Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Glowing Off the Deep End

I wouldn't exactly say I have writer's block or blogger's rot. It's more as if I'm not sure if I'm up to the task of trancelighting the Theo-Logic into plain coonglish. It's one of these situations in which I'll probably have to forget you fine folkers exist, hand over the reins to Bob's Unconscious, and let things be worked over in that vertical abyss of night and dread.

I am now jumping in.

Wait a minute. Allow my eyes to adjust to the blinding light. Truth unveiled can be so annoying at times. But the fact that truth is "Being unveiled" leads to the next question, which is "to whom is being revealed?"

What I'm going to try to establish while down here is that the idea of Being in the absence of a knowing subject is absurd. Otherwise for whom and to whom is Being giving out all this blindingly radiant truth? Down here within the ground, the cosmos surely speaks. It is legible. And there is no Word without someone to hear it. Do you hear what I hear? For to hear the speech is to know (of) the speaker, the Speaker without whom there is not a word to be heard.

As Balthasar puts it, "it is essential that all being should have a relation to some self-consciousness." Furthermore, once the truth of father being becomes apParent, "a thousand consequences, a thousand insights, spring from it as from a seed. Once being has become evident, this evidence immediately harbors the promise of further truth; it is a door, an entrance, a key to the life of spirit."

What he is talking about, of course, is alignment with O. As we have mentioned before, this is not any linear or discursive process, i.e., from A to B to C. Rather, it is very much a "flowing out" or "boiling over" from the center outward.

Truly, when we are in the mode of O-->(n), we are mirroring the primordial activity of the Creator, through whom truth overflows from being like... like something that really overflows, big time. Seriously, it was this that I was trying to capture in the Cosmobliteration section of the Wholly Bobble, e.g.,

Here, prior to thought, by the headwaters of the eternal, the fountain of innocence, the mind shoreless vast and still, absolved & absorbed in what is always the case, face to face in a sacred space.

It's hard when you're not a poet, and yet, some form of noetry poetry is the only thing that will do -- to convey this idea of the truth perpetually flowing out of being, like Son from Father:

Only the blissful wave of the immortal now, rising forth from the effulgent sea of of existence. Inhere in here.... What it's like to be dead, the Vertical Church of Perpetual Slack.

Or this one:

All-embracing secret center of depth, the meaning of Within, the realization of Being, O first and last truth of Self, knowing without knowledge all that can be unKnown: existence to the end of the beginning.

Frankly, me always feels a little I-ambivalent about referencing mysoph, but at the same time, I often think that if I don't explain these things, no one will ever understand the point of that linguistic verticalaesthetic. I wasn't just trying to be "different" -- much less difficult! Perverse is still a kind of verse.

Back on our heads. The point is that truth is a kind of inexhaustible "opening" to being. You might even say that you can start with any truth, and follow it back upstream to its nonlocal source in the Spirit from whom all truth is derived and given its seal of authenticity. It is why we may not only know truth, but love and trust it, i.e., have faith in it.

Thus we understand how "truth implies total transparency and apprehensibility, on the one hand, yet eludes any attempt to nail it down in a definition, on the other." Which is also why to reduce truth to mechanical reason is to truly invert the cosmos; instead of O-->(n), it is simply (k)-->Ø. Do you see why that must be so? It is to mistake a tool for the house one is building.

Truth is indeed everywhere, and yet, must remain "veiled in its totality." If this were not the case, then the cosmos wouldn't be the blessedly irreducible mystery that it is -- it would be in effect saturated, which would also be a kind of hell, for the moment something is stripped of its mystery -- which is also its dignity, its "veil" of privacy -- it is also deprived of its essence, which is permanently inaccessible to the knower. Or, to be precise, it is accessible, but only in the form of the appearances that it freely gives to the knower.

The knower can no more exhaust this mystery than one could ever completely "know" a loved one; indeed, to love them is to appreciate and cherish their depthless mystery. Love dies when the other becomes saturated and demystified -- which is always either an act of aggression on the part of the lover, or some kind of interior death on the part of the beloved. Or, the lover can essentially be endeadened and incapable of appreciating the mystery of the other, a common problem for the narcissistic personality, who only relates "surface to surface," never depth to depth and essence to essence.

Love and mystery (not to mention, freedom) are thoroughly entangled -- as are truth and mystery, as we shall see shortly. Truth is initiation into the mystery of the other, not murder of the other in the name of "knowledge."

A life without mystery is a living death! For Life Itself is a perpetual mystery. To attempt to foreclose this mystery is a kind of ontological sin, which is the real damage done by the metaphysical Darwinists, who are foolish enough to think that science is advanced by removing its central mystery! This is like suggesting that processed dead European white bread is healthier than the Real Thing, which will always -- thank God! -- elude our scientistic abstractions. When a science claims to have corralled the truth, know that these illegal omsteaders have simply excised and demysticated a little corner of Being.

Ah, it is just so: "True knowledge thus manages to conjoin two seemingly contrary experiences: the experience of possessing, and surveying from above, the object of knowledge in the clarity of the intellect, and the experience of being flooded by something that overflows knowledge in the heart of knowledge itself, or, to put it another way, the awareness of participating in something that is infinitely greater in itself than what comes to light in its disclosure" (emphasis mine).

Ho! Do you see, little lambs? No body crosses the phoenix line lest it be repossessed and amortized. Some by fire, some by flood, but all buy the farm & bury the form.

Here again, this is the death that is life, the razoraction on this side of the scythe that gives the fulsome gnosis spoken of by the Master in Luke 11:52: Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of gnOsis. You did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered.

In the end, it comes back to the dialectical mystery of ♀ and ♂, of container and contained. For truth is what we contain, even while it contains us -- on pain of there being no truth at all. "Knowledge" happens when we allow ourselves to be determined by the object of study. And yet, a subject is not simply a mechanical imprint of the world. Rather, being comes to its fruition in an act of knowing its truth, just as this post is an echo in the void until it reaches its destination and finds its reason for being in the patiently waiting receptacle of the noggin on the other end.

God works the same way. We find fulfillment in the Word, even while the Word finds its fillfullment in the human heart.

Well, that's about it for today. Trust me, with any lux, it's going to get a lot weirder in the coming days, so you might want to quit while you're ahead.

17 comments:

julie said...

Quit?
Quit?!?
Bring on the weirdness, Bob's Unconscious. Our unconscious digs the reverberations.

Truth is indeed everywhere, and yet, must remain "veiled in its totality."

I was thinking yesterday while looking at the APOD that in a way, our thoughts are like bright klieg lights at night. If we want to see the mystery of the cosmos, we have to turn down all the local ambient lighting before the stars will come out. But of course, it's not the stars coming out - they are there all along. It's that when we can turn down our own wattage, they become accessible. But in line with what you said about mystery, even though we see them and feel that sense of wonder, the mystery is heightened, not lessened, in the experience.

Anonymous said...

Very true. This is the "negative capability" of unknowculation. At the very least, you must calm the left brain to worm your way into the right.

walt said...

Yes, I agree: bring it!

¡Traigale, hombre!

I can handle weird -- it's "normalcy" that's disturbing!

You're painting in broad strokes of late. I'm watching, waiting, intrigued.

Anonymous said...

That post really bobsmacked me upside the head! Going back to read it again...

mushroom said...

Normal is a form of consensus about the raw weirdness of reality. We've already given up on that or we wouldn't be 'hear'.

even wv wants to lend a relera.

Anonymous said...

If you're not eccentric, you're wrong.

(Bylaw 2, subsection A)

Anonymous said...

Yes, I too like this departure from the rational and into the poetic. A very chewy, warm, flavorful reading experience.

I'll take another serving.

julie said...

(Shameless self-promotion alert; sorry if this gets annoying. I can't help it - when I see something beautiful I just have to share, and how many people take the time to get up close and personal with peach tree parts in the spring?)

A lotus gem pool
springs sweetly, an offering
in return for growth

robinstarfish said...

Whee! Why do I feel like someone tossed me in the washing machine and hit "Spin Cycle"?

Man, I'm dizzy. And all the change fell out of my pockets. There's that commemorative Noo Mexico quarter I was looking for.

And tomorrow, the dryer? Can't weight.

By flood, by fire.

Van Harvey said...

(Yep, I'll third or fourth Julie's "Bring on the weirdness, Bob's Unconscious. Our unconscious digs the reverberations.")

"As Balthasar puts it, "it is essential that all being should have a relation to some self-consciousness." Furthermore, once the truth of father being becomes apParent, "a thousand consequences, a thousand insights, spring from it as from a seed. Once being has become evident, this evidence immediately harbors the promise of further truth; it is a door, an entrance, a key to the life of spirit."

What led me up from the horizontal ground towards those vertical depths, was when I began to grasp the deep, deep integration of all that is known or knowable, and began to suspect that which animates that which is known... and that was also where I began to grasp the widespread assault upon all that is Good, Beautiful and True, that is initiated with such things as the denial of Causality, of Free Will and even of the possibility of Truth. Not only does that muddle the progress of the physical pursuit of truth, but the moral and spiritual as well (the possibility that someone can entertain the possibility of there even being any separation between the physical, the moral and the spiritual, is evidence of how deep the attack has struck us).

The assault is most recognizable in everyday activities, in classrooms, with such things as pushing the students to attain a more 'nuanced view of truth and logic' through such things as the "analytic-synthetic dichotomy between truths". A common example is "A bachelor is an unmarried man, that is an analytic truth and you can't even imagine a married bachelor, but "ice floats" is a synthetic truth, we can easily imagine a world with different rules of physics where ice sinks or water burns, since "ice" and "floats" aren't necessarily so or intrinsically connected facts, they are merely synthetic truths". Merely.

What is more disturbing, that they don't realize the full on assault which they are pushing upon the nature of reality, upon your mind and spirit which they assert, or that these scientists and lovers of wisdom, actually don't realize that every property of Water is a direct result of its core nature of not only H20, but of atoms, protons, electrons, etc, that nothing in the metaphysically given is optional, just as each IS, because of its full nature, that IS most definitely implies an OUGHT!? What sense of ethics, of Rights, of Justice, MUST follow from such thinking? Hint: 'Piss Crists' sculptures, Bailouts and Hate Speech codes are the direct results of such thinking.

If you have a stomach for it, there is still an ongoing controversy over the issue, but you'll find that all the debate is over the intricacies of various epicycles of logic chopping, the fact is, that they have all bought into an unbridgeable schism between what IS and what is knowable about it, and to them it is an uncontroversial presumption that there is NO 'One Cosmos', but only disintegrated worlds, within and without, that all that IS is just the result of arbitrary chance and our ability to know any of it is flawed at best.

"it is essential that all being should have a relation to some self-consciousness." becomes "it is merely coincidental that any being should have a relation to some self-consciousness, and consciousness is really just an illusion anyway.", and the reversal of ground between light and dark, is the OUGHT which necessarily results from such an IS.

Ugh.

Van Harvey said...

"... and the contestants are coming around the bend, entering the final stretch, it looks like... yes, #2 is in the lead... it looks like 'Van' is pulling ahead of the pack and is going to win the pennant for the the run on sentence marathon..."

woo-hoo

wv:senore
hmmm

NoMo said...

I’ve been wondering lately if The Return is on hold awaiting the global inversion of truth and lie to reach some saturation point. No matter where I look anymore, things seem more and more upside-down and inside-out. Whatever has been happening for some time seems to have just recently stomped the accelerator. It’s as if the darkness senses its impending end and is compelled to thicken and spread.

Like the Man said, “For the coming of the Son of Man will be just like the days of Noah. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day that Noah entered the ark, and they did not understand until the flood came and took them all away; so will the coming of the Son of Man be.” (Matt 24:37-39).

And how were the days of Noah inverted (perverted)? “Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually … Now the earth was corrupt in the sight of God, and the earth was filled with violence. God looked on the earth, and behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted their way upon the earth. Then God said to Noah, ‘The end of all flesh has come before Me; for the earth is filled with violence because of them; and behold, I am about to destroy them with the earth.’ (Gen 6:5, 11-13)

“It's not dark yet but it's gettin' there.” – Dylan

Also, I’ve been meaning to point y’all to this JWR site…always some good stuff to be found.

Trying to keep on glowing in the deepening dark.

Anna said...

ok first wv: rajoylyc, which is cool. then, otonal. and well, that's very cool.

I just wanted to report that I've been experiencing and encountering similar scenarios as NoMo described. It's funny though because I completely reject or ignore the (-) due to proper lenses and good and helpful books and blogs... so my concern is that if I'm happy (and this is because of looking at Him straight-on) people might think I'm in accord with all the, pardon me, but crap that's been happening. It's an interesting dynamic. Through conflict (many toils, snares, ...) shadows and darkness is dealt with even more, so the light is even clearer, brighter.

No time to edit or second guess. Have to go, so will post.

Anna said...

wv: efierce!

I meant to also add, the darkness is weeded out even more. Also.

Rick said...

Weird?
Doncha mean every place but here?

You know Bob, I keep forgetting you’re talking about Balthasar and not Eckhart. Ground, mirror, flowing out, boiling over…father to son and back a’gun. I’m keeping up ok, but I happen to be monitoring McGinn’s meter on the Meister-meister!

Anonymous said...

As we were part of our forebears is it thruthfull to deny our influence on them.

ge said...

Full-Filament
of Light
thank God Life is Electro-chemico-hydro-magnetic at heart

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