Monday 19 November 2012

The Within of Things

This is the title of one of De Chardin’s chapters. A word about how this relates to me. After a lifetime, it seems to me, I have involved to feel entirely comfortable in my innerness. And not only comfortable, but joyous. Though I have earlier often been conflicted about this natural tendency in myself, vitiated it with thoughts like ‘be more active,’ ‘Do more,’ “don’t be a nerd, get out, mingle, move,’ I have returned to this central space, my throne, actually, my hermetic room that includes the entire universe. Okay, enough about myself, though I am not ashamed of such interjections (more to follow), or of interpreting him in a personal way. He says the quarrel between materialists and upholders of a spiritual interpretation need to be ‘brought into union . . . in a phenomenology . . . in which the internal aspect of things as well as the external aspect of the world.’
In the eyes of the physicist nothing exists legitimately, at least up to now, except the without of things’ but this process in the bacteriologist, biologist, ‘breaks down with man, in whom the existence of a within can no longer be evaded, because it is the object of a direct intuition and the subject of all knowledge.’
   


Science has eliminated consciousness from the models of the universe. (“The term consciousness is taken in its widest sense to indicate every kind of psychism, from the most rudimentary forms of interior perception imaginable to the human phenomenon of reflective thought.” De Chardin)
“Deep within ourselves, an ‘interior’ appears at the heart of things, as it were seen through a rent. This is enough to ensure that in one degree or another this ‘interior’ should obtrude itself as existing everywhere in nature from all time. Co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within of things.
    

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