As
someone once said: Jesus
Christ did not come to make bad people good, but to make dead people alive.
Is
it true? I would say definitely yes, only because we need to be alive to be in
relationship with Life! And only when we're truly in relationship with Life, we
can be aligned with the good, the true, and the beautiful.
But
most people are contracted from Life, maybe not fully dead but half-dead. There
are moments of vividness, but these are often conditioned on worldly successes and
pleasures. And once those conditions close up, the dread and anxiety
can easily consume one's outlook.
Which is probably why culture today is easily seduced under some mass formation psychosis, as posited by Mattias Desmet. In the name of safety and control from dread and anxiety, society creates more haphazard rules and norms which in turn reduces human bonds, spontaneity and generosity. This results in an ongoing frustration and aggression that goes unvented—looking for a scapegoat of the Other—while placing its faith in the so-called managerial experts in power.
As Desmet says, “Why is mankind so hopelessly seduced by mechanistic ideology? Partly because it's under the influence of the following illusion: that one is able to remove the discomforts of existence without having to question oneself at all.” Boom, mic drop!
Further exasperating this human condition is today's digital and atomized culture. Many of my colleagues report zoom fatigue, not always aware of the fact that it takes a lot of energy to be present to someone's absence. Our minds are tricked that we are together, but our bodies know better. The digital world creates a simulacra of communal fakery on a superficial level, where instinctually we know it is not embodied.
Which is why I don't believe AI will truly ever catch up to us on a deeper level; however we're doing a pretty good job allowing it to seize us with our lack of self-awareness.
If people only knew how precious it means to be a human being, much like Eve Keneinan:
What is a human being? A human being is neither a free-floating autonomous self mysteriously stuck to a physical body that can contradict who that self "truly is"; nor a soulless, will-less mechanical body that for some reason produces the useless illusions of freedom and thought; nor a mere brute animal sunk into mere nature; but rather a being who in her being stands open to What Is; a being who knows beings as true, who loves them as good, who is pierced by them as beautiful; a wholeness of essence and existence, of soul and body, who faces other persons as a person, whose being is to be both a who and a what; a being of seeing and saying, who sees the intelligible eidetic structures of reality and who bespeaks these in language; who is open to wonder and awe and the mystery of Being; a being who chooses and acts within her freedom to be; a being who is finite, fallen, broken being; who is infinitely precious; who is an image of God.
As Christ was the Truth, he was also a human being—and only a human being can truly be consciously alive! But in order to be alive, we need not place our attention on the things that deaden us, but allow our relationship to these things to die within us so we can see clearly.
I've been reading this great book on Tantrik Shaivism, where the author makes this direct point: “Some people, of course, don't know they're on the path. either they are still accumulating enough pleasure to realize that accumulated pleasure don't lead to fulfillment, or they are still in the process of accumulating enough suffering to motivate themselves to seek a different paradigm.”
The problem is it takes a lot of courage to seek a different paradigm all together, and not just replace one belief system for another. To give up the control that has either falsely externally manufactured for us, or internally allowed to rule us. All that needs to happen is that it really needs to be seen as it truly is. Everything needs to be seen. Everything wants to be seen—to be seen alive.