unfinished manifesto

I am attempting here to sew the many disparate threads of my thought into a seamless garment that both summarizes the existential dilemma which faces me as a human being and describes the condition of the earth to which this dilemma has brought human society as a whole. As a human being I utilize my developing intellectual skills to objectify the world around me and I have not, as yet, progressed beyond the stage of trying to manipulate and exploit this objective, physical actuality to my advantage. I manipulate it in such a way as to impose an objective actuality upon a reality that, of necessity, I have discovered, should be apprehended subjectively. Since other forms of life do not have this same conceptual view of the world, the world as idea, I conclude that the objective world exists only as a projection of the human intellect, noting that while the objective, physical universe may exist independently of human intellectual involvement, it cannot exist for the individual intellect that has ceased to function, in which regard the assumption on which physical scientific theory is based, that the universe exists independently of human thought, cannot be proven and may therefore be legitimately questioned and lead to a conclusion that the objective universe exists only as possibility, and not as necessity, in human thought. The philosophic and scientific enterprise, the edifice of rational thought built upon the belief in the independent existence of a three dimensional physical universe is thus undermined.
Civilization is an idea imposed upon the natural world by human beings and the human laws that order civilization are not in harmony with the laws of nature except insofar as both appear to the fledgling human mind as chaos. Within the artificial, objectively apprehended environment of civilization the actuality of nature appears as antagonistic and the attempt to build an ordered actuality and superimpose it on the actuality of nature fails at the societal level, causing human souls to become fearful of the chaos and lose subjective contact with the source of their individual being in the transcendent reality of the void. The soul’s individual image, the self, becomes deformed in reflecting the artificial environment in which it is immersed and, within this context, an authentic human life becomes impossible.
The soul’s being is common to all forms of life, but the idea of the individual self is unique to human consciousness. The step from the consciousness of being to self consciousness may be described as a fall, since it involves the loss of subjective consciousness of the absolute, characterized as positive, and the embracing of consciousness of the relative, characterized as both positive and negative. The soul’s being falls from subjective consciousness of the absolute categories, the infinite and eternal, to the self’s objective consciousness of the relative categories, the finite and temporal. The self is an image of which the soul becomes objectively conscious and it is this image which is then projected into the artificial, human construction of civilization. The soul chooses its identity, which may be expressed objectively in the actuality of physical existence, the expanding, temporal, finite and relative universe, or subjectively in the reality of spiritual being, the eternal, infinite and absolute void.
There can be no authentic expression of the soul, no authentic identity of the self, in existence. Existence is a projection of the intellect, a mental faculty that is confined within a relative universe and the soul that expresses it’s self within this confined universe cannot rediscover its true being in an absolute context without a leap of faith following the denial of its identity as a self. Our identity as a self is also captive to the society in which our soul becomes conscious. Our individual, existential relationship with existence is conditioned by our need for community which need gives rise to anxiety. Society demands our participation as individual selves but this participation is inauthentic. The individual identity of the self is not an authentic expression of the soul of our being and society is not an authentic expression of the community of being. Every expression of the self in existence is inauthentic. We often say of a person projecting an image of self into the world that “he or she is not being real’ and this is the reason. Human society in a relative universe is made up of unreal images, unreal identities.

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