misdeeds of school education—and subsists as though stifled or crushed, or like a shrunken and hardened kernel, throughout the further development of the individual; whence a psychic imbalance which will show itself on the one hand by the apparent absence of the childlike element, and on the other by childish reactions, such as are not undergone by the balanced man since his mature possibility will have integrated his childlike possibility, the latter being as it were the background of the former. Any human excellence is always an aspect and the fact of an equilibrium; the person who is adult only, that is to say adult to the exclusion of any childlike element, is so only imperfectly and as it were through an inability to remain a child; now an incapacity is never a superiority.
The state of childhood must be transcended by integration, by “digestion” if one may say so, and this necessity is already indicated by the fact that there is a perfect continuity between the different ages; this means that the individual must at every age make use of all the positive contents of the preceding ages, and that he will then react to events not in a way strictly dependent on his age, but with complete balance, uniting for example the spontaneity of youth with the reflectiveness of maturity; in other words, he will possess his temporal “self” in its integral state; every positive attitude, be it childlike or other, is necessary and precious.


Oppression of Contemplatives
No doubt some will say that humanitarianism, far from being materialistic by definition, aims at reforming human nature by education and legislation; now it is contradictory to want to reform the human outside the divine since the latter is the essence of the former; to make the attempt is in the end to bring about miseries far worse than those from which one was trying to escape.
Philosophical humanitarianism under-estimates the immortal soul by the very fact that it overestimates the human animal; it is somewhat obliged to denigrate saints in order to better whitewash criminals; the one seems unable to go without the other.
From this results oppression of the contemplatives from their most tender years: in the name of humanitarian egalitarianism, vocations are crushed and geniuses wasted, by schools in particular and by official worldliness in general; every spiritual element is banished from professional and public life and this amounts to removing from life a great part of its content and condemning religion to a slow death.
The modern leveling — which may call itself "democratic" — is the very antipodes of the theocratic equality of the monotheistic religions, for it is founded, not on the theomorphism of man, but on his animality and his rebellion.


Mystical Proof of God
... before putting aside the mystical or experimental proof as unacceptable from the outset, one should not forget to ask oneself what kind of men have invoked it. There can be no common measure between the intellectual and moral worth of the greatest of the contemplatives and the absurdity that their illusion would imply, were it nothing but that. If we have to choose between some encyclopedist or other and Jesus, it is Jesus whom we choose; we would also of course choose some infinitely lesser figure, but we cannot fail to choose the side where Jesus is to be found.
In connection with the questions raised by the mystical proof and, at the other extreme, by the assurance displayed by negators of the supernatural—who deny others any right to a similar assurance without having access to their elements of certainty—we would say that the fact that the contemplative may find it impossible to furnish proof of his knowledge in no wise proves the nonexistence of that knowledge, any more than the spiritual unawareness of the rationalist does away with the falseness of his denials. As we have already remarked, the fact that a madman does not know that he is mad is obviously no proof to the contrary, just as, inversely, the fact that a man of sound mind cannot prove to a madman that his mind is sound in no way proves it to be unsound. These are almost truisms, but their sense is too often missed by philosophers as well as by men of lesser pretensions.
Moralism and Contemplativity
There is a moral relativism which is truly odious: if you say that God and the beyond are real, this shows you to be cowardly, or dishonest or infantile or shamefully abnormal; but if you say that religion is just make-believe, this shows you to be courageous, honest, sincere, adult, altogether normal.
Were all this true, man would be nothing, he would be capable neither of truthfulness nor of heroism; and there would not even be anyone there to note the fact, for one does not extract a hero from a coward nor a sage from a man of feeble mind, not even by “evolution.”
But this moralistic approach, base as it may be or simply stupid according to the case, is not altogether a new thing. Before it was applied to intellectual positions, it was used in order to discredit the contemplative life which, for its part, was described as an “escape”—as though a man did not have the right to flee from dangers concerning him alone, and what is more important, as though the contemplative life of withdrawal from the world were not much more truly describable as a pilgrimage toward God.
To shun God as do the worldly is far more senseless and irresponsible than shunning the world. To run away from God is at the same time to run away from oneself, for man, when alone with himself—and even though he may be surrounded by others—is always in the company of his Creator, whom he encounters in his very being.


Passion and Contemplation
... the two great traditional ‘dimensions’—exotericism and esotericism—can be, if not defined, at least described to some extent by associating with the former the terms ‘morality, action, merit, grace’, and with the latter the terms ‘symbolism, concentration, knowledge, identity’; thus the passionate man will approach God through action supported by a moral code, while the contemplative, on the other hand, will become united with his Divine Essence through concentration supported by a symbolism, without this excluding the former attitude—that goes without saying— within the limits which are proper to it.
Morality is a principle of action, therefore of merit, whereas symbolism is a support of contemplation and a means of intellection; merit, which is acquired by a mode of action, has for its goal the Grace of God, whereas the goal of intellection, in so far as the latter can be distinguished from its goal, is union or identity with that which we have never ceased to be in our existential and intellectual Essence; in other words, the supreme goal is the reintegration of man in the Divinity, of the contingent in the Absolute, of the finite in the Infinite.
Morality as such obviously has no meaning outside the relatively very restricted domain of action and merit, and therefore in no way extends to such realities as symbolism, contemplation, intellection and identity through knowledge. As for ‘moralism’, which must not be confused with morality, this is merely the tendency to substitute the moral point of view for all other points of view; it has the result, in Christianity at least, of fostering a kind of prejudice or suspicion with regard to anything of an agreeable nature, as well as the erroneous notion that all pleasant things are only that and nothing more.
It is forgotten that for the true contemplative the positive quality and hence the symbolic and spiritual value of such things will greatly outweigh any disadvantage which may arise from a temporary indulgence of human nature, for every positive quality is essentially—though not existentially—identified with a Divine quality or perfection which is its eternal and infinite prototype.
If in the foregoing remarks there is some appearance of contradiction, this is due to the fact that we have considered morality first of all as it is in itself that is to say as a matter of social or psychological expediency, and secondly as a symbolic element, therefore in the quality of a support for intellection; in the latter case, the opposition between morality and symbolism (or intellectuality) is obviously meaningless.