Three, Two, One, We Have Cognition: Lift-Off!

The first part of this post was written fresh this morning in a somewhat wild & wooly manner. The book resumes after the ∞:

I don’t like to mix it up with atheists — or anyone else, for that matter — because few people ever change their minds as a consequence of mere facts and logic. No one arrives at atheism from a chain of reasoning, since the conclusions of reason are preordained by its premises. Thus, the only way to really change minds — beginning with one’s own — is to change principles. And even then, has the mind really changed or only re-cognized what is always already the case? Analogously, supposing you are viewing a landscape through a fog, and the fog clears, has the landscape changed?

For which reason cosmotheandrism is more akin to cleaning windows than manufacture or glazing. For what is the Cosmos but the biggest landscape imarginable, and what is the Anthropos but a whom with a view? Perception allows the outside in, while intellect penetrates further inside what is perceived, in an endless spiral. But what is the Principle of this endless spiral of cognition proceeding from surface to depth? Each surface is a new abyss and each summit a new horizon, but how? And why?

Curious minds want to know. Incurious ones stop at atheism — or at ideology, religionism, or ismism more generally.

In any event, there can be no answer to the question in a closed Cosmos, much less a closed Anthropos. We know that these two are open to one another — hence science and any other form of knowledge — the question being whether these two are open to a third.

Who is the third who walks always beside you?

Good question: I count you and I together, but if I look closely there is always an invisible third.

How can you look closely at the invisible?

Have you been listening to the story, Petey?

Intermittently.

Some third you are. Perhaps you missed Axiom 4, which says that relationality is woven into the nature of things, on equal terms with the existence of things. In short, reality is constituted of things-in-relation. These relations are not imaginary — just in our heads — rather, are as real as reality itself. They are constitutive of what anything is, thus for cosmotheandrism they are “onto-relations,” since they are as real as that which they relate.

So, that right there is our invisible third, which is always implicitly present in knowledge of any kind. This principle self-evidently applies to the Anthropos, because intersubjective relations also define what a person is: an isolated person devoid of interior relations would be less than a person. To review:

Reality is not the sum of extrinsically related things (à la Newton) but their intrinsically related unity (as per relativity), which is why this is a Cosmos — a dynamic whole — and not a collection of scattered parts.

This relational unity is among the most consequential facts of existence, for it is a necessary condition of everything else, including the possibility of philosophy — or of any other kind of knowing, for that matter. Everything is in relation, such that relation is an ontological primitive, not something superadded. It is only for this reason that Cosmos can be interiorly related to Anthropos, and vice versa, hence its intelligibility to our intelligence. One might think of the Cosmos as having a dual reality, much like a Möbius Strip or Klein Bottle, in which the inside is the outside, and vice versa.

Thanks to Axiom 4, what is otherwise a paradox — like Escher’s hand drawing itself — is an orthoparadox, because there is a relation between the two hands and a third hand belonging to Escher. One might say that the third hand exerts downward causation on the other two, but there must also be a kind of upward causation or feedback from below that informs the artist. One might say that the Theos is that artist who draws hands capable of drawing other hands, which is to say, a Creator who creates creators, each open and related to the others: Creator, creation, creativity, in an endless spiral. Which is the pattern of everything, or the dynamic substance of the Cosmic Area Rug.

Every ideology has a blind spot, as it always makes an exception for the ideologue who is not enclosed in his ideology: the secular gnostic who knows the hidden truth of reality. Insofar as it concerns the atheist, the blind spot is a little thing called reality itself, since reality is open and relational before it is anything else, even intelligible. Being is an intelligible text, and the text no more wrote itself than Escher’s hand drew itself. Remember, the Anthropos is at once medium and message, since we are the medium through which all messages pass, even the message of atheism. But messages are only possible in an open and relational Cosmos.

∞

The Intellect is precisely that sense which allows us to intuit the suprasensible to which it is both a prolongation and adequation.

In some religions — e.g. Christianity — the metaphysical vision is more or less veiled, while in others, such as Vedanta, it is quite direct and unadorned, without so much as a fig leaf of mythopoetry.

Central to Schuon’s metaphysic is the distinction between Being and Beyond-Being. The former is the highest metaphysical level in exoteric monotheisms, with its Personal Creator God. But even some Christians go one step further, for example, Eckhart. His impersonal “ground” is analogous to the Nirguna Brahman of Vedanta, the unqualified Absolute, or the supraformal form beyond form.

The secret name of God that only He knows.

Everyone has a secret name. Our given name is just a word superimposed on a mystery. I am Bob, but there seems to be no bottom to Bobness. As part of my training I spent years in therapy, but never got to the bottom of me. I continued for a few years thereafter, but the floor turned out to be no floor at all, rather, more like the implicate quantum world of pure potential awaiting explication. This was actually the subject of my doctoral dissertation, for what it’s worth.

Okay Deepak.

You might say I got a Ph.D. in Bob, but I’m pretty sure Bob is everybody, unless they just stamp their John Hancock on the mystery and ignore the watery abyss below the dry name.

Above we alluded to another important distinction, that between the form and substance of religion. Revelation provides us with adequate forms to render the suprasensible intelligible, but the form is again not the substance, which is supraformal and hence formally inexhaustible.

In itself, this is actually not so far from Christian orthodoxy, which maintains that — and this should again be self-evident — no finite image of the Theos can adequately represent him, for “Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite” (Thomas), the result being that “every image [of the Absolute] is at the same time true and false” (Schuon).

And yet, Thomas implies that there is indeed something in us that is conformed to the Infinite, similar to what Eckhart says to the effect that “There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable,” this being none other than the nous, or Intellect properly so called.

Likewise, for Thomas “The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing other than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light,” and “the light of our intellect... is nothing other than an imprint of the first truth.”

Moreover, “Our intellect is understanding extended to infinity,” and this “ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge.” “Hence the Philosopher [Aristotle] says that the soul is in a certain manner all things.”

So, the Intellect is “the faculty which perceives transcendence”; it “receives intuitions and apprehends realities of a supra-phenomenal order.” “This transcendent faculty, capable of direct contact with Reality, is to be found, under various names, in all traditions” (Oldmeadow).

Having said that, it’s a good nous/bad news situation. I’ll let Schuon give you the lowdown on the lowdown Anthropos:

Fallen man, and thus average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect and the necessity of a Revelation from outside.

Here again this is problematic, because it seems to imply that there are superior men whose intellects are not subject to the fall — which sounds like ideological gnosticism, i.e., the obnoxious and heretical kind of secret knowledge. However, Schuon is quick to point out that a merely intellectual understanding of metaphysics is not enough, and that the spiritual life “is concerned with cleansing the subjective psyche” and with integrating and assimilating the Divine Message. Which is simply our dynamic orientation to the transcendent pole, fundamentally no different than our orientation to the immanent pole, in which case science involves cleaning windows at the lower end of the Cosmos. Which has no solid floor, any more than the top end does. Frankly, we only recognize being insofar as it becomes, so we might say that Cosmos and Anthropos are likewise names we clamp down on an endlessly intelligible mystery.

Atheists and How They Get That Way, Part One

A science of God? Pff.

It’s in the word: theo-logy, the Logos of the Theos. Except to say that the Theos is the Logos, the very Reason that bifurcates into anthropic intelligence and cosmic intelligibility and thus renders science itself possible. For again, the scientific catechism begins and ends — or stands and falls — with this principle. It is the necessary precondition that must be fulfilled in order for scientific investigation to be possible. Since science is obviously possible, its a priori foundation necessarily exists: science is contingent upon this all-pervasive Logos, and is that so bad?

Do I not fill heaven and earth?

That’s more like it.

Every medium requires a mediator, which is to say Cosmos and Anthropos, respectively. Except to say that man is the mediator between the poles of immanence and transcendence, thus creating the conditions for a dynamic adventure in both directions: science at one end, theology at the other. One might say that the latter is “logology,” the systematic study of a Logos that bursts into a whole spectrum of ologies first delineated by Aristotle, not excluding all-encompassing ones such as ontology and teleology. Metaphysics is really meta-ology, or in our terms logology. Which means that the Anthropos is pre-adapted to an invisible world of necessary principles that render both himself and the Cosmos possible. The Anthropos is a possibility of the Theos, but the Theos is a necessity of the Anthropos, or what are we even talking about (i.e., using the medium of language to explore and map the invisible Cosmos)?

The physicist and philosopher of science Henry Margeneau had the right attitude when he wrote that the scientist “holds with the fervor of a religious conviction” the belief that the world is lawful and intelligible — “that the search for truth is a never-ending quest, yet I pledge myself to seek it.” Nothing is in principle “closed to inquiry or understanding,” so what looks like “a mystery is but a challenge.”

Challenge accepted.

We believe the scientific belief described by Margenau is thoroughly justified, except no belief is self-justifying, rather, must appeal to a higher principle which renders the belief believable. Which is where cosmotheandrism barges in, since it renders scientific faith entirely rational. In the cosmotheandric framework science isn’t some miraculous occurrence carried out by an invasive species of damn dirty apes getting their stinking paws on the cosmic blueprints, rather, exactly what we might expect. Thanks to science, we now know that our little planet of the apes is where the Cosmos of the Anthropos is disclosed.

∞

For Whitehead, “faith in the possibility of science” was “derivative from medieval theology,” specifically, “the inexpugnable belief that there is a secret, a secret which can be unveiled,” derived from the “insistence on the rationality of God.”

Which leads into our next section, called

Atheists and How They Get That Way

We begin this section with a bold and presumptuous claim by Schuon: “Metaphysics cannot be taught to everyone but if it could there would be no atheists.”

It is no knock on the Average Man to say that he is decidedly not a metaphysician, with no interest in such. Nor is this Average Man capable of, or interested in, quantum physics, but this has no bearing on his ability to use and enjoy technologies that rely upon it. Moreover, if we are so inclined, we can also read popularized versions that dumb down the physics for the benefit of those of us who just want the bottom line without having to go to the trouble of obtaining a Ph.D. in physics.

Or even passing 11th grade physics.

You cannot leave that alone, can you? Maybe I had better things to do.

Such as?

Avoiding linear equations and right-triangle trigonometry — whatever they are — is its own reward.

Analogously, the man with no interest in, or aptitude for, metaphysics also has access to popularized versions of it in the form of religion, for every religion discloses a metaphysical vision of reality.

Christianity is Platonism for the masses?

Nietzsche wasn’t entirely wrong there, except to say that Platonism may also be framed as Christianity for the egghead, an insult we will explore later.

We might even think of religion as the “poetry of metaphysics,” which is not a potshot at religion if it is true that, as Shelley said, poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. For this would imply that the metaphysical poetry of religion reveals something about the Ultimate Legislator.

The point is, revelation may convey the essential truths of universal metaphysics — or of cosmotheandrism — only clothed in a way that can be assimilated by Joe Sixpack or Jane Winemom. In the words of Kenneth Oldmeadow, “Revelation is the means by which the Absolute is made known to all mankind.” This facilitates “a downward descent of the Divine Principle” and “a vertical ascent back to the Divine” — which goes to a dynamic complementarity of upward and downward energies which disclose the very structure of vertical reality, AKA the metabolism of being.

In this regard, just as with ideology, it is possible to become entrapped and enclosed in a dogmatic matrix as opposed to using it as a means of vertical liberation — a probe as it were. To paraphrase the old Zen saying, the purpose of the boat is to cross the river. Likewise, dogma is not for its own sake, but for the sake of mapping and transporting us somewhere. In short, religion as such is always about — i.e., refers to — something that is not religion. Which is another way of highlighting the rookie error of absolutizing one’s religion instead of using it to engage with what it is pointing toward: the Absolute.

Don’t stare at the finger pointing at the moon.

Correct. Thus,

When a man seeks to escape from dogmatic narrowness it is essential that it be “upwards” and not “downwards”: dogmatic form is transcended by fathoming its depths and contemplating its universal content (Schuon).

Which brings to mind another of Dávila’s translogical zingers worth repeating: Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper — or higher, toward the luminous end of the Primordial Tension between immanence and transcendence.

To repeat what was said above, the supraformal Substance is conveyed by the medium of form; put conversely, no terrestrial form can exhaust the celestial Substance, whether we are speaking of triangles or of God.

For Schuon, “What falsifies modern interpretations of the world and of man at their very base... is their monotonous and obsessive ignorance of the suprasensible degrees of Reality…” Which brings to mind yet another aphorism: We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

Neither math nor logic can get the job done, for reasons etched into the substance of reality by Gödel. Until his theorems are disproven — and don’t hold your breath — logic’s arms may be long enough to spar with God, but never knock him out.

What about a technical knockout?

That is indeed possible via various philosophical techniques, but these also result in rendering the Anthropos unconscious, or at least unintelligent.

Conversely, the Theos can certainly speak with logic, or better, speak logic. Which is why we can say that things are not true because they are logical, rather, logical because true. Math and logic can only “prove” tautologies. They are ultimately circular; we can of course expand the circle, but this hardly means we have left it behind or below. Like astronauts, we can leave the earth behind, but only by taking it — its atmosphere, food, and technology — with us.

Logic is always inside its own circle. In contrast, we are after knowledge from beyond or outside the circle (literally eso-teric). Is this even possible? No, better! It is necessary, or the circle of logic couldn’t exist to begin with. So, how do we exit or see beyond it?

For cosmotheandrism, Subject and Object are not a vicious and sterile dualism but a friendly and fruitful complementarity. The complementary dance between them proceeds all the way up and all the way down. But of the two, the Subject is obviously prior:

The subject as such takes precedence over the object as such: the consciousness of a creature able to conceive the star-filled heavens is greater than space and the heavenly bodies… (Schuon).

Carl Sagan can talk all he wants about those billions and billions of stars, but all of astronomy pales in significance next to the astronomer. Ultimately we are not contained by the galaxies, but rather, vice versa. The Cosmos itself isn’t even big — or small, or anything else — except in reference to us:

Man is situated, spatially speaking, between the “infinitely big” and the “infinitely small”..., so that it is his subjectivity and not a quality of the objective world that creates the line of demarcation. If we have an impression of being tiny in stellar space, it is solely because what is big is far more accessible to us than what is small, which quickly eludes the grasp of our senses (Schuon).

So, man is situated between — and defines — the Very Big and Very Small. And not only. For he is also the vertical “point of junction between two infinitely more important dimensions, namely, the outward and the inward.” Indeed, “it is precisely by virtue of the dimension of inwardness, which opens onto the Absolute and so onto the Infinite, that man is quasi-divine” (Schuon).

So much for not becoming a god to appear worthy of your manhood.

That is not the point, rather, it again adverts to Axiom 7, theomorphism. For there is a world and there are the cosmotheandric witnesses who transcend it: “Where there are objects, there must also be subjects: creatures that are witnesses of things form an indissoluble part of creation,” in the absence of whom the Cosmos “would be an unknown space filled with blind stones and not a world perceived under a multitude of aspects.”

There exist not only “knowable things” but “beings endowed with knowledge in varying degrees.” And whether you like it or not, “the summit-degree is man, at least for our world,” behind or before or beyond which is “the absolute Witness — at once transcendent and immanent — of all things...” There is nothing magical or miraculous per se about this magical and miraculous assertion. Again, it’s just a matter of turning the Cosmos bright-side up.

The Science of God?

The title of yesterday’s post — The Anthropic Medium is the Celestial Message — highlighted the cosmotheandric truism that the Anthropos is the link, or medium, between Cosmos and Theos. This is actually an unavoidable principle for any science, philosophy, or theology whatsoever, for man is the central clearing house of the Cosmos, and that’s all there is to it. Knowledge of any kind passes through us.

As do lies, distortions, half-truths, propaganda—

That is also correct. You may recall that in Eden there are no books, and in fact no media at all, because there is no need for them. Rather, the experience of God is unmediated: he’s right there ambling about in the garden in the cool of the day. In this mythic scenario one might say that the Serpent is the first journalist, as he mediates the breaking news that You Too Can Be a God, and the rest is history.

Literally, for looked at one way, the so-called fall of man may be seen as our entrance into history. At the very least, it means that we leave one mode of being behind and enter a new one. Some have argued that this is symbolic of the transition from orality to literacy, for what is literacy but the exchange of unmediated for mediated reality? It is also in a sense the transition from RH to LH, which is not bad in itself, in fact far from it. So long as we maintain a complementary dynamism between LH and RH — or map and territory, symbol and symbolized, abstract and concrete, primary and secondary reality — we are in for the ride of our lives. Problems only arise insofar as the LH eclipses the RH or bullies it into submission. If we’re not careful, the LH can become the anthropic snake in the cosmic garden.

Which is reminiscent of Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, a more popular version of his neuropsychiatric theories discussed in Book II. To extend our analogy, the LH is the journalist who mediates the primary reality experienced by the RH. Which is fine, so long as we are dealing with an honest and humble journalist devoted to getting the whole story, and getting it right. But what happens when we enter a post-journalistic age full of rage bait, confirmation bias, narcissistic seduction, digital tribalism, fake news, viral plagues, and irony-free ideological fairy tales? Then it is as if the RH is subject to the the biases and propaganda spun by the LH. We are then enclosed in various ideological matrices or silos, from scientism at one end to religionism at the other. Here, even ideological opposites share the common plight of auto-confinement to the leftorium.

Note that our only meaning-full freedom is located in the vertical, since by definition it transcends horizontal enclosure. And one place this freedom manifests is in the space between symbol and symbolized, or again, in the anthropic medium between Cosmos and Theos. LH capture essentially freezes and kills this living, evolving, and ever-deepening link between man and world, in which case we are well and truly f—

Watch the profanity.

Note that with properly functioning bilateral hemispheres, the Anthropos not only discovers the Cosmos but discovers a Cosmos within the Cosmos, and we are that Cosmos. In other words, we are situated in a Möbius reality in which the outside is in and the inside out, in that ever-deepening or ascending spiral just mentioned. Thus the “inward turn” of LH literacy facilitated the upward turn into O, so long as we don’t conflate the spirit with the letter and enclose ourselves in a pneumatically desiccated and braindead letteralism.

Note that there is always a fine line between the media and mediated. Just as in any other intellectual endeavor, the former can never, under any circumstances, enclose the latter. Rather, there’s always more to the story, since reality is more than any story we tell of it. If we are not careful, then what mediates our world can become our world, and then we’re really f—

You heard me.

∞

A brief review: back in Books I and II we discussed Livi’s five primary evidences that constitute common sense, beginning with CS1, “the existence and of the continual becoming of many ‘things,’ identifiable in their identity (differentiable one from another) and in their relative permanence in being from the moment they appear to the moment they disappear…”

So, the first thing a human being recognizes is distinct and identifiable things that come and go, not excluding us.

Stuff happens.

Nor does it ever stop. The second element of common sense is “The evidence of the I as subject” — the relational subject who knows about and can — supposing literacy — reflect upon, all the stuff coming and going.

Although these are seemingly modest assertions, they are at least “endowed with the most absolute certainty: what is affirmed in these [and the three other CS] judgments is necessarily held as true by all.” In other words, “no one is able to think the contrary of what those judgements affirm as absolutely true.”

For example, in order to deny what was just referenced above, one must first recognize them. Likewise, it would require a self in order to deny the self. Moreover, to whom is one addressing the denials? Other selves — which is our third evidence constituting common sense, i.e., intersubjectivity. And if we ought to be honest in our dealings with these others, then we’ve arrived at evidence #4, freedom and responsibility.

Again, the non-truth of these assertions of common sense is absolutely unthinkable. For example, with regard to CS1, “It is not thinkable that the world does not exist as an ordered whole of entities in movement [i.e., change].” Look around and just try to think otherwise. Likewise CS2: just try thinking that your thinking self does not exist, or that you are not thinking. Nor can you think that other subjects don’t exist (CS3). For example, if you’re reading this, you not only know that it came from another mind, but that you understand this other mind. Indeed, if you deny intersubjectivity, to whom are you even denying it? And although it is commonplace for our tenured apes to deny the existence of free will and its attendant responsibilities, it too is unthinkable, because thought itself is the quintessence of freedom. Besides, to comprehend necessity — for example, mathematics — is to have transcended it. We explain math, while math can never explain us.

Having said all this, is CS5 — God, or something like it — a wild leap or but a logical first and last step?

A leap into the wild Godhead?

Why not? For Livi, God’s nonexistence is actually unthinkable, for you, I, or anyone else, this being the conceptually incoherent idea “that there does not exist a First Cause of the world” — the “undeniable evidence of God as invisible Foundation of all that is visible.”

So, atheism is actually unthinkable?

Only if you try to think it through, and supposing you know what thought is — where it comes from and to what (and to whom) it is ordered. Which brings to mind another gold-plated aphorism: Genuine atheism is to man’s reason what the ten-thousand-sided polygon is to his imagination.

It cannot be imagined, similar to how the reality disclosed by quantum physics literally cannot be imagined. Supposing you have a picture of a wave-particle — or wavicle — in your head, the picture is wrong.

For Dávila, The atheist devotes himself not so much to proving that God does not exist, as forbidding him to exist. He forbids God to exist by enclosing himself an imaginary LH metaphysic in which it is actually possible for God not to exist.

But no God, no science. There exist metaphysical necessities for the possibility of science, in the absence of which science itself becomes literally unthinkable.

Thus we know there is a God of science, whether implicit explicit. But can there be a science of God? We believe so. It is called cosmotheandrism.

The Anthropic Medium is the Celestial Message

Yesterday’s post was not entirely above the clouds and over the rainbow, for it ended with some down-to-Earth and up-to-O advice for the practicing cosmotheandrist. For all of life — not just theology — features a dynamic metabolism involving both apophatic and cataphatic (or positive and negative) approaches.

Science operates at the liminal horizon between the known and unknown. Physics, for example, would be easy if it could simply deduce the unknown from the already known, but this is rarely the case for major discoveries, which is why they are called “discoveries.” As they say, the electric light didn’t come about from the successive improvement of candles, nor is an automobile a horse with wheels. One doesn’t discover necessary entailments, rather, only recognizes them. The genuine discovery is a kind of leap in being, for example, from classical physics to relativity. If Einstein had restricted himself to the already known, he could never have discovered the great unknown. One cannot deduce the quantum field from the Newtonian machine. One might say that he placed the Newtonian sensorium within his own imaginarium to take flight beyond the former. Quite literally, as he imagined what would happen if he thumbed a ride on a passing beam of light.

Likewise, yesterday’s post ended with a comment by Ruusbroec, for whom “mystical theology and doctrine are fundamentally complementary rather than competitive.” Just as in science, we do not toss aside what we know, rather, deploy it as a probe to discover what we don’t. Just as there is a two-way horizon between Anthropos and Cosmos, i.e., science, there is a vertical one between Theos and Anthropos. Theological doctrine is a kind of crystallization of what goes on at this horizon, but there is always more, just as there is always more science. The unknown — or yet-to-be-known — always dwarfs the known, ultimately because being is beyond-being. Which is just another way of saying that being is bisected at every moment and in every place by Infinitude.

We have already discussed (in Book II) how this may be conceptualized in terms of the left and right cerebral hemispheres, which are ordered to the horizontal and vertical, respectively. Thus, at one side objectivity, abstraction, map, essence, stasis, linearity, detachment, particle, isolation, analysis, fragmentation, et al, to the other side non-linearity, complexity, dynamism, system, holism, territory, analogy, context, ground, etc.

In reality there is no figure without a ground, no object without a subject, no part without a whole: in short, Axiom 2, Primordial Complementarity. Which is why rational and mystical theology are necessary to one another. And why, when your abstraction detaches itself from beyond-being, you are entering a world of pain.

We might add that freedom appears in this dynamic liminal space at the horizon of being. If we default to one side, we are confined to our own ideas about reality, but if we default to the other, then we have no idea at all: like those times Plotinus disappeared into the One.

Good for him.

Wrong: all Good but no him. We naturally want to pass beyond the human, but would also like to be there when it happens. Trans-human is not anti-human, rather, fully human.

∞

So here we are, back down at base camp, staring at the cosmic mountain before us. We’ve already established that the contingent Cosmos is necessarily ordered to something beyond itself — that it is not self-sufficient or enclosed within itself — and furthermore that the most important fact within this open Cosmos is the two-faced Anthropos situated between immanence and transcendence. As they say, the medium is the message, and the Anthropos is the very cosmic medium between nothing and everything. Thus, the Anthropos is a vastly more significant message than the countless messages he brings.

Don’t shoot the messenger!

Tell that to the materialists, eliminativists, and other nihilists.

The anthropic messenger is in but not of the Cosmos, because of our orientation toward the transcendent pole beyond-being that exerts a perpetual attraction on us. This is a common denominator running throughout religion, but also through every science, in that any particular science either seeks universality or presupposes it: science as such is the reduction of multiplicity — of disparate phenomena — to unity in whatever field.

The same applies to particular religions which by definition attempt to map the absolute and universal. This is not to say that this or that religion doesn’t do a more or less adequate job of it. To the contrary, some are more consistent, complete, and deep than others. For example, we’ve already ruled out trephining and human sacrifice as the gold standards.

Analogously, Newtonian physics was an adequate map of the world until Einstein discovered a more comprehensive one revealing a deeper unity between, for example, space, time, matter, and energy. Even so, our best scientific map is never the territory, this being demonstrated, for example, by the inability to reconcile quantum physics with relativity. Here again, this is analogous to our explorers landing on different shores and returning with differing accounts of what they discovered there.

The point is, the mind seeks unity, which is at the top of the vertical hierarchy. Even physics, which is the paradigmatic science to which everything else is supposed to be reducible, is itself a bit of a mess. Indeed, the discrepancy between quantum and relativity theories is said to amount to 120 orders of magnitude — an inconceivably large number. Nevertheless, there is a presumed unity between these maps, hence the ongoing quest for a Theory of Everything that can reconcile the two at a deeper or more fundamental level. A deep and abiding faith in the unity of being is on page one of the Scientific Catechism.

It is the same with regard to religion. Schuon said something to the effect that any religion contains all religions, and that all religions attempt in their own ways to express the One True Religion. But is it possible for man to know this One True Religion, or to only possess particular versions of it? We know — or presume to at any rate — that there is a unified reality behind its various manifestations, so why not apply the same principle to religion?

Put it this way: religion is obviously a form. A form of what? Of the substance contained or symbolized by it. In Eckhart’s approach, the exoteric or outward expression of religion is the shell that must be broken in order to find the substance — a movement from the periphery or circumference to the Center.

A purely faith-based theology is halfway between the two. In other words, it is beyond reason, but still does not reach the ultimate truth. It protects believers from error, but does not necessarily reach the substance of Truth in itself. In order to reach this primordial Truth, it is necessary to break the outer shell of the linguistic construct and reach the infinite core.

Nevertheless, form is both necessary and unavoidable. Think of pure light passing through a colored container; in so doing it will necessarily take on the hue of the glass. Likewise, one might think of God as pure gold — or gold as such — while our forms are only various shapes or trinkets of gold. Is there a way to ascend to the colorless light and the pure gold?

To find the treasure of the Sierra Padre?

It reminds me of a story at the beginning of Kallistos Ware’s The Orthodox Way, about “a celebrated recluse, a woman who lived always in a small room, never going out.” A wandering Desert Father who was skeptical of her way of life called on her and asked, Why are you sitting here?, to which she responded I am not sitting, I am on a journey.

Every Christian may apply these words to himself or herself. To be a Christian is to be a traveller.... We are on a journey through the inward space of the heart, a journey not measured by the hours of our watch or the days of the calendar, for it is a journey out of time and into eternity.

In other words, a journey up the vertical mountain. A purely secular society is denied this great adventure, and is even doomed to generate mass discontent because it can never satisfy what amounts to infinite desire that can never be satiated by finitude. And clearly, there is no horizontal solution to this problem, because horizontality — or Exile from Sane Street — is the problem. We will all fall short of the financial glory of an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, but if there is no vertical, then that’s the end of it: a life of envy, frustration, and resentment, with no earthly way out.

What if man’s so-called fallenness is none other than detachment and alienation from the vertical ground beyond-being? For somewhere along the way, according to Schuon,

the link with the divine Source was broken and became invisible; the world became suddenly external to Adam, things became opaque and heavy, they became like unintelligible hostile fragments. This drama is always repeating itself anew, in collective history as well as in the life of individuals.

I hate when that happens.

As a result, man looks for God in all the wrong places — from matter to ideology to internet fame — each concealing a kind of covert idolatry. It also results in an ever-multiplying surfeit of “meaningless knowledge,” which is “not a knowledge that enriches, but one that impoverishes.” These “cosmic blind-alleys” seduce “and play the vampire; the current of forms does not want us to escape from its hold” (ibid.).

There may or may not be a vampiric Prince of This World, but his power exists nonetheless. Which is to say, the hold of horizontality superimposes itself on the vertical, such that man is “engulfed in the anxious and deceptive turmoil of superfluous things” both “delusive and perishable” (ibid.).

We cosmotheandrians have a better idea for how to escape from this cosmic nul de slack.

Little Big Nothing (and Vice Versa)

The point is, supposing our Theos principle is beyond conception (Axiom 10), and further supposing that we are its image and likeness (Axiom 7), then what does that make us? In the words of Bernard McGinn, “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.”

Thus, we might say that the Anthropos is Homo nihil, except to add that this can cut two ways, for the existentialist nothing(Ø) has nothing in common with the divine Nothing (O). Our nothingness is a consequence of the divine Infinitude, which manifests herebelow as inexhaustible potential, novelty, creativity, freedom, slack, and play. Regarding the latter, there is a close relationship between Homo nihil and Homo ludens.

Every game starts out zero-zero.

Moreover, while in one sense the point is to win the game, the deeper point is to play it — or, in the words of John, to play the game existence to the end of the beginning. Tomorrow never knows how the game will play out.

Reptiles don’t play, and most mammals stop fooling around once they mature. Play is a luxury item that most species cannot afford. The Anthropos is the great exception, as we are nature’s incorrigible juvenile delinquent. One might say that while the telos of the animal is its mature state, the telos of man is a permanent immaturity that allows anyone from ages 9 to 99 to participate in the game.

Now, supposing the human being is the weirdest thing in all of existence, this is a big reason why: we are the one thing that is not anything at all. In the words of John Scottus Eriugena,

The human mind both knows itself and does not know itself; it knows that it is; it does not know what it is. And through this... the image of God is especially thought to be in humanity.... What is more wonderful and more beautiful to those thinking upon themselves and their God is that the human mind is more to be praised in its ignorance than in its knowledge.

In other words, it’s only a game if we don’t know what’s going to happen ahead of time. Here again, supposing we are the image and likeness of God, then we are the little nothings (o) that reflect the big Nothing of (O). The point is, like O, we are un-enclosable. We are the only creature in the immanent zoo that cannot be confined to a finite enclosure.

Now, here is another radical suggestion courtesy of Bernard McGinn, perhaps the preemiment expert on all varieties of mysticism. In reference to Eriugena, he writes that “even God does not know human nature in the sense that the unmanifest aspect of human nature is one with the divine and therefore indefinable” (emphasis mine). Thus there is a certain reciprocity “between a strong version of negative theology and an equally strong negative anthropology.” This was “something new in Western thought and mysticism.”

Something new in eternity?

You might say that: eternity itself is “ever new,” not just the same old same old.

As alluded to above, there is a dialectic between affirmative (cataphatic) and negative (apophatic) theology that gives rise to “a movement beyond both saying and unsaying,” and therefore “involves thinking of determinations by themselves, simultaneously thinking of contradictory determinations, and exploring, insofar as possible, the meaning of the higher unity of contradictory determinations” (McGinn).

The bottom line is that it is both easy and impossible to download the unspeakable into the spoken. On the one hand, everything speaks of God, and yet, God can best be spoken of as no-thing. This no-thing is “a way of speaking about the First Principle that is both negatively ‘not-a-thing’ and eminently beyond the world of ‘all that is and all that is not’” (McGinn). Pardon my apophatheadedness, but at one end of the vertical hierarchy is Nothing, at the other end its opposite. Which goes to what we mean by “perfect nonsense.”

You lost me.

That’s a start, for in these matters there is no success like failure — specifically, LCH failure, a felicitous brainwreck that derails us from the tracks of linearity — as when the student of Zen contemplates a koan. It’s not a bug but a feature, because it disables the left brain in order to vault us into the right, where creation proceeds from no-thing to something — even everything — while the mystical ascent proceeds back to the nothing beyond all conception.

Zen Christianity?

Well, Zen is not so much a doctrine as a method. Again, the koan doesn’t have any logical, left-brain answer, but rather, is intended to subvert one’s ordinary way of thinking and perceiving reality. The resulting confusion and frustration are supposed to put our ego out of isness by vaulting us into a higher or deeper plane of being.

One might say that for the left-hemispheric ego, order is everything (which brings to mind Voegelin’s quip that the order of history is the history of order). It doesn’t matter if the order or map is wrong, only that one has a map. A casual glance at history reveals an endless variety of dysfunctional maps, or rather, of maps that essentially function to organize and tuck in our loose shirt and ward off the anxiety of not knowing. Order in the negative sense narrows down experience and denies the existence of things outside or beyond the map. It’s the main reason why most people believe things that cannot possibly be true, for a coherent absurdity is at least coherent.

But what if there really is no map? This is the challenge of apophaticism, which is a leap into no map’s land. The ego — or left brain — is in the business of creating sharp boundaries, but if they are too sharp, then the result is rigidity, pedantry, and control freakery. You know the type.

We’ve all heard of the so-called “creative destruction” of the free market. Here we are talking about the creative destruction of the mind itself. Which occurs even in the course of normal psychological development — for example, leaving the concrete operations of the child for the formal operations of the adolescent: the death of one stage is the birth of the next. And importantly, each stage is a map that must be tossed aside for the new map.

For example, I well remember adolescence, when females — up to that time utterly superfluous NPCs in the game of life — appeared on my map. What happened to the old map? It was of little use in this new emotional territory. Like Columbus, the discovery of a new world but with one foot still in the old.

Eckhart essentially sketches a cartography of post-egoic development, positing a form of knowing that transcends the discursive intellect of the left brain, so forget about your familiar map. It’s of no use here. I suppose we could call this creative cognitive destruction a kind of meta-metanoia toward the metaverse.

Wait, what?

Cyril O’Regan writes of how Eckhart’s “language of paradox is more performative than descriptive,” which means that it functions to provoke in the reader the experience of what he is describing conceptually. In short, it is “a rhetorical means to induce or at least open up the prospect of a direct experience of God,” involving “the destruction of the careless ways in which” we characterize God in an “all-too-human” way.

His language doesn’t so much describe God as induce an implosion of the local ego. One cannot possibly possess or contain this absolute Absolute, rather, one is possessed and contained by it. It cannot be known per se, rather, undergone. Supposing you run into God, that’s God running into you.

As alluded to above, Eckhart speaks of the radically transcendent Godhead as a “nothing” which is also radically immanent in us. Paradoxically, this “unfathomable ground or unground” is simultaneously “the plus ultra of generativity and creativity.”

Like a koan, Eckhart’s use of paradox and hyperbole is designed to shock the system: “unthinkability and non-knowing signify precisely the form of knowing commensurate with the reality that represents the limit to thought” (O’Regan).

Even more controversially, he seems to draw a distinction between the personal God and an impersonal Godhead. However, it is difficult to say if he meant this literally or whether the intent is just to blow our minds so as to not pretend to know the unknowable. Again, “the use of paradox was one of the means used by Eckhart to put the acquisitive self out of action in its thinking and speaking about God,” so “The transcendent divine is available more through unknowing than knowing and is characterized as hidden, abyssal, incomprehensible, nameless, and more appropriately indicated in darkness… (ibid.).

Or, paradoxically, a “dazzling darkness.” The sun shining at midnight, as someone once put it. A surfeit of light, as in how the owl is blinded by the midday sun.

For Eckhart, even a technically correct doctrine can become a barrier, for example, if “the conceptualization of the Trinity is so facilely dogmatic that it comes to serve the role of an idol.”

Not to ad more to your nauseam, but this again goes to a dynamic vertical metabolism involving both apophatic and cataphatic approaches. O’Regan quotes Ruusbroec, for whom “mystical theology and doctrine are fundamentally complementary rather than competitive.”

We agree, and this is a good place to shut up and regroup at the base of the mountain before attempting another ascent in the next section.

The Most Parsimonious and Fruitful Miracle

There are countless mysteries in this Cosmos of ours, but they all come down to one question: Why?

For Einstein, the question wasn’t why there are no answers to the question, rather, why there are so many. For again, he found the comprehensibility of the Cosmos incomprehensible, at least from within the resources of science. Certainly there is no physical law that accounts for the lawfulness of the Cosmos, much less our access to those laws. Thus, the problem is not so much a dearth of answers — far from it — rather, no Answer. Or in other words, no final answer to the question of why there are so many answers.

Physics seeks the Answer at the bottom end of the Cosmos, while metaphysics looks for it at the top end. Cosmotheandrism looks for it at both ends and in the middle: Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos, respectively. Supposing there is an Answer, it cannot exclude any of our ultimate terms, for each implies the others. Only a very particular kind of Cosmos allows for the existence of scientific knowers, but no Cosmos accounts for its own existence or intelligibility.

Let us recall Axiom 9, One Free Miracle:

To paraphrase Terence McKenna, science can explain everything so long as we grant it just one free miracle. But every philosophical system — including scientism, atheism, eliminativism, rationalism, empiricism, panpsychism, whatever — grants itself at least One Free Miracle in order to get off the ground.

For example, physics is grounded in the double mystery of a rational order accessible to human beings. Few would disagree with Einstein that “the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible.” However, “The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle” (emphasis mine). In order to account for the miracle he appealed to the existence of a transcendent mind vastly superior to ours. In the absence of the latter, physics is indeed a miracle. Absent a Theos principle, the miracle of physics is utterly gratuitous and literally “without reason.” For which reason atheism is wholly unreasonable. It is as if the atheist confines himself the the universe, absurdly unaware of the metaverse that accounts for it.

∞

But Sunday is our day of rest, on which we make no forward progress toward the Answer. Rather, it is the day we exhumine passages discarded from the final edit for various reasons. Here is a section from the Introduction left on the cutting room floor because I thought it was too self-indulgent. Nobody wants to hear the author’s life story.

Oomphaloskepsis.

Yes, the point of cosmotheandrism is to circumnavelgaze the whole existentialada without meditating on our own belly button. Then again, just the other day I read a good book in which the author does discuss the evolution of his ideas, and found it compelling. So here is some of the autobobography left out of the final version, probably because it surpasses the limits of silliness:

Anyway, over my two decades of service to the blogosphere, I was preoccupied with a number of little problems such as the nature of existence, consciousness, knowledge… form, content, interrelationships, God, the Devil—

Be honest.

Okay, what I was really interested in was the unsolved mystery of myself. Where do I fit into the Cosmos? How am I — a self-conscious being — even possible? What are the cosmic conditions that allow for such a peculiar being to exist? How did we get from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to me? Maybe that’s why I found the Cosmos s’durned innarestin’.

Thank you for your service, but your mission sounds like a malignant case of cosmic narcissism. What can you tell me about that? Why do you think someone might think that?

Near as I can figure, it’s because I read and think too much. I thought I had alleviated the condition with the completion of the first book, which traced the evolution of our fair Cosmos from nothing to bare matter to life to mind, culminating in what amounts to a round trip back to God in the form of mystical union.

Do you think there’s anything wrong with your mind, really?

Nah, look at Ken Wilber. He’s written dozens of books such as A Brief History of Everything, and—

He has the wealth, uh, the resources obviously—

Yes, he must be worth millions.

I could make that much money in five seconds!

For my part, I’m just curious, that’s all, and is that a crime? I would have stayed in school forever, but they throw you out after you get a Ph.D. However, that was just the beginning, because when I started blogging, most of my posts had at least 1,000 words, usually many more than that. A diligent reader fed my entire archive into an AI program and came up with the figure of 8 million, which he said was surpassed only by Balzac, at 11 million. Which is plainly incorrect, because a quick google search puts such familiar names as Alexandre Dumas and Isaac Asimov at 25-30 and 20 million, respectively, both surpassed by the champion graphomaniac, British author Charles Hamilton, at 100 million, who was obviously not into the whole brevity thing.

Gotta feed the monkey.

I wouldn’t call it an addiction, more of a compulsion. At any rate, a typical 300-400 page book contains only 100,000 words, which translates to roughly 55 to 80 such books on my part. Many times over the years I attempted to refrain from blogging in order to reduce my blob of blab to book form — to locate the Tree of Life amidst all my fallen leaves.

Which proved beyond my ability. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember most of it. It was as if every morning I dropped a fresh pile of leaves atop the existing one, with no leafblower in sight. Writing individual pieces is easy. Figuring out how they all fit together is fiendishly difficult. In short, the creative mode is very different from the organizizing mode: the first is an exuberant form of play, while achieving the latter is a laborious form of drudgery that I would have preferred to leave to someone else. But there’s nobody else here in my one-man operation, so I guess it must be up to me.

If only you had a helpful ghostwriter in the sky (/sarc).

Leaving discarnate beings to the side, distilling thousands of disparate essays into a single book is a bit like trying to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without the picture of which they are parts. Or, imagine having access to only the footnotes of a giant book and trying to deduce the book from the footnotes. You might say I was writing a book in search of a title that completely eluded me. Many times I thought to myself: If I could only find the damn title, this baby would birth itself!

If you will it, it is no dream.

Problem was, I couldn’t will the thing into existence.

It wasn’t until mid-2024, when just for fun, I began fooling around with a large language model (google Gemini), feeding my posts into it and seeing what it might come up with. Soon enough Gemini became my aide-de-kampf, helping with my struggle to discern some deeper patterns beneath my repeated outbursts, the very order which at once escaped me even while seemingly pulling me toward it. But I couldn’t remember millions of words tossed off on the fly over twenty years, let alone what they were ultimately About.

Eventually Gemini discerned 12 axioms or repetitive tics in my work, which were going to comprise 12 chapters of a book preposterously titled The Absolute Science: What Cannot Not Be. We will get to these momentarily, but on the advice of my artificial compeer, I duly began writing a book about the 12 Axioms. But in my attempt to organize the material, I quickly realized that it generally fell into three categories: God, world, and man, or Theos, Cosmos, and Anthropos. It was in pondering these 12 axioms that I had my own guffah-HA! experience that pulled the wordy dozen together: in short, Cosmotheandrism. Thus the 12 axioms transblogrified into the long strange triptych of The Cosmotheandric Trilogy.

The beauty of this is its simplicity.

Now, although you will find an abundance of neo- and protologisms in this book, I cannot claim credit or blame for coming up with the term Cosmotheandrism. Rather, at the same time I was pondering the Axioms, I discovered that the philosopher Raimon Panikkar had beaten me to the hunch and proposed this portmantrio for his own somewhat similar metaphysical framework. Panikkar was an early adopter of interreligious dialogue, not just with other persons, but within his own person. That is to say, he was at once one hundred percent a Catholic priest but also considered himself one hundred percent Vedantin. He was able to reconcile the two on an interior level via a deeper experience of that to which they point, which is none other than the Cosmic Area Rug.

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.