Well, what about the cosmic egg?
I just checked, and there are indeed hundreds of images. I wonder if the snake symbolizes the vertical ascent mentioned in yesterday's post? Kundalini arousal, and all that?
In any event, it's a very old idea; or rather, an old image that symbolically communicates ideas that are as new as whatever is hatched from the cosmic egg. Maybe even this post.
To the left is another cosmic egg, this one soaring on wings of slack:
"The ancients imagined that the universe was hatched from a primordial egg.... To the Alchemists it was analogous to the Macrocosm, the universe....
"Out of the egg... will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis."
That's a rather Gnostic view -- the idea that we are imprisoned in matter, as opposed to being a hylomorphic union of matter and form, or body and soul. Which is why the Incarnation can't just involve the mind alone... what's the word?
Docetism?
Close enough: the idea that Christ's physical body was an illusion and that he only seemed to be human. This was again because matter was thought to be inherently evil or impure, and therefore incompatible with the divine nature of Christ.
One can see the appeal, for the body can at times seem like our best frenemy. We need one, but it comes with all those annoying shocks the flesh is heir to -- disease, dysfunction, degeneration, decay, deterioration, decrepitude... and that's just some of the D's. That Christ saw fit not just to inhabit one but to be one is most remarkable. Recalling yesterday's post, it means that the Center truly became Periphery. No half measures!
Back to O-ology, which -- if the word weren't already taken -- would colloquially mean "the study of O," while literally meaning the "logos of O."
Perhaps I should back up a step and begin with a definition of O. Which, of course, can never be defined per se, since infinitude escapes any finite --
Why not just say ultimate reality and be done with it!?
We could say that, but with many important qualifications. First there is the necessarily apophatic nature of our approach, which is perfectly orthodox, in the sense that what we can know of O is infinitely dwarfed by what we can't. O is not so much unknowable as infinitely knowable. And only in the beatific vision do we finally find out just how much we didn't know about God (?!).
You just said God instead of O.
Yes, because I was speaking in a Christian idiom, and besides, my humble readers are already aware of much they don't know about God. At the other extreme are folks like the one I saw on Christian TV the other night. My son and I occasionally tune in and enjoy these Flanders types for a laugh.
Not very charitable.
Maybe. I suppose these people are harmless enough when speaking to themselves, but they can do damage to the cause by making Christianity appear stupid to people already inclined to dismiss religion as stupid. Dávila knows what I mean:
Every Christian has been directly responsible for the hardening of some unbeliever’s heart.
It reminds me of Ringo's annoyed reaction to the cover of John Lennon's first solo album, on which he and Yoko appeared stark naked:
I said, "Ah, come on, John. You’re doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer. It doesn’t matter; whichever one of us does something, we all have to answer for it."
Likewise, it may be cool for this TV preacher to describe the exact color and molecular composition of God's throne -- which, it turns out, is made of alabaster -- but then the restavus have to answer for it.
Another point about O is that it leaves a space for us to fill in the content. It is what Bion called "unsaturated" with a rigid, determined, and pre-existing meaning. When this occurs, we can't really "discover" O, rather, only find what we're already looking for -- as, for example, with climate science researchers. When reality falsifies their (saturated) models, they chuck reality, so they're incapable of learning about it.
A third point about O is that it allows for experiential knowledge of it. At the end of the deity, O cannot be known like an empirical object, or reduced to human categories, but can be known via participation. Lao Tse is all over this paradox:
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real....
It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities....
Empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds.
It is "beyond is and is not," and yet, it is always right here right now, waiting to be entered.
Bob, are you not mixing Christian apples with Taoist oranges?
Absolutely. In Christ the Eternal Tao the author points out how
In modern Western society, many people turn away from the Christianity of their formative years because they find its truths smothered under an unreal kind of religiosity.... the churches have replaced a direct, intuitive apprehension of Reality and a true experience of God with an intellectualism on the one hand and an emotionalism on the other....
Properly oological Christianity is illicitly reduced to
something that is acquired through rote learning, based on the idea that if you just get the words right..., you will be saved. Christianity then becomes a dry, word-based religion... that operates on the same principles as the institutions of the world.
So, don't do that. Like how? "The only way to get past religious words and concepts is to seek... the Reality behind them," and "to rise above thoughts and emotions" to "the Mind Who is beyond thought."
It's the same with the Upanishads: "If you think that you know well the truth of Brahman, know that you know little.... He truly knows Brahman who knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks that he knows, knows not."
Which accords perfectly with Thomas: "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite." As such, "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God."
This is no different from what St. Paul says: "if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know" (1 Cor. 8:2).
Now, it is not as if we can't use words to describe O. It's just that we mustn't confuse the words with the reality they can only touch but never exhaust. I'm reading another book by Wolfgang Smith, and he describes it thus:
the Real is not what we catch in our nets, but precisely what we do not catch: whatever eludes our mental grasp.... And that is why it must be sought, figuratively speaking, "with folded hands," a gesture that betokens, not a "grasp," but the very opposite: a submission, namely, an unconditional openness, like that of a mirror wiped clean.
Suffice it to say, revelation is a kind of "map of O," but we still need to undertake the journey. Half of oology is our own unending (o) to O.
And what is Christmas but a celebration of the ultimate openness of O to us, of all people? There's much more to say about this, but I'll shut up for now. Still, I can't help wondering what Gemini thinks about this: