A 21-year-old computer whiz embraced the concept of the wonderfulness within, but rejected the idea of the spirit of God within–until two weeks ago. How did philosophy help?
Watch the 9-minute video or listen to the podcast episode.
For the video, I simplified the philosophy so much it’s hardly recognizable. I have organized some ideas about where to look for God in our experience. Realizing where to look helps us develop our concept of God.
The simplest idea is that God is one we turn to or focus on or sing hymns to or pray to (against a backdrop of other persons we could turn to.
The second is to seek the presence of God within.
The third is to experience the transformation of the act of conscious, reading or expressing, singing or listening, when all of a sudden new meaning and value is coming in.
The last is to grow in the sense of a surrounding, comforting, upholding God “in whom we live and move and have our being.
But I would like to share with the reader some of the sentences that are quotes or paraphrases of the pioneer who has helped me a lot (Edmund Husserl, 1859-1938). I’m going to indulge myself in this paragraph. Husserl has expanded my power of discovery more than any other philosopher. He evolved a rigorous way of describing the structures of conscious experience. He called it “phenomenology”; it means “experienceology.” Most of his writing was unpublished research manuscripts. What he published included some things he wrote when he was definitely not at his best, and he has been justly criticized for it. But it is sad, though understandable that people did not search, for example in the three volumes of work on “intersubjectivity”–mutual awareness of other persons (one needs to get at least two-thirds of the way through the second volume before his breakthrough in the late 1910s and early 1920s shines out.
Here is the hardest part of what I included in the video. You may find reward in pondering it.
The love emanating from the source is directed to the I (the self) and also to values and to persons, including God as the goal of all worthy striving. Husserl recognized that love comes from the depths of the self. Every person receives from the depths of her personality the values that she recognizes as absolute—her values of love. Such a value is an absolute ‘ought.’ “To go against this value is to be untrue, to lose oneself, to betray one’s true ‘I,’” which amounts to an “absolute practical contradiction.” We have to follow the call of our individual conscience; we have to realize and preserve our true genuine self, be true to our deepest self, to the absolute ought of our pure love. Husserl expresses the conviction that God is active in human beings generally. “God’s might lives and realizes itself nowhere else than in us, in our radically authentic will. Where else does he, the living God, work than in our life, in our pure will? He works in the deepest roots of the authentic person who does not will anything but what is true, as that which we cannot let go of without being forced to give up our life as meaningless.”
I see Sean tomorrow. Looking forward.
I will end with the standard close to my videos.
Always know, whatever is going on in your life or in our world, that
you are
a
divinely created
infinitely loved,
spiritually indwelt,
evolutionary,
free-will
son or daughter of the living God!
Image credit: Raphael, The School of Athens
