Three aspects:
Three aspects remain that relate to my writings of yesterday. My notion about humanity, my own early life time experience and Antiquity’s notion about compassion, which I recalled yesterday.
One: Humanity’s reason for being.
The overall frame work of reference that I use is what I have called earlier (2006+) ‘Existence Divine’, which includes all that exists and its processes. The process of becoming, shining and declining defines time within itself. This Existence Divine is a knowable mystery, containing the vast as well as the minute, within which the human realm exists and about which we humans are making our discoveries and finding our way.
I view our human ways of existence as a unique contribution to what can be possible in our own human realm of being and we are learning how this is best conducted and understood. One contribution we humans make is ethics and morals to govern behaviour such as to allow for variety of forms and expression. This is a fairly modern [since YZ (Year Zero)] discovery and is still a work in progress; see my remark on Antiquity below.
Our contribution as humans then, is to explore the humanly possible and do this as well as we can, informed as we so proceed by our own discoveries and experiences since times immemorial. This includes all traditions of humankind, the modern sciences and technologies, such as space travel. Our reason for being is the here and now, and to do so to the best of our abilities, enhancing Existence Divine with our own existence in the realm of humanity.
Two: Dis-covering the source and making it known.
The second part is a personal aspect as to how I relate to this insight and conviction, as I could call it. In relation to this, two earliest recollection have always been with me, be it not continuously. The earliest is a recall that I am going down into a dark place and ask: ‘… but why down into such a dark place?’ Nothing more, nothing less, this is the recollection I have always had and held.
The second recollection, following the first from very early childhood, is the following dream. ‘I have to find out whether animals can speak. I am in a great hurry. My method is to notice whether an animal has a breath and can thus can make a sound. I first encounter domesticated animals, a rabbit maybe, rushing passed them I see wild animals, a giraffe I recall, but there are others. I go lower into the woods, some distance away I see a crocodile and water, it can make noise like all they preceding animals.
[Still all in the dream] I now feel I have gone far enough and as I turn to my right by about ninety degrees and look up to proceed a snake faces me. It is upright, its head is level with mine, face to face. It only lispers and hence I ask: “But, how do I speak to an animal like that?” This is followed by a spoken answer from behind in my head: “You must approach this in a reasonably manner”.’
With this answer, the dream ends.
N.B: The dream was in Dutch, so that spoken answer was: “Je moet het op een redelijke manier benaderen.” The word ‘redelijk’ conveys two notions. One that you should be reasonable about some thing and the other that you must use the ‘ratio’, that is ‘reason’ in other words. So, to speak to this snake you must use reason and be reasonable as well. That is my interpretation.
This dream did not change until the nineteen eighties and the ensuing process [active imagination] is not simple to describe, but its result was as follows. A snake’s language is body language, it is in and with its motions that it communicates. That was my ‘reasoned’ and ‘reasonable’ conclusion. From the time of that realisation on, the snake would slowly become responsive in its bodily attitudes as I confronted it with a question and finding for consideration of certain types of fundamental questions.
Such a response could be null at times, you go figure it out in other words. The technique of re-entering your dream this way is called ‘active imagination’, and is reluctantly applied at time in a Jungian setting.
What I did this weekend, was to combine the two events of my early childhood. This resulted in my conviction that the two taken together mean for me to go to the source of (human) being [the going down into the darkness] and uncover what I as human, need to become conscious of, as represented by the snake and ratio dream.
This combined for me in a notion about ‘why do I exist as a human’. What am I doing here, what are we humans doing here, with all our activities? I was to try and discover an answer to that, making it conscious, knowable. This is the ability to speak!
&lr;10:09am, time for a coffee break.
Continuing 10:29am>
Three: Compassion as character flaw recalled.
The third topic is the notion of compassion in Antiquity. At that time, Greeks and Romans both, regarded sympathy and compassion as character faults of not flaws. It was something one had to fight off and not succumb to. It runs parallel to the mythological character examples that Jason, Odysseus and Heracles portrayed as heroes triumphant, to follow. Heracles even became divine for his helping the gods achieve victory. In this, Heracles is an early pointer to the idea and practice [as in prayer] of humans who inform the divine.
Jesus then was not a hero in the eyes of his contemporaries, but rather a weakling, who failed to live up to the adage ‘big boys don’t cry’. This in order to stay tough in battle. Yet, the idea of compassion turned to have a big pay off in the sense of surviving collective misfortunes, such as epidemics, where Christians looked after their own and survived, where others did not. [See my talks on Christianity.]
Another earlier such paradigm shift like this one, is noted by Julian Jaynes [‘Bicameral Mind’] as he compares attitudes of characters in Homer’s ‘Iliad’ with those in ‘Odysseus’. In the first, the actors follow the instruction given by the gods, in the second the hero makes his own choices. The old Testament characters of Abram, Moses and Jonah struggle between listening to the voice of revelation and their own view on things. They even argue with god and some times change the mind of it.
Conclusion: Making our own choices.
You might say then that humans as a society have come to change first from following instructions by the divine, to learning to make their own decision and the more challenging part of living with the consequences. Then second, to allow oneself to be informed by compassion when making such choices. Whereas we today are facing the problem of modifying our attitude such as to honour and validate people once considered unbelievers, infidels and apostates [whistle blower and distracters may be too?].
The difference for today is that we humans will have to uncover, - dis-cover - by means of our conscious ratio and knowing what it is that we need to do and how to do it. Revelations in the old sense cannot work, because they are not subject to reason. Ratio means = to proportion.
<11:00am~
