A little Yes

A big No

No idea as to day in day out. Resistance for me fairly easy. I am empowered to say no. Not too long from now saying NO is to be harder.

66 years of life have come and gone. I say YES to many things for I am a bucket with holes I expect seal themselves. Saying NO is not hard either since as a child I was loved and encouraged to be adult. I am a river flowing uphill. Yes bank and No bank and my untowardly current.

My wife, my love, my joy current suffers and my goal is using a little Yea and Big No for her healing. I steer our boat as Pilot in strange waters. How much rest is enough? How much activity too little?

Neurosurgeon says everything is now different.

How much energy will she find for healing? How do I help?

Technology signifies the transfer of the whole of human existence from the organism to the organization. Man no longer lives in an organic order. Man is accustomed to live in an organic connection with the soil, with plants and animals. The great cultures of the past were still surrounded by nature, they loved their gardens, flowers and animals, they had not yet broken asunder from the rhythm of nature. The sense of the land begat a tellurgic mysticism (Bachofen has remarkable thoughts about this). Man came from the soil and he returns to the soil. With this is connected a profound religious symbolism. The vegetative cults have played a tremendous role. The organic life of man and of human societies presented itself as a life similar to that of plants. Organic was the life of the family, of the corporation, the state, the church. Society had resemblance to an organism. The romantics at the beginning of the XIX Century ascribed an especial significance to the organism and the organic. From them comes the idealization of everything organic and hostility towards the mechanical. The organism is born, and not made by man, it is begotten by nature, by cosmic life, in it the whole is not composed merely of parts, but rather precedes the parts and determines their life. Technology tears man apart from the soil, carries him across the expanses of the world, and gives man the sensation of earth as a mere planet. Technology radically alters the attitude of man to space and to time. It is hostile to any organic embodiment. In the technological period of civilization man ceases to live amidst animals and plants, he is flung into a coldly-metallic medium, in which there is no longer any animal warmth, no warm-bloodedness. The might of technology bears with it an enfeebling of cordiality within human life, of cordial warmth, coziness, lyricism, sorrows, always connected with the emotion of soul, and not with spirit. Technology kills everything organic in life and sets it under the standard of the organization of the whole of human existence. The inevitability of the transition from organism to organization is one of the sources of the contemporary crisis of the world. It is not so easy to be torn asunder from the organic. The machine with a cold ferocity rips the spirit from its intertwined organic flesh, from vegetative-animate life. And this expresses itself first of all in the weakening of the soul-emotive element within human life, in the dissociation of integral human feelings. We are entering upon an harsh epoch of spirit and technology. The soul, connected with organic life, has proven very fragile, it shrinks back from the fierce blows which the machine inflicts upon it, it flows with blood, and sometimes it seems, that it is dead. We perceive this as a fatal process of technichization, mechanization, the materialization of life. But spirit can oppose this process, can master it, can enter into a new epoch of being victorious. This is the fundamental problem. The organization, into which the world is passing over, the organization of the enormous human masses, the organization of technical life, the organization of economics, the organization of scientific operations etc, is very burdensome for the soul-emotive life of man, for the intimate life of the person, and it begets the inner religious crisis. Elements of organization have existed since the very dawn of human civilization, just as always there have existed elements of technology, but never has the principle of technical organization been so dominating and all-extensive, always there remained much of the organic and vegetative condition. The organization, connected with technology, is a rationalization of life. But human life cannot be ultimately and without residue rationalized, always there remains an irrational element, always there remains a mystery. The universal principle of rationalization receives its just reward. Rationalization, bereft of any higher spiritual principle, begets irrational consequences. And thus in economic life we see, that rationalization begets such an irrational manifestation, as unemployment. In Soviet Russia the rationalization of life assumes forms, reminiscent of collective madness. Universal rationalization, technical organization, the spurning of the mysterious foundations of life, beget a lost sense of the old meaning of life, and anguish, and the tendency towards suicide. Man is attracted by the technics created by him, but he himself cannot be transformed into a machine. Man -- is the organizer of life, but he himself in his depths cannot be the object of organization, within him himself there always remains an element of the organic, the irrational, the mysterious. The rationalization, the technichization, the mechahinization of the whole of human life and of the human soul itself cannot but provoke a reaction against itself. This reaction existed during the XIX Century. The romantics always protested against the might of technology, the dissociating of the organic wholeness, and they appealed to nature, to the elemental foundation within man. A strident protest against technology was made by Ruskin. He did not want to reconcile even with the railroad and he journeyed in a carriage parallel to the rail tracks. The romantic reaction against technology is understandable and even indispensable, but it is impotent, it either does not decide the problem or it resolves it too easily. To return to former times, to the organic lifestyle, to the patriarchal relationships, to the old forms of the familial economy and handicrafts, to the life with nature, with the land, with plants and animals, is impossible. And indeed this return would be undesirable, for it is connected with an exploitive use of people and animals. In this is the tragedy of the position. And it remains but for spirit creatively to define its own relationship towards technology and towards the new epoch, to master technology in the name of its own ends. Christianity ought creatively to define an attitude towards the new actuality. It cannot be too optimistic. But it also cannot run away from the human reality. This presupposes an exertion of spirituality, an intensification of the inner spiritual life. Soul-emotive sentimentalism within Christianity has become already impossible. Soulful emotionality cannot bear up under the harsh reality. Indifference is possible only for the hardened, the obdurate spirit. Spirit can be an organizer, it can master the technical for its own spiritual ends, but it would have to resist itself being turned into a tool of the organizing technical process. In this is the tragedy of spirit.