Arquivo para December 5th, 2017
Desert and contemplation
05
Dec
Among the difficulties of modern man is contemplation, so he wants to make everything 
smooth, everything polished, without pain, without blemish, without risks and without diseases, but the remedies and vaccines, in general, are an attenuated disease, that is, it is part of nature.
We want nature in our image and likeness, and we do not allow it to go its way, so we feel in a desert that we ourselves have built, not to be confused with silence and the “desert of the soul,” perhaps an improper name, for contemplation.
But there is a desert of existential emptiness, of nothingness that we seek in the society of consumption, sterile religiosity or idealistic philosophy, a void that is not a silence.
Contemplation is just the opposite, and clarifies the thinker Byung-Chul Han, in the Society of Fatigue, the pursuit of “active life” has become opposed to contemplative and then it is a desert full of things whose real existential meaning is questionable , precisely when we are in hyperactivity, social and non-psychic disease, is that we are in the void.
Contemplation demands something beyond pure imagination, one must see “with the eyes of the soul”, see beauty in seemingly imperfect nature, and for this it takes some form of belief to hope for the future.
Thomas Merton, a materialist converted to Christianity who became a great mystic, said: “It is faith, not imagination, which gives us supernatural life; faith justifies us; faith leads us to contemplation.”
Contemplation is not passivity, therefore, but attentive listening beyond the senses,
