Theism: What’s in it for Me?

It is easy enough to prove the existence of God—

Objection!

I said prove, not believe. The former is a matter of logic or experience, the latter one of commitment. The first is a dry conclusion, the second a fluid marriage. One might say that faith seeks understanding as much as understanding seeks faith, because knowing of God isn’t the same as knowing God.

It is also a matter of sensibility, for many of our contemporary sophisticates believe religion is in poor taste, others that atheism is, and de gustibus. Everyone is attracted to different things, nor can we will what spontaneously attracts or repels us. On the other hand, you’ve probably had the experience of initially not liking something — say, a musical artist or genre — and eventually learning to appreciate it. So in that sense, sometimes we can will what we learn to enjoy. This is especially true if someone we respect tells us that the the payoff is worth the effort.

Nevertheless, even supposing we believe in God, does God believe in us? Or, in the words of Dávila, What is difficult is not to believe in God, but to believe we are important to Him.

Eckhart had some wildly non-inappropriate things to say about this, for example, that

It would be a small thing to me that “the Word was made flesh” for man in Christ as a person distinct from me unless he was also made flesh in me personally so that I too might be the Son of God.

In other words, woo hoo for God, but what’s in it for the restavus? Speaking frankly,

What does it help me if this birth is always happening and yet it does not happen in me? All that matters is that it happens in me.

Christianity is a quintessential expression of cosmotheandrism, in that it quite clearly promulgates the view that in the Incarnation, Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos are officially entangled: “The idea of the Incarnation and the idea that man is created in the image of God are only feasible if the scope of the individual and the divine are not wholly exclusive” (Johnson). In the ancient world such an entanglement was more or less unthinkable. For example, for neoplatonism it was possible to ascend to God, but only by losing one’s individuality.

Cashing in your chimps.

Correct. One can experience God but one cannot be there to experience it, much as how one can only provide an after-action account of last night’s dream from outside the dream. The Dreamer Who Dreams the Dream is not the one who only remembers it.

But with the Incarnation it is as if the Dreamer becomes the dream, or rather, the author of history — which, let’s face it, is already the weirdest dream ever — takes part in it. The question is, does this render the dream even crazier, or wake us from the dream?

As to whether God believes in man, the question answers itself, because the Incarnation implies God’s faith that human nature can benefit from the exercise. Which goes back to Eckhart’s question: what is the point of the Incarnation if it does not happen in me? All that matters is that it happens in me!

∞

Now, more generally cosmotheandrism most certainly believes in a Theos who believes in us. After all, it’s only fair. It’s called reciprocity, the point being that God and man are complementary, or two poles of a single relation. Of course, in all complementarities one is more primordial, in this case God. But God is the very Principle of both personhood and relation. This Principle is itself substance-in-relation, meaning that an irreducible Otherness is woven into the very substance of the Godhead, and for this reason reflected herebelow. Specifically, it is woven into us, in that we too are intersubjective persons, i.e., members of one another.

Speaking of Eckhart, he attempted his own version of cosmotheandrism he called the Opus Tripartitum. It was never finished, but only because cosmotheandrism can never be finished. His opus was intended to be a grand synthesis of being, truth, and unity — or existence, intellect, and ground, all mutually interpenetrating and ultimately the One Thing that is always happening, whether in God or in us.

Eckhart also wrote something he called Paradisus Animae Intelligentis which, in the parlance of the times, means The Paradise of the Intelligent Soul. The intellect is the nous, which for Eckhart is our uncreated spark in the dark, where the vestigial pilot light of human consciousness touches and mirrors the divine Light without separation. We could say that the Spirit is the wind that stirs the spark into a flame, but that is a somewhat different rant.

In any event, Eckhart’s paradise is not a distant spatial location, rather, an interior state of dynamic and unconditioned presence. It is where God’s birth takes place in the ground of the soul — where the created and uncreated overlap entirely. Conversely, if God were literally single he could by no means be free to mingle with anything but himself.

A confirmed old bachelor?

Correct: an ordinary God who likes to live his life free of strife, doing whatever he thinks is best for him.

But let an Other in your life and your sabbatical is through!

Not necessarily, for in cosmotheandrism Being and Intellect constitute a harmonious identity-in-difference mirroring the same one in divinas, i.e., between Father-Ground and Son-Logos. In short, God and the soul share one single act of being. Eckhart’s “paradise" is the realization that Cosmos, Anthropos, and Theos are not three separate entities but a single interpenetrating reality unfolding now and in every now, since this dynamic now is all there ever is.

Shifting seers for a moment, here is a surprising aphorism that goes directly to our final Axiom: That which is not a person is not finally anything. As it so happens, Eckhart was writing at a time when increasing attention was being paid to the nature and significance of the Anthropic individual, i.e., the self. What we take for granted was then just coming into view. One might say that he was witness to an expanding homoverse, for which reason “it became increasingly possible to speak of the individual as being divine” and therefore also “possible to speak of the divine as being individual.” Prior to this, Eckhart’s approach would have been regarded as a hubristic attempt “to usurp abilities that properly belong to the divine realm of the eternal. From that standpoint, an individual cannot be temporal and eternal” (Johnson):

In traditional societies, the individual is not at all a place of privilege. What is individual is transitory, part of the world of change. In a cyclical conception of time, individual life has meaning insofar as it reenacts or participates in what is archetypal and beyond the profane world of change…. Insofar as an individual participates in what is archetypal, he or she ceases to individual. By this way of thinking, how could one be both universal and individual?

I can’t worry about that. Eternal life goes on, man.

Yes, except to say that it goes on here and now. Which is what we call human privilege. It’s not fair to lesser species — even to hypothetical angels who are stuck where they are in the cosmic scheme. Rather, man alone spans the whole existentialada — which, of course, is one way of conceptualizing the Incarnation, for

Clearly, if individuals remain in the divine, are reflections of it, and seek to return to it, little distance must be crossed to say that an individual can be both man and God.

This little distance goes to Eckhart’s Impertinent Question of “what’s in it for me?” For it goes to “the paradox of being both created as creatures and uncreated as God, and the way that God is wholly present in each individual while He is also beyond being.” The Incarnation represents the place where “mankind straddles the divide between the creaturely and divine,” and we are always in this place.

So the Incarnation just rubs it in?

In a sense yes, because it is the full actualization of what is always there in potential: God becomes man that man might become God.

Waste and Void

Yesterday we spoke of the Theos breaking the fourth wall of spacetime, which implies a kind of top-down movement from Creator to creation, or from O to both Cosmos and Anthropos. We can also consider the matter from our end, in that Gödel’s theorems prove that any frame we use to describe the universe is always already broken, which is to say, incomplete: wherever we are, we must appeal to a higher order in order to know where we are, and this appeal is in the mode of faith, not knowledge per se. Rather, faith is the link between two orders, however we conceptualize them.

For example, the working scientist has faith in the intelligibility of the world without being able to account for this intelligibility. To paraphrase Polanyi, this wholly reasonable faith takes form in the implicit knowledge of an impending discovery — or in other words, we believe in order to understand, but we never stop at any mere understanding.

Here the recovering alcoholic knows something that eludes the sober materialist, insofar as the former comes to believe in a Power greater than himself that may restore him to sanity: the sanity is posterior to the belief. This belief or faith merely establishes diplomatic relations with this Power before being able to say what it is or does. Likewise the scientist who must believe in a power greater than science in order to arrive at any sane ideas about the nature of reality. In other words, he must retain a stance of openness toward whatever realm being explored. Supposing we enclose the world in an ideological frame, then we have broken off relations with reality.

Cosmotheandrism is not explicitly about politics, but it certainly has political implications. For example, think back on what happened the night of November 3, 2026, when an electoral tsunami washed over the nation. Whatever one’s perspective, the tsunami obliterated the existing political frame, and now what?

Too soon to tell.

In an open Cosmos it is always too soon to tell, because no one can tell ahead of time what the Cosmos will tell us. All knowledge is preliminary to new discoveries that no one can foresee. We cannot deduce the future from the present — much less ordain the future — for as we have said, reality itself is the Mother of All Unintended Consequences. Again, for Polanyi, reality is characterized by its capacity to surprise us with new discoveries. Thus, a good theory is fruitful whereas a bad one is a dead end.

Nevertheless, it is still unsettling to wake up and find our frame lying in pieces on the ground, whether it is the geocentric frame destroyed by heliocentrism, or creationism by Darwinism, Newton by Einstein, or the Gutenberg Galaxy by the internet. This latter is happening in real time as we make the turbulent transition from literacy to post-literacy. I don’t believe it will be possible for any of us who still reside in the Old World of literacy to ever grow accustomed to this new post-truth world of relativism, subjectivism, and emotionalism, wherein every man is his own priest, philosopher, scientist, and journalist.

This latter world is inherently unstable and turbulent, since it has essentially declared independence from the Absolute, so there is no longer any controlling mythos-frame shared by everyone. A new frame could only be imposed from the top-down via authoritarianism. Which only enables more turbulence. To pretend to know where the post-literate turbulence is headed is like pretending to know what will happen once the lunatics are in charge of the asylum, each lunatic dwelling in his own private delusion. It is not a matter of which one is the real Christ or Napoleon, rather, the recognition that no one is. But try telling that to the new saviors!

∞

Speaking of frames, Schuon writes that “The whole existence of the peoples of antiquity, and of traditional peoples in general, is dominated by two key-ideas, the idea of Center and the idea of Origin.” Thus reality is framed by Center and Origin, even if the Origin is the Big Bang and we are in the middle of it.

In reality, our two poles orient us to something in space and time pointing to what is beyond them. For example, the “sacred Center” is “the place where Heaven has touched the earth,” where “God has manifested Himself in order to pour forth His grace.” In short, it is any place where the breakthrough of grace — of vertical energies — is particularly noticeable: In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday.

Likewise, the Origin “is the quasi-timeless moment when Heaven was near and terrestrial things were still half-celestial.” Or, “in the case of civilizations having a historical founder,” it is “the period when God spoke,” which is to say, broke the fourth wall — as occurred in the Axial Age vis-à-vis the Hebrew prophets, Greek philosophers, Upanishadic seers, Taoist dudes, Buddhist pneumanauts, et al.

Incoming from T.S. Eliot, who speaks of

A moment not out of time, but in time, in what we call history: transecting, bisecting the world of time, a moment in time but not like a moment of time.

A moment in time but time was made through that moment: for without the meaning there is no time, and that moment of time gave the meaning.

Otherwise — absent this vertical ingression —

Waste and void. Waste and void. And darkness on the face of the deep.

Again! I hate it when that happens. Who can breathe in such a place?

No one can, hence

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

The transcendence of things is the salt that seasons their blandness.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

The waters of the West are stagnant, but the spring is unpolluted.

Hell is any place from which God is absent.

Each of these aphorisms goes to both God and man breaking the fourth wall. And we needn’t dwell on the meaning of Christmas, but there it is: the story of Jesus’ birth is the quintessence of God breaking the fourth wall of spacetime.

Granted, breaking the fourth wall is usually inappropriate. Most of the time, in order for art to function as it is supposed to, the frame must be respected. Typically we want to abandon ourselves to the illusion of art, not be reminded that it is an illusion. One of the reasons why breaking the frame can be effective is because of its unexpectedness. If it happened all the time, the novelty would quickly wear off: if everyone is the savior, then no one is.

It’s not just a film or play that has a frame, but all works of art. Art always involves some kind of boundary separating it from the world, such as a literal frame around a painting. Without the frame, we wouldn’t know what to look at.

In the case of the Incarnation, what is the frame? It depends, for there are multiple frames or hermeneutical perspectives, from the literal to the psychological to the cosmic and more. At the very least, there are the traditional four senses of scripture, the literal, allegorical, tropological, and anagogical.

In the most obvious and literal sense, the frame is a particular man named Jesus. However, this man is embedded in a particular tribe, but also within a narrative that goes back to the creation of man and even to creation itself. At the far end of the narrative frame is his return, but meanwhile life goes on. I can’t worry about that, man.

Now, no one has to reinvent the telephone or computer every time we use them, but that’s not the way it is with regard to art or scripture, which necessitate a personal engagement on our part. There is a passive element, as in suspending disbelief, but also an active one, as per the various hermeneutical frameworks referenced above, not to mention the wild card of the Holy Spirit that blows where it wants, gosh!

In the case of both art and scripture, the purpose of the frame is to convey something that is beyond the frame, just as, on a more mundane level, we use words to convey a meaning not reducible to the words themselves. Which is why a literal interpretation of scripture defeats its purpose, for it reverses the vector flow of meaning — like focusing on the finger instead of that to which the finger is pointing.

Now, if man is created, this implies that he is analogous to a work of art with multiple levels of meaning. But he will ultimately point to his creator, just as Macbeth points to Shakespeare or the Mona Lisa to Rembrandt.

Man as such breaks the frame of the Cosmos and cannot be contained by it. Or, we have one foot in the Cosmos and one foot out. We are existentially amphibious, which is to say, material and spiritual. Matter cannot literally contain the soul, rather, vice versa: the soul — again, literally — contains the body, which means that it transcends the material. It is only in this transcendent space where intelligence meets intelligibility, where mind encounters truth, where the soul perceives beauty, and where we encounter a power that can restore us to metaphysical sanity.

This is another way of saying that this is an open Cosmos, open to its transcendent source. And that we in turn are uniquely open at our end, in that the very principle of being is reflected in us. Conversely, if the Cosmos were indeed enclosed within itself, then man cannot be “about” anything transcending himself. He can be about “selfish genes,” or neural activity, or class warfare, or a blind will to power, but these reduce to empty frames that are about nothing.

Let’s just say that the only way to repair our broken frame is for it to be inbroken by something from outside the frame. Otherwise, waste and void.

Truth is in history, but history is not the truth.

History commits suicide by denying all transcendence. For history to be of concern to us, there must be something that transcends it: there must be something in history more than history.

Homo Ludens and Theo Ludens

The concept of play — both Anthropic and Theic — is so foundational that it either requires its own Axiom or must be the “activity” that results from the other 12. One might say it is the “dynamism” both within and without the Theos. For example, Rahner suggests that

All play — just as much as every task which we set ourselves to master with real earnestness of purpose — is an attempt to approximate to the Creator, who performs his work with the divine seriousness which its meaning and purpose demand, and yet with the spontaneity and effortless skill of the great artist he is, creating because he wills to create and not because he must.

To repeat what was said yesterday, this “mingling of the light-hearted and the serious is a flower that grows only midway betwixt heaven and earth,” or in the Anthropic space between transcendence and immanence:

Maximus the Confessor expounds this truth in his great dissertation on the playing of the Logos. When God himself breaks into our apparently closed order of play, something occurs that is completely beyond the power of any human words to express. Then, we can only be like Paul and speak of the weakness and foolishness of God…

You know you’re in utopia when the game never ends, for “the Christian has never ceased to use the concept of play as a verbal figure that most aptly describes, as far as he is able to conceive it, the state of the blessed in the world to come.” Thus, in the game of time we acquire skills that will serve us well in the game of eternity.

This is only the preseason?

Why not? “Our true playing and our true merriment will begin when this world has been left behind.” Then “The end will be even as the beginning — an eternal childhood.”

Too sappy.

Agreed. Let’s back up a couple of steps and inquire into the conditions that render a game possible: first, there must be rules, but the rules cannot determine the outcome, rather, are the boundary conditions that enable us to freely play within them. Given the rules, we adopt strategies and tactics to play, but the rules don’t dictate the strategies.

Our Cosmos is full of immaterial rules, from the laws of physics to the Rights of Man.

Who’s the referee?

Reality. Which of course doesn’t put an end to cheating, because how many concepts, philosophies, and ideologies operate outside the bounds of reality? The list is endless. There are even doctrines that render any game impossible, such as determinism at one end, anarchism at the other. But the game is always played in the space between order and freedom.

What sets cosmotheandrism apart from the rest — but not really — is the claim that God not only invented the rules but participates in the game. For example, the Logos is rationality itself, which is to say rules. And yet, for Christianity the Logos participates in the very game enabled by the Logos.

The rules incarnate as a player?

We see this same principle expressed in mythic terms in the Bhagavad Gita, in that Krishna operates largely through the concept of lila, or divine play, sport, spontaneous action. etc. He plays within the Cosmos because playfulness is intrinsic to the supreme reality. Taoism too expresses a similar notion, albeit in a more impersonal way via the concept of wu wei, which is to say, effortless and unforced action or “non-doing.” And we’ve already discussed Judaism, with Wisdom hersoph always playing beside the Creator. Call the game what you want, but the same principle applies:

Now, speaking of invariant rules, there are four dimensions in the universe woven into a single continuous fabric known as spacetime, this latter constituting the visible or — at least ponderable — side of the Cosmic Area Rug. However, we know — or ought to know at any rate — that the Cosmos is neither self-sufficient nor self-explanatory. In other words, it is contingent and incomplete, or rather, its completion requires that it be related to its own source: the Cosmos is the entailment of a higher principle that is not the entailment of anything else. This latter surely is, but mere isness is not enough; rather its isness must somehow spill over into creation, otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

Every religion in some sense involves God breaking our four-dimensional wall, as when an actor does so by directly addressing the audience in a play or movie. There are degrees of breakage, from flashing a covert Jim Halpert look at the camera, to jumping out of the film altogether, as in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo.

Now, if creation is the vertical nexus between time and eternity, then we should not be surprised that history is full of knowing winks, ironic smiles, and mischievous glances that reveal to us the author of history — or in other words, that break through the domed stadium of spacetime enclosure.

But how? We supposedly live in a 4D world, but are we actually bound by these dimensions? If we were, then we could never know a timeless truth, perceive transcendent beauty, or undertake a virtuous act, for each of these involves the apprehension of something beyond the walls of history. So, if we can break the fourth wall, it must be because God broke it first.

Not to abuse his name again, but Gödel’s theorems imply that man qua man uniquely breaks through the walls of logic, reason, and formal systems. Thus, we have access to a transcendent dimension of unprovable truths. One might say that in knowing the rules of the cosmic game, we have partially transcended the game.

As for God making the first move, ancient Judaism maintained that the temple was where God liked to dwell, while for Christians the temple is human nature itself. More generally, religions have their sacred mountains, forests, rivers, and relics, each communicating something of what is beyond them.

There are, of course, religions of pure transcendence — e.g., Gnosticism — in which the point of the game is to flee immanence and ascend into a better world for better people. Pantheism is the opposite, conflating God and Cosmos, so the game is ordered to no higher end.

But if God is necessarily in every place and at every time, then it’s not so much a matter of looking for God as a way to look — for example, with aesthetic eyes. For example, as Dávila says, From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints. These footprints imply a big foot, so one might say that God is a Bigfoot sighting. God the necessary condition of art, while we are the sufficient condition, so The work of art is a covenant with God.

This is true of any creative activity, in which there is a mysterious x factor that makes the transcendent whole greater than the sum of the immanent parts. In art, 2+2 is always > 4. In bad art, 2+2 = 4 or even less.

Now, what if art is but an exalted form of play? And if it is true that Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says, then it is a case of certain aesthetic experiences shattering the fourth wall and initiating us into a larger transcendent dimension.

Transformations in O

This morning I read an article touching on the low academic status of self-styled interdisciplinarians, much less presumptuous multi-undisciplinarians such as myself. The problem is, mastery of any field is a lifetime endeavor, so stay in your lane. My only credentialed lane is clinical psychology, and here I am presuming to encroach on philosophy, theology, physics, biology, cosmology, logic, neuropsychiatry—

It’s a joke.

Agreed, but hopefully a self-aware one. Nor do I presume to contradict the consensus of any given field, say, physics. It is not as if I am arguing for a new paradigm of physics, rather, taking the experts at their word. Physics is weird enough without me having to insert my opinion. In fact, every field becomes weird at the margins, because that is where its conclusions reduce to its assumptions — where the LH rubber meets the RH road. For example, no physicist can say with a straight face what is before the Big Bang or beyond its expanding horizon.

Likewise psychology, about which I do know a thing or two about a thing or two. We psychologists assume the existence of conscious subjects, but none of us can say what a conscious subject actually is. But because it is an irreducible mystery, there is always the temptation to impose an intellectual abstraction over it in order to make the mystery go away. As we have already stipulated, there is no bottom to Bob, but if this is the case, how is it that Bob is presuming to get to the bottom of everything else?

I have also told the story of how in graduate school I not only learned all the theories, but even sub-theories within the theories. I quickly gravitated toward the discipline of psychoanalysis as the deepest and most adequate explanation, but then gravitated to sub-theories within sub-theories until arriving at a fellow named W.R. Bion, from whom I borrowed the idea — or non-idea, rather — of O, beyond which lies nothin’.

Being that I am here in Texas, I have no access to my own library. Here at One Cosmos your posts are guaranteed to be 100% human generated, but here I will make an exception. Gemini, can you provide a concise definition of O?

Wilfred Bion introduced “O” in his late works — most notably Transformations (1965) and Attention and Interpretation (1970) — to signpost ultimate reality, the unknowable thing-in-itself, or divine truth within the psychoanalytic encounter.

It marks Bion’s departure from classical psychoanalytic reductionism toward an apophatic, ontological model of mind.

Already you can see why this empty category is so central to cosmotheandrism, because it signifies nothing less than the Ultimate which we can only characterize in terms of ultimacy. The Cosmic Area Rug is a map of O, but no one here is pretending it is O. In order to do that, one would have to be devoid of irony.

Bion explicitly chose the letter O because it was neutral and unencumbered by theoretical baggage, standing variously for Origin, Ultimate Reality, Absolute Truth, or God.

• Unknowable in itself: O cannot be known through sensory data, memory, or intellectual concepts. It is not an object of knowledge.

• The source of emotional reality: It is the ultimate truth of a session — the dynamic, unintegrated emotional reality present between analyst and patient before it is symbolized.

• Transformative: While O cannot be known, it can be experienced or attained. Bion distinguishes between “knowing about truth” (K) and “becoming or being the truth” (O).

Every time we know something, it is a transformation from unknown to known, or O to (K). But knowledge is only a symbol of the reality that is O — much like LH and RH. It is not so much that O dwells in the RH, rather, that the RH is ordered to O, whereas our LH abstractions are representations of it.

In earlier psychoanalysis [i.e., those other models I found inadequate], the goal was the acquisition of insight — turning unconscious [RH] material into conscious [LH] knowledge (K). Bion shifts the primary goal of analysis from (K) to O: moving away from merely accumulating intellectual explanations about oneself to undergoing a direct emotional transformation in O.

In other words, experiential and participatory knowledge “in” and “of” O. And of course, by definition there could be no final knowledge of O, since it is the infinite and enexhaustible ground of all knowledge.

As it so happens, this was the subject of my doctoral thesis. Lucky for me, my advisors didn’t really know what I was talking about, so I was able to slip it right past them. In it, I (among other things) compared Bion’s ideas to David Bohm’s model of the implicate order in physics, whereby corporeal reality is essentially the ever-flowing explication of this prior order. I’ll spare us the details.

Bion explicitly drew upon classical epistemological and mystical traditions to frame O, creating a unique bridge between psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, and theology.

Here he could hardly help being an interdisciplinarian, since his model has implications for everything. Some psychoanalysts even speculated that Bion had lost his mind, which is of course true.

Kind of the point.

Yes, in order to find one’s mind one must first lose it. In another context you could even call it an ontological come-to-Jesus moment, as in “whoever wants to save his life will lose it,” and vice versa. For the O that can be named is not the real O. Indeed,

O shares deep structural parallels with negative theology (e.g., Meister Eckhart, Pseudo-Dionysius, or Kabbalistic concepts of Ein Sof). Ultimate reality can only be defined by what it is not. Any attempt to name, define, or conceptualize O immediately degrades it into mere (K). The analyst's stance of "no memory or desire" mirrors the contemplative state of kenosis (self-emptying).

Alert readers will understand how all of this blew my mind, nor has the blowing ever stopped, for it is the literal analogue of the expanding universe, only in the key of subjectivity: an imploding universe, as it were. What is beyond the implosion? We can only speculate, but I have reasons to believe it is the same as that which is beyond the expanding universe.

Bion was fascinated by Plato’s Theory of Forms. O operates like an unembodied Form or mathematical invariant that seeks incarnation in temporal reality. Emotional truths exist in O prior to their psychological manifestation in a person.

Hoo boy. To my knowledge, Bion never speculated on the meaning of the Incarnation, but one of his students and my mentors did, James Grotstein. Gemini, I am away from my library. What do you know about that? Am I remembering correctly?

Your memory is precisely on target. In his extensive psychoanalytic and metapsychological explorations of Wilfred Bion’s work — most notably across his papers on the “Transcendent Position” and his foundational writings on the “Dreamer who dreams the dream” — Grotstein frequently turned to theological and mystical archetypes, and the Incarnation served as his ultimate metaphor for how O enters human reality.

Boom, there it is.

Grotstein saw the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation (the Logos taking on flesh, the infinite becoming finite) not merely as a piece of religious dogma, but as a profound structural template for psychoanalytic ontology: the mechanism by which raw, unknowable, and terrifying ultimate reality (O) translates itself into lived emotional experience.

Come to think of it, Grotstein was a little crazy too, but in a good way. He too was full of wordplay and applied humor. He

conceptualized a “dual track” of subjectivity: the Ineffable Subject is the transcendent, hidden dimension of the mind — what Grotstein explicitly equated with the Godhead, the deep and formless infinite, and Bion’s O. It exists prior to space, time, and representation. The Phenomenal Subject is our everyday, secular, flesh-and-blood ego — the creature of time, space, and sensory data.

For Grotstein, psychological and spiritual growth depends entirely on a bridge forming between these two realms. That bridge requires an incarnation.

Here again, if you don’t understand why Bob’s mind was blown, then you don’t understand Bob, nor why Bob is only endeavoring to blow your mind as well.

Grotstein argued that the Incarnation provides the exact phenomenological model for this:

• The Descent of the Infinite: Just as the theological Logos empties itself (kenosis) to enter human history as a vulnerable, finite human being, O must undergo a profound contraction or translation to register within the human psyche-soma.

• The “Truth Drive”: Grotstein postulated that humans possess an innate “truth drive” — an irresistible compulsion to encounter and embody O. However, because O in its raw state is blinding (like looking directly at the sun), it requires a medium of incarnation to be tolerated.

For “truth drive,” substitute the “divine attractor” toward Celestial Central.

In Grotstein's view, every genuine moment of psychoanalytic insight or emotional breakthrough is a micro-incarnation: a transient, miraculous moment where the transcendent and the immanent briefly kiss, and the unnamable truth of who we are finally finds a body to live in.

So eternal thanks to Wilfred Bion and James Grotstein, for there would be no cosmotheandrism without you, nor any hope of ever locating the Cosmic Area Rug.

Those two guys were like (lower case) incarnations of O.

Yeah, pretty much.

Irony Will Save the World

Let’s indulge in another weave, as I attempt to inject some new blood into the old. According to google, the Weave is “A conversational or oratorical approach in which Trump intentionally departs from a primary topic to discuss multiple separate subjects, anecdotes, or grievances before eventually looping back (or claiming to loop back) to the original point.” Trump

rejects labels like “rambling”, calling himself the “great weaver of all time” and asserting that it requires a “genius” level of mental organization akin to a “beautiful mind” where everything is connected. He has also claimed that English professors admire the method. His digressions frequently transition across wildly different subjects in a single speech or appearance — such as jumping from drones and the Department of Transportation to lumberjacks, the stock market, or historical elections, or meandering through pop-culture references, sharks, batteries, and economic complaints.

After all, even without the new material, we are attempting the greatest weave of all time, which is to say, a brilliant strategy to locate the Cosmic Area Rug that connects everything to everything else. In so doing we too must transition across wildly different subjects and even pepper the text with pop-culture references before looping back to the original point. You might say—

Stable genius?

No, flexible subgenius.

Biographers, media critics, and political opponents view the style differently, characterizing it as undisciplined free-association, incoherent word salad, or a sign of declining cognitive acuity and rambling.

That… that’s just nitpicking, isn’t it?

∞

The subject is Eckhart, who was also a formidable weaver, especially in his vernacular sermons, which are not only full of surprising assertions but asserted in order to surprise. Here we might say that his medium is the message, as it is intended to blast the listener right out of the medium of language per se.

In other words, he is using language in order to disable language and vault the listener into a realm beyond language. Thus the use of paradox, wordplay, irony, chiasmus, antinomy, and explosive metaphor. Not all of it works, probably because of the different mentalities between today and 700 years ago. Nor did it work for the authorities, insofar as they focused on the literal words instead of allowing their minds to be blown by what he was saying. Nowadays we can be much more ironic about such matters. But there is nothing ironic about medieval inquisitors, including of course our contemporary ideological ones. In our day, academia, the news media, and popular debate in general have become far more obnoxiously literal and dogmatic and far less ironically self-aware. The worst of them are at once diabolically cynical and childishly credulous.

Eight year olds, Dude.

Indeed. Cosmotheandrism makes the ironic assertion that irony will save the world, at least so long as it does not morph into cynicism. Rather, there is a sincere form of irony, which is not the same as ironic sincerity. Rather, it is meta-sincerity, the acknowledgement that we cannot help but regard any intellectual system with a knowing wink and a wry smile — even the Cosmic Area Rug, insofar as it necessarily exists but is always under construction. Everyone has their version of the Rug, but the moment you reify it you turn it into something less than the Rug.

You end up high on your own supply.

Precisely: cosmotheandrism goes to ultimacy, not to the ultimate per se (Axiom 6). To reduce the latter to the former is to indulge in idolatry, or G3AOA. Which is why even in utopia it would be prudent to keep an eye on the utopians, because they will surely screw it up. Is this not the lesson of Genesis 3 — the dwellers of paradise opting out for something better? Here in middle earth there is always — ironically — something better because there is always something worse. Recall Schuon’s words:

Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility — and necessity — of evil.

Which is why herebelow there are no solutions, only tradeoffs. Yesterday we alluded to one of them: literacy. On the one hand it ushers us into an interior world of detachment, objectivity, abstract ideas, analysis, rationality, individualism, separation between knower and known, et al. In this regard it is the full exploitation of LH potential. Which is fine, so long as it is not detached from RH holism, synthesis, context, etc. To maintain this balance is actually the archetype of irony, since we must take our maps seriously (ultimacy) even while knowing damn well they can never be the territory (ultimate). Conflating the two is a permanent temptation that the Anthropos has perennial trouble resisting. We are surrounded by scientistic and religionist dogmatists, but truly truly, the cosmotheandrist has no dogma in this fight, except insofar as it is a more or less adequate map, not the territory. Our dogma — or prime directive rather — is to weave all of the useful maps into the the one Rug.

Truthitarianism?

We’ll allow it. So long as you mean that ironically

Theophany, Cosmophany, Anthrophany

A theophany is an appearance or manifestation of God, which, for Berdyaev, “is given above all in freedom rather than authority.” Which is a remarkable claim, because it essentially means that God can only appears where he disappears, so to speak. In other words, freedom is an absence of coercion and compulsion; it is self-initiating, self-determining, and open-ended. Therefore God cannot impose himself on free beings, but can allow for his own discovery via our freedom.

As we already discussed in Book II, freedom is indeed a principle anchored in the Theos — freedom being one of his many names — and is cosmically inexplicable in the absence of this irreducible principle: the very existence of free will illuminates a vertical trail of transcendence that leads straight back to the Creator.

Note that the existence of freedom isn’t just a theophany but a cosmophany, in the sense that our creative Principle freely creates a Cosmos that in turn can be freely known by man. For again, if the Cosmos were a kind of closed machine, it could not be known. So, freedom — or an absence of full determinism — permeates all three terms of Cosmotheandrism from top to bottom and inside out, each open to the others.

The absence of free will is precisely why my dog doesn’t know there is a Cosmos, because she is not free (and hence rational) to know about it. Rather, she is constrained by the canine nature in which she is enclosed, but in the cosmophany, man either escapes his nature, or — so to speak — cosmophany and anhrophany co-arise: we are appearances of one another, so to speak.

At the same time, freedom is quintessentially an anthrophany, which is to say, a revelation of man — of subjectivity, of inwardness, of the person. To quote Stanley Jaki,

in a certain sense, free will “is subjectivity itself.” Thus, we are free to the extent that we are a subject rather than an object. However, freedom can only be exercised in an objective world, which is to say, on objects, including “objects” within oneself.

Irony again: freedom requires constraint, just as objectivity requires a subject.

Therefore, it seems that the appearance of both objects and subjects — cosmophany and anthrophany — co-arise in the indeterminate space of freedom. I call this a pretty, pretty important idea.

Leaving the Theos to the side for a moment, consider the fact that if everything were subjective, then there couldn’t be free will either. Rather, there must be some sort of “resistance” in order for subjectivity to distinguish itself from necessity and objectivity.

If the world were a friction-free function of our will, then there would be no distinction or delay between desire and fulfillment — between the way things are and the way we want them to be.

On the other hand, if reality were merely objective — a world of pure outwardness and ineluctable necessity — then obviously we could never know it. Rather, truth is a function of the freedom to know it. For which reason all arguments against the existence of free will are so many proofs of it.

Irony. Irony everywhere!

At the same time, an absolute freedom — freedom with no constraints whatsoever — would equate to absolute meaninglessness. We might say that freedom is either intertwined with teleological purpose or it is no longer free.

For example, the Judeo-Christian affirmation of man’s freedom is “born out of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do” (Berdyaev) — not automatically but freely. Thus, ironically, “Freedom is not a right, but an obligation.”

In other words, we are created free so that our actions “may have that merit which only a freely performed act can have. God therefore has to remain a subtly hidden God, lest man should find himself ‘constrained’ to obey Him” (ibid.).

Creativity too is obviously bound up with freedom, which is why machines aren’t artists and artists are not machines.

Could it be that God’s freedom is ultimately given its highest expression in the existence of the free human subjects who can either deny or align themselves with him? If so, then denial of God is an ironyclad proof of his existence.

All of this is entailed in the metaphysics of our triune Godhead, in the sense that God indeed has his own Other, in and through whom he “knows himself,” so to speak. Although the Son is “inevitable” in a manner of speaking, we would not say that he is a function of necessity, the way a machine produces an artifact. Rather, supposing God is freedom itself, then so too is the so-called engendering of the Son.

The Son is God’s own theophany?

I don’t see why not. At the very least, it is one way of describing the otherwise indescribable. Moreover, — following Christian meta-logic — this would make the Incarnation God’s own anthrophany (and our theophany), while creation itself is God’s cosmophany. But God’s cosmophany must also be our theophany, for, as we know, the Creator’s “invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse.”

Who’s they?

Those entirely lacking all irony: the nihilists, fascists, bums, and other underachievers, the men who deny or suppress the truth about Truth: “professing to be wise, they became fools,” i.e., two-footed beasts, tenured apes, and credentialed chimps.

We’ll resume this weave tomorrow.

The Eternal Man: Do As I Do, Not As I Say

Eckhart ran into some trouble when the authorities began looking into what he was saying as opposed to how he was saying it. They were especially concerned with its potential effect on the unlearned, who might not know the difference. In the parlance of cosmotheandrism, he was very much speaking to and from the RH. Reduced to LH propositions, there was bound to be misunderstanding, analogous to the difference between dream logic and wideawake consciousness.

Note that it is rare to know a dream from within the dream (AKA lucid dreaming). Rather, we only know of dreams a posteriori, when we consciously recall them. Whenever we think about a dream, the thinking actually takes place in a dialectical space between two different modes of thought. One might say that this space is a “third” between the first two (i.e., between RH and LH). Here it is the betweenness that counts: this space is the cosmotheandric how between the two whats.

Note that the Anthropos is always the link between two whats, whether it is between other persons, between mind and Cosmos, or between Anthropos and Theos. What is the nature of this ambiguous space between whats? Whatever it is, it is not just another what. So what is it?

It is impossible to describe without falling into — or ascending upto — paradox, which is not a bug, rather, a feature. Our how is not pre-literacy, nor is it literacy, rather post-literacy; or rather, literacy working over pre-literate material and arriving at something new.

Which actually goes to the existence of newness and novelty per se, because this is how creativity works. The RH ground is always the silent partner in any creative endeavor. Likewise, psychotherapy (my kind) is always a conversation not only involving this third partner, but its point is to enlist this partner as a way of being-in-the-world more generally. It mirrors the trialogue at the edge of the subjective horizon that is always taking place, bringing this flowing con-versation out into the open. For the Third is always there anyway, speaking in various tongues such as somatization, acting out, interpersonal conflict, self-defeating behavior, ideology, etc. In a word, symptoms.

In the book Paradox at Play: Metaphor in Meister Eckhart’s Sermons, Johnson describes it thus: our mysterious maestro

insists that the ground of conceptual thought is not itself conceptual, meaning that our attempts to answer fundamental philosophical questions have not been frustrated because we lack the appropriate conceptual apparatus, but because the questions themselves point to the nonconceptual ground of thinking that makes conceptual thought possible.

In exploring this dynamic — one might say Living — ground,

Metaphors allow us to enter more deeply into a thinker’s imaginative horizon than concepts do because they operate on an aesthetic, preconscious level that springs from the most fundamental metaphysical building blocks of the way we see ourselves and the world.

Show me the metaphor and I’ll show you the man.

Agreed, but the cosmotheandric man takes it one step further and asks: what is a good metaphor for metaphor, or for metaphor as such — a meta-metaphor? We cannot think without metaphor, but what is thinking metaphorically like? Is there a nonconcepual Master Metaphor that is like everything because it is prior to everything?

For Eckhart the master metaphor is the Ground, which is not “like” truth, rather, the prior nonconceptual truth itself. This Ground is like a bubbling spring that boils over into everything; or rather, everything is a consequence of this endless boiling over. To dwell in this Ground is not so much to “live without a why,” rather, to live within the space between the Why and Because. This is the reason why no Because ever exhausts the Why — at least in principle. History is, of course, an endless series of Whys that pretend to enclose us in a Because, from scientism to religionism. The Authorities, whoever they are, always pretend to know the Because.

Because they said so.

Correct. Recall Wittgenstein’s crack that “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” But really the bewitchment is a function of literacy itself, insofar as it encloses us within language, unless language remains open to the poles of immanence and transcendence. Properly functioning language is the liberating tool that links us to these two “grounds,” but in reality there is only the one dynamic Ground in two modes.

∞

With these preluminary murmurandoms out of the way, let’s get down to cases, for example, Berdyaev, because he struggles with the meaning of religion in a most modern — and cosmotheandric — way:

The eternal man, oriented toward eternity and infinity, is at once the eternally new man and an eternal and limitless purpose. The eternal man is not something given once for all: he is not to be comprehended statically. The truly new man is a realization of the eternal man, bearing in himself the image and likeness of God.

So, it’s a process. In Orthodox Christianity our theomorphism is a given, except to say that the image is one thing, the likeness another: the meaning of life is for the potential of the image to be actualized in the likeness. Thus, “The new man must be creative, and hence he must look toward the future, toward that which has never been. This is the answer to the call of God,” God being none other than the Great Attractor that draws the image toward the likeness. Even so, “Man is a riddle in this world, perhaps the supreme riddle.”

I would go further, and say: no man, no riddle — that man and riddle co-arise. Again, there were no riddles or questions of any kind until we showed up and began asking What the flip?

Riddle, riddled, and riddler rolled into one?

Man simultaneously embodies both riddle and solution, question and answer, why and because. But we can in no way be the answer to the riddle that we are. Rather, any answer must result from a dynamic engagement with the Transcendent Real, so to speak, which is again the very function of a functioning religion.

For Berdyaev, “Man may know himself from above or from below, from his own light, from the divine element in him, and he may know himself from his darkness..., from the demonic element within himself.” And

he may do this because he is a dual and a contradictory being, a being polarized to the highest degree, god-like and beast-like, high and low, free and slave, capable of rising to the heights or of falling, capable of great love and sacrifice or of great cruelty and limitless egotism.

We rate this passage 100% nihil bobstat, or free of philosophical BS. Rather, Berdyev tells it like it is (or us like we are): we are always polarized within the tension of immanence and transcendence.

But how did we get into this existential pickle? And what does it all mean?

Let’s say there is a no-man’s land between meaning and meaninglessness. Except to say that this is every man’s land — not to mention a knowing man’s land — in that this is the dynamic space in which all men live and know: “Man is the point where two worlds intersect, he belongs to two orders. Here lies the infinite complexity and difficulty of human life. There is the spiritual man and the natural man, and one man is both” (ibid.).

One person and two natures?

That rings a bell... But in any event, “the existence of personality presupposes the existence of God,” and “If God does not exist, as the source of super-personality values, then personality is valueless.”

In short, No meaning for you! Even so, the meaning is not given in the manner of an unambiguous concept or proposition, nor is this meaning transferable, i.e., my neighbor’s meaning isn’t my meaning. Rather, Petey was on to something with his crack about The religion the Almighty and me works out betwixt us, because the Great Betwixt is precisely where the meaning arises.

Which raises a host of potential problems, depending on the number of human beings at any given time. Let’s call it The Anthropic Incompleteness Principle: human beings are necessarily incomplete but ordered to our own completeness, which can only be found “in God” — or in O, if you like. In short, no God, no possibility of completeness.

And even then, what are the chances of our finding any straight-up meaning given the twisted wreckage of mankind? Schuon speaks of four inevitable infirmities to which man is heir. To begin at the top, it should go without saying that we are “creature, not Creator,” which is to say, “manifestation and not Principle or Being.” Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute.

Can’t argue with that.

Second, we are human beings and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal — somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a celestial ape. So we are human, and you can’t get worse than that, at least potentially, since we run the gamut from Mary Magdalene, first witness to the Resurrection, to Magda Goebbels, first lady of the Third Reich.

Third, we are all different, which is to say, individuals, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable.

Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as neurotic conflicts and mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of genetics, temperament, culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a specific form and a particular time and place.

Our earthly experiences are woven with contingency and chance, but it is difficult to imagine who we would concretely be in the absence of these contingencies. Given different experiences, we would be very different versions of ourselves — for example, if we had had different parents. I can think of a great number of people without whom I can’t imagine who I’d be, which goes again to the principles of both contingency and intersubjectivity.

Can there be a one size fits all cure for these infirmities — for the existential maladies of the finite, human, individual, and contingent? No, it seems that each of us is a unique problem of God, and doesn’t a unique problem require a unique treatment tailored to the individual person? But what even is a person?

Berdyaev is raising his hand again. I think he has impulse control issues.

Yes, Nick? Is there something you’d like to share with the group?

A person is never a completed datum: it is the task, the ideal, of man. The ideal of man is a perfect unity, the integrity of personality.

So, we’re always on the way to who we already are?

“No man can say he is fully a person,” because “The personality must produce itself, enrich itself, fill itself with universal content, attain unity in integrity, throughout the whole extent of its life.”

Berdyaev is essentially saying that personality is indeed a “joint effort” worked out — not determined — betwixt man and God, who is the very principle of creativity in whom we uniquely participate, making us “co-creators” of both the Cosmos and Anthropos, both of which are necessarily “works in progress.” Thus, “The essence of life is this striving of all being toward eternity.”

This almost sounds like it makes us “co-creators” of God, at least in some sense?

Shh! Don’t scare off the remaining reader(s).