I forgot to add ... finally something beyond mechanistic scientism.
--- In [email protected], "emptybill" <emptybill@...> wrote:
>
>
> Liberty . . . is limited to the extent that it is relative, but it is
> really liberty in so far as it is liberty and not something else.
>
> What then is liberty considered independently of free creatures, or of
> the particular case of a free creature? It is the consciousness of an
> unlimited diversity of possibilities, and this consciousness is an
> aspect of Being itself. To those who maintain that only a given
> experience of liberty such as that of a bird is concrete, and not
> liberty in itself (which in their view is no more than a purely mental
> abstraction), the reply must be made, without it being necessary to
> deny the existence of abstraction in the reason, that liberty in
itself
> is an immutable essence in which creatures may either participate or
not
> participate, and that a given experience of liberty is only an
> "accident." Defined in positive terms liberty is the possibility
> of manifesting oneself fully, or being perfectly oneself, and this
> possibility (or this experience) runs through the universe as a real,
> and hence concrete, beatitude in which animate beings participate
> according to their natures and their destinies; the animate Universe
is
> a being that breathes,and that lives both in itself and in its
> innumerable individualized constituents; and behind all this there
> subsists the ineffable liberty of the Infinite . . .
>
> When a bird escapes from its cage we say that it is free;we might just
> as truly say that liberty has erupted at a particular point on the
> cosmic shell, or that it has taken possession of the bird, or that it
> has manifested itself through this creature or that form; liberation
is
> something that occurs, but liberty is that which is, which always has
> been and always will be. The prototype of all liberty, and the reality
> expressed in every particular or "accidental" phenomenon of
> liberty, is the limitlessness of principal or Divine activity, or the
> consciousness God has of his All-Possibility.
>
> Frithjof Schuon
>
>
.
>
