We’re meditating on the “philosophy of pessimism” which is widespread in our tradition and offers beginning to worry and paranoia.
Is that this not what drives a tradition pushed by promoting and its numerous guarantees of false hope? Is that this not behind cynicism and far of the ennui and despair, despair and acedia that hits us after we are minimize off from our first chakra and connection to the universe? Reduce off from the Pleasure that marvel brings (Aquinas)? Does pessimism not feed pusillanimity and defensiveness?
Rank presents a treatment for a philosophy of pessimism when he factors out that the true supply of pessimism lies in self-hatred. Pessimism is the projection we make upon the world of our personal self-worth.
The place true self-love is meager, our love of the world will probably be meager. “Love others as you’re keen on your self,” suggested Jesus.
But when our love of self is shallow, the love we put into the world will probably be additionally. And the world is so robust in its varied misdirected loves that our weak and shallow love will probably be simply drowned within the energies of that world.
The outcome? We are going to slink again into pessimism, the pessimism that’s inevitable when human love relies solely on the human and is out of relation with the cosmic love or the divine love, together with the divine love incarnated in created issues.
Our self-doubts and self-hatred and self-constructed pessimism will win us over and deceive us into really believing (for it takes an act of perception) that life is vile and pessimism is the correct response to such vileness.
Blessing or goodness is gone; melancholy reigns. And when melancholy reigns, the center shrinks, as Aquinas observes. Our world will get smaller. Pleasure is rarer and rarer to be discovered.
(Pleasure, says Aquinas, expands the center, whereas unhappiness deflates it.)
When Adrienne Wealthy verifies that Patriarchy teaches a “fatalistic self-hatred” she too is saying that self-hatred kills. Pessimism subsequently is a form of sluggish demise by self-hatred. However Wealthy presents medication for rising from a tradition of pessimism grounded in a tradition of self-hatred: Transfer past Patriarchy. Incorporate the wholesome female and the wholesome—versus poisonous—masculine.
Select creativity, select to provide beginning. Rank concurs: “Pessimism comes from the repression of creativity.” To deliver creativity again is to deliver the Divine Female again. Gaia, Mom Earth, reminds us of this day by day.
Tailored from Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Reworking Evil in Soul and Society, pp. 295f.
To learn the transcript of Matthew Fox’s video instructing, click on HERE.
Banner Picture: “‘They’ say all of the solutions are inside. I consider that as a result of I’ve skilled moments of readability, so vivid that I dazzle myself. However these moments are fleeting, and the previous nonetheless so heavy to bear. So I hold looking out, for my very own everlasting flame.” Picture by Gwynydd Michael on Flickr.
Queries for Contemplation
Self-hatred and worry, self-hatred and pessimism: How radical is Jesus’ instructing that we be taught to like others “as we love ourselves” and the way arduous is it to like ourselves healthily?
Beneficial Studying
Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Reworking Evil in Soul and Society
Visionary theologian and best-selling writer Matthew Fox presents a brand new theology of evil that basically adjustments the standard notion of excellent and evil and factors the best way to a extra enlightened remedy of ourselves, each other, and all of nature. In evaluating the Japanese custom of the 7 chakras to the Western custom of the 7 capital sins, Fox permits us to suppose creatively about our capability for private and institutional evil and what we are able to do about them.
“A scholarly masterpiece embodying a greater imaginative and prescient and depth of notion far past the grasp of anybody single science. A breath-taking evaluation.” — Diarmuid O’Murchu, writer of Quantum Theology: Religious Implications of the New Physics
