We're nearing the end of Person and Being, which, as I mentioned at the outset, is one of my favorite little books. Indeed, I wish all books were simultaneously this compact and substantive. The world would be a much better and more coherent place without so much writing.
Fake News is only a symptom of a much deeper pneumopathology. Toss higher indoctrination into the mix, and we have millions of credentialed retards who think their low-watt words matter to anyone outside their immediate family.
If you really have something important to say, it shouldn't take that long to say it. So, what's the motivation? I suppose the same instinct that moves dogs to pee on fire hydrants, only worse, since animals have no free will; linguistic narcissism is a choice.
For it is written -- and even then just barely --
Writing is many times unavoidable; publishing is almost always indecent.
Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.
The deluded are prolix.
The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie.
Clarity eliminates rhetoric.
Write concisely, so as to finish before making the reader sick.
Simple talent is to literature what good intentions are to conduct.
Matter of fact, in the very next section Clarke describes what can go wrong if our movement toward self-transcendence is stymied or derailed: such individuals stagnate while wondering
what is wrong with them now that the old ways of self-fulfillment no longer seem to work as effectively as before; they become restless, wander on the horizontal level looking for new challenges, new stimuli that will fill the mysterious void they feel developing, but avoiding the shift to a new self-transcending level of consciousness....
"Others more or less consciously and deliberately cling tenaciously to their self-centered ego," and thus
positively block the flow of the Transcendent Center in them and through them, with the final consequence of stagnation or perhaps even disintegration...
Schuon describes in similar terms how our subjectivity may become hardened and frozen -- as if under a thick sheet of ice -- or dispersed and dissipated in outwardness.
But in reality, we are endowed with
a radical innate drive toward the whole of being, the unlimited horizon of being as intelligible.
Therefore,
since the Source and fullness of all being is Infinite Being, there is in every spiritual intellect a natural drive to know God as Source, fullness of being, and final goal of knowing... a natural drive in us as images of God to transcend our own limited point of view...
Let's stipulate that this drive is either present in us or it's not; and that it either has a proper telos or it is utterly inexplicable and devoid of meaning.
I'm just now reading another book called A Catholic Scientist Harmonizes Science and Faith, and the author makes the same point:
Our universal drive for self-transcendence does not seem to come from our genes.... As St. Bonaventure put it, "We cannot rise above ourselves unless a higher power lifts us up."
To say that we are images of God is to acknowledge a key principle, for it explains how it is possible to "de-center and transcend our finite selves," and thus "take on the Infinite Center, the authentic Center of all being, as our own center and perspective." Only in so doing are we able to fulfill "the potentialities of personal being as such."
This is at once "a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level."
Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite.
Like Whoever finds their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life for my sake will find it or something.
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