The Philosophy of Man

On my sophomore years, Philosophy was my second fave subject next to Humanities. When we were studying the Philosophy of man, I saw how one man can change the life of the other. Man in nature is intricate, aesthetic and mysterious, who, by himself is an actor of each others' story.   
~Mash~

THE PERSON NEXT TO YOU

 ROSS SNYDER

                        Who is the person next to you?

                    You might say a name, and describe how tall he is,

                        and the color of eyes and hair.

                        But none of these things are what the person is.

                        A person is invisible activities.

            The person nearest to you is an inexhaustible sort of existence.  Nineteenths of his possibility has not yet been touched off.  There is all kind of good that is struggling to be born from way within that person.  There are also worries, fears, hates that are struggling to get themselves expressed.  At the core of every man are these inexhaustible energies.

           

Deep within this person is a great toughness for his own integrity - a great tenacity in the face of adversity.  Human nature is the most indestructible things that we know.  It has almost unlimited ability to take whatever comes to go on surviving in the midst of unbelievable difficulties and persecutions.  A person is an overpowering will to survive, to arrive at destinations.  To blossom and be - with all the spontaneity of a rose at seven o’clock on a June morning.

           

The person sitting next to you is an urge to become manifest.To become something in particular.  To emerge as a dependable structure from out the amorphous cloud of being. And then to make clear and vivid this pattern until he is significant life.

           

He is a pain to be authentic. To experience a moment of truth. To have a story and a song. 

           

He is a need to be known even as he knows himself and at a level deeper than words.

           

The person sitting next to you is a unique world of experience. Within him is constantly going on a world premiere of experiences that no person has ever had, will ever have.

           

He is a cluster of memories of the past and expectations of the future.

           

He is a whole colony of persons, people,  people met all during his life who have become inner inhabitants.  Something of these people has entered into his person forever, so that the person sitting next to you is really a community.  In that community lives still the father and the mother  of this person, the boys and girls with whom he played most, the people with whom he went to school, the persons with whom he competed; the enemies he met; all the living things of this world that came and interacted with him.  They are still deep within.

           

Each person is this world of experiences.  And when a person drops out of the experiment of man, a whole universe in which many people have been gathered is lost.

           

The person sitting next to you is a right to choose and decide, to run himself, to show responsibility in the situations of life.  He may greaten in the act of choice.

           

He has some things he can do well.  There are some things that he can do no better than anybody else in the whole world.

           

 He participates in history-making. . . even though feebly; trying to make a way for himself and his kind of people - in a world that often makes no sense at all.  History-making is like trying to swim in a tidal wave.

           

Way down, the person sitting next to you is a commitment.

           

It is covered by layer after layer of compromise, and injured hurts.  But at some point, after admitting the shortness and fragility of his life and the evil in this world, he says, “Nevertheless.”

           

There is something his one life on earth means and cares for.  But does he dare to speak of it to you?

           

He is the kind of life that can live with you, rather than just alongside.  He was destined to be permeable, rather than impervious.   He is incomplete unless from time to time, he is part of a co-persons world.  He hopes desperately for a home.  To be creative fidelity would actualize his nature as person.

           

He can live not only for his self, but also for you.  He can confront, encounter,

understand you - if that is what you want.  In turn he is to be understood.  And unless other people take time to understand him, he is thwarted from being personal.

           

The person sitting next to you is a thin darting line of awareness, playing peek-a-boo with the world, and “run-sheep-run” with eternal sleep - and ultimately losing.  And knowing that he will lose.  So all the time he is quivering sensitivity.

           

The person sitting next to you is a suffering.

           

He is working away at problems. He has fears.  He wonders how he is doing.  Often he doesn’t feel too good about how he is doing;  and he finds that he can’t respect or be a good friend of himself.  When he feels that way about himself, he has a hard time loving others.  When he doesn’t feel good about himself and finds it hard to love others, he suffers.

           

He also suffers when two desires try to lead him in different directions.  They clash against each other.  He is indecision, he is disorganized.  And in indecision and disorganization he is so close to chaos that pain becomes intense.  For it is only when energy is in motion and in pattern that we are really happy.

           

The person sitting next to you is suffering partly because he keeps repeating patterns of solving problems and of relating himself to other people that never worked too well.  But he learned them in a situation where he was very tense and somewhat fearful.  Because of that he over-learned them; they tend to be the only ways which he can use.  And so he goes on trying to solve his personal problems by using ways of feeling and attacking problems that don’t work well, but were the means that he found when he was in a state of desperate need.

           

He creates symbol worlds.  He is a will-to-meaning.  Architect of a life world.  He is constantly translating the actual world and its events into symbols within this mind and feelings. He manufactures these on into meanings.  He can become fully personal only within some community of meanings. 

           

He is a Word punctuating the agitated noise of mankind.  He listen for an answering cry in the smog of time.  Sometimes he is presence.  Available Spirit.  And who can understand why sometimes we are spirit and sometimes we are non-spirit?

           

He can never be fully understood, he is more than any description or explanation or perception of him.  He can never be fully controlled nor should be.  He is Mystery.

           

The person sitting next to you is a Sacredness which you cannot violate with impunity.

           

In the vast darkness of the non-personal world, each of us is but a faint flow, hoping desperately to find light and warmth.

           

In the vastness of vibrant space which is galaxy beyond galaxy of continuous creation,  we are an aliveness that savors its own existence, and often finds it repellent.

           

Born of micro-patterned energy, we seek to be a link in the evolution of some stream of life, but suspect that we will be forgotten by the third generation.

           

Kin of the shrub and of the animal, alive only by the grace of our immersion in an ocean of air that so far is life-giving, we aspire to cover the earth with a network of thinking man’s reverence for life, yet perhaps it will be of sick destruction.

            Let us appear to each other before we are ended.