In the chapter on the Concrete Problems of Ethics Berdyaev has a subsection, #4, on Fear Terror and Anguish. The Dull and the Commonplace. And Phantasms.
Kaiser does serve quite well as a miniature world in this respect of Phantasms. And how could this be otherwise? Hospitals are both places of deep primitive fear-terror anticus-and therefore places of magic and totemic beliefs. The Doctor and Hospital have magic power over Death. Faced with helpless shuddering and danger on all sides the patient is told the Hospital magic protects them. Berdyaev writes the first emotion Adam must have felt after the Fall was fear.
Now religion means struggle against the terror anticus. However fear's absence is a feature of the life of Paradise and humanity is dominated by fear and is so distorted by it that religion as the relation between God and Man too becomes a place of fear and in liberating man from old fears and create new fears.
Phantasms are not my fantasy and imagination -not creative and not soul raising.
Phantasms spring from passions. When a man allows himself to be possessed by morbid pride, ambition, envy, jealousy, sensuality, morbid eroticism, greed, miserliness, hatred or cruelty man finds himself in the realm of phantasms he loses sight of being and is unable to apprehend things as they really are.
This chapter ought to be read closely by those opposed to the Covid Cult. Berdyaev shows how fear in the phantasmagoric world creates a false reality. In thinking over how the Cult conquered the world we need recall what the world is. A place of false “self love.”. Why? This is correlated to the passion obsessing the person. Self love always creates a phantasmagoric reality to defend or enhance itself. Self love always seeks compensation and in so doing falsifies reality. The only way to heal from life as a phantasmagorical phenomenon is overcoming the mental state giving rise to it. Berdyaev says we must conquer self centeredness and replace this by a spiritually enlightened view of the world. “Victory over the sin of self centeredness” is unfolding in oneself the Divine image.
The word humility in the deep sense overcomes phantasms.
In my struggle to bring my wife home I battle. My humble prayer in this place of Far Western Medicine with machines and big data but few humble people in authority is release her from being chained to devices in a sterile place not her home and let her recover in her own environment.
For now I am here 20 hours of 24. I read. I think. I listen. I watch. I hold my wife. I comfort her. Taped pictures of happy moments by her on the hospital bed and with no fear work my own magic quietly. If I could I would do more than all the machines but in this City built from golden greed the machine is a cost saving and also a potent magical scientific tool. Science is the creed of our hour. Science is also a form of revealed knowledge though time bound and not timeless. SCIENCE SAYS and all believe.
Her fully vaccinated Rabbi who said a prayer in Hebrew and mentions her name for healing while masked did pay a visit while I was out. I doubt he returns a second day. The manna of the Doctors will work. As for God, well, he would smile and say I do not know but come to service. I close my morning musing with this last insight of Berdyaev-”Phantasms are not produced by the unconsciousness as such; they are always products of consciousness severed from the primary sources of being.”
Slow is good. When a book joins with us we join with the river and flow. Berdyaev can be read in much shorter forms and you gain nearly as much. Sometimes pencil in hand and relaxing chair with the philosophy book is great. Other times skimming 20 years online article by article over years that interests is better To each their own.
All good points. Trusting your wife recovers soon and completely. The hospital is no place to get well for certain.