| The inclination – shouts.The Body – Talking.The Mind – Whispering.And the inner being is silent.Because she – knows. “May the God of love and compassion give me and all those who read this book the truth by which we will find and be aware of the truth within ourselves.”(Meister Urquhart)Dedication (longer than usual) Although ostensibly we live in a permissive, liberated and democratic society,beneath the surfaceit is a very conformal society, which exerts pressure on us to conduct our lives according to accepted norms. (“What haven’t you gotten married yet?”, “What, haven’t you changed the car yet?”, “How long does it take you to do your first degree?”) In this situation, most people find themselves aligned with society’s demands, even at the cost of giving up individual authenticity. There is no denying that this price is not perceived as particularly high for some people, those who are comfortable in the warm and protective bosom of social conformity.The problem arises in those peoplewho are eroded by the constant friction between the inner voice of their self and the booming voice of the social machine. The encounter of a unique and sensitive soul with the tough and demanding social commissar is an encounter between David and Goliath, in which Goliath usually emerges victorious. David remained a prisoner, imprisoned in psychological trauma for the rest of his life.What can society offer the confused and lost individual, who lives his life feeling missed at best, or convincedthat something is wrong with him at worst??One option that society tends to recommend is to seek psychological counseling. However, the psychologist, in quite a few cases, may be revealed to be acting as a messenger of society who tries to “repent” and “correct” the individual’s deviation from the normative standard set by society. The prevailing attitude is that if you have a problem with the company, something is wrong with you and not with the company, and the one who demands correction is you and not the company. Psychological therapy is not detached from the society in which it is implemented and therefore reflects The mood acceptable to her. A central question regarding psychological therapy is to what extent does psychotherapy serve the individual and to what extent does it serve society. Does he propose a correction based on objective, unchanging, and substantive criteria (according to the ‘possible psychology of man’ – as Uspensky says and writes), or an amendment based on the scientific, sociological and political values of society and the times? In other words, the good intention of psychological therapy may miss the point by not helping the individual reinforce what is unique about him (which is, according to that view, the source of his “problem”) but directing him to “slip” or get rid of what is unique about him (in order to get rid of the “problem”).Another way that society is willing to allow its exceptions is by channeling personal frustrations into artistic channels that allow legitimate expression of a poignant individual statement. Under the auspices of freedom of artistic expression, the individual is permitted to drain out mental residues that deviate from the norm and give expression to his unique inner world and extreme personal views. Art is the refuge of many nonconformists, but a thousand – not everyone can become an artist, and a home – it is, after all, a kind of elitist exile recognized by society, Rewarded by it and in some waydictatedby it. (Therefore, the more the artist wishes to express a unique and deeper statement, the more he will be busy breaking the artistic convention that preceded him, in order to avoid the dictate that allows statements that exist only within relative freedom.).The other conventional possibility that society legitimizes is the convergence of the individual under the sheltered wings of subcultures, frameworks that offer a kind of mental-spiritual correction or religious-spiritual comfort, such as repentance or various frameworks of self-search in the style of the New Age. The problem here is that an individual who feels that he has escaped the threat of social conformity finds himself within the subculture he has chosen – enslaved to conformity and equally tight norms.This book is dedicated to those who have not sold their spark of uniqueness in the stew of social recognition and acceptance, and who pay a heavy price for it. For those who preserved their pain because they could not, did not want to, or had difficulty receiving the tranquilizers and painkillers offered by society, in the form of various “nature reserves”: religion, art and psychological treatment. To the exceptional, to outsiders, to nonconformists, to those who did not fit in, who were ejected from frameworks. And also to many others who have outwardly surrendered to the dictates of society, who lead seemingly normal lives, but are eroded from the inside every day and hour by hour, due to the dissonance between what they feel inside and their conformal way of life.To anyone who feels like a triangle trapped in a square – this book is dedicated.Introduction:(Technical notes about the book)In this book, everything concerns being and being, coming to the entity and trying to stay with it, except for the last part: “What’s in Between,” where I allowed myself to deal with topics that are more marginal in the discussion of the entity.The book is structurally divided into three parts: “Inside,” “Inside,” and “What’s in Between.” Each part has a number of chapters, each chapter deals with a different topic, but all are under the roof of the chapter’s theme. In order to clarify the common denominator – at the beginning of each chapter there are several words of preparation for the clay in the chapter, these words are gathered under a heading called “background”, and there is a brief explanation of what clay has in common in the chapter.What is the purpose of the book? Should we enable a better way of life? More just? More spiritual? No and no. This book does not pretend to improve or fix anyone’s life. If this book has a purpose, it is to impart only one thing, awareness. Awareness about the entity and life in its absence. Awareness about the entity for those who are unaware, and strengthening awareness about the entity, for those who are already aware .I debated a lot about translating the wordSein from German, and being-from English. At first I translated “being” but after it fell into my hands Dr. Abraham Mansbach’s book “Existence and Meaning” – about Heidegger. And after talking to him, I was convinced that the name entity derived from Yesh was more appropriate to Heidegger’s original intention (which is the High Priest, or rather the High Prophet of the Entity Bearer).Introduction (and to the point)If I had to associate the book and its style with a particular genre, I would say that it is a travel book. On the surface, it may not seem like a travel book, but not only is it – it is the real journey, the journey of returning home. There are two types of journeys: the journey away from home, which is a journey of escape, a journey of illusion, of fantasy, and a journey of returning home. The real home is inside and therefore the journey in, home, is the real journey. The common denominator of all the essays in the book is an attempt to talk about the real journey, the journey home.Home is a place you leave in order to return to it… Home is a place where we unite with ourselves. Far from home we are in exile – and in exile there is only longing, only longing. True, one can try to satisfy the craving by substitutes such as food, sex, friendship, work, career, religious studies, etc., but the only way to deal with the craving is to turn from exile to pilgrim, abandon everything outside, turn our faces around and start traveling inside. To begin the most mysterious and wondrous of all journeys, the “journey to being.”“It’s good to have an end to travel towards; But at the end of the day, it’s the journey that matters.” Ursula K. Le Guin”The journey towards what we should be asked about is not an adventure, but a homecoming.” Martin HeideggerPart One: In“What we all desperately need to learn is that (e) place… That we can return home to is within us, at the center of our being. You can’t get there by walking outside, just by going back inside. We have seen people doing everything else to find the essence, except opening up to their inner world. They try to find unity through building dream homes, finding common hobbies, buying things, having children, and working together, but none of these will work without connecting to the inner essence. Many people in this culture are secretly sick in their hearts because they have everything but connecting with their essence.”Jay and Kathleen Hendricks “In the Course of Life” (Hoch Ahiasaf, 1996, p. 44) A. The philosophy of the entity introductionThe term ‘philosophy’ sometimes evokes negative reactions. We say ‘philosophizing’ which means talking a lot about nothing, talking high and high with no possibility of achieving anything real. But this view, more than it says anything about philosophy, it says something about this generation and its values. So what is philosophy that is not through the eyes of society and culture?“We are more curious to know the meaning of the dreams we dream than to understand the meaning of what we see.”Diogenes Creative philosophyPhilosophy is contemplating the meaning of life and existence and wondering about man’s place within it.The philosophers of yesteryear wondered about the pot of life from their unique conception of life, like poets, painters and musicians. A person is considered a philosopher ifhis workof thought had value in itself. But a strange thing happened to philosophy over the years: it was expropriated from the field of individualcreativityand annexed to academia. Most of the philosophy books written today were written as an academic study of philosophers and their thought, and few contributed new aspects of the author himself as a philosopher. As Whitehead wrote:“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition isthat it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato”.Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947Today this field, like many other fields, is institutionalized, monopolistic, look for it in the university.Today, those who work in philosophy are those who studied in the philosophy department at the university, or those who are engaged in research and cataloging existing currents in an academic framework. It is very similar to the scientist from “The Little Prince”, who constantly counted the stars. We have a sense of power when we organize our minds in battalions and leagues, it gives us the feeling that now that we have sorted out all this mess of thought, we have control over it, But naming a phenomenon doesn’t mean you understand it…The real philosophy, as I understand it, more than it is a field of research and study, is a verycreative and individualfield. It is the right and duty of the individual to wonder about life again and again and not to fall asleep and be swallowed up by the mechanization of existence per se. True, natural philosophy must carry within it the power of life, touch, shock, come from the stomach and the stomach and not only from and to the head. After all, at the end of the day, we are talking about issues that make up all of our lives, here and now: time, death, happiness, the meaning of life, etc. Philosophy must come not only from the stomach, but also from the heart, and therefore it must carry much of the poetry in order for it to stitch together intellectual dryness. Today, to access modern philosophers such as Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Merlo, Ponty, and others, one needs extraordinary endurance. The text is intellectual – hard, dry, full of harsh words and terms, which are more than intended to bring the reader closer to their content, they are intended to alienate those who do not belong to the academic clique.The problem is not with those who are not interested in philosophy, but with the few who have not given up the desire to understand what is happening here and what it means to exist, without giving up freedom of thought in favor of some academic, religious or institutional clique. Those people who take a philosophy book and drown in a sea of theories and words, or enroll in a philosophy department and get lost in a forest of currents and concepts.Philosophy was cut off from life and became the province of an elitist-intellectual and alienated group. It has been uprooted from the hands of the individual who tries to expose the truth beneath the false cover of social realism and has been annexed to the paycheck and pension of belonging to the academic establishment. From the day philosophy became a science, it ceased to do what poetry in particular and art in general, constantly trying to do, to touch the very heart of being, To redeem and release the inner truth from the prison of social, political and economic norms. Philosophy today is more concerned with labeling, associating and ordering the various labels instead of trying to focus on the essence, which is the enigma of human existence in the world.In the field of philosophy closer to dealing with essence are the phenologists: Heraclitus, Brentano, Husserl, Merlo Ponti, Aaron Gurevitch, Derrida, and first and foremostMartin Heidegger. Heidiger’s situation in the field of academic philosophy is similar to that of Zen within Buddhism: both try to reach a corrugated truth that contradicts the methods in which they grew and to which they belong. At most they can (as long as they speak from the method) cause the reader or student to experience a profound contradiction between the truth and the way he tries to reach it, for truth is in the inner being and not in the methods, In the techniques and concepts that indicate it.The problem is not really, but with the finger pointing in its direction. Both religion and philosophy are fingers pointing in the direction of truth. The problem is that the finger, whose sole function is to direct direction, becomes the main thing, the center of attention in itself. For most people, the direction the finger points in is something vague and unreal, myth or mysticism, while the finger is real. They are unwilling or unable to go in the direction the finger points and therefore make it itself true incarnate (like the Bible, The Upanishads, The Book of Zohar, the New Testament, etc.). They concentrate on the finger, analyze it, study it. But the finger has no value in itself, and so philosophy is not important if it deals with the analysis and cataloguing of the various methods and currents, butonly if it connects us with an inner knowledge of existence, which scientific philosophy does not even purport to do. Philosophy has gradually moved away from its own essence, and the essence of philosophy isBe on the meaning of existence. And when something moves away from the essence, it anchors in concepts and clings to models. Concepts are outlines of things, without their internal baggage. And when concepts become the main thing, they become a veil, a cover that hides the way to the primary essence. That is, philosophy got fat, adding more and more covers and clothing and fat around the initial philosophical core. It produced more and more models that not only did not confirm the core, the truth, Rather, shift the center of gravity to the variety of built-in concepts—instead of the truth within, to the fat—instead of to the bones and muscles. The raw essence is hidden by mechanisms that try to describe it but actually hide it.In general, expressing clear and direct philosophical attitudes towards life is not exactly considered something worth doing in our culture: writing stories, inventing fictional plots – it is, even expressing opinions about social, state, educational, etc. – but when it comes to expressing opinionsabout life – there is a kind of avoidance of it. For example, most writers express their attitudes toward life in their works and leave it to the critic or reader to try to interpret things from what is said in the work. Literary creators tend to avoid direct expression of their views Even in the interviews they give. There is a kind of avoidance pose, of expressing obscure general things, usually under the pretext that they are only creating, that they leave the reader (or critic) the interpretation. There are even authors who say that there is no statement in their work, no message, no position – they just wanted to tell a story. A worldview, a statement about life and existence – according to the writers themselves, this is something they don’t have, or prefer to obscure, as if it’s just not to the point. So what’s the point? Fabricating stories and happenings that never happened – that’s a yes to the point?Even those who write philosophy books rarely writetheir own philosophy forthemselves, but embed their personal message into essays they wrote about philosophers who preceded them, or hide behind scholarly research. Pure philosophical positions, those detached from established religion, politics, sexual identity, economic or nationalistic interests – there are few of these.Why? Why is it unpopular? Perhaps because any clear, unequivocal and declared position will always attract objections, and therefore it is safer and more careful not to reveal the exact position. Or maybe it’s just hard to formulate clear philosophical positions in such a confused and problematic world. And perhaps also because true philosophy poses questions and expands confusion and embarrassment rather than offers solutions. And maybe because when dealing with the truth, any truth, but especially the truth in relation to existence itself – it’s frightening and it’s painful. True philosophy has never been about individual, relatively small happiness, but about expropriating private happiness and personal fantasy—for a broader, less compromising truth. Perhaps this is really why, because of the uncompromising nature of true philosophy, there is a daunting difficulty in it, perhaps.Either way, there are too few overt, natural and pure philosophical approaches, philosophers and philosophers in our world today. What is there? There are studies on philosophy – from the side of science. There is a Gothic message hidden in the works – from the art side, and there are seminars, sects and spiritual teachings that offer philosophical teachings – from the spiritual/mystical side. What was once one field in which there was both individual creation and intellectual knowledge and insight and spirituality has split into three camps: the creative component has joined art, the insight component has been adopted by science, and the spirituality component has found its place in mysticism and religion. Art refuses to talk about insight, academic scholars do not create something authentic, personal and original of their own, and spiritual mystics shut themselves in their mothers’ doors, and between all three philosophical truth has fallen into oblivion.“Everything has been figured out, except how to live”.Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980(“Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device for dealing with theproblems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated by philosophers,for dealing with the problems of men”.John Dewey (1859-1952) Core philosophy (the real philosophy):In my opinion, today, more than ever, there is room to wonder about the potency of life and existence and not take anything for granted. This confused, worn-out, bland world needs philosophy more than ever, as Needleman and Applebaum write in their book, Real Philosophy“Without the guidance of philosophy, more and more people are beginning to turn to other approaches to search for meaning in their lives: established religion, science, psychiatry, political ideology, popular mysticism. But these don’t seem to quite be able to meet the need for meaning:Established religion, detached from its traditional and ancient origins, becomes an intrusion into the confusion and confusion of the present time.Psychiatry (and psychology) has long since lost its messianic light, the hope it ever seemed to offer, melting within the walls of the facts it itself has placed around it, and is no longer able to satisfy man’s natural needs for ultimate values.Ideology gave rise to mass movements and ‘true believers’ and thus led them away from the search, rather than towards the individual search for meaning. These movements relied on the herd instinct masses, and played on suggestion and the ability to influence people instead of serving their wish to seek and ask.The current currents of mystical teachings have become antagonistic to the impulse of search. They tend to anesthetize rather than embrace and reinforce the personal qualities of each person who approaches them. Yet the popularity of such movements (which often serve as an example of sectarianism – as in the Jonestown collective suicide, and other collective suicides that have occurred since then) illustrates how hungry we are for guidance and what little the current culture offers us.”Arkena Books-1990, page 12 (author’s translation) The questions of true philosophy, as opposed to the academic and intellectual one, come from the tribulations of existence, from the encounter between the heart and mind, from the child within, from the totality of the inner being. One of the clearest examples of the personification of such total questions in one person is Socrates, who embodies the approach of asking questions, which is the breath of philosophy at its best (as opposed to the previous approaches that deal mainly with issuing answers and solutions and calming doubts).“… Humanity faces some difficult questions, to which no one has a satisfactory answer. We therefore have a choice between two options: we can deceive ourselves and the world and pretend to know everything we need to know, or close our eyes to the central issues once and for all and give up all progress. In this sense, humanity is divided into two. People, usually, or they are completely convinced, Or they are completely equivalent;.It’s like a deck of cards divided into two stacks. One of the red cards and the other the black ones. But every now and then the Joker appears, Sophie! A parchment that is not a leaf or a clover, nor a diamond or a heart. Socrates was the Joker in the deck of cards in Athens: he was neither unconvinced nor equal, he only knew that he did not know—and that bothered him. He therefore becomes a philosopher—one who does not give up but tirelessly continues the search for truth.”J. Gurder, Sophie’s World, p. 65, Hoch Schocken 1996Apart from Socrates, quite a few philosophers tried to approach these essential issues, among them Plato, Scotus Arrigana, Nicholas of Couse, Descartes, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Heraclitus, Spinoza, as well as the Neoplatonic and Hermetic schools</sp… |
Gabriel