Pantheistic Tri-personalism

Our subject -- Life itself -- has provoked flashbacks to Book One of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order, The Phenomenon of Life. 

These aren't exactly memories, rather, memories of memories, in that I know we discussed it but I can't recall the details. I was going to reread the book today, but why not just review the previous posts and hope they aren't trashbacks?

No, that's not false modesty, because I feel as if anything I've said in the past I can say better today. Or more clearly. Or at least will be lower on the Wince Meter.

Clearly Alexander is our kind of architect: the subtitle of the book is An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Hmm, architecture and cosmology. Isn't that the bailiwick of the Freemasons -- one of our rival secret organizations? 

Alexander only uses architecture as a kind of focal point to discuss everything under the sun.

Speaking of the Masons, maybe like this:

I am quite sure Alexander would agree with the Aphorist that

Modern architecture knows how to erect industrial sheds but cannot manage to construct a palace or a temple.

And that

The preferred materials of modern architecture age like a prostitute.

Although this might be taking it too far:

Compared to a Romanesque church, everything else, without question, is more or less commonplace.

Along these lines, an amazon reviewer writes that

Alexander begins by asking the question, why is contemporary architecture so terrible? In the 20th century we have passed through a unique period, one in which architecture as a discipline has been in a state that is almost unimaginably bad. I find myself musing on this question as I sit in the waiting room at a doctor's office, park my car in a garage, or go though airport security. How did we end up with a built environment that actively degrades our lives? 

Does it have to be this way? Throughout history, cultures have established methods of architecture that enrich the human experience. He posits that this has been caused by a loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness....

Alexander establishes that aliveness is a property of space and matter, not only of biological organisms. Next, he establishes that aliveness exists on a spectrum: anything can be more or less alive. In the built environment, we have agency to influence where something -- a door nob, and window, a room, a village, a region -- falls on this spectrum.

So how do we discern aliveness? After decades of experimentation, Alexander has found that it is an objective property. A basic tenet is the question, "which of these things, manifestations, etc. brings me more aliveness?"

According to the ubiquitous Professor Backflap:

Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture.

He identifies fifteen geometric properties which tend to accompany the presence of life in nature, and also in the buildings and cities we make. These properties are seen over and over in nature and in the cities and streets of the past, but they have almost disappeared in the impersonal developments and buildings of the last hundred years.

This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

Seems to me that Alexander is tackling the same questions as Rosen, only under cover of architecture. But instead of illustrating his thesis with lots of bullet-proof mathematical equations, he illustrates it with lots of... illustrations. Could these constitute left brain / right brain demonstrations of the same fundamental truth?

Let's grow out on a limb and say Yes. 

Beauty is important, but maybe it's actually far more important than we realize. At the very least, Alexander's work explains exactly why beauty is so important, because it is as if Life is one of its attributes or entailments. 

I am an unabashed pantheist. It's just that I'm not only a pantheist. In a footnote, Alexander suggests that "all space and matter, organic or inorganic, has some degree of life in it" and that things are more or less alive according to their "structure and arrangement." More than once I've looked at a tree and pondered whether we are equally alive. I love trees, but the answer is no. 

In the same footnote Alexander claims that reality is personal, and now we're talkin', because that's one of my Ultimate Suspicions. He writes that "all matter/space has some degree of 'self' in it," and that "some aspect of the personal... infuses all matter/space."

I've never given it a name, but let's call it pantheistic tri-personalism. Until something snappier occurs to me.

I am now flipping through the book, and will pause when something does something to something in me.

Very few people realize, I think, how much the present confusion which exists in the field of architecture is wound up with our conception of the universe.

To which I can only add hoo boy, because this apples to any and every field. In other words, a stupid conception of the cosmos poisons everything. Didn't Thomas warn us that a small error in the beginning leads to a great one at the end? And that The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold?

Well, in this case we're talking about a massive error In The Beginning, in which case it must be multiplied at least a googlefold.

A great many metaphysical questions of great consequence are binary in nature, for example, the world is either created or not created, and you have to pick one. Of course, we ought to pick the more likely one, or at least the less unlikely, which is why I choose the former. 

Likewise, the universe is either personal or impersonal, but if it's the latter, then you've got a lot of explaining to do, but with no one here to explain it.

This post has probably gone on too long already, but I think I'll continue flipping and blogging tomorrow. Meanwhile, aphorisms:

The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Understanding Seeking Faith

Lonergan promises to reveal “a transcendental method, that is, a basic pattern of operations employed in every cognitional enterprise.” In other words, what we actually do when we know something or anything or everything. And what we know when we're doing it  

I’m in! However, I’d rather just use his thoughts as a springboard for my own reflections. Self-involved megalomaniacs are like that. But in my defense, I’m old enough to have my own opinions, and lazy enough to not want to slog through this book again.

I should say at the top that I don’t really see anything here that’s not expressed more clearly and succinctly in Polanyi, although he is nowhere acknowledged. Seems their vertical paths never crossed.

Mmmmm, gnostalgia. I just grabbed a volume of Polanyi from the shelf to check the index for any signs of Lonergan, but what grabbed my attention were the many frantic notes to myself about the discoveries therein. 

Mind you, I first read this book (Meaning) when I didn’t know anything about anything, but when my mind had just become activated and was hangry for Truth. The notes tell a story in themselves. At least to a self-involved megalomaniac.

For example, this note to myself could be straight out of Lonergan: The act of understanding is more important than what is understood. Boom, there it is. 

Or this: The technique is the content. So, Lonergan’s idea of the Method of method is a geist that's been in my zeits for a long time. Further examination of the pages reveals preoccupations that have never stopped occupying me.  

Which brings to mind another preoccupation: the idea that the journey of the soul involves the discovery of itself via encounters with the objects that reveal it. 

This sounds a bit tautological, but it’s actually the opposite, for this is the way we exit the closed world of mere instinct-bound animality and enter a higher and deeper, transcendental world that will reveal ourselves to ourselves. Paradoxically, the outside reveals the inside.

Which, of course, isn’t a paradox at all, unless you’ve made it one due to a faulty preconceived metaphysic you’ve brought to the game. In reality, the outside can only reveal the inside because it has an inside of its own. This is known as its “intelligibility,” but there is much more to intelligibility than merely the scientific or quantitative kind. 

Rather, the world is full of qualities, and woe to the man who misses out on them, whether due to ignorance, tenure, autism, poor taste, or just inattention. Let’s bring in our house Aphorist:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Which we do mean literally, a subject we have discussed in past in reference to the works of Christopher Alexander, especially the four volume Nature of Order (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Christopher+Alexander+the+Nature+of+Order&i=stripbooks&crid=1A9TOPGKWDQVS&sprefix=christopher+alexander+the+nature+of+order%2Cstripbooks%2C151&ref=nb_sb_noss_1).

Thus,

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners.

So, what things have selected you? I won't bore you with my list, rather, with the previous 4,000 posts about it. But so long as they are freely chosen, these are the very things that reveal ourselves to ourselves, so be careful what you choose to choose you, because

Each one sees in the world what he deserves to see.

Having said this, not all of the things that select us come preassembled. Rather, some assembly is usually required on our part, and this is where things get tricksy, since this involves an irreducible confluence of subjectivity and objectivity, even though -- paradoxically -- this is the only path to objective truth. There is no other, i.e., no “view from nowhere” that can eliminate the subject, let alone illuminate it.

Which reminds me of an idea for a post I had the other day, the notion of a “political view from nowhere.” On the one hand, there can be no such thing in politics, since politics is inherently factional, combative, and dynamic. 

But on the other hand, there is no becoming in the absence of Being (change my mind), so the superficial combat of politics must rest upon certain enduring principles, or it reduces to power — i.e., to a totalitarian leftism for everyone, good and hard.

I was discussing this yesterday with the boy, who has lately taken a great interest in politics. These are obviously interesting times, and yet, he doesn’t regard this as a curse, rather, an exciting substitute for the day-to-day masculine soap opera of baseball season.

Although he is temperamentally sane (AKA conservative), he also knows that to be ignorant of the other side of the argument is to be ignorant of both.

But how does one choose? I told him that one needs to think things through until one arrives at Rock, i.e., those things that are true and cannot not be true. All thought is for the purpose of arriving at Rock, and until one does so, one will be plunged into obscurity and ambivalence.

Or in other words, one will be locked up in Plato’s cave, looking the wrong way. Those are shadows of rock, not the rock that makes them!

This was followed by a discussion of mineralogy, i.e., the various types of rock which aren’t going anywhere so long as humans remain human and don’t all fall into progressive tyranny. At any rate,

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a religion, rather, just what it says: religious categories. They say that for most people, religion is “faith seeking understanding.” However, for the pneumatic Raccoon it’s actually the other way around, i.e., understanding seeking faith. 

That is to say, we begin at the other end, with intellectual certitude regarding those timeless truths, but then pray for the faith to “be,” or incarnate them, so to speak (what we call incargnosis). 

For on the one hand, our soul has “selected” them, but come to find out it is we who have been selected by someone who seems to know us intimately, or at least has been reading our mail. But who could believe such a thing? I don’t know, but

What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe that we are important to Him.

Therefore,

If we believe in God we should not say, "I believe in God," but rather, "God believes in me."

So, have faith in God’s faith, not ours. His rock beats our scissors.

Understanding Seeking Faith

Lonergan promises to reveal “a transcendental method, that is, a basic pattern of operations employed in every cognitional enterprise.” In other words, what we actually do when we know something or anything or everything. And what we know when we're doing it  

I’m in! However, I’d rather just use his thoughts as a springboard for my own reflections. Self-involved megalomaniacs are like that. But in my defense, I’m old enough to have my own opinions, and lazy enough to not want to slog through this book again.

I should say at the top that I don’t really see anything here that’s not expressed more clearly and succinctly in Polanyi, although he is nowhere acknowledged. Seems their vertical paths never crossed.

Mmmmm, gnostalgia. I just grabbed a volume of Polanyi from the shelf to check the index for any signs of Lonergan, but what grabbed my attention were the many frantic notes to myself about the discoveries therein. 

Mind you, I first read this book (Meaning) when I didn’t know anything about anything, but when my mind had just become activated and was hangry for Truth. The notes tell a story in themselves. At least to a self-involved megalomaniac.

For example, this note to myself could be straight out of Lonergan: The act of understanding is more important than what is understood. Boom, there it is. 

Or this: The technique is the content. So, Lonergan’s idea of the Method of method is a geist that's been in my zeits for a long time. Further examination of the pages reveals preoccupations that have never stopped occupying me.  

Which brings to mind another preoccupation: the idea that the journey of the soul involves the discovery of itself via encounters with the objects that reveal it. 

This sounds a bit tautological, but it’s actually the opposite, for this is the way we exit the closed world of mere instinct-bound animality and enter a higher and deeper, transcendental world that will reveal ourselves to ourselves. Paradoxically, the outside reveals the inside.

Which, of course, isn’t a paradox at all, unless you’ve made it one due to a faulty preconceived metaphysic you’ve brought to the game. In reality, the outside can only reveal the inside because it has an inside of its own. This is known as its “intelligibility,” but there is much more to intelligibility than merely the scientific or quantitative kind. 

Rather, the world is full of qualities, and woe to the man who misses out on them, whether due to ignorance, tenure, autism, poor taste, or just inattention. Let’s bring in our house Aphorist:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

Which we do mean literally, a subject we have discussed in past in reference to the works of Christopher Alexander, especially the four volume Nature of Order (https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Christopher+Alexander+the+Nature+of+Order&i=stripbooks&crid=1A9TOPGKWDQVS&sprefix=christopher+alexander+the+nature+of+order%2Cstripbooks%2C151&ref=nb_sb_noss_1).

Thus,

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners.

So, what things have selected you? I won't bore you with my list, rather, with the previous 4,000 posts about it. But so long as they are freely chosen, these are the very things that reveal ourselves to ourselves, so be careful what you choose to choose you, because

Each one sees in the world what he deserves to see.

Having said this, not all of the things that select us come preassembled. Rather, some assembly is usually required on our part, and this is where things get tricksy, since this involves an irreducible confluence of subjectivity and objectivity, even though -- paradoxically -- this is the only path to objective truth. There is no other, i.e., no “view from nowhere” that can eliminate the subject, let alone illuminate it.

Which reminds me of an idea for a post I had the other day, the notion of a “political view from nowhere.” On the one hand, there can be no such thing in politics, since politics is inherently factional, combative, and dynamic. 

But on the other hand, there is no becoming in the absence of Being (change my mind), so the superficial combat of politics must rest upon certain enduring principles, or it reduces to power — i.e., to a totalitarian leftism for everyone, good and hard.

I was discussing this yesterday with the boy, who has lately taken a great interest in politics. These are obviously interesting times, and yet, he doesn’t regard this as a curse, rather, an exciting substitute for the day-to-day masculine soap opera of baseball season.

Although he is temperamentally sane (AKA conservative), he also knows that to be ignorant of the other side of the argument is to be ignorant of both.

But how does one choose? I told him that one needs to think things through until one arrives at Rock, i.e., those things that are true and cannot not be true. All thought is for the purpose of arriving at Rock, and until one does so, one will be plunged into obscurity and ambivalence.

Or in other words, one will be locked up in Plato’s cave, looking the wrong way. Those are shadows of rock, not the rock that makes them!

This was followed by a discussion of mineralogy, i.e., the various types of rock which aren’t going anywhere so long as humans remain human and don’t all fall into progressive tyranny. At any rate,

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a religion, rather, just what it says: religious categories. They say that for most people, religion is “faith seeking understanding.” However, for the pneumatic Raccoon it’s actually the other way around, i.e., understanding seeking faith. 

That is to say, we begin at the other end, with intellectual certitude regarding those timeless truths, but then pray for the faith to “be,” or incarnate them, so to speak (what we call incargnosis). 

For on the one hand, our soul has “selected” them, but come to find out it is we who have been selected by someone who seems to know us intimately, or at least has been reading our mail. But who could believe such a thing? I don’t know, but

What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe that we are important to Him.

Therefore,

If we believe in God we should not say, "I believe in God," but rather, "God believes in me."

So, have faith in God’s faith, not ours. His rock beats our scissors.

How to Tell Your Friends from the Zombies

A little sidetrip from the main road, being that I don't have that much time anyway. Still, a critically important topic, especially if one wants to be happy and adjusted to cosmic reality.

Reader Magister commented that "Feminists seem to be perpetually at war with their own bodies." However, this resentment is projected into men and into babies, as if it's our fault that their bodies are so sexually alluring, or the baby's fault that they have a such nice cozy womb just perfect for perpetuating the species. It's almost as if the female body has a purpose or something.

However, feminists reject the sufficient reason of their body -- for readers living in Rio Linda or laboring under the delusions of gender theory, that means the reason why your body exists. I mean, everything has a reason, right? Can we at least agree on that? Or do feminists now regard logic as an abusive form of mansplaining?

No? I see. It's a form of rape. Besides, that's not funny!

Did you know that 90% of workplace deaths occur to men? So, why isn't everyone freaking out about MORTALITY INEQUALITY!

In my response to Magister's comment, I wrote that, "Speaking of cosmic rights, the baby certainly has a legitimate right to the mother's body, which is why, you know, breasts. (Which are to be distinguished from boobs, which is what breasts look like to a man.)

"More generally, as we've discussed in the past, not only are our minds intrinsically intersubjective, but our bodies are too. Man and woman point beyond themselves and 'refer' to one another. So to say that we 'own' our bodies and that's that is a little simplistic, to say the least, and certainly not humanistic."

The reason it is not humanistic is that a) human beings could not have evolved from such a static situation, and b) no existing human being lives as an isolated body, cut off from the rest of mankind. Rather, a living body is an open system at every level, biologically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually. Or supposed to be, rather.

Now, in order for language, or information, or meaning, to exist, one thing must be capable of standing for another thing. This is an extremely simple and basic concept, so simple that everyone has it as a background assumption without ever thinking about how it got here and what it implies. There is no reason to take meaning, because everything is always giving it away.

Of note, this feature is woven into the very fabric of existence, and was here long before human beings hit the cosmic stage. Consider DNA, for example, through which a gene, or combination of genes, stands for -- one might even say "symbolizes" -- this or that trait.

But even prior to that, we know that the world is always susceptible to intelligible abstraction, which is why, for example, we can talk about a "big bang." We can talk about a big bang because of background radiation that encodes information referring to that primordial event -- just as light striking your retina can tell you that a star existed a billion years ago, or however long it took the light to get herenow in spacetime.

This means that at the moment of luminous impact, our present and the star's past, or the star's past and future, are thoroughly entangled in this moment of knowing. When the star gave out that light a billion years ago, little did it know that it would someday arrive at the back of the eye of a lifeform that didn't yet exist. But stars were bigger back then. It's the cosmos that's gotten smaller.

Now, the one Big Idea I have retained from the Christopher Alexander books, and has been haunting me (in a good way) ever since, is that Life Itself is latent or implicate everywhere in the cosmos, but becomes manifest or explicate under certain circumstances.

This is an extremely handy idea for discerning the Living from the Dead at every level of the cosmos. But it is really helpful in sorting between the humans and the zombies, because the language of the latter is dead. There is something wrong with their whole encoding system. They radiate Death from every pore.

Let's see if I can auto-plagiarize some stuff from those old bobservations. "Recognizing this life in things is equivalent to saying, 'The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not'" (Christopher Alexander).

Yes, exactly. Person-stuff. Among other things, this means that human beings -- better, Persons -- are not late arrivals to the cosmic manifestivus, but its whole basis; or rather, its quintessential expression, only made explicate and local.

This is why everything makes so much sense, but it also explains when and why it doesn't, because things are supposed to make sense. Absurdity is the exception, not the rule -- just as most things in the world -- unspoiled nature, that is -- are oddly beautiful. Why? What's with all this useless beauty? Indeed, what's with all this useless truth? And Life. More generally, could Absurdity be the ultimate ground and source of all this life, love, logoi, and laughter?

From an old post:

For example, this is why language is even possible, because the person-stuff of the universe is interiorly related and therefore capable of encoding and transmission from one body or region to another. Our ability to see the beauty or apprehend the deep structure of the world represents one cidence of of the same coin-. It is to receive the Memo and be in the Loop.

For this reason, we now understand how and why scientists are guided by feeling and artists by science. In other words, a scientist wouldn't even know what to investigate in the absence of a feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something 'interesting,' something that attracts his attention.

More good stuff in those old posts on Alexander, but the main principle I have retained is the idea that when something is Living, there is a complex interplay of elements echoing and referring to one another. I would say that this is why Genesis is so "alive" with inexhaustible meaning, just as it is why one senses so much life in one of them big ol' cathedrals. Indeed, the Geometry of Love is anterior to the love of geometry, otherwise the latter couldn't exist.

Back to our original question, which we might formulate as What is the Message of the Human Body? As it so happens, Schuon has an essay on just this subject in one of his best books (most of which go to ten, this one to eleven). But I'm just about out of time, so we'll have to reserve that subject for another sidetrip in the cosmic rambler.

Eavesdropping on Nature's God

Continuing with yesterday's line of thought... well, first of all, here are some highlights from the second repost I promised:

Reader Magister commented that "Feminists seem to be perpetually at war with their own bodies." However, this resentment is projected into men and into babies, as if it's our fault that their bodies are so sexually alluring, or the baby's fault that women have such nice cozy wombs just perfect for perpetuating the species. It's almost as if the female body has a purpose or something.

However, feminists reject the sufficient reason of their bodies -- for readers living in Rio Linda or laboring under the delusions of gender theory, that means the reason why your body exists. I mean, everything has a reason, right? Can we at least agree on that? Or do feminists now regard logic as an abusive form of mansplaining?

No? I see. It's a form of rape. Besides, that's not funny!

Did you know that 90% of workplace deaths occur to men? So, why isn't everyone freaking out about MORTALITY INEQUALITY!

In my response to Magister's comment, I wrote that, "Speaking of cosmic rights, the baby certainly has a legitimate right to the mother's body, which is why, you know, breasts. (Which are to be distinguished from boobs, which is what breasts look like to a man.)

"More generally, as we've discussed in the past, not only are our minds intrinsically intersubjective, but so too are our bodies. Man and woman point beyond themselves and 'refer' to one another. So to say that we 'own' our bodies and that's that is a little simplistic, to say the least, and certainly not humanistic." (I don't want to imply that I am devaluing the gift of our individuality, only that it is a gift that must be given in return, ultimately for reasons of cosmic math, i.e., to assure that 1 + 1 = 3.)

The reasons humanism is not humanistic are that a) human beings could not have evolved from such a static situation, and b) no existing human being lives as an isolated body, cut off from the rest of mankind. Rather, a living body is an open system at every level, biologically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually. Or supposed to be, rather.

Now, in order for language, or information, or meaning, to exist, one thing must be capable of standing for another. This is an extremely simple and basic concept, so simple that you have to be the victim of a public education to not know it.

Of note, this feature is woven into the very fabric of existence, and was here long before human beings arrived on the cosmic scene. Consider DNA, for example, through which a gene, or combination of genes, stands for -- one might even say "symbolizes" -- this or that trait.

But even prior to that, we know that the world is always susceptible to intelligible abstraction, which is why, for example, we can talk about a "big bang." We can talk about a big bang because of background radiation that encodes information referring to that primordial event -- just as light striking your retina can tell you that a star existed a billion years ago, or however long it took the light to get here and now.

This means that at the moment of luminous impact, our present and the star's past -- or the star's past and future -- are thoroughly entangled in this moment of knowing. When the star gave out that light a billion years ago, little did it know that it would someday arrive at the back of the eye of a lifeform that didn't yet exist. But stars were bigger back then. It's the cosmos that's gotten smaller.

Now, perhaps the one Big Idea I have retained from Christopher Alexander is that Life Itself is latent or implicate everywhere in the cosmos, but becomes manifest or explicate under certain conditions.

This is an extremely handy idea for discerning the Living from the Dead at every level of the cosmos. But it is really helpful in sorting between the humans and the zombies, because the language of the latter is both dead and endeadening (see the leaden communiques of our anonymous troll, for example). There is something wrong with their whole encoding system. They radiate Death from every pore.

Now, to recognize the implicit Life in things is to realize that "The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not" (Christopher Alexander).

Yes, exactly. Person-stuff. Among other things, this means that human beings -- better, Persons -- are not late arrivals to the cosmic manifestivus, but its whole basis; or rather, its quintessential expression, only made explicate and local. For anything, the end reveals its purpose, right? Final cause is chronologically last but ontologically first.

This is why everything makes so much damn sense, but it also explains when and why things don't, because things are supposed to make sense. Absurdity is the exception, not the rule -- just as most things in the world -- unspoiled nature, that is -- are oddly beautiful. Why? What's with all this useless beauty? Indeed, what's with all this useless truth?

So, that is the end of the old post. On to the new. Recall what was said about cosmic messages: somehow, everything in nature is a message, or encoded information. I recall Chesterton making this point. He says something to the effect that if we're going to talk about messages, it makes a great deal of difference who the messenger is. Agreed, the world is a message. But from whom?

The message of Darwinism (or any other secular philosophy) is that there are no messages -- at least no human messages, nothing addressed to us. Yes, there are instructions for encoding proteins, but that's pretty much it: we might say there are messages but no messenger and no recipient.

So, how did humans decode the message? I guess you'd have to say that, like the NSA, we're just eavesdropping on conversations (or monologues) that are none of our business.

All of this goes to the fact that it is impossible to imagine a more inhuman philosophy than humanism, since it isolates the human being from this whole trimorphic network of messenger-message-recipient. In his From the Divine to the Human, Schuon has a typically illuminating essay called The Message of the Human Body.

Now, in the Raccoon view of things, everything is a revelation. Or in other words, there is revelation proper, AKA scripture, or the Incarnation, or direct mystical experience (or infused contemplation).

But obviously the creation itself is a revelation, as is the human person. By way of comparison, I can know with certainty that another person exists, for he is revealed to me. However -- and this is where revelation proper comes in -- I cannot truly understand "what he's like" unless he reveals it to me. So, the world is like that: it certainly reveals a Creator, even if it cannot necessarily convey intimate details of his subjective life -- what he's really like.

Back to the human body: what is its message? "Choom Gang '79?" No, no, not the tattoos. Just the body itself. Schuon suggests -- or reads, rather -- that the male body accentuates absoluteness, while the female body expresses the infinite; or I suppose one might say strength and nurturance.

"Even without knowing that femininity derives from an 'Eternal Feminine' of transcendent order," writes Schuon, "one is obliged to take note of the fact that woman, being situated like the male in the human state, is deiform because this state is deiform." Nor can there be any strict demarcation between the two, because we all descend from the "primoridal androgyne" that "survives in each of us."

This seems like common sense -- and certainly common experience: "the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be no more than a kind of transitory accident." Can I get an amen or two from a man or two? Dávila says something similar: The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face.

The child too carries a message, which all spiritually attuned parents recognize. (Again, for Jesus to emphasize this reality in the ancient world was almost unheard of.) The child reveals to us "what is simple, pure, innocent, primordial, and close to the Essence." His "beauty has all the charm of promise, of hope, and of blossoming," of "a paradise not yet lost" (Schuon).

You could say that the child has not yet drifted so far from the "divine intention"; they are much higher upstream, where the crystal waters flow. Thus the necessity of retaining the message of childhood in the wisdom and maturity of the adult, e.g., "the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, which he possessed in the springtime of his life."

There's more, but that's enough for today....

Wholeness, Happiness, Order, and Discrimination

Recognizing this life in things is equivalent to saying, "The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not." --Christopher Alexander

The whole thing reminds me of Eckhart's key principle of the Ground: Alexander speaks of how "the structure we call wholeness is connected with a ground where matter becomes personal..." This is why nature so obviously "speaks" to us, both in terms of feeling and of thought, art and science, beauty and truth. If we take this comm-unication seriously, the implications are endless.

For example, this is why language is even possible, because the person-stuff of the universe is interiorly related and therefore capable of encoding and transmission from one body or region to another. Our ability to see the beauty or apprehend the deep structure of the world represents one cidence of of the same coin-. It is to receive the memO and be in the lOʘp.

For this reason, we now understand how and why scientists are guided by feeling and artists by science. In other words, a scientist wouldn't even know what to investigate in the absence of a feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something "interesting," something that attracts his attention.

As it so happens, not too long ago I evaluated a former research scientist who had developed a dementia. It was still in its incipient stages, so he was well aware of how it had robbed him of his ability to perceive the deeper significance in things.

It reminds me again of a hybrid SACD, which has a standard CD encoded on the surface and the SACD layer encoded below that. Only an SACD player is able to reach beyond the surface and retrieve the denser, high-def information at the center. My research scientist was like this: his laser could no longer penetrate below the surface.

There is something analogous to this phenomenon in any discipline, from art, to science, to literature and religion, the difference being that there aren't just two levels to reality (i.e., CD and SACD), but an inexhaustible number. There is no end to the depth, but this depth extends in both directions, into the object and into the subject, which, in the end, are complementary aspects of one another.

In other words: we can only see the depth in things to the extent to which we have become deep. As I've said before, depth is a very real feature of the cosmos, not something merely "subjective." In many ways, it's the whole point, isn't it? It's certainly the point of this blog. And of this life, for that matter. I can't even imagine what it would be like to be a cosmic surface dweller. I know I was there, but I can no longer remember what it felt like.

Schall raises the same point in this book I'm reading -- or at least I'm seeing obvious links. For example: "The Catholic [you could also say Raccoon] soul is not a divided soul. What is characteristically Catholic is the mind that pays full attention to the truths of reason and revelation on the basis of the truth that they both belong to a coherent whole."

More: "The 'wholeness' of all things to be known, something that fascinated a Plato, an Aristotle, an Aquinas, a Dante, cannot leave anything out and still claim to be concerned with the full scope of mind.... Philosophy is the quest for knowledge of the whole, a quest that, in principle, cannot omit any claim to the truth of things and still claim to be open to all things."

Thus, any form of bonehead atheism or vulgar scientism is a philosophical non-starter, because each has closed itself to the living ground (both "outside" and "inside").

Dennis Prager makes a similar point in his Still the Best Hope, which should be required reading for all human beings struggling to cure themselves of the liberal plague. He writes of how

"It is difficult to overstate the depth of the differences between the Judeo-Christian view of the world and that of its opponents on the Left. In addition to such basic issues as objective versus subjective morality, it involves the question of whether there is order to the world" (emphasis mine, and bear in mind that Alexander's quadrilogy is called The Nature of Order).

Now, as Alexander explains, order is intrinsically related to life, to wholeness, to depth, and to happiness (I would prefer a slightly more spiritually inflected term such as ananda-bliss, beatitude, or slack). And as Prager points out, "Basic to the biblical worldview is the proposition that God made order out of chaos -- order expressed largely through separation and distinction."

Indeed, what is order but distinction? And what is thinking but discrimination and synthesis? And what is chaos but indiscriminate blending?

Now, we all know that the religious are happier than the irreligious, conservatives happier than liberals. Might this have something to do with the unregenerate muddleheadedness of the latter?

Prager discusses the most obvious distinctions that the left denies, thereby engendering chaos and fueling unhappiness, such as good and evil, God and man, man and woman, holy and profane, human and animal, and great and poor art.

Denying these distinctions has devastating material, psychological, and spiritual consequences for both the individual and the society. At the very least, it creates unhappy people, and unhappy people are responsible for most of the world's problems. Happy people don't become activists, utopians, and ideologues. But to deny the nature of human order is to defeat the order of human nature. Which is the quintessence of soph-defeating beehivior.

Thus, "Almost all disorders of private or public life somehow begin in the souls of an educated elite..." And these elites are shielded from the devastating consequences of their noxious ideas by such things as tenure, jerrymandering, and wealth (the most wealthy counties in the country are the most liberal).

"A wise man," writes Schall, "knows how to find the order in things."

Bottom line: Everything that exists is an orderly circle that flows from and returns to the ground, Alpha to Omega. And some circles are deeper and more expansive than others. A stone is a smaller circle than a plant.

Likewise, your life is a circle, the difference being that this is the only circle that isn't simply "given." Yours needn't be a little jerk circle. Rather, it has some free play, some slack. How wide will you make it? And how deep is the order? Or how depthless, rather?

For the name of this depthlessness is God.

How Did I Get Here?

By which I mean I AM, which is to say an interior locus of personal subjectivity. 

What must the universe be like in order for there to exist a conscious being asking what the universe must be like in order to have given rise to him? 

If you ponder the number of variables that have to go right, it approaches infinitude, from the basic laws of physics, to the nature of stars, to character of our galaxy, to the location of the planet, to the emergence of life, to the supposedly unguided adventure of DNA, culminating in the appearance of a neurologically immature primate, AKA the helpless baby who can internalize language and culture while his brain is developing -- in other words, an intersubjective being not bound by instinct but open to being.

And that only scratches the surface of a cursory glance at a perfunctory review of the tip of the iceberg of the variables involved in the appearance of a self-conscious rational animal. 

As I outlined in the book, the helpless baby is indeed the fulcrum of human development, a portal through which humanness emerges. It is necessary condition, or condition without which we couldn't be here. 

Note that the Incarnation fully acknowledges this, in the sense that God doesn't just pick some lucky grown-up to inhabit, but must go through the entire developmental process of becoming human, because there is no other way to become human.

This is now well understood by neuropsychology. It's been awhile since I read anything on the subject, so I've been getting up to speed with a book called The Brain: The Story of You. Which is really the story of I, at least insofar as neuroscience can illuminate the subject. 

Nevertheless, even the most detailed neuroscientific account can only illuminate the objective factors that permit subjectivity, while remaining silent on the nature of subjectivity itself -- much as how natural selection can help to explain the evolution of life but not its origins or essential nature. 

In a section called Born Unfinished, Eagleman writes that

At birth we are helpless. We spend about a year unable to walk, about two more before we can articulate full thoughts, and many more years unable to fend for ourselves. We are totally dependent on those around us for our survival.  

Is there anything more useless than a baby? And not just useless, but a great burden to even keep alive. 

Dolphins, for instance, are born swimming; giraffes learn to stand within hours; a baby zebra can run within forty-five minutes of birth. Across the animal kingdom, our cousins are strikingly independent soon after they're born.

How did man escape the circle of instinct, of neurologically imprinted and preordained patterns of behavior? Nor can other animals survive outside the narrow niche to which they are adapted, which is why we don't see polar bears in Los Angeles or snakes in the arctic. 

In contrast, humans are able to thrive in many different environments, from the frozen tundra to the high mountains to bustling urban centers. 

How? All because "the human brain is born remarkably unfinished":

Instead of arriving with everything wired up -- let's call it "hardwired" -- a human brain allows itself to be shaped by the details of life experience. This leads to long periods of helplessness as the young brain slowly molds to its environment. It's "livewired."

And even then, the brain isn't just molded to its external environment. Rather, -- and this is key -- it must be adapted to other minds, which is to say, the "interior environment" of intersubjectivity. Infants raised without this intimate connection to other subjects are left with permanent disabilities, because certain experiences must occur when the infant brain is so open and unformed:

Without an environment with emotional care and cognitive stimulation, the human brain cannot develop normally. 

Still, this intersubjective environment goes only to the necessary conditions of the human subject. What is its sufficient condition, the condition with which humanness is possible? Is subjectivity reducible to anything less than itself? Is it even conceivable that a material object -- a three pound hunk of meat called the brain -- could conjure subjectivity?

The so-called hard problem.

Yes, but maybe the problem is hard because some people just don't like the solution, which has to do with the ontological priority of mind. We've written before of how early man tended to "mentalize" everything, whereas modern man defaults in the opposite direction, "objectivizing" everything: for the former the cosmos is a crystallization of spirit, while for the latter spirit is a side effect of matter.

In The Phenomenon of Life, Jonas writes of how "When man first began to interpret the nature of things -- and this he did when he began to be man -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive" (emphasis mine).

Thus, "Animism was the widespread expression of this stage.... Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter -- that is, truly inanimate, 'dead' matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious."

Is it obvious that things aren't "alive," or imbued with a kind of life? I suspect this is partly a matter of left-brain capture of the right, in that it is through the RCH that we are in touch with the holistic and organismic nature of a nature that speaks to us of its transcendent life, truth, and beauty. There are aphorisms for this, too many to list:

Things do not have feeling, but there is feeling in many things.

True, but how?

From an aesthetic experience one returns as if from a sighting of numinous footprints.

The laws of biology do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face. 

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through. 

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

Scraping the painting, we do not find the meaning of the picture, only a blank and mute canvas. Equally, it is not in scratching about in nature that we will find its sense.  

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance.

Imagination is the capacity to perceive through the senses the attributes of the object that the senses do not perceive.

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners. 

Let's go back to the first one, that things -- objects -- are not mute at all, but incredibly chatty. I am reminded of Christopher Alexander's The Phenomenon of Life, in which he speaks of our "loss of the ability and desire to discern aliveness" in things. According to an amazon reviewer, 

Alexander establishes that aliveness is a property of space and matter, not only of biological organisms. Next, he establishes that aliveness exists on a spectrum: anything can be more or less alive....  

So how do we discern aliveness? After decades of experimentation, Alexander has found that it is an objective property. A basic tenet is the question, "which of these things, manifestations, etc. brings me more aliveness?"

Why do some objects radiate life?

Alexander describes a scientific view of the world in which all space-matter has perceptible degrees of life, and establishes this understanding of living structures as an intellectual basis for a new architecture....

This book shows that living structures depend on features which make a close connection with the human self, and that only living structure has the capacity to support human well-being.

This sounds remarkably similar in structure to the intersubjectivity of the human self that is forged in infancy. This same intersubjectivity is what allows is to discern the life in things, not to mention the light; or to see what is beyond sight, hear what is beyond sound, touch what is beyond the surface, etc. If we couldn't do these things, we would scarcely be deserving of the title human.

Here is Gemini's description of the image it could not create this morning due to "technical issues":

The image I intended to generate was a visual representation of the concepts in your post. It depicted a child at the center of a natural landscape. Glowing threads of light extended from the child's head to connect with other people and with the rocks, trees, and animals around them, all of which subtly radiated an inner light. 

The child represents the "unfinished" and "livewired" human, whose subjectivity is forged through intersubjectivity. 

The threads of light symbolize the deep connections to other minds that are necessary for consciousness to develop. 

The radiating aliveness of the trees, rocks, and animals visually conveys the idea that matter is not mute but is imbued with an objective quality of life that the human mind is uniquely capable of perceiving.

The image was intended to show that human consciousness is not an isolated phenomenon, but is an integral and connected part of a living universe.

God is the Superglue

We're still discussing what it means to be Alive.

Now that I think about it, I don't know that we can know what it means to be alive, for the same reason we can't know what it means to be conscious (or the eye can't see vision). The categories of being alive and conscious are simply the conditions of knowing anything.

Nevertheless, even if the problem isn't soluble, it's thinkable, at least with the proper tools. Caldecott suggests that life "unites, binding many parts into a single whole." I might add that it is both a dynamic wholeness and a timebound wholeness.

In other words, a nonliving entity can still be a whole -- a unit -- but it is a whole in space only. When the body becomes a corpse, it has made the transition from spatiotemporal wholeness to mere spatial wholeness -- until even that decays and dissipates, since there is no longer any interior principle -- the soul -- holding it all together.

Bearing this in mind, Caldecott goes on to say that the "secret of life" must have something to do with "memory, understanding, and love," to which I would add the very important and expensive category of anticipation, in order to account for the future-orientation of life, to go along with past (memory) and present (understanding). And again, each of these must be dynamic, not static.

That is to say, as alluded to in the previous post, our lives must be open systems at each level of existence. Obviously we will die if we do not exchange matter and energy with the environment, but the same holds true of information and emotion. Babies will literally die -- or at least become sickly and stunted -- in the absence of love, and what is sickness but an absence of wholeness (health and whole being cognates)? And the typical low-information liberal is dead from the neck up and the heart in. Stupidity kills!

Now, "When Christians speak of immortality, we are referring to the existence we receive when God remembers, understands, and loves us" (ibid). Tomberg makes the same point somewhere -- that just as death is related to sleeping and forgetting, life is related to awakening and remembering. Brings to mind the second criminal, who said to Jesus: "Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom" (Luke 23:42).

Reflecting on love and memory, Caldecott says that "in our own love for others is revealed that interior dimension through which we ourselves are renewed and resurrected." Not so sure about that last one, since human love, in the absence of divine intervention, is also the most painful kind of crucifixion.

An elderly Catholic neighbor of mine told me the story of losing his five year old son to leukemia back in the early 1960s. That's crucifixion, and it is precisely the dilemma that urgently introduces the need for renewal and resurrection. But how?

I wish I could remember the whole story -- it's probably been 10 years -- but he told of how, in the hospital, he had the experience of a kind of unimaginable peace descending from above. That doesn't mean he didn't grieve -- even Jesus cries at Lazarus's grave -- but it does mean that the ingression of divine Love and Recollection assured him that somehow everything was going to be alright in the end.

I'm also now remembering a patient who worked in a jewelry store and was involved in a robbery. While one monster was ransacking the place, the other monster had her on her knees with a gun stuck in the back of her head. She began praying, and again described the descent of a kind of total peace. Whereas before she had been thinking about her orphaned children and widowed husband, now it was as if she were being offered a preview of heaven.

Could it have simply been shock? I don't think so, because I've seen plenty of traumatized people whose minds shut down in the midst of the trauma, and it is more analogous to a photographic negative of the above; instead of widening, there is restriction; instead of vivid feeling, there is numbness; instead of peace, there is deadness.

In these latter cases the trauma isn't healed, but is merely kept in psychic escrow for later processing. The person has the traumatic experience, but it comes out later in piecemeal fashion, in the form of symptoms of PTSD.

But the woman referenced above didn't even need treatment. I saw her once, and that was it. I informed her of all the usual symptoms of PTSD, and instructed her to call me if she were troubled by any, but I never heard from her again. (I might add that I didn't have the sense that she was merely in denial; rather, it seemed to me that her preemptive healing was deep and robust, not brittle and superficial.)

Caldecott next goes into a discussion of Christopher Alexander, whose works we toyed with during the month of March. Alexander believes -- as does The B'ob -- that Life Itself is not, and cannot be, just a highly improbable concentration of local complexity in defiance of Big Entropy, but that it must be a more general property of the universe. It's frankly everywhere. It's just that it is brought out more intensely and vividly under certain local conditions.

I see that I said as much on p. 61: "Thus, while life arose through the universe, by no means are we justified in saying that it was a dead universe" -- if only because in a relativistic cosmos we must look at the time dimension in a different manner. If time is spatialized, then it becomes obvious that life is everywhen. You might say that the cosmos spent nine billion years just clearing its throat before uttering LIFE! some four billion years ago.

To quote the B'ob again, in order to comprehend our metacosmic egosystem, "we must read the fine print represented by Life itself, not just the large-print, condensed version produced by physics" for the consumption of cardiomyopic flatlanders.

I mean, I just don't see how one gets from non-life to Life in any other way: "Alexander argues that matter and space are not 'dead' but possess degrees of life..." (Caldecott). Only because the cosmos is already a field-like structure can we have the field-like structure of life -- which again forms a field in space and time.

Temporal glue. That's what life is. Regular glue only holds together things in proximity, but temporal glue holds together everytime from embryo to old man. And transtemporal glue affixes the latter timestream to O. Come to think of it, you could say the Trinity is a kind of dynamic glue, the glue being a very frisky love eternal.

I UnKnow, Wherefore He Is

Just another wild & wooly Friday post.

However, there is always an underlying method to our muddiness, in that every post, in one way or another, is trying to vault you out of your familiar absurcumstances. If the post can do that, then it has succeeded. So, just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Which actually goes to the explicit subject of the present post, which has to do with the complementarity of knowing and unknowing. Unlike my competitors, I'm not trying to tell you what to think, but rather, to help you break out of what you think you think. It unsays as much in what remains of my sidebar.

The following strikes me as a key complementarity: "knowledge is objectively certain, but cannot tune in to the living process of reality, nor can it embrace the infinite. In contrast to this, faith is highly uncertain, but allows us direct access to the infinite reality of our own being" (Watts).

As such, the opposite -- or complement -- of knowledge is not ignorance but not-knowing, or what Keats referred to as negative capability: the ability to abide "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

As it so happens, I first stumbled upon this concept by way of Bion, who applied it to the practice of psychoanalysis, through which we can only pretend to understand the mind -- beginning with our own, let alone the patient's. Any such knowledge involves the process of an unknown and unknowable reality giving itself over to our understanding on a moment by moment basis: out of the formless and infinite void, thoughts arise, we know not from where.

Or, to paraphrase Jesus, it is like the wind, which blows wherever the heck it wants to -- gosh! -- such that "you hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going." As if anyone could know that!

Here is an analogy of what Bion means by what he calls "transformations in O":

"Let us assume a painter sees a landscape and paints it. The landscape, according to our terminology, will be O," whereas the painting is "the end result of a series of transformations." Obviously there is a relationship between the painting (the transformation) and the landscape (O), but the number of potential transformations is literally inexhaustible -- and this is for just one landscape! Each one will transform something "invariant" from the landscape to the painting, otherwise we couldn't recognize the relationship. But there is no limit to the ways this can be accomplished.

It reminds me of an example Christopher Alexander provides in volume one of The Nature of Order. In it he reproduces a series of self-portraits by Matisse, each one showing very different features that couldn't actually be present in the same person. And yet, each one is clearly recognizable as Matisse. How did he do this?

First of all, this is what separates the genius from the Sunday painter, but that doesn't answer the question.

It must go back to what was said above about the mysterious invariant in the transformation. As Alexander puts it, a person's unique character "is something deeper than features: it is an inner thing which exists over and above the features, and is not even dependent on these features" (emphasis mine). That is weird! "What in the world is going on? What is it that Matisse is seeing?"

"The answer is, this 'character' is the wholeness. It is the overall vector, the overall qualitative structure, the overall field effect of the face." You can describe the face in terms of its elements or features, and yet, an accurate depiction by an average painter might not capture the character, while the "inaccurate" one by a gifted artist does.

I'll give you another example that we were discussing just last night. The wife, whose hobby is photography, -- c.f. here, at parkourmom99 -- has been trying to photograph our Great Dane. You'd think this would be easy, but despite hundreds of attempts, none of them capture his character. The photographs could be of just anydane, and simply don't convey his comical and endearing blend of traits. She might capture one of them, but not the unique combination. Maybe someday.

Conversely, our son is somehow a perfect subject. It's as if every photograph captures his spirit. Again, it's weird.

The thing that always bothers me is that we are in such a strange circumstance, and yet, people are forever wanting to normalize it, as if intelligence is "just anything." It's not! Rather, it is a daily miracle, one of three that are enough to keep us busy for the rest of our lives (the other two being existence and life). "With intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite" (Schuon).

Ironically, you can't leave God even if you tried. Rather, one can only pretend to. But this pretense can become like a block of granite or thick layer of ice that forms the boundary between the kingdoms of heaven and hell.

Therefore, you might say that (to mix metaphors) our terrestrial exile is built with bricks of (k), or with the type of self-enclosing knowledge that characterizes scientism and other pneumopathologies. "Theory" is etymologically related to sight, but any theory that pretends to be consistent and complete renders itself blind in a deeper sense.

Schuon has his own way of describing our permanent state of not-knowing, which is always in dialectic with our knowledge: "Whether we like it or not, we live surrounded by mysteries, which logically and existentially draw us towards transcendence." Why is that? Because if we could actually map reality in our heads -- if our knowledge were in perfect conformity to Total Reality -- it would connote complete immanence. Existence would be a closed circle instead of an open spiral.

I have this idea that any manmade map of reality is analogous to pi, which goes on forever without ever being able to resolve itself; in other words, the most perfectly detailed expression of pi is helpless to map the simple reality of a circle -- and what is more simple than a circle, AKA O?

"[T]he information-processing systems of the rational mind," writes Watts, "can comprehend only data existing in the finite world of form, whereas our 'faith-mind,'" -- which is a higher function -- "is the only 'wavelength' of the brain that permits us to attune ourselves to, and realize both the infinite, formless realm and the finite realm of existence."

The linear and timebound left cerebral hemisphere -- so to speak -- can never "contain" the right. But the right contains the left, such that in it we can reconcile finite and infinite. But never in any final way. Rather, its an ongrowing innerprize. It's the work of a lifetime, but the yoke is easy.

Any Idiot Can Pulverize a Statue, but It Takes a Real Genius to Create Ugly Art

How do we attain knowledge of something, anyway? How is it even possible? It is possible because "the soul recognize[s] in material objects a harmony identical with its own structure..." (Eco, in Taylor). But as we've been saying, it also works the other way around -- or in the other direction, rather.

That is, the objects of the world both illuminate, and are illuminated by, the soul. That's a very weird way to run a cosmos, but I wouldn't want to have it any other way, because I am convinced that this is an echo of the Trinity. You are free to call it something other than trinitarian if you like, but you must face the fact that knowledge is an endless perichoretic samba.

Perichoresis is pretty much my new favorite word -- lots of provocative stuff in the wiki article. Through a spontaneous series of clicks, I was just now led to an observation by theologian David Schindler:

"If you would understand yourself, open your mind to the Creator whose first gift to you is your existence. Then testify to what you see." That would be the ultimate instance -- or the very ground -- of recognizing the swirling harmony between being, existence, and knowledge.

Beauty can never be separated from this process. Taylor cites the example of a medieval village, which does not conform "to an imposed grid planned by a city engineer," but rather, to the "spontaneous impulse of builders in relation to the different sizes of the shops and houses.... along the rising and falling rural roads that yielded to the contours of the countryside..."

That brings back memories of Christopher Alexander. A memoir of the future to go along with Alexander's vertical recollection.

Such vertical re-cognition is "the genesis of aesthetic pleasure" (Eco). Moreover, it is "the connection between sense and intellect that precedes scientific knowledge." It is where we start our journey into world and self.

Both science and poetry begin in aesthetic arrest. Which can be taken in two ways, because some aesthetic sensibilities are more developmentally arrested than others, e.g., atheistic materialism, an ugly metaphysic to complement an unattractive soul. Beautiful souls -- expansive, open, fluid, grateful, bewondered -- spontaneously enquire elsewhy for their idiom.

But no matter how complicated you try to make things, It's always in the first place you look!

This is why, as Eco says, art may "simultaneously instruct and delight" -- except that I would say "must," since this is the sufficient reason of art. Unless you are one of those people who think the purpose of art is to produce things that are ugly and make us more stupid, e.g., a college dean or TV executive.

When I say that it's always in the first place we look, I think I mean this: that the cosmos is "a whole and living reality, significant and mysterious" (Taylor).

Note that this is the basis, the fundamental mindset, of the scientific attitude, for if the world weren't both significant and mysterious, why bother? And if the soul weren't equally significant and mysterious, why bother²?

If you really want to get to the bottamuvital, just say Creation: what is it, and how is it possible?

Again, who wants to create ugly? Doesn't ugly happen by itself? No, it takes a great deal of effort -- it's not as easy as pulverizing statues, for Modern man destroys more when he constructs than when he destroys (Don Colacho's aphorisms). It's much harder to be a performance artist than an Islamist barbarian. That's the work of an instant, whereas Madonna is the work of a lifetime.

It's orthoparadoxicality², in that so much beauty just happens by itself. Man has always recognized this: the moment there was a man, there was a soul noticing the beauty of the sky, the mountains, the sea, that cute girl over there. And The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face (Don Colacho). But the wife can try to capture it with her delicate new camera:

Here's another one I like. The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion another Johnny Bench, but at least he can try:

More recent:

Predestined to Freedom

We were talking about a possible relationship between involution and universals. My intuition tells me that one is impossible without the other.

Now, first of all, what do we mean by involution? For me, it is almost synonymous with "creation," or at least with the manner in which the creator creates. In other words, because the universe is created, it has certain features that mark it as being so. Indeed, the existence of these features cannot be explained in any other way.

Our creator is intelligent, which is the sufficient reason for the intelligibility that pervades the cosmos wherever we look. Likewise our own intelligence, which both mirrors and explores the intelligibility: intelligence and intelligibility are complementary sides of the same single reality, i.e., the createdness of things.

Our creator is also -- obviously -- alive, thus we inhabit a living cosmos. As I suggested in the book, biological life is a kind of focused concentration of a more general principle, like light through a magnifying glass. This is one reason why I was so drawn to the works of biologist Robert Rosen, because he says the same thing, even though he was not a believer. Rather, he just saw that biology was more universal than physics.

This is also why I was so pleased when a reader alerted me to the works of "metaphysical architect" (my term) Christopher Alexander. Alexander says that life is everywhere implicit in the cosmos, and that it is his job as an architect to render it explicit via certain patterns and relationships. Interestingly, you would think that this is a rather abstract theory, but it is really quite the opposite.

That is, it is empirical and experiential, at least if your soul remains open to it. You have one experience in, say, the Chartres cathedral, another inside a McDonald's. The former not only is more "alive," but it also radiates or transmits a spiritual presence. Conversely, the McDonald's transmits no life and no spirit. It is barren and dry -- even more barren and dry than the empty land on which it sits.

Which goes to another point: it is not as if the living spiritual reality is only made present by man's manipulation of patterns and relationships. Rather, it is spontaneously present everywhere in nature, in mountains, rivers, oceans, clouds, the animal kingdom, the starry sky, etc. Why should this be so? And why shouldn't we trust our intuition when it conveys the reality of a spirit-saturated nature?

That is one way I think of involution: that the Creator is everywhere involved in his creation. This is not the same as directing it from above or pulling all the strings in a deterministic manner. What I am saying doesn't so much go to cause as to presence; it is more a vertical reality than a horizontal one.

When we are in the presence of the sacred, it is not something brought about causally from past to present, but vertically from the top down. Sanctity is the downward prolongation of God into our world. We don't create it, but we must be open to it. Also, we can bring about circumstances that render it more visible -- or palpable -- but again, that doesn't mean we are its source.

To say that man is created is to say that we too are a kind of prolongation of God, such that God is intimately involved in and with us. In man there are both horizontal and vertical causes, not to mention different degrees in each. In other words, there is both horizontal and vertical hierarchy.

In one sense, we are a "creation" of the past. We can each trace past causes that led to our present circumstances. However, this can never be an exhaustive explanation, because the horizontal causes are always interacting with vertical ones. We are woven by a mysterious pattern of freedom and necessity, and it is easy to overemphasize one or the other, i.e., to fall into predestination at one end (no freedom) and existentialism at the other (all freedom, AKA nothingness).

This is something I tried to convey in an orthoparadoxical comment yesterday to a post by Bruce Charlton. I'm not sure I made my point clear when I suggested that "we are only truly free to the extent that we choose what we are and what is. Only a free being can comprehend predestination, and man is uniquely predestined to be free to realize the destiny that precedes him."

That soiled gem of bobscurity was inspired by an essay by Schuon called The Question of Evangelicalism. The theme of the piece is on whether protestantism is legitimate or not (short answer: yes), but it is a wide-ranging article that touches on many primordial issues, one of which being the paradoxical relationship between freedom and predestination -- or our freedom and God's omnipotence. How can these two coexist? I know, I know, but the standard answers don't satisfy my demand for logic, or at least compelling illogic.

I'm not sure I even understood what Schuon is saying, which is why I'm returning to it. Hopefully this isn't a distraction, but will somehow relate to the topic at hand, involution and universals.

First of all, Schuon points out that there are spiritual archetypes. By definition these archetypes are ontologically prior to us; we don't invent them, but rather, discover them. Or, more likely, we simply unconsciously identify with one.

God is obviously the archetype of archetypes. You could say that the archetypes are analogous to his primordial thoughts, at least as they pertain to our world. There is a human archetype, which is to say, our nature. Indeed, you could say that Jesus is God's archetype of man, just as he is our archetype of God. Both vectors meet in Jesus, which is pretty much the whole point of his being here with (and in) us.

For Schuon, an archetype is a "legitimate spiritual possibility." There are of course illegitimate spiritual possibilities, as found in everything from Nazism to new-ageism to leftism. These all involve counterfeit archetypes.

In the case of the funny pneumatic money, it is as if they invent and bow down to their own manmade archetypes. But this only encloses them in their own absurcular microcosmos, closed and cut off from the whole, the real source of life and spirit (not to mention intelligence; or, to be precise, intelligence renders itself stupid when it cuts itself off from its own vertical source -- just as life renders itself dead when it closes itself to the environment via starvation or asphyxiation).

"Each denomination manifests the Gospel in a certain manner," writes Schuon. A Catholic would say that his denomination does so in the fullest manner, but the Protestant would reply that too much of Catholicism is at the human margin, away from the core transmission. The purpose of this post is not to arbitrate that question, but rather, to point out that religion is somewhat analogous to Alexander's conception of architecture, in that it is a kind of vertical and nonlocal "structure" for rendering spirit present -- a cathedral of the mind (and spirit).

Schuon notes that Protestantism "retains from the Gospel the spirit of simplicity and inwardness while accentuating the mystery of faith..." Interestingly, he suggests that part of this has to do with the nature and needs of the Germanic soul -- needs that are not in and of themselves illegitimate. In fact, we all deserve a God who speaks to us, i.e., in our "language of being."

I wonder if the language of being changed with the emergence of widespread literacy? It must have. The iconography of Catholicism and Orthodoxy speaks even to the illiterate. You might say it is a direct transmission to the right brain, but what happened when people became literate and therefore more left-brained? It must have awakened a new need for clarity and individuality.

At the same time, "Lutheran doctrine is founded essentially upon the anthropological pessimism and the predestinationism of Saint Augustine: man is fundamentally a sinner, and he is totally determined by the Will of God."

Is this a "legitimate" archetype? Yes and no. For Luther, "the first condition of salvation... is the awareness of abysmal and invincible sin, and hence the impossibility of vanquishing sin by our own strength." There is a tension between grace and freedom, but Luther emphasizes the former. And it is true that grace is a necessary condition -- i.e., a condition without which -- but that doesn't mean there are no sufficient conditions that can cooperate (or not) with it.

Schuon suggests that "Without works, faith would not quite be faith, and without faith, works would be eschatologically inoperative," i.e., just horizontal arrangements cut off from God, with no intrinsic meaning or value.

But Luther sacrifices "freedom to the Prescience and Omnipotence of God," and therefore "intelligence to faith." For Schuon, "this is solely a question of spiritual temperament," not of the literal reality of things. I know people who are reassured by the idea that "God is in control" and that everything will somehow work out for the best. I am just not built that way, and if I said that, I would be lying to myself.

Back to the question at hand. Schuon points out that "Absolute Being comprises both Necessity and Freedom." And because this is the case, our world is comprised of the same things -- again, think of God's involution, his involvement in creation. Therefore, "it is false to deny the possibility of freedom in the world, just as it is false to deny predestination."

It would appear that freedom and necessity (predestination) are truly complementary. But in all complementaries, one must be prior. Which is what I was trying to convey in the comment above, in that it is necessary to be free in order to know our destiny. Necessity must be a mode of freedom, because the converse could never be true. We are predestined to freedom, and there is not a thing we can do about it. Except to use freedom to choose our (pre)destiny.

Cosmic Desire: What Make a Bulldog Hug a Hound

I want to articulate some lust wishes before moving on from Being Alive. Caldecott asks the key question: could Life itself "be a transcendental" in the manner outlined by Christopher Alexander? I don't think there's any doubt about it, because otherwise who or what is Good, True, Beautiful, and One? Something dead?

"Of course, for Life to be regarded as a transcendental, it would have to be in everything, not just biological organisms" (ibid).

I frankly don't see this as a huge conceptual problem, or requiring any kind of great ontological leap. Rather, the converse: you actually need a leap of faith and a heap of credulity to imagine this whole manifestivus comes from, and returns to, death, truthlessness, ugliness, and ir-irreducible multiplicity.

"If God is life in the highest sense," then this life revolves around "self-giving and self-receiving" (ibid.). As we have already discussed, this is exactly how a living system maintains life: one doesn't want to stretch the analogy, but life itself is always rooted in exchange with the other. It's just that in God, the self is the other and the other is the self -- or, they are distinct but undivided.

But here again, it is possible to look at the ecosystem through the same spooktacles. I've mentioned before Alan Watts' quip that there can be no radical distinction between, say, the honey bee and the flower. So intertwined are they, so interdependent, that the one cannot live without the other. It is as if each is an external organ of the other -- except there must be some sort of "interior glue" holding them together.

Which reminds me. One afternoon in... let's see, must have been 1986. I had just passed some sort of written exam for my doctoral program, and was having a little celebration with myself. Not a major buzz, just a few be-ers while sitting on the balcony of my apartment in Pacific Palisades. (I even remember the soundtrack of the moment: REM's dreamy Fables of the Reconstruction.) It was springtime, and the birds were quite active, darting in and out of the trees. You know. Randy. Libidinous.

While contemplating the scene I fell into a sort of light trance, as it occurred to me that it wasn't the birds who were doing this. How to explain... It was as if I intuited the underlying "desire" of nature, just flowing through the birds at that moment. After all, nature revolves around this abstract desire, filtered through everything from bacteria to Bach.

And what is this desire? Yes, it is in the service of life. And it's a self-giving, or self-abandonment, except it doesn't become conscious until it reaches the human plane.

Think of all those Medieval stories of courtly love; or come to think of it, Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.

Again: self-abandonment seems to be the essence of love, and would therefore be the inverse of narcissistic self-love. Which is why the encirclopedia says that everything about God must be completely unnarcissary (p. 10).

Bottom line: Brofessor Dixon was quite right about the generalized nature of this metacosmic desire:

Why do all these men

Try to run a big-leg'd woman down?

Why do all these men

Try to run a big-leg'd woman down?

Must be the same old thing

What make a bulldog hug a hound

So, God's interior activity "must be reflected throughout the creation. The existence of a thing is a receiving and a giving of itself" (Caldecott, emphasis mine).

And interestingly, while the self-giving High Life becomes articulate in man, so too does its inapposite mumbler, for only lowlife humans can "fail to be fully what they are or should be, and fall short of the real" (ibid.).

I just thought of a bumper sticker. That no one will understand. Still, here it is: Entropy: Don't Fight it, Join it!

In other words, as Caldecott explains, the essence of human life is not to simply "exist passively" or "merely to resist entropy," but to love actively, which ultimately implies -- well, if Jesus is the cosmic person (we'll be swimming this Ovocative nocean at length later), the human quintessence, then the implication is Jesus; or, more precisely, the self-abandoning -- and therefore, other-serving -- contours of Jesus's life.

Since the transcendentals converge, being alive would have to be an expression of truth, and vice versa. We all know phonies, don't we? But Caldecott suggests that (he's actually quoting Alexander here) most human beings "are not fully true to their own inner natures or fully 'real.'" Thus, "When you meet a person who is true to himself, you feel at once that he is 'more real' than other people are."

And not only. For I myself am more real in the presence of a real person, and indeed, will have a hard time being myself, or selfing my being, should I fail to discover those person(s) without whom I am not real.