One of the many passages that held interest for me -
‘Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?’
‘Hush,’ he said sternly. ‘Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind – ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind- is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakable remains.’
‘But there is a real choice after death? My Roman Catholic friends would be surprised, for to them souls in Purgatory are already saved. And my Protestant friends would like it no better, for they’d say that the tree lies as it falls.’
‘They’re both right, maybe. do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both. And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities. What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself: and that ye can watch them making.’
A state of mind does become one’s imprisonment or one’s paradise. I am one of the only ‘believers’ left in my school’s philosophy major – I am surrounded by a sea of atheistic and agnostic existentialists who forget that even Nietzsche laments the lack of a need for God, and overlooks the necessity of faith or admittance of the unknown for any major thinker. Arguments can be built and doctrines can be followed, but what really exists beyond all of our conjecture is not perceptible or fully understandable to us – it never will be and I do not think that its inability to be discerned was ever an accident, given the assumption that an underlying purpose does exist.
I am satisfied in what C.S. Lewis said through his Scottish Ghost character – I am satisfied with watching others make the choice and perhaps that interest is what draws me into psychology. I like to fiddle with statistical relevance every now and then – I like to see numerical trends, but a bit of the mystery is still there, a few spaces left for margins of error, for bits of the uncertain and present anomolies that defy the results. I am interested in human fallacy, ultimately, and its effects on the individual and group, the universe.
I am left to wonder, then – Do we have the power to impact the universe or does the universe hold the greatest authority (with whatever else controlling it) and impact us?
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