The Lambent

Humanity Itself

Written by

Lambencee

in

Body, soul, mind: To the body belongs sensations, to the soul impulses, to the mind principles.1

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

Remember,

You can not expect all humanity to see reason as apparent. We are so shortly removed from our enlightenment that we must still gather together these principles which govern our reason.

We desire activity.
We desire leisure.
We desire food.
We desire sex.
We desire procreation.
We desire companionship.
We desire community.
We desire domination.
We desire compassion.

All these desires – impulses, not gathered carefully in reason’s care, rather evolved through selection pressures fitted to survival. Therefore, to give into this desire without first committing to reason is to deny humanity’s Enlightenment through reason.

This is not to say that impulse acted on through desire for bodily sensation is of itself uniquely evil. Repression is to deny your humanity – to betray your own soul. For humanity is not segregated to reason, we are still who we are. Casting away 4 billion years of life’s evolution2 would be rather deranged. Impulse has driven us to new frontiers, to the craters and mountains upon our lone satellite. Desire will drive us farther still to new expanses beyond our current comprehension. Impulse blessed us with art, with love, with sacrifice, with glory. Without impulse, we would utterly lack that which makes us so strangely and uniquely human. One should not allow the chemicals in their brain to govern their actions. For we observe the natural consequence wrought through blind impulse, the horrors consuming as a fire unfought our so pragmatically constructed institutions. But reason tooled as a conqueror shall utterly repress the impulsive drive of desire and stamp out our dying light, casting us into the eternal night.

Let others complain that the times are evil. I complain that they are wretched, for they are without passion.3

Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or

I see in the light a transcendent humanity.
One –
Glorious collective, jointed together in our individuality.
To transcend – stabbing into what we feared was eternal night,

A NEW DAWN

One –
By which we cast off the pettiness etching such violent dispersions through our minds. To see clearly in each other’s eye the clarity of this opportunity before us. My own small part brought into focus through the endless reflection from your collective eye,

A NEW RENAISSANCE ENLIGHTENED –

By impulsive-reason.
Though abandoned by our every God, thrown without mercy into the chaotic void. Or perhaps more terrifyingly by means of our ignorance,

…we have killed him! How can we console ourselves, the murderers of all murderers! The holiest and the mightiest thing the world has ever possessed has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood from us? With what water could we clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what holy games will we have to invent for ourselves? Is the magnitude of this deed not too great for us? Do we not ourselves have to become gods merely to appear worthy of it?4

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

Let us then gather our bearings so that we may find ourselves worthy. For the swords shall be beaten still to plowshares!5 Preach this gospel of true hope! Is it not the conditions which regard our swords as worthless, not God directly?6 This now our great responsibility! There is no God nor cosmic force willing to bend our weapons for us, to redeem us from needless annihilation. We must bear the responsibility – equipping the hammer, lighting the flame, and standing before the anvil. Not to contort our swords, rather by the labor of our souls upon the anvil of progress forging the obvious choice for our next generation.

Humanity, the closest force to God we now know. Therefore, our duty must be that which necessitates the burdens of our universe and nature itself. The terrifying and yet joyous truth, we are so pitifully far from deity – wonderfully and fearfully Humanity!7 A humanity which birthed God in the clarity of impulse and through deluded reason murdered him! A Humanity which must embrace this universal chaos through transcendence. Transcendence, not to ascend our Humanity, rather to faithfully clasp to it in the light of impulsive-reason. That we might with accuracy interpret our bodily senses amidst these chaotic seas. Before us the task assigned to the Gods, We are to face Leviathan – utterly alone. Just as our ancestors, only now not deceived into believing We are aided in this endeavor. Our only force, what We muster for battle from our globe of priceless treasures, not of gold, rather the pearl of Enlightened flesh and blood8 – Humanity itself Renaissanced.

For he who values his own intelligence and the divinity within him and the worship of his excellence before all else, plays no tragic part, does not groan, does not need either solitude or much company.9

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
References
  1. Marcus Aurelius, Justin Martyr, Walter Pater, and Irwin Edman, Marcus Aurelius and His Times : The Transition From Paganism to Christianity, print (Walter J. Black, INC, 1945), 32. ↩︎
  2. Bell, Elizabeth A., Patrick Boehnke, T. Mark Harrison, and Wendy L. Mao. “Potentially Biogenic Carbon Preserved in a 4.1 Billion-year-old Zircon.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 47 (October 19, 2015): 14518–21. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1517557112. ↩︎
  3. Søren Kierkegaard, The Essential Kierkegaard (Princeton University Press, 2000), 40. ↩︎
  4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Josefine Nauckhoff, and Adrian Del Caro, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Gay Science, pdf (Cambridge University Press, 2001), 120. ↩︎
  5. Isaiah 2:4 (NRSVUE) ↩︎
  6. Isaiah 2:3 ↩︎
  7. Psalm 139:14 ↩︎
  8. Matthew 13:45,46 ↩︎
  9. Aurelius, Martyr, Pater, and Edman, Marcus Aurelius and His Times : The Transition From Paganism to Christianity, 29. ↩︎

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