Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Manna That Feeds The Soul

The notion of God however inferior it may be in clearness to those mathematical notions so current in mechanical philosophy, has at least this practical superiority over them, that it guarantees an ideal order that shall be permanently preserved. A world with a God in it to say the last word, may indeed burn up or freeze, but we then think of him as still mindful of the old ideals and sure to bring them elsewhere to fruition; so that, where he is, tragedy is only provisional and partial, and shipwreck and dissolution not the absolutely final things. This need of an eternal moral order is one of the deepest needs of our breast. And those poets like Dante and Wordsworth, who live on the conviction of such an order, owe to that fact the extraordinary tonic and consoling power of their verse.

Here then, in these different emotional and practical appeals, in these adjustments of our concrete attitudes of hope and expectation, and all the delicate consequences which their differences entail, lie the real meanings of materialism and spiritualism—not in hair-splitting abstractions about matter’s inner essence, or about the metaphysical attributes of God. Materialism means simply the denial that the moral order is eternal, and the cutting off of ultimate hopes; spiritualism means the affirmation of an eternal moral order and the letting loose of hope.


William James in his essay, Some Metaphysical Problems Pragmatically Considered does hit the beach of life with some powerful sand churning thoughts. Life is too busy to absorb all the information that flows through the universe. The rate of that flow is too much to process, but we do manage to process a small sliver of it. The God represented as a man is etched into the foundation our genetic pool, and we build a liquid world around it. We organize and perceive certain kinds of information in this world, and we form a contour of beliefs and events that shape our reality.

Our conscious knowledge sits on an invisible, psychological language that offers inner support for the conscious happenings we experience. This inner language is built on psychic organizational units that form events. Events are spoken components in living form. They emerge from the psyche, which is a non-physical mass of cordellas. The psyche forms events in the same way that the ocean forms waves, but our events are not confined to the surface of our reality—they are splashed out into the mass psychological reality. The effects of these events expand the psyche and they emerge like spoken words and impact our awareness.

All of these metaphysical facts fall into a pit of nonsensical gibberish to the materialist who believes that everything must be verified by facts, which for the most part are half truths. The spiritualist may accept the psyche as the instigator of events and experiences, but may not understand how all of that makes any difference in a world where exterior motivation is the manna that feeds the soul.

Moral order is something that we all have an opinion about, but most of us don’t dig deep enough into the self to recognize that moral order is the fruit of the psyche where the soul, mind, and spirit produce a Zentopia of personal as well as mass events. When we identify the self using specific beliefs we limit our personal moral order, but we still continue to expand the psyche. The fascinating aspect of the psyche is the fact that it is experiencing several selves in spontaneity and each one is different. Just like a sentence where the beginning and the end are know simultaneously, our psyche uses the circular knowledge of religion to point us in a direction that creates life events worth experiencing, as well as non-physical events that are precisely poised to expand our beliefs structure about God.

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