Sunday, December 20, 2009

ʘ, What a Beautiful World

No time for a new post, so I thought I'd select a prewordgitated one, since I haven't visited the arkive lately. Plus, I really, really want to get caught up with my work by the end of the year, so I need to get an early start on it today.

The post concerns all of the superfluous beauty that radiates through the fabric of being. You might say that our world is composed of math and music, or that truth and beauty are its warp and weft. There are lots of revisions and odditions here, so it probably ended up taking as long as a new post. Oh well. You never really catch up with your work in this life.

[T]he world is fundamentally neither a mechanism, nor an organism, nor even a social community -- neither a school on a grand scale nor a pedagogical institution for living beings -- but rather a work of divine art: at one and the same time a choreographic, musical, poetic, dramatic work of painting, sculpture and architecture. --Meditations on the Tarot

What if we actually lived only in a world of mere desiccated scientistic truth but no intrinsic beauty? In addition to being an "impossible world" -- existence as such being an exteriorization of the divine beauty -- our very lives would be a cold and joyless task, like removing the Guy Ritchie tattoos from Madonna's wizened flesh (which has long since given up everything but its tattoos).

"Beauty is a crystallization of some aspect of universal joy; it is something limitless expressed by means of a limit" (Schuon). Beauty is both container and contained (♀ and ♂), or an explosive force within a limiting boundary. The material world is this boundary, or the "frame" around God's canvas. With no frame or page or stanza or stage, there can be no ex-pression (or im-pression) of beauty.

Now, as UF explains, the idea of the world as a work of art is implicit in Genesis, being that existence is a result of a creative act. So-called creationists focus way too much on the inevitable result of the act, rather than the act itself, which would have to constitute the very source and essence of creativity. Remember, since human beings are in the image of the creator, our own seemingly boundless creativity should reveal something intrinsic to God.

Furthermore, it is vital to bear in mind that the cosmogony of Genesis discloses a vertical, not horizontal, act. When Genesis says "In The Beginning," it really means in the beginning of the eternal creative act that is always happening now and which sustains the universe. The generation of the universe -- and the events of Genesis -- did not happen just "once upon a time," but is always happening.

These are not just my own eccentric Bobservations, but standard Thomservations as well. "In the beginning" refers not to the temporal beginning, but to the atemporal beginning, or the beginning of time as such -- which "flows" from (and back to) eternity in the now familiar absurcular way. It is the metaphysical, not the physical, or scientific, beginning. Therefore, as Aquinas knew,

"God is necessary as an uncaused cause of the universe even if we assume that the universe has always existed and thus had no beginning. The argument is not that the world wouldn't have got started if God hadn't knocked down the first domino at some point in the distant past; it is that it wouldn't exist here and now, or undergo change or exhibit final causes here and now unless God were here and now, and at every moment, sustaining it in being, change, and goal-directedness" (Feser).

In short, the "first cause" is above, not behind. But because it is above, it is necessarily ahead, which is in turn why the present cosmos is the "shadow" of its final fulfillment: "I am Alpha and Omega." This is also why on an individual basis, we live in the shadow of our own future self, which "lures" us toward our own full filament of incoondescent light.

Similarly, as Perry observes, "from the cosmological perspective, creation is a progressive exteriorization of that which is principially interior, an alternation between the essential pole and the substantial pole of a Single Principle." Again, of the two, essence is the more interior, and therefore takes priority. Essence could never be derived from substance alone (or quality from quantity, semantics from syntax), which is one more reason why it is absurd to insist that consciousness could ever be derived from matter. Why do you even try, you atheistic morons? What is wrong with you?

What? Oh yes. Petey would like me to remind you that this is the meaning of One's upin a timeless, as it refers to God's eternal creative activity, which, because it constitutes the true (vertical) beginning, necessarily encompasses the end of all things, the eschatology of the world, the cosmic telovator that lifts us to the repenthouse and beyond. Was that unclear? Perhaps Schuon can shed a little less bobscurity on the subject:

"Art has a function that is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a 'sympathetic magic'; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the 'kingdom of God that is within you.' The Principle becomes manifestation so that manifestation might rebecome the Principle, or so that the 'I' might return to the Self; or simply, so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype."

In turn, this is why, as Eliot observed, our end precedes our beginning, and how it is that we may travel round the cosmos only to return to the beginning and know it for the firstest time. As I have said before -- or maybe it was after -- he wasn't merely being poetic, but noetic.

Zero, point, line, circle, and repent as necessary. The Father is O, the Son is •, and the Holy Ghost is (↓↑). Please note that the black fire of the dot is written on the white fire of the unKnown Godhead, while the arrows are the smoke and flames (or coontrail), respectively. Where there is "holy smoke," the flames of agni cannot be far above. Thus the "agni and ecstasy" referred to on page 16 of my book of the same gnome.

The movement from essence towards substance is also the movement of "the center toward the circumference" and "unity towards multiplicity" (Perry). Nevertheless, the center is always there at the periphery -- hence God's immanence and the resultant sanctity of the world -- and the unity is always in the multiplicity -- hence the possibility of the recollection of both union and transcendent unity, at any time or any place. Excepting perhaps Madonna's wizened flesh.

Now, as UF notes, the self-beclowning materialist or scientistic jester is "like the reader of a manuscript who, instead of reading and understanding the thought of the author, occupies himself with the letters and syllables. He believes that the letters wrote themselves and combined themselves into syllables, being moved by mutual attraction, which, in its turn, is the effect of chemical or molecular qualities of the ink as 'matter' common to all the letters, and of which the letters and syllables are epiphenomena."

Of this, Petey would like to say, And you pay a small fortune to deliberately expose your children this crap, about which the best one can say is that it is absurd?

[B]eauty stems from the Divine Love, this Love being the will to deploy itself and to give itself, to realize itself in 'another'; thus it is that 'God created the world by love'.... All terrestrial beauty is thus by reflection a mystery of love. It is, 'whether it likes it or not,' coagulated love or music turned to crystal, but it retains on its face the imprint of its internal fluidity, of its beatitude and of its liberality... --Schuon

35 comments:

julie said...

And on that lovely note, everyone should do themselves a favor and stop by Joan's Primordial Slack Shack today. Right now. (Sorry, I don't have the link because I'm using a proxy, but I bet if you google "primordial slack" you'll find your way)

Read all three installations. And yesterday's, too, if you haven't already.

Gazriel said...

I, being a man at the equilibrated age of 30, happen to find the greatest Beauty in the facial features of women, young and old alike, particularly those whom aren't being ravaged by countless mind parasites and are therefore more luminous from within. The physical body, when being touched by the glow of self-worth, self-love, and self-confidence, to say nothing of authentic spiritual Liberation, takes on an ethereal quality, becoming a direct portal to transcendent Substance, Energy, Light.

Now as we know, from the perspective of a lone male, there are a seeming infinite number of 'hotties' to be subdued with the trusty club and lugged back to the cave. The problem with this is that you can only take one at a time, two tops, and once you have them there it's likely that you'll get sweet on one of them and that will be the end of the endless parade.

What has been revealed to me, however, is that if I take the perspective that I am already one with the Beauty I am witnessing, that it is simply a reflection of myself, then I can experience unification with such without even a second thought to the club tucked behind my belt. Without grasping, without a sense of deficiency, without idolizing, Love emerges easily and naturally between myself and the woman I am interacting with, even a complete stranger I am sitting next to on a bus.

Quick story: I was at a poetry reading, sitting on a sofa, when three college aged young women walked in and sat down next to me. They were all off the charts beautiful, radiant in like 39 different ways. Works of art, if you will, and not just in the body but also in their hearts; I could see the kindness in their eyes.

As you can imagine with four of us sitting on the couch we were quite cramped. Witnessing a struggle begin to arise in myself I simply surrendered to the notion that there was nothing to be gained, that I was already one with them, and I had to neither grasp for satisfaction nor resist the natural tendency to allow my sexual/spiritual energy to blend with theirs.

As the night wore on internal tensions ceased and we all relaxed, joking and telling stories. I remember having feelings of honor and respect to be a party to such Beauty, that in reality I am that beautiful. When I got home I laid down to meditate and the three of them manifested within my Being, fully aroused and totally open to me. We made love on an energetic level, utilizing the connection established in person in a non-local playground
of delight.

It was simultaneously one of the most erotic and spiritual experiences of my life.

Since then I have made love to dozens of women in a similar way. With perfect respect for who they are as individuals, without grasping, I simply witness their Beauty and Love naturally arises.

walt said...

"...on an individual basis, we live in the shadow of our own future self, which "lures" us toward our own full filament of incoondescent light."

And a Bright Light that is, too -- unlike the "dim bulbs" mandated for our vision by the enviro-overlords.

My idea today is that, fractals that we are, that bright light is the teensy *spark* of conscience, buried in our Unconscious, which spark is a re-presentation of the image of God we are made in.

Love those arrows (↓↑), btw.

Anonymous said...

Gazriel:

I am enthused by your approach to Eros.

Women are tops in the transmission of beauty, and to possess that beauty is the natural impulse, and that can be troublesome.

Nataure translates this into wanting to touch and to implant seed within.

You succeeded in possesion without the touching and the seed implantation, at least indirectly.

How ever, I question whether this method will wholly suffice. At some point acutal physical possession is going to become an insurmountable impulse, and one will need to "score" in the usual sense of the word.

How do you handle this, Gaz? Do you "get some" once in a while, in additon to the spiritual lovemaking?

Stephen Macdonald said...

Every so often a troll ambles by and aside from stinking the place up offers something along the lines: "That Gagdhad Bob writes pure gibberish! There's no rational content there at all!"

Hmm...

Here is some choice postmodern literary criticism:

Textual nationalism and dialectic narrative


The primary theme of Bailey’s[4] model of capitalist appropriation is not desituationism, but postdesituationism. The subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism that includes truth as a paradox. However, the defining characteristic, and subsequent meaninglessness, of realism prevalent in Madonna’s Erotica emerges again in Material Girl, although in a more self-fulfilling sense.

If one examines textual nationalism, one is faced with a choice: either reject Sartreist existentialism or conclude that narrative is created by the collective unconscious. The subject is interpolated into a textual nationalism that includes sexuality as a totality. It could be said that an abundance of patriarchialisms concerning the rubicon, and hence the collapse, of neotextual society may be found.


Okey-dokey. The thing is, this passage was generated 100% by a machine. This machine will generate leftist literary criticism day in and day out. More than once these mechanically generated texts have been submitted to prestigious leftist literary journals and accepted for publication. Ooh! The red faces!

So of course the leftist mind has no problem with reductionist explanations of life and mind. They are utterly unable to tell mechanically generated gibberish from the sort that spills out of their heads. The mechanical tracts literally contain no truth whatsoever by definition (except insofar as the machine randomly spits out something that happens to be true by accident, such as "Bill Maher has to pay people to pretend to like him".

Of course OC makes no sense to a lefty. They lack any means of discerning truth in the first place. And the only "cure" is through Grace, and before that happens you need to get humble so many of them are simply hopeless cases.

Can anyone imagine a computer program that could write an OC post? I spent much of my career as a software architect, and while I can easily imagine generating an article on semiotics or even darwinism, generating OC, Jamess Joyce or the Bible isn't even remotely imaginable. There's no possible place to even begin thinking about this -- there is something qualitatively different about how lordly leftists (don't) assimilate Truth and how humble coons do it.

Stephen Macdonald said...

Further to this theme, one could without too much trouble create a computerized "jazz generator". To the ignorant listener the product would likely sound quite "real". To anyone with a basic understanding of what jazz IS, this wouldn't work even for a minute. There would be no beauty-truth present.

Not that computer generated music must always be empty -- a programmer could use the computer as a sort of instrument, but the music would then come from (through) the person, with the machine merely acting as the channel. However a programmer approaching this problem from a purely "scientific" (quantitative) approach would analyze the wave forms, look for patterns etc. and attempt to generate variations on these based on algorithms. To the extent the effort was "reductionist" the resulting "music" would contain no truth, except accidentally. Subtle distinction, but one I think explains why many highly intelligent people (Dawkins) are capable of holding out as truth that which is self-evidently perfect nonsense.

Stephen Macdonald said...

Anyhow the bottom line is I always thought the ultimate statement about post-modernism came when that computer-generated paper was not only accepted for publication, but discussed and damned with faint praise (not a bad effort, but...).

Long way from home.

vw: shiestom
(Copenhagen)

Gagdad Bob said...

I do think it would be possible to create a spiritual BS generator for, say, Krishnamurti or Deepak. Nether man makes much sense most of the time.

Gagdad Bob said...

... in contrast to, say, Alan Watts, who was genuinely witty in a way a computer program never will be.

Stephen Macdonald said...

Deepak would be straightforward. Hmm... I think I have an idea for an iPhone app that would make me richer. Too had about the "going to hell" part if I did it, though.

Gazriel said...

Anonymous said..."How do you handle this, Gaz? Do you "get some" once in a while, in additon to the spiritual lovemaking?"

Absolutely! "Getting some" is one of the very deepest expressions of spiritual life, at least on the path I have been blessed with by the Creator. The most important thing that I have learned is moving from that place of reverence and respect. Sex is like sitting meditation in a lot of ways; when I sit I have no expectation and supervise my ego for grasping and resisting, seeking of any kind. Then, whatever emerges from that place of surrendered awareness is a bonus, is a Grace on top of the spontaneous Liberation of Eternal Peace.

When I am with a woman the most important thing for me is recognizing the gift and sanctity of her Presence, which is a reflection of the gift and sanctity of my own Presence, of Life itself. Then I follow the flow of whatever naturally arises when a man and woman come together. Of course doing this adds a 'heavenly' quality to the experience, with Energy and Light coming to the front of Mind, but that in no way detracts from the bodily interaction, which is stronger than ever.

Also, dwelling in that place of respect towards women, or seeing the natural Beauty in which we both already possess, has made it more likely to attract partners that I would have never dreamed of in the past. This stems from never being nervous or shy, and when I experience the other as a soul instead of just a body I believe she is much more likely to want to embrace. Actually just hugging and touching is just about as good as sex, in my world, just degrees of intensity.

I am considering writing a testimony of the transformation of my every-day life experiences since the induction of concentrated self-awareness in my life. Eating, going two-sies, hugging, kissing, making love, walking, even the feel of clothes against my body has become downright erotic.

Stephen Macdonald said...

Gazriel: no offense, dude, but all that sounds uncannily like an Ecstasy overdose...

Petey said...

To say nothing of being way, way too much information. It's always a shame to reach the age of discretion without having achieved it. But such are the crass times in which we live.

Gazriel said...

Too much information for the
One Cosmos crowd!? What? Seriously? That is like saying too many blow-jobs, or hold the vicodin.

Discretion is for those who have no faith in the evolution of culture into a Self-aware playground of trans-temporal light-beings, hanging from hives and standing on material solidly realized as divine Expression.

Passing forms.

Truth beyond the body.

Beauty without boundary.

Ecstasy and Purity as Self Delight.

Electricity, excitement, one family!

jack said...

Gazriel...you're kidding, right?

Petey said...

Oh well. At least we've discovered someone less poetic than Al Gore.

Warren said...

>> Krishnamurti

You mean Jiddu or U.G.?

Warren said...

I think Gaz and Anony are just trying to make Julie vomit on her shoes....

Susannah said...

I liked the old trolls better; less stomach-churning.

robinstarfish said...

Jizzreal, sorry you fell into the hot tub with your vibrator on. The circuit breaker should kick off soon enough. Or not.

Susannah said...

"Zero, point, line, circle, and repent as necessary. The Father is O, the Son is •, and the Holy Ghost is (↓↑). Please note that the black fire of the dot is written on the white fire of the unKnown Godhead, while the arrows are the smoke and flames (or coontrail), respectively." Lots to think about in that one sentence! It rings many scriptural bells for me. The beauty of holiness drawing forth praise; beauty inhabiting the praise...

Anonymous said...

NB: You can I presume provide references for the machine-generated postmodernism that made its way (more than once) into "prestigious leftist literary journals"? Or are once again you and your fellows here trafficking in stupid made-up falsehoods?

I'm guessing you are confusing this stuff with the Sokal hoax paper, which was not machine-generated and considerably more convincing than what you clipped, although still ultimately gibberish. This did in fact get published in Social Text, to much embarrassment and hilarity. The problem is, Sokal is a leftist who performed his hoax as in order to save the left from what he felt was a silly and counterproductive slide into postmodernism. Sokal is also a scientist and thus presumably a reductionist.

julie said...

Warren, lol.
If there's one thing most women I know of really don't want to know, it's that random strange men are having erotic experiences with us just by walking past. Even if we're abstractly aware that a lot of men may think that way, the details are far more than we want to know. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss.

Alan Sokal said...

Anon:

I'm curious -- what part of my hoax did you find so convincing?

Gazriel said...

Jizzreal and Al Gore.

Julie vomiting on her shoes

Oh, and stomach-churning.

Nice ones!. I just drop every now and then by to receive wisdom and insight into the nature of myself from Bob, though, I'm not seeking your approval. Words only hurt if you happen to believe on some level that they are true. My internal life isn't some gag reel of a heavy breather with a trench coat on, and if you want to make it into that you may want to take inventory of your shadow. Have a look at some porn. Go to a strip club. The only way it can harm you or fascinate you is if you think that you can derive true Love or real Delight from it. In the case of authentic transcendence the obscene just becomes an expression of pathology, one of the many modes in which the Creator limits Himself in order to bring us this reality.

Gazriel said...

Oh, and Julie, the women are not the cause of my erotic experiences. The experiences are naturally occurring from dedication to my spiritual practices and sometimes happen to merge seamlessly with females I find attractive. Usually the feeling is mutual.

My LIFE is spiritually erotic and because I am a hetero-sexual male I enjoy sharing that with women.

Actually, now that I think of it I sometimes have similar experiences with men, but it is not of a sexual nature, just energetic. Like, when I meet someone that has interests close to mine and we talk up a storm about whatever. There is a shared feeling of bonding, of Light and Space that transcends ordinary reality.

I-Thou is a special thing, whether or not it has a sexual component.

Petey said...

Whatever. Feel free to come back after you've left the pre-oedipal stage.

Petey said...

BTW, that was not a joke. The kind of polymorphous, infantile sexuality described by Gazriel is a defense against mature love, but often conflated with "spirituality" because of the absence of boundaries. The giveaway is always that the person is inordinately "proud" of their accomplishment, as if they are the first to have discovered eroticism. Thus the cringe-making exhibitionism. And that is leaving aside the homosexual undercurrent in these matters, i.e., infantile narcissism. Probably worthy of a post one of these days....

Larry Flynt said...

Now you tell me. You mean I'm not enlightened?

Warren said...

OK, now I think I'm going to vomit on my shoes.... and I don't even have morning-sickness.

Warren said...

Petey,

There might be an interesting post or two in the connection between polymorphous perversity (which you analyzed perfectly) and non-dualistic spirituality - a connection which Gaz more or less explicitly made.

If nothing else, Bob would probably enjoy the brief boost in his readership which such a post would cause....

Gazriel said...

You are wrong, I am right.

Petey said...

Warren:

Excellent point about the relationship between non-duality & sexuality. For a host of reasons, love and sexuality are often split apart in the psyche, so that people have difficulty integrating them, i.e., maintaining and deepening a passionate love for one individual.

Obviously, a prerequisite of this is that one's self must be (relatively) whole, otherwise a real person-to-person relationship is impossible, and the person continues to lead various secret lives. But as with all mind parasites, when one is acting out on psychosexual mind parasites in the manner of Gazriel, one temporarily feels "whole." But it's just a compulsion.

And again, there is always an element of superiority in it. You really notice this, for example, among self-righteous homosexual activists. You know, homosexuality is not just equal to heterosexuality, but even better. Even pedophiles secretly feel superior to bourgeois losers who don't know the ecstatic glories of sex with a prepubescent child. You might say that in order to bypass shame, they convert it to its opposite.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

"Now, as UF notes, the self-beclowning materialist or scientistic jester is "like the reader of a manuscript who, instead of reading and understanding the thought of the author, occupies himself with the letters and syllables. He believes that the letters wrote themselves and combined themselves into syllables, being moved by mutual attraction, which, in its turn, is the effect of chemical or molecular qualities of the ink as 'matter' common to all the letters, and of which the letters and syllables are epiphenomena."

A BIG AYE! To that, Bob!
The moronreductionists not only CHOOSE to IGNORE but are totally BLIND to INTENT!
Or, liberty, freedom, truth, and all the Godly principles that are coonected to Beauty, Goodness and uth.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

In truth, reductionest lefties hate those of us who embrace TRUE freedom of INTENT.

Rather, they prefer BLIND followers, or SHEEP if you will.
Or rubes like Gazriel who are stuck in a circle jerk they believe connects them to O.

ARE YOU KIDDIN' me? Get Real, Gazreal! Puberty don't becum you.
Prolly wastin' my time, but MAN up man. Chilvary n' honor ain't just words you know.
Sheesh!

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