The New World

I was struck by the following passage from Thomistic Psychology:

But now, with the advent of thinking processes, a completely new world is opened up to us: a universe of ideas and volitions, an immaterial expanse of creativeness, a region liberated from the probabilities of sense (Brennan).

So many extravagant bells and whistles go along with the human condition, but surely this is the most consequential, for this "new world" is the human world, precisely. If you're reading this, you're in this world, no matter how much you try to pretend otherwise.

Well, not exactly, for man is apparently free to choose to be in or out of the real world, AKA reality. As you've noticed, alternate universes not only abound, but are but a click away.

Indeed, one small click for man can be a giant leap into a parallel looniverse -- for example, from the prospect of an inconvenient cold to WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!, from a long forgotten spree of trespassing to THE DARKEST DAY IN OUR DEMOCRACY!!!, from minimal safeguards against election fraud to JIM CROW ON STEROIDS!!!

Man's freedom to inhabit fantasy worlds is one of the lessons of Genesis 3, the principle of which is still undefeated after 12,000 years or so. In short, if even your Creator has to ask Where are you? (3:9), you know you're lost in the cosmos.

Where are you? 

A quick skim suggests that it takes until Genesis 22 for man to explicitly respond, Here I am, full stop, with no evasions, excuses, or rationalizations. Finally, man and God begin seeing I to I. 

But it's only a beginning. Nevertheless, as the Poet says, In my beginning is my end, as the Aphorist says, Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End, and as the Novelist says in about a billion ways, gosh!, the end-and-beginning is at hand.

Let's get back to the demons, which make their -- or its -- first appearance rather early in the saga of man-in-the-cosmos, in the first line of Genesis 3. 

Now, they say Genesis 3 was actually written several thousand years before Genesis 1, but it appears later in the Bible, and for good reason. For if it had come first, it would imply some rather serious Manichee business, as opposed to the radical monotheism and even more radical triunity before and after that. 

Well, I got sidetracked, so that's it for now.