I have trouble saying I wholeheartedly agree with anyone anymore, but I do agree with this:
The speculations of classic and scholastic metaphysics are edifices of reason erected on the experiential basis of existence in truth; they are useless in a meeting with the edifices of reason erected on a different experiential basis. Nevertheless, we cannot withdraw into these edifices and let the world go by, for in that case we would be remiss in our duty of "debate". . . .
The "debate" [in opposition to ideologists] has, therefore, to assume the forms of (1) a careful analysis of the noetic structure of existence and (2) an analysis of Second Realities, with regard to both their constructs and the motivating structure of existence in untruth. "Debate" in this form is hardly a matter of reasoning ( though it remains one of the Intellect), but rather of the analysis of existence preceding rational constructions; it is medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.
http://www.fritzwagner.com/ev/tools_for_analysis.html#horizon
The last time I heard these ideas were from Rev. Fr. John Romanides, my professor of Symbolic Theology at the University of Thessaloniki. They were words to live by then, as they are now.
Fr. John made the point clearly and often that the point of Christianity wasn't erecting some shrine of dogma, but to spiritually heal people of deep seated diseases of the whole person. Either people were healed or they weren't and the methods produced results or didn't. Christian theology, he insisted, was a positive science.
Its method was to catalog and systematize the "symbols" of theology, but theology itself was the living breathing act of the transmission of the new life from one person to another by the hesychast method.
The basis for both Greek philosophy and Christian theology was experience. These "lofty edifices" were based on something practical. Gnosticism degenerated into a remythologized series of speculations that find a surprising echo a thousand years later among the Jews in Spain. People need myths, they need stories to organize their lives. Life is a flow and we need to know our part.
Thus, at the core of history are the stories that inspire a culture. These stories, like an endless game of telephone, are passed down and refashioned and outfitted periodically. The stories you believe create your experience of the world, not what you experience, that is raw, but how you experience it, react to it, understand it, and learn to master it. Thus people with vastly different stories are those with vastly different experiential basis.
Having understood that I am the product of an ongoing web of intersecting storylines, I seek above all to first understand how this system works and how to acquire a story aligned with a noetic healing process.
This process has been taught throughout the ages and has been taught all around us all of the time since we were children. It is the process of learning empathy through understanding the deep motivations for human behavior while expecting others to continue to act as they do. The more people understand this and put it into action by empathizing with others because they too are caught in the web of time, the more a new community would naturally emerge within whatever structure was already there. And yet another storyline!
The myths tell us that people once lived peacefully and that the secret of how to live this way was passed down through very special people to you and me, but that the world doesn't live peacefully anymore and hasn't for a very long time. New capricious gods are in charge. These new gods hide, disguising their god status. But godhood has never been far from statehood. Whatever dark symbol systems drive states to thirst for power, they can be found only by looking past their own self serving and self justifying myths. Only when a people together reject those myths as true can the dark underbelly be exposed and exorcised.
The more we understand prehistoric anthropology, the more we will understand how we got from peace to war and from love to hate.
Locked inside our heads, it turns out, are all the old myths in new forms. Within these myths lies the way to rise above thinking within a single symbolic system and reach a state loosely described as enlightenment, fulfillment, ecstasy, and self-forgetting. There we find the light blazing in the dark.
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