So first of all, I have a soft spot for Chesterton and the Distributism that he and Hillaire Belloc devised, which is kind of a third way system in between capitalism and socialism that incorporates Catholic social teaching.
Second, I find myself in a kind of agreement with Chesterton. It's a similar argument to the one Stephen Tyman made in
A Fool's Phenomenology:
Tyman Wrote:You fancy you have chosen, then? And you seek to serve the Other? First, beware that the Other is not a subtle projection of the self! Too often it turns out to be so.
When we love another because we identify with that other, we are placing a condition on that love. It is not easy to love the things that resemble you, indeed, but it is even harder to love the things with which you don't identify at all, that are alien and other. That is real, unconditional love: not to love that which is the same, which is comprehensible, which elicits or reflects that which you love within yourself, but instead to love that which is wholly and categorically different, which does not reinforce your best concept of selfhood.
However, I think it is possible to love oneself. The problem is Chesterton's rather narrow view of the self as just more or less the outer personality. What he doesn't seem to grapple with is the extent to which we are strangers to ourselves in third density, and therefore the priority of relating to the self in a similar way that he conceives of relating to different others. His Catholicism or some other philosophical limitation appears to require him to reduce all the spiritual meaning of love to outer behavior and surface thinking, and like most Catholics (sorry, but it also applies to the broader definition of catholic as "universalist") he insists that we construct that matter in his way and his way only, almost on quasi-empirical grounds. That the kind of unity described by Besant must go deeper than this surface, and that he might have to reckon with a denser reality than what scripture can describe, seems to elude him.
It's only a person who thinks we're all ultimately separate selves to whom the adjective "selfish" could have no connotation but unqualifiedly pejorative. Besant's insight would require him to think more liberally and fluidly about the self, but Besant's view doesn't emphasize how much accepting we must accomplish if we are to apply that approach in third density. However, if you cling to the concept of the individual as irreducible, then Chesterton's admonition to love the other qua other is wise indeed. You can polarize via either perspective; it just goes to show that perspectives have blind spots built in.
The Ra material has never been stated as truth. But is rather a tool, like bread crumbs leading the seeker back onto the path.
I also like what you've said Jeremy. I've never read there work. So I can't input.
The misunderstanding about self-love is probably just religious/cultural conditioning, which everyone falls prey to some degree or another.
If you take a step back and just examine the concept of unconditional love, it by definition has no conditions, and thus includes love of the self and love of the others.
(01-24-2018, 03:53 PM)Infinite Unity Wrote: [ -> ]The Ra material has never been stated as truth. But is rather a tool, like bread crumbs leading the seeker back onto the path.
I also like what you've said Jeremy. I've never read there work. So I can't input.
There is a philosopher comedian named Robert Anton Wilson who did me the greatest favor anybody could ever do: he taught me how to free myself from the reflexive need for certainty, for one model that can explain every single phenomenon. Models are perspectives, ways of reducing reality to a subset in order to make it intelligible for a purpose. But because they are limiting, you must not commit the cardinal sin of mistaking the model for the phenomenon it describes. The map, as Korzybski once said, is not the territory.
A standard reaction to the Law of One from such highly individuated beings as those existing within the human race is typically violent opposition and great disappointment. Furthermore, the nature of duality/non-duality is at once so fundamentally paradoxical that the linear-thinking being will struggle to grasp it, and proceed to pick a side, either for or against, when in fact this only serves to confuse the point which is, in essence, inarguable.
And if it were words which caused this conflict in philosophy to begin with, then perhaps I am a fool to try and clarify it with yet more words. Words are not truth, and the thoughts born of words cannot grasp truth.
Creator knowing itself sounds selfish indeed (from this perspective). Or rather narcissist - the same as
the myth of Narcissus, who fell in love with his own reflection. Chesterton's emphasis is on transcendence of Creator (separation is real) because it's on the side of unselfish love - as opposed to emphasis on immanence and introspection as he sees it in Eastern religions and Western offshoots in teosophy.
Quote:Love desires personality; therefore love desires division. It is the instinct of Christianity to be glad that God has broken the universe into little pieces, because they are living pieces. It is her instinct to say "little children love one another" rather than to tell one large person to love himself. This is the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity; that for the Buddhist or Theosophist personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea. The world-soul of the Theosophists asks man to love it only in order that man may throw himself into it. But the divine centre of Christianity actually threw man out of it in order that he might love it. The oriental deity is like a giant who should have lost his leg or hand and be always seeking to find it; but the Christian power is like some giant who in a strange generosity should cut off his right hand, so that it might of its own accord shake hands with him. We come back to the same tireless note touching the nature of Christianity; all modern philosophies are chains which connect and fetter; Christianity is a sword which separates and sets free. No other philosophy makes God actually rejoice in the separation of the universe into living souls. But according to orthodox Christianity this separation between God and man is sacred, because this is eternal. That a man may love God it is necessary that there should be not only a God to be loved, but a man to love him. All those vague theosophical minds for whom the universe is an immense melting-pot are exactly the minds which shrink instinctively from that earthquake saying of our Gospels, which declare that the Son of God came not with peace but with a sundering sword. The saying rings entirely true even considered as what it obviously is; the statement that any man who preaches real love is bound to beget hate. It is as true of democratic fraternity as a divine love; sham love ends in compromise and common philosophy; but real love has always ended in bloodshed. Yet there is another and yet more awful truth behind the obvious meaning of this utterance of our Lord. According to Himself the Son was a sword separating brother and brother that they should for an aeon hate each other. But the Father also was a sword, which in the black beginning separated brother and brother, so that they should love each other at last. (Chesterton)