The Aloneness of Life by Dustin Pickering

According to Oxford Reference, passion is “derived via the Latin passio from the verb patior (pati, passus sum), ‘to suffer, endure, resign ...’” This is the thing we celebrate in embarking on life’s ultimate journey: that of choosing a profession. Often in doubt, others will suggest we “pursue our passions.”  However, the word comes to mean that which consumes you, energizes you, and develops your character. It is clear that the happiness in a thing or objective is derived from the endurance of passion. Passion spurs the mind and sparks curiosity, emboldening joy and effort at the same time. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi writes in Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, “Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times — although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.”  Passion is what engages your attention and focus. The word evolves from invoking depth of suffering and endurance to suggesting something that grants life purpose and meaning.

          However, for my own experience I find that enduring passion is limited. Merely enduring until the moment releases one suggests that passion engages like a job where you wait through the clock until quitting time: pleasure is derived from release, not the process. It is as if to say the circulation of blood is more important than the blood itself when both are integral and necessary to the other. Yet how does blood derive its own motion? How can passion derive the moments it endures?

          The spark that initiates the fire is analogous to the moment of conception, whether of an idea or a being. The purity of an act that initiates! Yet we dirty our hands and minds with tosspot considerations. Such makes passion the fire of our essence. However, such a spark is tedium. Often initiating a work is the trickiest part of accomplishment. To bring a culture to life, to shape its existence, is an act of passion: it is thus that man is a useless passion. In Sartre’s terms, the subject derives the goal from futility. Both roads, the one taken and the one less taken, lead to emptiness.”Man is in anguish,” lamenting the gift of freedom that comes from a teleological gap.

          There is no such thing as “nothing” as we conceive it; rather, there is a flux of energies and forces, a quantum vacuum, at the crux of life’s origins. From these forces in continual strain of motion emerges matter. The Biblical origin story states, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” The Gnostics believe the material world is evil and must be transcended. Is it perhaps that God, as divine legislator and unity of subject and object, is also the organizing principle of life? Earth, conceived as material reality, is mediated by the Lawgiver and His legislation. Perhaps it is that the Spirit of God is the principle that guides reason and order. The Demiurge, or brick in the system, is our human reason perceiving slowly. Flux and order divine utility out of recognition. Recognition occurs when patterns are in sync with the understanding. Plato writes, “We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.”

          Cognitive scientist Paul Thagard says emergence “[…] occurs when a whole has properties that go beyond the properties of its parts, because they result from the interactions of the parts.” Although Thagard’s cognitive philosophy discards the idea that consciousness is a “thing” composing the entire universe, is it not possible according to the definition of emergence that life as we understand it develops as a cognitive process, that is: through dialectic? Charles Hodges writes in Systematic Theology, “The progressive character of divine revelation is recognized in relation to all the great doctrines of the Bible... What at first is only obscurely intimated is gradually unfolded in subsequent parts of the sacred volume, until the truth is revealed in its fulness.” God is declared as Alpha and Omega, therefore God must return to Himself in order to complete His existence. This interiorized ‘within’ state of God-consciousness is embodied by a World Spirit. While the Christian view suggests the Bible is God’s revelation entire, human interpretations vary over different stages in history. The perennial wisdom that constitutes life is nevertheless unchanging until new information is introduced.  

          Hence history is cyclical yet the body of knowledge we entertain only offers a piece of the full human story. It is not so much that God’s nature is hidden and only revealed through the Bible alone, but our distance from the Creator obscures our understanding— shadows deepen the depths. The human tendency is to individualize God in order to bring Him to earth. In many ways, this humanizing of God suffers from incompleteness due to the breach created by Original Sin. St. Augustine writes, “Could I enjoy doing wrong for no other reason than that it was wrong?” Erasmus also indicates that sin is written into life, “Given a choice between a folly and a sacrament, one should always choose the folly—because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to god and there’s always the chance that a folly will.”

          Passion then comes from the breach between God and humanity, our own limitations in relation to the anguish of the eternal reaching toward us. This aloneness of life is reflected in our passions.