Light and Vision, Truth and Intellect

Bob is still trying to catch up with his work, so this will be Bob's Unconscious taking the wheel of the cosmic bus for awhile. Also, I'll probably exercise a heavier hand in deleting the Moloch-worshipping leftists who go off topic in order to testify of their strange gods.

Also -- and this is between you and me -- I think Bob's brain has been getting clogged up by reading too much profane history lately, so I'm going to try to clear it out and get back to some fundamentals. Back to the ground floor, if you like; which, through the cosmic Law of Inversion, just happens to be an analogue of the top floor.

I might also add that I will be assisted by my good friend Frithjof, whose fearsome sword of gnosis is so adept at cutting through all those annoying layers of superfluous mayaplicity.

I'll bet Bob wishes he'd seen this quote by Schuon before finishing the Coonifesto, because it goes to the reasons for its formal circularity: God's vision proceeds from Him and ends in Him, like a circle which originates and closes upon itself.

That circle is everything, but it is up to us to see it. If it looks like a line, or a point, or random pattern, then we're missing something essential about the very nature of things -- about how the One deploys itself into the many and returns to itself like the prodigal sun rising again in the east after its night sea journey in its underweird.

As Huston "We Don't Have a Problem" Smith observes, "Beauty is the vehicle for this return: outward beauty which comes from God and leads back to him; and inward beauty -- virtue -- which is essential for human participation in the Divine Nature."

It seems that everything else in creation automatically participates in the Divine Nature; only man has the choice of rebelling against it. This is because man, being in the image of the Creator, is "central" on his own plane of being.

That being the case, other animals are "peripheral" in relation to Man -- which is why, for example, in Genesis, it is Adam who names the animals; or, as our Unknown Friend properly notes, in the real (i.e., principial, or vertical) world of essences, man does not descend from the animals. Rather, vice versa: the lower animals descend from Man (otherwise lower and descend have no meaning).

So, as Schuon writes, "a bird greeting the sunrise really and necessarily greets God; a plant turning to the light really turns toward Him." Now, is there a way for Man to live in the simple, spontaneous and innoccent manner of the bird or plant?

Why yes, of course. It all has to do with light and vision, only transposed to a higher key. For a virtuous -- or unspoiled -- man spontaneously turns to Truth in the same manner that the flower opens to the light and warmth of the sun (and please note that just as animals are descended from God, our central sun is a transposition or declension from the more subtle Divine Light).

Just as light can shine in an outhouse, a sewer, or the NBC news department without in any way sullying itself, the divine light is omnipresent without undergoing any change upon contact with creatures.

This is another way of saying that Truth is anterior to our knowledge of it. Or, as Schuon would say, it is "independent of any dialectic." It matters not whether truth "is expressed this way or that," for the expression is not the thing -- just as a beautiful painting is not Beauty itself, and yet, not other than Beauty.

Another critical point: intelligence is not something other than what it knows, or the knowledge is not real. Ultimately, this means that intelligence is a substance: the substance of Truth.

Think about your lower senses, say, touch. The reason you can touch something is because your fingers are of the same substance as that which they touch, i.e., matter.

And the reason why the intellect may touch the divine realm is because it too is of the same substance. That "spark of divinity" we all carry inside (or which carries us) really is just that. You might compare it to a ray of light emanating from the Sun. The light with which you see the world at this very moment is actually not other than the Sun.

Just so, the light with which you see higher truths is not other than the primordial Light that comes from God. Please note that when the light shines on a landscape -- either in this world or the one directly above -- it does not "create" but discovers. That is, it simply reveals what is already there. This is a critical point to bear in mind with regard to the higher worlds, since spiritual light simply activates truths that are present in the nature (or substance) of intelligence itself.

Again, truth and intelligence are of the same substance; furthermore, just as matter and sensation form a unity, truth and reality are two sides of a single cause, that cause being God. That this is the case ensures that truth is real, efficacious, reliable, universal, unchanging, luminous, and ultimately salvific.

In his critique of rationalism, Schuon notes that the rationalist places reason above Truth, the result being that he places himself in the absurd position of only believing things that he can prove (or thinks he can prove) with his reason.

This is to place a means to truth above truth; and not only that, for in order for to use reason, something other than reason must select the premises to be used for the proof. This thing is again intelligence, which transcends reason and is the very substance of the truth it wishes to prove. Sadly, in order to live as a rationalist, one must make intelligence less than what it is, and ultimately make the assimilation of Truth impossible.

Furthermore, to limit intelligence to reason soon enough leads to the denial of reason, for the same intelligence that affirms reason can just as readily deny it -- as do all materialists, relativists, multiculturalists, deconstructionists, and the rest of the leftist rabble.

That is all. Good day.

Standing in the Light of God's bouncy house: what comes down, must go up.