Intellect or Logos may create a Garden, but not a City!
The creation of a garden is venial sinning and quite forgivable, as is the beaver's dam. But the creation of a city, of civilization through cephalization, is mortal sinning. A mortal sin, in religious parlance, is one which is not and cannot be forgiven. Human beings are destroyed by life in the city. In Biblical or Religious language, life in the city is living death. A city is a creation of the left side of the brain, the intellect, the sinister side or dark side. A city is a actualization of Logos, a vornado-like monster that sucks human beings into its concrete and steel internecine trap, tucks them into tenement houses and slums filled with the smells of junk and fumes from steel trucks.
Why is this? Simply because life in the world of cephalization, the intellectual world of civilization, requires inculcating the dominant conceptual paradigm by means of which people deal and relate to one another. And not only inculcating it, but adhering to its tenets. It is the conceptual World of Reality and requires a heavy involvement and the serious cooperation of intellects - or persons. In order to operate in the World of Reality, one must understand the conceptual categories and their relations to one another. For example, one must understand governors and citizens, those who make the rules and those who must follow them in order to establish the system of order. One must understand the laws, rules and regulations according to which people behave and operate. One must understand the nature of conceptual organizations designed to carry out some purpose, perform some service or provide some goods. One must understand to whom or what one must turn for certain provisions and services, already created in anticipation of one's needs.
In cephalized city-civilization human beings "become," in the deepest existentialist sense, firemen, policemen, doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants, insurance men, factory workers, miners, jewelers, automakers etc., etc. In cephalization we become "known" for what we "are." For what we "are" is the abbreviated understanding of "what we do." We become or "are" doctors by virtue of being conceived as such, an abbreviation for one who performs medical services for the sick and injured. In short order, the remembrance of the abbreviation is forgotten to the point where these individuals themselves come to hold and believe uncritically that they in fact ARE firemen, policemen and doctors etc., having forgotten that it stood for "what role they play in the conceptual paradigm, in the game. These roles and their attendant abbreviations becomes their identity, the way they are thought of, by the society at large. They no longer realize that they are only "called" John or Mary; they begin to think that they "are" John or Mary Smith. They no longer realize that they are only called Doctor Black or Mr. Jones, they now believe that "they in fact are" Dr. Black or Mr. Smith. They no longer are human beings, living beings, corporeal entities, but instead they became persons which "have" bodies, gifts to them, to these almighty miniscule arrogant points of conscious ego in the universe. They fail to realize or remember that their roles are parts they play in the contrived drama called Reality, a conceptual paradigm which is the sum total consensus of the people who inculcate, adhere to and operate according to it, without insight, without critical thought, without understanding what is actually happening to them. They become hidden behind the Veil of Maya, the fog which keeps them from the insight that this is only a game, a conceptual paradigm, an giant agreement according to which we feel we must act. They suffer the ravages of peace and slavery, never understanding the origins of their misery, in fact, their punishment. For the wages of sin are death. But not actual death, only real death, death in the world of Reality, living lives like unconsciously programmed zombies, moving like trolley cars along the lines of the conceptual paradigm already set up for them, never realizing their own limitations. They become like plants stuck in one spot, good enough because it provides the daily bread and secure sustenance. After all, we are no more than disconnected plants anyway. Oh what a harsh garden of cold concrete, wire and steel is this civilization.
And what good is freedom anyway when one has all he needs right here in this spot, in this jail, in this cell? We have become like men too long imprisoned who, upon release, not surprisingly ask to remain or even return to the security of the prison with its food, warmth and human relations. Even with its limitations, it lacks that most anxiety-producing phenomenon, freedom. As Dostoyevsky once wrote that men want mystery, authority and security and they sell their freedom for bread.
The term 'freedom' alone, as a concept, has no meaning, as Edmund Burke, the great English-Irish Parliamentarian once pointed out. "Freedom" is an abstraction which itself has no meaning. Yet, people raise their fists and their flags, and applaud "freedom" in honor of the nonsensical concept, never asking "freedom to do what?" Men everywhere impulsively jump to acclaim their freedom, willing to fight for it at the first threat, so they believe. But greater attention to the loudest language of all time, action and deed, shows just the opposite.
Almost all of us, with the exception of the rare and valuable entrepreneur, daily act to obtain and maintain whatever degree of security is within our reach. We search for guarantees through documents and contracts. We yearn for predictability in all our endeavors. We search for identity, for job labels like 'doctor.' If I should wake up in the morning without an identifying title, what would I do? How would I know where to go? What task would I be expected to perform to justify pay and my daily bread? But if I wake up and immediately realize and conceive of myself "as a radiologist", then I know what I'm supposed to do. Then I know that I must report to some radiology facility somewhere, either in a hospital or in some private office with x-ray equipment. I also know what is expected of me when I arrive, to read and interpret medical images. Ah, how simple life becomes when I "know who I am" within the context of the generally dominant conceptual paradigm called "my civilization", or "my society" or "my conceptual world" or my Reality! But once I am plugged in, secure and making good money, please don't threaten me with "freedom" again. For here I am like a bone cell metabolizing and oscillating within my lacunae, a space culled out of the bone of civilization and through whose canaliculi I receive my daily requirements..
This is civilization, analogous to an osteiod-like matrix of laws, rules, regulations, societal and social expectations in which people become embedded, awaiting only incrustation, and by means of which they will try to adapt and thrive, in one miserable spot, having sold their freedom and soul for the cowardly slavery of civilization and its promise of ease and daily bread. Like cells oscillating within bone, so does humanity suffer as it oscillates within the physical concrete-wire-steel of its cities, and the metaphysical laws, rules and regulations of its governments. This is civilization far beyond the garden. A serious case of hubris to say the least.
But the garden, the actual garden, is a different phenomenon. The garden demonstrates intellect at play, but restrained and limited, tilling the soil but not covering earth with sheets of concrete and asphalt to hold down life, building, but not sun-blocking skyscrapers of concrete and steel which replace living trees, ordering, but not entrapping man in its creation. The garden retains the smells, sounds and soul of God and Nature. And all purely for beauty and with no deference to function or expediency. The garden is God and Nature allowing the least it can to intellect, forgiving its innocent gesture against the wild and unkept growth of briar and bramble through which weak, hairless and vulnerable man can barely walk.
A garden is the order which God and Nature can still allow, tolerate, FORGIVE, because it is man's nature to create a garden as it is the Beaver's nature to create a dam. God and Nature allow each creature its own little alteration or even ruination of some small spot in deference to its nature. These are but venial sins. But cities, high civilization, concrete jungles of iron, wire and steel, iron trucks, car and bus-filled streets, crowded sidewalks and apartment houses, soot-covered buildings, collapsing old brick structures, falling and bent Anchor fences, noisy iron steeds and buses with their grease and fumes, litter, broken windows and abandoned tenement houses, these irritate God and Nature and grate upon the human soul, eat it out and destroy the human being bound and gagged behind the person, that creature of city and civilization. Ultimately their humanity becomes so deformed by adapting and adjusting to such a distorted environment that they essentially become devils - and hell literally becomes "other people." Here clients, with the help of their attorneys, devise contracts in which the defect is already implanted for the unwary signatory who promises to abide by it. So the spider snares the insect. So we become ants in the human ant-hill.
The Garden of Eden was God's gift to man. The Garden was a gift at the expense of God, tolerated for the sake of Man, that Man should reside in a place ideal to his nature. The wilderness is God's land and was the Promised Land of Moses, to which he immediately led the Jewish people upon their escape from captivity in Egypt. For Moses was the first (and last) to realize that they were enslaved, not by the Egyptian people, as some seem to believe, but by the Egyptian civilization. Cephalization and civilization, the manifestations of the False God of Logos-Intellect, are also signs of Intellect grown dominant, selfish, arrogant, demanding that its way, its judgments, replace those of God and Nature.
The creation of a Garden is a far as man should allow his intellect to go in altering the surface of the earth. Man has far exceeded this, certain that God, Nature or The-Powers-That-Be will allow the miserable gremlin to do all it can and wants to do without repercussion. The payment is at hand. Preparations for the Battle of Armageddon are being made. The conservative anti-intellectual forces of the world are growing. It is the pending universal battle between the forces of Analogos and Logos, between the forces of Intuition and Intellect, between the Actual World and the Real World which both thrive within each of us. And since Analogos is the power behind Logos, and since Analogos is "What-Man-Calls-God", then let us place our bet upon Analogos and its world of Actuality.
Let us pray. A. Iosue
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