Luke Breuer wrote: I could fill “Light of love”, “truth”, and “understanding” with my own definitions, but I don’t know if they would match yours. (My definitions largely come from what I like to call a fairly comprehensive and consistent view of the Protestant Bible, although I do not deny that some amount of truth can be found in other places, both religious and secular.) Would you be willing to flesh out what you mean with at least a few paragraphs of your own words?
The keenly sensitive and awakened soul who has fully removed his rose-colored glasses finds to his horror, and of course acceptance - if he can stomach the scene, that everywhere on earth, just beneath all the false smiles, mutual exploitation, and fine-sounding words, people are essentially cold, callous, violent, and self-centered human beings. Thoroughly immersed in and driven by the
'seven deadly sins', if you will. Hence love, in the purest sense of the word, is virtually unknown and fully lived by no one, as is the same case with truth and understanding. And those few who are in fact built to rise above it all and then go on to live a life of love, truth, and understanding are hopelessly stuck in the wall-to-wall human chaos and insanity with virtually little or no hope of climbing out of it by themselves. Hence there's a need for a perfect living embodiment, mirror, or Light of these things to appear if there's ever to be a collectivity of people who are truly and fully immersed in and motivated by love, truth, and understanding. Which is to also be fully human, fully alive, fully
'Spirit'.
Let me offer the simple point I'm trying to make here with Schopenhauer's paralleling worldview:
"Everyone who has awakened from the first dream of youth will realize, if his judgment is not paralyzed, that this world is the kingdom of chance and error, of folly and wickedness. Hence, everything better only struggles through with difficulty. What is noble and wise seldom attains to expression. The absurd and perverse in thought, the dull and tasteless in art, the wicked and deceitful in action, assert a real supremacy broken only by brief interuptions. In vain the sufferer calls on his gods for help. This irremediable evil is only the mirror of the will, of which himself is the objectification. To me, optimism, when it is not merely the thoughtless verbalizing of those who have nothing but words under their low foreheads, is not merely absurd; it is wicked. It is a bitter mockery of the unspeakable misery of mankind. To me, as to the writers of the Gospels, the 'world' and 'evil' are almost synonynous terms." (Arthur Schopenhauer)
However, I differ here with Schopenhauer in that I find that "everything better" never makes it through at all. Certainly not fully and completely, as was the case with Schopenhauer himself, good a soul as he may have been.
Biblically speaking let me offer this here: "Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates to the city. For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." (Rev. 22:14,15)
And once again and finally, I see no one anywhere entering into the
'city'. Along with a reminder here by Nietzsche that Christ came, "not to 'save mankind', but to show mankind
'how to live'." That is until he grew tired of it all and chose to go
'home'.