The 3 Phases that Everything, and I mean Everything, Goes Through (According to Hegel) - PART 3

     The Grand Finale

Oooo you excited little critter you!  I know you can't wait for me to reveal what Hegel's 3rd phase is!  Good news: I'm a compassionate individual and you have to wait no longer!

Yes the 3rd, and final phase is called...

DIFFERENTIATED UNITY

The circle finally closes on itself like a golden 18th century ring.  It's a marriage of the dispersed elements that were haphazardly causing mischief in the second phase.  It's a new unity that's not primitive like the single life of the first phase, but not overly self-conscious like the adolescent 2nd phase.  It's adulthood, and it's anything but boring!

This Differentiated Unity brings about a new harmony as we can transcend our obsession with difference.

Hegel says that this is evident in Christianity in which God & humanity, Law & grace, Self & Other are reconciled.  There may or may not be confetti involved.

It's love, see, that allows us to live by the Spirit of the Living WORD instead of the written letter of the LAW.  Make sense?  Ok it's abstract...

...but it's also not.  Let me summarize:

When we are young (and when history is young, and philosophy is young, and thought is young) it is necessarily simplistic in its constructions of the universe.  Ignorance is bliss and it's a jolly good phase what...if you can be satisfied with it. 
Once consciousness (or global communication) allows for the idea of contradictory ideas, we are flung into an overly self-conscious phase in which we question everything, and for a while lose our identity.  Woe is us. 
But never fear, because if you are willing to expose yourself to the Dark Knight...no wait, the Dark Night, then the 3rd phase will dawn with new, unifying light: You can transcend difference without some tacky eclecticism.  You can be yourself because you are accepted just the way you are because of something that's happened on a cosmic scale.  

"Oh there he goes talking about religion again," you may say.

Well firstly, yes.

and Secondly...duh!!

Oh, and PS: http://www.AsleepInEden.com/

The 3 Phases that Everything, and I mean Everything, Goes Through (According to Hegel) - PART 2

Dum dum dee dum...Phase 2 of the growth: 

Now this part is both paradigm-shifting and uncomfortable.   Remember what it was like when you first realized that everyone was forming opinions about you?  Everyone!  Ah, the glorious hyper-self-consciousness of the teenage years!  What dawning had you awakened to?  Metaphorically, of course.  I'm well aware that you hardly ever awoke at dawn in your teenage years!

You awoke to the 2nd of Hegel's phases: A Dualistic Split.

This involves a fragmented view of reality caused by fractured divisions between Self and Other.

- In religion this is typical of the Judaism.  A chasm between people and God leads them to live a nomadic lifestyle and live in, what Hegel calls “an unhappy consciousness” (42).  Wondering around, waiting for paradise.  Some Christians...a lot of Christians...still inhabit this mindset.  The Law is something imposed on them from above; something they can never live up to.

- In child development this takes the form of developing the analytical left side of the brain through education and acculturation.  The terrible two's say waddup.  This process peaks in adolescence, when the child realizes the power of their own opinions.   

- This is the modernist phase of philosophy in which Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” rules.  And it's all about me.  Humans abuse the planet to make themselves nice pretty outfits, or to make their bank accounts look nice and pretty.  Hey, everything is a bank account, we begin to think.  Time is divided into neat little compartments, each allocated to particular causes.  Time itself is a bank account with an unalterable balance that we continuously make withdrawals from.

It's an uncomfortable phase because it's the recognition of how far we have to go.  We suddenly understand something of how little we understand (for some teenagers that takes longer than others :)  But it's necessary. 

At this point you could run back to where the world was unified and everything seemed hunky dorey...and live a life of denial...

Or you could jump down the rabbit hole head first and hope that hitting your head on the bottom causes you to become open-minded instead of well...the Mad Hatter.

If he was sane he'd never be spilling the tea!

Awakening to an Enchanted Reality in God...a Portal of 1's and 0's

Asleep in Eden.com

Go to ==> Asleep in Eden.com
Thank thee kindly!

The 3 Phases that Everything, and I mean Everything, Goes Through (According to Hegel) - PART 1

“Nietsche is dead” - God

There was this philosopher bruv Hegel who painted a circular yet progressive picture of time.  He reckoned that every kind of history (including philosophical, religious and even the history of the psyche of your eccentric neighbour Gerry) progresses through three phases (Postmodern Philosophy of Religion 38-42):

 PART 1 (Second and third parts to come...)

The first is called Monism .  It’s characterised by a primitive unity, harmony.  There is coherence between self and other as they’re all part of an undivided whole. 

-In religious terms this is exemplified by the ancient Greek, Vedic and Roman religions.  In Biblical terms it’s the unspoiled world of Eden.  Oral traditions emphasise this unity and its holism still penetrates the African worldview.  There is theanthropocosmic union between humanity, God and nature. 

The same concept occurs in biology and psychodynamics.   Babies don’t recognise the difference between themselves and others until they’re 6 months old.  Some cases of stroke victims as well as autism are characterised by a sense of blurred lines between self and other, with the boundaries bleeding into each other so to speak.  Jill Bolte Taylor speaks about the blissful realisations that came about as a result of a stroke in her left hemisphere.  Her right, holistic hemisphere didn’t differentiate between herself and creation.  

 http://www.ted.com/talks/jill_bolte_taylor_s_powerful_stroke_of_insight.html

God Can't be a Luke-Warm Cup of Tea

     We can’t escape responsibility.  Each generation is responsible for inheriting the world, modifying it and then passing it on.  We only have temporary custody of this planet, but what we choose to do with it will have eternal consequences.  Pondering the profound and ambiguous may seem like trying to read in the dark – a futile attempt to extract meaning in a sphere where our senses are far too inadequate. 

“YOLO; Live for the moment, as long as you’re happy, it’s all relative.”  The acceptance of this apophatic existence may be mere excuses that justify living the way we want to.  “God may or may not exist...who knows, so why let it affect your life?”

See it can’t be a black and white issue.  Either this Entity/Force/Being/Power exists and the structure of things is the way that the prophets, saints and mystics have said it is…

…Or it’s not. 

Like C.S. Lewis said, either Jesus is a madman or real.  If he’s either then a vague respect for Him is inappropriate.

Sure there can be variation on what you see God as, but all the major religions advocate the fact that, since God exists, our lives should be rearranged fundamentally.  That’s the path to true peace.  The amazing thing is that this God, although infinitely bigger and deeper and transcendental, penetrates our lives.  Hello there ants, let’s have a cup of tea.

Boil that tea so that the substance transmutes to a higher state - from liquid to vapor.  Please.  If not, then ditch the tea and get your kicks from drugs.

“What is man that you are mindful of him, the Son of man that ...you set him a little lower than the angels”.  But God prefers human worship to that of angels because we have free choice.

Yes, I know you’re Mommy’s little angel.  Now what are you going to do about it?

 

True Happiness in this Life?

What's the meaning of life?  What is the meaning of that sentence?

Since the dawn of time our species has grappled with questions about the point of our existence.  Sometimes we have driven that point into other people in wars designed to further the interest of "us"; sometimes we have poked ourselves in the eye with that point repeatedly, causing pain and a certain kind of blindness.  "Oh but we've advanced far beyond those primitive days", you say?  Ok well what does our "advanced" culture tell us about what it means to be fully happy in this life today?

"The meaning of life is to be happy, and to cause others to be happy.  Set goals, work hard towards achieving them, accomplish things, prove to others your worth and thereby gain their respect, nurture your family, find your soul mate, live in the moment, get a white picket fence and an iPhone..."

Each of these bombs separated by commas above is a complex, lifetime quest toward achieving a dream that may or may not be in line with Reality.  Ok the iPhone acquisition doesn't necessarily take a whole lifetime, merely the majority.  Fun fact: the highest rate of depression is amongst the rich (money makes you happy?); the highest rate of suicide is amongst psychiatrists (education makes you happy?), and half of the uniting of "soul mates" ends in utter despair.

Don't mean to be cynical here, but let's define the problem.  Maybe the very problem is the lack of a definition: a definition about what it means to be human.  We are very aware that to be human means to have a body, to be of the species Homo Sapien, to be in relationship, to work.  These are objective facts that have been labeled so by the uprising of Rationalism in the Enlightenment of previous centuries.  Verifiable stuff = true, non-verifiable stuff = false.  Is that assumption verifiable?  Never mind. 
It's important to understand the historical context when we talk about things like happiness, because we are not an isolated moment.  In fact the very word moment has been produced by a series of historical interactions, and to ignore where we come from is to ignore where we are going.  We could pass all this up if the issue of happiness wasn't so pressing, but the fact of the matter is that there are more diagnoses of depression than ever before, and the highest incidents of this syndrome are in the developed first world countries.  Ok, maybe the developed countries develop these definitions, and then put themselves in it, but let's set that aside for now.

Quickly, because we need to talk about concrete things in the remaining 100 words too, let's take a step back and look at our progress historically.  We used to live a much more static life, where identity was defined by the role you played in your family and society.  The world made sense because it was all God's mysterious working.  We had our place in the cosmos, and cosmic peace had a place in our minds.  Don't get me wrong, these were barbaric times in other ways, but hear me out.  These people didn't strive under Western Individualism to validate their own worth.  They weren't competing in their own minds against a myriad of other options which they could be doing. 

Ok that touches on where we find ourselves today based on where we have come from: clearly it's the opposite in terms of how we achieve our identity, meaning, and thereby happiness.  That will have to suffice for now.  Let's get to the practical stuff:

We are body, mind, and spirit.  In order to be fully happy in this life, we need to feed each of our constituents. 
The body:  Feed it literally, with good stuff.  It's obvious what is good - things that we were created to eat like fruits, vegetables, nuts, natural meat...and chocolate (lots of it!)
The mind:  Question everything.  Don't accept the paradigm that was fed to you as a child.  That worldview is a product of our parents, the desire for organization that our society has conjured up, and previous thinkers.  Dare to question the very assumptions that they have been based upon, and do your own research to verify the facts.
The spirit:  Look, love is not just a series of neurochemical reactions, and meaning is not just an evolutionarily adapted survival mechanism that makes us feel special.  Don't buy into the rationalists dualism.  Look where they came from and then their reduction makes sense.  But you'll never find true happiness unless you feed your spirit with purpose and a relationship with the Transcendent.  How to do that is another article completely.

Hey, I'm not trying to preach here.  But as someone who is truly happy, and is a mental health counselor by profession, I feel my two cents is worth at least 1.5 cents.  Take it, spend it, invest it, or throw it into a pool and make a wish.  I bet you'll wish for true happiness.

You and I Share Symmetrical Colored Wings

Butterflies reverting to grey caterpillars

Forgetting the colorful fantasy flights of youth

Now time is money and gold makes the rules

The golden rule is sweet as honey to those who sting without mercy...ultimately causing their owns deaths

"Buzz off people, you're an inconvenient interruption of the self-instruction I'm engaging in.

Stop making me put down my spiritual books, can't you see I'm trying to be godly here, damn...(ed)"

The money markets mock the merchants

who have no cash to sell

It takes money to make money

And costs too much soul acquiring the former

Well ill keep discovering what I'm born into

Keep shedding these onion layers.

Ill use the tears to wash my soul,

Instead of mixing cement for walls.

Four walls is what it seems like I'm contained in

But the butterfly doesn't realize that the cocoon is self-induced.

Like the mind thinks its separate from Reality.