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 SAGE

For the sage, every star, every flower, is metaphysically a proof of the Infinite.
In the Middle Ages there were still only two or three types of greatness: the saint and the hero, and also the sage; and then on a lesser scale and as it were by reflection, the pontiff and the prince; as for the “genius” and the “artist”, those glories of the Lay universe, their like was not yet born.
Saints and heroes are like the appearance of stars on earth; they rescind after their death to the firmament, to their eternal home; they are almost pure symbols, spiritual signs only provisionally detached from the celestial iconostasis in which they have been enshrined since the creation of the world.


Spiritual Gravity
... one must take into consideration the gentleness and humility of sadness: it is opposed to pride and hatred and is close to love; it must also be appreciated that noble sentiments symbolize attitudes situated above and beyond the emotional plane.
Seen thus, sadness, far from being opposed to the impassibility of the sages is an attitude of spiritual “gravity,” an alchemical quality which brings our substance into conformity with the contemplation of the Immutable; for gravity, and this is the important point, has the same virtue as tears, that is, it excludes, as they do, hardness, levity, and dissipation.
If sadness is a weakness, we shall find no trace of it in the Divinity; but if it has a positive side, as it has, it is prefigured in God; now in God there is no suffering, but there is in him a sort of grave and merciful gentleness, which is not unconnected with the gift of tears in man.


Wisdom and Certitude
Human life is studded with uncertainties; man loses himself in what is uncertain instead of holding on to what is absolutely certain in his destiny, namely death, Judgment and Eternity.
But besides these there is a fourth certainty, immediately accessible moreover to human experience, and this is the present moment, in which man is free to choose either the Real or the illusory, and thus to ascertain for himself the value of the three great eschatological certainties.
The consciousness of the sage is founded upon these three points of reference, whether directly or in an indirect and implicit manner through “remembrance of God.”

Dream and Reality
Objection will no doubt be made that the sage should not concern himself with relative reality and therefore with degrees of universality; we reply yes, he must, since he is concerned with it in all kinds of ways, which deprives him of any right to claim to consider the Absolute exclusively; whoever has eyes and ears is obliged to discern relativities, with or without spiritual vision of Atma.
If a man dreams of eating, he has the excuse of not acting freely or in full lucidity; but if he eats when awake, while denying the qualitative ontological difference between the two states in an unconditional sense, he has no excuse, since he believes he is dreaming and knows that the dream is illusory; he should not then perform voluntarily actions the sole excuse for which, in dream, is that they are involuntary.
Moreover, in dreams it happens to all of us to work all sorts of wonders: jumping over precipices and floating happily in the void like a bird, and so on; let him who believes that all is dream and mere subjectivity do half as much in the waking state, if he is sincere!
If the opinion which unconditionally confuses the states of waking and of dreaming were well founded and if these two states were equivalent precisely on the plane of relativity — whilst in reality they are so only in the sight of the Absolute — it would be indifferent whether a man was a sage dreaming he was a fool, or a fool dreaming he was a sage.


The Sages of Asia
Hindus and the peoples of the Far East clearly do not have the notion of ‘sin’ in the Semitic sense of the word: they distinguish between actions, not with regard to their intrinsic value, but with regard to their opportuneness in view of their cosmic or spiritual reactions, and also with regard to their social utility. They do not distinguish between the ‘moral’ and the ‘immoral’, but between the advantageous and the harmful, the agreeable and the disagreeable or the normal and the abnormal, leaving themselves free to sacrifice the former, — outside any ethical classification, —in a spiritual interest. They are capable of pushing renunciation, abnegation and mortification to the very limit of what is humanly possible and of doing so without being moralists; the sage of Asia renounces not only the immoral but also the moral, in so far as these words designate, not virtues or vices, but categories of action.
Every truth can assuredly be proved, but not every proof is acceptable to every mind. Nothing is more arbitrary than a rejection of the classical proofs of God, each of which is valid in relation to a certain need for logical satisfaction. This need for logical satisfaction increases in proportion, not to knowledge, but to ignorance. For the sage every star, every flower, is metaphysically a proof of the Infinite.
Ramana Maharshi
In Shri Ramana Maharshi one meets again ancient and eternal India. The Vedantic truth — the truth of the Upanishads — is brought back to its simplest expression but without any kind of betrayal. It is the simplicity inherent in the Real, not the denial of that complexity which it likewise contains, nor the artificial and quite external simplification that springs from ignorance.
That spiritual function which can be described as ‘action of presence’ found in the Maharshi its most rigorous expression. Shri Ramana was as it were the incarnation, in these latter days and in the face of the modern activist fever, of what is primordial and incorruptible in India.
He manifested the nobility of contemplative ‘non-action’ in the face of an ethic of utilitarian agitation, and he showed the implacable beauty of pure truth in the face of passions, weaknesses and betrayals.
The great question ‘Who am I?’ appears, with him, as a concrete expression of a reality that is ‘lived’, if one may so put it, and this authenticity gives to each word of the sage a flavour of inimitable freshness — the flavour of Truth when it is embodied in the most immediate way.
The whole Vedanta is contained in the Maharshi’s question ‘Who am I?’. The answer is the Inexpressible.


Rûmi
Rûmi considers, with finesse and profundity and not without humor, that the sage is conquered by woman whereas the fool conquers her: for the latter is brutalized by his passion and does not know the barakah [blessing] of love and delicate sentiments, whereas the sage sees in the lovable woman a ray from God, and in the feminine body an image of creative Power.


Sage and proof of God
The mystical proof of the Divinity belongs to the order of extrinsic arguments and carries the weight of the latter: the unanimous witness of the sages and the saints, over the whole surface of the globe and throughout the ages, is a sign or a criterion which no man of good faith can despise, short of asserting that the human species has neither intelligence nor dignity; and if it possesses neither the one nor the other, if truth has never been within its grasp, then neither can it hope to discover truth when in extremis.
The idea of the absurdity both of the world and of man, supposing this to be true, would remain inaccessible to
us; in other words, if modern man is so intelligent, ancient man cannot have been so stupid. Much more is implied in this simple reflection than might appear at first sight.

Sage and thinker
Mention has already been made of the passage from objectivity to reflexive subjectivity—a phenomenon pointed out by Maritain—and at the same time the ambiguous character of this development has been emphasized.
The fatal result of a “reflexivity” that has become hypertrophied is an exaggerated attention to verbal subtleties which makes a man less and less sensitive to the objective value of formulations of ideas; a habit has grown up of “classifying” everything without rhyme or reason in a long series of superficial and often imaginary categories, so that the most decisive—and intrinsically the most evident—truths are unrecognized because they are conventionally relegated into the category of things “seen and done with”, while ignoring the fact that “to see” is not necessarily synonymous with “to understand”; a name like that of Jacob Boehm, for example, means theosophy, so “let’s turn over”.
Such propensities hide the distinction between the “lived vision” of the sage and the mental virtuosity of the profane “thinker”; everywhere we see “literature”, nothing but “literature”, and what is more, literature of such and such a “period”.
But truth is not and cannot be a personal affair; trees flourish and the sun rises without anyone asking who has drawn them forth from the silence and the darkness, and the birds sing without being given names.
There are men who believe themselves to be without passions, because they have transferred their whole passional life on to the mental plane, which becomes ‘egotistic’. ‘Wisdom after the flesh’ is, among other things, mental passion with its compensating complement — petrifaction. It is the thought of a ‘hardened heart’.
The sage, since he transcends the mind, loses his concepts in contemplation; he is always being reborn anew. Charity means to lose oneself.


Sage and ordinary man
What is subjective in the ordinary man — a feeling or an emotion — becomes objective, that is, alien for the sage, and what appears to the ordinary man as objective — some object or other, a natural law, a truth — enters intimately into the life or will of the sage and as a result becomes similar to what was a psychic and therefore subjective disposition for the ordinary mortal; the profane man a priori places his love in facts, whereas the spiritual man places his in principles; which leads us to point out that a fact has a deep meaning only insofar as it manifests a universal law, whereas from the profane point of view principles seem to be just some facts among others.

When the sage says: "I desire," he speaks truly, but when the ordinary man says of him: "he desires," he is mistaken. One might also say that the sage, when he "desires" something, does so with divine consent ... (or by divine order ...), and to the extent that his individuality does desire, it has simultaneously sacrificed the object of its desire; this is expressed in the words of Christ: "Not my will, but Thine be done," words which characterize the disposition of the perfect sage in all his wishing, and which compel us to admit that, from the ordinary human point of view, the perfect sage is beyond desire.


Sage and Religion
There are people who, disdaining the religions and traditional wisdoms, believe they can draw everything from within themselves, for which there is logically not the slightest reason; no doubt, the sage draws everything "from within himself" — regnum Dei intra vos est — in the sense that he benefits from intellectual intuition.
But such intuition, aside from the fact that it has nothing to do with either ambition or, a fortiori, presumption, accords with the sacred traditions, from which the sage does not dream of turning away, even if he is born with infused knowledge.
Be that as it may, religions and wisdoms are values as "natural" — although "supernaturally" so — as the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat...


Sage & perception of the world
Before the Fall, every river was the Ganges, and every mountain was Kailasa, because the Creation was still "inward," the knowledge of good and evil not having yet "exteriorized" or "materialized" it, and likewise: for the sage, every river is a river of Paradise.
According to the relationship of the element "Consciousness" or "Intelligence," the sage realizes a return to the quintessence in an analogous manner: his mind is concentrated, it maintains itself in the transpersonal climate of the Intellect; it does not lose itself in "what is thought," but tends to identify with "That which thinks," with the Intellect itself. The mind, rather than reposing in its being, is concentrated on its essence; but quite evidently the one does not go without the other.
All things are God and the sage sees the Divine Face in each thing — howbeit according to very different relationships — or, more exactly, he sees the Divine Face "through" each thing.
This precision is imperative in order that no one be tempted to see pantheism in a conception that is as from it as possible. The pantheistic error arises from the incapacity to see God in the appearances, whence the confusion — atheistic at the same time as being idolatrous — between the world and God; which is to say that pantheism consists in nothing other than the error of admitting an identity that is material and not essential between the Principle and manifestation.
The idea of "God's existence," although it has a certain legitimacy from the purely human point of view — for which "existence" is synonymous with "reality" — is not foreign, however, to the genesis of the pantheistic conception, in the sense that "God's existence" is a first stage towards the "divinity of that which exists."
If we also appear to attribute to the created a divine aspect, it is however in a totally different manner and in a purely metaphysical sense that has nothing either material or quantitative about it.
The world, whatever it may contain of things permanent or transitory, is never detached from God; it is always the same celestial substance fallen into a void and hardened in the cold of separation; the limits of things and the calamities that result from them bear witness to that.
The sage sees in things and through things the Divine origin now distant, and also—as he considers limitations and miseries—the fall which is inevitable and in which the world will finally crumble; he discerns in phenomena the ‘flux’ and the ‘reflux’, the expansion and the return, the existential miracle and the ontological limit.
The sage sees God everywhere’, but not to the detriment of the Divine Law to which he is humanly subject.
The nature of Intelligence is not to identify itself passively and as it were blindly with the phenomena which it registers but, on the contrary, to reduce these to their essences and thus to come in the end to know That which knows.
By the same token, the sage — precisely because his subjectivity is determined by Intelligence — will tend to "be That which is" and to "enjoy That which enjoys," which brings us back to the Vedantic ternary: Being, Consciousness, Beatitude (Sat, Chit, Ananda). There is in reality but a single Beatitude, just as there is but a single Subject and a single Object. The three poles are united in the Absolute, and separated insofar as the Absolute engages itself in Relativity, in accordance with the mystery of Maya; the final outcome of this descent is, precisely, the diversification of subjects, objects and experiences.
Object, Subject, Happiness: all our existence is woven of these three elements, but in illusory mode; the sage does not do otherwise than the ignorant man, that is, he lives on these three elements, but he does so in the direction of the Real, which alone is Object, Subject, Happiness.