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 PRIMORDIAL MAN

Primordial man knew by himself that God is; fallen man does not know it; he must learn it.
Primordial man was always aware of God; fallen man, while having learned that God is, must force himself to be aware of it always.
Primordial man loved God more than the world; fallen man loves the world more than God, he must therefore practice renunciation.
Primordial saw God everywhere, he had the sense of archetypes and of essences and was not enclosed in the alternative "flesh or spirit"; fallen man sees God nowhere, he sees only the world as such, not as the manifestation of God.


Primordial Man & Nature
Primordial man sees the "greater" in the "lesser": the world of Nature, in fact, reflects Heaven, and conveys, in an existential language, a divine message that is at once multiple and unique. The moral result of this perspective of the "translucid" cosmos is a respectful and even devotional attitude towards virgin Nature, this sanctuary — the key to which has been lost to the West since the disappearance of the mythologies — which fortifies and inspires those of its children who have retained the sense of its mysteries, as Terra did for Antheia.
Christianity, having had to react against a truly "pagan" spirit (in the Biblical sense of "idolatrous") has at the same time caused to disappear — as always happens in such cases — values which did not deserve the reproach of paganism; having to oppose, among the Mediterraneans, a philosophic and "flat" "naturalism," it suppressed at the same time, above all in the Nordics, a "naturism" of a spiritual character.
Modern technology is the result — quite indirect, no doubt — of a perspective which, having banished from Nature the gods and the genies, and having also by this very fact rendered it profane, has ended by allowing it to be "profaned" in the most brutal sense...


Human Body and Nudity
This spiritual function of the body explains the sacredness which is attributed to nudity in some non-religious traditional forms, notably in Hinduism, the form which most nearly corresponds to the Primordial Tradition.
This sacred aspect of nudity is indeed met with, if only exceptionally, in every traditional form, whether in the symbolism itself or in the case of isolated spiritual personages: we need only recall the nudity of the crucified Christ, which is far from being without significance, or that attributed by Christian iconography to Saint Mary the Egyptian and sometimes to Saint Mary Magdalene.
In a certain sense there exists a sort of symbolic opposition between the face and the body: the face represents in that case the individual and the mental faculty, while the body corresponds to the species and the Intellect ; consequently the denuding of the body is capable of manifesting outwardly a penetration or ‘transfiguration’ of the body by the Intellect, and therefore a re-integration of the flesh into the state of primordial innocence’.
In another respect the denuding of the body represents the spiritual exteriorization (the jalwah of Sufism) of what in the ordinary or ‘hardened’ man is inward and hidden. The body, having become a sanctuary of the ‘Real Presence’, thereby becomes sacred and ‘radiates’ in its turn, and for the spiritual man who affirms this corporeal ‘glory’ this also signifies the rupture of a profane or social bondage and the rejection of the artifices of the mind and so of individual limitations.
On the other hand nudity—serving thus as a support of contemplation— may also express love towards the Creator whose Presence man feels in his consecrated flesh, which implies as a consequence the abolition of the artificial and specifically human limits —represented by clothing—which separate man from the rest of creation.
The naked body has not only an ‘innocent’ or ‘child-like’ aspect, due to the fact that it is the work and image of the Creator and in this respect ‘good’ and ‘pure’ like the primordial Creation itself, but it also possesses an aspect of ‘nobility’—one might almost say of ‘love’— because it reflects God’s beauty by its own, or in other words, because it manifests the Divine Beatitude and Goodness, which preside over the Divine Act of Creation.
Lastly the body possesses also an aspect of ‘serenity’ or ‘reality’ since it affirms ‘That which really is’, that is to say, the naked ‘Truth’, unique and formless, unobscured by the veils of arbitrary human thought.
To say that the body symbolizes spiritual and even Divine Aspects—the former necessarily having a reference to the latter—amounts to saying that it really ‘is’ these realities and Aspects on its own plane of existence, and in consequence that the positive aspects of the body are metaphysically more real than its aspects of impurity and ‘flesh’; and it is precisely this knowledge that sacred nudity affirms.
Finally it may be added that the aspects of ‘innocence’, ‘nobility’ and ‘serenity’ refer respectively to the symbolism of the nudity of the new-born child, that of the body exalted in love and that of the corpse ‘in the hands of him that washes the dead’.
One of the functions of dress is, no doubt, to isolate mental subjectivity, that which thinks and speaks, from the two existential subjectivities which risk disturbing the message of thought with their own messages; but this is nonetheless a question of temperament and custom, more or less primordial man having in this respect reflexes other than those of man too marked by the fall; of man become at once too cerebral and too passional, and having lost much of his beauty and also his innocence.
“And they saw that they were naked”: their intelligence and their will, like their way of feeling, had become exteriorized, and their love had thereby become detached from the divine essence of things and transmuted into concupiscence; reflections of the Divine Sun on the water of Existence, they had taken themselves for the Sun itself, forgetting that they were but reflections, and they were ashamed of the humiliating consequences of this error.
If in the Biblical and Koranic symbolism the sexual parts evoke shame and humiliation, it is because they remind man of blind and God-fleeing passion that is unworthy of man because it ravishes his intelligence and his will: but it goes without saying that this moral perspective does not represent the whole truth and that the positive symbolism of nuditas sacra is much more profound: on the one hand, it evokes the semi-divinity of primordial man, and on the other hand, it seeks to draw us away from accidentality, which is diverse and outward, towards substantiality, which is simple and inward.
Besides, the Bible does not reproach Adam and Eve for their nakedness; it records that they looked upon it with shame, but this refers to the fall and not to nudity as such.


Intellection & Revelation
For primordial man, Revelation and Intellection coincided: contingency was still transparent so that there were as yet neither “points of view” nor “perspectives.”
Whereas in later times Revelation is multiple because, geometrically speaking, the circumference implies many radii, the “point of view” of primordial man corresponded to the whole circle; the center was everywhere.
Likewise, the unavoidably limiting aspect of expressions, forms, or symbols did not yet imprison human minds; there could be no question, therefore, of a diversity of forms, each expressing the same Truth in the name of the impersonal Self while being mutually exclusive in the name of this or that particular manifestation of the personal God.
Now that these diverse manifestations exist, what matters is to know that intrinsically they speak in absolute mode, since it is the Absolute which is speaking, but that extrinsically they are clothed in the language of a particular mental coloring and a particular system of contingencies, since they are addressed to man. The man to whom they are addressed in this manner is already cut off from that inward Revelation which is direct and “supernaturally natural” Intellection.


Before and After the Fall
Before the loss of the harmony of Eden, primordial man saw things from within, in their substantiality and in the divine Unity; after the Fall man no longer saw them except outwardly and in their accidentality, and thus outside God.
Adam is the spirit (ruh) or the intellect (‘aql) and Eve the soul (nafs); it is through the soul — horizontal complement of the vertical spirit and existential pole of pure intelligence — or through the will that the movement towards exteriorization and dispersion came; the tempter serpent, which is the cosmic genius of this movement, cannot act directly on the intelligence and so must seduce the will, Eve.


Man "image of God"
Man is ‘made in the image of God’; to humiliate this image may be a profanation. Likewise, the intelligence cannot humble itself in its impersonal essence or in its transcendent principle; one must not seek to humiliate the Holy Spirit along with man. In our fall one thing remains intact and this is the intellect.
Moral requirements do not account for the whole of man; if the difference between primordial man and fallen man was absolute they would not be the same being; only one of them would be human. But there is something unalterable in man and this can be a spiritual starting point just as can the abyss of the fall.
That which, in man, becomes aware that he is despicable cannot itself be what is to be despised; that which judges cannot also be that which is judged.


Primordial Man & Faith
The demerit of unbelief or lack of faith does not therefore lie in a natural lack of special aptitudes, nor is it due to the unintelligibility of the Message, for then there would be no demerit; it lies in the passionate stiffening of the will and in the worldly tendencies which bring about this stiffening.
The merit of faith is fidelity to the supernaturally natural receptivity of primordial man; it means remaining as God made us and remaining at His disposition with regard to a message from Heaven which might be contrary to earthly experience, while being incontestable in view of subjective as well as objective criteria...


PS: citiţi şi mai ales înţelegeţi ce scrie mai sus, nu vreau nici analize pe text, nici impresii, nici opinii, iar de suspenduri prea puţin îmi pasă... consider încheiată prezenţa mea pe acest forum...

Acest topic a fost editat de shapeshifter: 10 Apr 2009, 05:10 PM