Are We Missing the Obvious??

A monk of the 12th century Alanus de Insulis, in his De Incarnatione Christi states: 

"Every creature of the world is for us a book, picture and a mirror."

The Archbishob Fulton Sheen too thought in a similar line and said, " Each human being is a book issued from the divine press." One needs to read what a human being is while carefully learning each pages of the book. 

Now what happens when we read a book? We may not understand fully what the author means until we are familiarised with the context, the historicity of the text, the language and all that are involved in the making of a text. Interpretations abound. This is the reason why we have many books issued from many printing presses throughout the world.

Understandings and perspectives are too different. Is there any definitive answer to what is true? What is life? and such profound questions.

Bernard Lonergan tried to find a common ground that is operative in every human being - UNDERSTANDING. Religion cannot be a common ground because we see varieties of organised religion and varieties of religious experiences. Language can or cannot be a common ground because of the fact that there are many existing languages. Culture cannot be a common ground with the differences in culture every nook and corner of the universe. Understanding is of course a common ground because in every human being there is a structure of understanding. This consists in- 

Experience = The fact that we have seen how water boils at 100 degree celsius. It is our experience. This experience consists in merely observing the process of happening (water in the bowl, fire that heats up the water and the end result of the cold water becoming hot).

Understanding = our understanding explains our experience. This is a process prior to judgement. Here we know intuitively the truth before conceptualisation. 

Judgement = This consists in formulating what has been observed and understood and finally stating the fact in coherence with the phenomena observed. 

Now My question is Do we understand everything? It is an impossible task to understand the reality as a whole.But we can know a part of the whole.  Stephen Hawking realizes this fact. He says that it would be very difficult to construct a complete unified theory of everything all at one go (Stephen Hawking, Theory of Everything, 111). We have many fields of knowledge today. As there are many specialities, we have as many specialists. It is enough to look at the way different specialists treat the human body - we have dentists who specialize themselves in the care of teeth, the ENT specialists (ear, nose and throat), the orthopaedics (the branch of medicine concerned with injuries and diseases of the bones and muscles), the oculist (doctor who examines and treats people's eyes), general physician, etc., 


Our human body itself calls for specialization. If I want to get a hair cut, I cannot go to a tailor. Cutting hair is an art and a profession. The fact that awe are endowed with a body, no one can claim that we create unemployment. Our body and the care of it simultaneously create dignified jobs also with the possibility of the misuse of the human body. ( a diversion here - prostitution is also an undignified profession...... human body is subjected to this too..... this in turn creates the need for safety sex, the production of condoms, etc... if people contract AIDS or other sexually transmitted diseases, there again arises the need for hospitals, doctors, medicine, money, the workforce and the like). To cover my nakedness, I Need other expertise - The artisans who weave clothes, the people who bring it into the market, the tailors who stitches clothes, etc... After having mentioned the above, I need only to state one fact which definitely resonates with Raimundo Panikkar that we are all "in an interconnected web."

Do we not seem to neglect what is presented before us? Are we not missing the obvious while seemingly preoccupied with ourselves? We may not understand everything, but this does not mean that we need to give up our striving to understand. I may not understand electricity and yet I enjoy the benefits of it. I don't know how it works. But I do know this - You can cook a man's dinner with electricity and you can also cook the man. On the other hand, Sometimes it makes me wonder that "man is a great creator with the potency for great destruction."