The Postmodern Prometheus: A God of the Saps

As we were discussing yesterday, consciousness is not merely localized in brains, but is necessarily intersubjective. Without the anterior condition of intersubjecivity, subjectivity could not emerge. As infants, our consciousness is thoroughly entangled with that of our caretakers, and we only eventually--and to varying degrees--wrestle individuality from this primordial matrix of (un)consciousness.

You could almost think of this conscious/unconscious or individual/group duality as anlogous to the wave/particle complementarity in quantum physics. With normal “wideawake and cutandry” logic, something is either a wave or a particle, but cannot be both. The former is a collective phenomenon, the latter an individual one. But it is well understood in subatomic physics that the question of whether something is a wave or particle depends upon how you look at it.

This hardly means that reality is not objective. Both new-age errheads and postmodern solipsists take quantum indeterminacy to mean that, in one way or another, reality is created by observing it--that perception really is reality. This sinnerster meme has somehow trickled from the high country of middlebrow philosophers all the way down into the water supply below. Pick up most any new-age type book, and it will explain to you how, since quantum physics proves that reality is created by observing it, reality is only limited by your dreams!

Therefore, as Anthony Robbins teaches, you can AWAKEN THE GIANT WITHIN and TAKE IMMEDIATE CONTROL of your MENTAL, EMOTIONAL, PHYSICAL and FINANCIAL DESTINY! Yes my friends, YOU TOO can be as MALIGNANTLY NARCISSISTIC as TONY ROBBINS or even DEEPAK CHOPRA! Just like a baby, you can have the UNLIMITED POWER of MANIPULATION. Robbins will teach you the SEVEN SECRETS to GETTING WHAT YOU WANT and WHEN YOU WANT IT, although my 15 MONTH OLD could probably teach him A THING OR TWO about THAT! Deepak will reveal to you the MAGICAL SECRETS of achieving SPONTANEOUS FULFILLMENT by harnessing the INFINITE POWER OF COINCIDENCE! Yes, during the $1,500 POWER WEEKEND SEMINAR, Deepak will show you the HIDDEN RELATIONSHIP between HUMAN GULLIBILITY and his powerful BANK ACCOUNT!

The secret is to employ RIDICULOUSLY OVERBLOWN RHETORIC, just like ROBBINS and CHOPRA and make INSANE PROMISES that cannot possibly have any BASIS IN REALITY, quantum or otherwise. Then you can have a BESTSELLER on amazon.com, while books like ONE COSMOS that GUARANTEE ETERNAL LIFE WHILE YOU WAIT just LANGUISH at NUMBER 354,009! IT’S FUNNY because some of my new-age CRITICS think that I am some kind of budding CULT LEADER with a bunch of fawning BOBBLEHEADS! HA HA HA!

{inhale and let out another} HA HA HA HA HA! {you know, the HOLLOW and BITTER kind}

Where were we? Yes, the complementarily between our conscious and unconscious selves. In fact, in my view, this is how best to understand the idea of the unconscious mind. We tend to visualize the mind like an iceberg or archaeological dig, with the conscious ego “above” and the unconscious “below.” I would suggest that this is a rather unsophisticated view that mirrors the linear way we perceive the material world.

In my view, there is an element of unconsciousness in most every conscious act or thought, and vice versa. In other words, consciousness is not linear but holographic; the conscious and unconscious minds are complementary and indespensable to one another. Furthermore, consciousness is a spectrum, like a rainbow. You might imagine it as a sort of pure white light that is refracted through our evolved primate prismhouse. It is all one light, but we can discern many different shades and colors. While there is a hierarchy of color, the hierarchy is only possible because it presupposes the unity of the white light.

Thus there is infrahuman consciousness and what Aurobindo called “supramental” consciousness running along a continuum. There is no one who can become “fully conscious” under human conditions, although it is certainly possible to let in more or less of the light.

If we apply this principle to spiritual gnosis, it means that consciousness of God could not occur unless, so to speak, we were in God and God were in us--not equally, of course, for if that were the case, then we would be identical to God. Here again, because of the inexorable conditions that make human existence possible, any knowledge is necessarily going to be relative. But not only relative, and certainly not equally relative.

As a matter of fact, there is even knowledge that is relatively absolute, although there can never be knowledge that is absolutely relative, otherwise it is not knowledge at all. In other words, the entire concept of “knowledge” presupposes that it is possible to possess it, and knowledge is not synonymous with error, otherwise knowledge truly would be circular and meaningless, as it is in leftist academia. Listen carefully here, folks, Petey is speaking: this is precisely why the literally diabolical philosophy of deconstruction inevitably leads to the destruction of thought--no, the destruction of man--because it specifically destroys the hierarchy of consciousness that we are discussing here: no hierarchy, no knowledge. Period.

At the top of the hierarchy of knowledge lies revelation, the “relatively absolute.” The error of fundamentalists is to regard revelation as the absolutely absolute, which also makes no sense. If revelation were absolutely absolute, it would be inaccessible to us. The whole point of revelation is that it is the absolute presented to us in human, and therefore relative, terms. But again, being relative, it cannot be the absolute. But it is as close to the absolute as the human mind is capable of knowing (leaving aside nondual mystical states, which are more in the realm of being than knowing).

And even then, as with everything else, there are degrees of knowing. This is where authentic gnosis enters the picture. Many people object to the idea of gnosis, as if it connotes some “secret” knowledge that is separate from, or “higher than,” revelation. No. Gnosis simply involves depth of understanding, which tends toward the infinite. That is, our necessarily relative understanding of the absolute lies on a vertical plane with degrees of depth, and therefore, height. The saints are better than you and I because they are deeper and higher than we are. But they are only deeper and higher because they are much lower, which is to say, more humble than we are. Always mindful of the hierarchy of being, they are aware of the infinite gap between the absolute and the relative. The cosmically narcissistic postmodernist eliminates this gap, and therefore, in his exaltation of relativity, makes himself an absolute god: all hail the Awakened Giant, the Postmodern Prometheus, Tony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, and the rest of the New Age Traveling Salvation Show!

In reality, any genuine expertise--spiritual or otherwise--involves some kind of “esoteric” knowledge that allows the person to see and experience things that the uninitiated cannot. Theoretically, there is no limit to this deepening process. In my opinion, any genuine growth--especially spiritual growth--involves an ever-deepening extension of our interior horizon. This horizon extends in four directions, up and down, inside and out. Subjective growth involves "colonizing" more and more of what is, in the final analysis, the Great Within.

In the absence of this hierarchical and evolutionary view, the world is ultimately nothing, just a brute object that confronts us. Even the most materialistic science is a special “relatively absolute” language that allows, say, a physicist, to project his mind and peer more deeply within the realm of matter. This is never something the scientist sees with his physical eyes. Rather, the equations of quantum physics are a probe, analogous to the stick that the blind person uses to navigate while walking. The blind person deploys the stick forward into darkness, and it sends messages up his arm and into his brain, allowing him to form a picture of the space around him. It is no different with physics. Physics is just a stick in the dark, like reaching around for your shoes in the back of a dark closet.

Which brings us back to the very special language of revelation. For revelation is also a probe that we, in our metaphysical blindness, may use to illuminate the space around and within us. In fact, if your religion is “working” for you, this is what is happening. Naive secularists always think that the primary purpose of religion is faith or comfort or morality. Yes, it is all of those things, but it is also a way of knowing. By immersing oneself in it, it extends into regions that are otherwise inaccessible to the psyche--for example, into the realm of the sacred or holy. The realm of the sacred that is illuminated by religion is every bit as real as the weird quantum realm that is illuminated by modern physics. Except that it is more real. Indeed, the conviction of the ontological priority of the sacred is one of the things that accompanies the experience of it.

In certain respects, the invocations in the Book of Genesis and the Gospel of John are parallel commentaries on one another. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” and “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The former statement has to do with ontology, the latter with epistemology. For the separation of the heavens and the earth forms the deep structure of all being; it is the separation of the horizontal and vertical, thereby making the experience of experience possible. Without this primary duality, there is only God. But with this bifurcation, the world is split down the middle into object-subject, quantity-quality, eternity-time, form-substance, wave-particle, conscious-unconscious, Lennon-McCartney, and other primordial complementarities.

But the divide between these complementarities is not unbridgeable, although the one between Paul and Yoko is close. This is because the the Word is anterior to that primordial creative act of God (it was "with God" and "was God"), and is therefore present in each of the complementarities. The world is intelligible because it is thoroughly infused with the same Word that inheres in our consciousness. Thus, the world is structured as a pair of mirrors reflecting back upon themselves through a deepening relationship to language.

This is what is meant when it is said that we are “made in the image of God.” This is the anthropology that inevitably follows from the above ontology and epistemology. This is why the more human we become, the more divine, and the more divine, the more human--and humble. And it all happens in the magical space between the two mirrors, where language carries messages back and forth, in an ever deepening and ascending spiral. We don’t evolve. The Word does.

And the Word is God. Speaking relatively. If you gno what I meme.