Fountain of Love (Sketches)

Fountain of Love

Hope and Encouragement

Teilhard de Chardin

De Quaerendo Deum - On Seeking God

De Quaerendo Deum (DQD)

De quaerendo Deum, meaning: On Seeking God, a book written by Nicholas of Cusa (or Cusanus) in 1445, 660 years ago.

Truly venerable Brother-in-Christ, l in complying with your desire, as best I
can, I will here attempt to repeat in writing, briefly and clearly, that which I
endeavored to explain to the congregation at the Feast of Epiphany concerning
the analysis of God's name. [I will do so] in order that meditating may be
stimulated on the part of us both and that by the ascent of our intellects our
inner man may gradually be transformed from light unto light—[transformed] I to
the point that [having attained] unto clear recognition through the light of
glory, it may enter into the joy of its Lord.

To begin with,
Excellent Brother, you well know that when on
the Areopagus Paul (who says
that he was caught up unto the third heaven, to the point of beholding sacred
mysteries) preached the truth to those men who, in Athens, were then devoting
themselves to the very celebrated study of philosophy, he stated in his sermon
that he wanted to proclaim to them the good news about the Unknown God, to whom
those pagans had consecrated an altar. And when he proceeded to explain this
matter, he stated that God had created all men in one man and that He had
granted a definite period of time for men's being in this world, in order that
they might seek Him, to see whether they could gropingly find Him. And Paul
added that, nonetheless, God is not far from anyone, since in Him we exist and
live and are moved.

Then, reproving idolatry, he added that in
men's thought there can be no likeness at all to God. Whenever reading the Acts
of the Apostles, I marvel at Paul's procedure. For he wanted to make known to
[these] philosophers the Unknown God, whom thereafter he affirms to be unable to
be conceived by any human intellect. Therefore, God is made known by the fact
that every intellect is too small to be figure or conceive Him. But Paul names
Him God—or Theos in Greek. So given the fact that man entered this world in
order to seek God and to cleave unto Him once found and by cleaving unto Him to
find rest: since man cannot seek God, and grope for Him, in this sensible and
corporeal world (for God
is spirit rather than body and cannot be attained by
the intellect's abstracting, since man cannot conceive of any likeness to God,
as Paul said), then how is it that God can be sought in order to be found?
Assuredly, unless this world were useful to the seeker, man would be sent in
vain to the world for the purpose of seeking God. Hence, it must be the case
that this world offers assistance to the seeker and that the seeker knows that
neither in this world nor in anything which man conceives is there any likeness
to God.
Let us now determine whether the name “Theos,” or “God,” offers
us
assistance in these matters. For the name “Theos” is not that
name of God
which excels every concept. For that [name] which cannot be conceived, remains
ineffable. For to express is to externalize an inward concept by means of words
or other befiguring signs. Therefore, the name of Him whose likeness is not
conceived is not known. Hence, “Theos” is the name of God only insofar as God is
sought, by human beings, in this world. So let him-who-seeks take careful
account of the fact that in the name “Theos” there is enfolded a certain
way-of-seeking whereby God is found, so that He can be groped for. “Theos” is
derived from “theoro,” which means “I see” and “I hasten.” Therefore, the seeker
ought to hasten by means of sight, so that he can attain unto God, who sees all
things. Accordingly, vision bears a likeness to the pathway by means of which a
seeker ought to advance.

Consequently, in the presence of the eye
of intellectual vision
we must magnify the nature of sensible vision and
construct, from that nature, a ladder of ascent.

Innovation in Dutch

Check out Progressieve Innovatie

What is freedom?

What is Freedom? Does freedom exist?

Freedom according to Teilhard de Chardin:
That life has a meaning, meaning that what we do has an effect.
That what we do has an impact on the Universe.
We are free to play a role (or not) in this meaningful life.

Freedom according to Lucado:
The freedom to choose right from wrong, to choose right for the right reasons

Freedom according to Marx?

Un-i-tur(2)

Un-i-tur(2)
Un-i-Tur is a blog site in anticipation of my new website, which will go deeper into the mystical subjects of unity and the meaning of our lives.

The Universe as meaningful

The Universe as meaningful*

Anxiety is as old as mankind, contemporary man suffers from an anxiety that is specific to our age and that is somehow bound up with the rapid rate of human progress. Conscious or not, a fundamental anguish of being, a general anxiety of existence, strikes deep inside all men today. Something threatens us, something more than ever is lacking, but without our being able to say exactly what.

It is, more than fear of the future or fear of the death of the individual, the fear that there will ultimately be no future, the fear of the total death of mankind. What distinguishes modern man is his consciousness of evolution. What causes his anxiety is not being sure that there is a suitable outcome!

For Teilhard de Chardin modern man's most pressing psychological need is an addurance that some successful outcome exists for progress on earth for which he knows himself to be responsible. Unless such a guarantee is given, that is to say, unless the prospect of a total death ahead can be eliminated, then there is serious danger that progress will flounder and the whole human enterprise come to a halt!

This is the threatening reality we and our children are facing today [PaulQuest].

Teilhard tries to show that there is such a guarantee, that the world around him is meaningful, and that human endeavor does have a lasting value. He does this at two levels, at the level of an objective study of the phenomena (with the selection and arrangement of data to form an ordered series of increasingly comprehensive general hypotheses) and at the level of theological reflection. The first step in his effort to give his contemporaries a vision that is an assurance that the world is meaningful and that man's endeavor has a lasting value is his generalized physics, or scientific phenomenology of evolution.

At the heart of Teilhard's phenomenology of evolution is a law that he finds constantly recurring in the world of our experience, the law of complexity-consciousness. According to this law the universe is in movement, in evolution, toward ever more complex material arrangements and correspondingly higher degrees of consciousness. Having passed through the critical points of the appearance of life and the dawn of reflexive consciousness, evolution continues in man, advancing to still more complex arrangements through technical achievements and socialization and to still higher degrees of psychic tension, of consciousness. In this perspective, evolution is seen to be convergent; that is, it has an upper limit, an interior point of maximum development of complexity and consciousness. Evolution, then, has become conscious in man; it continues in and through man in the direction of a focus of convergence that Teilhard calls the Omega point.
Since evolution is reflective and free in man, Teilhard argues that it must be not only convergent but also irreversible; evolution —now conscious—could not continue without some assurance of escaping annihilation or total death. The demand for irreversibility implies the existence of an Omega point that is a transcendent center of unification.

This, in summary form, is Teilhard's phenomenology of evolution, a kind of generalized physics of the universe in process. It is a general hypothesis of the evolutionary structure of the universe, a dynamic hypothesis in the sense that it opens out to further investigation, to further refinement.

Quoted with modifications [PaulQuest] from:
Teilhard de Chardin's Theology of the Christian in the World.
Robert L. Faricy S J. author, Edward J. Sponga S.J.Publisher: Sheed & Ward. New York. Publication 1967.p73-75

Un-i-Tur

UN i TUR

Un i Tur [Papiamentu]: meaning "One" (Un) "and" (i) "All" (Tur)
and at the same time "Uniting All Together" (Unitur).

This resonates in harmony with the famous mystical "All is One", and
"One is All" from the apostle Paul

Paul The Quest

Teilhard de Chardin

Each soul exists for God in our Lord.

If we want a full and vivid understanding of...the value of human life and the promises or threats of the future life--then, without rejecting anything of the forces of the future life and of consciousness which form the natural endowment proper to the human soul, we must perceive the existence of links between us and the Incarnate Word no less precise than those which control, in the world, the affinities of the elements in the building up of 'natural' wholes.

There is no point, here, in seeking a new name by which to designate the super-eminent nature of that dependence, where all this is most flexible in human combinations and all that is most intransigent in organic structures, merge harmoniously in a moment of final incandescence. We will continue to call it by the name that has always been used: *mystical union.*
[Teilhard de Chardin, THE DIVINE MILIEU, pp. 57-58.]