Below is the first excerpt from The Quest for Completion.
An Attribute of Human Life - Our Finite Condition.
One has to admit that the stuff of which we are made existed even before our birth and persists in some form after our death. Beyond the physicality of matter, is there yet part of us which is infinite? The physical universe itself whether it expands or collapses, whether it has a beginning or an ending, is the only "place" we can physically look for our answer. I understand in the exercise of the human imagination there is no such limitation but try using your imagination which is not yet a figment of the physical universe we live in and continue to explore. I for one believe myself capable of the exercise of the creative mind subject to a rigorous discipline.
That which ends is finite. In our common experience that which lives and has life is finite. In the human condition I have a beginning, my birth, and thus the period of my non-existence ends. Likewise, I have an end, my death, and thus the period of my existence ends.
In my lifetime, I will experience and have experienced the end of finite relationships, parent-child, teacher-student, employer-employee, husband-wife, et cetera. One could conclude that the essence of the human condition is its limitation in time and space. While it is sometimes in jest that we say mememto mori, it is a reminder to make much of time before we go and an encouragement to seize the day (the jest part is the celebratory posture as opposed to the serious pursuit of a serious object for which pursuit our time on earth is indeed short).
A reasonable position about the non-physical or spiritual domain is that it can not matter since humans can not by definition experience something outside of the human condition and experience. Does a thinking person leave open the possibility of "non-existence" without limitation by time and space? It would seem not. Life as we know it is both defined and limited by time and space while the explanation of its existence at all is rooted in the practical and evolutionary realities of chemistry and physics.
To hit the nail on the head, our finitude is in human terms our mortality. When someone speaks to us of immortality of the human soul, it is spoken in terms of aspiration or hope for a "life" after death. This in spite of the conclusion that no mere mortal by definition can trump death. The revival of one who has died while it suggests a re-habitation of the body by the person wrongly presumed dead that person has actually not died. Why? Death can only be said to have occurred when the revival is no longer accomplished or to be accomplished.
Part of an enhanced state of our finite existence is our awareness of our finitude. However, this awareness, this human consciousness, leads inexorably to the contemplation of its opposite. The mere posit of the finite is the posit of the infinite.
In contemplating a time before I existed and after which I no longer shall exist, I think of the period of my non-existence as joinder with infinity, that which does not end and is outside of time and space. I do not mean this in terms of persistance or transformation into something else of the physical molecules of my body. Our humanity is in essence captured as I have said by this one quality, finitude. Regardless, in the germ of our nature as humans is the prospect of what is beyond the finite, beyond physicality.
So this is the jumping off point, the spiritual frontier.
RJH Saturday, November 22, 2008.
Edited by RJH on Wednesday, December 31, 2008, Thursday, January 01, 2009, Friday, January 02, 2009, Saturday, January 03, 2009, Tuesday, February 03, 2009.
©2011 by Richard J. Hilber with all rights reserved.
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