M-moses, Baba, Tommy, and the Frankly Amazing Journey

There once was a note, pure and easy,
Playing so free like a breath rippling by.
The note is eternal, I hear it, it sees me,
Forever we blend and forever we die. --Pure and Easy, The Who

"Petey, If God is always already all, then why the elaborate process of involution and evolutionary return? Furthermore, how can I 'meet' God on His own transcendental plane, when the bulk of my knowledge and understanding comes from my interaction with the horizontal plane? And conversely, how do I maintain a stable, balanced life in the material plane when my thoughts are constantly drifting towards intellection of the higher realms?"

What say you, Petey? Any likely stories for us this morning?

My fellow Coons, in the last analysis, each of us is but a spark in the dark ever since we were tossed from the park. When we talk about "ultimate reality," we must necessarily use forms and symbols as a blind man might use a cane (to borrow a metaphor from Polanyi). This is a prominent theme in many forms of mysticism, including Orthodox Christianity, in which the Godhead is hidden in darkness within a cataphatic cloud of unknowing.

How do we adapt our inner eyes to the divine darkness, so that we do not confuse the form with the substance? What the hell, let's ask another Petey through his alter-ego, Tommy:

Deaf Dumb and blind boy
He's in a quiet vibration land
Strange as it seems his musical dreams
Ain't quite so bad.

Sickness will surely take the mind
Where minds can't usually go.
Come on the amazing journey
And learn all you should know.

Pete Townshend wrote those lines under the influence of the unorthodox Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. Until this moment, I didn't know a great deal about Baba, but according the Wikipedia entry on him, he begins his metaphysics where any sound metaphysician must, which is to say with the idea of "divine unity, the view that diverse creation, or duality, is an illusion and that the goal of life is conscious realization of the absolute Oneness of God inherent in all animate and inanimate beings and things."

In short, Baba starts with the perennial -- and necessary -- distinction between the Absolute and the relative, or what we would call "being" and "beyond being." It is also the distinction between the One and the many, or Brahman and maya, the latter of which represents on the one hand "illusion," but also power and play, or shakti and lila. For Christians it would be the difference between God's essence and energies (dynamis), while for Kabbalists it would be the difference between the Ain Sof and the Sefirtoth, or the formless Godhead and the inner form, or "blueprint" of creation.

I like this -- it's very Eckhartian: Baba "compares God's original state to an infinite, shoreless ocean which has only unconscious divinity -- unaware of itself even though there is nothing but itself. From this state, God had the 'whim' to know Himself and asked 'Who am I?'. In response to this question, creation came into existence. What was previously a still, shoreless Ocean stirred, forming innumerable 'drops' of itself..."

Why do I like this? Because it's exactly what I unsay at the beginning of the Coonifesto in so many bobscure nonwords. From our human perspective, the "within" of the cloud of unknowing looks like "nothing, pure emptiness, a formless void without mind or life, a shadow spinning before the beginning over a silent static sea, unlit altar of eternity, fathomless vortex of the Infinite Zero." It is "One brahman deathless breathing breathless, darkness visible the boundless all, unknown origin prior to time and space, fount of all being, unborn thus undying, beginning and end of all impossibility, empty plenum and inexhaustible void."

And that is That.

But wait a minute. Something stirs within the darkness of this eternal One. What's is it? It's a question:

"Who is? I AM. A wake. A lone. Hallow, noumena!"

Who knew God was a Seinfeld fan? And has Kramer's racist diatribe changed this?

In any event, as Baba says, creation -- including our womentary maninfestation -- comes into existence simultaneously with God's Infinite Question, "Who am I?" Happily, this comports with the answer Moses received within his own little cloud of unknowing atop Sinai, which was, I AM WHO I AM, but you can call me I AM for short."

What? Haim?

"No, stupid, I AM."

Oh... okay... I AM... umm, care to elaborate, because -- no offense -- but that's what I call myself.

"Yes, that is correct. Tell your fellow wandering Coons that I AM has sent me to you, and that this is my name forever, and that all subsequent generations must vertically remember this fact."

B-b-bu.... I'm not m-much of a t-talker, Lord.

"Never mind that. Who has made man's mouth, anyway? Don't sweat it. I will be with your mouth and teach you O-->(k) despite the little hitch in your verbal giddyup. And I apologize for calling you stupid. I've got a lot on my plate. This is my crazy time of yuga."

Since repetition is the mother of pedagogy, alert Coons will have gnosised that the passage above from p. 7 of One Cosmos is a holographic fractal that contains the entirety of the book and repeats itself throughout. The same story is told from slightly different angles on pp. 8, 9, 10, 13-14, and 15-17. For example, on page 8: "But it was not good that this Godhead, the Most High, should be allone, so he expired with a Big Bong and said 'let there be higher physics,' and it was zo." Or on page 9: "Only himspoph with nowhere to bewrong, hovering over the waters without a kenosis. Vishnu were here, but just His lux, God only knows only God, and frankly ishvara monotheotonous." Etc.

According to Baba, "Each soul, being formed by God's whim to know Himself, contains within itself the same desire for self-knowledge." In attempting to answer this question -- as the "Who am I?" journeys back to I AM -- we become conscious of our divinity. But in order to do this, we must overcome many illusory and anti-evolutionary mind parasites, or samskaras, along the way. This idea is presented on p. 14 of One Cosmos, when we fall into so may "jivass godlings and samskara monsters."

The spiritual path represents a reversal of this involutionary process. As the soul "begins to traverse an inner spiritual path," it "gradually eliminates all impressions which cause the appearance of separateness from God" (Baba).

And "once the sanskaras are gone, the goal of knowing itself as conscious divinity is attained. The drop soul once again becomes merged in the Ocean, that is, it realizes its true Divine indivisible and eternal nature. It has now answered the question of 'Who am I?' with 'I am God.'"

Now, I know there are many Christians who believe that this doesn't apply to them, but with minor modifications and important qualifications, it does. I don't want to get into a theological debate over the fine points, and in any event, it is not for me to say. Suffice it to say that if you wish to investigate the original Christianity of the early fathers, it is not difficult to do.

As to the second question, "how can I 'meet' God on His own transcendental plane, when the bulk of my knowledge and understanding comes from my interaction with the horizontal plane?" Again, one does so by reversing the process of involution. In short, if you find yourself in an existential hole, the first thing you must do is stop digging. Scientists can keep digging, but the way back does not -- cannot -- lie in that direction. That's fine. We have no quarrel whatsoever with scientists, so long as they do not confuse digging with climbing, you dig? In the words of Richard Weaver,

“The modernistic searcher after meaning may be likened to a man furiously beating the earth and imagining that the finer he pulverizes it, the nearer he will get to the riddle of existence. But no synthesizing truths lie in that direction. It is in the opposite direction that the path must be followed.”

Ah ha! The opposite direction! Umm, could you unsay a bit less?

Yes, back to Tommy, in whom:

Sickness will surely take the mind
Where minds can't usually go.
Come on the amazing journey
And learn all you should know.

For the spiritual seeker, "health" is a kind of spiritual sickness and sickness is a kind of spiritual health. It's paradoxable, don't you know: blessed are the poor in spirit, the last will become first, and all that jazzus.

Once again, this is indirectly undressed in pp. 252-266 of the Coonifesto, each paragraph of which deals with caterpultering your buddhafly across the phoenix line -- with how to de-part and be-wholed in the vertical. Frankly, because of our original sinatra, this is very hard to do without a little nonlocal assistance, but not to worry: in lama land there's a wise old man, and he'll goose your nous for you.

So come fly with me on the amuzing journey, where "each sensation makes a note in our symphony."

And remurmur: Do be. Do be. Do!

Listening to you,
I get the music.
Gazing at you,
I get the heat.
Following you,
I climb the mountains.
I get excitement at your feet. --Petey Townshend