How I am surviving a heart attack and quadruple bypass, and maybe even surviving life...

Thursday, June 26, 2008

About how we are constantly, helplessly moving into the future, the unknown

From an email from the "What is Enlightenment" website -- basically an advertisement, but some cool thoughts --

Living Forward

In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred, the renowned biologist and complexity theorist Stuart A. Kauffman repeatedly speaks to the limitations of rationality in the face of an evolving, creative cosmos:

One view of God is that God is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere, and human cultures. Because of this ceaseless creativity, we typically do not and cannot know what will happen. We live our lives forward, as Kierkegaard said. We live as if we knew, as Nietzsche said. We live our lives forward into mystery, and do so with faith and courage, for that is the mandate of life itself. But the fact that we must live our lives forward into a ceaseless creativity that we cannot fully understand means that reason alone is an insufficient guide to living our lives. Reason, the center of the Enlightenment, is but one of the evolved, fully human means we use to live our lives. Reason itself has finally led us to see the inadequacy of reason. We must therefore reunite our full humanity. We must see ourselves whole, living in a creative world we can never fully know.





No comments: