| The human condition comes into its own only, as we have pointed out before,1 when Imaginatio Creatrix emerges and progressively reaches the realization of its full potential, bringing in the freedom to interrogate and the powers of creative invention.
When we come to stand back and ponder it, we are amazed at how the ontopoietic unfolding in self-individualizing life for so long “tacitly” and obscurely carried our various functional spheres and then how, of a sudden our beingness was extended from the sphere of feelings towards ideas, projects, and community. The radiating wealth of our circumstances became suddenly apparent. Life suddenly resonated with countless voices, shimmered with myriad shades, assumed all manner of shapes. The life that comprises us became something we could envisage. After submersion in the vegetativevital- organic spheres, we surfaced into the glaring light of the spirit. Within the sphere of the spirit, we find at last ourselves free and empowered. In “our” body-flesh-psyche-consciousness we become the focus of cosmic forces, the center of the universe.
For us, “living” means being alive in this realm of empowerment. Here the living individual raises itself above the enactment of the virtualities inherent in its ontopoietic sequence and acquires personal stature as self. This is obviously a new phase in our condition. It is attained with the emergence in our constitutive system of Imaginatio Creatrix. Two major steps follow on that, the genesis of the specifically human mind and of the human person. At this point the great metamorphosis of sense is accomplished and we have, indeed, reason to inquire anew into the continuity in the innumerable steps taken in the ontopoietic unfolding of self-individualizing life, into the continuity that is the condition, the proto-condition, of this progress. |
