Essay 7 Opposites- Copyright Robert Fullarton 2013

Essay 7 Opposites- 

Copyright- Robert Fullarton 2013-Unfinished

The body is the well of contradictions, the beast that one minute demands food and on the next demands unequivocal rest. Temperamental, it wants food, sex, water, oxygen, needs constant renewal, wants attention from the mind that directs the operation of the body. The body is a transient operation of various short-lived wills and desires that want fulfilment or else face the various displeasures of its nature. If the body is not appeased and attended to, we have hunger, we have thirst, and we have pain, various physical ailments, temptations, angers, a various multifaceted palette of grievances and temporal complaints. Our mood is one of agitation, our tempest is in full flight if our body’s will has not been granted and fully initiated.

The body loathes pain. In fact mankind perhaps views pain to be a sort of devil or ultimate evil, when it takes the shortsighted Epicurean view on pain and it’s various repercussions on life. The much-maligned walk for man, is a path of punishment, where man is to go without food, to face celibacy, to face physical pain, to have the sensual overdrive of the body, full in a potent experience of suffering, this to the hoards of the Earth is hell! We feel, perhaps more than we think in depth. We immediately and philosophically sense an experience, while we are awake in one moment unto the next waking moment. In each experience we often desire for physical fulfilment and the body has its’ needs, that are insatiable. The body requires maintenance, sustenance and furtherance to endure, or else the cracks are drawn across the fragile clay pot and all breaks and tumbles to temporal destruction.

When there is physical starvation, a suffering and unease in the members of the body, the central ego itself is shaken, the worldly identity which we wear as a mask (an image and extension of the body) is levelled, topped, trimmed and reduced to humility. The futility of the body and its needs, will not necessarily lead us to total misery and destruction. At the opposite end of the scale there is the soul, for which histories’ metaphysicians, theologians and religious believers have adhered to, graced, tended, lifted up and examined.

All in all each affirm that the soul, being invisible, intangible and ultimately a three-dimensional creature of immense depth, requires a care that is abstract, long-term in its extension (unlike the body), principled, disciplined and in polarity to the nature and needs of the body.

The soul seeks God, the soul seeks the sustenance of order, true beauty, meaning, craves hope, craves what we cannot see, the ends to reality and the means to reality.

To Christians the body is neither the means nor the ends to neither reality, happiness philosophical order and the levity of meaning. How does the soul reach levity and soar (in the analogical sense) like a bird through the great beyond? Well the soul must be tended often in antagonism to the body. The hungers and needs of the soul are abstract, long enduring and with a craving that takes a lifetime of immense circumspection. Great meaning, requires hard work, moral supervision and enactment, requires depth of thought often over immediate and short-termed sensual experiences.

Words like eternal, heavenly, spiritual and sacredness are in the virtuous canon of utterances said and written on the nature of the soul and the needs of the soul.

If you believe that you have a soul, the integral, kernel of your essence, your oneness and your real identity (an entity that has no social or earthly face, but a being whose face is made up of facts, memories, droplets and invisible qualities taken from your life in the long term, that define you) then you have acknowledged the first step or starting point for a hunger that cannot be satiated by physical demands. The boredom and repugnance of decadence, lavishness, gastronomy and selfishness offers a genesis of thought for those whose appetites cannot be filled on mere physical demands and appearances. The physical draws appearances, never taking into account the depth and quality of the object in question and the essence itself is not fully understood, unless consciousness experienced and stretched. The Christian maxim from the Gospels stating “is it profitable for a man to gain the whole world, but forfeit his own immortal soul?” This rings true to a man whose needs are not met through the bounties, ruthless pursuits worldly desires and physical demands.

The philosophy of the world (the demands of the body) believes in the means of making money (for the short-termed and short-sighted) for the ends of sustaining one’s physical self. The banker, the solicitor, the Wall Street traders, the computer engineers and entrepreneurs of the day, work for the short term goal of making money and foolishly believe money to be the long term goal and meaning of their life.

The rush to labour is a spinning charybdis (deadly vortex) that demands promotion, the appearance of compatibility, social functionality, where ants, pawns, invisible men and galley slaves shift through nightmarish Cubist like office blocks, is a pyramidal and feudal system that worships the system of money and depletes the abstract meaning of the soul. The body works for it’s physical needs, for the fixtures and spatial expansion of its ego. Houses need to be raised even higher; glamour needs to flourish, and great projects of technicality and triviality need to be endorsed and embraced for the ego to be satisfied. The ego is the image or base thought of what the body wills (it has a short-term identity, it has short-term needs and demands, it is conditional and it’s philosophy is centred on the pursuit of physical pleasure and physical sustenance). Society is essentially the fulfilment and existence of ego’s trying to fulfil their own short-term goals and ends. Society is the belief in appearance and the ignorance of immediate deception.

The second step on examining the nature and needs of the soul, would come with the openness, candidness and willing personality of the individual to orientate towards certain principles (which are truths and can only be truths) that must be abstract, require great depth, require labour of another kind, that heed not to appearance but to inner circumstantial truth and quality. The food of the soul, is embedded in a quality of experience, a quality and quantity of meaning (such words as meaning are of course abstract and often subjective, but they must have an objective source to orientate towards and need a state of judgment- which I will get to shortly) a state of grace, a state of reality; soul needs a compass and a direction to soar unto an airless and graceful flight to meaning. The soul seeks a selfless pursuit that seems to be an inherent contradiction but one that is fundamentally and uniquely different to the contradictions, mere whims and short-termed desires of the body.

The soul can grow in suffering, and the soul can grow in the merit of kindness and this leads up to my next point in this essay.

The nature of goodness (as vague as it sounds) entails and requires merit. The merits of goodness in essence include, kindness, selflessness, patience, love, charity, humility and self-control. These merits are in fundamental opposition with the merits of bodily existence, against the fully formed will of both the ego and the desires of the body. Because the world operates and systematically runs on the wills and desires of the body and the appearances of things, the soul cannot grow where neither water nor light, nor composite ingredients do not exist, but instead the soul feeds on a fundamentally different philosophy. Goodness likewise is the polar opposite of what we vaguely call badness. Goodness seeks the state of mind and reality of patience; it does not seek physical rewards, no ends or means of physical substantiality. Goodness seeks to fulfil its objective goal and adhere to the act. Out of the act itself there is the merit which we call, good. Christianity promulgates with passion to “turn the other cheek”, to “give ones’ cloak and gown to one’s enemy” and authoritatively says unto mankind, “blessed are the peace makers for they will be called children of God.”

These are the words and the instructions for an absolute standard and objectivity of meaning, orientation and with utmost need to what we can call goodness. Peace is the enactment of harmony and the union of human understanding and love. True peace is for a civilisation based on love and the fundamental polar opposite of war. War can be called anthropologically, philosophically and more truthfully –under a soulful examination- to be the enactment of selfish needs in collective chaos –a chase for the needs of the body and short-term pleasures- where greed for physical and social appearance are at play by the false rule of despotic megalomaniacs.

Goodness has its polar opposite in badness, as love has its polar opposite in hatred.

Goodness is fulfilled by goodness, goodness stands out by being opposed to badness, as love is elevated and lifted in opposition to hatred. Love and goodness do not run short of the demands and principles of the soul and the objectivity itself To understand goodness, you must operate on the principles of goodness, live a life that is fundamentally different to the short-termed and doomed desires of badness.

On Love, Saint Paul spoke truth in the First Letter to the Corinthians, when he stated,

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not rejoice in evil, but rejoices with the truth.”

In the Logos of the art form, art needs one fundamental merit for its true distinction and evaluation. Art needs objective judgement on the needs of an objective standard.

The progenitor and chrysalis of art came from the physical forms of the natural world, from acute observation, imagination and reproduction within the creative process.

All art needs judgment as goodness and badness needs definition, essence, merit and evaluation. Art needs to be consciously imbued and measured for understanding, as a natural wonder, experience and sight of beauty needs to be seen from the conscious subject. Art is in the transcendental relationship of the subject onto the object itself and more importantly unto a lofty standard, that defines one object, noun, thing, being or person from another. Art is very much within the laws of differentiation. While there are genres and art periods, (the banal, the grotesque and the totally irrelevant have come to fruition in a free for all art extravaganza, where truly talentless charlatans can claim to be artists and radicals) there has been that graceless drift away from art to ugliness, where quality has been lowered for the radicalisation of a childish and petty development in art (Art needs strict standards and definition) that includes a market for making money, a consumerist extravaganza (under Warhol’s cheap new age imagery) that goes hand in hand with the espirt de corps of a world philosophy that craves to make money, exploit and further its ends in imagery, produce and cheapness –for the art of making money!

If there is no absolute judgment on both art and more importantly human nature then there is nihilism, a Murphy’s law of pluralism, utilitarianism and relativism, there is existential, metaphysical, artistic and ethical anarchy. The human race has become adapt at judging the physical world in close sight and contact, but usually forgets, forsakes or neglects the judgments of behaviour, of essence and human conduct in core. It is my firm believe that man is not defined by the physics of his constitution but by the inner developments of his belief system and the actions that stem from his belief system. In abstraction, man is a theatre ongoing and in crisis that is judged by its director, creator and script writer, giving judgment and direction to the core of the piece being performed. All life is drama, lived out and played out to the full elongation of its purpose, the purpose depends upon the will of the director and the objective judgment itself. Harmony and flow and an eventual conclusion are the products and inescapable fruits of the drama. Discovering the soul, is the path towards discovering one’s love for irony, as the physical world of appearance must be subdued, overcome and transcended for the reality of things. The body and its appetites are in direct opposition to the appetites of the soul. That long meandering path and wandering to truth, leads a man, miles apart from his beginning to find depth where his fear knows no bounds, often where the body is in great discomfort and the philosophical side is nurtured and enriched. The irony of the matter is that the shortcomings and worries of the body are going to expire in the face of time as the body perishes (and society and all mankind believes and adores the world of the body and the physiological dimension of life believing morbidly that death is something terrible on all accounts and not something peaceful, timely and even a finely tune event) and the essence of all or nothing come into play. If you believe and live for the soul, then it will be easy for you to rejoice in the death of the body, your unconditional nature sees the world as a prison and not the everything your society has led you to believe in. The most miraculous moments in a man’s earthly existence occur during moments of unmeasured spontaneity. Near death experiences, the crises of an inner conflict, the reason of altruism that leads a man to see beyond himself (as one can see the philosophical and psychological state of poverty on a daily basis) and feel real unmeasured empathy and insight. The rush of insight is spontaneous, the miracle is spontaneous and beautiful, but the path towards it is heavy going, burdensome and tiring.

In Christianity all hope and redemption is based on and in Christ as a mystical body of souls in union with God. In Christianity the ends of the physical body are a terminal destruction of our cellular organism and our blind ego, while the ends of the soul are for the union or wedding with God. The end of time, seen as a mystical and majestic experience in Christian eschatology is the maturity of the human soul, the inauguration of mankind’s education on Earth and preparation for the union of our love with God. All time is tested for fulfilment, maturation and the graduation for when we enter with God into eternity.