[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]O[/dropcap]ne should not confuse “spirituality” and soul work.
The spirt is important, for it carries the tenacity of eternal forms while the soul contains the seat of the imagination and the heart of the earth.
Nor one should not confuse inert, religious dogma with the dreaming mindscape of God; a parcel of which we know as our world.
Yet: If one apprehends existence from the worldview of material reductionist fundamentalism, our existence is simply meaningless dance of fleetingly animated dust. Apprehending existence from the worldview of material reductionist fundamentalism is a fool’s game.
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence[.]”
— excerpt from ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, W. B. Yeats.
Conversely, If one defines human existence by the dry-as-dust dogma of religious fundamentalists then we are slaves to a cruel, despotic, and capricious Master.
Regarding the material reductionist worldview, Newtonian linearity has been built upon to the degree that one can declare, with confidence, that, the dimension we know as Time may appear linear to us but our perceptions are circumscribed, and to a very high degree. Withal, we are not in a position, at present, to make sweeping pronouncements about our place in the scheme of things
Thus how should we spent the fleeting hours of our finite lives? Joyce avers:
“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”
– James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission from the artist.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
