Tao of Steve: Individual Acceptance of Self Sacrifice pt 1 (569 hits)
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Submitted by sharpie <tiny-weiner.at.hugeballs.com> (View user info) at 2004-03-18 23:51:13 EST
*This is the first in a series of nine. Keep in mind this is NOT my work, this is being posted and the reviews are being given to a friend of mine to see if he is able to reach people "on a different plane" Here you go...*
I am asked, upon revealing my desire to retreat into the brutal innocence of the wilderness, abandoning the most of my actions for the greater fullness of thought, whether this decision is one that I would allow the majority to make; as Kant has said, "Act only upon that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it should become universal law". To this I answer, "This movement is the sole act that I am able to admit as having value universally, for if universal law is required, one must first consider the needs of the universal totality, above and unconcerned with the petty pursuits of the shut and shallow individual. His humanity is but to destroy, that his destructive aims might impart some sense of authority to appease his impotent dread at having been born. I, too, quiver at the specter of death, but I do not seek to flee his waiting embrace; as I now live, must I then die, this life is only of worth in that it ceases".
As we have risen out of the sludge of the primordial seas, expanded and complicated and multiplied, so too has our purity and sensitivity diminished in proportion to our physical and so-called humanitarian growth. As our society increases, we ourselves, as well as the compassionate action that only solitude allows, drastically diminish. Perhaps a 'devolution', a return to the harmonious ideal of the only system of semi-community that has proven capable of sustainment, that is, primitive and impartial natural selection, is the path by which the race of men might attain the Nirvanic paradise of the 'union with God'. Perhaps our longing after perfection and serenity of joy stems from the evolutionary remnants of our genetic memory of the harmony that once the most of animate life held, and which all inanimate and so-named unconscious life still retains. Perhaps 'original sin' is but the mingling of individuals, acquiring the 'forbidden fruits' of excessively conscious yet short-sighted technology and over-complicated concessions of society, at the cost of that which we, in balance, once were. This being the case, might not the 'strait and narrow road' be one of de-sophistication into innocent simplicity?
My thought is that the method by which this ascent has been created is one of a concrete knowing of the facts that our precedents, through the various and limited sciences, have proven. To be certain of the nature of one's being is to be unable of the contemplation of a further or more irrational possibility. Certainty is stagnancy, no matter how pleasing the disguise; to know all is but to close one's thoughts to the un-corresponding segments of the external universe, thus preventing any entire and balanced growth. For a being to harmoniously expand, as from a point into a sphere, he must expand all of him, including his dissonance, equally, whereas an incomplete growth leads to perversions of the fullness of the sphere; i.e. ellipsoid or cylindrical solids, skewed cubes, or worse still, a single line or plane that denies one or more dimensions of the harmony of being of the potential of the sphere. Surely this warping of the ability of man is an obstacle to the expansion that, ideally, society might aspire after, and surely this is an aberration that, had we not meddled in the fabric of destiny, would have been naturalistically 'weeded out'.
In our 21st century celebration of all that is easy, we have given birth to and protected this ideal of the desiring after security, and have denied the responsibility toward perpetuation of all that this people might at best become. I see this potential as one of growth, but only if complete; a balance of the physical needs against the other, more human, spiritual and intellectual needs. We have greatly eliminated the latter, finding it easier to absorb an excess of the former than to, struggling, expand ourselves to encompass the more invisible and immense fulfillment of the other. If I accept a help that furthers my own excessive needs, I, if but indirectly, have contributed to the destruction of the whole, and therefore I am also equally ethically unable to offer my assistance toward the pleasure of another. If, however, I restrain myself to the barest of total necessities, I am then able to justify, to the universal, my helping of another to acquire no more than this least, thus allowing of minimal assistance. All things being equal: if a man is willing to reap a crop of wheat to fill his stomach, or raze a mountain to raise a temple, he must also be willing to destroy the man who hinders his advance. To 'save a life' is a questionable undertaking at best, yet to refuse help to a drowning individual must also be the refusal of help when I myself would otherwise perish. Only in a universal frame of mind am I to accept my own death as necessary to the control of the population, beyond the needs and desires of being of my finite and (Socratic) wisdom-lacking self.
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To be continued.....
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Submitted by Systematicevil (user info) at 2004-05-16 13:01:37 EDT (#)
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