Notion of Spectator

A theatre audience; relating from a distance.  We are free to watch, applaud, but we don’t’ see ourselves as part of the action. without passion .... without personal decision. The quest for truth is not a search for something immediately useful; nor even the desire to know all things in their relations is the compelling motive.  Men of this sort are in search of the meaning of existence itself. they are no longer spectators, for they know that there very existence is at stake.  <Emil Brunner>

A Spectator – Walker Percy and Parker Palmer

remaining aloof, distant, uninvolved, watching, applauding, hissing, booing, yet we don’t see ourselves as part of the action.  Nothing more than a theatre audience. 

When freedom is lost, an apathy, neurosis, psychoses, shutupness develops - the inability to participate in the feelings/thoughts of others, or to share self with others.  

A technician - one who is concerned with the exterior part of reality; registering facts rather than discerning the truth, never touching the heart of things.

Man is a spectator, views the world from afar .... without passion .... without personal decision.

Emil Brunner

Always facing creation, we perceive there

only a mirroring of the free and open

dimmed by our breath.

.... its own being for it

is infinite, inapprehensible,

unintrospective, pure, like its outgazing.

Where we see future, it sees Everything

itself in Everything, forever healed.

And we, spectators, always, everywhere,

looking at, never out of, everything!

It fills us. We arrange it.  It collapses.

We rearrange it, and callapse ourselves. 

We are always aware of ourselves as spectators.  This spectatorship is a wound in our nature, a kind of original sin (here Rilke is in the Christian tradition of the Church Fathers and the mystics), for which healing is urgently required. Yet we refuse healing because we insist on preserving our status as spectators.  

We can never really believe ourselves fully at home in the world that is ours, since we are condemned to dwell in it as spectators, to create for ourselves the distance that establishes us as subjects fully conscious of our subjectivity.

Thomas Merton, Mystics and Zen Masters