Life

The Essential Principle is Life as sentient being – Supreme Life is Supremely Sentient Being.

Life pervades the cosmos – There is no being, and therefore no existence without sentience.

Therefore,

Praise Life if you are Christian;

Extol Life if you are Muslim;

Revere Life if you are Jewish;

Fete Life if you are Hindu;

Esteem Life if you are Buddhist;

Celebrate Life if you are Atheist;

Test Life if you are Scientist,

– in all regards . . .

Love Life if you are Alive, and always . . . Live Love.

In terms of the topic of Life and the associated blog category of Essential Principles, the pervasive reporting of individual spiritual experience across cultural and religious traditions – one that conveys to the individual an abiding conviction of immortality that transcends time and place – is enduring for the simple reason that this reporting results from direct knowledge of experiences that are singularly vivid and defy a customary understanding — at least from the vantage of those outside the custom. I have had such experience.

With respect to those who affiliate with others in a religious tradition, based on a common experiential knowledge, a key distinction should be made between custom and tradition. Custom is knowledge based on habit, which may or may not be grounded in a true understanding of experience. Tradition is knowledge based on principles, held to be understood historically by authorities of the tradition as founded in some directly experienced axiomatic truth. As a result, it is not unwarranted to remain agnostic concerning the essential validity of a customary emotional experience deemed to be transcendent, until the full exercise of essential intuition can provide such validation.

Because of the long term nature of historical tradition, it follows that any current authorities in spiritual matters may or may not be privy to the direct experiences on which their transcendental canon is based, where that initial canon may have changed with time into an amalgam of superstitious custom and truly inspired tradition, into a dogma of hybrid understanding. Thus we find the conflation of a very real individual experience of being touched by divine providence and a childlike literal interpretation of symbolically inspired scripture, bolstered and constrained against inquiry by ecclesiastical authority — fearful, tyrannical, or just plain wrong — to produce the current heartbreaking doctrine of creationism and an 8,000 year old earth.

Hence in the absence of a real knowledge of the subject, we have the need for a rigorous, axiomatic understanding, on the part of proponent and antagonist alike, that is dependent on consistency of logic, on logos, to use the Greek original for the Rational essential principle of Life; for the biblical scholar, from the Gospel of John, verse 1.1, “In the beginning was Reason, and Reason was with Theos and Reason was Theos,” where theos is the all powerful, living Principle and Principal that creates and drives everything that exists, and which is in constant communication with humankind; provided the latter party is listening, that is. Therefore, we will try to . . .

Understand Life by embracing reason as essential to solving problems, not emotion in response to existential fear.

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