So you're lost, uh? Happens a lot out here. You walk around for days, seeing things, losing your bearings, crying out for God, But He can't hear you. You can scream and scream but nobody'll ever hear you.
. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must__e passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .But anyway so Bickle said, __iracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?__ passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.He said, __ou could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there__ some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there__ have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That__ a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn__ bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn__ pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you__ start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you__ notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you__ start to wonder if somehow it didn__ get restocked while you slept. But you__ realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you__ keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you__ begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn__ explain it, you__ still need it. And you__ assume that you simply didn__ understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn__ place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You__ place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you__ come to realize you__ exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You__ worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You__ make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you__ start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you__ grow so frustrated you__ push it off this cliff.___s Mr. Kirkpatrick real?_ I asked.After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, __hat__ the neocortex talking again.
Blueprints of the Afterlife
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. . . waves of desert heat . . . I must__e passed out, because when I woke up I was shivering and stars wheeled above a purple horizon. . . . Then the sun came up, casting long shadows. . . . I heard a vehicle coming. Something coming from far away, gradually growing louder. There was the sound of an engine, rocks under tires. . . . Finally it reached me, the door opened, and Dirk Bickle stepped out. . . .But anyway so Bickle said, __iracles, Luke. Miracles were once the means to convince people to abandon reason for faith. But the miracles stopped during the rise of the neocortex and its industrial revolution. Tell me, if I could show you one miracle, would you come with me and join Mr. Kirkpatrick?__ passed out again, and came to. He was still crouching beside me. He stood up, walked over to the battered refrigerator, and opened the door. Vapor poured out and I saw it was stocked with food. Bickle hunted around a bit, found something wrapped in paper, and took a bottle of beer from the door. Then he closed the fridge, sat down on the old tire, and unwrapped what looked like a turkey sandwich.He said, __ou could explain the fridge a few ways. One, there__ some hidden outlet, probably buried in the sand, that leads to a power source far away. I figure there__ have to be at least twenty miles of cable involved before it connected to the grid. That__ a lot of extension cord. Or, this fridge has some kind of secret battery system. If the empirical details didn__ bear this out, if you thoroughly studied the refrigerator and found neither a connection to a distant power source nor a battery, you might still argue that the fridge had some super-insulation capabilities and that the food inside had been able to stay cold since it was dragged out here. But say this explanation didn__ pan out either, and you observed the fridge staying the same temperature week after week while you opened and closed it. Then you__ start to wonder if it was powered by some technology beyond your comprehension. But pretty soon you__ notice something else about this refrigerator. The fact that it never runs out of food. Then you__ start to wonder if somehow it didn__ get restocked while you slept. But you__ realize that it replenished itself all the time, not just while you were sleeping. All this time, you__ keep eating from it. It would keep you alive out here in the middle of nowhere. And because of its mystery you__ begin to hate and fear it, and yet still it would feed you. Even though you couldn__ explain it, you__ still need it. And you__ assume that you simply didn__ understand the technology, rather than ascribe to it some kind of metaphysical power. You wouldn__ place your faith in the hands of some unknowable god. You__ place it in the technology itself. Finally, in frustration, you__ come to realize you__ exhausted your rationality and the only sensible thing to do would be to praise the mystery. You__ worship its bottles of Corona and jars of pickled beets. You__ make up prayers to the meats drawer and sing about its light bulb. And you__ start to accept the mystery as the one undeniable thing about it. That, or you__ grow so frustrated you__ push it off this cliff.___s Mr. Kirkpatrick real?_ I asked.After a long gulp of beer, Bickle said, __hat__ the neocortex talking again.
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I saw the massive stone altar first begin to glow like a ruby; then it was a heart of liquid gold like a solid single-crystal chrysoprase: the gold intensified into ice-cold emerald and passed into the dark sapphire of an arctic sky; this again withdrew into a violet so deep that the visual purple of the eye itself seemed absorbed in that depth, that abyss of color in which sight was being drowned. And as this intensification of vibrancy seemed to sweep across the visible spectrum up to those ranges where energy absorbs all mass and that which can pierce the most solid is itself fine beyond all substance, so it seemed with hearing. That abyss of sound which I had been thinking of as only depth, it, too, seemed to rise or, rather, I suppose I was carried up on some rising wave which explored the deep of the height.As the light drew toward the invisible, I experienced a sound so acute that I can only remember feeling to myself that this was the note emitted when the visible universe returns to the unmanifest__his was the consummatum est of creation. I knew that an aperture was opening in the solid manifold. The things of sense were passing with the music of their own transmutation, out of sight. Veil after veil was evaporating under the blaze of the final Radiance. Suddenly I knew terror as never before. The only words which will go near to recreating in me some hint of that actual mode are those which feebly point toward the periphery of panic by saying that all things men dread are made actually friendly by this ultimate awfulness. Every human horror, every evil that the physical body may suffer, seemed, beside this that loomed before me, friendly, homely, safe. The rage of a leaping tiger would have been a warm embrace. The hell of a forest wrapped in a hurricane of fire, the subzero desolation of the antarctic blizzard, would have been only the familiar motions of a simple well-known world. Yes, even the worst, most cunning and cruel evil would only be the normal reassuring behavior of a well-understood, much-sympathized-with child. Against This, the ultimate Absolute, how friendly became anything less, anything relative.
The conscious events that we are aware of are physical events in their own right, just as much as the brain events observed in the lab by researchers. If we allow the mental its own existence as a category disjoint from the physical, we will never be able to get it back in.
Similitude of the heart is like that of a telephone operator between man and God.
When someone studies well, has a successful career, or deals with difficulties well, people think he is a wise man. However, such successes do not mean that one is wise. True wisdom is to know with the consciousness of God.
It is not solely or chiefly in virtue of the divine image that man effectively resembles God, but in virtue of his consciousness of being an image and the movement whereby the soul, passing in a way through itself, avails itself of the factual resemblance in order to attain to God.