Lord Help Me, I'm Lookin' for My Mind!

I say, what would life be without the effulgent beauty of being? And yet, the overflowing presence of this beauty is a mystery that can never be explained on any materialistic basis. Not in my book, anyway. Not only is there no reason for the universe to be so beautiful, there is no reason why a species should suddenly pop out of a recently dead universe and have the ability to apprehend the beauty that courses through its every artery and capillary -- or every branch, stem and itsy bitsy green leafy lovely.

Why? And not only is this species able to appreciate beauty, but it is driven to create beauty in all its forms -- visual, auditory, tactile, linguistic, mathematical, scientific. Why is that? Why this appetite for beauty? It seems so unnecessary. Why are women so much more excruciatingly beautiful than they need to be to get the Darwinian job done? Ouch! Why beauty to the point of pain?

As Col. Beaglehole sang on the lone (sadly unreleased but oft-bootlegged) album he did with Alexis Korner during the British blues revival of '67,

You upsets me baby, Yes, you upsets me baby
Like being hit by a fallen tree,
woman, woman what you do to me

In my book I posed the non-obvious question -- at least it wasn't obvious to me or the Colonel -- of whether the beauty that surrounds and abides in us is discovered or just projected. In other words, the universe has been in existence for what, 14 billion "years," right? During its first 10 billion years there was no life and therefore no consciousness -- or so they say, as little sense as that makes. Biological life has only existed for 3.85 billion years, and human consciousness in any meaningful sense only emerged 40,000 years ago next Tuesday.

So if we truly believe that this was a dead and unconscious universe prior to 4 billion years ago, we can't really say that it had any qualities at all, let alone something as complex as beauty. After all, beauty -- along with every other quality -- is a perception of a nervous system. Therefore, it is very difficult to say which is weirder: that a dead and unconscious universe suddenly produced a creature with an ability to apprehend, and a drive to create, beauty; or, alternatively, that the beauty was already there, just waiting to be unpacked and appreciated. And if the latter, I again ask: how and why?

For beauty is always a function of wholeness. That is, the beauty of a beautiful object inheres in its wholeness, harmony and radiance. A work of art cannot be reduced to its parts without losing sight of the artistic vision that organizes the parts and reveals their beauty. Thus, we would have to affirm that wholeness is a prior condition of beauty. But... assuming the cosmos is full of beauty -- which it is -- is the wholeness already there, or is it only in us? Are these "beautiful wholes" a function of our nervous system, or does the universe just effortlessly crank them out?

It's not just the material beauty of the earth and heavens; how about all the incredibly beautiful animals? It's easy to understand how one reptile will be "attracted" to another for the purposes of reproduction -- say, Britney Spears to Kevin Federline.

But animals of one species do not find those of another species beautiful or attractive, unless they are very, very coonfused -->. Rather, they are generally either indifferent to them or frightened of them. They certainly don't find them beautiful (please, no "Beaglehole" jokes -- he's a little sensitive). No deer thinks to itself, "wow, what a majestic mane on that lion!," or "those beady little eyes of Federline's are kind of a turn-off." No. For animals, it's either 1) have sex with it, 2) eat it, 4) ignore it, or 4) run away from it.

But in the case of humans, we find our fellow animals to be beautiful. We even collect them and put them in zoos so that we can admire them. Again I ask: are these animals actually beautiful? Or is it just a trick of our nervous system? If the former, why were these animals beautiful with no self-conscious being to appreciate them until 40,000 years ago? And if the latter, what possible evolutionary reason is there for humans to be hung up on the beauty of other animals for reasons totally unrelated to our reproductive fitness?

It's not just the obvious things, like sunsets, mountains, oceans and thunderstorms that are beautiful to us. How about a long and happy marriage. Why is that a beautiful thing, while divorce is felt to be ugly (not to cast moral aspersions or deny that it is sometimes necessary)? Marriage is a kind of "frame" that serves a similar function as the frame around a painting -- after all, without a frame to define it and set it apart, you can't have a work of art.

Balthasar writes that marriage is "a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual's cravings to 'break out' of its bonds and to assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence's tendencies to disintegrate, and compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined. When they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves -- the shifting songs of their own freedom -- but rather on the form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons.... "

Spouses "entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life -- from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and of life in the holy spirit." Paradoxically, freedom "is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery, which mystery is no longer accessible from the sphere of the general."

I didn't intend this post to be about marriage, but that was such a nice passage by Balthasar, I just kept going with it. Actually, I'm still waiting to find out what this post is about, since I haven't even finished my coffee. You could say that I'm looking for my mind.

Which reminds me of a song by the immortal Merle Haggard -- like Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and many other artists who could only have arisen in America and nowhere else, a practitioner of uniquely Cosmic American Music:

I lost my mind the day I lost your love
I'm not crazy but sometimes I wish I was
If you turn around and find me crawling close behind
It's not you I want, I'm lookin' for my mind

Yes, I'm still searching for the point of this post, which is another way of saying that I'm lookin' for my mind. Or you could say that I'm looking for the wholeness which is somehow guiding me but which I have not yet discovered. I can intuit it -- it's there, just over the interior horizon -- but it's up to me to bring into existence -- to convert its potential into actuality.

Which emphasizes the point that both Truth and Beauty -- and the freedom to discover them -- are a function of wholeness. Indeed, wholeness is the cosmic prerequisite of the possibility of truth or beauty. And as a matter of fact, as I pointed out in the Coonifesto, it is also a precondition of Darwinian evolution. That is to say, natural selection rests on the assumption that there exist prior "wholes" -- whole organisms -- for it to operate on. There is no materialistic philosophy that can account for wholeness, or true unity in diversity.

Therefore, I think I understand the point of this post: love, truth, beauty, and freedom are not effects of existence. Rather, they are causes of existence. Thus, to say, for example, "God is Love," is not a mythological or speculative statement. Rather, it is a scientific statement. No, it is beyond that -- it is a metaphysical certitude upon which the foundation of science rests. For who is not in love with truth, with beautiful Sophia?

Don't get me started.

*****

I just received an email from a Raccoon that illustrates my point. He seems to have spent most of his life "looking for his mind," but without really knowing that he was embarked on the search until relatively recently. An excerpt:

"I had been learning this one language, English, for the past 41 years. What I didn't realize during those 41 years is that either I've been learning another language or it was already in me, waiting -- unused, but there. This other language was made up of just, let's say, nouns. I read some of your writing and the thing I read that I call the 'last thing' constituted a verb. The instant I read that, everything I had learned about language (structure, usage, grammar, rules, etc.) from the 1st language suddenly overlaid the 2nd one and the verb I'd learned from you linked it all together in the 2nd language, and in an instant, all the meaning flowed down like a dam breaking.

"Or, sort of like a puzzle was being built -- I wasn't building it, didn't even know I had pieces -- but I found the missing piece, which, independent of what this particular last piece stood for, was no more significant than any of the others, its only distinction being perhaps that it was the last piece. It was placed with the other pieces and in an instant I recognized, 'Hey there's a puzzle here!' But a completed puzzle. Where literally, before the puzzle appeared, I didn't even know I had the pieces."

*****

That's what I call a clean kill, or eros shot straight through the heart.

This is another way of saying that parts cannot exist in the absence of the whole -- nor time in the absence of eternity, the many in the absence of the One, or beauty without a Creator. Or, in the words of Rabbi Kushner, "the end is seeing for even one moment that the apparent multiplicity is in reality a unity." But a dynamic unity in diversity in which the one is a necessary condition of the other -- and whence the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time (Eliot).

Wholly matterimany, congratulations on the equation of your cosmic birth. Oh my stars, He expectorated a mirrorcle, now you're the spittin' image!

The Religion the Almighty and Me Works Out Betwixt Us

I've been getting more than the usual interior static about what I Am. Of course I would like to settle it once and for all, so I can move on with my life. Surely there must be a shorter answer than Improvisational Esoteric Judeo-Christian Orthoparadoxical Bohemian Classical Liberal Neo-traditional Retro-futurist in the First Church of Perpetual Slack.

What I really want to believe is contained up in the mysthead, in the immortal words of the Reverend Harry Powell. There is a scene in which a slightly skeptical listener asks, hey, wait a minute, just what religion do you profess, preacher?

Harry's face hardens and he responds with a menacing, The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.

Which doesn't usually work out well. The best you can usually hope for is some ego-flattering new age mush, or an idiosyncratic jumble of truth and fantasy.

Here's Reverend Harry conversing with the Lord about his next move. Yeah, you could say he has a purpose-driven life, but so does any psychopath.

Hey, wait a minute Mr. President. Just what kind of constitution did you swear to uphold?

The one I works out betwixt what it says and what I wants it to say.

This problem still comes up all the time, and I am far from resolved about it. For example, I know for a fact that I have provoked many readers to turn or return to orthodoxy or Catholicism -- wife included -- and yet, I cannot do so myself. Why is that? And is it just a lame excuse? And if you are excluded from the general mandate, what makes you so special? What makes you different from a Harry Powell, or worse, a Deepak Chopra?

I notice that the Happy Acres Guy has confronted the same issue, which essentially comes down to the source of authority and the means of salvation. He tried, he really tried, to turn himself into the authorities and go straight, but he just couldn't do it:

"I put aside my protestant prejudices, drawn by the Catholic writers that speak to me and to the truth behind it all. And not incidentally intending to poke my finger in the eye of progressives by joining the most traditional organization."

That last one is indeed a major draw -- to join the one institution that is at antipodes to the depraved values of the demonic left. If the left hates it so much, it must be true! Although as soon as you say that, the Pope comes out with some vague, innumerate economic blather that gives aid and comfort to the demon class (and will of course further immiserate the poor).

And I certainly revere those many illustrious Catholic writers who "speak to me and to the truth behind it all." Not just the most beautiful art but most of our deepest thinkers came out of the church. Then again, one of my favorites, Meister Eckhart, ran afoul of the church. Speaking of HA, I found a helpful comment there from the Meister, which very much comports with my sentiments:

"We ought simply to follow where God leads, that is, to do what we are most inclined to do, to go where we are repeatedly admonished to go -- to where we feel most drawn. If we do that, God gives us his greatest in our least and never fails."

Yes, no doubt. Cosmic Slack, and all that. But consider the mischief that can result from a misinterpretation of simply doing "what we are most inclined to do." Here we need to specify that he means vertically, not horizontally.

As we have discussed in the past, the soul is in constant trialogue with its ground and destiny; or situated in the space between the two, to be precise. We know the soul by paying attention to its spontaneous and yet specific inclinations and aversions. We are always oriented to the divine attractor -- O -- but in our own unique way, thus combining the universal and the particular, the one and the many, God and Incarnation, Father and Son, etc.

In fact, even more than an incarnation, we are an incarnotion, i.e., an idea or notion of God. While one could theoretically understand how natural selection could account for a universal type, it can never account for the unique form of our soul, which again navigates in the hyperspace of the vertical in order to discover and potentiate itself by assimilating truth.

"Even if God is in all ways and all things evenly," asks Eckhart, "do I not still need a special way to get to him?" Well, yes and no. I would say that it cannot only be special, or else you are living in your own private Idaho. Rather, the special must embody the universal. With that caveat in mind,

"Whatever the way that leads you most frequently to awareness of God, follow that way; and if another way appears, different from the first, and you quit the first and take the second, and the second works, it is all right. It would be nobler and better, however, to achieve rest and security through evenness, by which one might take God and enjoy him in any manner, in any thing, and not have to delay and hunt around for your special way: this has been my joy! To this end all kinds of activities may contribute and any work may be a help; but if it does not, let it go!"

Note the evolution he implicitly describes: we begin in the unique, the particular, the individual, but end -- if we are lucky -- in the universal. This makes sense to me. By way of analogy, think of language. Let's stipulate that you can more or less convey truth in any language. Nevertheless, in order to do so, you must speak a particular language. You cannot do so with Language as such, which is pure abstraction.

Thus, suppose there is a Religion As Such which embodies the truth of reality. Well, as with language, you need to "speak" -- i.e., practice -- a particular one. But even then there are loopwholes. Alert readers will recall that in the Cosmogenesis and Cosmobliteration sections of the book, I endeavored to playgiarize with a kind of universal language beyond language in order to convey truth as such.

Recently I read an intriguing essay by Rebecca Bynum called God Descending. The reason I find it intriguing is that it is so Coonlike that it appears to me that we are in the orbit of the same attractor, although naturally coming at it from different angles, being that we are not the same individual. In it she expresses the wholly orthoparadoxical view that

"Just as we, in our limited ability, ascend toward God [↑], so does God descend toward us [↓], invading and encompassing his entire creation. Though God exists as an absolute, eternal being outside the confines of time and space, there must be some part of God, or level of God, that exists within those self-imposed and self-created confines -- a God of time and space. Thus creation remains a part of God, not separate from him."

This is an Exact Truth, a truth beyond which there can be no truthier. She continues:

"Ultimately of course, God the Father is eternal, absolute and unevolving, but within spacetime, he exists as actualizing potential -- he is both actual and potential.

"Therefore, as we participate in our own self-realization by growing in the spirit, that is to say, as our God-given potential becomes actual in time, we are adding our own small mite to the great actualization of the evolving God. We have been created as unique beings -- there is no one else who can contribute exactly the same bit of actualization to God and thus in a very real sense, God is dependent upon our growth, and our increasing ability to bear the fruits of the spirit, for his actualization."

My only quibble would be that she contradicts herself, in that she first refers to God as being "absolute and unevolving," and then suggests that human beings add "to the great actualization of the evolving God" (emphasis mine).

The only way to reconcile the contradiction, in my opinion, is with recourse to some version of Hartshorne's process theology, whereby God is essentially an "evolving Absolute." I don't want to get sidetracked into a defense of that proposition, but I will say that there is no other kind of God in whom I can believe. So it may well be my own limitation, but it is my own, dammit, and not somebody else's.

In fact, this forms the basis of the very multiundisciplinary religion the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, so back off! I'm lookin' at you, Bob.