Lou Gold wrote: ↑Sat Dec 18, 2021 9:28 am
Actually, I don't think that Ben, in focusing on a toothache or the illness of a friend, chose the extreme examples of things difficult to be grateful for. More extreme examples may soon manifest as painful stuff becomes more societal and collective, such as what may happen if the more infectious Omicron reduces the available workforce in hospitals and on the streets during a winter of more extreme weather events. (To save Dana angst I won't supply the links about the gathering "perfect storm".) If one reads the Book of Nature, as ecologists seek to do, some big changes, including the death of old structures and ways, are demanded because "nature bats last" or as Goethe put it:
Life is her [nature's] most exquisite invention; and death is her expert contrivance to get plenty of life. Though the initiation into serious changes may be necessary and something to be ultimately grateful for, it can take a great deal of caring, sharing and compassion to get through it without fearfully making a difficult situation even worse. I cannot but offer a prayer that we may work better both individually and collectively to meet challenges way beyond our previous expectations.
As long as we fail to imagine a spiritual depth structure immanently weaving within the perceptible world, we will abstract, reduce, and physicalize all of her rich phenomena. Goethe was
not saying "nature bats last" in the sense that you have used it above. In fact, physical death is
not any permanent state of affairs or something to be terribly afraid of. The more we obsess ourselves about physical death, the less we perceive the holistic spiritual realities weaving through the Cosmos and our own inner experience, and the more likely we are to impose reckless and rash 'policies' on populations. Physical death is an image of
unconsciousness, of the sort we also experience every night when going to sleep,
when viewed from our limited cognitive perspective. From a higher spiritual perspective, it is a necessary condition of evolution in our current stages, i.e. Goethe's metamorphosis of the Spirit which he is speaking about in that quote.
Spiritual 'death' is what can really set us back in our evolutionary progress. It's not hard to see how blind fear of Omnicron and what not will practically impose spiritual death on people if it once again becomes about shutting businesses down, telling people not to interact with others too much, imposing additional vaccine mandates for every new strain, directing businesses not to employ people without up to date 'vaccine passports' for each new strain, not to speak or think about these things too much in public. You see, when the spiritual is ignored for long enough, we inevitably end up doing things which makes it even harder for us to find the spiritual even if we tried.
That is "Nature batting last". Most people cannot even imagine
reincarnation as a concrete reality, rather than a vague and comfortably distant intellectual theory, so all 'serious matters' are collapsed down into this one single lifetime. These are the aspects of Nature we need to start paying attention to if we have any interest in taking all this 'spiritual stuff' seriously.
"And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell [perpetual physicalized perspective]."
