God cannot reveal anything to us if we do not have his Spirit, and represented in the dream of his entire life. However, our insensible thinking will end immediately once God’s resurrection life has its way with us. Humans do not speak by words alone. A mute glance of reproach has pierced the heart a tirade would have left untouched; and even an inarticulate cry may utter volumes. Never learn anything until you have been made uncomfortable for a long while by not known it. Scholars study a great number of things dealing with subject ranging from grammar and rhetoric to philosophy and theology, from apologetics to politics, and from medicine to magic and astrology. Academics are convinced that philosophy is an all-embracing science to which all other sciences must be referred as their ultimate source and foundation. No subsidiary science deals with all things as they are, but only as they appear, whereas philosophy, and especially metaphysics, deals with things as they are and insofar as they are. Philosophy is an inquiry after the truth of both human and divine things, based on the testimony of God, who reveals himself either through the World of created things or by direct teaching. Consequently, nature and the Scriptures are the two codes on which philosophy must be built. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 8

The principle of self-consciousness is the basis of knowledge and certitude (absolute certainty or conviction that something is the case). One can distinguish between innate and acquired knowledge. Innate knowledge (notitia innata) is cognition through self-presence and belongs to the very essence of the soul; acquired knowledge (notitia illata) is the soul’s cognition of external things. Innate knowledge is superior to, and more certain than, acquired knowledge; for the soul, cannot be mistaken about what belongs to its nature. The two great movements of the soul are the desire of honor and the fear of shame. Knowledge of the external World can be obtained either by intuition or by abstraction. By intuition one grasps a thing immediately in its concrete reality, so that nothing of the object escapes the penetrating and all-embracing act of the intellect. Knowledge is made by partial assimilation of the object known. This assimilation is made by contact between the knower and the sensible species of the object known. These species are neither the intentional species nor the corporeal images. Although, they may assume as many different forms as there are sensations, they are always something material that impinges on the senses and represents to a certain extent the external object. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 8

A second and more advanced explanation of knowledge is what may be called the metaphysical approach from the standpoint of the soul as an essentially knowing nature. The characteristic doctrine that to know is to be (cognoscere est esse). In this new approach knowledge is still called sensation and assimilation, but the assimilation is carried so far as to means a real transformation of the knower into the object known. This doctrine that to know is “being” or “to be” must be understood in the idealistic sense of the absolute identity of object and subject. There is a distinction between knowledge that a person has of oneself in virtue of one’s own nature and knowledge that a person acquires from outside of oneself. This is called the distinction between “innate” and “illate” knowledge. Both types of knowledge are said to belong to “being”: but the former refers to knowledge of the original being of the knower, and the latter refers to the knowledge of being that is inferred by reasoning and is formally distinct from the being of the knower. In the first case, knowledge is the esse; in the second case, it becomes intentionally the esse in the possession of the extramental reality. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 8

We all know what happens when the average person feels humiliated: Most individuals put all of their energy into protecting themselves, developing whatever survival strategies one can. Most individuals may repress their feelings; they may get furious and plot revenge. Many behaviors that are classified as psychiatric problems, including some obsession, compulsion, and panic attacks, as well as most self-destructive behaviors, started out as strategies for self-protection. Unreality is the result of the massive infusion of entertainment into every realm of human affairs to the point that everything is distorted and complexity is denied by a society that is hooked on massive dosages of entertainment in order for it to function. The gratification in respect of the fulfilment of the repressed wish may prove to be so great that it balances the painful affects adhering to the day-residues. What is fulfilled by unreality is an unconscious wish—the wish for punishment of the participant for a repressed, prohibited wish-impulse. Because most of the negative feelings are accompanied by a negative value judgment, they are suppressed, repressed, or projected.  #RyanPhillippe 4 of 8

Are there some things regarding your physical or intellectual life to which you have been paying no attention at all? Suppression, repression, and projection are all destructive dynamics and result in a progressive stress on and decline of our relationships.  All things, whether spiritual or material, consist ultimately, although in different degrees, of power, knowledge, and love as their transcendental principles. These are called primalities and are found in creatures as well as in God, of whom creatures are faint imitations. Whereas God is pure and infinite being, creatures are composites of finite being and infinite nonbeing. Being and nonbeing concur in making up finite things, not as physical components but as metaphysical principles. Just as a creature is essentially and necessarily a particular and limited entity, so it also is essentially and necessarily the nonbeing of all others things and of God himself. You no more need a day off from spiritual concentration on matters in your life than your heart needs a day off from beating. As you cannot take a day off morally and remain more, neither can you take a day off spiritually and remain spiritual. God wants you to be entirely his, and it requires paying close attention to keep yourself fit.  #RyanPhillippe 5 of 8

Humans are a composite of three substances, body, spirit, and mind or mens. The spirit or sensitive soul is the corporeal principle that animates the body and serves as a link between body and mind. The mind or intellectual soul is created and infused by God into the body already organized by the spirit; it is a spiritual substance and the form of the whole human. There is a World soul, and a Universal animation that endows all things with some kind of sensation. Human’s supreme good consists in self-preservation. However, this must not be understood in a purely egoistic sense, but rather as the conservation of one’s existence in God in the next life. Whereas God is his own supreme good and does not look to another being outside of himself for his preservation, so that to be and to be happy are for hum one and the same thing, human depends entirely on God for their own preservation. God is therefore the supreme good toward which human must direct all his or her acts and operations. No power on Earth nor in Hell can conquer the Spirit of God living within the human spirit; it creates an inner invincibility. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 8

Space is a primary and incorporeal substance having the capacity to receive all bodies. Space is the substratum of all things. In this space God placed matter, a body that is formless and inactive but capable of being molded into many forms, just as wax is acted upon by a seal. Matter is not pure potency, but has a reality of its own distinct from the form. This, in turn, is not a substantial principle of material beings and is only improperly called an act. Heat and cold are the active principles of matter as the passive principle of al material beings. And time is not something ideal and subjective, but something real. Time is the successive duration of things having a beginning and an end. Or, more concretely, time is the thing itself considered in its successive duration through change, deeply interwoven in the galaxy, but you can never try to separate yourself from time, as time is God and penetrates every bit of human nature. Time takes the omnipotence of God—his complete and effective divinity—to live the life in human flesh. We have to keep letting go of our own will and slowly, but surely the great, full life of God will invade us. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 8

Our roles in these studied has been akin to that of neutral observers on a battlefield, one in which the most intense war is constantly waged against death. While we have witnessed many victories, some patients we observed did not survive. As our studies have continued, we have been increasingly struck by the uniqueness of every patient, as well as by the responsiveness of the human heart to the most ordinary types of human contact. Very recently, for example, we watched a 54-year-old man die. He succumbed after 14 days of the most intense medical care that could be imagined. When it was clear that this man was not going to survive, the medical personnel reluctantly shifted their concern to one of making his death as comfortable as possible. We watched this man’s heart change abruptly when a nurse held his hand. She quietly comforted him at a point when he was in a deep coma, shortly before his death. Not only was the patient in a coma, but ever muscle in his body had been completely paralyzed by a drug known as d-tubocurarine, and he was able to breathe only with the help of a machine-regulated artificial respiration. And yet, in spite of, or perhaps because of, his acute condition, the heart rate changed in the comatose man when the nurse comforted him was striking. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 8