" Serious mind, serious life"

The actuality of existence is a projection of the idea invented by the intellect in the imagination and superimposed upon the chaos of nature by the self in an unconscious act of repetition. Civilization, the city, is the objective, intellectual domain of the actualized possibility, an illegitimate repetition of consciousness that is bound up with the dis-integrative processes of matter and subject to the natural law of entropy. While deceptively appearing constructive, civilization actually hastens the entropy of the physical universe, and all signs promoted in actuality as signs of progress are in reality signs of decay.

Existence is the actuality of the self which supplants the reality of being, civilization imposed upon nature, the relative displacing the absolute, objectivity replacing subjectivity. The individual self exists but has no being, while the soul is absolute being, immanent within yet transcendent to existence, expansive in more dimensions of consciousness than the expanding universe perceived by the senses. When the self expresses its various images in the actuality that it invents, it enters a conflict within the duality of existence, the incongruity between actuality and reality, between civilization and nature and between existence and being. Unable to relate immediately and innocently to this actuality because it is an invention of reflection, the self doubts, protesting against the intellectual conclusion that wants to invalidate emotion and immediate sensation and overthrow intuition and instinct . It is doubt that begins the process of reflection which negates the innocent relationship between the soul and its source in the absolute. When the soul projects its image into existence as an individual self it annuls innocence and becomes guilty. The individual self is thus an expression of existential guilt.

To the spiritual consciousness of a redeemed being the physical universe is sensually and intellectually apprehended as a projection of an actuality of relative dimensions within the spiritual reality of absolute being. This infinite and eternal consciousness of the absolute reality transcending the actuality of the universe of form must be the goal and the purpose of human life. The absolute reality is the void of spiritual being.

All forms of life articulate the absolute, the soul’s being. There is no individual identity, no image of self, in the absolute, the spirit poured out as life in all its forms within the world. It is the human intellect, a point of existential consciousness reflected in the physical universe, which grasps an assortment of illusory reflections of the soul’s identity in the imagination and projects these negative images as representations of individuality into the artificial actuality of existence, civilization, which it constructs.
It is solely the human self that introduces the idea of the negative into the universe. Being is absolute and positive while existence is relative, necessarily bringing the negative into opposition with the positive. The negative exists only in human perception, the perception of the intellect which has fallen into reflection. The negative is a negative reflection, a mirror image, of the positive. Existence, the ground of the self, is a false and imperfect projection of the reality of being. The individual self is the delusion of a fallen intellect that has been seduced by the possibility of the negative discovered by reflection, and everything that the self constructs in existence, all of civilization, is doubly false, doubly negative, a representation of a negative image of reality. Nothing in the imagination is real. Ideas are only negative images of the real, and reality cannot be imagined since reality is absolute and the ground of reflection is relative.

The physical universe apprehended by human conceptual thought which grasps the object and conceives the objective world consists only of dust and ashes and the imminent phenomenon of life. This world of relativity only takes shape through the elimination of the subjective. It exists but cannot articulate reality, since reality requires the subjectivity of human consciousness to the absolute categories. Existence is an actuality imposed upon nature by the human intellect and is therefore limited to the expression of that which is objective and rational. The objective world exists as a figment of the human imagination and is not real. Consequently, the phenomenon of life as subjective consciousness becomes our sole avenue into the reality described by the absolute categories of being, the infinite and the eternal. The construction of an objective world proves to be an error on the path of development for human consciousness, a descent from that subjective apprehension of the absolute which is familiar to all forms of life into a conceptual framework of an invented and artificial actuality, imposed upon the reality of nature as civilization.

Existence, conceptual to the rational mind, can be defined and approached through dialectic. Intellectual existence in the physical universe described by relativity contains all that the human intellect has conceived and constructed as actualized possibility. The universe, which human consciousness describes as the realm of existence, is confined within the limitations of human rationality and the scientific method of thought which explores this finite universe cannot uncover a reality that is transcendent and spiritual. Reality is absolute, not limited by the boundaries of that human rational thought which outlines and defines existence in dialectical terms of the idea. The reality in which we live as actual subjects is immaterial, a spiritual void of absolute being, infinitely conscious and eternally alive, immanent within and yet transcendent to the physical universe that is suspended within the void. The consciousness of existence is an intellectual consciousness based on an idea which rejects the reality of spirit, while the consciousness of absolute being is a spiritual consciousness which comprehends and transcends the idea. The spiritual transcends the intellectual as being transcends existence.

Within the confines of relativity irrational chaos is the natural order and any attempt to establish a rational order on this chaos can only be temporary and predestined to fail. Chaos is not reality, it is the universal actuality to which all other actualities are subject, the actualities established by individual persons to bring order into their lives, the actualities established by groupings of people to form a common environment and the actualities established by an elite to control by power, and by the fear of suffering, the lives and actualities of others. None of these relative actualities form reality, which is absolute and beyond the comprehension of the rational mind, yet the chaos of existence is a negative, limited mirror image of the void of being. Who can comprehend this?

The chaos of existence calls for a response rooted deeply in the human soul, which is not an image of the reality of being but being, not itself, since the self is merely an image of the soul reflected against the chaos of existence, but absolute being, unadulterated and pure. The human soul is the spiritual reality of the void of being, born into the chaos of existence.

I find it necessary at this juncture to share my view of the differentiation between the actualities of existence, which are manifold, and the reality of being, which is singular. In fact, the reality of being is the singularity of which the universe of actualities is striving to be a mirror image, which, of course, cannot be achieved since the universe is a universe of relativity while the reality of being is absolute. For this reason the expansion of the universe continues unabated. The reality of being is the infinite, spiritual void which contains the expanding material universe of finite actualities.

Each center of consciousness, each being, projects its own actuality into the chaos of existence, striving to impose an ordered actuality which accords with its own knowledge and understanding of the environment in which it consciously exists. These actualities rarely and only coincidentally mirror the reality of being.