The existence of our 'self' is totally related to the fact that we can been convoked for our (conscious, free) acting: the 'self' cannot be appointed in the brain, it is immaterial and spiritual, in the sense that it is something or someone that has to exist in order to make possible the act of convocation. Idem dito concerning the existence of the will: nolens volens yet we must be considered as being able to act freely if we also want it to be possible that we can be convoked for our acting. Although what is causing the necessity of convocation?
Suppose for a moment that people could not be convoked, e.g. because they would not be accounted to possess some form of free choice. In that very case, it would be senseless to speak of the good and the evil. For the good and the evil refer to the good and the evil acting while this acting presupposes the freedom of the one who is acting, in order to be able for one to consider it as being either good or evil. Yet: if the opposition of the good and the evil would become irrelevant, and so if it would disappear, then truth itself would disappear. This is a fact since we know that truth is being measured by the means of (truth-)criteria, which are necessarily values, which means: things defined by our awareness of the good and the evil. If values disappear, then necessarily also truths will disappear. And if truths disappear, also reality as such will disappear. The latter is even a quite comprehensible fact: in "Transatheism" (Bauwens 2003)we gave the example of the command that asks us to speak the truth: if everyone would start lying, then not only truth would disappear yet also language, while in that case language would loose every signification, while it is the signification and so it is the essence of language to bring truth to the light. The reader will recognize Kant's categorical imperative in here, and even so he shall understand why the stating of it is just right as soon as it is being understood that the essence of things coincides with their signification which is their sense. In this way, we can state with the uttermost certainty: if the good and the evil could no longer be considered to be mutually different, then reality itself would disappear into nothingness. And this is Death.
So, Life itself demands that the good and the evil exist, and the knowledge of the good and the evil demands on its turn that we could be convoked, that we possess a 'self' and that we as well possess the freedom of choice concerning our own acting. So, the principally rejecting of debt essentially is not separated from the rejection of consecutively: the own freedom, the own self and the Living reality as such. The rejection of debt results in Death. And the acceptance of all debt what the Messiah does results in Life.
28-03-2007
§ 20. Fate is cruel...
§ 20. Fate is cruel...
Truths as such are being determined by truth-criteria, and these are measuring-staffs which origin in the force of our valuations. Knowledge is valuable if it merges with truth and, consequently: if the truth-criteria have been chosen well, which means: if the valuations that lay on the base of them are valuable themselves, or rather: if they are objective. The statement that values would be subjective, neglects the fact that the valuating person eventually does not coincide with himself: he is not just himself; he has received himself, and his life (as well as his valuating activity) are in fact participations to life as such which transcends himself. As has been explained in "Transatheism", in the unavoidable fact of the suffering itself (and, in extenso, also in death), that the knowing one and the known thing merge: pain itself is being defined as the thing one coincides with while one is never able to take distance from it. The refusal of pain which is the 'not-willing' of it is as factual as is pain and, consequently, the will is a fact as certain as is pain. In this way, the statement that we, humans, would not dispose of a will, has been proved to be nonsensical once and for ever. The one, who has to endure torture, recognises that his will not to be suffering is even so true as is pain, and we are factually condemned to this will for live. Man cannot choose suffering and death without deceiving himself, without making himself insensible to his own 'deeds'. From the factuality of pain origins the factuality of the will that is necessarily the will for life and the repugnance against death. The good is being determined fully by this basic fact. Free choice, at last, origins from the given facts, being, at the one hand, the will for life and, at the other hand, knowledge which is knowledge of the 'external order' an order imposed to us by the nature of things. E.g. we cannot simultaneously want to eat sugars and have healthy teeth, because objective, natural laws hinder the co-existence of the fulfilment of both of these wishes. Knowledge of natural laws is one thing, the recognition of them manifesting itself only in the acting according to this knowledge is a totally different thing. Acting is principally good, only if it relies on the recognition of the objective order of things as its fundament.
Though, things are not as simple as one could believe at first sight. Considered superficially, it seems as if pain and death would be the ultimate criteria determining our acting, though this does not correspond to reality: such a thought is strongly reductionist and it leads to the tendency called sentientism. For not only in 'external' nature there is order; there is also 'internal' nature, often called the soul, which has its own laws that are not rarely in conflict with the laws of external nature, and even with the laws of natural life. E.g. in the submitting of one's self to painful restrictions, the primautair character of the inner laws upon the brute outer laws is obvious: it is allowed to and even preferable to restrict one's natural freedom although this can be painful just because the laws of the soul must reign over the laws of nature. For what is natural stands in the service of what is good, while natural things exist within the good because the existence of the good is a necessary condition to the existence of life as such. Freedom and consciousness do not increase unless dead nature is being put in the service of the living; and the living, on its turn, is being put into the service of the good. This holds necessarily because dead matter gets its signification and consequently also its very essence or its being from the spiritual, while the spiritual stands in the service of the good. Dead ink cannot form characters without the eye that is reading them; so, the written words get their significance from life and from spirit and, moreover, all words and language as such would become totally useless and would disappear at last if lies were the rule. Once more: the good (e.g. truth) gives sense to the spiritual (the word), and the word on its turn gives signification to the living and the dead material. Without the intrinsic value of absolute Love, which is the aim of all that exists, ethics, the spirit, life and matter degrade to an absolute chaos that is simultaneously evil, false and ugly. As a consequence, it does not belong to us to make decisions about the content of the good and the evil: each arrangement by the means of rules that deny love, is evil, while love as such is evident: we must learn to give way to this evidence and to obey it, rather than constructing laws and rules that just hide the deprivation towards others from their freedom and eventually also from their lives. In "De gijzeling van Mithras" we tried to prove that mainly those organisations that pretend to stand in the service of some 'higher goal', are responsible for the misery originating from the shortness of love that all kinds of ethical rules and laws factually expose. The distrust of love that ethical rules try to compensate is essentially satanic, as one can learn from the mentioned book of Job. The resistance to the gift of a minimum of human dignity to people who do not respond fully to up-to-date norms norms that are being created just by those 'institutions of distrust', is even growing all the time and creates either visible or invisible extermination-camps celebrating nothing else but Death. Let us listen once more to Achilles' words as spoken in the mentioned drama by Kris Van Steenbrugge: "Fate is cruel, yet crueller is man." There is not the slightest reason to complain about our fate included death where it is put in the shadow of the evil originating from our own acts. As long as we murder, we do not deserve life, and then death is just the fate convenient to us.
31-03-2007
§ 21. Death, Life and the End of Times
§ 21. Death, Life and the End of Times
The question whether there is life after death sounds paradoxical; yet it is not similar to the question whether God is able to make a stone that He cannot lift: for 'life' and 'death' refer to realities differing strongly from the things that come up into our mind spontaneously. We can think about a (mere biological) 'death' that can be significant and preferable above a (mere biological) life without any signification, as already Plato stated implicitly by his saying that it is better to undergo evil than to do it, and this is true because, as Saint-Paul said, only love signifies life. The offer of one's life is uttermost preferable above the gaining of it at the prize of one's beloved ones. Moreover: life undeserved is death in such an amount that it cannot undo this death by the means of a biological death, as the Scripture states in saying that there will come a time that some will search death yet they will not find it: in those cases not (biological) death is the problem but rather its absence is.
However body and soul can be useful concepts in the service of our thinking, in reality both are mutually woven, and moreover: they are woven with something that does not belong to ourselves, while life is not the possession of the living ones: we participate to a life that has been offered to us. During our life, nature and super-nature merge as we are obeying the command to do what is good, because exactly in the recognition of the good, the reality of our own life origins: reality demands the existence of truth, and truth demands the existence of truth-criteria, which are values that have to be recognised in personal freedom. The duty to do the good loads us with a debt that is even so real to our soul as pain is real to our body. The mortal body is a weight to the soul exactly while it connects us to this debt, namely by the means of the inescapable duties inherent to physical life that, in this way, connects us to nature as well as to the fellow-man.
The reality of death transcends the problem and is unsolvable as such: this fact turns natural life into a holy madness manifesting itself in the natural drift to self-continence and continence of the species, yet against this madness there is still love that, out of its own being, does not support death and that claims eternity. When the beloved one dies, at once and in the same movement the originally deterrent death is being adapted by life itself and, in doing so, Life tries to transcend Death. Love forces us to recognise the person-related character of death, alike it demands from all individual living human beings to connect themselves to a proper 'self' and, in this way, life and death relate mutually, similar to the body and the soul. As the neglecting of the good contains the neglecting of the 'self' and, eventually, brings reality to its end, even so the recognition of the good forces us to recognise the real character of (individual) death as being a reality totally different from nothingness: the fact that some beloved one 'has existed', is being recognised in the reality of his death that is connected to him and in which he, as a beloved one, however not alive any more, nevertheless continues his existence. As the church states that it is the gathering of all of its saints who are in fact 'death' it does nothing else but adapting this continuation of existence after death into a Life which transcends the mere biological one. By the way: it is quite easy to comprehend that this statement holds as soon as we realise that factually nothing else influences and guides life that much than precisely death does ( death, referring to individuals who died). This is so according to the science that the (tangible) matter is being governed by the spiritual, as the spiritual is being governed by the good. In this context we have called death the 'wave-facet' of our existence while, analogously, life can be called the 'particle-facet'.
Considering the (creative) activity of life as a comforting 'imitatio Dei', one can ask one's self whether God Himself did need some solace, while He Himself seemed to feel the need for some creatures and, in this way, it becomes clear that only in the mysterious reality of love, need and solace merge. Indeed, in our own existence we can discover a clear reflection of this mystery, in the fact that love is simultaneously the need for love as well as its solace: the beloved one causes the need that only he or she can solace. Manifestation of love seems to require a continuous wave-movement of need and solace and even so the twofold character of life, while simultaneously it must be mentioned that divine love cannot be described exhaustively in this way and still will transcend these descriptions.
Alike life, death is a component of existence, as in their turn body and soul are two components of life as well, and both the components seem to keep each other alive and they seem to strengthen each other at least in the way that our mind probably can get some grasp on it. Consequently it is not biological death that must be frightened it is rather Death that hits us through sin: for the Being Life and the Good merge, and the question whether there is life before death, is inherent to this very question.
Though, eventual inevitability of death shows that the sin mentioned here has not necessarily a personal character: it rather concerns what we call 'original sin', which is imaginable as a common responsibility and, consequently, as a common debt concerning everything that can go wrong in life. The general and increasing tendency to move debt from the individual towards society, enforced by the awareness of the eventual impossibility in the individual to carry debts, not only accomplishes the coming up of a common debt, yet it also brings about a unification of all the members of humanity that by the weight of this debt is being forced to a higher form of life in the moral sense.
Exactly the latter movement is significant for what is being called 'the end of times'. As has been stated before concerning a discussion about the probable signification of Islam for the West, we may repeat here that the changing accompanying the last phase of humanity, in our view, can be described perfectly by a terminology prepared by Saint-Augustine, as following. (N.B.: the next sentences have been taken over almost literary from a work of ours published before, which has been entitled: "Over de opkomst van de Islam in het Westen. Enkele speculaties.")
Let us start from the probably most important difference between Christianity and Islam, which at our own advice is the question of freedom. Christians are being invited by God they are in no way forced to life faithfully, while Muslims seem to confess their faith under a seemingly pressure. In the more fundamentalist tendencies of Islam is it even being intended to set up Islamic theocracies with a specific law extorting faith.
For now the question is whether this kind of compulsion can be justified. According to some authors, 'terror' is embedded in Islamic principles as such, and it would count all believers to its 'victims'. Yet we can consider the rise of Islam still otherwise, more specifically by the means of Saint-Augustine's thought and at once making the presupposition that we now have arrived in the so-called 'end of times'.
For Saint-Augustine distinguishes two periods in history of human kind: the period before original sin and the period that follows to it. Let us accept moreover that in Christianity the latter period slowly is being transmitted to a third one, namely the end of times. Due to Saint-Augustine, the situation before original sin is being characterised by the human freedom either to sin or not to sin: God invites man to be faithful, though man is able to sin ( "posse peccare"). This is no longer the case after original sin has been committed: as Saint-Augustine himself declares, he wants to do the good, yet he is not able to do so by his own strength ( "non posse non peccare"). Nowadays, in the mundial rise of Islam we can see the beginning of a third period the end of times characterised by a condition that asks man to give his freedom back to God and, consequently, he will not be able to sin any more ( "non posse peccare").
In that case, the latter condition would inaugurate the just divine ordeal, because people with a true faith would not consider the rise of Islam (which would mean the 'impossibility' to sin) as a terror; only the godless ones would experience the obligation of a faithful life as a torture. By this fatal and irreversible process in sacred history, in this way the good ones should be rewarded while the bad ones should only experience punishment. This can sound fantastic yet; referring to Shakespeare, the turns of history always go beyond our bravest fantasies. And that's just a paraphrase on the words of the Christ, stating that we have eyes while we don't see, and that we are guilty because we pretend to see.
01-04-2007
§ 22. The Last Judgement
§ 22. The Last Judgement
As a matter of fact, the great repression that, following the Holy Scripture, will characterize the end of times, ought not to be caused by Islam: it can also be communism, pan-Islamism, or rather a brutal form of capitalism that is already rising. The idea of a 'repression' evidently originates in the belief that God is testing his people in order to separate chaff from wheat in the 'Last Judgement'. Though we think that this idea definitely might be a misconception for the reasons given next.
It cannot be possible that a good and loving God, taking care of his creatures, even more than a mother loves her own children, as says the Scripture, would submit his people to a 'test'. A man experiencing that he is being 'tested' by his beloved one, immediately, and justly, will see in this a fundamental shortcoming of faith at the side of the beloved one, and this can be a just and even an urgent reason to end up the concerned relationship. The one who has to experience that his beloved one is testing him in a serious, not joking way, will experience in it a real shortcoming of love and faith, and the lacking of the unconditional character that must signify love. On the occasion of our former discussion of the first part of the book of Job, we have seen that not God was the one willing to subject Job to a test, yet it was Satan. Moreover: most likely God would have hindered this testing if not Job himself allowed it and even demanded it, as is being shown by the fact that, evidently, and Satan alike, in his turn he wanted to weight God's justice by the means of a trial that should make him conscious of what he had done wrong. If at the end of times some last judgement will come, it is impossible that this would be a kind of a sequel to such a 'testing' by our Creator; if ever there will be condemnations, then these condemnation will not be executed by God yet by man himself, just like it happened in the book of Job.
Simultaneously it has to be said that this nevertheless cannot be a soothing; the self-condemnation by man is still a condemnation, as we definitely lack the power to wipe away from our memory those things that we know with certainty; in other terms: our consciousness continues to be ours, as does our own self, while the consciousness and the self coincide. The loaded consciousness that tries to annihilate itself, will never find the searched death. So, Achilles saying, that fate is cruel though man is still crueller, holds here too.
Nevertheless one cannot deny that our end as a human being will be at once our end as a free being: we will not be able any more to make corrections. Already faced with the death of others, and probably pre-eminently in there, man finds himself in front of this severe reality, being unable for ever to revoke things done to the deceased ones. In this way, death enters most perceptible, irreversible and irrevocable into our life, sometimes long before the own life-end has arrived. Man's failures pile up and they have condemned him a long time before death has made his entrance. These condemnations can even weight so heavy that one doesn't care about his life-end and that he even longs to it, in this way hoping that his life-end will also stop the tortures of his self-condemnations. Yet the concerned one can know by the strength of his consciousness that neither his life-end is able to take away these debts, nor he can deny the specific knowledge that he gets in this way. In these matters, fate is cruel, for even the self-declared unbeliever will get the certainty about the continuation of existence after death, and this is even so less ignorable as is physical pain, in which he just had to believe.
Knowing in this way that the 'end' will signify the impossibility to decide some more things in freedom, we can understand that life definitely is all about the saving from death as many things as possible, especially concerning our own deeds. As a guideline in these, perhaps an old Indian proverb can be recommended, saying that "all what has not been given will be lost". All we want to save from death, must be given a good end before death takes away our opportunity to do so, obliging us to take it with us for ever in the grave.
