The Philosopher's Stone

A New Beginning

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A man who is managing himself in the knowledge that all things are in a constant state of change needs something. He realizes that in the circle of creation and destruction, there isn't anything that one would refer to as a beginning or end. Hence one's experiences in this regard appear magical or is cultivated as divine.

 

The practice of magyk today is undertaken by the association of the wicca, who in many ways are reviving an old way of understanding and bringing it to the light of modern knowledge. Others may have left aspects of the old world behind but reintroduced parts of the experience in the practice of institutionalized religion.

 

Both practices contain one indispensable element that is relied upon by the thinking individual. They point to his beginning, in the way that his sensitivity relates to certain issues of the past. A son may therefore limit himself to the time line of his father and continue the advances of his experience, in his life time, in relation to that.

 

In other societies, one's period of relation may go further than that. In the Indian community, as they borrow from past wisdom, sayings and guides to faith, the individual comes to relate to that period of past civilizations as the starting point, that he comes to refer to as his beginning. The word Muladior, in Sanskrit, is in reference to that.

 

In connection with this, many philosophies have sprung up in the world's experience to guide the thinking of man. These studies may generally be classified into three time periods, which when put together, comprise the summum bonum of our experiences.

 

The first period is covered by the writings of Virgil. Virgil created an in-depth account of the lives of men and portrayed them in a process of realizing cognitive experiences of existing natures. The study is an affirmation of the experiences encountered by the individual and the manner of portrayal of such experiences according to the imagery and instruments available to the individual.

 

The second period of experience is conveyed as an analysis of past experience, such as reported by Virgil, and then is broken up and re-assembled. This is brought to our attention by Hegel, who proposed the dialectic process of first affirming the thesis, then creating an argument against it as anti-thesis and thereafter coming to unite the two opposites in a synthesis of the understanding.

 

This today refers to our thinking process in society and the way in which we are bringing new knowledge to that which we have been undertaking by force of habit. However, in opening up the past to inquiry, it is a bit of a Pandora's box and we are obliged to bring as much clarity as is possible to the plethora of issues that we had previously relied on as true.

 

The third period is conveyed by Jean Paul Sarte as the philosophy of existentialism. This restarts the entire process of inquiry into the nature of phenomenon by cultivating a real time identity to the environment and defining our common identities in relation to it. This may first be engaged with will, based on the survival imperative, but is thereafter brought back to the philosophies of Virgil to challenge and reaffirm his studies by engaging Hegel's dialectic process.

 

The beginning, as it comes to be defined in this exercise, is the time and place that we occupy in our lifetime today. That beginning is the start of our conscious thought on the day that we began to take a sharp look at ourselves and build up our understanding of ourselves from there.

 

Where we engage that as a life long learning, it continues at a pace and rhythm that is consistent with our daily lives.  A remarkable example of that is the way the Americans came to define their experience as the achievement of the dream and in the process, redefined the beginning, in the experiences of many around the world.

 

Such an event in the world's affairs is consistent with our experience of physical reality in our lives and it brings to the practice of Wicca and divinity, a perception of the existential nature of our experiences in the world. In such an encounter, divinity is transformed to the studies of Virgil and Wicca to that of Hegel.

 

Existentialism, in many ways, wakes up the masses from the stupor of their opiate habits and Karl Marx may well approve the study as the philosophy of the common man. It bears close resemblance to studies in Zen Buddhism and Indian literature on Impersonal Brahman.

 

Science and its study of the phenomenon of creation, the work of gases, liquids and solids presents the greatest achievement, eventually, as the creation of man. This is the greatest accomplishment of the work of the elements, referred to in Indian writings as the Jivan. This bears close resemblance to the principles contained in Existentialism, with some refinement, on account of scientific knowledge.

 

In defining the beginning, man is therefore coming to position himself as the source of the perception. This is obvious as a product of man's thinking and experience. As man defines himself from the beginning of his awareness, and where such an awareness is a new experience in the world, one may concur with the view that our beginning just began.

 

Any period that we refer to as before today, may be termed as the beginning of the Wicca or the divine. We are not familiar, at this time, how conscious perception by  other associated life forces may be defined or experienced. But we can say that they led us to the discovery of ourselves.

 

Reviews

[patricia]

Fascinating stuff! I am going to have to read this a few times more to take even tiny amounts of it in. An interesting and very deep chapter. Thankyou.