Telegram
Reverence for Life
“The worldview of reverence for life grows out of accepting the world as it is. And the world shows us the repulsive within the beautiful, the meaningless within what is full of meaning, the sorrowful within the joyful. However we look at it, it remains a mystery to us.
Reverence for life gives us a spiritual connection with the world that does not depend on how much we know about the Universe.” 📚
“I come to know the mystery of the living in the only way available to a human being—by experiencing this union, not by thinking about it.
Sadism creates a need to know the mystery, yet I know just as little as before. I tear a living creature into pieces, but by doing so I destroy it, and there is nothing left. ✔️(было).And only love, in the act of union, can satisfy my desire to know the mystery. Only by loving, by giving myself to another and entering into them, do I find myself; I discover myself, I discover both of us, I discover the human being.
The passionate desire to know oneself and one’s neighbor is expressed in the saying of the Delphic oracle: ‘Know thyself.’
All of psychology grew out of this!”
Have I grown enough for that?
Questions about this article
01What does reverence for life mean as a worldview?
It means accepting the world in all its contradictions: beauty and repulsiveness, meaning and meaninglessness, joy and sorrow. This stance connects a person with living reality even when knowledge cannot exhaust the world's mystery.
02Why can love reveal living reality better than destruction?
When someone destroys a living being to uncover its mystery, they also destroy the very object they hoped to know. Love instead makes union with another possible and, through it, reveals the other, oneself, and the human reality shared by both.
03How is reverence for life connected with self-knowledge?
A person's relation to another living being also reveals the observer: the capacity to love, resist reducing life to an object, and remain with its mystery becomes a way of knowing oneself.