Last night in church they sang the song What Child is This?, set to the tune of Greensleeves, which made me wish for John Coltrane's deconstructed modal version, with the lights turned low and maybe an open bar:
Also, while I'm not gay, I do love the Carpenters:
And like Coltrane, they did a fine version of My Favorite Things, although theirs is rather more conventional than his:
Nevertheless, if Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then I say this is Christmas song:
Shouldn't you knock off for a day or two? Give readers a break?
No, it's the other way around: since I write in order to find out what I think, I am the primary reader. Also, one doesn't need a "break" from retirement, which is itself a break. Therefore, writing is a break from the break. More generally, slack isn't just nothing, rather, --
Like the eternal void, filled with infinite possibilities?
Yes, much like this blank page. It is void of form, darkness on the face of the deep, just waiting for a helpful spirit to come along and pull some order out of it or put some light into it. To paraphrase Lao-tse, it is the emptiness of this cup that holds the coffee. Likewise, the empty page that holds the post.
By the way, Lao-tse, according to Mitchell, means "'the Old master,' or, more picturesquely, 'Old Boy,'" and it has only recently begun to dawn on this particular boy that he's getting rather long in the tooth. At some point it just can't be denied. It's almost like having to undergo another puberty, just as one was coming to terms with the previous one.
Speaking of which, I was surprised that Wolfgang Smith speaks favorably of astrology. I won't go into details, but it is noteworthy that scripture not only takes it for granted, but tells us of those wise men from the east who presumably deduced from the stars the location of the newborn king.
Now, I myself once dabbled in astrology. It was back in grad school, when I met a fellow student who was an actual practitioner, a "clinical astrologer," so to speak. He was also very smart, which made it difficult to dismiss his ideas out of hand.
He introduced me to a more psychological form of astrology that was more or less Jungian in its approach -- "archetypal astrology," so to speak. It had nothing to do with fortune telling or predicting the future, rather, with describing the configuration of one's personality, doing so with the language and symbols of astrology.
After all, the human subject is as invisible as this blank page. How then do we talk about it? My friend did so via the symbolic language of astrology. He went on to be a successful psychoanalyst, and I don't know if he continued to integrate astrology into his practice.
In any event, Wolfgang Smith's mention of it caused me to dig out a book recommended by my friend, called The Astrology of Personality: A Re-Formulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals, in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy.
This book was pretty much the beginning and end of my dabbling in the subject. There's a lot of wisdom in it, albeit conveyed via the symbolism of astrology, somewhat analogous to the way our Unknown Friend uses the symbolism of the tarot to talk about man, God, the universe, and everything in between.
If Rudhyar is deepaking the chopra, it is of a high-end sort. His wiki page says that his integration of astrology and depth-psychology
overcame some basic problems, including astrology's deterministic approach to life and the trouble of designating an agent to produce the astrological effects. Rudhyar postulated that the stars did not cause the effects seen in human life but were pictures synchronistically aligned to human beings. They detailed psychological forces working in individuals, but did not override human freedom in responding to those forces....
Arguing that astrology is not essentially predictive but rather productive of intuitive insights, The Astrology of Personality was one of the most influential tracts of "free-will" astrology, despite being written in the dense, circuitous style that characterizes much of Rudhyar's writing.
Is there a point to this dense and circuitous story?
Yes, I was about to get to it. Rudhyar makes the claim that time isn't just linear and "empty" -- like Newtonian time -- but rather, has qualities and cycles, much in the way that the I Ching purports to describe the qualitative "signs of the times," both personal and collective.
Specifically, Rudhyar says that life unfolds in seven year cycles. I remember trying to see how the pattern of my own life lined up with these holofractal cycles, and there seemed to be something to it. At the time, I was particularly struck by the following passage, describing the fourth cycle (21 to 28):
At the middle point of this 7-year cycle, that is, at the age of twenty-four and a half, man faces the great crisis of discrimination between various types of ideals and companions. He has to "make up his mind" about what he is going to be. Usually this determines the nature and character of the "second birth" at twenty-eight; not, however, before a period of readjustment is passed through, perhaps at the cost of deep suffering...
Which -- gosh! -- precisely described the pattern of my own life. For reasons I still can't explain, it was indeed precisely in the middle of that seven year cycle that I left the old ideals -- which were no ideals at all -- and companions -- i.e., drinking buddies -- behind, and soon entered grad school.
In short, at twenty-four and a half, my life underwent a 180º. I had no part in making it happen. Rather, it just happened, seemingly in spite of myself.
I've written before of how my mind suddenly and unexpectedly "switched on" during that cycle, prior to which I had zero interest in ideas, reading, philosophy, religion, college, or basically anything more elevated than partying with my equally wayward and shiftless companions. For what it's worth, at the end of that cycle -- 28 -- I got involved with a new companion who turned out to be my wife, of all people.
For Rudyard, 7 x 7, or 49, represents the completion of a larger cycle, and here again, that's how it was for me: a book, a child, a disease (late onset juvenile diabetes), and even this here blog. Meanwhile, I am now careening toward the the completion of my tenth seven year cycle, and what's that about? It is in fact -- as alluded to above --
the "third puberty" [the second being the so-called "midlife crisis" at around 42] with the entrance into the new relationship -- which often means death.
Whether literal or symbolic, hopefully the latter, in which case "the organism"
can repolarize itself according to a new rhythm of life contacts, then the real inner world may open; and man learns to be familiar with the rhythm of the "other world," with entities or energies of the "beyond" -- whatever may be meant exactly by the term. He becomes the wise old Sage..., bringing to earth visions of a world of pure and serene significance.
And you ask me why I blog!
Well, what about the cosmic egg?
I just checked, and there are indeed hundreds of images. I wonder if the snake symbolizes the vertical ascent mentioned in yesterday's post? Kundalini arousal, and all that?
In any event, it's a very old idea; or rather, an old image that symbolically communicates ideas that are as new as whatever is hatched from the cosmic egg. Maybe even this post.
"The ancients imagined that the universe was hatched from a primordial egg.... To the Alchemists it was analogous to the Macrocosm, the universe....
"Out of the egg... will rise the eagle or phoenix, the liberated soul, which is ultimately identical with the Anthropos who was imprisoned in the embrace of Physis."
That's a rather Gnostic view -- the idea that we are imprisoned in matter, as opposed to being a hylomorphic union of matter and form, or body and soul. Which is why the Incarnation can't just involve the mind alone... what's the word?
Docetism?
Close enough: the idea that Christ's physical body was an illusion and that he only seemed to be human. This was again because matter was thought to be inherently evil or impure, and therefore incompatible with the divine nature of Christ.
One can see the appeal, for the body can at times seem like our best frenemy. We need one, but it comes with all those annoying shocks the flesh is heir to -- disease, dysfunction, degeneration, decay, deterioration, decrepitude... and that's just some of the D's. That Christ saw fit not just to inhabit one but to be one is most remarkable. Recalling yesterday's post, it means that the Center truly became Periphery. No half measures!
Back to O-ology, which -- if the word weren't already taken -- would colloquially mean "the study of O," while literally meaning the "logos of O."
Perhaps I should back up a step and begin with a definition of O. Which, of course, can never be defined per se, since infinitude escapes any finite --
Why not just say ultimate reality and be done with it!?
We could say that, but with many important qualifications. First there is the necessarily apophatic nature of our approach, which is perfectly orthodox, in the sense that what we can know of O is infinitely dwarfed by what we can't. O is not so much unknowable as infinitely knowable. And only in the beatific vision do we finally find out just how much we didn't know about God (?!).
You just said God instead of O.
Yes, because I was speaking in a Christian idiom, and besides, my humble readers are already aware of much they don't know about God. At the other extreme are folks like the one I saw on Christian TV the other night. My son and I occasionally tune in and enjoy these Flanders types for a laugh.
Not very charitable.
Maybe. I suppose these people are harmless enough when speaking to themselves, but they can do damage to the cause by making Christianity appear stupid to people already inclined to dismiss religion as stupid. Dávila knows what I mean:
Every Christian has been directly responsible for the hardening of some unbeliever’s heart.
It reminds me of Ringo's annoyed reaction to the cover of John Lennon's first solo album, on which he and Yoko appeared stark naked:
I said, "Ah, come on, John. You’re doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer. It doesn’t matter; whichever one of us does something, we all have to answer for it."
Likewise, it may be cool for this TV preacher to describe the exact color and molecular composition of God's throne -- which, it turns out, is made of alabaster -- but then the restavus have to answer for it.
Another point about O is that it leaves a space for us to fill in the content. It is what Bion called "unsaturated" with a rigid, determined, and pre-existing meaning. When this occurs, we can't really "discover" O, rather, only find what we're already looking for -- as, for example, with climate science researchers. When reality falsifies their (saturated) models, they chuck reality, so they're incapable of learning about it.
A third point about O is that it allows for experiential knowledge of it. At the end of the deity, O cannot be known like an empirical object, or reduced to human categories, but can be known via participation. Lao Tse is all over this paradox:
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is the eternally real....
It is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities....
Empty yet inexhaustible, it gives birth to infinite worlds.
It is "beyond is and is not," and yet, it is always right here right now, waiting to be entered.
Bob, are you not mixing Christian apples with Taoist oranges?
Absolutely. In Christ the Eternal Tao the author points out how
In modern Western society, many people turn away from the Christianity of their formative years because they find its truths smothered under an unreal kind of religiosity.... the churches have replaced a direct, intuitive apprehension of Reality and a true experience of God with an intellectualism on the one hand and an emotionalism on the other....
Properly oological Christianity is illicitly reduced to
something that is acquired through rote learning, based on the idea that if you just get the words right..., you will be saved. Christianity then becomes a dry, word-based religion... that operates on the same principles as the institutions of the world.
So, don't do that. Like how? "The only way to get past religious words and concepts is to seek... the Reality behind them," and "to rise above thoughts and emotions" to "the Mind Who is beyond thought."
It's the same with the Upanishads: "If you think that you know well the truth of Brahman, know that you know little.... He truly knows Brahman who knows him as beyond knowledge; he who thinks that he knows, knows not."
Which accords perfectly with Thomas: "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite." As such, "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God."
This is no different from what St. Paul says: "if anyone thinks that he knows anything, he knows nothing yet as he ought to know" (1 Cor. 8:2).
Now, it is not as if we can't use words to describe O. It's just that we mustn't confuse the words with the reality they can only touch but never exhaust. I'm reading another book by Wolfgang Smith, and he describes it thus:
the Real is not what we catch in our nets, but precisely what we do not catch: whatever eludes our mental grasp.... And that is why it must be sought, figuratively speaking, "with folded hands," a gesture that betokens, not a "grasp," but the very opposite: a submission, namely, an unconditional openness, like that of a mirror wiped clean.
Suffice it to say, revelation is a kind of "map of O," but we still need to undertake the journey. Half of oology is our own unending (o) to O.
And what is Christmas but a celebration of the ultimate openness of O to us, of all people? There's much more to say about this, but I'll shut up for now. Still, I can't help wondering what Gemini thinks about this:
This text explores the concept of "O," representing ultimate reality, through various philosophical and religious lenses. Here's a breakdown of the key ideas:
O as Ultimate Reality: The text introduces "O" as a placeholder for ultimate reality, acknowledging the limitations of human language and understanding in defining the infinite. It emphasizes the apophatic approach (knowing by negation) -- what we don't know about O far exceeds what we do know.
Critique of Literalism and Intellectualism: The author criticizes overly literal interpretations of religious texts and intellectual approaches that prioritize words and concepts over direct experience of reality. Such approaches can obscure rather than reveal the true nature of O. The example of the TV preacher describing God's throne illustrates this point.
Experiential Knowledge and Participation: The text emphasizes the importance of experiential knowledge and participation in O. This is contrasted with merely intellectual or emotional understanding. Quotes from Lao Tzu, the Upanishads, and Christian mystics like Thomas Aquinas and St. Paul support this idea. The author suggests that O is not just an object to be studied but a reality to be entered into.
The Cosmic Egg and Gnosticism: The image of the cosmic egg is introduced as a symbol of the universe's origin and potential. The author connects this to Gnostic ideas about the soul being imprisoned in matter, contrasting this with the Christian concept of hylomorphism (the union of body and soul). The discussion of Docetism highlights the tension between valuing the spiritual and devaluing the material.
The Incarnation as Ultimate Openness: The Incarnation of Christ is presented as the ultimate example of O's openness to humanity. By becoming human, O entered the periphery, fully embracing the material world.
Oology as the Study of O: The author playfully introduces "oology" as the study of O, emphasizing the ongoing and unending quest for understanding. This involves both revelation (the "map of O") and personal experience (the journey).
Blending of Traditions: The text draws on various traditions, including Christianity, Taoism, and Gnosticism, to explore the nature of O. This blending suggests a search for universal truths that transcend specific religious or philosophical frameworks.
Unsaturated Concepts: The concept of "unsaturated" meaning, borrowed from Bion, is introduced. This means that "O" is a flexible concept that allows individuals to find their own meaning within it, rather than being restricted by pre-defined interpretations.
In essence, the text explores the ineffable nature of ultimate reality, arguing for a balanced approach that combines intellectual humility with experiential seeking. It suggests that true understanding of O comes not from mastering words and concepts but from participating in the reality they point to.
It's nice to be understood. How about an image?
I became an existentialist back in the early 1980s. Or rather, I realized I was one: existence on its own terms made no sense except for whatever arbitrary sense we could temporarily impose upon it. This is what we call "auto-pullwoolery," which is to say, fooling ourselves.
For example, today I very much hope the Rams defeat the Jets. But if I ask myself why I nurture this hope, and what it signifies, the whole exercise falls apart. Likewise, last summer I hoped the Dodgers would win the World Series. Well, they did. Now what?
Hope for the Rams.
Correct. One hope replaces another, but where does it end? In a wholly horizontal world, hope is an absurcular tautology. The illusion of worldly hope only works "in the dark," so to speak. If we examine it closely in the light, it dissolves into nothing.
Much like the quantum physics we've been discussing: look closely enough at an object and it dissolves into a ghostly field of vibrating energy. There are no good or bad vibrations, just atoms in the void, a "flux of configurations" that is "senseless, valueless, purposeless." "The aboriginal stuff, or material, from which a materialistic philosophy starts is incapable of evolution," the latter being just
another word for the description of the changes of the external relations between portions of matter. There is nothing to evolve, because one set of external relations is as good as any other set of external relations. There can merely be change, purposeless and unprogressive (Whitehead).
So, evolution is as hopeless as any other metaphysic. It's just maya by another name.
Just as the world doesn't owe us a living, nor does it owe us an explanation. Which brings to mind an aphorism or two:
History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.
So, don't pull the historical wool over your eyes, especially the third one that "sees" transcendence:
The promises of life disappoint no one but the one who believes they are fulfilled here.
Of course, it would be nice if history made sense. But
For history to be of concern to us, there must be something in it that transcends it: there must be something in history that is more than history.
Like what, for example? Any ideas?
If history made sense, the Incarnation would be superfluous.
Put another way, history is the bad news into which the good news is inserted from outside history. This is the central claim, at any rate, and our last hope in an otherwise hopeless world.
Thus, it seems to me that Christianity is predicated on a deep and unblinking appreciation of just how screwed we are existentially. Thus,
There is some collusion between skepticism and faith: both undermine human presumptuousness.
Looked at this way, the materialist, the atheist, the evolutionist, aren't skeptical enough: they haven't yet hit the bottom of their own impoverished worldview. Perhaps they hope for a complete explanation from physics, or a total understanding of natural selection, which is to say, winning the Scientistic World Series. Then what?
If the atheist does not commit suicide he has no right to be thought lucid.
In the Foreword to The Wisdom of Ancient Cosmology, Jean Borella describes our lamentable existential situation: the world of modern scientism
refutes the world of religion, silences it, and destroys its power. This is because religion speaks of an invisible world, while contemporary civilization renders the sensory world more and more present, the invisible world more and more absent.
I suppose the point of this blog -- it's in the name -- is that there exists a Perennial Cosmology that is the cure for, and way out of, modern cosmolatry. For "today it is nineteenth century materialism that has become a superstition."
Conversely, the perennial cosmology isn't even a little stitious. Rather, "it is not religion but the customary interpretation of science that needs to be 'demythologized.'"
We have only to demythologize the idolatrous myths of these impudent demythologizers. Like how? We're open to suggestions.
Smith lists four: first, what we are calling the perennial cosmology "has to do primarily with the qualitative aspects of cosmic reality" -- precisely those features that "modern cosmology excludes." And why does it exclude them?
For reasons alluded to in yesterday's post: for example, if your only tool is a high energy particle accelerator, don't be surprised if everything looks like a vast collision of quarks in the dark smashing into one another. A very expensive exercise in hammers and nails.
The second principle of our perennial cosmology has to do with verticality, and no amount of horizontality can account for it. The attempt to reduce the total cosmos to its horizontal aspects entails "a drastic diminution, an ontological shrinkage of incalculable proportions."
The nightmare of ontological shrinkage! Note that the meaning of the calculable is literally incalculable -- another way of saying semantics cannot be reduced to syntax.
Which reminds me of the unintentionally ironic eulogy of the great mathematician, whose contributions to mathematics were incalculable. The meaning of even a mathematician's life is not an equation or series of numbers, if only because abstract numbers are void of content. The map will never be the territory, nor can a man nourish body or soul by eating the menu.
Here we could say something about Gödel, who proved beyond the shadow of a doubt and with geometric logic that the mind is more than a machine: it calculates while always transcending calculation.
The quantifiable cosmos is only its "outer shell," so to speak -- the periphery, not the center. Rather, we -- which is to say, persons -- are the center of the universe, more on which as we proceed.
Coming in at number three is the related idea that man is the microcosm, a "universe in miniature." Sounds daft on superficial consideration, but "In the final count, man is able to know the cosmos precisely because he is in fact a microcosm."
It's why everything that exists is intelligible to our intellect, or why, in a word, being is fungible to knowledge: "The fact is that we can know the cosmos, because in a profound sense... the cosmos pre-exists in us."
Our fourth and last principle has to do with "the spiritual ascent of man":
It affirms that the higher strata of the integral cosmos can be known or entered experientially through the realization of the corresponding states of man himself...
Now let's put these four together and see if we can't reduce them to one: recall that there are quality and verticality, each irreducible to anything less; then microcosm and spiritual ascent.
Hmm... how to unify these into the big picture? Here's one man's attempt:
the cosmogonic movement is not merely centrifugal, it becomes centripetal in the final analysis, which is to say that it is circular; the circle of Maya closes in the heart of the deified man....
To the question of knowing why man has been placed in the world when his fundamental vocation is to leave [i.e., transcend] it, we would reply: it is precisely in order that there be someone who returns to God (Schuon).
Or, Peter Kreeft writes of how "that-which-was-from-the-beginning," the "unmanifest Source of all manifestations became manifested," and "the distance between Heaven and earth" is bridged.
"Jesus is Jacob's ladder..., and we see this ladder is upside down: it really rests on Heaven, not on earth like the Tower of Babel," much less the babble of tenure. "He makes it possible to escape earth's gravity."
Ultimately, there is the spiral of
exitus-redditus, an exit from and a return to God, Who is both Alpha and Omega. God is the ontological heart that pumps the blood of being through the arteries of creation into the body of the universe... (Kreeft).
So, I think we can ultimately reduce it to something like the following, only spiraling down and out, and then up and in:
O
(↓↑)
(•)
(↓↑)
⬤
Yesterday we spoke of our inverted Weltanschauung and perverted Zeitgeist; which is to say, our view of the world is upside-down, and the spirit of our times is deranged.
Now, who is to blame? Or what? As mentioned a few posts back, I am loathe to blame philosophers, because history is a complex system and spontaneous order, with no one and everyone in charge of it.
Also, most everything is a mixed bag, a tradeoff. I'm thinking in particular of the so-called Enlightenment, which certainly lit up some things but relegated others to the shadows. Including, ironically, the most luminous things.
Who lights a candle to look for the sun?
Enlightenment Man, that's who, with his grab bag of flickering isms: materialism, mechanism, reductionism, rationalism, empiricism, relativism, Kantianism, Marxism, et al -- and even the "Christianism" which was its reaction, which is to say, a diluted Christianity excised from the explicit science to which it gave birth and the implicit metaphysics it preserved. The three solas are comparatively dim bulbs.
Way back in the day, Plato said Science is nothing but seeing. But what is sight? Human vision is not like a camera, which records only surfaces.
Rather, it can see what it doesn't see, for example, the dark side of the moon. We don't literally see it, but in seeing the bright side, we know it's there. In other words, we can't see the totality of a single object, even though we know -- unlike animals -- that there's always more to what we see.
Analogously, with the tools of science we see the bright side of the cosmos. But here again, there's the other side which we cannot see, the noumenon. By this we do not intend a Kantian bifurcation that encloses us in phenomena with no possible contact with the real, rather, a different mode of vision -- a transpersonal seeing "within" or "beyond" the surface.
Our current worldview doesn't view the world at all, i.e., in its integral wholeness, rather, is a certain diminished view that brings into being a broken world of imaginary fragments. We can try to put the fragments back together in a multitude of ways, hence all the arbitrary isms that do just that.
For example, imagine viewing a painting with a microscope of infinite power, which would at once reveal "everything" and "nothing." More generally, the tool determines what we shall find.
This is the paradox at the heart of quantum physics, and why "no one understands it." The experimental set-up determines what we see, but again, what determines sight? Sight is the unseen side of anything we see -- put another way, the subject is the mysterious dark side of any object it perceives.
But whence the intellectual light with which we see -- or enlighten -- intelligible objects? This primordial light is perhaps the most important thing that has been overshadowed by the Enlightenment. It's the central sun we've exchanged for the scientistic candles that light the surface or periphery.
No one can see the cosmos, and yet, we see it just the same in seeing anything. In other words, every intelligible existent is the visible side of a cosmic area rug that extends over a transcendent horizon of total intelligibility. Which is why any truth speaks of all truth. One might say that science is embedded in omni-science, as part is to whole.
Thus, if the cosmos
were even remotely what the physical sciences declare it to be, it could not be "viewed" at all. To speak seriously of a "worldview," one needs consequently to assume the incompleteness of our physics-based scientific knowledge (Smith).
To what can be seen through physics needs to be added what is in principle not seeable through it. Smith has in mind irreducible wholeness, which in turn implies vertical causation, when physics by definition sees only the horizontal parts. But you can spend your entire life in search of a sphere in Flatland, and will never find one.
Unless you know how to look at circles, i.e., see the dark side from which visible circles are a declension.
Plato for the win!
Correct: the light is coming from outside the cave. Moreover, the call is coming from outside the cosmos, i.e., from the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility alluded to above.
Switching seers for a moment, I want to touch on a book called A Metaphysics of the Christian Mystery -- which I do not recommend, because I only understood about ten percent of it. I think something must have been lost in translation. Which is to say, about ninety percent. Nevertheless, parts are clear, for example,
ideologies constitute "the true mythologies of the modern age." Any philosophy, moreover, disconnected from its roots (from the enigmatic question "Why and how do I think?") runs the risk of being reduced to an ideology.
I'll bite: why and how do I think? In giving it some thought, I don't. For example, I'm not thinking about this post, rather, thoughts merely arise -- from somewhere -- and it is more a matter of catching and transcribing them. Some editing is required, failure of which results in a train wreck. But I'm more of a middleman between thoughts and post.
Middle earth?
Yes, in the sense that earth is indeed the center of the cosmos after all, certainly with the arrival of Homo sapiens. Analogously, the center of Flatland is not a point equidistant from the sides, rather, any place bisected by the sphere. In other words, in rising above the merely physical cosmos, this is an infinitely deeper center than any mere sun, star, or galaxy.
To reach its true objective philosophy must thus transcend its own constructs, relinquish its own logic and its very thought in order to take possession of that which is beyond logic, beyond all thought (ibid.).
In other words, into the Great Attractor just over the vertical horizon. This is the place where knowledge converts to being and vice versa, otherwise we could have neither. Well, being would still be being, but we couldn't know of it.
To the incompleteness of reason... corresponds "its natural demand for a supernatural completion in the intellective and even supra-intellective order"; intelligence "is supernatural by nature," "its essence is metaphysical"; "the intellect (nous) is already something divine."
Bold claims. Nevertheless,
the intellect enables the human being, in his present state, to intelligibly make contact with realities that ontologically surpass him...
That's the ever-present dark side of our knowledge, except that it's not really dark at all, rather, the very source that lights up the surface and renders it visible to us.
We haven't yet reached the End, only the end of the post. We'll end with this:
The fact is that our physics-based sciences as such can tell us nothing about being: they are literally and incurably blind to "that which is."
You might say that a particle collider is the biggest candle ever invented, but it will never find the sun, since it is at the other end, i.e., outside and beyond the quantum shadows dancing on the walls of the cave.
This is yesterday's post sifted through the filter of today. In other words, it ended in another brainwreck, when things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and mere anarchy is loosed on the cosmos.
Then it's hard to relocate the durn center from which the post proceeded. I can try to put it back together, but this is a top-down or "exterior" exercise that feels very different from the insight-out process of giving birth to the post. The nonlocal portal is more or less closed for isness.
It sounds pretentious to say that every post is a kind of "automatic writing," and a critic would no doubt call it BS masquerading as even more of it. Being that I am simultaneously the liberatory and the gliberator, we're always poised on that fine line between surprising discovery and pretentious nonsense. But like any good experiment, we don't know the results in advance.
also called psychography, is a claimed psychic ability allowing a person to produce written words without consciously writing. Practitioners engage in automatic writing by holding a writing instrument and allowing alleged spirits to manipulate the practitioner's hand. The instrument may be a standard writing instrument, or it may be one specially designed for automatic writing, such as a planchette or ouija board.
So, it's not that. Besides, "There is no evidence supporting the existence of automatic writing, and claims associated with it are unfalsifiable. Documented examples are considered to be the result of the ideomotor phenomenon." Ideowhat?
The ideomotor phenomenon is a psychological phenomenon wherein a subject makes motions unconsciously.... The phrase is most commonly used in reference to the process whereby a thought or mental image brings about a seemingly "reflexive" or automatic muscular reaction, often of minuscule degree, and potentially outside of the awareness of the subject.
Not that either. Maybe it's just free writing, "in which a person writes continuously for a set period of time with limited concern for rhetoric, conventions, and mechanics." It is "comparatively formless or unstructured" and "often produces raw, or even unusable material."
As the cliché goes, we write in order to find out what we think. Nor is this the royal we, because no post is simply what I think. I abandoned that approach within weeks of starting the blog in 2005. That is, I quickly exhausted the modest storehouse of what I knew, which called for the desperate measure of pouring out what I don't.
That explains a lot.
Let's call it pneumography. Anyway, on to the post -- which is still flawed, but we tried:
For readers who obviously aren't golfers,
The term worldview is a calque of the German word Weltanschauung, composed of Welt ("world") and Anschauung ("perception" or "view").
And I suppose every welanschauung reflects its zeitgeist, i.e.,
the "spirit of the age," an invisible agent, force, or daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.
So, what is the invisible geist haunting our zeit, and the implicit anschauung that dominates our welt?
Bor-ring. Another post about scientism? Just because it -- or reductionism, materialism, dualism, subjectivism, relativism -- is wrong, it doesn't make you right.
That's true: if no one understands quantum mechanics, how can this essential darkness illuminate what is superessentially above and beyond it?
Well, I am told that even people who believe in God struggle to comprehend the Trinity. Expressing it in terms of quantum physics mitigates this somewhat, in that it shows how the world itself can likewise be at once continuous and discontinuous, local and nonlocal, i.e., wave and particle: what looks like a contradiction is a complementarity. Analogously, if the Persons are "particles," the substance is "wave."
That's it?
You're putting me on the spot. However, if the Trinity is the ultimate reality, then everything should be stamped with its imprimatur, no? Ultimately, it is not only why there's such a thing as a we, but why the we must be prior to the I.
But God says his name is I AM.
True, but I AM implies WE ARE. Besides, if God is love, then at the very least there must be a beloved, unless God is the first and last word in metacosmic narcissism. If love is selfless concern for the other as other, then otherness must be built into God: God must have his own Other.
Couldn't this Other be the creation?
Could be, but we say the very principle of creation is located in divinas, in the generation of the Son from the Father. This being the case, then creation is a word from our eternal Sponsor, hence the irreducible intelligibility that infuses things -- you know, all this Light that lights up the world from the inside out.
That's very poetic, but --
No, it's as literal as literal can be. Intelligibility is to intellect as light is to eye. The eye doesn't have to prove the existence of light in order to see.
The point is, no one understands quantum physics because they don't know what understanding is -- or what is is.
What is it?
For starters, it is us -- or we rather, in the act of understanding, i.e., the union of intellect and intelligibility in the act of knowing.
Like anybody could even know that.
Like anybody could not know that and still know anything. The very possibility of knowing truth is gorounded in the ceaseless actualization of the Father's knowledge of the Son in the eternal remurmurance of his Word.
The eternal collapse of God's own wave function?
Something like that. As you know, I dropped out of high school physics. But if even Gemini can come up an image for it, maybe there's something to it:
For reason itself, whether it knows it or not, only derives its power of knowing from the liberality of a God who is the "Father of lights," and from a Word who is the "True Light which, coming into the world, enlightens every man" (Bérard).
Why are we even talking about this? Because we're reading chapter 3 of Physics: A Science in Quest of an Ontology, called Subcorporeal Physics and Vertical Causation.
Why is there such a thing as vertical causation? It must exist, otherwise there is no explanation for intellect, free will, creativity, disinterested love, i.e., all the things that make us human. These are quintessentially top-down phenomena, and where there are phenomena there are -- or is, rather -- the noumenon.
Hallow, noumenon!
In philosophy, a noumenon is knowledge posited as an object that exists independently of human sense. The term noumenon is generally used in contrast with, or in relation to, the term phenomenon, which refers to any object of the senses.
And God, hallowed be his noumenon, is independent of the senses, but not entirely so, since he is omni-present. There is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses, but nor is perception not knowledge (i.e., of appearances, precisely). My dog knows a lot of things without knowing she knows them.
After all, who among us really knows what a bone is? Man is surely a knower, but when all is said and done, we cannot perfectly know the essence of a single fly, let alone an electron, hadron, or quark, so, to say no one understands quantum physics is par for the curs, and every dawg has his deity.
Just because you think of a pun, it doesn't mean you have to share it with the restavus.
Can't be helped. Automatic writing is automatic.
Yada yada, the reality of vertical causation in the corporeal act of measurement "impacts the physical to the point of affecting its very laws."
The fact is that our scientistic Weltanschauung is not only oblivious of all but the crudest aspects of our cosmic reality -- i.e., the quantitative -- but is inverted as well: in our moments of scientistic orthodoxy, we are literally "standing upside-down."
Indeed,
The very "instantaneity" of vertical causation militates in fact against the "flat" cosmology of the evolutionist Weltanschauung, which simply has no room for anything "vertical."
In the words of Bérard,
ideologies constitute the true mythologies of the modern world.... To reach its true objective philosophy must transcend its own constructs, relinquish its own logic and its very thought in order to take possession of that which is beyond logic, beyond all thought....
Here we see knowledge converted into being in precisely the same way that being is converted into knowledge...
Pneumography? We'll try to regroup tomorrow...
Sincere question: why isn't the philosophy of holism more popular? Since it is self-evident to me, there must be a flaw in it somewhere.
If reductive science analyzes wholes into parts, holism situates the parts in the whole and the whole in the parts, and why not? For practical purposes everyone is a holist, since we don't treat people as aggregates of mechanical parts, much less as ghostly fields of insubstantial energy.
However, now that I'm thinking about it, psychotic persons are prone to just these tendencies, perceiving reality as an incoherent jumble of disconnected parts haunted by ethereal projections of ghostly forms, i.e., hallucinations. Are they the sane ones after all?
Gosh. Now that I'm thinking about thinking about it, there was a movement in the 1960s that tried to do just this, not only normalizing psychosis but regarding it as a kind of higher mystic awareness of reality.
Before ever undertaking the formal study of psychology, I remember reading R.D. Laing, who "regarded schizophrenia as a normal psychological adjustment to a dysfunctional social context,"
a transformative episode whereby the process of undergoing mental distress was compared to a shamanic journey. The traveler could return from the journey with important insights...
Mental patients aren't crazy, rather, the world is.
Two words: Luigi Mangione.
Good point: large segments of the left regard him as a hero instead of a psychopathic killer. "As you would expect, Democrats are most likely to condone cold-blooded murder."
And as you would expect, "Politically, Laing was regarded as a thinker of the New Left."
Our larger point is that if the quantum world were the real world, and if we were adapted to this world, we would literally be psychotic.
Indeed, if we were to even put everyday scientism into practice, we would undoubtedly be arrested or hospitalized. Scientism isn't a rational map of the world, rather, a metaphysical disease. Its cure is holism.
But one hesitates to even call the latter an "ism," because it's just the way a normal human sees the world. For example, we effortlessly see faces without having to add the sum of mouth + nose + eyes.
We don't assemble parts into the whole, rather, we have to disassemble the whole in order to see it otherwise.
Of course, another characteristic of mental illness is the perception of "false wholes," for example, a conspiracy theory that imposes connections between things that aren't connected at all. Candace Owens is the reigning champion, although Tucker Carlson isn't far behind.
(Un)fun fact: I'm reading a book on Nazi Germany and the Jews, and in the 1930s, some Germans were so unhinged that they thought Nazism not only didn't go far enough, but was controlled by the Jews.
Our next chapter is on the subject of irreducible wholeness, and if we're on the right track, then the attempt to reduce irreducible wholeness is a kind of insanity. For example, it would be a kind of "musical insanity" to reduce a symphony to a series of isolated notes, and regard these as more real than the symphonic whole.
Nevertheless, this is "the rationale of our fundamental science -- physics namely -- to break entities conceptually into the smallest spatio-temporal fragments and thenceforth identify them with the resultant sum":
Our very conception of "science" -- of rationality almost -- entails the reduction of wholes to an assembly of parts.... the implicit denial of irreducible wholeness has virtually become a mark of enlightenment (Smith).
The cure is rather simple, really: don't elevate scientific methodology to an ontology. In reality, there is a complementary relationship between part and whole, analysis and synthesis, induction and deduction, one and many, left brain and right.
It all starts with nominalism, which denies the existence of universals -- of essences -- regarding the latter as mere names of things. This "became the implicit credo of the modern age -- its religion almost, one might say -- at least in the Western world" (ibid.).
Which is again a crazy ideology that no one could actually put into practice and avoid prison or institutionalization. One assumes that even Richard Dawkins doesn't treat his wife as a skin-encapsulated melange of selfish genes. Then again, he's been married three times, so perhaps this is the issue. Maybe his current wife's genes are less selfish?
But Dawkins is hardly alone, for
to minds steeped in the Zeitgeist of our age, the very idea that there may be something "beyond" the spatio-temporal smacks of the unbelievable, the utterly fantastic (ibid.).
Nevertheless, some form of holism not only "makes sense" but "may well be in essence the only ontology that does."
Really, it comes back to the question of the one and the many, and which is more real? I'm with Peter Kreeft: "The Trinity is the ultimate reconciliation of the one and the many." It implies a dynamism of parts in the whole and the whole in the parts, and that's just the way it is, and why it's that way.
Eh, we didn't get far today, but it's time to disembark from the bus...
