Are We In Time or Of Time? And What Can We Do About It?

For some reason I awakened this morning thinking about the past. I used to be a more nostalgic person, but as I get older, it's as if bits of my past are gradually falling off the end of the earth -- as if time were spherical, and as you sail forward, the past slowly dips under the horizon.

But not exactly. Sometimes it's like a faded photo. Or as if there are fewer and fewer "bits" of information to reconstitute the photo, so it starts to lose its edges and its focus. Then again, what really seems to fade is the interior of the memory. I have a very good memory for what actually happened, but it gets increasingly difficult to really and truly remember what it was like. This must be because the more times we draw up an old memory, the more it becomes entangled with the present, and loses the distinct feeling that accompanied it in the past.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the more change you undergo as an adult, the more difficult it is to reconcile your past and present. As I lay there this morning, I was trying to find the connecting thread. There must be some continuous line from there to here, some core identity that has been preserved over time. I suppose neurologists would say that that's all an illusion, and that our brain simply reconstructs our identity day by day, moment by moment.

I guess this is a continuation of yesterday's post about whether the cosmos is evolutionary and progressive, or whether it is actually winding down into chaos and degeneration. Because the answer ultimately depends upon the nature of time. According to Schuon and the traditionalists, perfection exists in the past, so that time must necessarily result in further and further distance from the ideal, like rays of light going away from the sun. He insists that this is true Christian doctrine, and I suppose his point is somewhat unassailable, given that the "arc of salvation" begins in paradise and ends with the reign of the antichrist and the apocalypse. I'm pretty sure he would say that it is pure folly to place any kind if hope in or for the fallen world.

But as Biker Lady pointed out in a comment yesterday, brilliant though Schuon may have been, he nevertheless existed in a certain time and place. From what I understand, the effect of World War I was particularly catastrophic to the European mind, and in many ways explains why they are still the way they are today. I've tried to study European history, but it seems that it was one endless battle until the period of relative peace that lasted for nearly 100 years before war broke out in 1914. It literally was a kind of apocalypse that we can scarcely imagine -- the disintegration of the world order and the end of reality as people had come to know it. Then everyone took a breath before going at it again in World War II. And even now, the Islamist problem can to a certain extent be traced to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire as a result of World War I.

One of the reasons the Great War was so unexpected was that people had placed so much faith in science, reason, and progress -- which is perhaps one of the reasons why Schuon was so suspicious of them. People think that we live in a materialistic age today, but this really isn't so. If anything, we aren't materialistic enough, in the sense of respecting concrete reality. One of the reasons leftism is such a dysfunctional philosophy is that it is on the one hand "materialistic," since it denies spirit, i.e., the entire realm of the vertical. Nevertheless, if you deny spirit, it will return with a vengeance, only in a distorted form. Like nature, you can drive it out with a pitch fork, but she always comes back. Thus, anyone who is not under the influence of leftism -- which operates through the principles of seduction and hypnosis -- can see that it is just a highly abstract secular religion. It is hardly rational, for example, embracing economic and psychological principles that we know to be purely fanciful.

It is interesting that at the peak of materialism in the late 19th century, cracks began to appear in the structure of reality. I'm not sure if this is apocryphal, but it is said that by 1900, graduate students were advised against studying physics, since it was felt that the application of reason had essentially solved all of the problems of physics, with the exception of a couple of minor "clouds on the horizon." But those little clouds turned out to be the huge anomalies that were Einstein's point of departure for overturning the whole world of physics with the publication of his revolutionary papers in what is called the scientific annus mirabilis of 1905. And it wasn't until 1919 -- one year after the conclusion of World War I -- that the theory of relativity was empirically confirmed, and the commonsense Newtonian universe was definitively overturned.

The cracks in materialism did not just appear in science. 1900 was also the year in which Freud published his first and still most revolutionary book, The Interpretation of Dreams, which was certainly analogous to Einstein's revolution, in that it showed that the mind was not a repository of pure reason, but governed by unconscious and irrational drives and impulses just under the "civilized" surface.

It was also in 1909 that Picasso began his experiments in cubism and other forms of abstract art (thus breaking up the continuity of space), and between 1914 and 1921 that Joyce composed what was then a radical departure in literature, Ulysses. In fact, Ulysses seems to simultaneously incorporate ideas of Einstein, Freud, and Picasso, since it largely consists of a non-linear stream of consciousness of the three main characters, who are in turn symbolic of the Father (Bloom), Son (Stephen), and Holy Ghost (Molly). The book takes place on a single day in Dublin on June 16, 1904, and one of Joyce's points was to show how dense, resonant, and "full" time was.

In other words, time is not merely abstract and linear duration, à la Newton, but filled with a kind of infinite archetypal meaning that fractally resonates with all of human history. This is why the book is entitled "Ulysses," since the idea was that just underneath the surface, our lives are resonant with the universal and archetypal myths of antiquity; Bloom's wandering about the streets of Dublin resonates with Homer's Odyssey, as Ulysses tries to find his way back home (a myth also resurrected in the Coen Brothers O Brother, Where Art Thou?)

To cite one obvious example of this fractal resonance, when you take communion, you are tapping into a resonant "timeless time" that connects with Jesus and is "always present." But in reality, this applies to all rituals; when you get married, you are Adam and Eve back in the garden; when you celebrate Christmas, you enter a time that is resonant with all past Christmases, both individually and collectively.

It wasn't until 1975 that Benoit Mandelbrot coined the term "fractal" for the self-similarity that arises at every level of existence. Of course, he was taking about geometric self-similarity, but what if the cosmos is temporally fractal, i.e., self-similar in the manner suggested by Joyce? If this is true -- and I think it is -- then the realm of religion would actually constitute a dimension of archetypal truths that order temporal reality in a self-similar way. And this would explain why you cannot "escape" from religion, any more than you can escape from geometric order.

I discussed this possibility in a couple of scholarly papers I published in 1991 and 1994. Wait a minute... let me go track them down....

But before I do -- let me jump to a more macro idea that sort of encapsulates and illustrates what we are talking about this morning. Back then I was just a regular intellectual -- or thought I was, or wanted to be one -- my thinking was nevertheless quite "off the map" of what is considered to be the accepted reality. I wasn't just "interested" in these things, but I felt like Jake and Elwood -- as if I were on a Mission From God, even though I wasn't consciously aware of being "religious" at the time. It was simply a passionate adventure that really consumed me, and in a way, I suppose you could say that my book -- which was mostly written in the 1990s -- was the culmination of this adventure.

The point I'm trying to make is that in looking back, I can see that I was not so much "driven" as "pulled" -- plunged is more like it -- into a reality that I was compelled to explore. Very few of you will relate to this, but back in the late '60s and early '70s they had this ride at Disneyland, the Monsanto Adventure Thru Inner Space, in which you entered a giant microscope and shrunk down to submolecular size to explore the outer reaches of inner space. (Wow, here it is -- if you scroll down, you can see a little video about it.)

Ha! The internet is amazing. Who needs memory? I found the narration of the ride on wikipedia:

*****

I am the first person to make this fabulous journey. Suspended in the timelesssness of inner space are the thoughtwaves of my first impressions. They will be our only source of contact once you have passed beyond the limits of normal Magnification.

The Atomobile enters the Mighty Microscope and begins to shake back and forth as the riders enter the darkness. As their vision returns, the riders see giant snowflakes all around them, some still spinning as they fall. As they continue to shrink, the narrator says, I am passing beyond the magnification limits of even the most powerful microscopes. These are snowflakes -- and yet they seem to grow larger and larger. Or can I be shrinking -- shrinking beyond the smallness of a tiny snowflake crystal? Indeed, I am becoming smaller and smaller!

The snowflakes take on a crystalline form, eventually becoming large enough to cover the entire field of the riders' vision. Approaching the walls of ice crystals, the voice of the unseen scientist marvels, These tiny bits of snowflake crystal tower above me -- like an enormous wall of ice. Can I penetrate this gigantic prism? And yet, this wall of ice only seems smooth and solid. From this tiny viewpoint, I can see that nothing is solid, no matter how it appears. The ice crystals can be seen to be not solid but a lattice-like structure that the riders pass through.

And still I continue to shrink! What compelling force draws me into this mysterious darkness -- can this be the threshold of inner space?

Next we encounter a matrix of spheres appearing in columns and rows of infinite length. What are these strange spheres? asks the narrator. Have I reached the universe of the molecule? Yes, these are water molecules -- H2O. They vibrate in such an orderly pattern because this is water frozen into the solid state of matter.

As we continue to shrink, the molecules become larger, and take on a peculiar shape. These fuzzy spheres must be the atoms that make up the molecule -- two hydrogen atoms bonded to a single oxygen atom. And I see that it's the orbiting electrons that give the atom its fuzzy appearance. And still I continue to shrink.

The scientist wonders, Is it possible that I can enter the atom itself? As the atomobile enters the atom, a storm of lights flash past on all sides at impossible speeds. Electrons are dashing about me -- like so many fiery comets! Can I possibly survive?

Suddenly the frenzy of the electrons passes, and the rider is in a large, empty space, surrounded in the distance by a sphere of slow-moving lights. I have pierced the wall of the Oxygen atom, says the Narrator. I am so infinitely small now that I can see millions of orbiting electrons. They appear like the Milky Way of our own solar system. This vast realm, THIS is the infinite universe within a tiny speck of snowflake crystal.

A large pulsating red ball can be seen inside the atom. And there is the nucleus of the atom! Do I dare explore the vastness of ITS inner space? No, I dare not go on. I must return to the realm of the molecule, before I go on shrinking...forever!

The riders begin the return journey to full size, but are soon greeted with the sight of water molecules swirling rapidly. At first the scientist is confused: Ah, how strange! The molecures are so active now! They have become fluid -- freed from their frozen state. That can only mean that the snowflake is melting! Around us we see molecules moving faster as their temperature increases. The molecules are depicted in green and yellow, with occasional star-shaped flashes representing evaporation.

Yes, the snowflake has melted, tones a scientist's voice, But there is no cause for alarm. You are back on visual, and returning to your normal size. The riders can see evidence of the monitoring as they pass under a large microscope through which they can see the giant eye of a scientist.

Having returned to normal size, the riders disembark and pass by displays of Monsanto's advances in material science before exiting the attraction building.

*****

So, as I return you to your normal size, what have we learned today about time, nostalgia, and atomobiles?

I think the period of collective materialism persisted through the 1950s, at which point there was a huge ingression of spiritual energy in the 1960s, sort of like when the Wizard of Oz transitions from black & white to color. Just bear in mind that spiritual does not equate to "good." But with that Monsanto ride, we can see how the limits of materialistic science led full circle to an incredibly mysterious universe that is literally beyond our wildest imagination, since we literally cannot imagine it. Materialism circled back around to immateriality in a way that most people still haven't grasped. In fact, the hole in scientism is big enough to drive a religion through.

From this tiny viewpoint, I can see that nothing is solid, no matter how it appears. And still I continue to shrink! What compelling force draws me into this mysterious darkness!

To paraphrase the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, it's stranger than we can suppose. Therefore -- to paraphrase Terence McKenna -- since it's stranger than we can suppose, we might as well suppose that it's as strange as we can suppose. Because even that won't be strange enough.

To be continued.... Probably Monday. I think it would be a good idea for all of us to not touch a computer for one day a week.

One Flew Over the Cosmic Nest

I wanted to finish up my thoughts about Frithjof Schuon in commemoration of his 100th birthday. As I have said, I don't agree with everything he says, and in fact, I might even be in disagreement with one of his most unfunfundamental tenets, which is, to put it bluntly, that the world is in an inexorable slide toward dissolution and catastrophe, and that there's nothing we can do about it, at least collectively. In short, no one knows the day or hour, but we are headed toward apocalypse in a hand basket.

I say I "might be" in disagreement, because I'm no longer sure if the world is evolutionary and progressive, or whether mankind's apparent progress is not only superficial, but a kind of deodorant that covers up the smell of the rot. I am an optimist by nature, an attitude which is further exacerbated by a disposition that is essentially cheerful, sunny, and sort of jovial. But what if the universe is not cheerful, sunny and jovial? Then I'm distorting things every bit as much as the depressed and morbid person who sees life as one hopeless struggle, aren't I?

Obviously, when I wrote my book, I was unabashedly in the evolutionary camp. This was undoubtedly due to the influence first of Ken Wilber and then Sri Aurobindo, both of whom see the cosmos as a field of progressive spiritual evolution. A while back, I wrote that.... Never mind what I wrote. I was about to select a quote, but I couldn't pick just one, so here's the link to the whole thing. It is a reflection of the optimistic side of me, which again comes very naturally. But that doesn't mean it's correct, now does it?

Then again, the traditionalists such as Schuon all appear to me to be on the serious side, to say the least. I've almost read Schuon's entire body of work, and I don't think there's a single gag in the whole existentialada, except maybe the hollow and bitter kind, as Bertie Wooster might put it. In my more grandiose moments, I sometimes think that maybe I was put here to introduce a little levity into the gravity of religion. I mean.... somebody's gotta do it, right? Alan Watts was a pretty funny guy, but he was also alcoholic and had a spanking fetish.... not that there's anything wrong with that, but my point is that whatever seriousness he was able to convey through humor did not extend to himself, since he was a pretty frivolous character, and underneath the frivolity were some pretty dark currents. Thus, he was only superficially frivolous, whereas my goal is to be deeply frivolous.

Come to think of it, I have to say that all of the spiritual models I was initially drawn to were of that nature. Given my basic temperament, I just couldn't take traditional religions seriously. They were just too easy to make fun of. So I was drawn toward people like Watts, Ram Dass, Terence McKenna, and even a sociopath like Timothy Leary, since at least they all had a sense of humor.

Is my sense of humor just a giant defense mechanism? Here's where I think psychology can go too far. Yes, there are certainly people who use humor as a defense to cover up their problems. Just think of all the deeply troubled great comedians. Research has shown that there is a very high incidence of mental illness, including bipolar disorder, among great poets, but the comedians might even be worse. There are the completely self-destructive ones, like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce, and John Belushi, and a great many who clearly just use comedy to cover up an essentially bitter and angry personality, such as Bill Maher, David Letterman, or Rosie O'Donnell. Ironically, it is apparently rare to find a comedian who is actually fun to be around and happy in his private life.

At any rate, something in me caused me to reject all of the above "stand-up theologians" for a variety of reasons, even though I suppose I wanted to retain their playful attitude. As I mentioned the other day, if there is one adage I live by, it is to simply follow the depth, wherever it leads. This includes scientific truth, psychological truth, theological truth, and comedic truth. Is there any fundamental reason why ultimate truth can't be deeply funny, a guffah-ha experience, the joke than which there is no jokier?

Yes, I suppose so. First of all, if you aren't funny, you shouldn't try to be. Please, leave it to the professionals. And the professionals know that it is much more difficult to write good comedy than good drama. Even more difficult is to write good comedy that is simultaneously deep. Now that I think of it, my favorite films tend to be those that walk that fine line between comedy and drama, for example, Sunset Boulevard or One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest.

And now that I think of it some more -- and I'm thinking about this for the first time -- I can't even tell you how much I was influenced by the latter film. I was 18 or 19 when it came out, and it was sort of a.... religious experience. In short, I totally identified with the R.P. McMurphy character, who was quite transparently a symbol of the messiah. And when I say "messiah," I don't necessarily mean it in the Christian sense, but in Bion's sense as the person who comes along and injects a little life into the dead and sclerotic establishment. I even had the movie poster on the wall of my shabby little apartment back in the day.

Obviously, this is why I was a default liberal in my younger days, since I identified "the establishment" with conservatives. But as I was mentioning to my uncomprehending brother the other evening, one of the biggest disappointments in my life is how my own generation has become the stultifying establishment -- conformist, narrow-minded, humorless, politically correct, authoritarian, fearful of change. I mean, Hillary Clinton is the very image of Nurse Ratched, is she not? From Wikipedia:

"Nurse Mildred Ratched is the head administrative nurse at the state mental hospital, where she exercises near-absolute power over the patients' access to medications, privileges, and basic necessities such as food and toiletries. She capriciously revokes these privileges whenever a patient displeases her. Her superiors turn blind eyes because she maintains order, keeping the patients from acting out... A cold sadistic, tyrant obsessed with her own power.... She has also become a popular metaphor for the corrupting influence of power and authority in bureaucracies.... When McMurphy arrives at the hospital, however, her dictatorial rule is nearly toppled; he not only flouts her precious rules with impunity, but encourages the other patients to follow his example. Her attempts to cow him into submission -- at first with threats and mild punishments, then with shock therapy -- are unsuccessful. If anything, they only make him more defiant...."

So back to my theological dilemma. In many ways, the question of whether the cosmos is evolutionary or degenerative comes down to whether God is a funny guy or more like the morbid fellow portrayed in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Yes, it's an extended quote, so skip it if you want, but it's pretty entertaining. Otherwise, this is the end of today's post.

*****

The preacher's voice sank. He paused, joined his palms for an instant, parted them. Then he resumed:

-- Now let us try for a moment to realize, as far as we can, the nature of that abode of the damned which the justice of an offended God has called into existence for the eternal punishment of sinners. Hell is a strait and dark and foul-smelling prison, an abode of demons and lost souls, filled with fire and smoke. The straitness of this prison house is expressly designed by God to punish those who refused to be bound by His laws. In earthly prisons the poor captive has at least some liberty of movement, were it only within the four walls of his cell or in the gloomy yard of his prison. Not so in hell. There, by reason of the great number of the damned, the prisoners are heaped together in their awful prison, the walls of which are said to be four thousand miles thick: and the damned are so utterly bound and helpless that, as a blessed saint, saint Anselm, writes in his book on similitudes, they are not even able to remove from the eye a worm that gnaws it.

-- They lie in exterior darkness. For, remember, the fire of hell gives forth no light. As, at the command of God, the fire of the Babylonian furnace lost its heat but not its light, so, at the command of God, the fire of hell, while retaining the intensity of its heat, burns eternally in darkness. It is a never ending storm of darkness, dark flames and dark smoke of burning brimstone, amid which the bodies are heaped one upon another without even a glimpse of air. Of all the plagues with which the land of the Pharaohs were smitten one plague alone, that of darkness, was called horrible. What name, then, shall we give to the darkness of hell which is to last not for three days alone but for all eternity?

-- The horror of this strait and dark prison is increased by its awful stench. All the filth of the world, all the offal and scum of the world, we are told, shall run there as to a vast reeking sewer when the terrible conflagration of the last day has purged the world. The brimstone, too, which burns there in such prodigious quantity fills all hell with its intolerable stench; and the bodies of the damned themselves exhale such a pestilential odour that, as saint Bonaventure says, one of them alone would suffice to infect the whole world. The very air of this world, that pure element, becomes foul and unbreathable when it has been long enclosed. Consider then what must be the foulness of the air of hell. Imagine some foul and putrid corpse that has lain rotting and decomposing in the grave, a jelly-like mass of liquid corruption. Imagine such a corpse a prey to flames, devoured by the fire of burning brimstone and giving off dense choking fumes of nauseous loathsome decomposition. And then imagine this sickening stench, multiplied a millionfold and a millionfold again from the millions upon millions of fetid carcasses massed together in the reeking darkness, a huge and rotting human fungus. Imagine all this, and you will have some idea of the horror of the stench of hell.

-- But this stench is not, horrible though it is, the greatest physical torment to which the damned are subjected. The torment of fire is the greatest torment to which the tyrant has ever subjected his fellow creatures. Place your finger for a moment in the flame of a candle and you will feel the pain of fire. But our earthly fire was created by God for the benefit of man, to maintain in him the spark of life and to help him in the useful arts, whereas the fire of hell is of another quality and was created by God to torture and punish the unrepentant sinner. Our earthly fire also consumes more or less rapidly according as the object which it attacks is more or less combustible, so that human ingenuity has even succeeded in inventing chemical preparations to check or frustrate its action. But the sulphurous brimstone which burns in hell is a substance which is specially designed to burn for ever and for ever with unspeakable fury. Moreover, our earthly fire destroys at the same time as it burns, so that the more intense it is the shorter is its duration; but the fire of hell has this property, that it preserves that which it burns, and, though it rages with incredible intensity, it rages for ever.

--Our earthly fire again, no matter how fierce or widespread it may be, is always of a limited extent; but the lake of fire in hell is boundless, shoreless and bottomless. It is on record that the devil himself, when asked the question by a certain soldier, was obliged to confess that if a whole mountain were thrown into the burning ocean of hell it would be burned up In an instant like a piece of wax. And this terrible fire will not afflict the bodies of the damned only from without, but each lost soul will be a hell unto itself, the boundless fire raging in its very vitals. O, how terrible is the lot of those wretched beings! The blood seethes and boils in the veins, the brains are boiling in the skull, the heart in the breast glowing and bursting, the bowels a red-hot mass of burning pulp, the tender eyes flaming like molten balls.

--And yet what I have said as to the strength and quality and boundlessness of this fire is as nothing when compared to its intensity, an intensity which it has as being the instrument chosen by divine design for the punishment of soul and body alike. It is a fire which proceeds directly from the ire of God, working not of its own activity but as an instrument of Divine vengeance. As the waters of baptism cleanse the soul with the body, so do the fires of punishment torture the spirit with the flesh. Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the nose with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever-increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the God-head.

--Consider finally that the torment of this infernal prison is increased by the company of the damned themselves. Evil company on earth is so noxious that the plants, as if by instinct, withdraw from the company of whatsoever is deadly or hurtful to them. In hell all laws are overturned - there is no thought of family or country, of ties, of relationships. The damned howl and scream at one another, their torture and rage intensified by the presence of beings tortured and raging like themselves. All sense of humanity is forgotten. The yells of the suffering sinners fill the remotest corners of the vast abyss. The mouths of the damned are full of blasphemies against God and of hatred for their fellow sufferers and of curses against those souls which were their accomplices in sin. In olden times it was the custom to punish the parricide, the man who had raised his murderous hand against his father, by casting him into the depths of the sea in a sack in which were placed a cock, a monkey, and a serpent. The intention of those law-givers who framed such a law, which seems cruel in our times, was to punish the criminal by the company of hurtful and hateful beasts. But what is the fury of those dumb beasts compared with the fury of execration which bursts from the parched lips and aching throats of the damned in hell when they behold in their companions in misery those who aided and abetted them in sin, those whose words sowed the first seeds of evil thinking and evil living in their minds, those whose immodest suggestions led them on to sin, those whose eyes tempted and allured them from the path of virtue. They turn upon those accomplices and upbraid them and curse them. But they are helpless and hopeless: it is too late now for repentance.

--Last of all consider the frightful torment to those damned souls, tempters and tempted alike, of the company of the devils. These devils will afflict the damned in two ways, by their presence and by their reproaches. We can have no idea of how horrible these devils are. Saint Catherine of Siena once saw a devil and she has written that, rather than look again for one single instant on such a frightful monster, she would prefer to walk until the end of her life along a track of red coals. These devils, who were once beautiful angels, have become as hideous and ugly as they once were beautiful. They mock and jeer at the lost souls whom they dragged down to ruin. It is they, the foul demons, who are made in hell the voices of conscience. Why did you sin? Why did you lend an ear to the temptings of friends? Why did you turn aside from your pious practices and good works? Why did you not shun the occasions of sin? Why did you not leave that evil companion? Why did you not give up that lewd habit, that impure habit? Why did you not listen to the counsels of your confessor? Why did you not, even after you had fallen the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the hundredth time, repent of your evil ways and turn to God who only waited for your repentance to absolve you of your sins? Now the time for repentance has gone by. Time is, time was, but time shall be no more! Time was to sin in secrecy, to indulge in that sloth and pride, to covet the unlawful, to yield to the promptings of your lower nature, to live like the beasts of the field, nay worse than the beasts of the field, for they, at least, are but brutes and have no reason to guide them: time was, but time shall be no more. God spoke to you by so many voices, but you would not hear. You would not crush out that pride and anger in your heart, you would not restore those ill-gotten goods, you would not obey the precepts of your holy church nor attend to your religious duties, you would not abandon those wicked companions, you would not avoid those dangerous temptations. Such is the language of those fiendish tormentors, words of taunting and of reproach, of hatred and of disgust. Of disgust, yes! For even they, the very devils, when they sinned, sinned by such a sin as alone was compatible with such angelical natures, a rebellion of the intellect: and they, even they, the foul devils must turn away, revolted and disgusted, from the contemplation of those unspeakable sins by which degraded man outrages and defiles the temple of the Holy Ghost, defiles and pollutes himself.

--O, my dear little brothers in Christ, may it never be our lot to hear that language! May it never be our lot, I say! In the last day of terrible reckoning I pray fervently to God that not a single soul of those who are in this chapel today may be found among those miserable beings whom the Great Judge shall command to depart for ever from His sight, that not one of us may ever hear ringing in his ears the awful sentence of rejection: Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels!

Beyond the Human Margin of Politics

Schuon has a thought-provoking essay entitled The Human Margin, in which he points out that there is necessarily a realm in religion which, "while being orthodox and traditional, is nonetheless human in a certain sense." This is because "the Divine influence is total only for the Scriptures and for the essential consequences of the Revelation," which always leaves a "human margin" where this divine influence shades off to the human and "exerts no more than an indirect action, letting ethnic or cultural factors speak."

For example, many of the differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy are at the human margin; they are ethnic and cultural, two different ways of interpreting and living the Christian message -- two different views of the Absolute. As Schuon points out, "It is to this sector or margin that many of the speculations of exoterism belong; orthodoxy is on the one hand homogeneous and indivisible, on the other hand it admits of degrees of absoluteness and relativity."

This is why theological disputes are inevitable even within a given revelation, as man with his relative mind attempts to grapple with the absolute and eternal message. If time is the moving image of eternity, then perhaps theology is man's diary of this movement. It is not in eternity, nor is it quite in time, but in that ambiguous twilit realm where eternity pours into each of us at our own human margin: O-->(k).

I would like to abruptly shift if not grind gears for a moment, as I was thinking yesterday of how this principle might apply to the political realm. For Americans, the Constitution is analogous to revelation -- a quasi-divine message from the Absolute with regard to the best way to order relations between the individual and the group. In fact, because we are American, this is more than an analogy. Our innate sense of a spiritual mission is something that people from other nations do not comprehend -- with the exception of the many essential Americans who were only accidentally born in other nations, such as an Arnold Schwarzenegger, or Irving Berlin, or my own father. Or even me, since I was actually born in the People's Republic of Santa Monica.

Because of the constant drumbeat of sick and twisted leftist anti-American propaganda, I don't really know if it is equally true today, but there was a time when immigrants flocked to America not just for the economic benefits but because of the beacon of spiritual liberty. But the left, because it is thoroughly materialized -- which, you must understand, is a spiritual state -- looks at America only through a crude economic lens.

I would say this is "ironic," but it really isn't. The organizing fantasy of the left is that conservative classical liberals are obsessed with money and wealth, but this is pure projection. It is the left that is obsessed with money and wealth, which it must be, since it knows no realm higher than the material. This is why they cannot understand the phenomena of "Reagan Democrats," or "values voters," or just everyday Americans who -- in the eyes of the left -- "vote against their own economic interests" by being in favor of low taxes and limited government. In short, conservatives are much more motivated by eternal values, not by class envy or leftist schemes of income redistribution.

And this is why the left has such undisguised contempt for middle America and certainly for "red state" America. For the leftist, reality is by definition reduced to the material plane. But you cannot reduce reality to the material plane without a disastrous effect on your own psyche and spirit. It goes without saying that in embracing materialism, you do great violence to your soul, since you essentially foreclose it. But not exactly. Rather, you transform it into something hard, inflexible, and concrete; furthermore, you render yourself impenetrable to the divine light, or to the influx of transcendent forces in general. As always, the rain of grace will fall from the sky, but it will land on the stony soil of your own shrunken and desiccated soul. Anyone with awakened coonvision can see this -- can vividly perceive the interior state of someone whose soul has turned to stone.

It would be bad enough to be in the presence of all these creepy stoners if they were only encased in stone, but something else happens to them on their merry way to hell, and again, it is something I think you'll agree is vividly apparent to one's awakened coonvision. No soul can actually live in a closed state. Rather, like the body, it must always receive "nourishment" from outside sources. In fact, take the analogy of something with which I am intimately familiar, diabetes. If I did not give myself insulin on a daily basis in order to metabolize glucose, my body would soon begin to literally consume itself. In so doing, it would give off a toxic, acidic byproduct known as ketones, which would kill me in a matter of days.

Is there something analogous to ketoacidosis that happens to the leftist mind, by which it suffocates in its own acid? Now that I think of it, it is interesting, is it not, that the left is so very acidotic? When I say this, I obviously cannot get through to the leftist whose soul is in a state of advanced ketoacidosis, such as these typical examples. For one thing, this spiritual acidosis -- like its physical analogue -- causes confusion and eventually delirium.

(An interesting point: one reason why there isn't any controversy about leftist "hate speech" is that so much of it is unprintable as compared, say, to Ann Coulter, who may be polemical but not even remotely similar to the haters of the left, such as a Rosie O'Donnell or the rantings of the most popular leftist websites. The MSM takes Coulter to task for merely taunting John Edwards for being a such a feminized man, whereas the anti-Catholic bigotry of the official bloggers Edwards hired is so vile that it can't even be repeated on TV or printed in any mainstream newspaper. I can't think of any mainstream conservative rhetoric that can't be repeated in the MSM except for self-censoring reasons of political correctness. For example, many things I say are unmentionable in the MSM, not because they're hateful, but because they're true. In fact, you might say that political correctness is the left's corrupt technique for converting truth into hate and rendering it unmentionable.)

When you hit the above link -- and I recommend that you do, if only to firmly understand my point -- pay no attention to the intellectual content, which is obviously nil. Rather, try -- but not too hard, since it is not healthy to go there -- try to discern the spiritual state of the person from whom these "headlines" -- bowel-lines is more like it -- arise. Again, such a person is subject to a continuous flow of "grace," as it were, but it is the inexhaustible satanic grace which allows, say, a Noam Chomsky to write book after tedious book of corrosive bile. Yes, it is the same book over and over, which it must be due to the very nature of satanic grace, which contains no true novelty, just infinite permutations of the satanic message. This is why, for example, left wing radio is so incredibly boring, and why the totalitarian left wants to reimpose the "fairness doctrine" to force-feed their unpopular message to Americans.

This kind of pseudo-novelty is apparently "thrilling" to the vital mind of the materialist; it provides their "intellectual food," just as "transgressive" art provides their spiritual nourishment. Again: the materialist mind, cut off from its source above, will attempt to feed itself from below, which, over time, leads to deeper and deeper states of pathology. This is the true source of what we call the "culture war" in America, as the left necessarily becomes sicker and sicker, but imagines that the movement responsible for this divide is coming from "conservatives."

To cite one obvious example, Barack Obama -- who is increasingly beginning to sound sinister and not just stupid -- spoke the other day of how conservatives have "hijacked faith." Yes, you are hijacking faith if you simply adhere to what the faithful have always believed, which is that marriage is the spiritual union of a man and woman, or that children do best with a mother and father, or that abortion cannot possibly please God. Let's at least be honest -- who is trying to hijack faith to ram through their new sociopolitical agenda?

As I was about to say, I cannot possibly speak to the leftist whose own mind has been fully hijacked -- or lowjacked -- from below. Rather, I can only reach the leftist who is still at the human margin (which I know happens, since I have the emails to prove it). No, not in this case the margin between the divine and human, to which my theological bobservations are addressed. Rather, the margin between the human and the infrahuman; or, if that sounds too harsh and insulting, let us just say, between the human and the post-human -- which is what postmodern secular humanism surely is: an experiment in what it means to violently toss aside what it has always meant to be human, and to try to "transcend" the human state.

But this transcendence is not from above, but from below. It is not actually transcendence, but rebellion. This is why, ironically -- but not really -- the left is the real reactionary movement, since it is always reacting to, and rebelling against, the Divine. In so doing, it comes into contact with intoxicating forces that are greater than the individual, but they are from below, not above.

Returning to the question of the "human margin" and how it applies to politics. Again, if we look at the American Constitution, it is analogous to divine revelation. It is absolute, but it nevertheless shades off into the human margin. In turn, the purpose of the Supreme Court is to determine the point at which the human margin shades off into political heresy, so to speak, into the realm of the "unconstitutional."

There is a "natural" left and right which is healthy and to which no true American should be opposed. This represents the realm of alternative points of view within the Constitution, somewhat analogous to different traditions that cohere around the divine revelation of Christianity. The Constitution allows for a certain latitude, for certain "divergencies within orthodoxy," in which different theologians -- or constitutional scholars -- can hammer out their differences at the human margin.

But at some point in our history -- different people will argue whether it was, say, with FDR's usurpation of federal power, or with the rise of the anti-American left in the 1960s -- the honorable left-hand side of American tradition veered well beyond the acceptable human margin and began embracing doctrines that were frankly extra-constitutional, un-American, and completely at odds with our traditions.

Running out of time here, but the examples are too numerous to mention. For example, America was intended to be a Judeo-Christian nation -- not government, but nation, which is something much deeper, and from which the government derives its just powers. If you argue that America was somehow intended to be a secular nation, or a Muslim nation, or an anti-religious nation, then you are simply un-American. You are "out of bounds."

Smoov left a relevant comment yesterday, which was actually the inspiration for today's post. He wrote,

"Yesterday's 30,000 foot reading included the current New Yorker, wherein an essay contains a casual reference to the recent decsion of America to introduce the practice of torture.

"The Left has fully insinuated this vile slander against their own nation into the global zeitgeist. The 'fact' that Americans are now morally equivalent to Robert Mugabe's thugs or the SS is so entrenched that the likes of Jon Stewart routinely use it as fodder for inane jokes.

"The indecent Left's willingness to sabotage their own nation in such a thoroughgoing manner -- all due to an infantile hatred of the current President -- should elicit a stronger response than it does.

"Call me a torturer publicly and I'll see you in court, and liberate you of half your paycheck for the next 20 years. Do it to your own nation and get published in the New Yorker or knock down 5 or 6 mil a year fronting the Daily Show.

"Where's the public outrage over these diabolical affronts to America?"

Why, it's right here at One Cosmos, where we point out how the Left has ventured well beyond the human margin -- where the bright and gory post-human moon god steps ashore from the sea below, surveys the sinister world he has created, and pronounces that it is bad.

Gods --> Kings --> Men --> Chaos

In the book I am currently reading by Charles Upton, he analyzes one of the central problems of the postmodern world, which is the plethora of information that no person could possibly ever master. I'm not sure we realize how new and how alien this is compared to past generations of humans. After all, it wasn't too long ago that a gifted polymath such as Thomas Jefferson could more or less have a passing familiarity with everything important to know, but today it's probably a rare person who even masters his own specialty. As the cliché goes, we will know more and more about less and less until we eventually know everything about nothing. In fact, the secular left is already there "ahead" of us.

This excess of information easily leads to subjectivism, cynicism, gullibility, fanaticism, and paranoia. In the absence of a "central clearing house" to process all of the information -- some kind of fixed, all-encompassing map or scheme that isn't just another piece of information -- then there is no way to ground any of it in a more meaningful whole. Religion used to serve this purpose, but now contemporary religion itself has fragmented into so many shards -- although it needn't be that way. With a little verticalisthenics and mental gymgnostics we can still have One Cosmos Under God. It just takes some upplied nondoing.

Upton defines paranoia as "the attempt of the human mind to reach cognitive closure in a situation that does not allow for it, either because there is too little information to warrant that closure, or -- as with the paranoid schizophrenic -- too much information to make sense of, except through delusion."

A perfect example of postmodern paranoia is the weather hysteria of the greenhouse gasbags, which serves the same purpose that witch hunting did in an earlier age. In a frightening and uncertain world, we can at least be certain about what the weather will be like in a hundred years, long after we're all safely in the grave. Note how they take something so inherently filled with uncertainty, but nevertheless convert it into a fixed and unalterable belief, when the only appropriate stance toward manmade weather change at this juncture (at least for the lay person) is one of skeptical agnosticism (which is not necessarily true of the "experts," whose job it is to argue their point of view with other experts who have differing points of view; but just don't pretend the issue is settled).

If you are not in need of this kind of organizing fantasy in your life, it's very difficult to understand the mindset of the people who do need it. It is a kind of reverse image of genuine religion, which deals with perennial truth, not a need for cognitive closure. This is not to say that anxiety-ridden people don't misuse religion for that purpose, since they do so all the time. But in my view, just as science is a journey from the unknown to the known, religion is a journey from the known to the unknown. Properly understood, it is the precise opposite of what these critics believe it to be. I don't practice religion because I want easy answers, but because I am drawn to the inexhaustible mystery of being. Ho!

Upton notes that our "postmodern information culture is perfectly designed to create paranoia," since "we are forced by it to process too much information; and this 'too much' is, in another sense, too little, since as the quantity of facts (or conjectures, or fantasies) increases, our certainty as to the truth of any fact decreases."

In reality, the mechanism underlying the paranoid process is a necessary function for the human being, because without it we wouldn't be able to make any kind of decision or judgment at all. We could never assess the available facts and arrive at any cognitive closure. We would be the opposite of the paranoid, which is the obsessive, going round and round in circles, unable to make a decision and stick to it -- to fish or cut bait. The mechanism that underlies paranoia is what allows us "to create a stable outlook, a consistent and unified worldview."

Now, as I mentioned above, the infinite number of facts in our world can also breed cynicism, since the facts can be manipulated and configured in any way a malevolent person wishes. Whereas paranoia is the unconscious closure of an ambiguous field of facts, cynicism is the conscious manipulation of the facts for some ulterior purpose. Take, for example, the prewar intelligence that made the invasion of Iraq necessary. No one knew for certain whether or not Iraq had WMD, because that's not the way intelligence works. Rather, there are only millions of facts -- or bits of information -- with which intelligence services inductively arrive at different scenarios. No one just drops a pile of raw information on the President's desk and says "you're the decider. You decide."

The left maintains that the president was cynical in manipulating this information, when it couldn't be more obvious that they are the ones who are cynically making that charge. But even worse, the blatantly cynical ones, like John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore -- who know full well they are lying -- make the charge in order to satisfy a base that is not cynical, but outright paranoid -- which is another form of demagoguery, which is to say, pretending one is as crazy as the masses so that the masses can imagine they're not crazy. It is to give them a false cognitive closure and to provide in President Bush an object for their otherwise unbound hatred.

*****

"Without question, we need to disarm Saddam Hussein.... And now he is miscalculating America's response to his continued deceit and his consistent grasp for weapons of mass destruction.... So the threat of Saddam Hussein with weapons of mass destruction is real..." --John Kerry

"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program." --Bill Clinton

"Iraq's search for weapons of mass destruction has proven impossible to deter and we should assume that it will continue for as long as Saddam is in power." --Al Gore

"... [I]ntelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including al Qaeda members.... if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." --Hillary Clinton

*****

I do not present these quotes for the tiresome purpose of rehashing the argument for going to war, only to show how the cynical and power hungry manipulate the paranoid and gullible in the postmodern world -- and then cynically turn reality on its head, calling President Bush the cynical one, since his "real motive" for going into Iraq was to make money for Halliburton. Can you imagine a more simplistic, magical worldview? And yet, millions on the left believe it. John Lennon once sang the vapid lyric, "God is a concept by which we measure our pain." I suppose that's true for an Islamist, but it's also true of the secular leftist who turns George Bush into the Antichrist -- who literally believes that he is worse than Hitler.

Regarding the mental mechanism underlying paranoia, Bion -- who always aimed at formulating the most abstract essence of a thing -- called it PS<-->D. There's no need to get into what the PS and D stand for, only to point out that their interplay is somewhat analogous to metabolism, in that the properly functioning mind is constantly going back and forth between tearing down, so to speak, and rebuilding. For example, in therapy you are generally confronted with one of two kinds of patient; either they will have an excess of PS, which is to say that they are in a state of fragmentation and persecution; or, alternatively, they are in a kind of dead zone of pathological certitude -- they are stuck and cannot evolve out of an impasse. The only way for the latter to evolve is for their mind to "dissolve" into PS (which they don't want to do, since that is where all the persecutory fragments are, i.e., mind parasites) and rebuild, so to speak, on a more firm foundation.

But in a purely secular world, the mind has no final destination, so that there can be no ultimate point to the PS<-->D process. It can become arbitrary, which leads to a kind of pseudo-maturity, which is what characterological cynicism always entails. And deconstruction is the essence of cynicism, since it can take any text and show how it actually means something else, essentially whatever one wants it to mean. So if you are a postmodern secular leftist who doesn't believe in objective truth, what possible grounds do you have for objecting to President Bush's use of intelligence? He's just doing what you and everyone else are condemned to do in a world without intrinsic meaning or truth.

Upton writes that this is the greatest danger of postmodernism: "that in its understandable attempt to avoid totalitarian ideologies, it is storing up in the collective unconscious, through its own 'totalitarian relativism', a deep desire for the lost Unity which was once provided by religion, metaphysics, and the intellectual intuition of God. When our exhaustion with chaos and relativism reaches a breaking-point -- which will also be the point when our ability to recognize the true, objective, metphysical Unity is most deeply eroded -- then our unconscious desire for that Unity will explosively emerge. And the one who can best fulfill this desire, on a global level -- no matter how unrealistic his promises are, since our collective sense of reality will then be at its lowest ebb -- will step into the role of Antichrist" (emphasis mine).

There are some key concepts in that passage: totalitarian relativism, the desire for the lost Unity, the exhaustion with chaos, and finally, the satanic thunderclap that signifies that man's fall is complete and that the time is ripe for the false god to come to the rescue.

James Joyce built the structure of Finnegans Wake around the cycle of the Age of Gods --> the Age of Kings --> the Age of Men --> and the Age of Chaos. The age of chaos will only be resolved with a new Age of God(s), which renews the cycle. The question is, what kinds of God?

Looked at cosmically, we are now on the cusp between the Age of Men and the Age of Chaos. The Age of Men more or less ended at some point in our lifetimes; those of us who are even half-awake can sense it, which I believe was the whole point of this beautiful but disturbing essay by Van der Leun, Will the Sleepers Awake? The vast difference between a king and a man is the unbridgeable gap between a Ronald Reagan and a Jimmy Carter -- who is not techncially a Man -- as was, say, JFK -- but a preview of the coming post-human in the Age of Chaos -- the Bill Clintons, John Edwards, and Barack Obamas.

Postmodern is post-God and therefore post-human. We can only hope that the chaos it engenders will be pre-God, in a massive PS<-->D that humanity has been aching for since it first fell from the trees. Either we metabolize our demons or they will metabolize us. In these dysluxic times, it's a god-eat-god world.

Phall if you but will, rise you must: and none so soon either shall the pharce for the nunce come to a setdown secular phoenish....

Hohohoho Mister Finn, you're going to be mister Finnagain! Comeday morm, and, O, you're vine! Sendday's Eve and, ah you're vinegar! Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again! --James Joyce

On Hitting the Invisible Target

Schopenhauer said something to the effect that the talented man is like a marksman who is able to hit a target that others can't hit, while the great artist is like a marksman who is able to hit a target others can't even see. Irrespective of whether I hit the target, due to the very nature of the subject (non)matter, every morning's post is definitely like target practice, in which I aim for an invisible target that I'm trying to make out through bobscure layers of phenomena -- somewhat like dowsing for water. Whatever it is, it's always on the tip of my tongue -- or just beyond it.

Furthermore, in the absence of feedback, I would never really know if I hit the target -- that is, a target that exists objectively, not just in my mind here in Upper Tonga. Or, to put it another way, it is always a surprise and a delight to hear others say that I more or less hit the bulls-eye, because that's the most vivid testimony to the reality of the target. It means that there really is an invisible Matterhorn at which we are both unlooking from our respective photo uppertunities.

Schuon was an expert marksman who spent his life hitting invisible bulls-eye after bulls-eye. It's one thing to be a gifted scientist who makes many interesting discoveries in his life. He is like the marksman who hits the target. But the scientist is just a small part of a huge collective enterprise called "science" that is groping toward a target it can never actually reach. And in science, one day's bulls-eye is the next day's errant shot, as the target perpetually advances forward, making old discoveries obsolete.

But when you are writing about God, the target is fixed and final. You might say that science tries to discover timeless principles about the temporal, whereas metaphysics tries to arrive at relative statements about the absolute. They are relative only by virtue of the fact that we are not God, but nevertheless, they are the closest we can come to objective truth, at least on this side of manifestation. Thus, the realm of metaphysics is the "relatively absolute."

I'm currently reading a book that I am greatly enjoying (disclaimer: I'm only up to p. 94 of a 500 pp. book), The System of Antichrist: Truth & Falsehood in Postmodernism and the New Age, which does an outstanding job of sumarizing Schuon's basic philosophy. Interestingly, a reader yesterday left a comment that he wanted to start a discussion group of LOBSTRs, that is "Left Of Bob But Still a Raccoon," and this fellow may be your man. The author evolved up from the bowels of the deep, dark left, much further left than I ever was, and still hasn't made it all the way back. He acknowledges that almost all his fellow traditionalists are politically conservative, but that he is part of a tiny minority of liberal traditionalists. Therefore, every so often he makes a passing comment that is rather off-putting to the point of moonbattery, despite the fact that the great majority of the book is brilliant and extremely well-written -- both clear and beautifully expressed.

I give the man credit, for there is no question that the adage holds true: the greater the fall, or the plunge into darkness, the greater the realization, and this man seems to have come from the rock bottom depths of loony left activism (of the kind David Horowitz recovered from), which makes his present writing quite grounded and authoritative. His transformation has obviously been real, even if he is still (or was, as of 2001) needlessly frightened of conservatives. I know how difficult it was for me to realize that the people I thought were demons were just regular folks, so I can't even imagine how it is for him. He is also rather blind to the intrinsic problems of Islam (he is actually a Sufi), but the book was written prior to 9-11, so he gets a pass on that.

As I mentioned, I was never really a leftist per se, just a garden variety baby-boom liberal who was unwittingly swept up in the tide as the party moved further and further leftward, away from its modern liberal roots. Like all my friends, I didn't know the first thing about conservatism, only that conservatives were evil. But by the time I finally woke up and looked around, the Democrat party was no longer recognizable to me. Hard to believe, but back in the 1970s, they really weren't the party of haters, losers, the envious, the perpetually angry and the frankly crazy, as is true today. Even in the 1980s, those people were more on the fringe of the party, not the mainstream. But now the illiberal left completely dominates the Democrats. There's hardly a point of entry for a sane voice -- which is unfortunate, because it forces conservatives to align themselves solely with a Republican party that is more often than not completely at odds with our own values. But between the stupid party and the evil party, we aren't left with much of a real world choice.

Anyway, in his various books, Schuon set out to present "nothing less than a doctrine that is essential, integral, homogeneous, and sufficient unto itself; we would gladly say 'pholosophy' or 'theosophy', were these terms not susceptible to being misinterpreted." With regard to the issue of "hitting the target" -- and the impossibility of doing so -- he writes,

"One point that always seems to elude de facto rationalists is that there is inevitably a separation between the thing to be expressed and its expression, that is to say, between reality and a doctrine." Thus, "it is always possible to fault an adequate doctrine for being inadequate, since no doctrine can be identified with what it intends to express...." And "If the expression of a thing could be adequate or exhaustive in an absolute sense or from every point of view... there would no longer be any difference between the image and its prototype, and in that case it would be pointless to speak of thought or even simply of language."

But the whole point of metaphysical doctrine is not to paint a literal picture but "to provide a set of points of reference which, by definition, are more or less elliptical while being sufficient to evoke a mental perception of specific aspects of the real." So Schuon can only aim at the invisible target, but "the rest is a matter of intellectual capacity, good will, and grace" in the reader (and not in that order!).

That is, in pure metaphysics "there is no empiricism: principial knowledge cannot stem from any experience, even though experiences -- scientific or other -- can be the occasional causes of the intellect's intuitions." But the sources of these intuitions are ultimately "innate data, consubstantial with pure intelligence, but de facto 'forgotten'...." Thus, it is really a matter of vertical recollection -- which, as our unknown friend points out in Meditations on the Tarot, is as waking is to sleeping and resurrection is to death.

Therefore, the target Schuon is aiming at is intrinsically tied up with life, death, sleep, awakening, remembering, and realizing. Although hardly irrational (being supra-rational), it is the opposite of rationalism, which "consists in seeking the elements of certitude in phenomena rather than in our very being." This is why the targets of rationalism are so easy to hit. Again, an adolescent, so long as he is in Piaget's stage of formal operations thought, can completely understand the abstract and insipid arguments of materialism and atheism. And in fact, these doctrines often carry a lot of appeal to adolescents, but for extra-rational reasons. That is, rationalism exalts the adequacy of the ego, and easily fosters an attitude of pride and rebelliousness.

One reason Schuon is a "conservative" (not in our mundane political sense, but much deeper than that) is that for him, there are no "problems of our time." Rather, there are the same fundamental, underlying problems which reside in the nature of Man. Or, if there is a unique "problem of our time," it is this: that modern man thinks he is somehow fundamentally different than all the men who have gone before, especially in the sense that he imagines that faith (which is virtual gnosis) and gnosis (which is the fruit of faith) no longer have any relevance to him. It is as if all past generations were idiots, which raises the issue, as Schuon pointed out on a number of occasions, that if man was too stupid to know universal truths in the past, there is no reason to believe that he is intelligent enough to do so today.

Well, not much slack this morning. I didn't really have time to get into things as deeply as I had hoped. We'll pick up this thread and search for the invisible target again tomorrow.

Follow the Depth (6.07.09)

Reader Magnus Itland left a comment yesterday, "Bob, you write about how you recognized Schuon as a vehicle of grace, but you don't agree with everything he said, and he sure wouldn't have agreed with everything of what you say. It mildly amuses me that this sums up how I relate to you. I see some things quite differently, but that never held me back from riding your spiritual coat tails. I am not in a position to only buy lamp oil from people I agree with in all things."

Yesterday the phrase popped into my head -- or was it an order? -- follow the depth. That's pretty much what I try to do, irrespective of the source, in that each post is simply a murmurandom from the deep space of vertical understanding. I assume it's the same way with you, in that there's something in us that is not only able to distinguish truth from falsehood in the conventional way on the horizontal axis, but also on the vertical axis.

On the horizontal axis, things are either true or false in the unambiguous scientific sense. But only on the vertical axis can you get into "profound truths," some of which might even superficially contradict one another. This, of course, is one of the fundamental errors of atheists and other shallow philosophies. One of the reasons the vast majority of normal people reject atheism is that it's so trite and insipid. Our vertical truth detector knows that nothing can be that simplistic, let alone everything.

A profound truth is one that qualitatively ties together and organizes a greater quantity of phenomena on both the inner and outer planes. Thus, the more shallow the level, the more truths multiply; whereas the deeper one ventures, the more all-encompassing the truth, until one finally arrives at the One: "to know much, you must know little" (and vice versa).

But even then it's not that simple, because on the vertical axis truths can be expressed in such a way that they "carry their own depth." Or, you might say that they simultaneously elucidate and demonstrate. The sayings of Jesus are quintessential in this regard. When he speaks, he is not just talking about the vertical, but at the same time showing it to you, tying together the interior and exterior dimensions of reality. You might say that his death and resurrection are the ultimate case of tying all of the planes together: "it is accomplished."

This is more or less what I meant about Schuon being a vehicle of grace, in that he too has the power to "make present" that which is under discussion, which is always more or less O, approached from a multitude of vectors. As he put it in the preface to one of his books, "Metaphysics aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe, which extends from the Divine Order to terrestrial contingencies." Further, it offers "humanly crucial openings, which is all the more important in a world wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom." In my book, I compare these openings to the vertical springs that dot the horizontal landscape. Once your coonvision is operative, these inscapes are hidden in plain sight every where and eventually -- one hopes -- when.

As Schuon wrote -- and which I could add as a disclaimer to each of my posts -- "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."

This is why Schuon's writings -- like the cosmos itself -- never merely contain what they contain. Rather, they are activated in unpredictable ways upon contact with them (indeed, as mentioned yesterday, ways to which he might even object!) by one's own gnosis. This is why he can say in the preface of another work that "there is the order of principles, which is immutable, and the order of information -- traditional or otherwise -- of which one can say that it is inexhaustible."

Paraorthodoxically -- or perhaps not -- although O is immutable, it flows with ceaseless novelty. Conversely, the infinite number of facts on the horizontal plane never adds up to the Infinite, only to the many, or the false infinite. The facts of our existence -- of Being -- are only tied together in depth by virtue of the deeper reality explicated through traditional metaphysics.

Which does not mean that you must be a metaphysician to appreciate this deep unity. Rather it is our prior condition, and available to anyone -- it is man's birthright, and part of what makes him man -- but "extended" and given voice and body through providential religious doctrine and practice. Religion is always fundamentally about deep unity, which is another way of saying deep meaning -- or the depth of meaning and the meaning of depth, both of which completely elude materialistic reduction: the secret protects itself, especially from the cold and greedy hands of the flatlanders.

And in fact, this is why Schuon is never a syncretist, as he is always writing from the standpoint of primordial unity: "it is one thing to manufacture a doctrine by assembling scattered ideas as best one can, and quite another to recognize the single Truth contained in various doctrines on the basis of what we willingly call the sophia perennis." If he sometimes draws from this or that tradition, it is not a result of mixture, but generally for the purposes of illuminating an underemphasized doctrine in one tradition by way of another -- which in turn underscores the totality of each tradition and ultimately reinforces one's faith in their divine origin.

Human beings are mental beings, and to the extent that religion cannot offer a deep and satisfying vision to man's intellect, then it has failed in its saving mission. A religion should not only illuminate your mind, but save it -- and not just from "the world," but from yourself. Can I get a witness? Thank you. Left to his own devices, there is obviously no end to the nonsense man will come up with. But one of the reasons he attempts to come up with these harebrained schemes is that faith and gnosis have become severed from one another in modern times. It is analogous to trying to illuminate what is off the road by following your headlight beams, which is a sure way to miss the splendor of the True, subtly illuminating itself off to the side in the dark woods.

The sapiential dimension of religion has generally been lost, and one of Schuon's central missions was to restore this element, so that religion may once again speak to intellectually gifted men. Religious doctrines "provide a comprehensive and qualitative knowledge of the cosmos," even though it seems that the majority of modern men have lost their ability to grasp "the compatibility between the symbolic expressions of tradition and the material discoveries established by science." (Obviously, my book was an attempt to demonstrate this deep and even necessary compatibility.)

It is as if modern man wishes the deeper truth that reveals the unity of the vertical and horizontal to be of the same character as profane horizontal knowledge, which it can never be. With this benighted approach, man forecloses in advance that which he wishes to know. Today, few so-called intellectuals are even capable of comprehending the arguments of a Meister Eckhart or Denys the Areopagite, for they aren't even in contact with the plane from which they speak and to which their writings apply.

Proofs of God are not linear equations, as in 2 + 2 = 4. Rather, their proof is contained in their formulation, very much in the manner that the "proof" of a great work of art is not separable from the work itself. The genuine work of art is its own proof, its own certificate of authenticity. It is vertically self-confirming, is it not? And although a particular instance, it is proof of the existence of art in general -- as well as of the artist. When we say that "the word became flesh," this is by virtue of the principle that the Divine takes on qualities that are accessible to man, and which speak to him through their very substance. They demonstrate both that the cosmos does not contain itself, nor that man contains himself -- that he is only man by dint of his self-transcendence. Praise God!

Thankfully, man's mind is not closed but open; it is open both horizontally and vertically. It opens out to the infinite -- or, to be perfectly accurate, the infinite opens into us: O--> (k). Praise Bob! And pass the I AM notion!

Although Schuon's writings are the essence of humanism -- being that they not only speak to the deepest level of our humanness, but attempt to preserve and resurrect it -- "humanism" has come to take on its opposite meaning in our disordered times. Thus, so-called humanists are actually profoundly anti-human, and specifically present us with a doctrine that cannot speak to the total man -- and therefore participate in genocide, both literal and symbolic -- or should we say, both vertically and horizontally. This de facto subhumanism can only speak to the fragmentary husk of man, not to the kernel (of which it naturally denies the existence) and embodies "the will to make oneself as useful as possible to a humanity as useless as possible."

Which is why Schuon's humanism is so useless to most people, whose own uselessness precedes them in advance of any encounter with the Real. For, to paraphrase Schuon, they blame the truth for their own refusal to admit it.

Follow the depth. And avoid the deeply shallow false lucidity of the terrible simplifiers.

Ho!