Skip to main content

Making Sense

 When some years ago, I expressed in "Mythopoetics" my rejection of the concept of "Das Heilige" (The Sacred) as a useful concept to express the specific context that defines mythology in relation to religion and metaphysics, it was not so much a rejection to the "Mysterium stupendum et tremendum" that gives fundamental content to "Das Heilige" as a rejection to the rational use that metaphysics has made of the concept in all philosophical traditions. My rejection was of the role of rationality entering the field of the Ineffable, believing that it was really saying something with meaning in relation to Being, not about the vital realm where “Das Heilige” occurs, a spontaneous realm of Life-Intelligence. One thing is the philosophical thesis of the "Mysterium Tremendum" of existence, and another is the experience of that Mystery. According to the philosophical thesis, the Mystery has a rational and an irrational dimension. This does not make sense, because the Mystery, the Numen, the Being, is not rational or irrational. Rational and irrational are not concepts that exhaust the force of Life-Intelligence, they do not cover all of its ontological space, nor the epistemological one. The concept of "Das Heilige" flourished in a Spirit-Nature opposition that fails to understand Reality. As stated in different mystery traditions that live far away from philosophy classrooms: Nature is a symbol of the Spirit. Only this starting point can restore the sense that Nature has lost in our civilization. We now pay attention to our concepts of Nature simply because we fear the disaster towards which we are heading our ships.

The failure of "Das Heilige" as a concept did not occur at the moment when it ceased to have meaning, but when it was a concept incapable of generating meaning. Making sense is more than meaning. The Sacred is what generates meaning for human existence and the cosmos. As symbolic beings, Sacred are the symbols with which we build a mythical-ritual axis full of meaning, symbols with which thought, word, and action are harmonized and we are welcomed back within the meaning. The Sacred is Sacred because it has meaning and generates meaning. But something that we have called Sacred does not necessarily have to make sense, as we have verified in the last centuries. Our mental structures become stagnant and die, and they kill in that process, they take away the life of spontaneity, and when our lives lose spontaneity, meaning disappears, and we find ourselves orphans of our own concepts, of our old symbolic constructions, not renewed in contact with a Consciousness-Force (what has been called Spirit) much more subtle and complex than the basic mental constructions that we have developed (or that have developed us) up to this moment. The new religion, Science, far from admitting its limitations and inability to generate meaning, something that also happens to the old ocean liners of the Old Religions, persists stubbornly in a childish technological messianism. The psychological triviality in which we live immersed closes like a noose around the neck that barely allows us to breathe. We are one step away from new inquisitorial courts, now incarnated by idiotized masses who only want or try to survive anesthetized a little more.

And meaning is less than a step away from us, closer than our own jugular, closer than the psychological construct we have called the ego. The meaning is so obvious that it goes unnoticed, our species forgot it. It was inevitable because "word", symbolizing, is responsible for this distancing: the word names and by naming creates and separates. The word must be the way back, albeit a word of union and joy, like the one produced by the Sun dawn after dawn.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please write here your comments

Popular posts from this blog

Limen et Continuum

  Existence is Encounter. Meeting at the limen. In the limen, the masks disappear, that is, the basic intuitions of identities, such as the identity that I feel and think in relation to the tree that I see in front of me. The identity of the tree is a projection of mine: the unity of my process of perceiving the tree generates a mask in me, the ghost of a limited unity separated from everything else. The simplest form of intuitive understanding of masks and limen is given to us by numbers. Numbers intuitively express the liminal tension that is Existence. A little etymological note. Rythmos in Greek means flow. Arythmos (number) is what does not flow, what remains solidified. Numbers express the liminoid, and flow, rhythm, expresses the liminal. A rhythm becomes liminoid when we can trace patterns in it, that is, when we can construct masks of identities. Mathematics has spoken of flow using the Latin word “continuum”, the continuous. All modern science, since Leibni...
Post a Comment
Read more

Rhapsodies of Anima Mundi: Fear of Death

In the nascent dawn of consciousness, when the human spirit still danced in rhythmic harmony with the grand, elemental pulse of nature, the enigma of cessation—that profound silence we name death—arose as the most formidable of shadows. Yet, it was not then perceived as an absolute, terminal end in the stark, isolated sense we often conceive today. For those early societies, intimately imbricated in the vast and primordial canvas of the Anima Mundi, death was seamlessly woven into the very ur-tapestry of existence as a continuity, a fluid dissolution into the great soul of the world, or a joyous return to a collective paradise, utterly devoid of the strict, solitary individuation that modernity has, unwittingly, imposed upon us. This is not merely the clinical apprehension of biological cessation, but rather a primordial panic before the void, a visceral anguish in the face of the "I's" dissolution and the potential loss of all that imbues life with meaning. Confronted...
Post a Comment
Read more

Shamans and the development of Social Masks

  The growing dissociation of new social persons (social masks) from a single primitive mask that brings them together occurs due to the specialization processes that require increasingly complex economic actions. From the mask of the shaman, compatible with the masks of man or woman, but not with the child mask, unfold the social masks of the founding hero, the priest (priestess), the poet, or depositary of narrative memory, the doctor, the meteorology controller, and even the holy king. The shamanic powers are either the result of a search or of a spontaneous happening within a human lineage, which from the point of view of the professionalism of the economic action of shamanism is irrelevant, since it is the work of a specialist for communication with the Anima Mundi. In fact, the lineage transmission of social persons is not exclusive to shamanic professional practice. The shaman is not an individual person any more than the social person of the old man can be. I...
Post a Comment
Read more