Collected Essays of Valerie Lynn Stephens (Part 3)

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ISBN: 978-1-365-35197-6

©2021 Valerie Lynn Stephens

LIGHTNING IN A BOTTLE

Oftentimes one of the greatest paradoxes of the human condition & experience lies in how the self-preservation instinct must often sublimate itself via the conduit of self-destructive and/or negating means of methodology. To clarify, it is often that which we must do, or that which we must be in order to survive which acts in direct opposition to that of our own thrivance, or self-actualization. Furthermore, this human dilemma and, indeed, often multilemma, is what German existentialist Martin Heidegger called our “existentialia”, which includes all of those exigencies which our lives place upon us both externally and internally. The external, of course, having to do with the fulfillment of our practical and physical needs-the most basic means & ends of self-preservation. Those internal agencies of the human “existentialia” of course, concern that which has to do with the so-called "intangibles" of self-actualization or, with those psychological methods which each human individual must often employ in defense of one’s personal integrity and dignity.

Moreover, such metaphysical matters concern that most epic human quest to live one’s life as authentically as one can in accordance to one’s individual moral and/or ethical code. In fact, many believe this brand of self-interest as a prerequisite to all other pleasantries & successes of communal existence. For each individual, the answer to the questions of this human condition & experience will, of course, vary. Some take a more extroverted, sensate approach towards seeking the answers to each their own existence. Others work more from the inside-out. In a word, some are better-suited for a more introspective approach. Those of this persuasion seek the answers through the mediums of reflection and contemplation. In essence, their interaction with life is on a more intuitive and intellectual level, whereas for the former mentioned persons, they have more faith in the pragmatic consistencies of material & experiential engagement with the world outside of themselves in bringing their fates to fruition.

However, of course, both methods are sound, as long as their intent & goal remain moral/ethically prescribed & circumscribed, and as long as each individual learns to accommodate enough of those methods & approaches not in line with their most natural & preferred way of being, so that we all, no matter our particular brand of individualistic "typology", might continue to grow & develop into more well-rounded persons. Although unfortunately, since the world recognizes & rewards action more than deep thought, people of the latter, more "extroverted" persuasion are usually afforded more of a sense of communality than those of their counterparts. However, most "introverts" are usually quite self-sufficient enough, they will especially be quick to point out, to compensate for any savoir faire & socio-political drive or appeal which they may lack.

In finale, living amongst other individuals who are just as complicated & solipsistic as we, ourselves feel ourselves to be, is oftentimes felt by persons of all typologies to be a Sisyphean task to achieve and thus, also often a futile attempt at compromise. However, we depend upon other human beings in large part, for our very sense of purpose. One cannot find fulfillment living within a vacuum. Or as the old maxim reveals: “Nature abhors a vacuum.” Thus, can we already see the complexity of human existence itself, let alone that of seizing control over the means by which one resolves each their own private and very personal “ultimates,” while also grappling with task of one's own “survival,” both physically & psycho-spiritually. It is difficult enough to quiet the turmoil of the human soul enough to be able to “get by” each and every day, let alone to synthesize the crude limitations placed upon our potentiation.

But feeling as if our spirit is too large for the small-minded world in which we live is, of course, a universal & intractable aspect of our human experience. But, if indeed perception becomes what we perceive to be & thus allow through our behaviour to become even further rooted in "actuality", then the best we can do is in the systematic refinement of our Spirits & Intellects, or the careful, diligent cultivation of our inmost selves into that which we wish to bring to fruition externally in the world. As within, so without comes to manifest itself thus, time & again.

For if any true worth or nobility is to be breached by any one human individual, it must spring forth first, from within. I suppose it is best described as a practice of inward cultivation before outward realization. And, contrary to the world which mainly exalts mindless pragmatism while belittling & scoffing at a more circumspect, methodical approach, the latter methodology is often discovered to be much more profound and efficacious regarding the individual's quest of self-actualization & fulfillment, especially in relation to "the collective".

In the end, both means and ends must of course be duly weighed when they involve the ultimates of this human existence. Nevertheless, all quandaries & margins for human error aside, each & every individual must grapple with keeping drawn, a very distinct boundary line between what one does in order to "survive" vs. what one must also do to live by the dictates of their inmost cherished & authentic soul’s desires, values and dreams, as we all face a continual struggle of reconciliation between the paradoxes of this life. Yet although our need to survive will often violently collide with that of our need to thrive, the reasoning of both Heart & Head are best granted equal deference. For ultimately, if we fail to dream, if we fail to love, if we forget how to laugh, to cry, but most of all, how to most deeply, humanly & honestly live, it is then that we will have truly ceased, to both survive & thrive.

MATRIX: A UNITARY TRANFORMATION

Love floods the desiccate crevices of the atrophic Heart, and the Soul is once more saturated with the superencumbrant, almost unbearable weight of True Freedom and Life once more. And how we always feel so foolish when we realize just how much we’ve missed fearing and shutting it out. But we can also now see just how much it has missed & needed us, for this is a raison d’etre intractably interdependent. And it’s almost as if, all the times we were without Love never really existed at all, but were perhaps spurious projections to keep us preoccupied until we returned back to our true Home. And what faithfully prodigal Sons & Daughters we all are, indeed.

Yet perhaps any world outside of the Matrix of Love is never our true dwelling place at all, although these other worlds are ever-present, nevertheless. But this “two worlds apart” dialectic persists only when we resist them, or attempt to fully inhabit both. For the human entity cannot serve two antithetical masters and neither can the body, spirit or the mind. And hence the age old philosophical inquiry of what is “real,” the objective consensual phenomena of a world of sharply demarcated Logic and linearity, or that world perceived through the sentient organs of Intuition & Subjectivity? For we are told that both exist, but that only one is relevant. And furthermore, it seems to me that the state in which we most deeply connect with Love is anything but linear, disaffective and impersonal. Yet there are no current provisions made for Metaphysically-employed scientists and Love hurts just as much if not perhaps more than any physical malady or affliction- even as it soothes and satiates.

Furthermore, per Eastern thought, perhaps our universe cannot exist without the presence of human consciousness itself. But, to play upon the philosophical cliche, if no-one was in a forest where a tree fell, wouldn’t someone still see it, smell it, taste it, feel it, hear it even but if within their Mind's Eye? For even one consciousness alone, even removed from the premise of classical empiricist observation is capable of a wondrous infinitude of imagination and dynamism with which to construct any world of its choosing. And this is perhaps the Ultimate act of Love, Creation. The acknowledgment of and regard for ‘Being-ness,’ the pure desire to be alive and sensing and sharing of one’s gifts with our fellow human kindred. The process being, in & of itself, the product. Or rather, I like to think of the valuation of the very act of being & cogitating lying not so much within the "answers" one is seeking, but within the edification process of Inquiry itself. Indeed, being authentically & fully who one is, actively & responsibly engaged with the world itself is, in some sense perhaps the ultimate act of Love, as well as a variation of "ordinary heroism".

Of course all philosophers have pondered upon the concept of the superior virtue and nobility to be found in & gleaned from Chaos and an oppositional striving against that which is comfortably conformant & quotidian-as in the classically epic, Rousseau-esque imago of the “noble savage.” For an escapist philosophy can be very seductive indeed, insofar as it absolves people of any authentic engagement with life & relieves one conveniently of any real accountability for one's actions or even one's sins of omission, if this be the case. I suppose this can be referred to as a kind of "spiritual entropy", a force which human individuals are constantly in tug-of-war with. Yet many physicists specify that what we generally regard as “chaos” as order, just order of an "infinite complexity". In other words, human consciousness is still too myopic in its vision & limited in its scope to be able to fully see things as they truly are beneath the macroscopic perspective we are socially engineered to place our faith in.

In finale, I think that we are all continually learning that the purpose of the existence of paradox and seeming disunity perceived to be at work throughout the universe is not necessarily aimed to merely bewilder or to inflict petty torment, but to teach & hone the Soul towards its fullest possible spiritual evolution & actualization. In other words, strife is best viewed upon as an evolutionary tool of "psycho-spiritual" means, to borrow a phrase coined by Carl Gustav Jung. And it is also perfectly fine to simplify things for ourselves when need be as well. Perhaps it all exists merely for the sake of existing. Perhaps it just is because it is the way that it was created to be. And perhaps this Heraclitean-and also Taoist wisdom, in and of itself, contains the key to all heavenly portals. All is perfect exactly as it is.

And perhaps all that Evil is, is that which manifests as an interference with the natural design and course of all things. For even Life and Death cavort in celebration and diplomacy beyond what we can often fully grasp with our myopic Mind's Eye. In the end, the only danger perhaps, does lie only within each and every individual’s heart, mind and attendant will. And hopefully, someday, we will each come to accept this verity with finality. Until then we must contend with the classically bifurcate mind & heart as we learn to more efficaciously navigate the labyrinthine, hazardous laboratory of a kind of existential quantum mechanics, which also follows its own uncertainty principle, while keeping lucidly within our Soul’s Mind’s Eye both a prescience and a sentience towards the highest and noblest objectives of our fullest potential as a Humanity.

And, if we manage this experiment with sufficient reverence and competence, will perhaps we come to the place where, at last, there will be no more “collapses of any wave functions” to tediously measure & anticipate, no more photons or other assorted matter/matters to let “propagate in isolation-“ or rather, isolate in vacuous propagation, no more Schrödinger’s cats to diligently care for, no more quantum hypotheses to perplex and dizzy ourselves with, no more “constants” to establish. Yes, perhaps someday we will learn how to just live and love within the universe we’ve already got-within the wondrous world we already know and have been gifted with. But most of all, perhaps will we finally someday come to see that all of our burning & toiling questions were always and already, fully answered.

AURIBUS TENERE LUPUM

Sometimes the darkness is there to lead us to the light. The darkness always finds the light, no matter how reluctantly, deriving its very being from it. Yet still, the outside often seeps in too keenly, no matter how hermetically sealed the Soul-no matter how hermeneutically well-schooled the Intellect. And thus are the strivings of the Spirit time & again stupefied by the arcane syllabus of Rationalist Empiricism. For these metaphysical ministrations are subservient only to the laws of Immaterialism, as they strive towards that canonical consummation wrought by those statutes scriven by the right-handed magistrate of the Triune God.

For only when we pray in the name of all three, the Father, the Son & the Holy Spirit, can we then be miraculously released from the afflictions of Temporality, unto the exultation & expansion of Eternality foreseen within the here & now. Thus we indeed, must seize a wolf by its ears if we are to spare the Soul the infestations of its rabid claw & fang. For Eternity is often weighed in most measurably upon the wings of a singular moment, finding its most poignant expression in the wake of all Ecclesiastical realization & ecumenical synthesis.

Yet we are never so alone as when we are stricken deaf, dumb & mute in our most common coherence. And we are often never so rejuvenated as when tended by the metaphysicians of Disease & Despair. Yes, sometimes the ever immanent sense of one's own nihility, in a world of such negligence & broken dreams is the one thing, in the end, which spurs a Soul ever onward towards Epektasis, that striving of every human soul towards its truest & fullest actualization, wholeness & perfection.

How then can an entity as enriched & eternal as a Soul feel thus so vacuous, so futile, so chronically impoverished, & intractably ephemeral & finite? Perhaps this feeling, is what we have come to call “Time”, whether it is being experienced as Kronos or Kyros. For most things seem to equate more to an intangible & fleeting movement of experience, both external & internal, rather than to the casuistry so often ascribed, ad nauseum, to only those objects & subjects which we tend to classify as being “had” or “held”. Perhaps all which truly exists is best classified within the taxonomy of abstract thought alone as many philosophers have pondered. Perhaps all we are-perhaps all that is, is truly an infinite & glorious manifestation of intellectualis Dei, dreaming in endless & splendid perpetuity? For what is declared & sanctified as “real” by the all-too-cleanly-shaven bards of Positivism, in all of its subversively cynical negativism, housed as it is within the atrophic viscerae & leprotic skin of the Body Politic, is ultimately what begs all of these questions concerning the “immaterial”.

So then, perhaps we have known all along, that there are no such things as Nihility or Despair. There is no Rosetta Stone that will not bleed forth with an ever-flowing spring of Lux et Veritas et Vitae Aeturnum, so long as it is struck squarest upon its most fracturable fissures. For oftentimes, in never allowing life to dissect us, is to risk never being assembled rightly by the hand of our Creator Divine. For what so often desires unity must first allow disunity to assert its form so that the Master Sculptor may bring to completion the Soul's realization, most immanent and eminent, of the truest self it seeks to substantiate, of the personage God Himself envisages within the psychomantium of such hallowed projections alone.

Thus we, with Primal Intuition must declare ourselves definitively sane in the face of all of the salacious intensity & licentious delirium which this mortal human flesh may visit upon us. For only then, can we thereby discharging our wanton shadow from the ghost asylum of that puritanical tyranny so unnaturally cultivated as it is, by the pretenses & posturings of the Body Politic. For we are all too achingly aware of the true apostasy we must commit daily before the ecumenical altars of so-called Social Order & Industry. Yet, not unlike the true nature we must often shun, nothing is ever just either-or, but is always all-of-the-above and at-the-same-time. It is that infinite Quantum Void, ever teeming with mere probability or possibility, until we choose, thereby externalizing the internal.

Yet until this fateful moment, all remains in mere ontological suspension. And one individual's Civility & Order is another's utter Savagery & Chaos. Moreover, the "depraved anarchy" and portentous "damnation" often so sanctimoniously prognosticated by some of a more provincial-minded leaning, is, in actuality, usually experienced by others as their only Raison d'être & Redemption. It is often assumed that resistance to that which is most natural in human nature is rewarding in its preventive or safeguarding effects, but, we also must determine, for each individual context, what harm such resistance could also do to the human entity overall. For, some argue, that all was created to possess a particular intrinsic perfection of design & nature. And they also argue that, perhaps Essence should always be honoured as preceding Existence, even, & perhaps especially in the face of those dictates of ontological revision so militantly urged & enforced by the Political Architects & Social Engineers of any given milieu. Yet I suppose, many will continue to pay heed only to the stifling dogmas of Doctrine & Denomination.

Yet what we all often fail to realize is how this blind adherence to sacrosanct orthodoxy merely seeks to exact from Humanity, a diffusion of Ipseity, and therefore can prevent any ultimate ethical or moral soundness or efficacy to be achieved amongst any given society or within any given individual. For truly, all communal or civic duty begins within a commitment to individualistic accountability and governance. Furthermore, many Unitarian religions merely reduce the human essence to a kind of gross & unorthodox uniformity, as, to become "One" in a grander sense of communal altruism, each and every individual can so easily forget that they must cultivate a sense of such wholeness first from within themselves. For we are only as "divinely human" or "evolved" as we have earned this distinction of character through a kind of transpersonal practice of egoism. For some kinds of self-centrism are not only morally acceptable but are actually morally imperative.

As common wisdom recognizes, “We can only give unto others what we have given unto ourselves.” And indeed, we can also only truly and fully achieve spiritual & worldly synthesis & harmony when we have worked on cultivating such qualities from within our core inmost being, before such wealth can be shared, without undue debits, with the outer world. Speaking of seizing wolves by their ears in order that they may be tamed, the most potentially ravening wolf lies within each our own selves if we do not properly & diligently care for its most basic needs.

In continuum, percipience and the monitoring thereof is the most powerful & adept tool which we, the human species, have always had at our employment. And how we think, is indeed a life force in and of itself, as it determines so much. Hence, perhaps the most important question for each individual to ask themselves is not: How should I live? but How should I think? The verdict is in. What we think & believe is all that there is. Mind is what matters, and perhaps as theorized by quantum physicists and eastern mystics, is what all matter is composed of itself.

Thus perhaps we should seek both a cultivation of mind & spirit first from within ourselves, before we will ever be able to truly reap the fruits of the Holy Spirit in the outer world. The current, and many believe, anachronistic Cartesian-based paradigm of either-or, often dictates a kind of matter over mind, at the costly expense of that which ultimately and truly matters. This well-balanced approach to the Mind-Spirit synthesis has always been held in highest regard especially within the Judaist tradition of intellectuality and the refinement thereof as a means towards achieving spiritual enlightenment.

Moreover, the Judeo-Christian tradition better yet, achieves a perfect balance between a cultivation of both Mind and Heart. There is a Latin term: amor intellectualis Dei, which translates roughly as "a love for the mind of God". This translates roughly to the concept that to truly love God means seeking to cultivate as much of this same mind within oneself. And indeed, perhaps if we each, as the individual human entities that we are, continue to allow God to mold our innermost beings into that which we hope the outer world to become, then some fine day we may have reached full fruition despite all human err risked to get there. For if indeed the numinous substance of all things holy and evil are born from each our own cognitions and behaviour, then we all must take diligent heed of which mind-fruits we seek to cultivate, for not all kinds of fruit both sustain and nourish.

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