bernie
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Total Posts
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503
- Joined: 11/22/2007
- Location: TX (transplanted New Yorker; world citizen)
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Rootedness & Unity...
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7/31/2009 9:27 PM
( #1 )
More than anything, perhaps, we too often seek for forgiveness, making amends - i.e., at-one-ment because we're not feeling whole, together, or good about ourselves ... This split is a kind of duality, an existential longing for integration & unification of our self with our Self at the depths of our being w/ a deeper, wider consciousness which somehow seems to evade us, which is not yet fully formed, inchoate, yet imminent and impending of coming into Being; yes, on the edge, the periphery ... and more than anything we long to re-connect, to become whole again, nondual, fully born, &, above all else, not dying before giving birth to our true Self...
“The inability to experience the suffering of another as one’s own is what allows such suffering to continue.
Separation breeds indifference, false superiority. Unity produces compassion, genuine equality.
... it was collective consciousness which provided fertile soil for the growth of the Nazi movement. Hitler seized the moment, but he did not create it.
It is important to understand the lesson here. A group consciousness which speaks constantly of separation and superiority produces loss of compassion on a massive scale, and loss of compassion is inevitably followed by loss of conscience.”
(Neale Donald Walsch, Conversations with God ∙ an uncommon dialogue ∙ book 2)
“The alternative between regressive and progressive ways of achieving salvation is not only a social-historical one. Each individual is confronted with the same alternative; his margin of freedom not to choose the regressive solution in a society that has chosen it is indeed small – yet it exists. But great effort, clear thinking, and guidance by the great humanists is necessary. (Neurosis can be understood best as the battle between two tendencies within an individual; deep character analysis leads, if successful, to the progressive solution.)
Another solution to man’s existential split problem is quite characteristic of contemporary cybernetic society: to be identified with one’s social role; to feel little, to lose oneself by reducing oneself to a thing; the existential split is camouflaged because man becomes identified with his social organization and forgets that he is a person; he becomes, to use Heidegger’s term, a ‘one,’ a nonperson. He is, we might say, in a ‘negative ecstasis’; he forgets himself by ceasing to be ‘he,’ by ceasing to be a person and becoming a thing.”
(Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness)
“The mind’s highest good is the knowledge of God, and the mind’s highest virtue is to know God.”
(Baruch Spinoza; Spinoza is one of the prototypes of the philosopher who truly lived his own thinking.)
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