Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

especially the paradoxes within them — is our primary spiritual practice.

That there is, within human experience, ideas that might resolve the paradox we encounter in the universe, collectively referred to as the mountaintop experience.

That peace and the search for peace is our primary task in the world.

It seems like none of these things could ever be proven. So people either believe them or they don’t. Maybe seeing from eternity will show us that good eventually triumphs over evil and all the problematic things in life have been worth it, for the sake of the end result. But maybe it would be telling us that the ‘harmony’ of the universe must always include the cruelty and evil of the world. In the second case, it sort of undermines our efforts to solve the world’s problems. It undermines our efforts for peace. In a similar vein — sometimes people say we are part of nature. But sometimes they say we are separated and need to find our way back. Sometimes everything is sacred, sometimes nothing, or sometimes the world is a mixture and we must decide on whether we are going to acknowledge the sacred and reject the profane.

To get some clarity on these concerns, I want to take each of the topics outlined above and unpack them, to see where they might lead.

The Phenomenological View

I have included phenomenology as a further truth-seeking concept. There have been inklings

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