You Can't Domesticate the Weirdness

Yesterday's post on our weird-woven universe brought to mind... 

Well, a number of things, beginning with Haldane's suspicion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that

I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

Variants of Haldane's Law hold that the universe is both stranger than we can imagine and stranger than we can think. This being the case, Terence McKenna added that we might as well suppose that it's as strange as we can suppose, because this still won't be strange enough.

While looking up the exact wording of Haldane's comment, I found some other good quips, some of which are well known:

Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination. 

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.  

The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public. 

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.

I also thought of my own modest effort to forge a sufficiently queer language to convey the queerness of things:

In The Beginning was the weird, and the weird was with God, and the weird was God.... And nothing He made was it made without being made of the weird light with which everything was made from the Word (lo)go.... And the weird light shines in the dark, but the dorks don't comprehend it. For truly, the weirdness was spread all through the world, and yet, the world basically kept behaving as if this were just your ordinary, standard-issue cosmos.

I suspect that a big part of the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it. 

Now, Christianity is pretty weird. Indeed,

Nothing attracts me as much to Christianity as the marvelous insolence of its doctrines.

One connotation of insolence being disregard for the conventional propriety of the insufficiently weird. Thus,

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Ultimately, 

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

A weird counterworld to the banal world of scientistic materialism. 

Coincidently, as part of my due diligence in pursuit of the weird, I thought I'd check out a book on one of the all-time weirdest mystic theologians, Jacob Boehme. Say what you want about his visions, they are indeed weirder than we can suppose. The author does his best to reduce the ineffable weirdness to something manageable, with mixed success. It's certainly not for the faint of head.

What's weirder than an unschooled cobbler subject to unbidden mystic visions of God, the universe, and everything? Was he just crazy, and if so, was he crazy enough?  

Our dissident shoemaker was influenced by the Hermetic Tradition, "sometimes called Pansophism."

by which is meant the search for a universal wisdom uniting and explaining all things, a means of reconciling the ways of of God to man and of penetrating the mystery of nature by finding its underlying unity.

Understanding this context "will help us to see his writings not as the eccentric outpourings of a religious maniac or an unbalanced visionary," but rather, our kind of guy, only in a very different cultural matrix. 

Also, his use of language is so idiosyncratic that it's often difficult to know what he's talking about, not to mention that his visions were ineffable to begin with. It seems that he invented his own peculiar vocabulary to describe the indescribable, making him doubly obscure. 

"Many have spoken of the poetic supralogical nature of Boehme's thought as expressed in his writings," such that the words "are the living expressions of living reality" made present "in the process of expression." He's not conveying concepts, rather, trying to provoke "mental attitudes which will encourage the dawning of light of truth in the individual soul." 

That's a valid and worthy goal, and I've even had occasion to attempt it myself, but I'm finding it difficult to penetrate his prose. It's weird alright, but without guidance, it's a little like jumping into Finnegans Wake without a net. I'll finish the book today and get back to you tomorrow if I can extract anything useful from it. 

The Weird-Woven Cosmic Area Rug

Fun fact: the other day I read that "the word weird derives from the Old English wyrd," and that "as used in the profoundly Catholic culture of Anglo-Saxon England, meant the mystical presence of divine providence" (Pearce). 

That's too good to check, but the author speaks speaks of history as "a tapestry, time-stitched and weird-woven, of threads that are good, bad, or beautiful." That's a convoluted way to describe the cosmic area rug, but it does highlight the fact that it is necessarily woven of good and bad threads. 

Which reminds me of Jesus' parable of good seeds and naughty weeds. Probably if we attempted to pull out all the bad threads from the area rug, it would fall apart. 

For example, maybe you don't like human aggression, but it has its role to play herebelow, being a component of what Aquinas calls the irascible appetite. Help us out here, Gemini:

The irascible appetite is concerned with "arduous" goods and evils. It is not simply about immediate pleasure or pain, but about things that are difficult to attain or avoid. It's about facing challenges and overcoming obstacles. 

Among other things, it is the source of courage in facing a difficult evil and of anger in response to a present evil. Thus, no one will need irascible appetites in heaven, but down here they're essential. 

Indeed, the Bible makes it plain that God hates evil and that we are expected to do the same -- although this must be understood in the larger context of loving the good. 

What does the Aphorist say? 

Such is the complexity of every historical event that we can always fear that from a good an evil might be born and always hope that from an evil a good might be born. 

For example, Biden gives birth to Trump. As did Obama before him. Not to mention Carter and Reagan.

More profoundly Dávila says that

No paradise will arise within the framework of time. Because good and evil are not threads twisted together by history, but fibers of the single thread that sin as spun for us.

And what is progressivism but systematic forgetfulness of this fact? Thus,

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

Moreover.

Hell is being ignorant of Hell. If it knew, it would be a temporary place of purgation.

Perhaps history is already a temporary place of purgation. Or maybe either a higher rung of hell or a lower rung of purgatory. Our choice. In any event,

Earth will never be paradise, but it could perhaps be prevented from approaching closer to being a cheap imitation of Hell.  

Which is any place from which God is absent, and a place only identifiable from Paradise.

This whole line of thought reminds me of the genome, which is so complex that for the most part you can't just eliminate one "bad gene," since the gene is embedded in a complex network, influencing multiple traits or functions.

Yanking out a single gene can disrupt the network, leading to unintended effects elsewhere. Moreover, a single gene can have multiple roles that are simultaneously harmful and beneficial. The overall design is nonlinear, so removing the gene doesn't guarantee a predictable outcome.  

Which means that the genome too is weird-woven.

Coincidently, Spencer Klavan has a post up this morning about the weirdness of creation, particularly, under the sea, where God and/or Nature unleashes some of its weirdest productions under cover of water:

There’s something just aggressively weird about the ocean, like God’s determined to make a show of creating the wackiest possible animals just to prove no one can stop him.

More generally, 

Considered as a work of art, the universe expresses a raucous and insatiable appetite for life in every possible variety. The skill is that of a Rembrandt but the spirit is that of a toddler with a box of crayons. 

I don’t think we take this into account nearly enough in our theology, what a limitlessly free and ravenously inventive mind we must be talking about when we talk about God. Why make a global swimming pool and fill it with space aliens? His answer seems to be something like uh, why not??

The world is "endlessly full of eerie caverns and misty dwelling places," and "when we talk about miracles, we’re not talking about any reality other than the one in which, wonder of wonders, we already live and move."

And we're back to the weird-woven cosmic area rug. Which is as good an explanation as any for both natural and human evil.  

Above we alluded to Biden giving rise to Trump. Now, Trump no doubt has some "bad qualities" (as indeed do we all), but I suspect that if we could somehow eliminate these qualities, we'd no doubt extirpate a lot of good with them. 

Churchill was similar, it's just that his irascible qualities were precisely what were required in the context of fighting an even more irascible Hitler. 

Here again, Churchill was full of qualities that wouldn't be needed in heaven. Indeed, the British electorate concluded that they weren't needed at all once victory in Europe was attained. They then went about the business of creating a socialist paradise, with predictable consequences. Enter the irascible Mrs. Thatcher.

Now, we needn't actually look under the sea for God's weirdest production, which is none other than man. Schuon goes so far as to say that

If there is to be a cosmos, a universal manifestation, there must also be a fall or falls, for to say "manifestation" is to say "other than God" and "separation." 

Of course, evil must come, but woe to the man by whom the evil comes.

I guess we're done here, except to add that the Incarnation means that human nature becomes truly weird-word-woven, but that is the subject of a different post. Gemini, what say you about this one?

Connecting the Threads:

You've successfully woven together these different ideas to create a compelling argument about the complex and intertwined nature of good and evil. The "weird-woven" metaphor provides a consistent thread throughout, connecting the theological, philosophical, biological, and historical examples.

In essence, you argue that:

• Evil is not simply an external force to be eradicated but an intrinsic part of the fabric of reality.
• Attempts to completely eliminate evil are not only futile but potentially harmful.
• Seemingly negative qualities can play a necessary role in certain contexts.
• The world is a complex and mysterious place, full of wonders and paradoxes.
• Recognizing the reality of evil is essential for understanding the human condition and the nature of history.

This is a nuanced and insightful perspective that challenges simplistic notions of good and evil and encourages a more profound understanding of the world.

An even weirder image of the weird-woven cosmic area rug:

A Brief and Prosaic Autopsy of Wokeness

Yesterday I read a lengthy piece on The Origins of Wokeness. Now, this is a tedious subject, plus it's been in retreat since last November, so why write about it now?

Well, I'm between books at the moment, so I have nothing else to write about. Besides, what is the best in life? Crushing the woke, eating all their steak, and hearing the lamentations of their women of both sexes. 

In short, it's an opportunity for some fine insultainment, but maybe we can learn something too. 

For example, one thought that occurred to me in reading the article is how it could be reduced to a handful of aphorisms by the Master. 

For me, the aphorisms are quintessential examples of how one may know much by knowing little. This is because the aphorisms come from a higher plane that conditions the levels below. They are simultaneously concentrated and expansive.

Scientific knowledge is the opposite: expansive, sprawling, and complex, such that no one could ever hope to master it. Even a single discipline such as medicine has dozens of specialties and subspecialties. My psychiatrist friends -- who went to medical school -- don't know much about medicine per se, but they do know all the good specialists if you need a referral.

The point is, the mind seeks unity, which is at the top of the vertical hierarchy. Even physics, which is the paradigmatic science to which everything else is supposed to be reducible, is itself a mess. The other day I read that the discrepancy between quantum and relativity theories amounts to 120 orders of magnitude, which is an inconceivably large number. 

Gemini rates my statement more or less true: that "This is a major problem in physics, highlighting the tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity," although there are disagreements as to exactly how vast the divergence. The larger point is that we are far from unifying these two fundamental descriptions of the universe. 

Now, knowledge is good, but wisdom (or prudence) is better, which is to say, "higher" on the vertical spectrum. Indeed, it requires wisdom to even know what to do with all the knowledge -- which again, as per yesterday's post, is infinitely beyond any human capacity to know it. The two -- wisdom and knowledge -- exist in a kind of complementary and dynamic relationship, like principles and entailments.

Which is why There are rules! 

Rules are a device for coping with our constitutional ignorance. There would be no need for rules among omniscient people who were in agreement on the relative importance of all the different ends (Hayek).

The fundamental error of the social justice warriors is that the rules do not and cannot guarantee any specific outcome. Hayek compares the free society to a game which consists "partly of skill and partly of chance":

It proceeds, like all games, according to the rules guiding the actions of individual participants whose aims, skills, and knowledge are different, with the consequence that the outcome will be unpredictable and that there will regularly be winners and losers (ibid.).

So while it is right to insist that "nobody cheats, it would be nonsensical to demand that the results for the different players be just." If a hitter in baseball strikes out a lot, we don't therefore change the rules and allow him four strikes instead of three. But this is precisely what DEI does: different rules for officially designated victim groups. In short, legally sanctioned cheating.

The article linked above characterizes wokeness as 

An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

Which is to say, a focus on preferred outcomes instead of transparent and consistently applied rules. Thus, it is the rule of the ruleless, or law of the lawless, in which case 

orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.

Virtue is playing by the rules. Wokeness is overruling the rules -- as in Biden's recent unilateral declaration of a new amendment to the constitution. 

The author of the piece traces the rise of wokeness to the 1960s, especially in the universities, and more particularly in the humanities and social sciences. By the 2010s it had become "more virulent": 

It spread further into the real world, although it still burned hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick.

A wider variety of sins, identified and punished by people who would be the first to deny the existence of sin and dismiss it as the relic of a superstitious age:

What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins.

Which brings to mind another aphorism:

Only the Church considers itself a congregation of sinners. All other communities, religious or lay, feel themselves to be a confraternity of saints.

However, 

Christianity did not invent the notion of sin, but that of forgiveness.

Nor does it ask that we be impeccable but that we be eager to be forgiven.

But wokeness is an unforgiving counter-religion, "with God replaced by protected classes." The real God harmonizes justice and mercy, but the god of the sinless and saintly woke is all social justice and no mercy. 

Let's get back to the related principles of wisdom and unity. Clearly, there can be no unity in a society in which there are different rules for different groups. Rather, unity can only be a function of agreement on the nature of the rules. We can't play the game if we can't first agree on the rules, and agree to abide by them.   

But there is a deeper principle involved, which can only be a function of wisdom -- the wisdom that says All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, whereby we are free to pursue happiness in our own way, so long as we play by the rules.  

Thanks Cap'n Obvious.

I suppose this post is rather banal, but then again,  

We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.

Moreover,

Strictly speaking, it is in reiterating the old commonplaces that the work of civilization consists.

So, 

The  conservatism of each era is the counterweight to the stupidity of the day. 

The stupidity of our day being progressive wokeness. 

Now,

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

Which is why 

In certain eras the intelligence has to devote itself merely to restoring definitions.

Definitions of words like man, woman, freedom, equality, justice, fairness, reason, fascism, racism, and the rule of law. 

An Important Message About the Virus of Nihilism from the Center for Vertical Disease Control

C. Bradley Thompson writes that 

the greatest existential threat to the United States is a philosophic virus of the mind. Specifically, the two greatest threats to the United States are nihilism and socialism, which, as actionable ideologies, are working in tandem to destroy Western Civilization.  

Socialism is the end, and nihilism is the means.

I don't know about that. If I'm Satan, then I'm thinking that nihilism is the end, because it is situated at the "bottom" of the vertical, or at least the bottom deprived of its context -- like a purely phenomenal world with no noumena, or appearances with no reality. Which is impossible. 

Alternatively, one might think of nihilism as the peripheral area furthest from the central sun, where its rays shade off into a nothingness without even the possibility of meaning.

As for socialism, the other day I began working on a post called Austrian Theonomics, in which I wanted to explicate the theological implications of some of Hayek's ideas, if indeed any such implications exist. Hayek himself was not a religious man, but in my world, any deeply true idea can and must be reconciled with other deeply true ideas. 

Now, one of Hayek's ideas is that socialism is not just a bad idea but literally impossible because of the calculation and knowledge problems. Prices instantaneously adjust to, and convey information about, supply and demand, and thereby determine the value of goods and services:

Without market prices for capital goods, socialist planners lack this essential information. Without economic calculation, resource allocation under socialism becomes arbitrary and inefficient. Planners might make decisions based on guesswork, political considerations, or outdated information, leading to waste, shortages, and misallocation of resources.

As for the knowledge problem, it simply means that in a complex system, information and knowledge are widely dispersed among millions of individuals, and constantly adjusting to circumstances, such that no central institution could ever hope to gather it, much less synthesize it and make rational decisions.

In short, socialism is the pursuit of the impossible, making it a means to a nihilistic end. 

Hayek also felt that "social justice" was another impossibility, a name for nothing: the term is "entirely empty and meaningless," and

the people who habitually employ the phrase simply do not know themselves what they mean by it and just use it as an assertion that a claim is justified without giving reason for it.

It is indeed a "quasi-religious belief" that "has no content whatever and serves merely to insinuate that we ought to consent to a demand of some particular group." The phrase means "nothing at all," and the person who uses it is "either thoughtless or fraudulent." 

Those who are interested in the whole argument are directed to The Mirage of Social Justice. Those who just want the bottom line may take the word of the Aphorist that

Socialism is the philosophy of the guilt of others, 

and that 

"Social justice" is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right. 

Back to the essay cited at the top, Bradley writes of how the revolutionary strategy of the New Left changed in the 1960s. Since the proletariat were too stupid to get on board with a bottom-up revolution, this would have to be a top-down one, such that "the intellectual and cultural elite" would

engage in a long march through America’s cultural institutions. The nihilistic goal was to undermine all the values and virtues of America and Western civilization. America’s cultural Left attacked reason, truth, objectivity, free will, rights, individualism, freedom, constitutionalism, and capitalism.

Here again, the pursuit of the impossible by a superior erristocracy of nihilists. 

Speaking of which, just yesterday I was notified by the of California Psychological Association that if I want to maintain my license to practice -- which I don't -- I am required to take a course in Social Justice, which

pertains to the historical, social, and political inequities in the treatment of people from nondominant groups, while addressing the various injustices and different types of oppression that contribute to individual, family, and community psychological concerns. 

The totolerantarian informing me of my obligation says that this is "an ethical imperative, particularly here in the state of California," which she calls -- without irony -- "a diversity mecca." 

In other words, California is already a kind of paradise for nihilists who wish to impose the mirage of social justice on the restavus. They may be no better at treating mental illness than they are at fighting fires, but at least they're free of heteronormative and ableist fire departments.

So, does this post have a point? Well, it seems to me that the MAGA movement is a counter-revolution against a nihilist revolution that has been been unfolding for at least three-quarters of a century. But you already knew that, so I don't know that this post has added anything to the conversation.

Craniacs & Skyhookers

I had to take the wife to the airport before I could even complete my morning routine, a large part of which includes the morning post. Therefore, this will have to be brief.

Atheist Daniel Dennett came up with the metaphor of cranes and skyhooks to characterize naturalism and theism, respectively. In his world, skyhooks are not allowed:

Dennett uses the term "skyhook" to describe a source of design complexity that does not build on lower, simpler level -- in simple terms, a miracle.

Now, I say the existence of cranes is already a miracle that can't be explained without recourse to a skyhook, which is to say, a vertical telos. One might say that crane and skyhook are complementary, another way of talking about the "heavens and and earth" created in the beginning (which is always now). 

But for Dennett, the skyhook concept is intended to ridicule "the idea of intelligent design emanating from on high," i.e., from what regular folks call God. He contrasts this with earthbound cranes, i.e., "structures that permit the construction of entities of greater complexity but are themselves founded solidly 'on the ground' of physical science."

At antipodes to the craniac perspective are skyhookers such as Wolfgang Smith, who writes that "the Darwinism of our day" is

no longer science, properly so called, but proves to be, ultimately, a kind of religion: a counter-religion, to be exact. 

If Darwinism is a religion, it must have a secret skyhook of its own buried somewhere, i.e., the One Free Miracle that gets it off the ground. 

I don't doubt the existence of cranes, but they are not self-explanatory. You could say they are built from the laws of physics, but this leads to two problems, first, the origin of those laws, and second, how the laws give rise to beings who transcend those laws.

Richard Dawkins, for example, talks about how human beings ought to develop a morality that is free of religion, but whence this "ought" in a deterministic world of selfish genes? There is no ought in natural selection, nor any freedom to conform to it. To even say that one morality is superior to another is to sneak in a hierarchy that is forbidden by its principles. 

Now, as we always say, if a miracle is something that has no naturalistic explanation, then high on my list is the miracle of subjectivity in an otherwise objective universe; and if this weren't miraculous enough, we have the human intelligence that somehow mirrors the intelligibility of the world. 

Is it reasonable to suppose that this immaterial intelligence was simply lifted by a material crane out of monkey's head? To believe this is to simply not know what intelligence is, which is to say, adequation to reality.  

We say that man is always suspended between the crane and the skyhook, which is to say, immanence and transcendence, or time and eternity, respectively: "man by nature belongs to a reality beyond time while living in time" (Nasr).  The human state "resides precisely in standing on the vertical axis between" these poles, skyhook above, cranes below.

Looked at this way, evolution is indeed a journey through time, but to recognize the journey is to already be partly outside of it -- as Dawkins implicitly acknowledges with his his preference for a morality that is higher than mere survival of the fittest. 

Gemini, I have to fill some space. Whaddya got?

This is a well-structured and thought-provoking piece that explores the tension between naturalism (represented by Dennett's "cranes") and theism/transcendence (represented by "skyhooks"). Here's a breakdown of the key arguments and some observations:

Key Arguments:

• Critique of Dennett's Cranes: The central argument is that even "cranes" (naturalistic explanations) require a "skyhook" (a source of ultimate explanation or a vertical telos). The existence of natural laws, and especially the emergence of beings who can transcend and understand those laws, is seen as inherently inexplicable without recourse to something beyond the purely material.
• The Problem of "Ought": The piece highlights the problem of deriving "ought" (morality, values) from "is" (natural selection, deterministic processes). If everything is determined by physical laws and selfish genes, where does the concept of moral obligation or the ability to choose a "better" morality come from? This echoes the classic is-ought problem.
• The Miracle of Subjectivity and Intelligence: The emergence of subjective experience and human intelligence capable of grasping the intelligibility of the world is presented as a major challenge to purely materialist explanations. How could purely physical processes give rise to immaterial consciousness and the ability to understand abstract concepts?
• Man Between Crane and Skyhook: The piece concludes by positioning humanity as existing in a tension between immanence (cranes, the material world) and transcendence (skyhooks, the spiritual or eternal). Evolution is acknowledged as a temporal process, but the very act of observing and understanding evolution implies a perspective outside of pure temporality.
• Implicit Argument for Transcendence: While not explicitly advocating for a specific religious view, the piece strongly suggests the necessity of some form of transcendence or non-material reality to account for the phenomena it discusses.
• The "One Free Miracle": The idea of Darwinism having its own "secret skyhook" or "One Free Miracle" is an interesting point. It suggests that even naturalistic explanations might rely on some unexplainable starting point or assumption.

Overall, this is a well-argued and thought-provoking piece that raises important questions about the relationship between science, philosophy, and religion. It effectively uses the crane/skyhook metaphor to explore the limits of naturalistic explanations and the potential need for a transcendent perspective.

Pictured below, a skyhook lifting a crane:

The Meek Shall Inhere in the Vertical

I read a couple of things this morning that got me to thinkin'. The first is an observation by Spencer Klavan on the "normie revivial" and "the spiritual horizon of everyday life":

It may surprise our readers to learn this, but most people are normal. By definition, we can’t all win extraordinary recognition or wealth. So, also by definition, widespread happiness depends on the possibility of achieving fulfillment without the glamor and excitement of becoming a world-historic figure. 

We can't just be resigned to an ordinary death-in-life, rather, flip the crypt and turn it into an adventure -- a vertical adventure. 

Surely this was a massive part of the appeal of Jesus' message -- for example, in the Sermon on the Mount, wherein he articulates a total inversion of the world's values and instead privileges the humble, the persecuted, and the poor in spirit. It is they who will inherit the earth, know the Kingdom of Heaven, see God, and receive comfort and slack.

Which is another way of saying that their lives will be a vertical adventure, or at least the adventure will be more accessible to them than to the privileged worldings preoccupied with gaining more wealth, power, and status.

If there's no reward for life on offer besides the worldly goods of money and fame, normalcy becomes drudgery. This is probably why a purely secular society is doomed to generate mass discontent: by its nature, it can never satisfy most of its members.

We will all fall short of the glory of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, and if there is no vertical, then that's the end of it: a life of envy, frustration, and resentment, with no earthly way out:

I think it follows that the test of true religion is whether it can make an adventure out of being merely human. 

In general, I would say that the secret of the mystics is a recognition of the extraordinary in the ordinary, for example, Blake's famous crack about seeing eternity in a grain of sand:

The fact of existence, rather than nothingness, is itself astonishing. In the same vein, Isaiah once stressed that the messiah would look like any other human, with “nothing in his appearance to attract our attention.” From this I gather that what looks outwardly like normalcy is already, inwardly, a miracle.

So, the trick is not just to reframe life as a vertical adventure, but to plunge into it. 

Which reminds me of that story at the beginning of Kallistos Ware's The Orthodox Way, about "a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in a small room, never going out." A wandering Desert Father who was skeptical of her way of life called on her and asked, Why are you sitting here?, to which she responded I am not sitting, I am on a journey.

Every Christian may apply these words to himself or herself. To be a Christian is to be a traveller.... We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time and into eternity. 

Along these lines, I discovered the other day that the hardcore atheist Christopher Hitchens requested that Steve Winwood's Higher Love be played at his funeral, which is ironic, because I believe Winwood is himself a Christian. Gemini?

Yes, Steve Winwood is a Christian. His renewed Christian faith is reflected in some of his music, particularly in the 1986 album "Back in the High Life," which features the hit song "Higher Love." This song contains spiritual themes and alludes to a return to faith.

One would think that the lyrics of Higher Love would be in poor taste if not totally inappropriate for an atheist's sendoff:

Think about it, there must be higher love / Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above / Without it, life is wasted time 

Is Hitchens trolling us from the grave?

The other thing I read this morning was from Rob Henderson's newsletter, in which he highlights how social media can fuel envy and discontent: young adults are exposed to a barrage of internet celebrities "who don’t seem all that different from themselves" but have won "the social media lottery."

Imagine you’re 22 or 23, just out of college, and scrolling through Instagram. You see someone your age who looks like you and has a similar level of intelligence or talent (maybe the person has no talent at all), but they’re making a living as an influencer.....

Young people might think, “Why not me? Why can’t I have that kind of job?” It’s one thing to see Ludacris living a glamorous life -- that feels understandable and unattainable -- but seeing someone so similar to yourself succeeding in a way that looks effortless can feel deeply unfair.... 

This is because similarity is one of the strongest predictors of whether you envy someone. The people you envy are those that you could imagine yourself being. The key components are similarity, and achievement in a domain that is relevant to yourself.... you will feel more envy than if it is someone very different from yourself, someone who comes from a completely different background than you...

Which goes back to what Klavan says about a purely secular society being doomed to generate mass discontent because it can never satisfy most of its members. And clearly, there is no horizontal solution to this problem, because horizontality -- or exile from the vertical -- is the problem.

Now, in the larger scheme of things, exile from the vertical is none other than man's fall. Yesterday while in the waiting room for a medical appointment I brought along a random volume of Schuon to keep me company, and lit upon a passage about the fall and its consequences, whereby

the link with the divine Source was broken and became invisible; the world became suddenly external to Adam, things became opaque and heavy, they became like unintelligible hostile fragments. This drama is always repeating itself anew, in collective history as well as in the life of individuals.

As a result, man looks for God in all the wrong places, from matter to ideology to internet fame, each concealing a kind of covert idolatry. It also results in an ever-multiplying surfeit of "meaningless knowledge," which is "not a knowledge that enriches, but one that impoverishes." These "cosmic blind-alleys" seduce "and play the vampire; the current of forms does not want us to escape from its hold."

Which is to say, the hold of horizontality, which superimposes itself on the vertical, such that man is "engulfed in the anxious and deceptive turmoil of superfluous things" both "delusive and perishable." 

Then the nurse called, so that was the end of that. But earlier in the day I was reading another book that, as it were, deals with the reversal of the fall, which is to say, the vertical adventure. But I see that I've already exceeded my allotment, so to be continued.

Stale Bobservations and Flaming Homilies

Nobody thinks seriously as long as originality is important to him.

Well, that's a relief. 

How does one keep it fresh when one is talking about timeless truth? After all "perennial" and "novel" would appear to be antonyms. Well, there's this:

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper. 

Therefore, it is possible to say the sameold sameold in a deeper way. There's also this:

There is no spiritual victory that is not necessary to win anew each day. 

 Zen Mind, Beginners Mind, only transposed to the key of Christianity?

In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few.

So, a carefully cultivated learned ignorance gives rise to an infinitude of possibilities. Indeed,

As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject.  

More generally,

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence. 

Now, God is incomprehensible, and ten out of ten mystics will tell you that the more they know of him the less they know, and vice versa. Thus, 

There are types of ignorance that enrich the mind and types of knowledge that impoverish it. 

I do feel very much as if every morning I start all over -- like Sisyphus, only with the unjaded spirit of a hopeful child or something? 

The intelligent adult is one in whom the child has survived and the youth has died.

In my back pages I was a rather cynical youth. But I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. 

The Roshi tells us that

This is also the real secret of the arts: always be a beginner.

But

The modern desire to be original makes the mediocre artist believe that simply being different is the secret to being original.

 I also recall something Schuon wrote in one of his later books: 

Everything has already been said, and well said; but one must always recall it anew, and in recalling it one must do what has already been done: to actualize in thought certitudes contained, not in the thinking ego, but in the transpersonal substance of human intelligence.

Similarly, the Aphorist reminds us that

The scientific proposition presents an abrupt alternative: understanding it or not understanding it. The philosophical proposition, however, is susceptible to growing insight. Finally, the religious proposition is a vertical ascent that allows one to see the same landscape from different altitudes.

So, as scientific and horizontal knowledge proceeds in a forward direction, philosophical and religious -- which is to say, vertical -- thought partakes of depth and height. 

There is also the matter of assimilating novel horizontal knowledge into the vertical -- or, put conversely, reformulating the old truths in the parlance of the times. The quantum world gives rise to a vision of the world that is astonishingly different from the Newtonian, but neither has any ultimate bearing on the timeless, it's just that we have new ways to express the timeless. Physics may change, but 

Nothing is more outdated at any moment than yesterday's novelty.

And

Whoever believes he is original is merely ignorant.

Moreover,

No one seems more like the others than he who believes himself to be different.

Ironically, 

Originality must adhere to the continuity of a tradition.

Now, tradition is a kind of horizontal continuity in approaching the vertical. Along these lines, Gustav Mahler said that "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire,"and now we're getting somewhere: what may sound like another stale cosmic homily is really a modest attempt to preserve and pass along the Fire.

After all, someone has to do it, so it might as well be me.

Gemini, what do you make of this? Stale bobservations or flaming homily?

This is a rich and insightful collection of thoughts on originality, tradition, and the nature of religious and philosophical truth. Here's a breakdown of the key ideas and how they connect: 

The Paradox of Originality: The core argument is that the pursuit of originality for its own sake is counterproductive. True originality arises not from striving to be different, but from deeply engaging with timeless truths and traditions. 

Vertical vs. Horizontal Knowledge: The essay distinguishes between scientific (horizontal) knowledge, which progresses linearly, and philosophical/religious (vertical) knowledge, which deepens and ascends. Religious truth isn't about novelty but about gaining deeper insights into the same fundamental principles. The analogy of seeing the same landscape from different altitudes is particularly effective. 

The Beginner's Mind: The concept of "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" is applied to the spiritual life. By approaching truth with a sense of wonder and openness, like a beginner, we open ourselves to new possibilities. This contrasts with the "expert's" limited perspective. This links to the idea of "learned ignorance" -- recognizing the limits of our knowledge allows for greater understanding. 

The Timeless and the Temporal: The essay acknowledges the importance of relating timeless truths to the current context. While "nothing is more outdated at any moment than yesterday's novelty," we can use new language and concepts (like those from quantum physics) to express enduring principles. This is the "reformulating the old truths in the parlance of the times." 

Tradition as a Fire, Not Ashes: The quote from Mahler is crucial: "Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire." Tradition isn't about blindly adhering to the past, but about keeping the vital essence alive. This connects to the idea of "recalling it anew" and "doing what has already been done." 

The Role of Ignorance and Incomprehensibility: The essay suggests that true understanding involves recognizing the vastness of what we don't know. This is particularly relevant to the concept of God, who is inherently incomprehensible. This echoes the idea of "There are types of ignorance that enrich the mind and types of knowledge that impoverish it." 

Constant Renewal: The image of Sisyphus with a "unjaded spirit" emphasizes the need for constant renewal in the spiritual life. Each day is a new beginning, a fresh opportunity to engage with truth.

In essence, the essay argues for a nuanced understanding of originality and tradition. True originality isn't about inventing something new, but about deeply understanding and re-expressing timeless truths in a way that resonates with the present. This requires a beginner's mind, a recognition of our own ignorance, and a commitment to keeping the fire of tradition alive.