Necessary explanation:
The following text was taken from the book Setas para o Infinito - edition in Portuguese only - (Arrows to the Infinite). A book that was probably written in the early 1960s, where the author, Huberto Rohden (1893-1981), Brazilian philosopher, educator and theologian invites men of sensitive thinking, or for those who seek the true meaning of life, for a flight through the epics of the Universe and human drama; an invitation to a definitive inner liberation through mental discipline and spiritual wisdom.
The ordinary man, living the profanities of life, with an exaggerated tyrannical ego has only the ability to think on concrete levels; his thinking is always objectified to sensory objects, to the inebriating materialities.
They are like arrows signing in all directions and making him not knowing which ones to follow; as a rule, he wanders everywhere, given the chaos in which he lives; actually, the entire human race. With that, the man stops thinking with the right logical reason, not following the direction indicated by the arrow of his conscience.
According to Rohden, the arrows that a man encounters during his pilgrimage have a double function: that of being properly observed and of being courageously abandoned. The arrow indicates the direction to follow, which must be continued, passed, not allowing the traveller to stagnate in the middle of the path, taking him nowhere. However, the arrows to the infinite, indicate the right path of self-knowledge and subsequent self-realization.
And he concludes for man “... to have the good sense to abandon the arrows placed at the side of the path, for whoever clings to them fails in their purpose, which is to be transcendent and not immanent; it is not a reflecting mirror, but an open window giving vision to wider horizons. The arrow's mission goes beyond its present indicator idea and is realized in an absent desire, which is the goal, indicating the infinite path of human destiny”.
Cosmic Philosophy is a philosophy according to the Universe or Cosmos. It deals not only with the extensive amplitude of Universal Philosophy, but with the intensive depth that characterizes the Universe itself. It does not take any individual philosopher or school of thought as a reference, but reflects the very nature of the Constitution of the Universe, in the synthesis of the Cosmos itself, that is, the most intense unity in the most extensive diversity - the Universe in all its genuineness and integrity.
The Integral Universe - as cause and effect, as essence and existence, as soul and body, as source and channels - is the only valid model for man's thought and life. The integral and perfect man is modelled after the image and likeness of the Cosmos, One in its essence and multiple in its existences.
The One is the Infinite, God - the multiples are the finite, the creatures.
Neither the One nor the finite, when taken separately, form the great Whole of the Universe; only the One and the multiple finite - the source and the channels - when taken together, complete the Universe in all its genuineness and integrity. The Infinite of the essence is revealed without ceasing in the finite of existence. The transcendence of the God of the world appears in the immanence of the worlds of God. The Universe is the essence of existence, cause-effect, soul-body, being-acting, Infinite-finite, eternal-temporary, unmanifested-manifested, absolute-relative.
Man, this microcosm, which is a reflection of the macrocosm, cannot directly reach the transcendence of the One-Infinite - but he can reach the immanence of God's multiple-finite, which is revealed in all things in the world. God is the Divinity in his finite immanence, which is the existence of the cause in the cause itself - the Divinity is God in his infinite transcendence which is his sublimity. Divinity, as it were, becomes finite in God. Divinity “is” - God “exists”. No one can know Divinity - can only know what exists.
The Greek word “kósmos” means beautiful.
The Latin word “mundus”, synonymous with Universe means pure.
The Universe is, therefore, beautiful and pure, when taken in its genuine totality.
The more man resembles kósmos, the more beautiful and purer he is. When the man moves away from the kósmos or mundus, he ceases to be beautiful and pure. Therefore, man must become cosmic to be fully himself, beautiful and pure.
The profane man is ugly and impure. He knows only the effects, the body, the periphery of the Universe, the finite, and everything else accessible to the senses and the intellect.
The mystical man took a great step forward; he is pseudo beautiful and pseudo pure; he took refuge in God, to his soul and isolated himself. From so much love to the One (to the Infinite, God), he hates all diversities (the finite, the creatures).
The cosmic man, full of light and conscience, after completely immersing himself in the Infinite of the Cosmos and consolidating himself definitively through the experience “I and the Infinite (Father) are one”, performs a reversal movement towards the peripheries, the finite, but without leaving the Infinite; he branches through all the finite of the world, penetrating with his intense light all the darkness and penumbra of the peripheral diversities. And within his stillness, he manages to master all the hustle and bustle of the world around him.
This cosmic man lives the cause of God in all its multiple effects, he overflows his mystical experience into an ethical living, making Infinite, all finitude, illuminating all darkness and penumbra, enlivening all those destined to die.
Under his experience of being centred in God, he has the power to express in concrete form the great Abstract of Infinite Reality; he sees the transcendent of the Infinite as immanent in all finite; he sees the God of the worlds in the worlds of God.
For this reason, the cosmic man is both a philosopher and an artist because he visualizes the Infinite in all finite - which is characteristic of philosophical vision - and knows how to clothe in a finite, concrete and individual way, the one which has no form, the Universal Abstract that characterizes the artistic experience.
For him, the Truth of Philosophy is revealed in the Beauty of Poetry, if we understand “poetry” as art in general. (1)
When Mahatma Gandhi said that “The truth is hard as a diamond and delicate as a peach blossom”, he had the intuition of the Universe and man as being the Truth (hardness of the diamond) revealed as Beauty (the delicacy of a peach blossom).
Whenever Truth culminates in Beauty, philosophy is born as poetry.
The musician, the sculptor, the painter, the poet, the ethical - they are men with the ability to give concrete form to abstract reality. The intuition of universal Reality is typical of all philosophers - but the expression in concrete form is peculiar to artists. The cosmic man is necessarily a philosopher-artist, an integral man.
The painter uses paint and canvas as a means of expressing his inspiration.
The sculptor uses a block of marble, granite or other materials, or models his ideal in any malleable mass.
The musician reveals his abstract vision in the concrete vibration of sound waves.
The poet realizes the mental substance of the universe in the form of aesthetic words.
The cosmic man reveals his divine intuition in acts of human ethics, overflowing the fullness of the "first commandment" in the beneficial streams of the "second commandment", doing good to others for being good himself.
They are all beings who manage to materialize Universal Truth in Individual Beauty, for the consortium of Truth and Beauty, of knowledge and action, make them live the plenitude of life, “full of grace and truth”.
It is necessary to build a philosophy on this cosmic foundation, free from the still narrow mentality of individuals and schools, making philosophy a reflection and echo of the Universe itself.
The methods to pursue this ideal are sometimes complicated and laborious - but the goal is simple and glorious.
True philosophy aims to give man full autonomy and autocracy, in all sectors of life. It seeks to exempt him from all subjections, needs, absolute power and passions, which, for some time, are indispensable as provisional crutches, but which will be abolished when man recovers from the weaknesses of his telluric ego and reach the fullness of his cosmic Self.
This cosmic Self is not some strange element, alien to his nature, but it is his central stronghold, his inner being, his genuine and authentic I AM. What man knows, or thinks he knows consciously - his physical-mental-emotional ego, his persona or mask - are only the outer peripheries of his nature; his inner centre remains, still unknown or suspected, in the depths of his unconscious, which is the Infinite, the Absolute.
When this unconscious of the Self awakens and interposes between all sectors of the conscious ego, integrating them in its domain, then the Cosmic man is born, which is for the Telluric man just as the plant in full evolution is for the seed from which it sprang.
The Cosmic man is explicitly what the Telluric man is implicitly.
The seed, to give rise to the plant, dies as a seed - but it does not die as life - and, for potential life to spring up in dynamic life, the smallness of the seed must yield to the greatness of the plant.
Every initiation, every self-realization, supposes something like destruction, death, extinction, annihilation. The man who is not willing to die spontaneously cannot live gloriously. In this spontaneous want-to-die lies the whole secret of being able to live plentifully. Dying, or rather, being compulsorily killed - by accident, illness or old age, does not solve the problem; man must be willing to die spontaneously before being compulsorily killed. Dying relatively - to be able to live with intensity. Only in this way does man fulfil himself fully, and forever.
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1) - The Latin word “poesis”, poetry is derived from the Greek verb “poiéo”, which means “to do”, “to act”. Therefore, that word, in its scientific interpretation, origin and formation means “done”, “action”. The individual realization of a universal vision is the meaning of poetry and art, that is, beauty as a concrete manifestation of abstract truth, which is the poetry of philosophy, i.e., the philosophy of art.
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