Here’s Another Post

The title is in reference to a live album I was listening to the other day by R.E.M., in which Michael Stipe introduces each song by drily announcing “here’s another song.” At the other extreme of the irony spectrum is someone like Barbra Streisand, who reads her stage banter from a teleprompter, in a simulation of spontaneity.

Likewise, at one end of the musical spectrum is jazz, which is created on the spot, at the other end the Eagles, who endeavor to recreate their records without so much as a whiff of spontaneity. The former is transcendentally open to the thing we call music, the latter as tightly closed as a syllogism or mathematical equation.

Petey, I know what you’re thinking, but Creedence was pretty much the same — in concert they were more a jukebox than a jam band.

Cosmotheandrism adopts a jazz approach to metaphysics, because this mirrors the Creator’s approach to creation. For who bothers to create the already known, when the whole point of creation is to bring something novel and unanticipated into being? Otherwise it’s just manufacturing: industry, not art.

Leonard Cohen once said that religion is the most exalted form of adult entertainment. In an interview discussing his spiritual practice, he asked

What [else] would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.

He goes on to describe his practice as a “profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment…. Nothing touches it.”

Speaking of music, a disciplined spiritual practice — and Cohen spent five or six years practicing in a Zen Monastery — is much like the transition from knowing all about musical theory to picking up an instrument and learning how to play. Religion is an instrument for engaging the vertical.

Maybe, but there have been as many as 10,000 distinct religions in the world.

Good point. It’s easy enough to prove that a reductive or material explanation of existence is insufficient, for it is much like pretending to read reality off a telepromter. But it is not altogether clear what to replace it with. We know that horizontal and vertical are complementary down here, and we can even deduce that the vertical must be ontologically prior, since no amount of time or horizontal shuffling could have given rise to it. Beyond this, the sages diverge.

Man has been trying to map the transcendent pole since before Keith Richards took his first stumbling steps. It reminds me of European explorers who discovered the “new world.” One lands in modern day El Salvador, another in Canada. Both return to their respective monarchs and describe what they found:

“Balmy weather, palm trees, and little regard for clothing.”

“No, a frozen landscape, fur-clad natives, and the occasional moose.”

Of course both are correct, and I wonder if something similar could apply to the upper vertical, based upon the testimony of countless sages and mystics who have landed on different shores of the same nonlocal continent?

My house has many mansions.

You can say that again. There are said to be 45,000 distinct denominations within Christianity alone, meaning there are more intra-Christian variants than the total number of extra-Christian religions in history. So, on what basis do we choose which mansion to inhabit?

You know what they say: two rabbis, three opinions.

Analogously, it is like trying to decide where to go on vacation without having any knowledge of the destinations involved. Rather, you just pick one at random and hope you don’t end up in Fresno. No wonder people reject the whole notion of religion and take flight into secularism.

The problem is, you may not care about the Absolute, but the Absolute cares about you. In other words, you can only pretend to ignore it, because you will inevitably put a false absolute in its place. But are there any features of the Absolute about which all reasonable people could agree? Here again, it is somewhat analogous to science, for example, in the widespread disagreement about the nature of the quantum world, with dozens of ways to explain what the equations actually mean for reality.

The house of physics has many mansions.

And not just physics. The higher up the vertical scale, the more diversity and less agreement on fundamentals. In my old racket, there are over 500 schools of psychotherapy, one reason being that a human being is much more complex than a subatomic particle, so naturally explanations multiply as we ascend the vertical hierarchy.

But even supposing we acknowledge some kind of Absolute, it results in a rather threadbare religion. What is It — or He or She or They — really like? What even are Its pronouns? Is there a way to get to know It better? And does It give a hoot about us?

Yes, there is revelation, but which one is truly the big reveal? Is he none or one or three or more? What are his rules? Is he actively involved in the world — a helicopter Theos — or more like the deist conception, in which he creates the world but leaves it to us to FAFO through history?

Here’s a thought: if our own subjectivity is grounded in his, then perhaps the most central features of our subjectivity may reveal something of his. If this is the case, then features of our consciousness may reflect features of his.

It’s worth a shot.

Let’s think about this... Ah ha! Thinking. Certainly this is the main feature of human consciousness, in that we pretty much never stop thinking — or at least “thinking.” Nor does our consciousness resemble that of lower animals, since we inhabit an immateriaal world of ideas, essences, and abstract concepts that is totally inaccessible to the beasts.

And why do we do this? Here again, reduced to horizontal resources, there is no why. But supposing we think, it is in order to know. Know what? Truth. Just try denying this property of thinking and see how far it gets you.

Could it be that the Absolute is not only the source and ground of truth, but Truth itself? If so, this would explain why there are so many seemingly contradictory truths down here — even those thousands of religions, sub-religions, and anti-religions — because a truth can never be the Truth.

But we are finite while the Absolute is Infinite, so we know going in that none of our finite 3D maps are going to be adequate. Just look at a flat map of the earth, on which Greenland appears almost as large as Canada, when in reality Canada is nearly four times larger. Now, imagine what happens when we try to transpose a hyperdimensional reality into the key of man, and you understand the problem. Some things are necessarily distorted and stretched, while others might be left out entirely.

Here’s an idea: what if we could take all of these human maps of the Absolute and somehow put them together — like a religious sketch artist who uses the descriptions of all the witnesses to come up with a likeness of the suspect?

This is what Frithjof Schuon essentially attempted in his Transcendent Unity of Religions. In his view, the principle orthodox religions — Christianity, Judaism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, et al — do indeed share certain features beneath their superficial differences. Not to necessarily say he was correct, but he felt that the differences were on the exoteric plane, while the unity was on the esoteric plane — the inner dimensions of metaphysics and mysticism. For example, a Christian and Buddhist mystic might actually have more in common than do two Christians, say, Meister Eckhart and Claude Osteen.

The name is Joel. You’re thinking of the baseball player.

Nevertheless, Eckhart knew no more about baseball than Joel Osteen knows about mysticism or metaphysics.

In any event, Schuon compared our hyperdimensional object or Principle to a mountain. Imagine the diverse religions situated at the base of the mountain, where they are widely separated and may not even know of each other. But as they ascend the mountain, the space between them necessarily shrinks, until they meet at the top and bear witness to the same infinite reality. Up there, the account of a Christian mystic sounds quite similar to a Buddhist, Hindu, or Taoist mystic.

Example.

Consider the astrophysicist and cosmologist Robert Jastrow, who had this to say:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

More generally, as scientific and horizontal knowledge proceeds in a forward direction, while philosophical and religious — which is to say, vertical — thought partakes of depth and height. Here again, we know from St. Paul that even Christianity can be understood superficially or deeply — milk for the former, meat for the latter.

Or consider Thomas Aquinas, who arguably created the most consistent and complete map of the vertical ever conceived by man. And yet, at the end of his life he was vouchsafed an earth-shattering mystical experience that made his own map appear as “so much straw.” In other words, the most comprehensive map of total reality proved to be totally inadequate — and that’s saying something.

What does it say?

Nothing.

Wait, nothing?

Yes, nothing. For even before his mystical experience, he wrote that “This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know him.” Not to mention Eckhart, who uttered such orthoparadoxes as “God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingnesss; and yet God is something.”

In fact, this knowing and unknowing of something and nothing constitutes another dynamic complementarity, in that while the finite can never exhaust the Infinite, it never stops trying — this being what we call the “metabolism of God.” For example, how many circles are in a sphere? Correct: ∞. Likewise, how many points in a line?

Yes, but what’s the point?

So, how many religions, doctrines, and theologies in God?

I’m guessing a lot?

Well, Aquinas also said that “Although uncreated truth exceeds all created truth, yet there is nothing to prevent created truth from being better known to us.” Just don’t pretend the created can ever exhaustively map the uncreated, for “God is one in reality but multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him.”

Like that giant disco ball in the sky mentioned yesterday, with millions of reflections?

In the end, “God is honored by silence, not because we may say or know nothing about him, but because we know that we are unable to comprehend him” (Aquinas). Therefore, “The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth” (Eckhart).

But there is also this: supposing God is no-thing, and we are the image and likeness, what does that make us? A double nothing, or nothing squared? Here’s a thought: “If humanity alone is described as made to God’s image and likeness..., there must be a sense in which the deepest meaning of being human is that homo, that is, human nature, is also ‘no-thing’..., not just in a privative but also in an eminent sense” (McGinn).

Homo nihil?

Hold that unthought.

Tripolar Theism and the Disco Ball In the Sky

We are now over 100 posts into the Trilogy, so I can’t recall if we’ve already discussed Hartshorne’s dipolar theism.

Isn’t that your job?

What, avoiding repetition? No, it’s the editor’s job, and I don’t have one of those. However, I do read a lot of books, and can’t help noticing that most authors not only repeat themselves but often spend their lives belaborating a single theme.

What’s yours?

Not a bad question. Looking back, beginning with my doctoral dissertation, I think it can be reduced to One Cosmos, Three Poles, Twelve Axioms, and a lotta laffs. All along there have been certain implicit themes, but this book is the attempt to render them explicit. Supposing the following passage is redundant, I will at least endeavor to make it entertaining:

Cosmotheandrism unapologetically pilfers Hartshorne’s extremely helpful concept of dipolar theism, the purpose of which being to counteract one of man’s perennial approaches to the Theos, which is to divide it in two and then overvalue one side while denigrating the other, when in reality there are better and worse forms of each contrast. However, cosmotheandrism goes one better and posits a tripolar theism.

For Hartshorne, man has a persistent tendency to mistake a half-truth of his own making for the whole truth he could never make, and then be confused by the paradoxes that ensue. More generally, absurdity always follows whenever we cut reality in two and then reify the division, whether we inflict the dualism on the Cosmos, Anthropos, or Theos. But doing so to the latter carries the extra penalty of idolatry — or of G3AOA.

The Creator creates genuine co-creators, and if our own creativity is determined by God, then it is no more creative or free than what a machine inevitably does. Hartshorne felt that his conception of God was not only more metaphysically coherent and consistent with human experience, but was more impressive than the distant, impassive, and immutable God of tradition.

In fact, this dipolar God is the one in whom believers already believe, in the sense that, for example, belief in the efficacy of prayer implicitly assumes that God hears and responds — and to the extent that he does, this implies some kind of change in God. There are theologians who twist themselves into pretzels to deny this truth, but why all the hostility directed at change? How can one be changeless and responsive? That’s not a proper orthoparadox but an oxymoron.

We certainly wouldn’t consider it a virtue if a human person were impassive, unrelated, and absolutely resistant to change. Rather, it is a matter of what kind of change. Hartshorne concludes that God is both the most Absolute conceivable but also the most Relative, in that he is related to everything and everyone. In this sense, he is at once the unmoved mover and the most moved mover. Which sounds like a violation of the principle of non-contradiction, but it’s really a complementary dynamism.

Any apparent contradiction disappears if we regard change and changelessness under different aspects. Yes, God never changes insofar as his nature is concerned. But this nature includes responsiveness — a “being with,” not just a being apart from everything else. Which tracks with our Axiom 11, irreducible substance-in-relation, which applies to us because it first applies to the Godhead.

Thus, it should come as no surprise that God creates a Cosmos that is so densely interconnected, such that not so much as a single atom isn’t woven into a web of internal relations. This same principle accounts for our own intersubjectivity, such that we are again “members of one another” — this being the horizontal expression of God’s own intersubjectivity, or in the cosmotheandric words of Jesus: I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you. This clearly implies a three-way, reciprocal relationship: Jesus is in and with the Father, and believers are integrated into this divine tri-unity. How is any of this reconcilable with changelessness? A God who is responsive without being contingent is the only one who can logically sustain a real relationship with creation and account for the vertical causation that lifts us out of horizontal absurcularity.

Surely this tripolarity renders God more approachable and relatable than an immutable and impassive one. Jesus himself is said to be Immanuel, which literally means God with us. Now, is God really with us or not? Because if he is, this means he is with us in all our contingency and finitude, so not the distant and unresponsive stuffed shirt of tradition. Isn’t the whole point of this revolutionary idea of the Incarnation that God personally intervenes and resides with humanity, bridging the gap between the Anthropos and Theos and making a permanent, intimate relationship possible? Nor is a relationship even a relationship — let alone an intimate one — if one of the parties isn’t really involved in it. You know the type.

Objection!

By whom?

By the Wise, who inform us that God does not change because he cannot change. Moreover, he knows everything in a single instant before it ever undergoes the formality of occurring in time, because there is no “before” or “after” in eternity.

You have articulated the traditional view, which was quintessentially expressed by old Boethius, who defined eternity as “the complete, simultaneous, and perfect possession of interminable life,” such that all of time is equally and immediately “now” to God.

Conversely, for those of us who must deal with the unpredictable ups and downs or strikes and gutters of time, we experience a movement from a determined past to an open future. But if God sees and knows all our actions in a single, unchanging, eternal present, then the future has already happened — much like Einstein’s block universe in which time is but a “stubborn illusion.”

This is a metaphysical headscratcher, because it sure does seem like the past is something fundamentally different from the future. We cannot change the past, nor can we know the future, and we can only actually live in the present. Nevertheless, we are asked to believe that there can be no causation in eternity, since this would require time for the effect of the cause to come into being. Which is a gratuitous assertion, certainly not one that is capable of proof. In other words, it simply defines its terms ahead of time, so it is true by definition — end of deuscussion. More problematically, it renders the very source of intelligibility unintelligible if not absurd.

To begin with, it is again difficult to see how immutability can be reconciled with freedom, for If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, then error does not exist. Error supposes that something happened that should not have. Substitute “sin” for “error,” and we see that in a fully God-determined universe sin does not and cannot exist, insofar as it was necessarily caused by God. Or rather, he doesn’t cause it, it just IS in his Eternal Now. But if God’s Eternal Now includes all our tomorrows, then tomorrow is already yesterday for God, and our future sins have already been committed. Does this make sense to you? If so, then go away and sin no more. Or keep right on sinning, since in either case you’re off the hook because God is in the saddle.

Surely there is a better way to approach this subject, one that preserves our genuine — which to say, undetermined — freedom. This aphorism provides a big hint: The permanent possibility of initiating causal series is what we call a person. This is key to our real freedom, being that we are persons, so the future is open and we have the power to make choices that will contribute to this or that outcome.

Now God is not only personal, but because personal, interpersonal. And our own interpersonal personhood is an icon and entailment of his personhood. But if he is the kind of absolutely immovable being described by tradition, then he lacks the causal power we human persons possess. There can be no causation in eternity, since cause and effect require time, for which reason everything has already happened. Moreover, supposing God is unmoved by his creation, this actually makes him less than a person, not more. It would mean we possess a perfection — empathic and loving responsiveness — that God lacks, which is another headscratching non-starter.

Christians say God is love.

That goes to one of Hartshorne’s metaphysical dealbreakers, even though he was by no means any kind of normative Christian. But it does imply that something is happening up there — for example, Lover, Beloved, and the Love that passes between them. These are real distinctions, nor can they be reconciled with a timeless blob of Pure Now. Rather, the Godhead must be a kind of eternal dance, not a static entity — what is called perichoresis.

Perichoresis — sometimes translated as “rotation” or “dance” — describes the eternal relationships within the Godhead. It affirms that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are three distinct Persons who are perpetually and perfectly united, eternally giving, loving, and sharing the single divine essence. The dance metaphor emphasizes this relational dynamism and its continuous movement.

Not to belabor the point, but how can this delightful movement be reconciled with an unmoved mover, when this eternally perichoretic God again looks more like the most moved mover?

God leaves it all on the dance floor of eternity?

Yes, and tomorrow we will further discuss the nature of the giant disco ball in the sky.

Laboratory Notes on the Divine Ecstasy

I'm not sure what to make of this post, and I hesitate to publish it. Large sections of Book III are mostly written, but here I ran into a section that consists of a lot of fragments. Some of it — more toward the bottom — seems to have been inspired by Berdayev, but there are no citations or quotation marks. I’ll do my best to sort it out, but the whole thing is of bootleg quality.

Never purchase a Chinese post on Ebay.

                                                      ∞

In this house We Believe in Science. Except to say that for cosmotheandrism science is posterior to reality. Or in other words, science is about reality, this being possible because the Cosmos is pervaded by an Aboutness (Axiom 4) that relates one thing to another.

For the same reason, reality is the scripture prior to scripture (or revelation prior to revelation), otherwise there would be nothing with which to write it nor anyone to read it. Obviously religion presumes a Cosmos and Anthropos, each related to the other and to their own higher principle.

For both science and theology the Cosmos we see is but the outer side of the one we don’t, and the latter is more real than the former. For this reason we are always in an ambiguous situationship with O: we are all about the Cosmos and Theos, and vice versa: our bridge to reality not only flows in two directions but four: in, out, up, and down.

And this four-way innersection is first located in divinas, for the cosmotheandric Godhead may be visualized in the form of two related open spirals, one on the horizontal plane, the other vertical. For Christianity these would be conceptualized as the economic and immanent trinities, respectively. The first refers to the eternal inner life and relationality of the Godhead, whereas the latter has to do with its (vertical) prolongation into time and creation.

∞

Here we need to dwell for a moment on exactly what the Trinity is and is not, because one of the most important things it is, is not, this being because one Person or pole of the Godhead is not the other but related to the other. Therefore, the principle of relationality is notness. Except this is not a bipolar or dualistic notness in which our parties would be forever separated, rather, one in which the three unites the two, thus reconciling Is and Is Not.

As we now know, the Cosmos is not a thing but an evolving event: it is not in time but of time, so it can never be understood outside the context of its own historicity. One might even say it is a story or narrative. Here again, the reality of this narrative is prior to the science we deploy to map the narrative, but like any good story the Cosmos is full of surprises.

A dynamic and triune Godhead is also an event and therefore a kind of story, except this story has no beginning or end. God is his own narrative and even his own theogony, i.e., a revelation of himself to himself, or an eternal self-causing, self-generating, and self-coming-to-be. God is spontaneously creative out of the dark ground of his own relational beyond-beingness.

God is not just a static unity, rather, “enfolds in his Logos every conceivable particularity, which are also manifest, in their pure particularity, as the creation outside of God.” (Berdayev?). Here “the unity of the unfathomable One” lies “beyond its own immanent totality” (ibid?).

All-possibility means God’s perfection includes — in a manner of speaking — imperfection, lack, and finitude, “only because his plenitude turns out to include those things also.” I am what I am and I am what I will be imply that God is simultaneously what he has become, what he is, and what he further becomes: his own story is one of relation, event, receptivity, relational connection, and reflexive self-becoming…

Everything whatsoever has to identify with something else in order to be something itself at all…. If identity is only through relational identification, then that seems to suggest that I am what I am not…

The meaning of existence is to ex-ist in the way that the Father exists in the Son and the Son exists in the Father. In short, the gospel suggests to us a completely different notion of what it means to exist, namely, to be in and for another…. The Father has no existence (no identity) except in the Son, the Son has no existence (no identity) except in the Father, and the Holy Spirit has no existence (no identity) except as the love of the Father and the Son for one another. In and of themselves, the persons of the Trinity have no identity and are nothing in themselves except by dint of that essentially existing love by which they are what they are.

The Father is the Eternal Ground of the divine essence, which neither exists nor has any form except in the Son; the Son is the Eternal Ex-istence of this ground, its Eternal Splendor; and the Spirit is the Eternal Return of God’s existence into God’s essence…. Its existence is a standing outside oneself…

The identity of the persons of the Trinity would appear to consist precisely not in themselves, but rather outside themselves in the triune form of a reciprocal, selfless ecstasy…. It is not that God is (or has) an identity before or apart from his ecstasy, but rather that he remains in himself, paradoxically, by going beyond himself.

In other words, in God, immanence is transcendence, essence is existence, and identity is ecstasy…. Like God, we are not already what we are, but must become what we are.... God shows us how and how not to exist: not statically in oneself, much less curved in upon oneself, which is the definition of sin and contradiction of being, but rather to exist as the word itself etymologically suggests, namely, ecstatically…

You-ness completes me-ness?

Secondness has the sense of difference, the idea of an over-against otherness, which, on the face of it, seems to allow only separation and not mediation. Thirdness restores a continuity…. not being merely dualistic or dyadic, but of a secondness as ontological communication beyond self-recurring mediation.... The over-full is in the origin, not only full of himself, but overfull….

Some order is restored in the following few passages:

Eckhart describes the paradox in his usual unusual way: The Word of God is always “in the beginning,” which “means that it is always in the process of being born and is always already born.”

Moreover, “God is a being beyond all being; God is a beingless being.” In other words, he is in one sense prior to being, but in another sense always related to it, as is Father to Son, or Ground to Possibility, Absolute to Infinite, Source to Manifestation, et al. For Eckhart “The final goal of being is the darkness and unknowability of the hidden divinity.” Why dark? Because pure light itself is invisible, only becoming visible as a consequence of striking the surface of something. One might say that Beyond-Being is the darkness of this invisible light before it strikes being. Thus “God is a being beyond being and a nothingness beyond being,” because a being beyond-being — the ultimate something — is again the nonappearance of an invisible nothing.

This is all by way of saying there is the cataphatic God we can know, in dialectical relation with the apophatic God Beyond-Being whom we cannot know but can definitely unknow.

In the following section, I will discuss what I just put you through in a less annoying manner.

Do I Dare Disturb the Universe?

The universe itself is already a kind of disturbance, which is to say, “an action, event, or condition that interrupts peace, disorganizes a calm state, or causes physical, mental, or public commotion.”

A nuisance.

The biggest.

We do not know why we are here in the Cosmos. We do not know who built it, nor do we know why everything inside the Cosmos is as it is. We do not know if it is safe or even sane to venture outside the Cosmos. But let’s give it a shot anyway. Instead of just asking “What is it?,” let’s go up & make a visit.

I have a kinsman living there. Surely he is bound let us in.

The Triune Godhead

Throughout the Trilogy we’ve touched on the idea of a triune Godhead — or ultimate principle — while cautioning the reader that we are not necessarily tying this to the revelation of the Christian Trinity, rather, the Trinity as one way of symbolizing a universal metaphysical truth in which to ground our cosmotheandric Axioms — in particular, openness, complementarity, and substance-in-relation. These in turn redound to our final Axiom of ultimate reality as personhood, because supposing God is personal, then this requires some notion of intersubjective openness and relationality.

In this regard, I am not the first mythmatician to notice that One cannot be the first number, or even a number at all. Rather, supposing God is “One without a second,” then number as such can only come into being with the Two. Indeed, to even say that the One is one is to have added something to it. And supposing the Two “relates” to One, then we have the idea of a Third, i.e., the relationship between One, Two, and the infinite series of numbers that follows. A pure oneness lacks any notion of quantity because there is nothing outside of it to count it against. It is an unmanifested, silent infinity. Indeed, to even call it One is already a linguistic compromise. In reality, the so-called One must be more like a Zero in which concepts like number or quantity are entirely absent.

But a purely enclosed and static One is mathematical and metaphysical nul de slack To imagine the Godhead as merely Numero Uno—

The big Juan?

That can’t be the Juan we’re waiting for.

In Neoplatonic thought, the absolute One is explicitly not a number. Rather, number implies quantity, and quantity implies boundaries, comparison, and parts, and pretty soon we’ve got the whole mess of contingent existence on our hands. The Monad has none of these annoyances, for in this undifferentiated Ground of Being, no Others, nor even the concept of Otherness, are permitted entry. Which is again how Plotinus could visit there from time to timeless, except he couldn’t actually be there. Rather, he had to become no one in order to merge with the ultimate nobodaddy.

Now, we know we exist in a Cosmos, and we also know that this Cosmos is other than God, even if one doesn’t believe in God. So we definitely need to account for the possibility of our own contingent Otherness. In Neoplatonism this Otherness is a kind of useless entailment of, or emanation from, the One. It has no value in and of itself. One might say that the imperfect necessarily issues from the perfect, so it’s not just a crime to have been born, but existence itself is a kind of fall from the heights. It is what happens when the One is busy doing nothing, for it is in no way involved in, or affected by, the effluvia of emanation.

But as we have previously outlined, for cosmotheandrism the principle of Otherness is already situated in divinas. That is to say, relationality is a perfection that must be present in the Godhead. But if we start and stop our counting at Two, this results in an absolute dualism — a permanent bifurcation between opposites, or a celestial standoff. One cannot be the loneliest number, because it is not a number at all. But two can be as bad as one, supposing they don’t relate to, and harmonize with, one another.

However, if we only continue counting up to Three, then we have the notion of communion, a reciprocal flow that prevents the Two from leading separate lives in total isolation from each other. In the cosmotheandric vision, two is a crowd but three is company, for the latter goes to the connective tissue ensuring that our terms are not separate islands but a singular, dynamic con-spiracy of “breathing together.” It also means that our Cosmos will bear the stamp of this triune pattern, for example, the endless spiral of knower, known, and knowledge.

In an essay called The Interplay of the Hypostases, Schuon has a helpful way of discussing this triple primacy in purely metaphysical terms. As per Axiom 2, he begins with the complementarity of Absolute and Infinite, the latter an intrinsic aspect of the former. It is precisely because of Infinitude “that the world springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.” Of course, in the Judeo-Christian tradition creation is a free choice of God, nevertheless, this requires a principle by which he can create, this being the creative power of his Infinitude.

Thus, this dynamic principle exists in divinas even prior to the creation of this or any other Cosmos, meaning there is a kind of eternal radiation or projection within the Godhead itself, described in Christian terms as the engendering of the Logos-Son from the inexhaustible ground of the Father. One might say that through Infinitude the Absolute projects its truth, beauty, and goodness into the Other: “The principle of radiation or projection — inherent in the Absolute, in the ‘Father’ — corresponds to the ‘Holy Spirit,’ and the principle of polarization or refraction, to the ‘Son.’” Schuon compares this to a circle in which the Father would be the central point, the Son the circumference, and the Holy Spirit the radius, that latter at once a link and the means of radiation and communion.

Which, if you recall, is precisely the analogy we used to describe cosmotheandrism in the introduction to the Trilogy, in which case the center is the Theos, the circumference the material world, and the Anthropos situated in the two-way radii between. Which means that our immanent micro-circle is an image of the transcendent macro-circle. In both cases, the archetypal circle reconciles unity and diversity: “being what It is, the Absolute cannot not be immutable, and it cannot not radiate. Immutability, or remaining true to Itself; and Radiation, or gift of Itself; therein lies the essence of all that is” (ibid.).

To affirm that the Godhead is both Absolute Necessity and Infinite Possibility requires some additional explanation that may not be to everyone’s taste, but you have to admit that it is an explanation for what is otherwise inexplicable. Schuon draws another distinction in divinas “between God as Essence, or Beyond-Being, and God as Creator or Being.” The former is “absolute necessity in itself,” but “possesses the possible as an internal dimension and in virtue of its infinitude.”

As such, being itself is not only a possibility of Beyond-Being, but one might say it is possibility as such. Which is not as far as you might think from Christian orthodoxy, for which existence is the “act of being” (esse) which brings relative being into existence. In other words, there must be something beyond-being to account for being, though there was never a time when being did not exist, just as there was never a time when the Son didn’t exist. We might say that being is the endless self-determination of Beyond-Being, and that the Cosmos is a reflection of this endless process of specification.

Rather, we are talking about — in a manner of speaking — an eternal dynamic between the beyond-beingness of the Father and the beingness of the Son. Except to say that the being of the Son of course partakes of the beyond-being of the Father. Or rather, Father and Son are a way of talking about this primordial distinction that is everywhere and in everything — the idea that being itself is always already beyond-being.

Which is one reason why the Cosmos is such a nuisance, because it simply won’t stand still, rather, never stops evolving and revealing more of itself. Not to abruptly change the subject, but we have heard from the wise—

You mean you googled it?

Never mind where I got it, and the exact figures don’t matter anyway. But it is said that the information generated in 2001 alone doubled all the information available to human beings prior to that. Then in 2002 it went and doubled again. You get the idea: we are sinking under a sea information, and what comes after that?

Human voices wake us, and we drown?

The only alternative is to learn how to swim, hence the reason why cosmotheandrism is needed more than ever right about now. If everything is an entailment of our 12 Axioms, then perhaps we have a way to float above the noise and render the Cosmos less of a nuisance.

Nothing Is Impassible

For the past 24 hours we’ve been holding the thought that the perfect world must be imperfect, the reason being that necessity + possibility is better than either one alone, if only because neither would even be conceivable. The Cosmos itself is both lawful and contingent, thus accounting for its ceaseless novelty, or “creativity within the creation,” so to speak. But this same dynamism is present in divinas, for again, our Theos principle is irreducibly Absolute and Infinite. Which makes God himself contingent, or rather, contingency a property of the Godhead.

Analogously, it is not so much that God doesn’t move as he is ummoved by anything outside himself, i.e., self-moved. In Christianity this self-movement is conceptualized in terms of the economic Trinity whereby the Father eternally begets the Son and the Spirit proceeds from them in a kind of dynamic dance, i.e., perichoresis. For cosmotheandrism this is the very sparchetype of the Cosmic Area Rug, or at least one way of lighting its flame.

There are others?

Sure. We torched on a couple of them in the previous post, from the worlds of Vedanta and Taoism. There is also a tradition in Judaism that looks into this matter, in particular, Talmudic interpretations — midrashim — on the nature of divine creativity. A number of these rabbis concluded that God’s creativity did not begin with the creation of our Cosmos, rather, that God has always been creating because that is what creators do. In other words, supposing God is eternal then so too is his creativity. Thus is it highly likely that there are other worlds, even if those worlds are not really any of our business. Rather, from our end, One Cosmos is already more than we can handle. No need to speculate about a hypothetical multiverse. (Although for Kabbalah even this world contains other unseen worlds, but we’ll leave them alone for now.)

You may not be interested in other intracosmic worlds, but they are interested in you.

That’s a separate subject. As to a perfect world being imperfect, just imagine what life would be like if yesterday were identical to every yonderday. Under those conditions we wouldn’t be bored stiff, rather, always already stiff. They say that the glory of God is a human being fully alive, but what is Life? What ever else it is, it never stands still or it would be dead. Life Itself is an evolving system of contingency and necessity ordered to its own open yonder.

What high as that?!

That’s for the poetry department, All I know is that We follow, now we follow — Yonder, yes yonder, yonder!

∞

A Cosmos of pure indeterminacy would be as unthinkable as one of pure necessity — one might say that it would be not even absurd. Rather, potency and actuality are complementary poles of any existing thing, the question being whether these poles extend all the way up and into the Godhead. But insofar as it concerns us, In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge. Not just of bound and unbound, but bounded in order to transcend the boundaries. Or logical so as to surpass logic.

The error of scientism — or of any ideology — is to use logic as a cage, when our friend Gödel has proven that this is strictly impossible. On the one hand we escape the cage of logic, but if we jettison logic altogether, this places us in another kind of cage. Or rather, it would be like dropping someone into the middle of Death Valley and declaring him to be free, which you might call a prison of infinitude. For which reason Dávila says that Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison, and that Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything.

Logic becomes a cage to the extent that it limits reality to its own restricted categories. Instead of the bad infinite described above (the endless desert), we now confine ourselves to a bad finite. It insists that anything that cannot be fully explained by a restricted form of logic is nonexistent: thus we are simply transferred from one prison to another while time keeps draggin’ on.

It takes forever to get nowhere.

Note that both of these rookie errors end up eliminating the verticality that at once transcends finitude without thereby releasing us into an infinite nothingness, as existentialists imagine. Rather, this is not just a radical freedom from, but a freedom for and to.

Elimination of the vertical occurs the moment logic tries to capture the Logos within natural reason. If one pretends that science has no limits, it means — paradoxically — that man has all the more: man becomes limited by the very science he invented. So it’s a bit like Dr. Frankenstein being killed by his own creation: as scientism expands, man necessarily shrinks.

If there is no higher privilege than Truth, then it seems that religion must be subordinate to it, not vice versa. Schuon suggests that “Truth and Revelation are not absolutely equivalent terms, since Truth is situated beyond forms, whereas Revelation, or the Tradition which derives from it, belongs to the formal order, and that indeed by definition…”

Again, a form is a limit. Analogously, jazz is a form of music, but music cannot be enclosed in the form of jazz. Rather, there are diverse forms of music, while music itself is limitless, or rather, full of possibilities that can never be exhausted by a single form. So, God must be like this: an absolute substance full of possible forms and expressions, of limits on the limitless.

“Limit” is a loaded word, for it suggests something inferior to the unlimited. Applied to God, it connotes a being “who is restricted, hampered, in what he can do and know” (Rice), inferior to the supposedly limitless God of tradition.

But even supposing God is omnipotent, this cannot be “the ability to do anything, period,” but “to do the things that fall within the range of logical possibility” (ibid). Thus, it would again be absurd to say that God’s omnipotence entails the ability to make a square circle or a married bachelor. It is not that he lacks the power per se, “but because these expressions do not refer to anything ‘doable.’ They are logical absurdities.”

This implies that God’s limitlessness cannot be completely unlimited. For example, if he is Truth itself, then there can be no falsehood in him. And supposing he is love, then this has certain implications for both God and world, because love would be strictly impossible with no other to love, nor in a deterministic Cosmos — one in which God exerts unlimited power to micromanage every event. For us it would mean, as was the case for Elvis, I can’t help falling in love with you, or for Ray Charles, I can’t stop loving you. But there is always an element of choice and of will — in other words, of knowing the truth and willing the good, not forgetting creating the beautiful.

The Cosmotheandric Imperative.

Insofar as it makes no sense to know the false, will the bad, or create the ugly.

∞

With regard to loving the good, for Hartshorne God cannot simultaneously be impassible and still meet any definition of love. Rather,

at a bare minimum, love requires both the capacity to act for the welfare of others and to sympathize with their feelings.... If this sort of love is to be attributed to the divine being, then it must be possible for God to act for the welfare of the creatures but also to be affected by their weal and woe. In short, divine love entails the divine relativity.

But divine relativity is precisely what traditional theology rejects, since “God is impassible or unaffected by anything external” to him.

As the Sun and its radiation are not two distinct substances but one substance in two modes, it is the same with regard to the Absolute Principle and its radiation via the Infinite pole of All-Possibility: we are always in God and vice versa, and that’s just the way it is. And this divine radiation is precisely what accounts for our own intellectual Light: we are created, but surely we didn’t create the uncreated Light!

Relativity is necessarily bound up with contingency, even though traditional theism denies the possibility of contingency in God. No doubt there are certain types of contingency that are necessarily impossible for God, since God himself is necessary being, just as the Sun is necessary for contingent living beings to be here at all.

But supposing we are contingent, and God really knows us, then it necessarily follows that he knows contingency. And knowledge of contingency inevitably introduces contingency into God, because to learn something is to have been changed by it, however minutely.

The only way to avoid this conclusion is to insist that everything we think and do is necessary, which reduces us to necessary entailments of the divine being, thus depriving us of our genuine freedom, including even the freedom to know or accept God.

God must possess all perfections in the highest possible degree. Since in my book love and knowledge are indeed perfections, these require relationality and responsiveness. Therefore, a non-relational God is simply not qualified for the position, for his conspicuous imperfections would render him inadequate to the diverse demands of the job description.

An impassible dream.

Correct: for cosmotheandrism nothing is impassible, least of all God.

A Perfect World Would Be Imperfect

In the traditional view God is said to be pure act, in the sense that if there were any potency in God, this would imply both privation and change, which is an a priori metaphysical no no.

Well, cosmotheandrism welcomes a principle of potency in the Godhead, which in its most abstract form is simply the Infinite pole of the Absolute, or what Schuon calls All-Possibility. This too is reflected in Vedanta, which features, for example, a dynamic complementarity of Purusha and Prakriti, a tale of two siddhis between a static presence and dynamic force. In other words, Purusha is the immobile witness who doesn’t do anything but simply abide. Prakriti is the complementary pole dancer, the dynamic counterpart that is pure restless energy and potentiality. For cosmotheandrism this would simply be another way of talking about Absolute and Infinite.

The same principle is reflected in the Tao Te Ching whereby the Tao is “filled with infinite possibilities,” much like a well that is “used but never used up.” Interestingly, in that same stanza it says the Tao is “older than God,” so one might be tempted to say that God is one of the potentials of our ultimate principle. Which our version of cosmotheandrism does not exactly say, rather, that God is always already complementary to — or rather within — himself.

Which we can easily translate right back into Christian terms in the doctrine of the essence and energies of God. In the Orthodox world the essence corresponds to the absolute pole — transcendent, immutable, and beyond any category of human thought — while the energies that flow therefrom are like rays from the sun, or from the center to the periphery. These energies are possible because God is an open, relational, overflowing fountain of dynamic plenitude. As the rays of the sun are still the sun, so too are the energies still God.

It is precisely because of the principle of All-Possibility that God can indeed create something that is “not-God.” Nor is our genuine freedom subsumed into God’s omnipotence, because we have a share in God’s own All-Possibility. Positing a purely actual God renders him as static and lifeless as… Actually nothing we can imagine, since everything in existence is characterized by a complementary dynamism of actuality and possibility.

Note that Infinitude is not a number, nor is it ever consummated. It can never be fully actualized, since it is ever-actualizing. Likewise it is never fully determinate, rather, like pi, keeps chooglin’ along ad infinitum.

God is an odd number.

Not exactly. Suffice it to say at this juncture that for cosmotheandrism three is not a quantity, rather a quality. Nevertheless, this quality cannot be an even number.

Creation is a downstream consequence of the eternal complementarity of Absolute and Infinite: the principle of All-Possibility is the dynamic, internal wellspring of creativity within the Absolute. It means that God’s power is not just the power to be (actuality), but the creative power to make (infinite potency). All-Possibility ensures that this ultimate ground can actually generate genuine novelty without ceasing to be perfect. In this regard, a perfect world would be imperfect, since it would lack the principle of dynamic creativity. Nor would it be Alive, for obvious reasons.

God’s creative potential is a perfection rather than a privation, the essential principle that reconciles changelessness and dynamic generativity. It is not as if God were “lacking” the Cosmos, rather, that a Cosmos is bound to happen given his dynamic generativity.

It is the freedom within God that allows for the creation of a truly distinct Cosmos itself capable of novelty and freedom. This dynamic tension — Actuality united with Infinite Potency — is an eternal perfection, not a privation or imperfection.

∞

The analogy of being essentially maintains that the creation is analogous to the Creator. While the similarities are endless, they must be understood in the context of an even greater dissimilarity. We might say that everything is like God, but God is not like everything (i.e., the mere sum of existents).

The analogy of being helps to avoid two metaphysical non-starters, pantheism at one end (the Cosmos is God) and a monistic theopanism at the other (God is everything, in such a way that, for example, there is no space for human freedom).

∞

As we have said, natural theology proceeds from the bottom up, ascending from facts on the ground to the principles above, whereas revealed theology begins from the top down, giving us access to a set of data that can never be reached from the bottom up, such that only an act of faith can span the discontinuity between them. This ultimate Principle is beyond reason, but once in hand, not unreasonable — for example, that the world is created. Philosophy can argue either way, but only something from outside the Cosmos and beyond philosophy could settle the issue.

Having said that, natural reason is already a function of supranatural reason, the latter of which can never be enclosed in the former, just as life cannot be reduced to matter, nor mind to biology. Any attempt to eliminate verticality in the Cosmos is a performative contradiction because the intellect itself is already a vertical power that transcends mere horizontality. The Anthropos is the nexus where the upward and downward movements meet in the relational dynamism of the moment.

∞

The philosopher Charles Hartshorne believed that metaphysics not only proved the existence of God but of a certain type of God. In short, he affirms both that God cannot not be and that he cannot fail to have certain properties and attributes which sometimes contradict traditional views of God, for which reason he labeled his approach neoclassical metaphysics. If his metaphysic clashed with revelation or tradition, well, too bad: he would always choose metaphysics. Which of course may be problematic, since if logic is pushed too far, it renders itself illogical. Logic has its rights, but it does not have the right to reduce Truth to its own restricted categories — as in left brain capture of the right. At some point in life’s vertical relay race the metaphysician must pass the baton to the mystic for the final leg.

The focus of Hartshorne’s metaphysical project is less on the truth of various theologies than their coherence, this being because — as you will have noticed — every off-the-rack Big Box religion tends to generate absurdities and contradictions at the margins while conveniently renaming them mysteries. Imagine trying to pull this off in court: “You say you were at home in bed, but the video shows you were at the decedent’s house. How is this possible?”

It’s a mystery! Like the time Keith Richards was busted for having drugs in his pocket. When questioned, he calmly informed the police, Those could belong to anybody.

Which is true but not exactly credible. Hartshorne maintains that “there would be fewer atheists if theists had done a better job of making sense of the concept of God.” The popular (i.e., exoteric) ones in particular end up with logically impossible or at least incredible forms of God, so no wonder the atheist rejects them. Ironically, Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. So one flees to atheism — as did I, back in the day — but that makes even less sense: the irony doubles back on itself, such that The unbeliever restores our faith.

For Hartshorne the very principle of God, properly understood, must exclude certain forms of theism. In other words, God has an intrinsic nature that cannot fail to be what it is, for even God cannot, for example, violate the principle of non-contradiction. So, God is always who he is, but man can say all sorts of things about him that cannot possibly be the case. Which is no less true of the things man has said of the Cosmos or Anthropos. For example, cosmology per se didn’t even become a strict science until the early to mid-20th century, prior to which it was a purely speculative enterprise. Beginning with Einstein’s insights, the Cosmos could be regarded as whole — an open, dynamic, and evolving system encompassing space, time, matter, and energy.

As we know, logic cannot contain God, but it can and must nevertheless exclude those concepts of him that are absurd or self-contradictory. Genuinely mysterious, bueno. Just don’t call absurdities mysteries. In the ultimate sense logic is more negative than positive, in that it is better at excluding what cannot be than telling us what is — in other words, at ruling out impossible Gods as opposed to describing the actual one.

Ones? By definition there can be only one.

Ah, my discarnate friend, but look what you just did there: you equated God and oneness, thereby affirming one of the things God cannot be, which is to say, multiple. Does this mean you have thereby caged God within human logic, or have you merely acknowledged a proper boundary to help think about him?

More controversially, Hartshorne excludes the possibility of an omnipotent God whose power is so absolute that it negates the very existence of genuine creaturely freedom, for even God cannot create what amounts to a square circle of “unfree freedom.”

For what is freedom, really? Speaking logically, is it even conceivable that determinism or absolute necessity could be reconciled with freedom? Here again, freedom must be a function of potency, which is per se indeterminate, like Aristotle’s prime matter, or even quantum indeterminacy. For Hartshorne there are not only limits on God’s power (even if self-limits), but the very concept of absolute divine omnipotence is incoherent and contradictory, for reasons we will get into as we proceed. He still maintained that God was the most powerful being, but that our world and our experience simply make no sense if this power extended to every occurrence herebelow, and in particular, if it negates our real creaturely freedom.

So, the perfect world must be imperfect?

Hold that thought.

The Eternal Complementarity of Thing and Thingy

Here is a whole section left out of Book I: Cosmos due to redundancy, banality, pretentiousness, forced humor, etc. But since there may be a new reader out there, the redundancy won’t pose a problem. And supposing this reader is not burdened by rudimentary literary standards, then nor will the banality be an issue. By way of context, it contains some further discussion of celebrity atheist Carl Sagan’s ultimate humblebrag that The cosmos is all there ever is, was, or will be. If this is true it is false, since it fails to take into consideration the primate who knows this to be the case.

What Sort of Monkey Is This?

I certainly don’t mean to pick on Carl Sagan, for man is forever trying to contain infinitude within finitude — or absolute within relative, subject within object, vertical within horizontal — but it would be easier to drink the ocean or jump over the moon, since these at least involve a finite volume or distance. Our best map is never the territory, which is why Dávila reminds us that Reality cannot be represented in a philosophical system. Whatever else the Cosmos is, it cannot be reduced to our abstract conceptions of it.

Ours is the same as Sagan’s shrunken post-Enlightenment Cosmos, only looked at in a very different way: one that emphasizes process and development; telos, purpose, and intrinsic meaning; organicism and interior relations; the creative advance into novelty; and an implicate transcendent ground of which the physical Cosmos is but the explicate expression.

For again, man’s perceptions are not restricted to some evolutionary niche, rather, to the totality of being: this alone is man’s proper “environment,” which Sagan himself presumes. For was Sagan free to articulate his vision of the Cosmos? If so, then his vision does not account for his freedom to understand and express it. We too are of course free to accept or reject this vision, and whence this freedom? For any argument for or against free will presumes its existence, since it proves the reality of the subject who is free to either accept or reject it. Conversely, to affirm that free will doesn’t exist is to void one’s argument at the outset, since the argument can appeal to neither truth nor to the subject who may know it. As Poincaré commented, “no determinist argues deterministically,” so “all arguments against free will are so many proofs of it” (Jaki)

Freedom is indeed key to our Cosmos, but does this freedom have a telos? Is it ordered to anything beyond itself? Dávila suggests that Freedom is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.

To accomplish what, exactly?

Among other things, to accomplish this book. Otherwise I could just sit here and wait for it to be written.

∞

Here we may propose another binary: Either the Theos exists, or it does not exist. And: If the Theos exists, then the Cosmos is intelligible; if it does not exist, then it is unintelligible. But the Cosmos is intelligible. Therefore the Theos not only exists but is the very Principle of both intelligence and intelligibility in dynamic relation herebelow. Lonergan expresses a similar syllogism: If the totality of reality is completely intelligible, then God exists. But the totality of reality is completely intelligible. Therefore God exists.

I don’t think that’s going to convince anyone who wants to believe otherwise.

That is true. When is the last time you changed someone’s mind using facts and logic? People have all sorts of unconscious reasons for believing what they believe, and one of my tasks as a psychologist was to bring these willful darklings to the fore and interrogate them in the light of day.

The above syllogisms bridge the gap between the subjective mind and the objective world by proving that the Cosmic Area Rug is composed of a single rational and relational fabric known as the Logos through which we might propose a marriage of Thought and Thing. Which implies that the grammar of our minds matches the grammar of the Cosmos because both are in-scribed by the same source.

Among other reasons, theories are often judged by their fruitfulness, and just look at the fruitfulness of this one, for all knowledge is a product of the prior union of logocentric mind and logospheric world, without which there could be no genuine knowledge at all. In other words, the ontological proof is in the existential pudding: since we do perform science, we do understand math, and we do navigate reality, we have already implicitly chosen our intelligible spouse. To cheat on our spouse by fooling around with reductive scientism means our cosmic house is a broken home where the Anthropos is no longer welcome.

Here we might use the analogy of the suspiciously male and female key and lock to illuminate the relationship between knowing and being, respectively. Now, any halfway decent locksmith presumably makes not just a lock but a key to open it, since neither alone is of much use. Thus, not only does our intellectual key fit into and open the lock of nature, but the very existence of this clever mankey is an important factsimian in its own right, because it is an echo of the unity of being. The Anthropos, we might say, is this unity in silhouette.

As above, so below, meta-Cosmos to micro-Cosmos.

Correct. This single fact must be the most important one in all of existence, since in its absence the world would be a locked door with no key. Which makes no sense, because who creates a lock with no key, a safe with no combination, a joke with no punchline?

All other animals are bereft of these keys, but somehow the Anthropos got ahold of the very skeleton key that opens all locks. What gives? Darwin explained a lot, but what explains Darwin? And what not only made him so curious about nature, but made his key insights so fruitful? He certainly explained how we evolved, but not now how we understand how we evolved.

To be perfectly accurate, animals do possess their own limited set of keys, but not the skeleton key that opens every lock. My dog, for example, knows how to unlock a treat from me, without knowing how she knows how to do this. I know: it’s because she’s so damn cute, and the cuteness unlocks any reservations on my part.

This subject goes to the very mission of the Anthropos, which, in addition to loving dogs, is to discover its own nature — its telos — via objects, relationships, and spontaneous attractions in the environment. Although we come into the world with something like a soul — or better yet, in the words of Bertie Wooster, “I mean to say, there’s a sort of soul-thingy that — well, you know what I mean. It’s a sort of... well, it’s a soul-thingy.”

This thingy is the form of our individuality, but we don’t come into the world with explicit knowledge of its content. Rather, this form harbors implicit knowledge of what will come to be recognized as its content. In other words, our spontaneous attraction to this or that endeavor, or person, or discipline, or dog, will reveal our self to ourselves. I have no idea why some people are attracted to Chihuahuas. But it is very much as if our Anthropic soul thingy is the lock for which the Cosmos will furnish keys to open it.

Think of, say, Mozart, who was obviously born with a musical soul. Lucky for him (and for us) he was given a means of discovery and expression of what was implicit in his soul thingy. In other words, thanks to his father, a clavier was right there waiting for him to find himself — his musical potential — through it. By the age of five he was already composing, which is to say, exteriorizing his interior or explicating the implicit. True, he was a genius, but that’s beside the point, which is that the clavier was a lock Mozart seemingly picked with preternatural ease, even while his own soul was a lock the keyboard opened for him, in an in-spiraling and ex-spiraling two-way movement.

Perhaps a more subtle point is that he also opened this musical lock for the restavus, in that we are all able to enjoy the sounds of Mozart unlocking the piano, the piano unlocking Mozart to himself, and his music unlocking our appreciation of it.

Which reminds me of something my son once asked me: is everyone born with a gift? The question caused me to hesitate, because one doesn’t want to sound like some new-age happy-talk woke oil salesman: Of course! Anyone can be Mozart or Einstein! Your world is as big as your smallest—

Theodore Herzel. State of Israel. If you will it, it is no dream!

Of course we can’t all be geniuses, but that hardly means we can’t enjoy geniuses. Indeed, more often than not we can enjoy the genius more than the genius himself enjoys being one. Biographies of the Great Ones often reveal a disconnect between the greatness of the gift and the rest of their lives. For example, I enjoy the famously grumpy Van Morrison much more than he seems to enjoy being himself. The point is, you don’t have to be an accomplished locksmith to benefit from the unlocking, whether of truth or beauty.

All of this is meant literally, because this is literally how we experience the world. Things grab us, do they not? And different things grab different people. I realize this book won’t grab everyone. What is indeed so surprising is how specific our soul-attractors can be. It is by no means obvious why being should be this way, but it is impossible to understand this vital phenomenon within the standard scientific paradigm. Even in science, the most hardboiled egghead wouldn’t know what to investigate in the absence of an intuition or feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something “interesting,” something that attracts his or her attention.

In a certain sense we are what intrigues us, whether persons, subjects, objects, or activities. For example, according to psychiatrist Anthony Storr,

Hobbies and interests are often aspects of a human being which most clearly define his individuality, and make him the person he is. To discover what really interests a person is to be well on the way to understanding them.

More often than not these interests “reflect what the individual does when he is alone, or when communication and interaction are at a minimum.” One might say the soul is like a concavity in search of the convexity that will fill it, so to speak; or again, a lock in search of the key(s) that will open a man to himself.

Two words: vertical recollection.

Yes, when we grab something that grabs us, it is a case of discovering what is already within us — much in the manner of Jungian archetypes, which are inborn patterns actualized upon contact with the environment. These latent preconceptions are filled with conceptual content depending upon our particular experiences of the world. Some of these blueprints are universal, e.g., anima, great mother, shadow, hero, and trickster, while others are quite specific clueprints into our personal identities, again luring us in a top-down manner toward our own destiny, as it were. Which implies that our existential future is ontologically behind us, which is true of any anticipatory biological system wherein its present state anticipates and changes based upon a future state. In short, in a purely linear system the cause precedes the effect, but in a complex, nonlinear, anticipatory system the cause of a current statr may be predicated on a future one. Thus the cosmotheandric imperative to fully become who we already are in potential, more on which in Book II.

Me? I am interested in tonight’s Dodgers-Brewers game. Did you know that in all of playoff history there is a less than 1% chance of a matchup between the first and second best pitchers in the game?

Who cares.

That’s the point: different strokes for indifferent folks.