VAST EVERLASTINGNESS
In a big enough space what now is deemed to be massively material is reduced to an infinitesimal , in a big enough space. It may be the Earth. It may be the Sun. It may be the Milky Way. Whatever it is or may be, in a big enough space--in infinity--its massive materiality--ceases to be, ceases to exist. It will have been swallowed by the vast everlastingness of infinite space.
As with space, so too with time. Stars, galaxies, meteors, asteroids fall from the sky, visible to the eye, whose drying light still reaches us millions and billions of years after these cataclysmic terminal events.
In the sacred vast everlastingness of infinity, time and space are not, only God is which/who flows from everlastingness to everlastingness.
Yet by grace and love we are here. Not merely are we here but happily endowed with the spirit, the means of inquiring into that essence, that quintessence of what we appear to be; "we" being all that is, or was, to the extent of our ability to inquire!
Plotinus, 3rd Century African philosopher framed it admirably, in his great book, THE ENNEADS:
"The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not deliberate purpose : it is due to a higher Kind engendering in its own likeness by a natural process . And none the less, a second consideration, if a considered plan brought it into being it would still be no disgrace to its maker--for it stands a stately whole, complete within itself, serving at once its own purpose and that of all its parts which, leading and lesser alike, are of such a nature as to further the interests of the total. It is, therefore, impossible to condemn the whole on the merits of the parts which , besides, must be judged only as they enter harmoniously or not into the whole, the main consideration , quite overpassing the members which thus cease to have importance. To linger about the parts is to condemn not the Cosmos but some isolated appendages of it; in the entire living Being we fasten out eyes on a hair or a toe neglecting the marvelous spectacle of the complete Man; we ignore all of the tribes and kinds of animals except for the meanest; we pass over an entire race, humanity , and bring forward--Thersites."
P.138-139, "Providence : First Tractate," THE ENNEADS by Plotinus (1991)
Wednesday, November 8, 2017
EVERLASTINGNESS
VAST EVERLASTINGNESS
In a big enough space what now is deemed to be massively material is reduced to an infinitesimal , in a big enough space. It may be the Earth. It may be the Sun. It may be the Milky Way. Whatever it is or may be, in a big enough space--in infinity--its massive materiality--ceases to be, ceases to exist. It will have been swallowed by the vast everlastingness of infinite space.
As with space, so too with time. Stars, galaxies, meteors, asteroids fall from the sky, visible to the eye, whose drying light still reaches us millions and billions of years after these cataclysmic terminal events.
In the sacred vast everlastingness of infinity, time and space are not, only God is which/who flows from everlastingness to everlastingness.
Yet by grace and love we are here. Not merely are we here but happily endowed with the spirit, the means of inquiring into that essence, that quintessence of what we appear to be; "we" being all that is, or was, to the extent of our ability to inquire!
Plotinus, 3rd Century African philosopher framed it admirably, in his great book, THE ENNEADS:
"The world, we must reflect, is a product of Necessity, not deliberate purpose : it is due to a higher Kind engendering in its own likeness by a natural process . And none the less, a second consideration, if a considered plan brought it into being it would still be no disgrace to its maker--for it stands a stately whole, complete within itself, serving at once its own purpose and that of all its parts which, leading and lesser alike, are of such a nature as to further the interests of the total. It is, therefore, impossible to condemn the whole on the merits of the parts which , besides, must be judged only as they enter harmoniously or not into the whole, the main consideration , quite overpassing the members which thus cease to have importance. To linger about the parts is to condemn not the Cosmos but some isolated appendages of it; in the entire living Being we fasten out eyes on a hair or a toe neglecting the marvelous spectacle of the complete Man; we ignore all of the tribes and kinds of animals except for the meanest; we pass over an entire race, humanity , and bring forward--Thersites."
P.138-139, "Providence : First Tractate," THE ENNEADS by Plotinus (1991)