Beyond the Thorns

A Discovery

Beyond the thorn bushes … in the encounter with the great mountain of the passions … a man comes to discover many things. Our stories sometimes depict a princess in the castle … or he may come into contact with the father … and beyond that … in what may be a newly emerging experience … a person may come to meet his eternal friend. Whatever it is … it provides an interesting account of the relations between the passions and the mind and the way they have journeyed together over the ages.

However with regards to our present needs … the mind is astonished to discover that the passions have in recent times created a self sacrifice of themselves for the sake of the mind's growth. Our faiths create an aim in life that many of us find tiresome and exhausting. But where we are organized around the experience of the passions … we find that in devoting ourselves to faith … we free the mind to explore and to experiment with knowledge and the epistemology of knowledge.

This it now does without its habituated attitudes from the past … to be in the ' know ' … to be exact in every thought it takes and to be true about every possibility it sees. It frees the mind from the past instruments of knowledge … which by today's standards appear archaic in comparison. In that … it renews life and its possibilities … in a world that continues to grow. Hence the mind modernizes and creates a positive response to the influences of modern society … as compared to its own past Gothic landscapes … that it sometimes continues to hold on to with some pride.

Something that was considered important before cannot today be dismissed with disdain. In doing so we create a culture of avoidance … supported by critique … and then hope to hop it beyond the clutches of the maddening passions. But then again I don't know of anyone who returns willingly to deal with the passions. My own comment on returning was to call it a ' son of a b***h ' who wouldn't leave me alone to live my life. It responded pretty much the same way … knocking the stuffing from me and leaving me bereft of anything remotely connected to passions. And this as I found out later was my eternal friend.

The father was kinder and the girl in the castle … well … she helped me deal with my deprivations. And then about two years later … I made contact with my friend at the back of it all … and I wept. Its a relationship from times in which no one actually took note of the time. It was open … entirely dependent on what the two of us brought to the relations … as if it was an act of progeny. It was in some ways founded on gender differences but also its similarities. And then my friend introduced me to a level of intelligence that is beyond mere cockiness … or the satirical … the ' suffer fools gladly ' … or the feeling of being surrounded by peasants way below in intellectual capability.

It took my breath away … I remember whispering below my breath … ' its the realization of the dream ' … to which the father replied ' its heaven on earth.' It was a turning point in my life … I had never encountered something like this before … not in a book … a movie … a person … or even in the tales of braggarts. This was real. I've mentioned this before … but its worth repeating … its intelligence with humility. Not the self professed humility of the passions in the practice of selflessness in faith … but a humility that was simply … human … transparent with an absence of self-defense.

The passions had from the past … created a concoction of everything … the anima, God and other species. From this the mind discerns those qualities that are human and are in the natural expression of his person as a man. Thereafter the man is guided into understanding the other parts of the passions … with the clear invocation that he is not these other things. Thereafter we got along a little better.

In a final analysis … it appeared to me that while I was looking for a friend in the passions … it has been looking for a pal in the mind … obviously someone who applied himself more diligently to the issues than me … but I have been learning … and I must say all those past remarks about me being a dumb-a*s were grossly exaggerated … I mean … besides those from me. As I write this … it continues to unfold … and I mustn't say more about it than what I have truly experienced. But it makes me look forward to tomorrow.