Here's an exercise. I don't know if this is philology or philosophy or mysticism or what. But I hope you enjoy it.
When Christ's hem is grabbed, the gospel says: "He felt the power (δύναμις) leave him, and he asked: "Who touched me?" δύναμις is Aristotle's word for potentiality (potentia in Latin). Christianity would likely define Christ's power as being specifically divine power, I'd like to see how Aquinas treats this power, likely making a distinction between the impure power and potentiality behind worldly things, and a specifically Christian potential power (maybe Lord's anointedness type thing), that is sometimes in and sometimes out of this world. As moderns, pagans, scientists, punks, non-dualists, we can assume there is no such thing as specifically divine power, a power that is only good, preserved in the ranks of the priesthood, anointing a certain group and not others. As Vivikananda, a far purer and holier man than me said: "We can never do pure good, no one can. We breath perfect truth and kill millions of microbes, what greater evil could we do to them?" What then is the relationship between δύναμις, potentiality, and energeia, actuality? How, and I don't ask this really in an intellectual way (but in some way that I hope is more meaningful than that), do we make potentiality into actuality? How do we turn what we think we SHOULD be, our potential, into what we ACTUALLY are? We can ask about this in reference to different things, to the nature (ousia) of different beings, each trying to be its own thing, at odds and war with all other things. But out Eastern friends want us to challenge the concept that things have inherently different ousias, they'll say different natures and Daseins (particular being-there-nesses) are just ice cubes in the warm and warming pot of Being. Lets say our goal as philosophers is to melt into that pot, and to help others melt if they want to join us. The conversion, the alchemy, of δύναμις to energia, the potential into the actual, is perhaps the goal. That would require "preparing for death," as Socrates put the goal, "or giving up your life to take up your life," as Christ said. Perhaps the West has never expressed this tension and dynamic interaction better than in the "Will to Power," for what is potential but Will, and Power but actuality. But is it becoming something different than we are now? Superhuman? No, I don't think so, because it was always our potential and it is everyone's potential to become what we feel we must become, and everyone is moving towards the actuality of the potential. There are compounds on a genetic level that prevent proper gene firing and protein production when rats are not properly nurtured. Are we any different? Isn't the potential of being fully human the most infinite yet humble actualities? But let's ask that question with utmost sincerity. If the goal is to become superhuman and leave common humanity behind, lets do it! But where has it ever happened? Did not the Nazi's attempt that with the utmost sincerity? If they just didn't have enough ambition, lets have more. But it seems that all evidence, on all levels of the spiral, points to the idea that it is our true, common genetics, that we are seeking to unleash. Every non-mutant, every muggle, is capable of the shift into full-beingness, into the utmost magicalness. Muggles, it seems, are merely those who think they "know" they can't. How much easier minds are to change than genes! Let's hear our Eastern side out and say that greatness is not to be gained, but to be recollected. "It is always an illusion that we are separate" Ramakrishna says lovingly to us. I think it's not about becoming an Overman, but understanding that we are, all of us, already that, and what we have to do is give up is the illusion that we are not already that. We must give up our anger towards all those who said we were not that, and treated us as less than that. It is our own contempt we must swallow, the narrowness of others and their desire to inflict us with their own wounded sense of limitedness, that contributed to the illusion of our finiteness, and we must let that go and shine out our light, shedding the bushel basket that knowledge's fruit was once stored in. Ramana Maharshi says "Liberation is attained with the concept of bondage and liberation are left behind." I think many, though not a great many, are willing to accept that their true nature is greatness (a state of complete unity of potentiality and actuality, where logos "becomes flesh," or comes into being as the Greek says) and they accept the burden of this greatness which is solemnity. Yet fewer by far are willing to accept the burden that not only is greatness (theos) their own true nature (nature in the sense of what is outside of potential and actual, the ultimate reality which we can only approach by words like Absolute Being [remembering that words are merely potentiality, not even actuality]), but truly it is the nature of all things to be great, and not just to be great, but that they are great even now, they are fully theos, divine and limitless, and thus they have infinite friends. Is there a word for Maya in the West, for that which stands between potentiality and actuality, and makes us believe that there is even a distinction between these things at all? These things are distinguished, as Aristotle might say: "In speech only." So it is speech which seems to be the problem, which creates this veil. Do we ban speech? Let's not write this off immediately, many have had great success with vows of silence. But let's see this: what we really want is to move beyond words, through words, outside of words and "distinctions in speech," and separation from others and their sorrows and joys. Words (and isolation) are milk, and milk is for babes, but we need meat, for we are men. Words, and the leviathans they create, called ideas, and the world they inhabit, called Knowledge, this is a very small solar system in the universe of Being. Genesis was not wrong in saying that the fruit of knowledge brought us a step closer to theos and greatness, but with much burden did we take on knowledge, with much hereticalness we tried to name and know things and limit things (even though He told us that this was our job to name things [so perhaps our fall was planned and unavoidable]). What lies beyond words and the burden and punishment of knowledge? If in the beginning the word was with God and the word was God, then moving beyond words takes us beyond God, before the beginning and outside of time itself. Before Chronos was Chaos. Is Chaos the most fertile ground to plant our mustard seeds in? Even Chaos seems a bit too ordered, a bit too in reference to that which knowledge can sink its dragons teeth into and generate a race of insufferable egotists. This ground is something more like Brahman than the Gods of Greece or the God of Genesis, this the ground that which cannot be named, this formless forehead from which from all things spring from, all born with the head of energia and the tail of dunamis. In what way can we make less tension between our individual potentiality and our actuality, the insufferable tension of being chimeras? What can help us melt our icebergs into the ocean of Being? Could the best way be to say, loudly, from personal experience, that this tension comes merely from an illusion that there is a conflict between the two sides of us, our potentiality and our actuality? Is this only a myth that they are at odds? The fear that we could not live up to what we were "meant to be," is it all bullshit? Could that fear be an illusion, based on the mistaken thought that we must live up to the definition that others have placed upon us? We followed the whims of wounded others and not the true potentiality which resides in us, a microcosm of Absolute Being, a perfect model of the macrocosm of Absolute Being? Are we seeking a knowledge of ourselves from a source outside ourselves, prolonging the alchemy of our potentiality into actuality, because we are afraid of what we really are? Is it possible that we are truly that which, unlike dunamis and energia, unlike Zeus and unlike Moses' God, has no parts, no hidden faces, no tension, no time, no beginning, no end. Are we, since He was only a stand-in, place-holder for, that thing which declares: "I am," that infinite self-declaring thing? If there is a thing which is that, can we say with any meaning: "I am that?" And if we are, is there anything left to do? What moves do we have left?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMPF6lpM0XM&sns=em
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