There is not much to work with here, because it is such a short reading, but here are my thoughts nonetheless...
When Novalis states how "philosophy is really homesickness", I can wrap my mind around this concept. Philosophy is defined as 1) a belief accepted as authoritative, or 2) the rational investigation of questions about existence and knowledge and ethics, or 3) any personal belief about how to live or how to deal with a situation. Any of these definitions suffice in helping to understand why you could replace the definition with homesickness. All that philosophy is looking for is a comfort area, what you can hold to, something that is real and true to you...something similar to home. We desire an innate feeling of goodness, along with familiarity to be able to cope with life. Philosophy is just how you find this for yourself. And then it is labeled.
When he says that "when we understand how to love one thing-then we also understand how best to love everything", I don't know if I particularly agree. When we are small, we understand how to love mom, but we do not understand how to best love everything else. In fact, the world is pretty damn scary. Or let's take the example of having a "first love". When I had my first love, I understood how to love that person, and granted, it did teach me a lot about love, and the different concepts and ideals included in that one word, but I don't think that I understood then how best to love everything....rather, I understood more that everything thrived off of this amazing thing called love.
Wednesday, March 25
Shadow of Desire
William Blake has amazing insight. There is so much to digest in his excerpt.
He negates all preconceived notions of Good and Bad, God and Satan. Instead we are enlightened with this new knowledge of how maybe these opposing forces are really one, and we have viewed everything backwards and upside-down all of our lives.
We are told that the Soul and Body are not separate, but instead are one, intertwined. And that Energy (which is correlated with Satan) is the only life and is from the Body, and that Reason (which is correlated with God) is the outward circumference of Energy.
We are told that we should not restrain our desires, and he writes some of the Proverbs that he collected from Hell...
Some of which I really enjoyed:
Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
Shame is Pride's cloke.
It seems that we fall back on the recurring theme of looking outside your box. If we do so, then we will see that everything is infinite.
Having the opposing forces of good and evil be called one and the same is a little difficult to grasp, but if we believe that evil exists, it is only because we have the good to compare it to. Kind of like when Blake turned the Heaven/Hell existance around on us, and put it in Satan's perspective. Where Satan said that God was the one that "fell" out of their Paradise, and that God then created from what was around him a place that he labeled "Heaven".
He negates all preconceived notions of Good and Bad, God and Satan. Instead we are enlightened with this new knowledge of how maybe these opposing forces are really one, and we have viewed everything backwards and upside-down all of our lives.
We are told that the Soul and Body are not separate, but instead are one, intertwined. And that Energy (which is correlated with Satan) is the only life and is from the Body, and that Reason (which is correlated with God) is the outward circumference of Energy.
We are told that we should not restrain our desires, and he writes some of the Proverbs that he collected from Hell...
Some of which I really enjoyed:
Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
Shame is Pride's cloke.
It seems that we fall back on the recurring theme of looking outside your box. If we do so, then we will see that everything is infinite.
Having the opposing forces of good and evil be called one and the same is a little difficult to grasp, but if we believe that evil exists, it is only because we have the good to compare it to. Kind of like when Blake turned the Heaven/Hell existance around on us, and put it in Satan's perspective. Where Satan said that God was the one that "fell" out of their Paradise, and that God then created from what was around him a place that he labeled "Heaven".
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