The World, the Adversary, and the Divine Presence

Unlike artificial intelligence, human intelligence is and must be aware of its limits, on pain of enclosing itself in unintelligence -- or in an intelligent stupidity. Not only is the history of philosophy a history of models of reality, so too is each and every person such a model. 

I suppose the average person has an implicit model composed of fragments and contingencies that one more or less tries to force reality to be; but reality is what it is prior to our thinking about it.

The Existential Climate Emergency is an example of a model that wants to be the reality. And for some reason, people want to be terrified by this model. Indeed, those of us who aren't terrified are lying dog-faced pony soldiers. 

Now, no doubt life itself -- at least in the human mode -- is an unending Emergency. People talk about "identity crises, "midlife crises," and "existential crises," which are somewhat beside the point in the face of the Crisis. 

What is this crisis? Here again, there are as many ways to symbolize it as there are people. Most people don't think it through to the foundation, for which reason a variety of retail crises are available to purchase off the rack, as it were. Higher education, for example, has become little more than the internalization of various crises, which again symbolize and conceal the crisis.  

For example, adolescence is always a crisis, the crisis of the loss of childhood and the uncertainty of what it means to be an adult. Back when I was an adolescent I assumed that attainment of adulthood would end the crisis, but it just replaces one with another.  

Come to think of it, I also assumed that acquisition of a Ph.D. would end the crisis of epistemology -- or, in the parlance of the times, of being an idiot, and I suppose it worked for at least a couple of weeks before I came to my senses and realized the models weren't the reality. 

It was around that same time that I was in my phase of peak leftism, which again allows one to project and externalize one's existential crisis into those various off-the-rack concerns alluded to above, from structural racism to nuclear power to American imperialism, et al. 

You can deny a lot of personal problems by pretending that we're all gonna die from, say, a nuclear power plant meltdown. I suppose you had to be there, but the hysteria worked, since it resulted in the abolition of nuclear power in California. Apparently there's one plant left, scheduled to be shut down in 2025. 

And yet, people are no happier, since one crisis is just replaced by another (and the "solution" to one crisis often causes the next one). Similarly, the moment homosexuals are allowed to marry, we find ourselves in a crisis of "transphobia." 

Along these lines, Schuon writes that 

Serenity is to keep oneself so to speak above the clouds, in the calm and coolness of emptiness and far from the dissonances of this lower world; it is never to allow the soul to immerse itself in impasses of disturbances, bitterness, or secret revolt....

The man who is conscious of the nature of pure Being willingly remains in the moment that Heaven has assigned to him; he is not feverishly straining towards the future nor does he dwell lovingly or sadly over the past. The pure present is the moment of the Absolute: it is now -- neither yesterday nor tomorrow -- that we stand before God.

In the same book (Echoes of Perennial Wisdom) he writes that

The habitual dream of the ordinary man lives on the past and future; his heart hangs, as it were, over the past and is carried away by the future at one and the same time, instead of resting in Being.

This is not what you would call practical or pragmatic advice, but then again, the most important truths are for their own sake, not for the sake of any lesser end. It seems that the implicit motivation for all those Practical Concerns is to finally abide in Being. Is it possible to bypass the middle man and proceed straight to Being? Asking for a friend.

Whatever may be the phenomena and whatever their causes, there is always That Which Is; and That Which Is, is beyond the world of tumult, contradictions, and disappointments.... Nothing can tarnish It, and no one can take it from us.... the accidents pass, the Substance remains (ibid.).

Sounds good! Where do we sign up? 

Let the world be what it is and take refuge in Truth, Peace, and Beauty, wherein is neither doubt nor any blemish.

Easier said than done?

there is in every man a tendency to attach too much to this or that element of passing life or to worry about it too much, and the adversary takes advantage of this in order to cause troubles for us.

Probably to understand the nature of this adversary is to stop externalizing him into all those myths provided by the world to explain and justify our unhappiness. Rather, it is necessary to 

not allow ourselves to be excessively troubled by the things of the world, seeing that dissonances cannot but exist, the world being what it is.  

Life would be great if it weren't for... the world.   

Now, the world -- our world, anyway -- is person, time, and place; I mean everybody has to be someone somewhere at some time. 

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to being what one is, and on the other hand one has to become a place of the Divine Presence....

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to being where one is, and on the other hand, one has to turn this place into a center through the remembrance of God....

On the one hand, one has to resign oneself to living in the moment in which one lives, and on the other hand one has to turn this moment into an Eternal Present, which every present moment becomes through the Remembrance of God... 

So, we got that going for us.