I believe the dynamic struggle that defines the human experience is the tension between the immortal spirit living within the mortal flesh.
The body knows it will die. The body and its obedient retriever The Brain have been programmed with a clear directive: Survive. Survive, survive, survive. Such it is with all life. All life wants to live, all life wants to survive. And yet, if all we think about is survival, if all we think about is ourselves and our flesh, how quickly things go awry. Greed, hubris, lust and on down the seven deadly sins are all expressions of a psyche consumed with the survival of the flesh or the satisfaction of the Ego.
The soul, meanwhile, is eternal, knows it is eternal, and has, as a result, an eternal perspective. The soul is not afraid of death. The soul is not afraid of pain or poverty or scorn. And yet the soul must contend with the very real need of the body to stay alive. If the body does not stay alive, the soul cannot express itself in this form. If the soul were merely to stay in its energetic eternal state, there would not be this dynamic tension. Chastity, humility, charity and so on all ask us to live not from our earthly needs but from something higher. And yet each of these great qualities seems to put our body or our ego at risk.
And so our lives are characterized by this tension. This is why religions sprout up all over the world and why they all preach, in one form or another, obedience to something higher, which is ultimately the spirit, which is God. The spirit, interestingly, cannot lead you astray. And yet to listen to it always requires setting aside your fear of death. And so the tension.
Happiness, by the way, occurs when you live from spirit. You have found that spiritual vibration. It is the difference between riding with the current or against the current. As the song goes:
Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.
So true.
3 comments:
Bull concky. There is only the genome. And the genome doesn't say "SURVIVE SURVIVE SURVIVE," it says, "REPRODUCE REPRODUCE REPRODUCE." It cares not if we are happy, or sad, or in love, or trascendent. It will manipulate us in any way it possibly can to ensure that it spreads like a virus, dominating and replacing any and all genomes that it can. If natural selection determines that a feeling of transcendance will help the genome to spread, it will fuck with our brain chemistry to create one. Beauty? Love? Ecstatic visions? Whatever it takes.
You come to my sight to talk trash? Very well.
Reporduction is part and parcel with survival, but making babies is notthing if we do not survive. All living matter attempts to live as long as it can and as easily as it can. I don't see how you can say it stops at reproduction.
As for the soul, all of life is a choice. From the first atom to the last Bill in congress. It is all a choice. Reproduction is a choice. Even death is a choice. Your soul is choice. Life is choice, is thought itself. That spirit driving you in your choice, that enteleche I believe is what Aristotle called it, is your soul. That which compels you to live.
The genome is not an accident. It is not a fluke. It is not a fluke that every living thing wants to live. What is the choice to live? That is the soul.
bk
Don't listen to that ape. He's a nice monkey, but he has no ken for the soul! Only a true artist knows these things, a POET! (I just gestured skyward in a juanty salute) The truth is that the soul (the source of all creativity) is constantly whispering in our minds. But the intellect, in it's compulsion to survive the imaginary peril, to endure the halucinated monsters, and to observe the tenets of the mass hypnosis, convinces itself that the inspired, cosmic clairvoyance of the spirit is just something we ate. Or a genome. And so, the majority of the species continues to commit slow, stupid suicide, convinced that it has solved the riddle: that survival and fear is living. The truth is, there is nothing to fear, death is a myth, life is a vaudeville intended to expand the conciousness through humor, and the genome actually does not create or even effect life, it's just a prop. BOOM! POW!
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