Phronema

Reading Varela* has made me more aware than ever of the yawning gulf at the heart of existence. The more I think about it the less I can think of being as static. To exist is to be rushing headlong, to be projecting oneself into the future, into relationships. Again the more I think about it relationships seem to be the very stuff of existence. The tiny bit of solitude of these last few days makes me realise once again that the essence of being human is in relating to other human beings. Simply to relate – to love, to converse, to be with, to help, to make bonds, links. Saint-Exupéry’s fox in The Little Prince knew all about it. We all know this in our heart of hearts but we are taken in too easily, men are anyway, by the ideology that life is for doing, consuming, spending.

The two of the most pernicious ideas today are the individualistic ethics of egoism and consumerism. These do not touch the essence of human existence. These lock a person into a solipsist modality and he ceases to grow; he becomes bored, empty, effete. A yawning gulf appears within and he knows neither what is its cause, nor what to do about it. All he can do is try to fill it with a ceaseless round of stimulation, sensation, pleasure, drugs, sex whatever will stifle the pangs, the angst, the fear.

It is so important not to be afraid of the emptiness, the gulf. The Buddhists, in this respect, are so much wiser than us. We want so much to cling to a foundation and, by definition, a foundation has to be static. Perhaps the Christian focus is wrong, wrong because it sets us in the wrong direction, to talk about faith, or Christ, as a rock. It is even more wrong to talk about eternal rest. Stasis is death, to cease to be alive. Ultimate reality is… We do not have words to describe it. There is no foundation. There is only to move, to love, to dance, to be; no substantives (in a sense), only verbs.

*Varela, F. J., Thompson, E, Rosch, E. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience The MIT Press, 1993, p. 119

It is quite true that now is all that there is. We all live for the future, for a goal. Our desires, our heart is in the not now. But the now is all that there is. This is reality. There is no other. In this present reality is all that there is. ALL is in this reality. It is filled, the pleroma. Paul and Teilhard de Chardin and others talk about the Parousia, the Omega point, towards which everything is progressing – but I wonder. In a way Eliot is right. Time past and time future are both contained in time present, though in different ways. But to say that only now exists is not to say that all time is eternally present. Now is eternally present, it is all that is, and time plays as a sort of passacaglia or fugue in it.

I keep thinking about the metaphor of the cosmic dance as a description of reality. Barbour* quotes Peacock who says that God is like a choreographer of an ongoing dance, or the composer of a still unfinished symphony, experimenting, improvising and expanding on a theme and variations. It is nice to see that others have the same sort of insights. How does one go about helping others to become aware that they, we, all of us are caught up in a kaleidoscopic interchange? We worry but worry is a form of selfishness. It is trying to keep all the strands of ones relationships hugged close and tight. It is only by letting go and giving oneself and others over to the dance that freedom comes.
*Barbour I.G; Religion in an Age of Science, SCM, London, 1991 p. 177

The more I think about it and the more I read it seems to me that the correlation between inner and outer is far more extensive and deep rooted than we can ever dream or imagine. I was reading about the difference between objective and subjective survival after death. The latter is a worry. It is impossible to imagine disembodied existence. Out of the body and near death experiences are no help really because they always occur in the context of the body and relate to the body. The problem arises when there is no body at all; when the body has decomposed and all that remains are scattered atoms and molecules. What then? I think the solution, or a possible solution, lies in the insight of Irenaeus. “God became man so that man might become God.” This is not to be thought of as a drop of water falling into, and becoming merged with, the ocean. Much more it is becoming in the sense of union without loss of individual identity. A participating in the being and the activity of God. Unimaginable. Yet the incredible thing is that it is a present reality – the only thing is that it is not a reality of which we are conscious. Sometimes there are glimmerings that we are standing on the threshold of an unimaginable vastness of being, sometimes a sense that this so solid and substantial world is translucent and reality is only an enclosing shell. Crack through the shell, break out of the egg and then we shall know.