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C P 1:584 “But how is it with you, my Consciousness? Would you think it was reason enough for the creation of heaven and earth that it put you, or any other individual, into this condition of working for your living?”
First, we can situate Peirce as he was during his lifetime. He was born into a privileged status. He was the son of a Harvard Professor of Mathematics. He lived in the comfort of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was clearly brilliant and generally difficult. His character traits included a taste for conflict and an extreme distaste for authority.
He combined theological bravado, aristocratic pretension, and intellectual impatience.
As life schooled him and he became a public intellect, more of his soul became apparent. He had a personal relationship with Consciousness. And as his words suggest, he questioned the assumption that we must engage in working for a living.
At ease in an environment of Puritan ethics, Peirce revealed an iconoclastic sweep more in tune with Whitman than his father’s academic peers.
As time has passed, the question Peirce raises become more and more germane. What are we to be doing? Why are we here? Consciousness clearly has room for helping, caring and creative endeavor. But it suggests we are free to choose how we live. And that we have a life beyond work.
Peirce was familiar with stories in Genesis that record the fallen nature of humankind. He knew the edict that we work rather than simply enjoy the bounties of Eden. He is not a Calvinistic proponent of abject sinfulness. He grew into a quite generous notion of who and what we are. And how we should serve.
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We now have two major forms of work. What used to be called sweat work, done to support and maintain the society in which we live. And work which is deemed a privilege. Work which one must have college and graduate training. Prestige work.
Heaven can only have been created as an act of love. Love can only manifest in Souls who have the freedom to choose. Freedom creates the profusion of stories that are the information that fuels the development of the Cosmos and its inevitable growth. The realm of Heaven is where the unification of Souls is normative. The Cosmos is the field where Unconditional Love remains the goal and where the freedom of Souls plays out.
The creation of heaven and earth was never to make work the ascendant endeavor of life. It was always to build communities based on unconditional love at every level.
First, we can situate Peirce as he was during his lifetime. He was born into a privileged status. He was the son of a Harvard Professor of Mathematics. He lived in the comfort of his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was clearly brilliant and generally difficult. His character traits included a taste for conflict and an extreme distaste for authority.
He combined theological bravado, aristocratic pretension, and intellectual impatience.
As life schooled him and he became a public intellect, more of his soul became apparent. He had a personal relationship with Consciousness. And as his words suggest, he questioned the assumption that we must engage in working for a living.
At ease in an environment of Puritan ethics, Peirce revealed an iconoclastic sweep more in tune with Whitman than his father’s academic peers.
As time has passed, the question Peirce raises become more and more germane. What are we to be doing? Why are we here? Consciousness clearly has room for helping, caring and creative endeavor. But it suggests we are free to choose how we live. And that we have a life beyond work.
Peirce was familiar with stories in Genesis that record the fallen nature of humankind. He knew the edict that we work rather than simply enjoy the bounties of Eden. He is not a Calvinistic proponent of abject sinfulness. He grew into a quite generous notion of who and what we are. And how we should serve.
***
We now have two major forms of work. What used to be called sweat work, done to support and maintain the society in which we live. And work which is deemed a privilege. Work which one must have college and graduate training. Prestige work.
Heaven can only have been created as an act of love. Love can only manifest in Souls who have the freedom to choose. Freedom creates the profusion of stories that are the information that fuels the development of the Cosmos and its inevitable growth. The realm of Heaven is where the unification of Souls is normative. The Cosmos is the field where Unconditional Love remains the goal and where the freedom of Souls plays out.
The creation of heaven and earth was never to make work the ascendant endeavor of life. It was always to build communities based on unconditional love at every level.
