Need for recollection

WE need to work this out. As persons, whether individually or collectively considered, we need to enhance our subjective selves and see to it that we truly correspond to the objective reality around us and the reality meant for us.

Since we think and reflect, we choose and love, we automatically, unavoidably create a world within us that needs to be founded and rooted on an objective truth. Otherwise we would end up living in fantasy land. What we will have in our mind would have no “fundamento in re,” no foundation in reality.

The other day, I saw some youngsters belting and crooning like famous singers. With all this frenzy surrounding Susan Boyle, Charice, American Idol, etc., there’s a kind of epidemic in singing.

It’s actually a good development. I just pray that things are put under control. I already got glimpses of singer-wannabees whose talent remained more in their mind and their intentions, but not in their voice and other natural endowments.

In short, they looked more up in the clouds, with ambitions that are unhinged, unmatched and unsupported by the relevant capability and power. It’s actually a funny situation, deserving a Simon Cowell scorn, though I would not go that far.

We have to be careful about this point. We need to be more aware of both the subjective and objective realities that govern us. And with such awareness, of course, let’s see to it that their correspondence would be as perfect as possible. Only we as persons can and should do this. The animals don’t give a hoot.

Of course, we have to understand that such correspondence is never a rigid and fixed affair. It’s something dynamic and alive, though it has its stable element. We have to know the intimate dynamic of this relationship between the objective and subjective realities, and help one another to achieve this end.

But for now, what is essential is to realize that to work on this correspondence, we need to learn the art of recollection. That is to say, we have to learn to gather all our powers and faculties together so they can be engaged with their proper and ultimate objects.

What we have to avoid is to have them scattered and often in conflict with one another, entangled with objects that, though having some validity, are not the proper and ultimate objects we should try to pursue.

This need for recollection simply indicates that our life consists of different aspects and levels that we have to orchestrate to be able to reach our final end. We just cannot go about reacting spontaneously to things, depending solely on instincts and feelings. We are meant for something much, much more than these.

Our tendency, given our fallen nature and the effects of our personal sins, is to get dispersed in our attention and to plunge into activism. In the process, we lose our interior serenity.

This loss of serenity can lead us to to bad consequences—loss of self-control and dominion over things, proneness to temptations, vices and sins, disorder in our sense of priority, etc.

For Christian believers, the source and end of their consciousness should be God. This is simply because the Christian faith teaches that God is the creator of the whole universe, including us, and continues to govern us intimately in our hearts, thus, a living relationship between God and the believer.

We need to be focused always on him. Straying from him would be to stray from reality. It would lead us to make our own reality and our own world, with consequences that sooner or later will always be bad for us.

For Christian believers, reality is not simply the items that we see or hear or even feel. Reality is a given, not made by us. It has to be discovered, not invented by us. But it has to enter deep into our being, since we have a subjective mode of existence.

And ultimately the one who gives the reality to us is God, since things just don’t break into existence on their own. There is an ultimate cause—God.

This human need for recollection will always bring us to the realization of the existence of God, with the corresponding rights and duties towards him.

We have to work this skill out, helping one another, being patient and understanding with one another, since the road to it, aside from being narrow, is strewn with difficulties, traps and snares.