Human Experience

When the heart is still, we continue to think, to try to unearth the motifs that lie beneath the padding of experiences. These experiences are of everyday living. They are a constant feature of perception. We live in experience. But are we experience? Yes and no. The way the experience affects us directly is the part of it that makes us who and what we are. But the experience as conceived separately from us is not us. This is because firstly others have the same experience in their own daily living. One experience, like say shopping for groceries at the store, may be encountered by more than one person. The way it affects us would definitely be different from the way it affects someone else.

Experience may be pleasurable or not. There are four elements for pleasurable experience, for Aristotle. The first is that there should be a congruence between the object of pleasure and the faculty for experiencing the pleasure. The second is that the higher the purity or degree of the object of pleasure, the higher the pleasure. The third is that the higher the acuity of the faculty of pleasure, the higher the pleasure, and fourth the higher the inexhaustibility of the object of pleasure, the higher the pleasure. Pleasure is God's actual activity, and the pleasure we humans feel is but a share in God's pleasure. 

God is Understanding understanding understanding. This level of thinking or intellection, of the divine thinking about himself, is the supreme good possible. There is no higher good than this. God allows us to share in this good through what is called rational contemplation. Rational contemplation is human understanding understanding divine understanding, and because it is a pleasure, this activity, rational contemplation, varies directly with the four aforementioned factors. Firstly, the more our intellects are disposed to contemplating the divine, the more pleasure we derive from it. Secondly, the more it is the divine we contemplate and not some erroneous reality, the more we experience pleasure. Thirdly, the more our contemplation is accurate; in other words, the more there is a congruence between the object of our contemplation and the faculty of such contemplation within us, the more pleasure we experience. And fourthly the more we realize how inexhaustible God is, the more we derive pleasure from contemplating him. 

So, as people trained in philosophy or religion or both, we have a higher faculty for rational contemplation. We also are better positioned to experience a congruence between the God we contemplate and the faculty we use in contemplating him. Thirdly, we experience greater joy than most because we more easily appreciate the inexhaustible nature of God. Furthermore, we are better disposed to turn our sights to higher order pleasures, such as the divine intelligence; in other words, we are better disposed to value God. "O God you are my God, for you I long" (Psalm 63:1). The entire 63rd psalm indeed describes how the trained soul longs for God, thirsts for the divine.

God's love is a desire that sets everything in motion. We have already mentioned in this regard how it is that scholars say that God loved us into existence. We are fashioned out of the eternal love of the Father for his son, set in motion by the Spirit. God is a just God, a loving God, a creator spirit. I love God. You should too. God fills us with love and with his spirit. The purpose driven life is a life lived in God as holistically as possible. God is the beginning and end of love.