@pauljpastor 1/4 'Wait'? That, we call 'occultation': imagining our capacity to 'see' the heaven of earth as standing apart from our engagement with it; as though 'waiting', with key-in-hand, will somehow suffice to open the door upon a participatory realm escaping our perception, ‘for now.’
Image description
Original X alt text
The territory of homecoming, already spread out among us, awaits a personal invocation. It will not come by waiting for it. 'In order to inherit your freedom, you need to go toward it.' "The problem is not to find the answer, it's to face the answer." "Everyone seems to be waiting: waiting for the villains to be exposed; for justice to be done: for government to be changed; for climate science to be urgently acted upon; for Truth to be spoken and acted upon; for a tidal shift in human morality and higher consciousness; for a whole systems transition to a global culture of peace; for spiritual values to prevail. We wait as if the future will save us but the toxicity grows while we wait and the present is immobilized by endless commentary on our predicament as we sit on every possible solution to our multiple crises. And yet somehow we will become what we are waiting for if we put more than a toe in the water of real transformation and if we give it an almighty shove of creativity.”
@Dan_Bowdoin end/ Panikkar: "The ultimate religious fact does not lie in the realm of doctrine or even individual self-consciousness... subordinating reality to mind. The ultimate basis for the method will have to be the very reality which the method helps to disclose." (Lk. 17:20-21)
Image description
Original X alt text
The Need for a Sacred Science, Seyedd Hossein Nasr. Image: the first paragraph of Chapter One, here:
Extended description
Image text supplied by Nick; quotation from Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Need for a Sacred Science (1993). Supplied transcription preserved; footnote bodies not included. CHAPTER ONE God Is Reality The sensualist and empirical epistemology, which has dominated the horizon of Western man in the modem period, has succeeded in reducing reality to the world experienced by the external senses, hence limiting the meaning of reality and removing the concept of ‘reality’ as a category pertaining to God. The consequence of this change in the very meaning of reality has been nothing less than catastrophic, reducing God and in fact all spiritual realms of being to the category of the abstract and finally to the unreal. At the base of the loss of the sense of the reality of God by modern man in his daily life lies the philosophical error of reducing the meaning of reality to the externally experienced world, of altering the meaning of realist in its early medieval sense to the connotation it has gained in various schools of philosophy since the rise of nominalism at the end of the Middle Ages. Cut off from the twin sources of metaphysical knowledge, namely revelation and intellection , 1 and also deprived of that inner spiritual experience which makes possible the concrete realization of higher levels of being, modern man has been confined to such a tmncated and limited aspect of reality that of necessity he has lost sight of God as Reality. Also, even if he continues to have faith in the Divinity, the conception of the Divinity as Reality does not at all accord with that empirically determined worldview 2 within which he lives and whose premisses he accepts unwittingly or often unconsciously.
Open original document