However one believes is immaterial; that one believes in is the stuff of humanity. That one believes goes beyond the Cartesian principle. A sense of self could in lower forms exist -- admittedly primitive. A dog conceivably has a sense of awareness of itself, yet we do not ascribe thinking to a dog.
On a human level, one believes because he has no choice. He cannot say I do not believe in myself anymore than Descartes could say I do not think therefore I am not. Without belief there is no humanity. Anthropologists rack their brains in trying to fathom along the time-continuum evidence of the genesis of humanity. Various human skulls uncovered signify nothing without related evidence of human activity, such as tools and artifacts of development. The related evidence is significant because it lends to the belief that without the impression of the mind upon an activity beyond that of peeling a banana human activity is non-existent. Of course, all animals engage in labor but it is instinctual, having no bearing on hierarchical labor dependent on progressive thinking in communion with the underlying mathematical-mechanistic intelligence in the universe.
The first human germinated beyond its ancestry's sense of delimited awareness. Not only did the original person who could be so-called magnify sense of awareness, but had to swallow hard and digest a being truly unique to himself driving him to a mystifying purposeful action beyond the constricted instincts of other animals. In so doing, within the vortex of this intra-action between self and the inner other a strange anxiety to be more, a sense of greater worth, occurred. Deep within the self, then, was the cry that what is, no longer seemed natural -- something was lacking. Tools and skills became the natural extension of the hand and the perceptual in order to go beyond the delimited labor of the lower chain of beings.
Love as animated frolicking and release of mysterious passion was demeaning. Some of the great events and beauties of nature somehow had to be frozen in time by art. This rumbling of mastery transformed the primitive vermin of satanic fear by objectification in the material into legitimate awe of the existential responsibility in the order of things as opposed to chance and chaos, thus lending purpose to the new awareness of expanding labor in behalf of the other.
The first utterance, then -- I think, therefore I must be -- was coupled with "but why?" leading to the dove-tailing of the other four W’s and how, eventuating purposeful myths and beliefs into play to explain to some satisfaction the mystery. Tools enhanced not only immediate environmental and biological needs, but cultural as well; love gave meaning to sex and expanded to satisfy the mystery of self-love as an extension of the other within to that of others beyond; art beautified what was felt within and attuned to the rhythm of the heart to express the wonders of otherness signaled by the responses of the beloved; religion institutionalized the mystic feeling of the Other within by replacing fear and clarifying the sub-level sense of the self, the surfacing of otherness, and the magnanimity of a purposefully expanding environment.
To believe otherwise is to deny humanity, which is impossible. To believe otherwise is simply a linguistic trap of saying the same thing in another format. Denying — not only by so doing is there an admission of elemental being — these four human and divine elements of industry and culture can only apply to existence before the origin of man in which case there can be no such action without the thought process unless the denial is predicated on illogical and contradictory conviction that a rock existentially is in itself and unmoved by natural law.
An atheist may deny the God in the formation of religion but he cannot deny the God or sense of otherness within; for it is clear that the individual needs help — he cannot presume the totality of his perceptive and conceptive prowess to be his own doing. The evident need of otherness and the demonstration of uncontrollable dreams substantiate that there is a governance — whether good or bad — underlying what is normally conceived as the self in itself.
If this were not so, we would fall into the solipsistic net of destruction of all that there is but a heartbeat away, which is as ludicrous as thinking, owing to the fallacious perception of time, that the universe is mortal. The totality of existence hinges not on one's perception of it, but rather the totality of itself and in itself. For ultimately that is the otherness that we sense—it can never go away. No matter what label we put on it—nothingness, everything-ness, God, Being or non-Being — remains undisturbed, for it is not a thing caught in the space-time continuum, it simply is the matrix of all that there was, is, or will ever be — that is, eternal is-ness.
In the meantime and in the media of our rationality the universe is what is. We enjoy, or become annoyed with its current format in virtue of the blessing or curse of cognition. By virtue of our sense of the other within, it allows us to participate in understanding it, assisting in its evolvement. The supra-being may not always be as friendly, but that is the prerogative of the Other, even though within its own make-up it is destined evermore, though not without interruption, to pulsate communication with its cognitive beings who are at all times in the business of becoming.
If all life on the earth were destroyed today, tomorrow would resort to its nature and begin again. If the planet were totally obliterated the mystery of the cosmos would eventuate the likes of another: this is the nature of the Supra-being who thrives on cognition -- nay, is cognition intertwined with prescience. To think otherwise is a contradiction of the very subsistence directly responsible for the being forging the misconception, which is sense of the other, however distorted. So, too, the totality of being relies on material otherness, requiring manufacturing, to give it purpose -- good or bad -- and therefore complete being through its Labor.
Let us say for the sake of argument that the entirety of being -- space-time, matter -- collapses upon itself as some predict the universe will eventually do. This concept stems from the myth of death that all is in the end lost. But as in death the memory of the departed lives on in the memory of the other, the pre-existence of the material lives on in the ethereal monad of memory and otherness which drives it always to material objectification. If in fact the material does exhaust itself by the nature of its corruption, it is only in its format as we perceive it, not its sub-element that even in a black hole by necessity exists.
Thus with corruption comes regeneration or more accurately its love of spider-like labor and challenge -- ergo, immortality.
Copyright © 1999 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: November 9, 2003 .
