FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- Does the body move the spirit or does the spirit move the body?

FRAGEMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY – Does the body move the spirit or does the spirit move the body?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007

“He that loseth wealth, loseth much; he that loseth friends, loseth much; but he that loseth his spirits loseth all.”

Spanish Maxim

Many of us are of such an age that we were born and matured during the middle of the last century, a century in constant war and rebellion in which more than 100 million immortal souls perished on battlefields, in concentration camps, or were the innocent victims of collateral damage.

We have seen Nazism and Communism rise and fall; totalitarian dictators come to power and wreak havoc on everything they touched, and we have seen misguided republics attempt to put their stamp on people of other persuasions, all equally damaging to our individual as well as collective soul

We have seen democracy return to Western Europe and be born again in Eastern Europe, while the rest of the planet has remained in various states of war and deprivation, where dictators come to power by the will of the people having tired of the exploitation by countries such as the United States who installed puppet regimes for economic advantage. I have seen this first hand in my working life in South America.

Then there are the sins and transgressions of lingering colonialism that still play havoc with South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East.

History has not been kind to the native and cultural peoples across the globe of this small planet.

Poland disappeared from the map of the world in the nineteenth century; was born again after WWI, only to be overrun in WWII first by the Germans and then the Russians. Descendents of the Portuguese oligarchy still dominate Brazil while the Native Brazilian Indians remain the peasant class. The jury is still out on Argentina. This is also true to various degrees throughout South and Central America. Five hundred years of colonialism leave permanent scars on the national psyche.

Even in the United States Native Americans are still treated as second-class citizens so the US is hardly one to cast the first stone.

Look at the legacy of the midget nation of Belgium and its colonial exploitation of the Belgium Congo, a nation larger in area than most in the world, but still poor although rich in natural resources with a population the majority of which does not make a dollar a day.

The world’s attention is on the Sudan and Darfar and the tragedy of that civil war in which millions of displaced, dying and starving people are casualties in a forgotten land. Someone dies in Africa every five seconds from malnutrition, AIDS or warfare. When relief is received, it seldom gets to its intended destination as corruption reaches yet another level. Too often rapacity has no specific color or conscience.

Meanwhile, religion has entered the fray on every continent of this planet taking to militant and military means to bring about what is perceived as change and social justice.

Fear and foreboding has become the diet of a global society that has lost its way. Its moral compass is faulty, and now it believes that the only way for peace is to annihilate all nonbelievers, as there is little room for differences.

The case can be made that I am speaking exclusively of fanatics of Islam, but the same charge is equally true of fanatics of all religious persuasions. Fear finds these fanatics feeling justified in attempting to annihilate those that would harm them, thinking that those of such a persuasion think differently than they do when they think and believe the same. They are both equally without a guidance system.

We have seen China in the short span of twenty years move from Godless communism to Godless capitalism combining communism with capitalism as the diet in its future quest for superpower status, believing that a high standard of living is the ultimate in spiritual fulfillment.

Have they failed to see what has happened to the lone superpower and the richest and most progressive nation of the world?

The United States has moved beyond a transcendental spirit guiding it to a handheld gadget to take its mind off the fact. Indeed, it would appear the US would rather solve the problems of the world in nation building than face its own, a common psychological ploy of a schizophrenic personality.

The world has enthusiastically embraced technology as its god seeing no limits to what science can do as it solves the mysteries of the universe. But it is not science and technology that makes us human, but regard for and connection with nature and each other that does.

We spring from the earth and go back into it as a natural phenomenon called a life span, but our immortal spirit lives on through our family and friends and through our common connection to something surreal, beyond our language and comprehension that connects us all into one race and one nationality and one common soul that goes on for eternity.

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Dr. Fisher's latest book is "Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).