Travels with my Mind - part 1

Travels with my Mind (or 'Please, show a little kindness') - February 2020.

I have already, many years ago, started to write about the travels of my body, mind and soul, each travelling to different domains and to different destinations at the same time and mostly all three unconnected in space and time, but each leading or lagging the other in meaning, insight and substance. Although it was not out of body experiences, they might as well have been, being so unconnected in subject and context.
The first one being 'Rome is burning' when I visited Italy in 2012 and found it in modern day ashes and organized chaos, so to speak, after the world economic crises of 2008. It was a parody on the history of Nero who is said to have played a fiddle whilst Rome was burning during his persecution of the Christians in 69 AD. In fact, this impression and extraction is so powerful in our lives even today as we use Nero software to burn CD's.

However, what I noticed from the first article was that while I physically travelled the world, my mind was also travelling the realm of philosophy in ways I could not understand or fathom, but in ways which were exciting with new discoveries on my pilgrimage to the City of Reality - the main purpose of my blog. 
Somewhere, I knew, I would find the ransom money to 'pay for my mind and  soul' in their quest for 'The stuff reality is made of', and by implication also for my quest for truth and reality - and by purpose for who and what I am and knowing myself - indeed a life long quest.

This so closely resembles the farcical plot of 'Travels with my Aunt', a 1972 comedy film directed by George Cukor. It is thus only natural that I would use an aberration of that name as the name of this parody of 'Travels with my mind' and soul with or without my aunt.

So, I have decided to spend my holidays travelling through ideologies and philosophies and in the process exploring virtual destinations I never thought existed. I have now travelled to my favourite place at the sea named Pezula, meaning 'On top', in one of our indigenous languages and in sympathy with the song 'On top of the world':

Such a feeling's coming over me

There is wonder in almost every thing I see

Not a cloud in the sky, got the sun in my eyes

And I won't be surprised if it's a dream

Everything I want the world to be

Is now coming true especially for me

And the reason is clear, it's because you are here

You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen

I'm on the top of the world looking down on creation

And the only explanation I can find ....

My excursion today is into Existentialism - a philosophy which went cold some fifty years ago and coming into its own again in this mad world of today which is spinning out of control as during WWII.

Existentialism is quite the opposite of the philosophy of Essentialism. Essentialism assumes that our lives are governed only by what we inherently are born with and existentialism is governed only by what we experience - and that brings me to the excursion of my mind into the subject of seeing God, quite in line and in contrast with the great existentialist Nietzsche, who cried out in a sort of desperation: God is dead!

He did not express it blasphemously, but sympathetically, by taking it as a result of the secularization of religion in the Enlightenment - a movement which did not need a God. And  ... it has been valid ever since, each time mankind had fallen to its lowest ebb in moral and spiritual values, and there was this painful realization that there was no hope for us as we have killed God, and with Him, hope in our descent into the abyss if Nihilism.

In Nietzsche's words from 'The Madman':

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? ...

The essence of the 'Travels with my mind' is that I can only see God clearly if I can see Him clearly in the minds and lives of mankind. How can you and I live such that people can see God in us? I can only think of one way to do that and that is by showing kindness and love unpretentiously towards all human beings who remain human in a world which has become alien to humans, and that is the essence of the existence of God, expressed in both of the forms Essentialism and Existentialism.

Of course I also write regularly about touching the face of God, a thing I experience so regularly in my life and especially during 'Travels with my mind' and soul. In fact, you might remember my veneration and admiration of the painting by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Cystine Chapel where God and Adam reach out to touch each other's fingers.

Well ... I know so well when I see God in my fellow humans, but I know very little of how they may be able to see God in me, although there are so many ways in which one may be able to expose that.

Can I extract the reality and presence of that in my life to showcase it with humility in the world today, where we are once again killing God in this new enlightenment which has gripped the imagination and minds of mankind? 
This is a new era of secularization by globalization into a quest for a new Romantic Era, like the Enlightenment, where anything goes except what is valuable, essential and intrinsic in our own humanity or humanness - our Essentialism.

It is playing deja vu with a quantum leap into a new era moving once again from Essentialism to Existentialism as we once again move dangerously close towards that abyss of Nihilism in this refuge from reality called Millennialism.

It is like WWII without blood.