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23. November 2016

Life as a gift, tendance or creation

'ne gute Regel man danach erwägt, daß sie auch mal 'ne Ausnahm' verträgt.
I usually refrain from developing notions in any other language than my own for fear of unwanted associations, but in this case there's only one notion whose equivalence with the German notion I had in mind, Pflege, is in question and after some consideration I decided that tendance is a perfect match or a beautiful translation.

There are two different forms of transcendence: inspiration and prayer. And since the question: What is life? if not asked by a physicist inquires about the relation between life and what is beyond, there are three canonical answers to it, depending on what forms of transcendence are assumed by the person who answers.

If inspiration alone is assumed, life is a gift coming to an open mind. If both inspiration and prayer are assumed, life is the tendance of a soul moulding its dwelling. And if prayer alone is assumed, life is an act of donating creation.

In the first case the concern of the believer is to maintain the good that he enjoys by giving back that which he was given. In the second case the concern of the believer is to do his duty in the greater scheme of things. And in the third case the concern of the believer is to leave a presentable legacy.

Looking at this, we should suspect three spiritual poles on this planet, and three there are.

The belief of the open mind has its origin and is also still centered in Arabia. Sophists will object that the Arabs are especially closed minded when it comes to picking up certain ideas, but the truth is of course that a radically open mind simply cannot pick up ideas that force it to acknowledge certain impossibilities and the bizarre pursuit of incongruous principles to absurd ends that Thomas Edward Lawrence observed in the Arabs reflects nothing more than the childlike relish of the open mind for principles, which completely ignores their nature.

The belief of the refurnishing soul is likewise South Asian and the belief of the creative donor Finnic, but these localisations do of course not determine a person's individual belief.

I've always been driven by the question, how I could possibly become engaged in the kind of interaction that mattered, the Indian question, not the Christian one of how I could maintain the good that I was given, though its existence has always been a consolation for me, a promise of sense, of re-union, but never something dear that I held in my hands. Alienation is of course a shade of distrust, but my distrust is the result of not being able to feel any substance and hence caused by my spiritual nature.

Looking at the sum total of spirituality like in this post leads to the kind of speculative detachment often observed in the clergy of any religion. It evokes the question of the evocation of spirituality, the answer to which is suggested by the old-saxon booknian for to evoke, meaning that it's given by the imagination of the readers of a book.

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