OPEN YOUR EYES AND LOOK!!!!!

The "displacement of attention" of which Bergson speaks, as in the case of Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenological reduction”, is in fact a conversion: a radical rupture with regard to the state of unconsciousness in which man normally lives. The utilitarian perception we have of the world, in everyday life, in fact hides from us the world qua world. Aesthetic and philosophical perceptions of the world are only possible by means of a complete transformation of our relationship to the world: we have to perceive it for itself, and no longer for ourselves.

-Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, pg. 254.

This is just not a problem of philosophy, but this can also be applied to the things of God. Why when something polemical comes up on the religious side of the Internet, everybody comes out of the woodwork to give an opinion? But when something more important comes up, no one has anything decent to say. It is because we are not looking at theology in the correct manner, we do not perceive it as something for itself, but rather as something for ourselves. I am just as guilty as everyone else, but at least sometimes I realize it.

Just go outside and stare at the clouds. It’s better for you anyway.

First of all, the bright, clear color of the sky, and all it holds within it, the stars that wander here and there, and the moon and the radiance of the sun with its brilliant light; all these, if now they had been seen for the first time by mortals, if, unexpectedly, they were in a moment placed before their eyes, what story could be told more marvelous than these things, or what that the nations would less dare to believe beforehand? Nothing, I believe; so worthy of wonder would this sight have been. Yet think how no one now, wearied with the satiety of seeing, deigns to gaze up at the shining quarters of the sky!

…A truth wondrously new is struggling to fall upon your ears, and a new face of things to reveal itself.

-Lucretius, De Rerum Natura