Thursday, March 27, 2008

Spring Cleaning: Mythellaneous Gods & Ends

As I mentioned the other day, I'd like to clear out all of these notepads and post-its I have laying around, and reduce them to some kind of coherent disorder, so I can finally toss them. I must have at least half a dozen notepads here in my lap, filled with murky mudditations and cognitively arrested developments that never even grew to juvenilia.

Let's start with this big yellow one. Hmm. Some of this looks pretty self-indulgent. When I look back over these things, sometimes I'm not even sure what I meant. Oh well. Maybe you can figure them out, or at least find a useful nugget or two on which to coontemplate. In any event, I apologize in advance for some of these nascent pre-thoughts that perhaps should have been allowed to properly grow up and become fully half-baked before being prematurely sent out to make their way in the world.

Is a merely rational theology possible? Need for a-logic in theology, or patterned transrationality. Pre-scientific mythologies are incoherent non-absurdities. Mental illness is an incoherent absurdity. Reason reduces world to coherent absurdity. Only metaphysics leads to coherent non-absurdity.

How do we mediate between a theological literalism that no longer speaks to modern minds and a liberalism that drains it of any emotional resonance with the deeper strata of consciousness? In order to understand the vertical, the realm of imagination must be engaged & expanded, e.g., Genesis: the less saturated, the more likely imagination can fill the innerstices. "Form walks with meaning in the ascent to infinity." God is found in the "deep within" of things. If not there, where?

To convey the eternal, the transcendent, the infinite, the absolute, within the things of time, one cannot do so without symbolism, paradox, myth, wordplay, oxymoron (virgin-mother) & other deivoices. Must have both spiritual experiences and a special way to communicate and talk about them. In so doing, the one pole strengthens the other. Trying to speak in such a way as to attract and engage the attention of the supramental consciousness. Linguistic theological attractors.

Mystical theology revolves around a central point vs. linear description of science. The verbal hammer hits the celestial stone, sending luminous sparks down below. The stone is one, the sparks infinite.

Why is there a literal hunger for music? To whom or what is it speaking? What's the difference between listening to the Eroica Symphony and reading a good biography of Napoleon? Schuon: "Music is the art of bringing terrestrial shadows back to celestial vibrations and divine archetypes."

Aquinas: time measures before and after, eternity is the simultaneous presence of the whole: "no beforeafter, nobodaddy, no mamafestation, nothing but neti..." Wholly present vs. everlasting. Christ annuls time, full-fills history: first and last, Alphomega, it is accomplished.

Mysticism is no different from ordinary life, just a different angle. Not an attempt to obliterate the ego by entering a murky cloud of unconsciousness, but infusing one's being with it -- not to merge with the ocean but to partake of it. Not merging with the infinite, nor clinging to fixed thoughts about it, but living in the flow between them. Epistemology vs. Mystepistemology: what did you not know and when did you unKnow it?

Your Being is God's Doing.

Something must be understood a priori of the nature of God before we can make any statements about him. It is tautology unless we have uncreated, implicit, pre-conceptual knowledge of the category of God, into which certain experiences will flow, or be "attracted." If we don't agree on our ontology, epistemology will just confuse. God is an innate readiness to experience O. Or vice versa. To "invite" the religious object.

When you ask what something "is," is it atoms? Or is it the palpably physical? Or the thoughts you have that are able to ponder the physical or atomic, the macro or the micro? Which is more "real?" The supraconscious does not "ex-ist," or "stand out." In-sist, maybe. We can notice its vapor trails on the inscape of consciousness. Higher realities don't "stand out" except to those who "stand in" them. How do you go about standing in them? Same way you stand in the unconscious. Relux & call it a deity.

Rt. brain develops ahead of left brain & is where our unitary background of primary being resides. Just so, God is not what stands out, but that from which other things stand out. God is not in space. Space is in God. Creation is holographic and fractal: therefore, whole of God is in the consecrated bread. It has no physical existence, and yet, can only ex-ist in the physical. So the question is not whether God exists -- it is whether or not God can be made present.

Creation and storage of eternal memories. How is this done? How do temporal events move into the zone of timelessness? Garden of Eden: from the zone of timelessness to time, symmetry to asymmetry. We live in time but we remember the timeless. Adam blew it. He's our blewprint.

Revelation is the first draft of metahistory, journalism makes a daft farce of history. Merger of vertical and horizontal in prehistory. They only became completely separate with modernity. Still merged in Islamic world.

Those half-humans who live solely in the scientistic horizontal: factsimians.

Idea for title of Victoria's Secret catalogue: "All Thongs Considered."

Viagra: a cure for what fails you.

Trying to make a post out of all this BS: "composting."

Modern philosophy: "A systematic abuse of language invented for that purpose." (Not sure who came up with that one.)

Dream a little dream: you are the dream programmer, the medium through which the programmer works, and the material with which he works. The world is in your dreams, but you are the world that is in your dreams -- i.e., you created the dreamworld you inhabit, as well as the you that you experience in the dream. How is this any different from waking life? Like a Klein Bottle: there is an "inside" and an "outside," but only one surface. Could the dream be the cosmos outside in, and "reality" the dreamer inside out? How could it not be.

Well, one journal down, six or seven more to go.....

26 comments:

julie said...

Haven't read the post yet, but apropos the tail end of yesterday's comments is this article by Spengler.

Anonymous said...

So that's what crystallized crack-pottery looks like; and six more to go!

Anonymous said...

Viagra: a cure for what fails you."

Viagra is to LSD as phallus is to (n): "Although erections lasting for more than 4 hours may occur rarely with all treatments in this drug class, to avoid long-term injuries (impotence), it is important to seek immediate medical help."

Anonymous said...

Hmmmm…tap, tap, tap..scribble…
…the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square root of the remaining side…
Bah. Crumple. Pitch. Two points.
Hmmmm…
I spy…
…a Victoria’s Secret catalogue!
Cool.
Scribble.
What else, what else, what else, what else…

(RR :-)

Rick said...

Bob, this is not cool. I would like my notebooks back.
Thank you.

While you have them though, could you jot this down for me?

You can’t handle the Toots.

Thanks again.

Gagdad Bob said...

Cousin Dupree in the news again.

mushroom said...

When I retire my hobby will be building ships of Mobius Strips inside Klein Bottles.

For some reason they always run the "Viva Viagra" and Cialis commercials during the MSM prop-agit hour -- which I watch out of habit because I am an old fart -- which is probably why they run them then.

I used to do Stat programming and graphics in pharmaceutical research. We always got boring drugs like Prilosec. I would have loved to have plotted the AE's for these ED treatments.

[Insert joke here]

Anonymous said...

Bob: you have written about the Islamists/jihadists...Fitna, a "film" by a Dutch MP named Wilder has been released. Many of the images/video have been around for some time. The remain horrific, ugly and satanic.

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020472.php#comments

Gagdad Bob said...

Yes, to put a twist on one of the thoughts in the post, one may not be able to prove the existence of God, but one can surely prove the existence of the devil. Which proves the existence of God.

NoMo said...

You say, "Spring cleaning". I say Spring gleaning". Thanks, Bob. Spiritual transformation has its own weather system. Like the seasons. A thing of beauty. Praise the One.

debass said...

"Mr. Fagen and Mr. Becker crafted a catchy song about a decadent layabout who, after a period of lusting in his heart, attempts to seduce his teenage cousin."

So, Cousin Dupree is related to that other Dupree after all. Sounds like more than kissin' cousins though.

Anonymous said...

"Your Being is God's Doing"
WAY COOL bumper sticker! Pithy, to the point, and has that elusive hint of oxymoron, to unclog and discomboobulate the inner tunnel vision...ranks up there with my all-time favorite,
"BAN BUMPER STICKERS!"

...lurker uncloaking

Anonymous said...

discomboobulate

hmmm......

discoonbobulate?

disbobcoonulate?

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"You can’t handle the Toots."
Good one, Rick!

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Dusty:
How immediate?

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Mushroom:
LOL! You said "plotted"! :^)

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"In order to understand the vertical, the realm of imagination must be engaged & expanded, e.g., Genesis: the less saturated, the more likely imagination can fill the innerstices."

One Cosmos: No saturated pap.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"God is an innate readiness to experience O. Or vice versa."

Or, an ayemate readiness.

Skully

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"Mysticism is no different from ordinary life, just a different angle. Not an attempt to obliterate the ego by entering a murky cloud of unconsciousness, but infusing one's being with it -- not to merge with the ocean but to partake of it."

Surf's up, Dude!

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"Higher realities don't "stand out" except to those who "stand in" them. How do you go about standing in them? Same way you stand in the unconscious. Relux & call it a deity."

That was inpsycive!

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"Trying to make a post out of all this BS: "composting.""

Fertilayezer.

Skully.

Anonymous said...

Cousin Dupree ain't decadent.
He's Cajun, not French.

Magnus Itland said...

I did in fact just this morning, while buying my breakfast, in my regular shop see a video titled "You, Me and Cousin Dupree." Well, the "Cousin" part was missing, but that's how I saw it. I didn't buy it though. Better to get the real thing right here.

Rick said...

Thanks, Ben! I knew you’d innerstand.
I tried to do my best Jack Nicholson, which is hard in a comment window…so I just used two fingers. Not a stretch for me but now I think it means I’m typecast.
Anywho, at least I know the sound of one guy clapping…which is good for my record but not a career in show biz.
Now where’s that darn notebook…

NoMo said...

If Islamists really believed in the power of the god of Islam, wouldn't they be praying for the rest of us rather than blowing us up?

vanderleun said...

"Well, one journal down, six or seven more to go....."

Barrel. Gasoline. Match.

Works for me.

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