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The Modern Soul and the Paradox of Freedom

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20.06.2024
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The classical man trembled at the mere thought that perhaps God does not exist. For him, the most terrifying notion was the overwhelming possibility that there might be no God. In contrast, the modern man, steeped in sin and vice, is haunted by the opposite fear: that God might indeed exist.

The modern man fears God. Contemporary thought is born from the idea that we can hide, that it is possible to establish a subjectivity rooted in concealment. Deep within our subjective, human, and deceitful souls emerges a false sense that we can hide. But if hiding is not possible, then no secret can be kept.

The all-seeing eye and the all-hearing ear make it impossible to hide, yet the modern soul is not born of openness but of concealment. Concealment enables masks, theatrics, pretension, and deception. The full range of the human soul’s complexity stems from its vices, from the transition from order to disorder, from right to wrong, from symmetry to asymmetry.

Morality once relied on symmetry, meaning every question had an answer, a symmetrical ticking between question and response, a mutual accountability born of the idea of return. Today, we live in an era of irreversibility—an age of irresponsibility. We can exist without responding to the call, the question, or the voice of conscience, but conscience itself appears as a call. This call appeals to the righteous to confront the unrighteous. It appeals to faith to counter our doubt, to joy to answer our suffering, or, inversely, to disquiet to disrupt our mechanical complacency.

Those who seek to strip us of sin also seek to strip us of knowledge. The modern soul relies on secrecy, deceit, and hypocrisy, relying on the notion that it can hide from the all-seeing and all-hearing, from the lack of a return. We shirk responsibility because we see no return; we have plunged into the abyss of endless, irreversible vice, into the asymmetrical freedom of boundless impulse.

Jean-Paul Sartre once said we are "condemned to be free." I say we are scorched by the flame of freedom, pierced by its spear. Our foreheads are split open by the sword of freedom, meaning we cannot escape it or return to necessity. We have launched forward into infinity. This irreversibility is our fate. If we could return, the pendulum of symmetry—between question and answer, between call and response—would once again swing. But we are a call that cannot be answered because the call itself is a movement toward infinity; it is endless. Infinity can only return as finitude. It is the finiteness that restores infinity, and thus, the symmetry of virtues.

Virtue is the capacity to break from irresponsibility and reach responsibility. But responsibility assumes the ticking between question and answer, between crime and punishment, between transgression and repentance. All morality is based on the symmetrical pendulum, the rhythmic oscillation between question and answer, between inquiry and responsibility, between action and reaction. Today, we are an activity that cannot return, a call that cannot await an answer. We do not even know whom we are calling because the call itself has become infinite, and the one we call has vanished due to our infinity. We can call the infinite, but the call itself must be finite. When the call becomes infinite, the infinite subject, who should respond to our call, disappears.
The modern man's retreat into concealment and the nullification of the all-seeing eye and the all-hearing ear mean that today, we find the substance of our souls not in openness but in secrecy. This secrecy is the mother of our vices. This multiplicity, this game of moving from originals to copies, from copies to mirrors, from images to reflective beings—this is the alphabet of our conscience-free existence. And yet, man has been given everything! A striking example is that the future lies within us, yet we strive to achieve it. We are divine, yet we search for God! God is within us, yet we seek Him far away.

We possess prayer and meditation through the act of breathing: each time we inhale, we meditate, and each time we exhale, we pray. Unaware of this, we invent entire practices to define what meditation and prayer are, only to discover, after long study, that meditation is the act of assimilation, where the entire universe enters us. When we inhale, we meditate; when we pray, we fly toward the universe through the act of exhalation, disassimilation.

We have everything, but we do not know it. We continuously inhale and exhale—when we inhale, we meditate, drawing the world into ourselves through the act of assimilation. When we exhale, we pray, sending the world out of ourselves. Meditation interiorizes the external world, forming our soul and psyche, while prayer exteriorizes our soul, returning the world. In the natural pulsation of meditative inhalation and prayerful exhalation, we find morality, which is based on the steady and rhythmic swinging of the pendulum. We maintain morality as long as we sustain the moral ticking of question and answer, of desire and satisfaction, of ambition and fulfillment.

Today, we are a desire that cannot be fulfilled, a call that cannot reach the one who calls. The connection between the intermittent, pausing human thought and the ceaseless thought of heaven has been severed. We have lost the connection with conscience. To revive humanity, we must restore its conscience. And to restore its conscience, we must return its sense of shame. To restore its sense of shame, we must give back its awareness of right and wrong, its sense of sinfulness.
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