Day #32

Today’s favourite poses: Tiger, Pigeon, Tiger, Pigeon, Tiger, Pigeon, Tiger

Minutes with a relatively quiet mind: zippo so far

Today’s interesting/thought provoking reading: (Taken from The Case for GOD by Karen Armstrong)

I started off this post wanting to talk about Plato. But for some reason, a beautiful piece of writing caught my eye in the above book about Saint Augustine (a Neoplatonist):

We cannot pray TO the Spirit, because the Spirit is the ultimate innerness of every being, ourselves included……

Augustine was appalled by the instability of the material world, which seemed to tremble on the brink of nothingness……

……Late have I loved you, Beauty so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! Behold, you were within and I was without and there I sought you, plunging unformed as I was into the fair things that you have formed and made. You were with me, and I was not with you. I was kept from you by the things that would not have been, were they not in you……

God was “within” but Augustine could not find him because he was “outside himself”. As long as he confined his quest to the external world, he remained trapped in the fragile mutability that so disturbed him. When he questioned the physical world about God, the earth, the sea, the sky, and the heavenly bodies all replied “I am not he, but it is he that made me” But when asked, “What then, do I love in loving my God?” Augustine knew that, like the Upanishadic sages, he could only answer, “neti….neti”:

No Physical beauty, no temporal glory, no radiancy of light that commends itself to these eyes of mine, no sweet melody of songs tuned to every mode, no soft scent of flowers or of ointments or of perfumes, no manna, no honey, no limbs that can conceive corporal embrace.

[Sounds a bit like Shakespeare!]

But God was all these things to my inner man. There it is that a light shines on my soul that no place can contain, a sound is uttered no time can take away, a fragrance cast that no breath of wind can disperse, a savour given forth that eating cannot blunt…..This is what I love in loving my God.

Scripture told us that we had been made in God’s image and it was therefore possible to find an eikon within ourselves that, like any Platonic image, yearned toward its archetype…..

Memory gave us intimations of infinity, but to encounter the divine, it had to strain beyond itself to the intellectus, the place where the soul would encounter God in deepest intimacy. When Augustine spoke of “intellect, he meant something different from a modern intellectual……..In the ancient world, people saw reason as a hinterland, bounded on the one hand by our power of discursive rationality, and on the other by intellectus, a kind of pure intelligence, which in India was called buddhi……..



So there you go. I love it when Western philosophy connects to Eastern philosophy, just like I love it when Spirituality and Science merge or converge. (Why does it have to be East OR West, Science OR Spirit??) Although Augustine developed the doctrine of original sin (which I highly disagree with, but will forgive him for, being that he was likely traumatized by the fall of Rome), he does however get points for his stance that the bible is not ALWAYS to be taken literally, and that science does play an important role in our understanding of God and the world: