SUBJECTIVISM January Seminar / 2006 |
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SUBJECTIVISM << back to negative Triads
Subjectivism or Negative Order
The inversion of the law of order, 3-1-2, is not disorder but order in the wrong place, which we can call subjectivism. Objective order is the pattern of what is possible and impossible. When the negative triads of order of World 96 dominate us, we take our own accidentally formed opinions to be truth and possibility itself. We assume that our subjective attitudes, which have been formed in us due to the action of our environment, are reality. What is objectively insignificant becomes most important, until we ourselves occupy the center of the universe. Unable to participate in any other will other than our own, we are undisturbed by those opinions contrary to ours because they are obviously wrong. This condition of the will is subjectivism.
Subjectivism of the personality is reflected in its attitude towards time. The personality lives either in the past or the future. It cannot live in the present for it does not exist. So it lives in a false world upon which it imposes its own false order. . It is not able to grasp the nature of time and therefore cannot picture its own death. Death is one of the most significant facts of life, obvious to everyone, yet we go no living as if there was no such thing. So we have the strange situation that the personality fears everything except the real terror, which is its complete dependence upon a perishable body.
One consequence of subjectivism is the inversion of values. The subjective personality takes the potential for the actual and the actual for the potential. We live in an unreal world. We fail to see that in order to be here and now we have to be. The personality builds about it self an unreal world, and so remains isolated from existence as well as essence. It is a condition that produces absurdities and ludicrous manifestations in the life of man and can produce disturbances in the order of higher worlds.
Here I will try to share my experience with subjectivism:
It seems that often I do not understand others, than I am in my own world of perception, of realization... in my own language. Even if I use for example same words, it seems that the meaning is different.
In contact with other people, it feels like each one speaks a foreign language, which reminds me to the building of the tower in Babel, when it was "raining" so many different languages, and afterwards there was no more understanding.
In an orchestra or a choir, this means a disconnection, a Cacophony. There is no harmony.
The choir we did have the evening of José’s birthday, was for me a beautiful example of order.
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In Rumi's famous story of the man who knocked on the door of a friend, the visitor was asked who he was and he answered, "Me." He was told to go, for he was too "raw" [khâm]. The man was then "cooked" by the fire of separation and returned a year later. Asked who he was, he answered, "Only you are at the door, O beloved." His spiritual friend then said, "Now, since you are me, O me, come in. There isn't any room for two 'me's' in the house!" (Mathnawi I: 3056-63)