Carnival

The person who loves like this, simply loves, and knows nothing but love.

- St. Bernard

It is a choice whether we wish to remain in and to foster a mental state where we discern between good and evil. If we choose to do so then we reject the innocence for which we were created, in which we have been lost, and which we prefer to not regain. If we would be people who are spiritually stripped, who have realized that we are in fact designed to be absolutely empty vessels in which God works, then we need to reject the selves who have acquired emptiness, or somehow become empty. Embracing the freedom that springs spontaneously and directly from the fact that emptiness is indeed what we are, we awaken to our true self, namely, one is simply lost in God.

This knowledge (scientia) is described as discerning between good and evil because the soul ought not to reach out for it without recognizing the baseness of doing so. If we desert God and turn in on ourself, finding pleasure in exerting our supposed spiritual power, we become inflated with pride, responding with self-assertion. This is the foundation of all sin.

- St. Augustine

When the soul deserts the wisdom (sapientia) of love...and desires knowledge (scientia) from temporal things, it becomes inflated. And weighed down in this manner it falls away from God by its own weight.

- St. Augustine

Well I've walked these streets A virtual stage it seemed to me Makeup on their faces Actors took their places next to me

Well I've walked these streets In a carnival of sights to see All the cheap thrill seekers The vendors and the dealers they crowded around me

Have I been blind Have I been lost inside myself and my own mind Hypnotized mesmerized by what my eyes have seen

Well I've walked these streets In a spectacle of wealth and poverty In the diamond market The scarlet welcome carpet that they just rolled out for me

And I've walked these streets In the madhouse asylum they can be Where a wild eyed misfit prophet on a traffic island stopped And he raved of saving me

Have I been blind Have I been lost inside myself and my own mind Hypnotized mesmerized by what my eyes have seen

Have I been wrong Have I been wise to shut my eyes and play along Hypnotized paralyzed by what my eyes have found By what my eyes have seen What they have seen

Have I been blind Have I been lost have I been wrong Have I been wise have I been strong Have I been hypnotized mesmerized By what my eyes have found

In that great street carnival