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]

Contemplative & the world
... one is only too familiar with the prejudice which would have contemplative love justify itself and excuse itself before a world that despises it, and which would have the contemplative engage himself unnecessarily in activities that turn him away from the end he has in view; those who think in this manner are obviously unaware that contemplation represents for human society a sort of sacrifice which is salutary for it and of which it is strictly in need.
The whole problem here lies in the definition of “duty”: the imprescriptible vocation of the contemplative — of the “pneumatic” whose spiritual ascent results from his very substance and not from a choice or a conversion as in the case of the “psychic”— may possibly be reconcilable with activity in the world, but there are cases — and this is more probable — where it is not so. At all events, it is through the duties that are properly his that the contemplative fully satisfies the love of God, and thereby the love of men, the latter being contained in the former.
A world is absurd exactly to the extent that the contemplative, the hermit, the monk appear in it as a paradox or as an “anachronism”. The monk however is in the present precisely because he is timeless: we live in an epoch of idolatry of the “age”; the monk incarnates all that is changeless, not through sclerosis or through inertia, but through transcendence.
The worldly confusion between charity and natural — or passional — attachment does not concern the contemplative, whose sanctity is infinitely more profitable to men than would be his complicity in their dissipation. One of the characteristic features of the worldly is that they do not like being lost alone: for them charity means to have their perdition shared by others.
When perceiving a sign-proof of the divine Principle, the contemplative mentality has two spontaneous reactions, namely essentialization and interiorization, the first being objective, and the second subjective: through the first, man sees in the sign or quality that which is essential — the divine intention if one will — whereas through the second, he finds the sign or quality in his own soul; on the one hand "unto the pure all things are pure"; on the other, "the kingdom of God is within you." The first reaction refers to transcendence, and the second to immanence, although transcendence too relates to what we bear within ourselves, and although immanence also exists outside ourselves.


Virgin Nature
The virtues, which by their very nature bear witness to the Truth, also possess an interiorizing quality according to the measure in which they are fundamental; the same is true of beings and things that transmit the messages of eternal Beauty; whence the power of interiorization proper to virgin nature, to the harmony of creatures, to sacred art, to music.
The aesthetic sensation — as we have often remarked — possesses in itself an ascending quality: it provokes in the contemplative soul, directly or indirectly, a recollection of the divine essences.
For the “pneumatic” [contemplative], sensible beauty, as well as moral beauty, possesses a virtue that interiorizes; it ennobles the world while separating us from the world.


Spiritual Union
Spiritual doctrines admit ‘union’ or ‘identity’, according to whether they envisage the being from the point of view of creation or from that of Divine Reality.
From the point of view of creation nothing can ‘become God’ or ‘become nothing’; in the Divine Reality the world has never been and so the creature can never have ceased to be.
Now the intelligence which is immersed in God sees according to the Divine Reality, otherwise it would not truly see God.
In the last analysis everything comes down to a question of terminology: the unconditional affirmation of identity by Shankara, though not by all Vedantists, necessarily results from the perspective of the absolute Subject.
For Ibn Arabi it is not a question of ‘becoming one’ with God: the contemplative ‘becomes conscious’ that he ‘is one’ with Him; he ‘realizes’ real unity.
In Christianity ‘deification’, the necessary complement of the ‘Incarnation’, does not imply any ‘identification’ on the same plane of reality. That man as such should literally ‘become’ God would imply that there was between God and man a common measure and a symmetrical confrontation.
No doubt it was this reservation Shankara had in view when he affirmed that the delivered one (mukta) is without the creative power of Brahma.
Be that as it may, the expression ‘to become God’ has not to be rejected any more than has the formula of ‘identity’ of a Shankara, for they retain all their value as paradoxical and elliptical indications.


Man "center" & "periphery"
When humanity is considered from the standpoint of its values, it is necessary to distinguish a priori between the man-center, who is determined by the intellect and is therefore rooted in the Immutable, and the man-periphery, who is more or less an accident.
This difference is repeated — mutatis mutandis — in every man who is conscious of the supernatural, whether he belongs to the first category or the second; without this awareness he has no authentic centrality nor consequently any decisive worth.
That is the meaning of the Eckhartian distinction between the "inner man" and the "outer man": the latter identifies passively with his experiences, whereas the former may enjoy or suffer in his temporal humanity while remaining impassible in his immortal kernel, which coincides with his state of union with God.
The possibility of such a parallelism lies in man's very nature, and is the essence of the notion of the avatara; in this respect — analogically speaking and with all due proportion — every pneumatic is "true man and true God." The underlying divine substance does not abolish the human mask, any more than the mask prevents the divine manifestation.
It has been said that there are saintly men who "laugh with those who laugh and weep with those who weep"; which indirectly expresses the detachment, and directly the good will, of the "pneumatic" or "central" man.
He is detached because he does not identify with the accidents; and he is good-willed because, for that very reason, he could be neither egoistic nor petty; but his very superiority poses for him problems of adaptation, for on the one hand he must form part of the human ambience, and on the other he cannot grasp immediately all its absurdity.
The man-center is necessarily situated in an isolation from which he cannot but suffer "externally": feeling that every man is in a certain way like himself, he sincerely puts himself in their place, but it is far from the case that others put themselves in his.
Moreover, the ways of acting of the man-center may be "amoral," although not "immoral": they may be contrary to a particular morality, but not to morality as such; thus it is proper to discern between a "justice" that is extrinsic and conditional and another that is intrinsic and unconditional.
We mentioned above the isolation of the man-center in the face of the world's absurdity; now the fact that his behavior can be like that of the man-periphery may give the impression of solidarity with the worldly ambience, but this is a deceptive appearance, since similar ways of acting can hide dissimilar intentions.
Aside from the fact that the superior man may behave "like others" to mask his superiority, precisely — either out of charity or out of an "instinct" for self-preservation — there is this to consider, and it is essential: for the contemplative man, pleasure does not inflate the individuality; on the contrary, it invites to a transpersonal dilation, so that the "sensible consolation" gives rise to an upward opening and not to a downward inflation.
Moreover, an analogous grace intervenes for every sincere believer when he approaches pleasure "in the name of God" and thus opens himself to Mercy: he "invites" God and at the same time takes refuge in Him.


Contemplative and Altruism
Some people readily accuse of "selfishness" the contemplative preoccupied with his salvation, and maintain that instead of saving oneself one should save others; but this is firstly hypocritical and secondly absurd because, on the one hand, it is not from excess of virtue that those who argue thus refuse sanctification, and on the other hand, it is impossible to save others, since one can only know and will with one's own knowledge and one's own will; if it is possible to contribute to saving others, it is only by virtue of one's own salvation.
No man has ever been of service to anyone by remaining attached to his own faults out of "altruism"; whoever neglects his own salvation certainly will save no one else.
To mask passions and spiritual indifference behind good works is a proof of hypocrisy.


Contemplatives and society
It is quite obvious that in order to be able to determine the rights of earthly things — and we regret that this is not a truism — it is necessary to start from the axiomatic truth that the value of man and of things lies in their adequation to the integral Real and in their capacity to participate directly or indirectly in this end; the role of the contemplative man is constantly to look towards this Real and ipso facto to communicate to society the perfume of this vision; a perfume both of life and death, and indispensable for any relative wellbeing to which the world here below may be entitled.
It is necessary, therefore, to start from the idea that spirituality alone — and with it the religion which necessarily is its framework — constitutes an absolute good; it is the spiritual, not the temporal, which culturally, socially and politically is the criterion of all other values.


Spiritual Perfections
The first spiritual phase is isolation, for the world is the ego; its summit is to "see God everywhere," for the world is God.
In other words, there is one spiritual perfection in which the contemplative sees God only inwardly, in the silence of the heart; and there is another that is superior to this and derives from it — for it can only be conceived as an extension of the first perfection — in which the contemplative perceives God equally in the outward, in phenomena; in their existence, then in their general qualities and then in their particular qualities, and indirectly even in their privative manifestations.
In this realization, not only does the ego appear as extrinsic — which happens also in the case of the first perfection — but the world appears as inward by revealing its Divine substance, things becoming as it were translucent. It is to this realization, at once radiating and all-embracing, that the Sufis allude when they say, with Shibli: "I have never seen any thing but God.


Contemplative thought
Contemplative thought is a ‘vision’; it is not — like passionate thought — ‘in action’. Its external logic is dependent on its inner vision, whereas, in passionate thought, the logical process is so to say blind. Such thought does not ‘describe’ realities that are directly perceived but ‘constructs’ mental justifications on the basis of preconceived ideas, which may indeed be true, but are accepted’ rather than understood.
The word ‘thinker’ implies that an individual activity is attributed to knowledge, and this is significant. As for the ‘contemplative’, he may abstain from ‘thinking’: the act of contemplation is principial, which means that its activity is in its essence, not in its operations.
Morals can vary, for they are founded on social exigencies: but virtues do not vary, for they are enshrined in the very nature of man; and they are in his primordial nature because they correspond to cosmic perfections and, a fortiori, to Divine qualities.
For the moralist, the good lies in action: for the contemplative it lies in being, of which action is only a possible and at times a necessary expression.


Contemplation and sexuality
An enjoyment which brings man nearer to God — by virtue of its symbolism, its nobility and the contemplative quality of the subject — is no less profound than suffering, and perhaps in some respects even more profound. But this possibility requires rare qualities of nobility and contemplative penetration, of intuition of the universal essences.

The renunciation of the contemplative has in no wise the aim of accumulating merits in order to enjoy individual bliss. It serves to put the soul, by what one might call radical measures, into the most favourable possible disposition for realizing its own true and infinite Essence.
Love of God, far from being essentially a sentiment, is that which makes the wise man contemplate rather than do anything else.
The virtue of the contemplative is that he makes of his virtues a grace for others; in the last analysis his positive virtue is that of God which he realizes in his vision.
Art has an aspect that is inward and profound by virtue of its symbolism; it then fulfills a different function and speaks directly to the contemplative mind: in this way it becomes a support for intellection, thanks to its nonmental, concrete and direct language.
The intrinsically sacred character of sexuality was not unknown to Judaism or to Hinduism, from which the two ascetical religions just mentioned issued respectively; however, neither Judaism nor Hinduism was unaware of the value of asceticism, which obviously keeps all its rights in every religious climate.
Man is so made that he naturally slides towards the outward and has need of a wound to bring him closer to "the kingdom of God which is within you," and this notwithstanding the complementary fact that the contemplative — and he alone — perceives the traces of the divine in outward beauties, which amounts to saying that given his predisposition, these beauties have the capacity to interiorize him, in conformity with the principle of Platonic anamnesis.
This means that man's ambiguity is that of the world: everything manifests God — directly or indirectly or in both ways at the same time — but nothing is God; thus everything can either bring us closer to Him or take us further from Him.
Each religion, or each confession, intends to offer its solution to this problem in conformity with a particular psychological, moral and spiritual economy.