Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Turning a Blind Eye Doctor

As mentioned yesterday, I want to leave politics aside, and return to our usual fare. Which is what now? Never mind that. But it can be a challenge to leave politics alone when politics won't leave us alone, no? As we've often said, the right can never match the left in political energy, since political mania is their demonic religion. Which is another reason why they despise actual religion, because it is a competitor.

I don't know about you, but whenever I want to get back to basics, I turn to... Actually, I do know about you, because I'm sure you don't do what I am about to say I do, which is have a little chitchat, or vertical summit meeting, with Schuon. This is not to say I am any kind of formal disciple, and I don't want to pretend I am. It's just that I find him so provocative, that virtually every paragraph sends me flying into four or five different dimension.

I think this is because he is essential, by which I mean he cuts through appearances like so much smoke, and gets right to the essence, to the beating heart of reality. In fact, this is precisely what Nasr says in his introduction to The Essential Frithjof Schuon. In describing the virtues of his writings, he begins with their essentiality, their universality, and their comprehensiveness.

Or, one might say their depth, their height, and their breadth, respectively. I would love to be able to accomplish the same sort of effect, because to do this would be to write things that will always be true, because they touch the eternal. And when you think about it, what would be the point of writing anything less than this? Seriously. There are not only WAY too many books, there are too many blogs, too many magazines, too many paragraphs, too many sentences. Will someone please shut-up already?!

As to Schuon's essentiality, Nasr notes that his writings "always go to the heart and are concerned with the essence of whatever they deal with." Which is to say, he "possesses the gift of reaching the very core of the subject he is treating, of going beyond forms to the essential formless Center of forms whether they be religious, artistic or related to certain features and traits of the cosmic or human orders."

The question I have is, why isn't everyone hungry for this type of intellectual -- or pneuma-cognitive -- nourishment? I think Schuon would say they are, by virtue of being human. To paraphrase the man himsoph, human beings are condemned to transcendence, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

That is, the intellect is ordered to the absolute, which is its proper, or ultimate, object. In fact, to know any truth is to be ordered to this object, otherwise it wouldn't be truth. It wouldn't even be false, just nothing, since falsehood is the shadow of truth. You can't be wrong if you can't be right. Right?

Nasr describes exactly how it is for me: "To read [Schuon's] works is to be transplanted from the shell to the kernel, to be carried on a journey that is at once intellectual and spiritual from the circumference to the Center."

The Center would have to be the place -- the only possible place -- where essence, universality, and comprehensiveness collide. And when they do collide, one sees stars. Or sparks. At least I do.

You know the old crack about how Christianity is not a religion, but the cure for religion? I think it is the same with Schuon's intellectuality, i.e., a cure for secular or rationalistic intellectualism.

And we are in need of a cure for the latter, because when reason becomes the master instead of the slave, it is as if a corrosive mind parasite has hijacked the soul. It doesn't so much metabolize truth as it does erode the foundation, as do termites to a house. And once you've destroyed the foundation, you can't build anything on it. Logic wins, but the soul perishes. Or, the operation is a success, although the patient is dead.

I had a free-wheeling discussion about this with our vertically attuned contractor yesterday. He mentioned a distressing conversation with his hyper-rationalistic ophthalmologist, a man who can deploy reason to disprove anything, but which leaves him in a cold and barren world deprived of spiritual light and cosmic meaning.

He sounds like a reasonably intelligent person, which I'm sure he is. One generally can't be an idiot and get through medical school. However, in the Darwinian sense, the environment of medical school "selects" people with certain personality traits, and then aggravates those traits over the subsequent six or seven or more years. Is it any wonder that reason can become hypertrophied while the spiritual imagination withers? And when the latter shrivels up, the realm to which it gives access naturally "disappears." It's like me and my pancreas. Ask it about insulin, and it will say insawhut?

A brilliant physician has access to other tacit worlds that the layman cannot perceive. And these worlds can certainly be essential to physical wellbeing, but an exclusive focus on them can occlude other realities. One reason I like to blog first thing in the morning is that it helps ground me in the essential before I must venture forth and make my way in that other annoying world. It helps me be in it but not of it.

A person whose (lower case r) reason is running amuck needs to get back to the Essence, the Universal, the Comprehensive, and away from the surface, the particular, and the local. The rub, of course, is that I don't really want my surgeon living in the latter world, any more than I want my accountant to be floating in a happy rainbow land of tangerine taxes, marmalade math, and marshmallow IRS agents.

Anyway, for the eye doctor with the hypertrophied rationalism, Dr. Bob might prescribe a little Schuon to break through the layers of ice and rock that have formed above his mind. I know what it's like to be encrapsulated in an omniscient little ego, and it is not a pleasant feeling. There are ways out, of course, but many of them involve bypassing the intellect, which is precisely what the intellectual will have difficulty doing.

Therefore, he is in need of some intellectual keys that dwarf his puny reason, restore his epistemological humility, and show logic for what it is: a limited tool for exploring certain realities, but certainly not a key to the truth that necessarily transcends it.

It's a little like martial arts, whereby the power of the mind is used against itself. When properly used, the intellect should arrive at the mystery which it cannot solve, because it is a reflection of it. This is where the intellect can finally find its rest, and stop thrashing about, looking for, or pretending to have, answers that surpass it.

Speaking of eyes and physicians, we all know about the "three eyes" of the soul. There is the physical eye that discloses the empirical world, just as there is the rational eye with which we perceive invisible mathematical and logical truths.

But there is also the spiritual eye with which we "see" spiritual truths and realities that precede us -- just as the physical world obviously must precede the physical eye. The world doesn't proceed from the eye, any more than God proceeds from the human spirit.

We can take the analogy further, in the sense that even perception is never just perception. Take the example of two people watching a baseball game, one who played the game and knows all its subtle rules and strategies, the other attending his first game. Although they will "see" the exact same thing, they will perceive very different realities. The more one understands the game, the more one sees, to the point of inexhaustibility.

Now, if we transpose this idea to the spiritual realm, the same truth applies. Religion, you might say, provides the rules of the game: common landmarks, points of reference, warnings, tips, hints, etc. And as one immerses oneself in this world and gazes into the clear-view mirror, sure enough, it begins coming into view. One starts to perceive the contours of this world, to which all the points of reference are referring.

And then one can describe this world in a more direct way, without necessarily having to use the existing points of reference -- although it is generally best to use them, for the same reason it is best to speak truth in an existing language instead of inventing a new one that no one understands.

It is as if one touches the substance, but the substance still needs a form in order to be both intelligible and communicable. For example, Christianity obviously provides such forms. But if they are only understood dogmatically as forms, then I think one has missed half a loaf on the boat to nowhere.

Rather, I think the whole point must be to embody the form, which is to say, prolong the vertical into the horizontal -- which, if I am not mistaken, is kind of the whole point of the Incarnation. It is what the Word is trying to tell us, if only we know how to listen with the third ear, or correct for our cardiomyopia.

13 comments:

Rick said...
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julie said...

whenever I want to get back to basics, I turn to... Schuon

Not nearly as off the wall as you seem to think; I find Schuon very helpful in that regard.

Rick said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Rick said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
mushroom said...

The question I have is, why isn't everyone hungry for this type of intellectual -- or pneuma-cognitive -- nourishment?

That is a good question. They are hungry; the shelves are empty or containing nothing but Monkey Chow. They don't know there's a vine and fig tree out back.

Joan of Argghh! said...

When properly used, the intellect should arrive at the mystery which it cannot solve, because it is a reflection of it.

Such a lovely truth!

*continues reading*

Joan of Argghh! said...

I like the analogy of baseball and would extend it to include that appreciation grows as one pays for their own seat in the stadium.

"Investment" is a very real part of the intellect. When we buy into the concepts of the game, our curiosity deepens and, as we learn, we enjoy it more than any mere attendant that scored a ticket from his friend's season seats but doesn't really follow RBIs and ERAs batting avgs. The strategies reveal themselves to the student of the game.

But this has never happened for me in soccer, despite years of exposure to it.

John Lien said...

Although they will "see" the exact same thing, they will perceive very different realities. The more one understands the game, the more one sees, to the point of inexhaustibility. Now, if we transpose this idea to the spiritual realm, the same truth applies.

Great analogy. That's why you, Bob, can write about the same thing over and over and when it is re-presented I get "it" a little more each time.

Ears to hear and all that...

Oh, and thanks.

Gagdad Bob said...

Joan:

I'm just now reading a book about the logic of sacrifice, and it preiterates what you say -- that we sacrifice for what is good, but through a little twist, can think that something is good just because we have sacrificed to it. This would explain the morality of suicide bombers, who can thereby commit mass murder and purify themselves at the same time.

Great line: "Misguided self-transcendence is morally more problematic and lethal than a disproportionate attachment to self-interest."

To put it concretely, transcendent leftism has killed millions more than "selfish CEOs." Give me selfish any time over misguided transcendence.

Gagdad Bob said...

I think the sacrifice involved also helps explain why we love babies -- more self-sacrifice = more love. Another reason to think that the premature and helpless baby is a key to humanness.

Joan of Argghh! said...

I was thinking more along the lines of, "where ever your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

And selfishly, I was just setting up a soccer joke!

But now that you speak of investment as sacrifice then, yeah, we need to mind where our "sacrifices" are leading us to.

ge said...

PITTSBURGH — An employee of a McDonald’s restaurant was charged Wednesday with selling heroin in Happy Meals to customers using the coded request, “I’d like to order a toy,” or "May I have some junk with my food?"
Allegheny County authorities made the arrest after an informant told them that an employee was selling the drug at a McDonald’s in the East Liberty section of the city.

Customers looking for heroin were instructed to go through the drive-through window and say, “I’d like to order a toy,” said Mike Manko, spokesman for District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. The customer would then drive to the window, hand over the money and get a Happy Meal box containing heroin in exchange, Manko said.

Undercover agents set up a drug buy and arrested Shania Dennis, 26, of East Pittsburgh. Dennis denied wrongdoing to reporters as she was being led away in handcuffs.

Authorities said they found 10 bags of heroin in a Happy Meal box and recovered another 50 bags from the suspect.

Another McDonald’s employee was arrested this month for selling heroin out of a restaurant in nearby Murrysville.

Authorities said the heroin recovered Wednesday does not appear to be related to the fentanyl-laced heroin blamed for 22 overdose deaths in southwestern Pennsylvania.

[[ge & bob dole added the line
"May I have some junk with my food?"]]

Rick said...

"I think the sacrifice involved also helps explain why we love babies -- more self-sacrifice = more love. Another reason to think that the premature and helpless baby is a key to humanness."

Also a way toward humanness.

I imagine the book you are reading explores the many forms of (good) sacrifice. Do we use the word a bit too loosely? I mean, shouldn't we properly reserve it for when a life is given up for another? Perhaps a distinction between charity and sacrifice is valid. In any case, sacrifice, charity, and love all seem to be intimately entwined.
Charity is to the Father as Sacrifice is to the Son as Love is to the Holy Spirit. And if so, love is synonymous with person. I think it is UF or someone in the Philokalia who suggested good deeds or maybe even good thoughts produce angels.

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