WILL: Our guest today is well known to longstanding One Cosmos readers for his insightful commentary and his uncompromising honesty and self-insight with respect to his own spiritual path. Welcome, John.
JWM: Hey.
WILL: John, I know you're a southern California guy, but could you tell us a little more about your background?
JWM: That's an invitation to an autobiography. I started out life as a baby, but that was a long time ago. Just kidding.
WILL: You are forgiven.
JWM: Here's the condensed version: I was born in Michigan. I lived there until I was in the sixth grade, when we moved from a suburb of Detroit to a suburb of Los Angeles. That was 1963. We left Michigan a month after Kennedy was assasinated, took off on the cross country drive after school on Friday, the thirteenth of December and moved into a house in North Orange County on Christmas Eve.
WILL: Hmm, Interesting that this huge change in your life came at such a pivotal time in American history. Would you say you were self-aware as a child? What kind of student were you?
JWM: I was always told I was smart, but I never did well in school. I slouched through high school with C's, mostly.
WILL: I swear I've never met anyone with spiritual inclinations, even if those inclinations were buried, who didn't float through grade and high school in a cloud of indifference -- you know, they failed to "apply themselves." I know there's got to be some out there who actually did well in school, but --
JWM: Well, all I know is I graduated in 1970 without the faintest idea of what I wanted to do. So, of course I signed up for junior college that Fall.
WILL: Naturally.
JWM: But even in 1970 they wanted more homework out of you than I was willing to do.
WILL: I hear ya talkin'. So what did you do?
JWM: I took a few crappy jobs, moved out of the house when I was nineteen, and decided to be a self educated intellectual. I got a job working as night custodian for the local school district. I drank a lot of sour wine, smoked a lot of crappy pot. I listened to a lot of great music. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Monteverdi, William Byrd.
WILL: That's not a bad education, right there.
JWM: Well, I read a lot of garbage, too.
WILL: Like what?
JWM: Existentialists. French authors.
WILL: Any theology, spiritual stuff?
JWM: No, I despised religion, and the religious. I was living like a character in a Simon and Garfunkle song. [Hmm. Reminds me of this one -- "Michigan seems like a dream to me now." Sorry. Continue. I'm all ears. -- BG] But in '74 I went through a seismic shift. It was the first of several I would experience. [Hmm. This also comes to mind... ]
WILL: What happened?
JWM: I threw all that intellectual crap over for the True Education.
WILL: Which was... ?
JWM: I took up surfing.
WILL: Whoa! You've no idea how cool that sounds to a Midwest flatlander such as myself. The Beach Boys, endless summers, Dick Dale, "hangin' ten".... So you really lived that "Zen and the Art of Surfing" thing?
JWM: Will, let me tell you, the ocean is a merciless instructor, but every lesson is allegory and parable that you can apply on many levels.
WILL: I can believe it.
JWM: Well, my salad days -- where the hell did they get that term? -- wilted when I met my first serious girlfriend.
WILL: I'm guessing it's because the first thing served at a dinner is a salad, thus one's early days are the "salad days." Or maybe it's because in our early years we are "green" like a salad, or --
JWM: Right. Anyway, my days went from: surf, work, beer, bed; to: work, beer, bed. I was hearing, "Can't you get a better job? You're smart." So I left the school district for a utility company.
WILL: How was that?
JWM: Hated it. I quit the job. Then another seismic shift.
WILL: Which was . . . ?
JWM: I went back to surfing.
WILL: Cool.
JWM: But then I went back to school when I was 30. I wanted to do something "meaningful". To me the most "meaningful" job was teaching school. And the most meaningful subject was English because being able to communicate clearly and understand communication is the most important thing. It never occurred to me that a degree in English, even with high honors -- State College can't afford Latin, like the UC system -- was like getting first prize in a coloring contest. It's a blue ribbon in getting a blue ribbon.
WILL: Understood.
JWM: All it did was kill any love of reading that I ever had in me. But it taught me how to think. I gave speeches in speech class about the need for socialized medicine and I roundly loathed the Puritans in American Lit class. In short, I came out well indoctrinated with kneejerk liberalism.
WILL: Most of us have been in that bus station at one time or another. So then what did you do?
JWM: I taught English in inner city Los Angeles for ten years.
WILL: Admirable thing to do.
JWM: I married. I divorced. I bought a Harley. Crossed the continent ten times over before I sold it. I was teaching continuation at an insanely bad school. I was burning out very badly. So badly that I did not not realize I was burned out. I cracked. I just lost it, completely. When all was settled and done the school pushed me out the back door with a disability retirement. Even the hired gun shrinks didn't fight it.
WILL: That's another thing that people with serious spiritual intentions -- even if they aren't consciously aware of those intentions -- have in common. At some point, they hit rock bottom. Dark Night of the Soul. How did you cope at this time?
JWM: Well, I threw myself into artwork for the next six years, and spent my time working in stone. I carved a lot of alabaster, got invited to shows, won some awards, and even sold some stuff. And... out of the blue I met Mary. I wanted no relationship but... we took a bike ride and were married within the year. Didn't expect that.
WILL: Excellent! Are you still involved with the stone work?
JWM: No, the art dried up. The last of the creative process went into the epic toyshelf serial that I published on Robot-Japan.
WILL: For those readers who don't know, '"Doesn't Play Well With Others" is JWM's online serial comic. I hesitate to use the word "charming" to describe it, but that's exactly what it is -- particularly if you find the bizarre, off-center, very clever, and hysterically funny to be charming. I urge everyone to check out DPWWO. Anyway, John, that take us pretty much up to the present. What's been going on lately?
JWM: Well, by the time I published the last exciting DPW episode, the creative energy that had sustained me for over fifteen years just vanished. A spiritual hunger took its place.
WILL: It really is interesting how the intensely creative periods in our lives seem to camouflage a spiritual desire that we aren't fully aware of -- until it really makes itself known, of course.
JWM: It had been eating at me ever since 9/11. It's what drew me to certain people on LGF, including the mysterious Gagdad Bob who dropped those awful puns in his otherwise hillarious one-liners.
WILL: Oh yeah, that guy.
JWM: I spent a lot of time walking. I live near the hills, so I took the energy that used to go into doing art, and used it to stay in decent physical condition. Besides, I always appreciate the times when I can hike up there alone. Then last fall I had some heart trouble. Another seismic shift. Had to give up hiking for a while. But they got me fixed. And broke. The part isn't all that expensive, but the labor to install it is kind of steep. So as soon as I got on my my feet again I got a job working part time for the local elementary school district. I'm substituting for the custodial staff. Right back where I started.
WILL: The symbolic full circle. And as with full circle completion, I don't doubt you have been transformed in the process. How do you see yourself at this time?
JWM: Well, one of the wonderful things about what we are doing here on the internet is projecting what is as close to pure thought out into the ether as is possible. The impressions we have of one another are built entirely of electrons ordered just so to reflect the inner workings of heart, mind, and soul.
WILL: Yes, agreed.
JWM: I'm sure we all wonder if the person whom we project on line is the person whom we want to project. The very first time I posted anything on a message board, it struck me that I was creating an on-line reputation. I decided right then that I'd use the same nic and signature all across the web. I wasn't going to try and create some on-line alter ego with a flashy name and a goofy style -- although much of what I post on LGF falls into the Goofy zone.
WILL: Goofy is good. It's an important part of the spiritual kit-bag, I think. it helps to lighten the load, so to speak.
JWM: It does. And that's one thing I like about the gang here at OC. There are lots of very sharp senses of humor. I'm 54 years old. I have some "been theres" and some "done thats." Some small successes and some spectacular failures. I try to stay simple. Point is, if I say I did something, then I did it. I don't make stuff up or pretend to know things that I don't know. The overall topic here is theology. Many of the regular posters and all of the Raccoons are better studied than I am. I'm no theologian. Neither am I well read in philosophy. Even though I have practiced daily prayer for decades, I am a neophyte at this business.
WILL: It's interesting. I always have the feeling that I'm "just beginning," even though like you, I've spent years splashing around in the shallow end.
JWM: Well, I have my first hand experience, some small knowledge of Scripture, and that which I seem to sort of intuit, the stuff that the voice just seems to place in my head.
WILL: And that voice sort of led you to One Cosmos?
JWM: After 9/11, I turned to the one person in the world whom I trusted to make sense of things -- Dennis Prager. I bought a cheap radio just so I could listen to his show while I worked on the stones. I listened every day for months. One day Prager talked about Little Green Footballs. I was new to the internet, but I found the site. I was drawn to a couple of people in particular out of the LGF crowd, BabbaZee, and Gagdad Bob. It was like following a trail that seemed random at the time, but it led me to address the real issue that was drawing me in the first place -- a spiritual hunger. I was looking for religion. Bob's writing gave me the doorway that I had been looking for.
WILL: I think that's a good note to end on. John, I think I speak for many when I say I find your story to be really inspiring. Thanks for the interview.
JWM: Thanks, Will, I'm honored.
*****
Random Bobservations
That's pretty weird, because I was listening to that same Dennis Prager show that led me to LGF, which opened up a whole new world to me, an instant rapport with a community of generally kindred spirits that I never would have found without the internet. Interestingly, I rarely posted anything explicitly spiritual there, since that's not what the site is about. Rather, I simply tried to come up with humorous gags as a way to deal with my disgust with the psychotically hateful Islamist world and its satanic leftist allies (all-lies) in the West. Hence the nic "Gagdad Bob," which was actually coined by another reader. Before that, it was just "Bob G."
Only after a couple years of posting on LGF did it occur to me that I might start my own blog, which I did in October 2005. Now I literally can't remember what it was like to not have this outlet. What did I do before with all those thoughts? I think I just overwhelmed people in conversations. Now I am not nearly so compelled to speak.
This certainly highlights what Will always says about the "quickening" effect of the internet. I think the idea of an instantaneous virtual "global community" has prematurely become a cliche, to such an extent that most people are utterly blind to how truly revolutionary it is going to be. It will be foundational to man's future evolution in ways that we can scarcely imagine. The most clueless of all are the MSM and academic elites, who don't even realize they are working for the other side. They are truly dinosaurs, but unfortunately, it will take another meteor hit of the magnitude of 9-11 for them to become extinct. It's coming, and we can only hope that a man such as Rudy Giuliani -- which is to say, a man -- is in office when it comes.
Only then will more than a handful of people in the West begin to rediscover the surpassing value of our traditions and of America'a spiritual mission -- a mission that can be brought about by no other nation. And this may awaken the ruthlessness necessary to defend our uniquely beautiful values. In the process, all the vacuous spiritual careerists of the "new age" variety will be exposed for the narcissistic frauds and fascist enablers they are.
It reminds me of a discussion I was having with a colleague at work a couple of days ago. We were talking about how the mind has this miraculous ability to "somatize" anxiety and conflict. There is a certain type of person who spends his life going from doctor to doctor, trying to find out what's wrong with him or her, even though nothing really is, except mentally -- we call them hysterics or hypochondriacs. And then finally, when you hit your 50s or so, something finally is wrong -- heart disease, or diabetes, or some other condition, and it kind of blows away all the hypochondria. You go from the obsession with fantasy illnesses to dealing with a real one.
Our liberal media are hysterics and hypochondriacs, obsessed with meaningless trivia for the purposes of managing and channeling collective anxiety, including their own. You might remember, for example, that prior to 9-11, all of the networks were obsessed with the Gary Condit affair, day in, day out. Then something real came along -- 9-11 -- which rendered the Condit affair totally meaningless, even though it had been utterly meaningless before.
If you've ever stepped on an ant hill, you may have noticed how the orderly lines of ants suddenly become chaotic, but within a matter of minutes they sort things out and are back to their mundane routine. It's the same with our lamebrained MSMistry of Truth. Within weeks of 9-11, they were back to purveying their mindless substitute reality of leftist lies and hysteria. (Here is the appropriate response to Al Gore's weather hysteria.)
So there's a straight line that leads from 9-11 to JWM and I bumping heads and hearts in cyberspace. For me, my life is so utterly different than it was pre-9-11, that I've almost lost any sense of continuity between my past and present selves. When I pause to think about it, it's a little disorienting, and I don't quite know how to assimilate my past into my present. The image that comes to mind is those rockets that jettison their lower half as they leave the earth's atmosphere. Naturally, there's no turning back at that point. Nor is there standing still. Rather, you can only continue to hurtle forward into the unknown.
I want to thank Will for coonducting the interview, and JWM for submitting to it. It provoked a lot of other thoughts that I think I'll discuss later. Suffice it to say that I always love reading any meaningful spiritual autobiography. In a way, it's the most important testimony or witness we have to the reality of spirit. In the absence of this kind of unfolding and very real transformation, even the greatest theology is just theory. For the transformation is a result of ongoing conformity to a reality that simultaneously transcends and abides within us. But it is always retail spirituality: the cosmic tumblers can only align themselves one Raccoon at a time.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Friday, June 15, 2007
The Form of the Formless and the Substance of Nothing
The divine message is a form that "contains" a substance. The substance is One but the forms reflect and convey diverse aspects of it -- it can be grace, or salvation, or a sense of the sacred, or peace, or bliss -- but without the form, we cannot know the substance -- or only know it accidentally. Again we return to the analogy of a work of art, which presents a form for the contemplation of beauty. Without a form and a boundary for its expression, beauty is "everywhere and nowhere."
Christianity, for example, is a form. Many people who don't understand or respond to religion often confuse form and substance. In other words, they pick apart the form, looking for inconsistencies or logical flaws, when the whole point is to enter and contemplate the beauty and mystery of the form -- very much like, say, watching a movie. To me, a good movie -- and they are few and far between these days -- is one that allows me to seamlessly enter its world. It doesn't matter one bit whether it is a "real" world, which is why, say, The Wizard of Oz is an infinitely greater film than any Michael Moore documentary -- which always unintentionally conveys a dark substance reflecting the deadness of his soul, irrespective of the content.
In fact, the Wizard of Oz is much more realistic than any Michael Moore film, for the precise reason that while some of its forms may be fanciful -- witches, magical kingdoms, talking scarecrows, and the like -- its substance is nevertheless quite real and enduring, even timeless. Conversely, a Michael Moore film is -- to be generous -- presumably about the "real world," and yet, its substance is entirely nonexistent or false. Or it is the "substance of nothing," which is to say, nihilism.
Again we touch on the importance of whole and part, for the substance of religion can only be preserved in its wholeness. Trying to "enter" spirit by first breaking apart its forms is somewhat analogous to disassembling a symphony in order to find out what it's about. If you're going to be scientific about it, perhaps you'd first identify all the notes and then categorize them. This or that symphony has so many B flats, so many F sharps, this many key changes, that many tempos. Sounds foolish, but this is the approach of the ham-handed "Jesus seminarians" who think one can understand scripture by blowing it to bits. It is also the approach of any logic-chopping atheist who thinks he has accomplished anything by dissecting sacred forms like a frog.
In this regard, theology -- "the study of God" -- is really no different than, say, biology, "the study of life." There is actually no science, including biology, that can say "what it is about." Rather, this or that science must assume its content at the outset, since it is strictly impossible for any science to stand outside of itself and make any unambiguous pronouncement on the ontological status of that which it purports to study. If it attempts to transcend this boundary, it generates the paradox and absurdity known as scientism.
For example, no biologist troubles himself (or should, anyway) to speculate as to what Life actually is. Or if he does, he is no longer a biologist but merely a bad philosopher or lame metaphysician. In my book I used the example of a watchmaker. A watchmaker can tell you all about gears, springs, and pendulums, but he is hardly fit to pronounce on the nature of time. Indeed, imagine the absurdity of going to a watch repair shop and asking the owner if he would be so kind as to sort out your confusion about the nature of time. Does it really exist, or is it an illusion? And isn't it true that a clock measures space, not time? Is time an empty category, or does it condition the events within it, as students of the I Ching believe? And is time actually "tight," as maintained by Booker T and the MGs? (See here for demonstration.)
I think you can see that posing these types of metaphysical questions to the watchmaker is exactly -- exactly -- like asking Dawkins/Dennett/Harris/Hitchens to tell us about God. What they can tell us is precisely nothing, since they are fundamentally confused about the form and content of religion.
Again, the biologist just studies "living things," even though biology can by definition never explain how the living things got here, or even what Life is. Or look at my profession. A psychologist can help you overcome and "cure" an emotional problem, even though psychology will never be able to say what consciousness is (except in a fatuous way).
In fact -- and this is a critical point -- as I mentioned a few days ago, there are many schools of psychology, and they all more or less work, at least with some people some of the time. What seems to be most important -- in addition to simply being a gifted healer of souls, which is another mystery that cannot be quantified -- is that the therapist have a very clear theoretical framework, or form, for the study of what is otherwise completely invisible and amorphous -- i.e., the mind.
Thus, it is very easy for those of a materialistic bent to criticize psychoanalysis on the grounds that it is more mythological than scientific, or that it reifies things that don't actually exist -- say, the "id" or "superego." While there is something to this criticism, in that it is possible to reify concepts and confuse one's abstractions with the underlying reality, it is nevertheless true that without such concepts, it is not possible to "observe" or work with the mind. In other words, just like the biologist, we have to make some assumptions about the mind at the outset, or else we are simply confronted with a blank mystery.
Ultimately, a good theory of the mind allows one to think about thinking, and all that implies (and I am including emotion as a form of thought which stretches on a vertical axis from the primitive to the highly sophisticated). Think about it: how does one productively think about thinking? By having a useful model, an abstraction, even though no one knows what a "thought" actually is. True, the abstraction is not the same as the reality, but that is equally true of biology or even physics. The genome is an abstraction; it is not synonymous with Life. Likewise, the equations of quantum physics are abstractions. It is not as if you can take these abstractions and create a cosmos with them.
No. The real world is the human world, the day-to-day world we encounter with our mind and our senses. All scientific models are abstractions of that world, abstractions we wouldn't even know about if we weren't first situated in the human world. This is one of the secrets of religion that materialists and atheists simply cannot get through their thick skulls: religion conveys forms that specifically concern themselves with the human world and its relation to the divine world. Take, for example, the stories of Genesis. These stories are not about the abstract worlds of biology, or cosmology, or profane history. Rather, they are about certain fixed coordinates, or eternal certitudes, of divine-human existence.
This is what I was trying to convey with the joycey gymgnostics in the prologue and epilogue of my book. For example, on pp. 7-17, I am not attemtping to scientifically describe what happened "once upon a time." Rather, I am attempting to give form to that which perpetually happens (present tense), beginning (and ending) where "One's upin a timeless without a second to spore." Yes, it's meant to raise a smile, but it's also a straightforward ontological statement: One's upin a timeless. Obviously. How could it not be?
Just as psychoanalytic theories are models for "thinking about thinking," religions are forms to contemplate and reconcile oneself to the Formless Infinite. Yes, the Formless is the prior reality, but we still need a way to approach it. Thankfully, we have this thing called "revelation" with which to do so. Like the biologist who cannot say how life got here or even what it is, I don't really trouble myself with how revelation got here or "what it is." I only know that it is -- to my everlasting surprise -- a supremely effective means to think about and know the substance of God.
One of the working titles of my book was A Huge Mythunderstanding. Which, unlike materialists and atheists, I admit to engaging in up front. The only question is, "is it useful for thinking about ultimate reality?" -- that is, do its forms convey the intended substance? I suppose not, since Hitchens sells more books in an hour than I have in two years. But the question remains: how could God not be understood as great if one has conveyed an adequate form to contemplate his substance? And how can man understand any truth at all unless he is by definition the being able to conform himself to the true, and therefore a form of Truth, a mirrorcle of the abbasolute?
If God isn't great, then man isn't even adequate -- certainly not adequate to make any pronouncements about God.
In the opinion of all unbelievers, it is the absurdities contained in the sacred Scriptures which primarily stand in the way of the credibility of the Message.... First of all, it is necessary to envisage a Scripture in its totality and not be hypnotized, with perfect myopia, by a fragmentary difficulty, which after all is the perspective of the devil, who disparages a mountain because of a fissure and, conversely, praises an evil because of an inevitable particle of good. When Scripture is envisaged in its totality it imparts global value and its supernatural character to whomever is not blinded by any prejudice and who has been able to preserve intact the normally human sensibility for the majestic and the sacred. --F. Schuon
Christianity, for example, is a form. Many people who don't understand or respond to religion often confuse form and substance. In other words, they pick apart the form, looking for inconsistencies or logical flaws, when the whole point is to enter and contemplate the beauty and mystery of the form -- very much like, say, watching a movie. To me, a good movie -- and they are few and far between these days -- is one that allows me to seamlessly enter its world. It doesn't matter one bit whether it is a "real" world, which is why, say, The Wizard of Oz is an infinitely greater film than any Michael Moore documentary -- which always unintentionally conveys a dark substance reflecting the deadness of his soul, irrespective of the content.
In fact, the Wizard of Oz is much more realistic than any Michael Moore film, for the precise reason that while some of its forms may be fanciful -- witches, magical kingdoms, talking scarecrows, and the like -- its substance is nevertheless quite real and enduring, even timeless. Conversely, a Michael Moore film is -- to be generous -- presumably about the "real world," and yet, its substance is entirely nonexistent or false. Or it is the "substance of nothing," which is to say, nihilism.
Again we touch on the importance of whole and part, for the substance of religion can only be preserved in its wholeness. Trying to "enter" spirit by first breaking apart its forms is somewhat analogous to disassembling a symphony in order to find out what it's about. If you're going to be scientific about it, perhaps you'd first identify all the notes and then categorize them. This or that symphony has so many B flats, so many F sharps, this many key changes, that many tempos. Sounds foolish, but this is the approach of the ham-handed "Jesus seminarians" who think one can understand scripture by blowing it to bits. It is also the approach of any logic-chopping atheist who thinks he has accomplished anything by dissecting sacred forms like a frog.
In this regard, theology -- "the study of God" -- is really no different than, say, biology, "the study of life." There is actually no science, including biology, that can say "what it is about." Rather, this or that science must assume its content at the outset, since it is strictly impossible for any science to stand outside of itself and make any unambiguous pronouncement on the ontological status of that which it purports to study. If it attempts to transcend this boundary, it generates the paradox and absurdity known as scientism.
For example, no biologist troubles himself (or should, anyway) to speculate as to what Life actually is. Or if he does, he is no longer a biologist but merely a bad philosopher or lame metaphysician. In my book I used the example of a watchmaker. A watchmaker can tell you all about gears, springs, and pendulums, but he is hardly fit to pronounce on the nature of time. Indeed, imagine the absurdity of going to a watch repair shop and asking the owner if he would be so kind as to sort out your confusion about the nature of time. Does it really exist, or is it an illusion? And isn't it true that a clock measures space, not time? Is time an empty category, or does it condition the events within it, as students of the I Ching believe? And is time actually "tight," as maintained by Booker T and the MGs? (See here for demonstration.)
I think you can see that posing these types of metaphysical questions to the watchmaker is exactly -- exactly -- like asking Dawkins/Dennett/Harris/Hitchens to tell us about God. What they can tell us is precisely nothing, since they are fundamentally confused about the form and content of religion.
Again, the biologist just studies "living things," even though biology can by definition never explain how the living things got here, or even what Life is. Or look at my profession. A psychologist can help you overcome and "cure" an emotional problem, even though psychology will never be able to say what consciousness is (except in a fatuous way).
In fact -- and this is a critical point -- as I mentioned a few days ago, there are many schools of psychology, and they all more or less work, at least with some people some of the time. What seems to be most important -- in addition to simply being a gifted healer of souls, which is another mystery that cannot be quantified -- is that the therapist have a very clear theoretical framework, or form, for the study of what is otherwise completely invisible and amorphous -- i.e., the mind.
Thus, it is very easy for those of a materialistic bent to criticize psychoanalysis on the grounds that it is more mythological than scientific, or that it reifies things that don't actually exist -- say, the "id" or "superego." While there is something to this criticism, in that it is possible to reify concepts and confuse one's abstractions with the underlying reality, it is nevertheless true that without such concepts, it is not possible to "observe" or work with the mind. In other words, just like the biologist, we have to make some assumptions about the mind at the outset, or else we are simply confronted with a blank mystery.
Ultimately, a good theory of the mind allows one to think about thinking, and all that implies (and I am including emotion as a form of thought which stretches on a vertical axis from the primitive to the highly sophisticated). Think about it: how does one productively think about thinking? By having a useful model, an abstraction, even though no one knows what a "thought" actually is. True, the abstraction is not the same as the reality, but that is equally true of biology or even physics. The genome is an abstraction; it is not synonymous with Life. Likewise, the equations of quantum physics are abstractions. It is not as if you can take these abstractions and create a cosmos with them.
No. The real world is the human world, the day-to-day world we encounter with our mind and our senses. All scientific models are abstractions of that world, abstractions we wouldn't even know about if we weren't first situated in the human world. This is one of the secrets of religion that materialists and atheists simply cannot get through their thick skulls: religion conveys forms that specifically concern themselves with the human world and its relation to the divine world. Take, for example, the stories of Genesis. These stories are not about the abstract worlds of biology, or cosmology, or profane history. Rather, they are about certain fixed coordinates, or eternal certitudes, of divine-human existence.
This is what I was trying to convey with the joycey gymgnostics in the prologue and epilogue of my book. For example, on pp. 7-17, I am not attemtping to scientifically describe what happened "once upon a time." Rather, I am attempting to give form to that which perpetually happens (present tense), beginning (and ending) where "One's upin a timeless without a second to spore." Yes, it's meant to raise a smile, but it's also a straightforward ontological statement: One's upin a timeless. Obviously. How could it not be?
Just as psychoanalytic theories are models for "thinking about thinking," religions are forms to contemplate and reconcile oneself to the Formless Infinite. Yes, the Formless is the prior reality, but we still need a way to approach it. Thankfully, we have this thing called "revelation" with which to do so. Like the biologist who cannot say how life got here or even what it is, I don't really trouble myself with how revelation got here or "what it is." I only know that it is -- to my everlasting surprise -- a supremely effective means to think about and know the substance of God.
One of the working titles of my book was A Huge Mythunderstanding. Which, unlike materialists and atheists, I admit to engaging in up front. The only question is, "is it useful for thinking about ultimate reality?" -- that is, do its forms convey the intended substance? I suppose not, since Hitchens sells more books in an hour than I have in two years. But the question remains: how could God not be understood as great if one has conveyed an adequate form to contemplate his substance? And how can man understand any truth at all unless he is by definition the being able to conform himself to the true, and therefore a form of Truth, a mirrorcle of the abbasolute?
If God isn't great, then man isn't even adequate -- certainly not adequate to make any pronouncements about God.
In the opinion of all unbelievers, it is the absurdities contained in the sacred Scriptures which primarily stand in the way of the credibility of the Message.... First of all, it is necessary to envisage a Scripture in its totality and not be hypnotized, with perfect myopia, by a fragmentary difficulty, which after all is the perspective of the devil, who disparages a mountain because of a fissure and, conversely, praises an evil because of an inevitable particle of good. When Scripture is envisaged in its totality it imparts global value and its supernatural character to whomever is not blinded by any prejudice and who has been able to preserve intact the normally human sensibility for the majestic and the sacred. --F. Schuon
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Lord Help Me, I'm Lookin' for My Mind!
I say, what would life be without the effulgent beauty of being? And yet, the overflowing presence of this beauty is a mystery that can never be explained on any materialistic basis. Not in my book, anyway. Not only is there no reason for the universe to be so beautiful, there is no reason why a species should suddenly pop out of a recently dead universe and have the ability to apprehend the beauty that courses through its every artery and capillary -- or every branch, stem and itsy bitsy green leafy lovely.
Why? And not only is this species able to appreciate beauty, but it is driven to create beauty in all its forms -- visual, auditory, tactile, linguistic, mathematical, scientific. Why is that? Why this appetite for beauty? It seems so unnecessary. Why are women so much more excruciatingly beautiful than they need to be to get the Darwinian job done? Ouch! Why beauty to the point of pain?
As Col. Beaglehole sang on the lone (sadly unreleased but oft-bootlegged) album he did with Alexis Korner during the British blues revival of '67,
You upsets me baby, Yes, you upsets me baby
Like being hit by a fallen tree,
woman, woman what you do to me
In my book I posed the non-obvious question -- at least it wasn't obvious to me or the Colonel -- of whether the beauty that surrounds and abides in us is discovered or just projected. In other words, the universe has been in existence for what, 14 billion "years," right? During its first 10 billion years there was no life and therefore no consciousness -- or so they say, as little sense as that makes. Biological life has only existed for 3.85 billion years, and human consciousness in any meaningful sense only emerged 40,000 years ago next Tuesday.
So if we truly believe that this was a dead and unconscious universe prior to 4 billion years ago, we can't really say that it had any qualities at all, let alone something as complex as beauty. After all, beauty -- along with every other quality -- is a perception of a nervous system. Therefore, it is very difficult to say which is weirder: that a dead and unconscious universe suddenly produced a creature with an ability to apprehend, and a drive to create, beauty; or, alternatively, that the beauty was already there, just waiting to be unpacked and appreciated. And if the latter, I again ask: how and why?
For beauty is always a function of wholeness. That is, the beauty of a beautiful object inheres in its wholeness, harmony and radiance. A work of art cannot be reduced to its parts without losing sight of the artistic vision that organizes the parts and reveals their beauty. Thus, we would have to affirm that wholeness is a prior condition of beauty. But... assuming the cosmos is full of beauty -- which it is -- is the wholeness already there, or is it only in us? Are these "beautiful wholes" a function of our nervous system, or does the universe just effortlessly crank them out?
It's not just the material beauty of the earth and heavens; how about all the incredibly beautiful animals? It's easy to understand how one reptile will be "attracted" to another for the purposes of reproduction -- say, Britney Spears to Kevin Federline.
But animals of one species do not find those of another species beautiful or attractive, unless they are very, very coonfused -->. Rather, they are generally either indifferent to them or frightened of them. They certainly don't find them beautiful (please, no "Beaglehole" jokes -- he's a little sensitive). No deer thinks to itself, "wow, what a majestic mane on that lion!," or "those beady little eyes of Federline's are kind of a turn-off." No. For animals, it's either 1) have sex with it, 2) eat it, 4) ignore it, or 4) run away from it.
But in the case of humans, we find our fellow animals to be beautiful. We even collect them and put them in zoos so that we can admire them. Again I ask: are these animals actually beautiful? Or is it just a trick of our nervous system? If the former, why were these animals beautiful with no self-conscious being to appreciate them until 40,000 years ago? And if the latter, what possible evolutionary reason is there for humans to be hung up on the beauty of other animals for reasons totally unrelated to our reproductive fitness?
It's not just the obvious things, like sunsets, mountains, oceans and thunderstorms that are beautiful to us. How about a long and happy marriage. Why is that a beautiful thing, while divorce is felt to be ugly (not to cast moral aspersions or deny that it is sometimes necessary)? Marriage is a kind of "frame" that serves a similar function as the frame around a painting -- after all, without a frame to define it and set it apart, you can't have a work of art.
Balthasar writes that marriage is "a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual's cravings to 'break out' of its bonds and to assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence's tendencies to disintegrate, and compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined. When they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves -- the shifting songs of their own freedom -- but rather on the form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons.... "
Spouses "entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life -- from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and of life in the holy spirit." Paradoxically, freedom "is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery, which mystery is no longer accessible from the sphere of the general."
I didn't intend this post to be about marriage, but that was such a nice passage by Balthasar, I just kept going with it. Actually, I'm still waiting to find out what this post is about, since I haven't even finished my coffee. You could say that I'm looking for my mind.
Which reminds me of a song by the immortal Merle Haggard -- like Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and many other artists who could only have arisen in America and nowhere else, a practitioner of uniquely Cosmic American Music:
I lost my mind the day I lost your love
I'm not crazy but sometimes I wish I was
If you turn around and find me crawling close behind
It's not you I want, I'm lookin' for my mind
Yes, I'm still searching for the point of this post, which is another way of saying that I'm lookin' for my mind. Or you could say that I'm looking for the wholeness which is somehow guiding me but which I have not yet discovered. I can intuit it -- it's there, just over the interior horizon -- but it's up to me to bring into existence -- to convert its potential into actuality.
Which emphasizes the point that both Truth and Beauty -- and the freedom to discover them -- are a function of wholeness. Indeed, wholeness is the cosmic prerequisite of the possibility of truth or beauty. And as a matter of fact, as I pointed out in the Coonifesto, it is also a precondition of Darwinian evolution. That is to say, natural selection rests on the assumption that there exist prior "wholes" -- whole organisms -- for it to operate on. There is no materialistic philosophy that can account for wholeness, or true unity in diversity.
Therefore, I think I understand the point of this post: love, truth, beauty, and freedom are not effects of existence. Rather, they are causes of existence. Thus, to say, for example, "God is Love," is not a mythological or speculative statement. Rather, it is a scientific statement. No, it is beyond that -- it is a metaphysical certitude upon which the foundation of science rests. For who is not in love with truth, with beautiful Sophia?
Don't get me started.
*****
I just received an email from a Raccoon that illustrates my point. He seems to have spent most of his life "looking for his mind," but without really knowing that he was embarked on the search until relatively recently. An excerpt:
"I had been learning this one language, English, for the past 41 years. What I didn't realize during those 41 years is that either I've been learning another language or it was already in me, waiting -- unused, but there. This other language was made up of just, let's say, nouns. I read some of your writing and the thing I read that I call the 'last thing' constituted a verb. The instant I read that, everything I had learned about language (structure, usage, grammar, rules, etc.) from the 1st language suddenly overlaid the 2nd one and the verb I'd learned from you linked it all together in the 2nd language, and in an instant, all the meaning flowed down like a dam breaking.
"Or, sort of like a puzzle was being built -- I wasn't building it, didn't even know I had pieces -- but I found the missing piece, which, independent of what this particular last piece stood for, was no more significant than any of the others, its only distinction being perhaps that it was the last piece. It was placed with the other pieces and in an instant I recognized, 'Hey there's a puzzle here!' But a completed puzzle. Where literally, before the puzzle appeared, I didn't even know I had the pieces."
*****
That's what I call a clean kill, or eros shot straight through the heart.
This is another way of saying that parts cannot exist in the absence of the whole -- nor time in the absence of eternity, the many in the absence of the One, or beauty without a Creator. Or, in the words of Rabbi Kushner, "the end is seeing for even one moment that the apparent multiplicity is in reality a unity." But a dynamic unity in diversity in which the one is a necessary condition of the other -- and whence the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time (Eliot).
Wholly matterimany, congratulations on the equation of your cosmic birth. Oh my stars, He expectorated a mirrorcle, now you're the spittin' image!
Why? And not only is this species able to appreciate beauty, but it is driven to create beauty in all its forms -- visual, auditory, tactile, linguistic, mathematical, scientific. Why is that? Why this appetite for beauty? It seems so unnecessary. Why are women so much more excruciatingly beautiful than they need to be to get the Darwinian job done? Ouch! Why beauty to the point of pain?
As Col. Beaglehole sang on the lone (sadly unreleased but oft-bootlegged) album he did with Alexis Korner during the British blues revival of '67,
You upsets me baby, Yes, you upsets me baby
Like being hit by a fallen tree,
woman, woman what you do to me
In my book I posed the non-obvious question -- at least it wasn't obvious to me or the Colonel -- of whether the beauty that surrounds and abides in us is discovered or just projected. In other words, the universe has been in existence for what, 14 billion "years," right? During its first 10 billion years there was no life and therefore no consciousness -- or so they say, as little sense as that makes. Biological life has only existed for 3.85 billion years, and human consciousness in any meaningful sense only emerged 40,000 years ago next Tuesday.
So if we truly believe that this was a dead and unconscious universe prior to 4 billion years ago, we can't really say that it had any qualities at all, let alone something as complex as beauty. After all, beauty -- along with every other quality -- is a perception of a nervous system. Therefore, it is very difficult to say which is weirder: that a dead and unconscious universe suddenly produced a creature with an ability to apprehend, and a drive to create, beauty; or, alternatively, that the beauty was already there, just waiting to be unpacked and appreciated. And if the latter, I again ask: how and why?
For beauty is always a function of wholeness. That is, the beauty of a beautiful object inheres in its wholeness, harmony and radiance. A work of art cannot be reduced to its parts without losing sight of the artistic vision that organizes the parts and reveals their beauty. Thus, we would have to affirm that wholeness is a prior condition of beauty. But... assuming the cosmos is full of beauty -- which it is -- is the wholeness already there, or is it only in us? Are these "beautiful wholes" a function of our nervous system, or does the universe just effortlessly crank them out?
It's not just the material beauty of the earth and heavens; how about all the incredibly beautiful animals? It's easy to understand how one reptile will be "attracted" to another for the purposes of reproduction -- say, Britney Spears to Kevin Federline.
But animals of one species do not find those of another species beautiful or attractive, unless they are very, very coonfused -->. Rather, they are generally either indifferent to them or frightened of them. They certainly don't find them beautiful (please, no "Beaglehole" jokes -- he's a little sensitive). No deer thinks to itself, "wow, what a majestic mane on that lion!," or "those beady little eyes of Federline's are kind of a turn-off." No. For animals, it's either 1) have sex with it, 2) eat it, 4) ignore it, or 4) run away from it. But in the case of humans, we find our fellow animals to be beautiful. We even collect them and put them in zoos so that we can admire them. Again I ask: are these animals actually beautiful? Or is it just a trick of our nervous system? If the former, why were these animals beautiful with no self-conscious being to appreciate them until 40,000 years ago? And if the latter, what possible evolutionary reason is there for humans to be hung up on the beauty of other animals for reasons totally unrelated to our reproductive fitness?
It's not just the obvious things, like sunsets, mountains, oceans and thunderstorms that are beautiful to us. How about a long and happy marriage. Why is that a beautiful thing, while divorce is felt to be ugly (not to cast moral aspersions or deny that it is sometimes necessary)? Marriage is a kind of "frame" that serves a similar function as the frame around a painting -- after all, without a frame to define it and set it apart, you can't have a work of art.
Balthasar writes that marriage is "a kind of bracket that both transcends and contains all an individual's cravings to 'break out' of its bonds and to assert himself. Marriage is that indissoluble reality which confronts with an iron hand all existence's tendencies to disintegrate, and compels the faltering person to grow, beyond himself, into real love by modeling his life on the form enjoined. When they make their promises, the spouses are not relying on themselves -- the shifting songs of their own freedom -- but rather on the form that chooses them because they have chosen it, the form to which they have committed themselves in their act as persons.... "
Spouses "entrust themselves foremost to a form with which they can wholly identify themselves even in the deepest aspects of their personality because this form extends through all the levels of life -- from its biological roots up to the very heights of grace and of life in the holy spirit." Paradoxically, freedom "is discovered within the form itself, and the life of a married person can henceforth be understood only in terms of this interior mystery, which mystery is no longer accessible from the sphere of the general."
I didn't intend this post to be about marriage, but that was such a nice passage by Balthasar, I just kept going with it. Actually, I'm still waiting to find out what this post is about, since I haven't even finished my coffee. You could say that I'm looking for my mind.
Which reminds me of a song by the immortal Merle Haggard -- like Ray Charles, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, and many other artists who could only have arisen in America and nowhere else, a practitioner of uniquely Cosmic American Music:
I lost my mind the day I lost your love
I'm not crazy but sometimes I wish I was
If you turn around and find me crawling close behind
It's not you I want, I'm lookin' for my mind
Yes, I'm still searching for the point of this post, which is another way of saying that I'm lookin' for my mind. Or you could say that I'm looking for the wholeness which is somehow guiding me but which I have not yet discovered. I can intuit it -- it's there, just over the interior horizon -- but it's up to me to bring into existence -- to convert its potential into actuality.
Which emphasizes the point that both Truth and Beauty -- and the freedom to discover them -- are a function of wholeness. Indeed, wholeness is the cosmic prerequisite of the possibility of truth or beauty. And as a matter of fact, as I pointed out in the Coonifesto, it is also a precondition of Darwinian evolution. That is to say, natural selection rests on the assumption that there exist prior "wholes" -- whole organisms -- for it to operate on. There is no materialistic philosophy that can account for wholeness, or true unity in diversity.
Therefore, I think I understand the point of this post: love, truth, beauty, and freedom are not effects of existence. Rather, they are causes of existence. Thus, to say, for example, "God is Love," is not a mythological or speculative statement. Rather, it is a scientific statement. No, it is beyond that -- it is a metaphysical certitude upon which the foundation of science rests. For who is not in love with truth, with beautiful Sophia?
Don't get me started.
*****
I just received an email from a Raccoon that illustrates my point. He seems to have spent most of his life "looking for his mind," but without really knowing that he was embarked on the search until relatively recently. An excerpt:
"I had been learning this one language, English, for the past 41 years. What I didn't realize during those 41 years is that either I've been learning another language or it was already in me, waiting -- unused, but there. This other language was made up of just, let's say, nouns. I read some of your writing and the thing I read that I call the 'last thing' constituted a verb. The instant I read that, everything I had learned about language (structure, usage, grammar, rules, etc.) from the 1st language suddenly overlaid the 2nd one and the verb I'd learned from you linked it all together in the 2nd language, and in an instant, all the meaning flowed down like a dam breaking.
"Or, sort of like a puzzle was being built -- I wasn't building it, didn't even know I had pieces -- but I found the missing piece, which, independent of what this particular last piece stood for, was no more significant than any of the others, its only distinction being perhaps that it was the last piece. It was placed with the other pieces and in an instant I recognized, 'Hey there's a puzzle here!' But a completed puzzle. Where literally, before the puzzle appeared, I didn't even know I had the pieces."
*****
That's what I call a clean kill, or eros shot straight through the heart.
This is another way of saying that parts cannot exist in the absence of the whole -- nor time in the absence of eternity, the many in the absence of the One, or beauty without a Creator. Or, in the words of Rabbi Kushner, "the end is seeing for even one moment that the apparent multiplicity is in reality a unity." But a dynamic unity in diversity in which the one is a necessary condition of the other -- and whence the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time (Eliot).
Wholly matterimany, congratulations on the equation of your cosmic birth. Oh my stars, He expectorated a mirrorcle, now you're the spittin' image!
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Of Canines and Composers: Reducing the Song Celestial to a Bark in the Dark
At risk of once again wounding the strangely delicate sensibilities of our atheist friends, I want to revisit the idea that knowledge of God -- or at least a major aspect of it -- is much closer to an aesthetic experience than it is to other forms of knowing. As we all know, dogs can often appreciate Beethoven's early sonatas, but generally struggle with the late quartets.
This focus on the "aesthetics of God" was one of the preoccupations of the great theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, whose Glory of the Lord I've been reading lately. I shouldn't say "lately." Rather, it's something I dip into from time to time, since it consists of seven large volumes which are only part of a trilogy consisting of a total of eight additional weighty volumes, including the Theo-Drama and the Theo-Logic. Like Finnegans Wake, I don't think I'll ever read the 15 volumes straight through, but you can open them to most any page and find some little jewel of spiritual vision and insight.
Although Balthasar is one of my favorite theologians, stylistically he's very much the opposite of Schuon. Schuon wrote in an extremely compact, condensed, and unsaturated way, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I don't think I've ever read anyone who conveys the most "information" with the least amount of verbiage. Almost all of Schuon's books are collections of essays on diverse subjects as opposed to unified works. He would have been a good blogger.
As I said, Balthasar is the opposite. Instead of cranking out compact little gems, he's like a geyser -- no matter where you dip in, you're pretty much drinking from the firehose. His central theme in the seven-volume Glory of the Lord is that in modern times, the aesthetic approach to God has become eclipsed by the ethical and the logical. However, being that the transcendentals (the Good, True, and Beautiful) are inseparable, "neglecting one can only have a devastating effect on the others."
"Glory" is the category of transcendental beauty. It specifically has to do with the seeing the form and the splendor of God. Just the fact that this glory clearly exists -- that God has a splendorous form accessible to human beings -- is an extremely provocative notion. Our age values garden-variety intelligence as measured by a high IQ, but a high IQ has no bearing whatsoever on one's ability to apprehend God's glory. Rather, it can only be grasped by the awakened intellect understood in its traditional sense, not by mere intelligence.
When we behold the glory of the lord, we are in a state of rapture. But it is not as if rapture is simply an effect; rather, it is more of a two-way street. As Balthasar writes, "no one can really behold who has not already been enraptured, and no one can be enraptured who has not already perceived." Thus, rapture is the subjective response to glory, just as glory is the objective content of rapture.
Glory be! God has a form. How patently true, and yet, how mind-boggling. But how do we begin to learn to perceive a form of the Form and be-wholed the glory?
After six days, Jesus brought them high on a mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became white as the light.
Yeah, that's one way.
As I have mentioned before, faith is not an empty category, but a form of knowing. It is what the poet Keats called a "negative capability," by which "man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." This highlights the critical relationship between faith and grace, "since, in giving itself, faith apprehends the form of revelation, while grace has from the outset transported the believer up into God's world."
God "presents" himself to mankind in a multitude of forms, all true in their own way. Not only is Truth one of the properties of Being, but so too is it the inseparable bond between God and the world. As Aquinas recognized, beauty is the splendor of this Truth. Beauty is not merely a pleasing surface or veneer, but something that accompanies Truth and radiates from within it.
No philosophy could be more impoverished than one which denies the existence of this radiant interior Light -- or that reduces it to some material property of physics. "Divine light" is not a metaphor borrowed from our sensory apparatus. Rather, the reverse is true: the radiant light that fills the cosmos is an analogue of God's infinite luminous presence.
I was about to say that it is impossible to imagine a world without transcendental beauty, but I'm afraid that isn't true. In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a world that intrinsically recognizes and values transcendental beauty, which should form one of the axes around which a healthy civilization revolves.
No one should ever consciously seek ugliness, any more than they should consciously embrace the lie, but there you go. Just as beauty and truth are inseparable, so too are ugliness and the Lie forever bonded. While there are surely "attractive lies" -- such as the constant lies of the left -- their attractiveness is always on the surface only.
And this kind of superficial beauty will eventually beget the lie, as we see time and time again with the leftist fantasists. When a fuzzy panderbore such as John Edwards oozes his platitudes, you can almost see Death in the background holding his coat and snickering.
Once a civilization has devalued transcendental beauty as one of its guiding ideals, the question naturally arises: "Why not just plumb satan's depths? What difference does it make?"
I guess that's what you call a rhetorical question.
As Balthasar points out, in a world where beauty has lost its attractiveness, truth soon follows in its wake. But it is not just any kind of truth that is eliminated. Rather, what we specifically lose is the capacity to recognize self-evident truths, the kind of self-evident truths upon which America was specifically founded -- for example, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Are any children in public schools taught how to recognize this self-evident truth -- or that it even exists? Indeed, wouldn't it now be considered against the law to teach children to perceive transcendental truth in the manner of our founders?
Some law that makes the basis of Law illegal.
And if transcendental truth and beauty are eliminated, what then is left of Being itself, since these are among its "first fruits?" Obviously, you are going to breed a population of nihilists who are paradoxically filled with existential emptiness. To put it another way, they will be filled with the world, since this is ultimately the only alternative to being filled with God. There is nothing a priori wrong with the world, unless it is drained of its transcendent light. But Balthasar asks, "Will this light not necessarily die out where the very language of light has been forgotten and the mystery of Being is no longer allowed to express itself?"
In such a debased world, all that remains is "a mere lump of existence which, even if it claims for itself the freedom proper to spirits, nevertheless remains totally dark and incomprehensible even to itself. The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty."
In short, "Whoever insists that he can neither see it nor read it, or whoever cannot accept it, but rather seeks to 'break it up' critically into supposedly prior components, that person falls into the void and, what is worse, he falls into what is opposed to the true and the good." One then spends one's life adapting to a denatured world of one's own making, and calls it "reality."
But this secondary and derivative world is about as real as a body without a soul. In such a closed, endeadened state, Being cannot call out to being, nor Form to form, Truth to truth, Beauty to beauty. In a word, it is hell. Unhappitants of this world are physically alive even while they deprive themselves of that which gives Life. But I suppose there are worse places for the proud to live. For example, on one's knees.
You haven't perceived the hologram to your private particle? Come in, open His presence and report for karmic duty. Why, it's a Tree of Life for those whose wood beleaf. What in carnation?! Viveka la revelation! --The Weird & Wacky New Testavus for the Rest of Us
This focus on the "aesthetics of God" was one of the preoccupations of the great theologian Hans Urs Von Balthasar, whose Glory of the Lord I've been reading lately. I shouldn't say "lately." Rather, it's something I dip into from time to time, since it consists of seven large volumes which are only part of a trilogy consisting of a total of eight additional weighty volumes, including the Theo-Drama and the Theo-Logic. Like Finnegans Wake, I don't think I'll ever read the 15 volumes straight through, but you can open them to most any page and find some little jewel of spiritual vision and insight.
Although Balthasar is one of my favorite theologians, stylistically he's very much the opposite of Schuon. Schuon wrote in an extremely compact, condensed, and unsaturated way, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. I don't think I've ever read anyone who conveys the most "information" with the least amount of verbiage. Almost all of Schuon's books are collections of essays on diverse subjects as opposed to unified works. He would have been a good blogger.
As I said, Balthasar is the opposite. Instead of cranking out compact little gems, he's like a geyser -- no matter where you dip in, you're pretty much drinking from the firehose. His central theme in the seven-volume Glory of the Lord is that in modern times, the aesthetic approach to God has become eclipsed by the ethical and the logical. However, being that the transcendentals (the Good, True, and Beautiful) are inseparable, "neglecting one can only have a devastating effect on the others."
"Glory" is the category of transcendental beauty. It specifically has to do with the seeing the form and the splendor of God. Just the fact that this glory clearly exists -- that God has a splendorous form accessible to human beings -- is an extremely provocative notion. Our age values garden-variety intelligence as measured by a high IQ, but a high IQ has no bearing whatsoever on one's ability to apprehend God's glory. Rather, it can only be grasped by the awakened intellect understood in its traditional sense, not by mere intelligence.
When we behold the glory of the lord, we are in a state of rapture. But it is not as if rapture is simply an effect; rather, it is more of a two-way street. As Balthasar writes, "no one can really behold who has not already been enraptured, and no one can be enraptured who has not already perceived." Thus, rapture is the subjective response to glory, just as glory is the objective content of rapture.
Glory be! God has a form. How patently true, and yet, how mind-boggling. But how do we begin to learn to perceive a form of the Form and be-wholed the glory?
After six days, Jesus brought them high on a mountain by themselves, and was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun, and His clothes became white as the light.
Yeah, that's one way.
As I have mentioned before, faith is not an empty category, but a form of knowing. It is what the poet Keats called a "negative capability," by which "man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." This highlights the critical relationship between faith and grace, "since, in giving itself, faith apprehends the form of revelation, while grace has from the outset transported the believer up into God's world."
God "presents" himself to mankind in a multitude of forms, all true in their own way. Not only is Truth one of the properties of Being, but so too is it the inseparable bond between God and the world. As Aquinas recognized, beauty is the splendor of this Truth. Beauty is not merely a pleasing surface or veneer, but something that accompanies Truth and radiates from within it.
No philosophy could be more impoverished than one which denies the existence of this radiant interior Light -- or that reduces it to some material property of physics. "Divine light" is not a metaphor borrowed from our sensory apparatus. Rather, the reverse is true: the radiant light that fills the cosmos is an analogue of God's infinite luminous presence.
I was about to say that it is impossible to imagine a world without transcendental beauty, but I'm afraid that isn't true. In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine a world that intrinsically recognizes and values transcendental beauty, which should form one of the axes around which a healthy civilization revolves.
No one should ever consciously seek ugliness, any more than they should consciously embrace the lie, but there you go. Just as beauty and truth are inseparable, so too are ugliness and the Lie forever bonded. While there are surely "attractive lies" -- such as the constant lies of the left -- their attractiveness is always on the surface only.
And this kind of superficial beauty will eventually beget the lie, as we see time and time again with the leftist fantasists. When a fuzzy panderbore such as John Edwards oozes his platitudes, you can almost see Death in the background holding his coat and snickering.
Once a civilization has devalued transcendental beauty as one of its guiding ideals, the question naturally arises: "Why not just plumb satan's depths? What difference does it make?"
I guess that's what you call a rhetorical question.
As Balthasar points out, in a world where beauty has lost its attractiveness, truth soon follows in its wake. But it is not just any kind of truth that is eliminated. Rather, what we specifically lose is the capacity to recognize self-evident truths, the kind of self-evident truths upon which America was specifically founded -- for example, that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights. Are any children in public schools taught how to recognize this self-evident truth -- or that it even exists? Indeed, wouldn't it now be considered against the law to teach children to perceive transcendental truth in the manner of our founders?
Some law that makes the basis of Law illegal.
And if transcendental truth and beauty are eliminated, what then is left of Being itself, since these are among its "first fruits?" Obviously, you are going to breed a population of nihilists who are paradoxically filled with existential emptiness. To put it another way, they will be filled with the world, since this is ultimately the only alternative to being filled with God. There is nothing a priori wrong with the world, unless it is drained of its transcendent light. But Balthasar asks, "Will this light not necessarily die out where the very language of light has been forgotten and the mystery of Being is no longer allowed to express itself?"
In such a debased world, all that remains is "a mere lump of existence which, even if it claims for itself the freedom proper to spirits, nevertheless remains totally dark and incomprehensible even to itself. The witness borne by Being becomes untrustworthy for the person who can no longer read the language of beauty."
In short, "Whoever insists that he can neither see it nor read it, or whoever cannot accept it, but rather seeks to 'break it up' critically into supposedly prior components, that person falls into the void and, what is worse, he falls into what is opposed to the true and the good." One then spends one's life adapting to a denatured world of one's own making, and calls it "reality."
But this secondary and derivative world is about as real as a body without a soul. In such a closed, endeadened state, Being cannot call out to being, nor Form to form, Truth to truth, Beauty to beauty. In a word, it is hell. Unhappitants of this world are physically alive even while they deprive themselves of that which gives Life. But I suppose there are worse places for the proud to live. For example, on one's knees.
You haven't perceived the hologram to your private particle? Come in, open His presence and report for karmic duty. Why, it's a Tree of Life for those whose wood beleaf. What in carnation?! Viveka la revelation! --The Weird & Wacky New Testavus for the Rest of Us
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The One Cosmos Innerview: A Shocking True-to-Wife Story!
WILL: For our very first One Cosmos Interview, I'd like to welcome none other than Mrs. Leslie Godwin, spouse of and life-partner to Bob, creator of the One Cosmos blog. Welcome, Leslie!
LESLIE: Thank you, Will.
WILL: For those O.C. readers who may not know, Leslie is the author of the book From Burned Out To Fired Up: A Woman's Guide to Rekindling the Passion and Meaning In Life and Work. She is also a therapist and a life-transition coach.
I encourage everyone to check out Leslie's web page. As a disclaimer, I should let everyone know that Leslie gave me some invaluable professional advice regarding a recent project of mine, so count me as an unabashed Leslie G. fan. Leslie, I'd like to discuss your book and your professional life, but first a few questions about which everyone is probably curious - when and how did you first meet Bob?
LESLIE: Bob and I met in school in 1983, California Graduate School in Westwood, CA -- a private psychology graduate school near UCLA that focuses on those going into private practice as opposed to research or teaching. He was studying for his Ph.D. and I was in the Master's program.
WILL: Are you originally from southern California?
LESLIE: No, I'm from New York -- Forest Hills, Queens then Dobbs Ferry in Westchester County. When I met Bob, I had just moved out to Los Angeles from New College in Sarasota, Florida, via Davidson College in North Carolina and auto mechanic school in Pennsylvania. I had done quite a bit of traveling, unlike --
WILL: Wait, could we back up for just a moment? You were in auto mechanic school? You were considering being a car mechanic?
LESLIE: I had no idea what I wanted to do when I fled Davidson College after a little over a year of being the token Yankee. My dad suggested learning about repairing planes. I guess that gave me the idea to investigate fixing cars. But it's hard to say how it all worked out to get my degree from tech school. But I absolutely loved it. After feeling lost and homesick at a very challenging liberal arts program, learning how to fix things and being around non-Ivy League types was just what I needed. I even wrote a manual for my friends' Mustang once I got to New College. Nowadays, it would have been a "Dummies' Guide" sort of thing.
WILL: Well, I had no idea you had that kind of talent. That's impressive and revealing. But okay, so you met Bob in graduate school . . .
LESLIE: We met in group therapy actually.
WILL: Group therapy? Not exactly the White Cliffs of Dover, but...
LESLIE: Well, the school had a good scam going. The two owners ran group therapy sessions that were mandatory for every student for a full year. They were slightly less than professional as group leaders, and if you missed a "class" you had to make it up in a private psychotherapy session ... and pay their full fee for that! It was borderline unethical, but thanks to Dr. Packer, Bob and I met.
WILL: So... was it, you know... love at first sight?
LESLIE: Not unless you think of revulsion being the flip side of the same coin as love.
WILL: (laughing) Yes, please go on...
LESLIE: Well, on the first day of the new term, Bob walked in to group therapy with his earpiece on, listening to a Dodger game on the radio...
WILL: Yeah, he's big on the baseball metaphors...
LESLIE: ... and I thought he was incredibly arrogant that and he was setting himself apart from the group I had already bonded with for one trimester before he strolled in... After group, I went out to dinner with my fiance, Ricardo. He couldn't believe how agitated I was. Poor Ricardo...
WILL: "Ricardo". One doesn't meet a lot of Ricardos . . .
LESLIE: He was my Ricardo. I was his Lucy... I must have bored him to death venting about this new guy in group who I just couldn't stand. I remember doing a lot of -- what's the word for audible, irritated exhaling? I went on for a while about how aggravating the whole group was going to be now that Bob was in it for the next seven months.
WILL: So what happened with you and Ricardo?
LESLIE: He didn't pay enough attention to me. Of course, that's not what I told HIM.
WILL: So splitsville?
LESLIE: Wasn't easy. I suffered from middle-of-the-night panic attacks after I broke up with Ricardo.
WILL: Understood.
LESLIE: Bob was very sympathetic at this time. He gave me his phone number at work -- he worked the graveyard shift at a grocery store so I wouldn't be waking him -- and said I could call if I needed to talk to someone. It sounds like a pickup line as I talk about it now... if you want to pick up a neurotic, panicky 23 year old. But looking back, I can see that this is when I saw the other side of Bob. Isn't that a Dylan album?
WILL: Yeah, it's titled Another Side Of -
LESLIE: I know what it's titled, Will. Anyway, Bob was sensitive, empathic, and genuinely wanted to help --
WILL: ... I think "Chimes of Freedom Flashing" is on it...
LESLIE: -- and I didn't see the potential for romance until a crisis occurred.
WILL: What was that?
LESLIE: My best friend from college had just been killed while bicycling at night after class.
WILL: That's awful.
LESLIE: Mauricio was so unusual. I have never met someone so comfortable with himself. He exuded joy. A good counterpoint for me, exuding angst. Well, Bob and I walked around Westwood for over an hour talking. It really helped. Shortly after that, he invited me to hang out at the beach one evening before he had to work and we talked some more. It was as if his spirit was hidden at first, then he opened up a bit. And finally, I got to experience the real Bob.
WILL: And the Fateful First Date?
LESLIE: Bob invited me to a Big Joe Turner show at a nearby club, Madame Wong's West.
WILL: Yeah, that works.
LESLIE: As soon as we got there and parked, I locked the keys in my car.
WILL: That's something I'd do!
LESLIE: Really?
WILL: Bank on it.
LESLIE: Well, I was very impressed that Bob didn't get irritated or think I was a knucklehead. After the show, we sat out by the pool at my aunt's guesthouse where I was living and talked til 2 am? 4 am?
WILL: Definitely an am.
LESLIE: Let's just say It was very magical and I've been hypnotized ever since.
WILL: I think that under questioning, Bob would confess to the same. In fact, I can recall some One Cosmos posts that were Shakespeare sonnet-like in their profession of love and the holiness of the marital union, and I believe your name came up in conjunction with them --
LESLIE: Well, never has a husband put up with a messy house, a lack of homecooked meals, and a wife who needs to sleep late every morning because the puppy and toddler conspire to keep her up off and on every night with more grace and kindness...
WILL: ... You were going to say?
LESLIE: Well... I am sure Bob didn't know what he was getting into.
WILL: Well, what husband does? Or wife for that matter?
LESLIE: Or parent, now that you mention it. You should know I refer to the time that followed the honeymoon period as the "Taming of the Shrew."
WILL: Just how shrew-ish was Bob?
LESLIE: Will, I'm sure you realized I was referring to myself as the shrew.
(to be con't)
LESLIE: Thank you, Will.
WILL: For those O.C. readers who may not know, Leslie is the author of the book From Burned Out To Fired Up: A Woman's Guide to Rekindling the Passion and Meaning In Life and Work. She is also a therapist and a life-transition coach.
I encourage everyone to check out Leslie's web page. As a disclaimer, I should let everyone know that Leslie gave me some invaluable professional advice regarding a recent project of mine, so count me as an unabashed Leslie G. fan. Leslie, I'd like to discuss your book and your professional life, but first a few questions about which everyone is probably curious - when and how did you first meet Bob?LESLIE: Bob and I met in school in 1983, California Graduate School in Westwood, CA -- a private psychology graduate school near UCLA that focuses on those going into private practice as opposed to research or teaching. He was studying for his Ph.D. and I was in the Master's program.
WILL: Are you originally from southern California?
LESLIE: No, I'm from New York -- Forest Hills, Queens then Dobbs Ferry in Westchester County. When I met Bob, I had just moved out to Los Angeles from New College in Sarasota, Florida, via Davidson College in North Carolina and auto mechanic school in Pennsylvania. I had done quite a bit of traveling, unlike --
WILL: Wait, could we back up for just a moment? You were in auto mechanic school? You were considering being a car mechanic?
LESLIE: I had no idea what I wanted to do when I fled Davidson College after a little over a year of being the token Yankee. My dad suggested learning about repairing planes. I guess that gave me the idea to investigate fixing cars. But it's hard to say how it all worked out to get my degree from tech school. But I absolutely loved it. After feeling lost and homesick at a very challenging liberal arts program, learning how to fix things and being around non-Ivy League types was just what I needed. I even wrote a manual for my friends' Mustang once I got to New College. Nowadays, it would have been a "Dummies' Guide" sort of thing.
WILL: Well, I had no idea you had that kind of talent. That's impressive and revealing. But okay, so you met Bob in graduate school . . .
LESLIE: We met in group therapy actually.
WILL: Group therapy? Not exactly the White Cliffs of Dover, but...
LESLIE: Well, the school had a good scam going. The two owners ran group therapy sessions that were mandatory for every student for a full year. They were slightly less than professional as group leaders, and if you missed a "class" you had to make it up in a private psychotherapy session ... and pay their full fee for that! It was borderline unethical, but thanks to Dr. Packer, Bob and I met.
WILL: So... was it, you know... love at first sight?
LESLIE: Not unless you think of revulsion being the flip side of the same coin as love.
WILL: (laughing) Yes, please go on...
LESLIE: Well, on the first day of the new term, Bob walked in to group therapy with his earpiece on, listening to a Dodger game on the radio...
WILL: Yeah, he's big on the baseball metaphors...
LESLIE: ... and I thought he was incredibly arrogant that and he was setting himself apart from the group I had already bonded with for one trimester before he strolled in... After group, I went out to dinner with my fiance, Ricardo. He couldn't believe how agitated I was. Poor Ricardo...
WILL: "Ricardo". One doesn't meet a lot of Ricardos . . .
LESLIE: He was my Ricardo. I was his Lucy... I must have bored him to death venting about this new guy in group who I just couldn't stand. I remember doing a lot of -- what's the word for audible, irritated exhaling? I went on for a while about how aggravating the whole group was going to be now that Bob was in it for the next seven months.
WILL: So what happened with you and Ricardo?
LESLIE: He didn't pay enough attention to me. Of course, that's not what I told HIM.
WILL: So splitsville?
LESLIE: Wasn't easy. I suffered from middle-of-the-night panic attacks after I broke up with Ricardo.
WILL: Understood.
LESLIE: Bob was very sympathetic at this time. He gave me his phone number at work -- he worked the graveyard shift at a grocery store so I wouldn't be waking him -- and said I could call if I needed to talk to someone. It sounds like a pickup line as I talk about it now... if you want to pick up a neurotic, panicky 23 year old. But looking back, I can see that this is when I saw the other side of Bob. Isn't that a Dylan album?
WILL: Yeah, it's titled Another Side Of -
LESLIE: I know what it's titled, Will. Anyway, Bob was sensitive, empathic, and genuinely wanted to help --
WILL: ... I think "Chimes of Freedom Flashing" is on it...
LESLIE: -- and I didn't see the potential for romance until a crisis occurred.
WILL: What was that?
LESLIE: My best friend from college had just been killed while bicycling at night after class.
WILL: That's awful.
LESLIE: Mauricio was so unusual. I have never met someone so comfortable with himself. He exuded joy. A good counterpoint for me, exuding angst. Well, Bob and I walked around Westwood for over an hour talking. It really helped. Shortly after that, he invited me to hang out at the beach one evening before he had to work and we talked some more. It was as if his spirit was hidden at first, then he opened up a bit. And finally, I got to experience the real Bob.
WILL: And the Fateful First Date?
LESLIE: Bob invited me to a Big Joe Turner show at a nearby club, Madame Wong's West.
WILL: Yeah, that works.
LESLIE: As soon as we got there and parked, I locked the keys in my car.
WILL: That's something I'd do!
LESLIE: Really?
WILL: Bank on it.
LESLIE: Well, I was very impressed that Bob didn't get irritated or think I was a knucklehead. After the show, we sat out by the pool at my aunt's guesthouse where I was living and talked til 2 am? 4 am?
WILL: Definitely an am.
LESLIE: Let's just say It was very magical and I've been hypnotized ever since.
WILL: I think that under questioning, Bob would confess to the same. In fact, I can recall some One Cosmos posts that were Shakespeare sonnet-like in their profession of love and the holiness of the marital union, and I believe your name came up in conjunction with them --
LESLIE: Well, never has a husband put up with a messy house, a lack of homecooked meals, and a wife who needs to sleep late every morning because the puppy and toddler conspire to keep her up off and on every night with more grace and kindness...
WILL: ... You were going to say?
LESLIE: Well... I am sure Bob didn't know what he was getting into.
WILL: Well, what husband does? Or wife for that matter?
LESLIE: Or parent, now that you mention it. You should know I refer to the time that followed the honeymoon period as the "Taming of the Shrew."
WILL: Just how shrew-ish was Bob?
LESLIE: Will, I'm sure you realized I was referring to myself as the shrew.
(to be con't)
Monday, June 11, 2007
Just Passin' Through: Coordinates and Gaps in the Hyperdimensional Godhead
If we extend our Matterhorn analogy and think of God, or the Absolute, as a sort of hyperdimensional mountain range, what does that imply for human beings?
I don't know. I'm thinking about it.
Let's see. Perhaps we can compare the situation to dogs and people. Obviously, a human being has many "dimensions," so to speak, that a dog doesn't. So how is a dog supposed to understand a human? He can't. Not really. Or just a very narrow "frequency" out of the totality. I remember about 15 years ago, when we were training our first dog. The big breakthrough occurred when the trainer explained that we might think of the dog as a dog, but she doesn't think of us as human. In order to get into her world, you have to think like a dog. Dogs have an elaborate nonverbal language that you have to tap into. Basically, you want them to consider you the alpha dog.
But that analogy can't be quite right, because although dogs aren't made in the image of man, nine out of ten sages agree that man is made in the image of God. If this is correct, then a certain kind of applied introspection can lead to accurate intuitions about God, just as knowledge of God can lead to wisdom and self-understanding.
Interestingly, Orthodox Christianity emphasizes this two-way movement, with Athanasius of Alexandria's formula that "The Son of God became man, that we might become God." Therefore, only God's kenosis, or self-emptying, makes possible theosis, or union with God. As such -- since we are the image and likeness -- our own self-emptying would apparently be a prerequisite for theosis. And this is indeed what all mystical paths emphasize in one form or another, the three part process of purgation/purification, illumination, and union -- which has certain shared points of reference to the aspiration-rejection-surrender theme we discussed a couple of weeks ago.
Last week I mentioned that a photograph, painting, or any perception at all is actually a geometrical transformation that maintains certain coordinates and dimensions while distorting others. For example, this is why we can all recognize the simple "have a nice day" smiley face as a smiling face. You can transform a human face with just a couple of dots and a semi-circle and still recognize a face (even infants can do this). It is also why we can view a two-dimensional movie and experience it as three-dimensional. We subconsciously employ certain coordinates, or "invariants," to project the missing dimension.
In linguistics -- I think I'm more or less right about this, but I could be making this up -- a declension occurs when a more general term is modified to become a particular case. In a certain sense, it means that potentiality is reduced to actuality. I believe we can see that scripture operates in the same way, in that the Absolute in itself can have no interlocutor, no mediator, no middle term, not even a "here" and "there" -- "for no man shall see me and live" (Rabbi Mo).
To a certain extent, this accounts for the inevitable "incoherence" of religion, which cannot not be. The reason is that scripture is a description -- a declension -- expressed in our terms of something that vastly exceeds the terms of expression. For example, imagine a flat sheet of paper, where two-dimensional beings live. None of them knows anything about the third dimension. Now imagine your hand moving through the sheet of paper. What would that look like to the two-dimensional beings? First of all, they wouldn't see a hand. First they might see a point -- the tip of a finger -- expanding into a circle. Eventually they would see five points expanding into separate circles. But then those circles would merge and blend into one larger oval (the palm), followed by a smaller circle at the wrist. And then everything would disappear as the arm moved through.
Now, if God is a hyperdimensional object (or subject-object), perhaps we need to take a lesson from this. Supposing that for the flatlanders, the Mysterious Arm is God. But their description of the arm would be very distorted. In fact, they would experience what is actually a singular object in space as a series of events playing out in time. Could it be therefore that we experience God in the same way -- as the "playing out in time" of what is unified and whole on a higher dimension?
"I am Alpha and Omega." "Before the world was, I AM." "When He prepared the heavens, I was there." "Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning, for the one who stands at the beginning will know the end." "Blessed is the one who comes into being before he came into being" (Gospel of Thomas), "Lucky is the blind man who can feel a woman's wrist and learn everything he needs to know about the rest of her" (Gospel of Ray Charles).
Bearing in mind what we said above about transformation, perception, coordinates, and invariance, Schuon writes that "Religious formulations limit themselves to enunciating points of reference without being too concerned with outward coherence, although from another point of view, the mythic and symbolic image always evokes a profound and lived reality" [i.e., something higher than that which maps it]. For example, "the history of Adam and Eve may clash with a certain need for logic, but we bear it deeply within ourselves, and it is this inherence of the sacred image which on the one hand justifies it and on the other explains a relatively easy adherence to it."
Thus, "it is precisely the surface contradictions, the fissures so to speak which, by a crowning paradox, offer the decisive points of reference for the discovery of the metaphysical homogeneity of doctrines or symbols that are at first sight disparate."
What is Schuon saying? That the gaps and fissures in scripure are more like points of entry which testify to its higher dimensional reality -- just as the five fingers passing through flatland testify to the existence of the hand. But in Flatland, there would undoubtedly be philosophers and skeptics who would look at the same data and conclude that the gaps were evidence of incoherence, not coherence. They literally could not "see the big pitcher," which is to say, Randy Johnson's left arm passing through Flatbush on the way to Manhattan.
The point is this. Being that we are in the image of God, "the sacred truth is part of our soul." Therefore, to begin to comprehend it, you must see how the truths embedded in scripture are a transformation of your own self. Or, you might say that revelation is a memo from your higher (dimensional) self to your lower self. And this is why it is such a -- I won't say "sin," but a shame -- to seek only a literal understanding of scripture, thereby interpreting it in terms of the lowest human way of knowing it. In other words, in doing this, you eliminate all of the higher dimensions and deeper connections. And we're back to dogs, Beethoven, and tone-deaf atheists.
For example, take one of the many works of Bach which stand as an eternal monument to the transdimensional God. Even an atheist can appreciate this music on his own level. But what will specifically be denied him -- or what he denies himself -- is the Real Presence from which the music flows and to which it stands as testimony. But can a single work of Back possibly encapsulate that object? Yes and no. If he were alive today, he would still be cranking out his aural monuments to divinity, since a higher dimension cannot be exhausted in a lower one. There is literally no end to the forms which a higher dimension can take in a lower one. And yet, they are all one. And who has the musical vision to "integrate" all of the musical gaps between Bach's indivdual works, and apprehend the higher dimensional unity from which they flow?
I'm guessing that there's some mystico-musically gifted person out there who has done it. In a way, this is again what Joyce was attempting in Finnegans Wake: to describe the single hyperdimensional object as it passes through our world as the experience of "history." Joyce simply took seriously the idea that "time is the moving image of eternity." And if that's true, then every passing moment is a unique and priceless snapshot of the eternal Magic Mountain.
And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that could be written. --John 21:25
I don't know. I'm thinking about it.
Let's see. Perhaps we can compare the situation to dogs and people. Obviously, a human being has many "dimensions," so to speak, that a dog doesn't. So how is a dog supposed to understand a human? He can't. Not really. Or just a very narrow "frequency" out of the totality. I remember about 15 years ago, when we were training our first dog. The big breakthrough occurred when the trainer explained that we might think of the dog as a dog, but she doesn't think of us as human. In order to get into her world, you have to think like a dog. Dogs have an elaborate nonverbal language that you have to tap into. Basically, you want them to consider you the alpha dog.
But that analogy can't be quite right, because although dogs aren't made in the image of man, nine out of ten sages agree that man is made in the image of God. If this is correct, then a certain kind of applied introspection can lead to accurate intuitions about God, just as knowledge of God can lead to wisdom and self-understanding.
Interestingly, Orthodox Christianity emphasizes this two-way movement, with Athanasius of Alexandria's formula that "The Son of God became man, that we might become God." Therefore, only God's kenosis, or self-emptying, makes possible theosis, or union with God. As such -- since we are the image and likeness -- our own self-emptying would apparently be a prerequisite for theosis. And this is indeed what all mystical paths emphasize in one form or another, the three part process of purgation/purification, illumination, and union -- which has certain shared points of reference to the aspiration-rejection-surrender theme we discussed a couple of weeks ago.
Last week I mentioned that a photograph, painting, or any perception at all is actually a geometrical transformation that maintains certain coordinates and dimensions while distorting others. For example, this is why we can all recognize the simple "have a nice day" smiley face as a smiling face. You can transform a human face with just a couple of dots and a semi-circle and still recognize a face (even infants can do this). It is also why we can view a two-dimensional movie and experience it as three-dimensional. We subconsciously employ certain coordinates, or "invariants," to project the missing dimension.
In linguistics -- I think I'm more or less right about this, but I could be making this up -- a declension occurs when a more general term is modified to become a particular case. In a certain sense, it means that potentiality is reduced to actuality. I believe we can see that scripture operates in the same way, in that the Absolute in itself can have no interlocutor, no mediator, no middle term, not even a "here" and "there" -- "for no man shall see me and live" (Rabbi Mo).
To a certain extent, this accounts for the inevitable "incoherence" of religion, which cannot not be. The reason is that scripture is a description -- a declension -- expressed in our terms of something that vastly exceeds the terms of expression. For example, imagine a flat sheet of paper, where two-dimensional beings live. None of them knows anything about the third dimension. Now imagine your hand moving through the sheet of paper. What would that look like to the two-dimensional beings? First of all, they wouldn't see a hand. First they might see a point -- the tip of a finger -- expanding into a circle. Eventually they would see five points expanding into separate circles. But then those circles would merge and blend into one larger oval (the palm), followed by a smaller circle at the wrist. And then everything would disappear as the arm moved through.
Now, if God is a hyperdimensional object (or subject-object), perhaps we need to take a lesson from this. Supposing that for the flatlanders, the Mysterious Arm is God. But their description of the arm would be very distorted. In fact, they would experience what is actually a singular object in space as a series of events playing out in time. Could it be therefore that we experience God in the same way -- as the "playing out in time" of what is unified and whole on a higher dimension?
"I am Alpha and Omega." "Before the world was, I AM." "When He prepared the heavens, I was there." "Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning, for the one who stands at the beginning will know the end." "Blessed is the one who comes into being before he came into being" (Gospel of Thomas), "Lucky is the blind man who can feel a woman's wrist and learn everything he needs to know about the rest of her" (Gospel of Ray Charles).
Bearing in mind what we said above about transformation, perception, coordinates, and invariance, Schuon writes that "Religious formulations limit themselves to enunciating points of reference without being too concerned with outward coherence, although from another point of view, the mythic and symbolic image always evokes a profound and lived reality" [i.e., something higher than that which maps it]. For example, "the history of Adam and Eve may clash with a certain need for logic, but we bear it deeply within ourselves, and it is this inherence of the sacred image which on the one hand justifies it and on the other explains a relatively easy adherence to it."
Thus, "it is precisely the surface contradictions, the fissures so to speak which, by a crowning paradox, offer the decisive points of reference for the discovery of the metaphysical homogeneity of doctrines or symbols that are at first sight disparate."
What is Schuon saying? That the gaps and fissures in scripure are more like points of entry which testify to its higher dimensional reality -- just as the five fingers passing through flatland testify to the existence of the hand. But in Flatland, there would undoubtedly be philosophers and skeptics who would look at the same data and conclude that the gaps were evidence of incoherence, not coherence. They literally could not "see the big pitcher," which is to say, Randy Johnson's left arm passing through Flatbush on the way to Manhattan.
The point is this. Being that we are in the image of God, "the sacred truth is part of our soul." Therefore, to begin to comprehend it, you must see how the truths embedded in scripture are a transformation of your own self. Or, you might say that revelation is a memo from your higher (dimensional) self to your lower self. And this is why it is such a -- I won't say "sin," but a shame -- to seek only a literal understanding of scripture, thereby interpreting it in terms of the lowest human way of knowing it. In other words, in doing this, you eliminate all of the higher dimensions and deeper connections. And we're back to dogs, Beethoven, and tone-deaf atheists.
For example, take one of the many works of Bach which stand as an eternal monument to the transdimensional God. Even an atheist can appreciate this music on his own level. But what will specifically be denied him -- or what he denies himself -- is the Real Presence from which the music flows and to which it stands as testimony. But can a single work of Back possibly encapsulate that object? Yes and no. If he were alive today, he would still be cranking out his aural monuments to divinity, since a higher dimension cannot be exhausted in a lower one. There is literally no end to the forms which a higher dimension can take in a lower one. And yet, they are all one. And who has the musical vision to "integrate" all of the musical gaps between Bach's indivdual works, and apprehend the higher dimensional unity from which they flow?
I'm guessing that there's some mystico-musically gifted person out there who has done it. In a way, this is again what Joyce was attempting in Finnegans Wake: to describe the single hyperdimensional object as it passes through our world as the experience of "history." Joyce simply took seriously the idea that "time is the moving image of eternity." And if that's true, then every passing moment is a unique and priceless snapshot of the eternal Magic Mountain.
And there are also many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that could be written. --John 21:25
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Shedding a Little Obscurity on the Dazzlingly Self-Evident
In the few moments I have here, I wanted to say something about the debate last week between Christopher Hitchens and the Christian theologian Mark Roberts on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. I predicted that it wouldn't go well for the theist, being that standard-issue logic is going to trump exoteric religion every time. This hardly means that exoteric religion is "wrong," only that it has no merely logical way to defend itself against charges of internal inconsistency.
It goes without saying that many aspects of religion would appear to defy conventional logic. On their own plane they are true, but when applied to another plane they don't so much become false as absurd. Thus, any reasonably intelligent person -- and Hitchens is an unreasonably intelligent person -- can pretty much pick apart exoteric religion if they are so inclined. A child can do it, really. I myself used to do it all the time. I was one of those people who welcomed the door-to-door Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons into my home just to mess with their heads.
The "content" of science is the relationship between our senses and the external world. But the content of religion is the relationship between God and man. If you treat the one like the other and expect religion to be bound by the same kind of logical rigor as science, you are bound to be confused. Pursuing this fruitless line of inquiry falls under the heading of using one's intelligence for a stupid end. Much finer and more subtle minds than Christopher Hitchens have always been well aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies, and had no difficulty reconciling them in the appropriate way.
The relationship between God and man is, among other things, interior, protean, and multiple. In other words, there are many ways to form a relationship with God, which, in a way, is not that different from the diverse ways we can form a relationship to the external world. After all, we can see it, smell it, touch it, taste it, hear it, etc. Just so, there are diverse ways we may know God, only one of which is through revelation. Or, to put it another way, God is only known through revelation, bearing in mind that revelation does not consist only of certain sacred texts. To cite one obvious example, the uncreated intellect that is able to comprehend the truth of revelation (or the truth of anything, really) is as much a revelation -- more so, in fact -- than revelation itself. They are simply two sides of the same Word that courses through the arteries of being.
I only caught a few minutes of the debate, but one of the predictable problems was that the two men were operating on entirely different planes. The theologian understood God and religion in one way, while Hitchens (dis)understood them in an different way. In a word, the two were using entirely different paradigms, or operating systems, to try to apprehend the phenomena under scrutiny. The same thing can and does happen in fields other than religion.
To cite one example that comes readily to mind since it pertains to my own field of psychology, a psychoanalyst and a behaviorist will have virtually nothing to debate, since their paradigms, and the assumptions underlying them, are so radically different. The psychoanalyst believes that the source of our emotional pain and conflict is unconscious -- that there is an "unthought known" realm of consciousness "beneath" the ego, which shapes and directs conscious thought and behavior. Various schools of psychoanalysis might even be compared to different religions, in that they all try to map this invisible domain in different ways -- there are Freudians, Kleinians, Kohutians, Jungians, and many others.
If one were so inclined, one could easily dismiss psychoanalysis based merely on the fact that the people who posit this thing called the "unconscious" cannot even agree amongst themselves on its characteristics, and often contradict one another. However, this would be very short-sighted, since the the unconscious -- like God -- is "interior, protean, and multiple." By its very nature, people are going to have different views and theories of it, since it is subjective and holographic, not objective and atomistic. Just because people cannot agree on its exact nature, does not mean that it does not exist. If we were to use the same criteria with regard to quantum physics, we would have to say that the subatomic realm doesn't exist either, since there are so many different models and theories pertaining to it, and no existing way to even harmonize quantum and relativity theories (i.e., the macro and the micro realms).
So psychoanalysts cannot agree on the nature of psychic reality. Comes now the behaviorist, who says that the unconscious doesn't exist at all. In fact, even consciousness is a dubious construct. Rather, there is only observable behavior. Mental illness is really just painful or dysfunctional behavior. Change the behavior and you change the man. End of issue.
Right away, you can see that the atheist Hitchens debating the theist Roberts is exactly like a behaviorist debating a psychoanalyst. In fact, I remember having such a debate with an atheist during my internship at Camarillo State Mental Hospital around 20 years ago. Naturally I won the debate, although the behaviorist had no way of knowing it, since his mind was limited to the plane of observable behavior. How can he have any knowledge of that which he a priori excludes? Again, it is like the dog who cannot understand Beethoven or the atheist who cannot understand religion. Same sensory apparatus, different planes.
Now, Schuon makes an excellent point in this regard, writing that "The man who rejects religion because, if taken literally, it sometimes seems absurd -- ... such a man does not know the one essential thing, despite the logic of his reaction: namely, that the imagery, contradictory though it may be at first sight, nonetheless conveys data that in the final analysis are coherent and even dazzlingly evident for those who are capable of having a presentiment of them or of grasping them."
Thus, religion can be simultaneously "illogical" and nevertheless "dazzlingly evident." How can this be? First of all, one must resist the temptation to resolve the contradictions within religion on a lower plane than that from which they arise. Again, pointing out apparent inconsistencies is so easy that a 13 year old can do it, but to the extent that you win this kind of argument, you lose.
Rather, any inconsistencies must be resolved on a higher plane, the plane of esoterism. Rather than trying to comprehend the center from the periphery, or the principle from its manifestation, this approach tries to understand the periphery from the center -- the center being the Absolute, or God. The other day we used the analogy of people taking photographs of the Matterhorn. Each photo will necessarily be a little different, despite the fact that there is only one Matterhorn (and one Schuon standing in front of it... funny, he doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would have been interested in visiting Disneyland).
The physicist David Bohm used an even better analogy. Imagine a rectangular fish tank with a fish swimming around in it. There are two video cameras trained on the tank at right angles to one another. The resulting images are projected on to two separate video monitors in a different room. Looking at the two monitors, one would see what looks like two different fish. Nevertheless, there would appear to be some correlation between their movements. What might not occur to the person is that the images on the screens are two-dimensional projections of a three-dimensional reality; while they appear separate, they are in fact unified at a higher dimension.
This is precisely how I would understand O, which revelation is here to illuminate -- dazzlingly so, I might add. For example, scripture is a lower dimensional representation of a reality with more dimensions than three or four. Two "four dimensional" stories can easily be reconciled in five dimensions. And before you dismiss this as speculative or overly abstract, I would redirect your attention to the unconscious and to the dream, which are also hyperdimensional and operate free of the demands of aristotelian logic. (See for example here, here, and here.)
Well, that's about all I have time for now. For a while, you can probably expect my posts to appear a bit later in the day, although today I surprised myself and got off a blast by the usual time.
It goes without saying that many aspects of religion would appear to defy conventional logic. On their own plane they are true, but when applied to another plane they don't so much become false as absurd. Thus, any reasonably intelligent person -- and Hitchens is an unreasonably intelligent person -- can pretty much pick apart exoteric religion if they are so inclined. A child can do it, really. I myself used to do it all the time. I was one of those people who welcomed the door-to-door Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons into my home just to mess with their heads.
The "content" of science is the relationship between our senses and the external world. But the content of religion is the relationship between God and man. If you treat the one like the other and expect religion to be bound by the same kind of logical rigor as science, you are bound to be confused. Pursuing this fruitless line of inquiry falls under the heading of using one's intelligence for a stupid end. Much finer and more subtle minds than Christopher Hitchens have always been well aware of the contradictions and inconsistencies, and had no difficulty reconciling them in the appropriate way.
The relationship between God and man is, among other things, interior, protean, and multiple. In other words, there are many ways to form a relationship with God, which, in a way, is not that different from the diverse ways we can form a relationship to the external world. After all, we can see it, smell it, touch it, taste it, hear it, etc. Just so, there are diverse ways we may know God, only one of which is through revelation. Or, to put it another way, God is only known through revelation, bearing in mind that revelation does not consist only of certain sacred texts. To cite one obvious example, the uncreated intellect that is able to comprehend the truth of revelation (or the truth of anything, really) is as much a revelation -- more so, in fact -- than revelation itself. They are simply two sides of the same Word that courses through the arteries of being.
I only caught a few minutes of the debate, but one of the predictable problems was that the two men were operating on entirely different planes. The theologian understood God and religion in one way, while Hitchens (dis)understood them in an different way. In a word, the two were using entirely different paradigms, or operating systems, to try to apprehend the phenomena under scrutiny. The same thing can and does happen in fields other than religion.
To cite one example that comes readily to mind since it pertains to my own field of psychology, a psychoanalyst and a behaviorist will have virtually nothing to debate, since their paradigms, and the assumptions underlying them, are so radically different. The psychoanalyst believes that the source of our emotional pain and conflict is unconscious -- that there is an "unthought known" realm of consciousness "beneath" the ego, which shapes and directs conscious thought and behavior. Various schools of psychoanalysis might even be compared to different religions, in that they all try to map this invisible domain in different ways -- there are Freudians, Kleinians, Kohutians, Jungians, and many others.
If one were so inclined, one could easily dismiss psychoanalysis based merely on the fact that the people who posit this thing called the "unconscious" cannot even agree amongst themselves on its characteristics, and often contradict one another. However, this would be very short-sighted, since the the unconscious -- like God -- is "interior, protean, and multiple." By its very nature, people are going to have different views and theories of it, since it is subjective and holographic, not objective and atomistic. Just because people cannot agree on its exact nature, does not mean that it does not exist. If we were to use the same criteria with regard to quantum physics, we would have to say that the subatomic realm doesn't exist either, since there are so many different models and theories pertaining to it, and no existing way to even harmonize quantum and relativity theories (i.e., the macro and the micro realms).
So psychoanalysts cannot agree on the nature of psychic reality. Comes now the behaviorist, who says that the unconscious doesn't exist at all. In fact, even consciousness is a dubious construct. Rather, there is only observable behavior. Mental illness is really just painful or dysfunctional behavior. Change the behavior and you change the man. End of issue.
Right away, you can see that the atheist Hitchens debating the theist Roberts is exactly like a behaviorist debating a psychoanalyst. In fact, I remember having such a debate with an atheist during my internship at Camarillo State Mental Hospital around 20 years ago. Naturally I won the debate, although the behaviorist had no way of knowing it, since his mind was limited to the plane of observable behavior. How can he have any knowledge of that which he a priori excludes? Again, it is like the dog who cannot understand Beethoven or the atheist who cannot understand religion. Same sensory apparatus, different planes.
Now, Schuon makes an excellent point in this regard, writing that "The man who rejects religion because, if taken literally, it sometimes seems absurd -- ... such a man does not know the one essential thing, despite the logic of his reaction: namely, that the imagery, contradictory though it may be at first sight, nonetheless conveys data that in the final analysis are coherent and even dazzlingly evident for those who are capable of having a presentiment of them or of grasping them."
Thus, religion can be simultaneously "illogical" and nevertheless "dazzlingly evident." How can this be? First of all, one must resist the temptation to resolve the contradictions within religion on a lower plane than that from which they arise. Again, pointing out apparent inconsistencies is so easy that a 13 year old can do it, but to the extent that you win this kind of argument, you lose.
Rather, any inconsistencies must be resolved on a higher plane, the plane of esoterism. Rather than trying to comprehend the center from the periphery, or the principle from its manifestation, this approach tries to understand the periphery from the center -- the center being the Absolute, or God. The other day we used the analogy of people taking photographs of the Matterhorn. Each photo will necessarily be a little different, despite the fact that there is only one Matterhorn (and one Schuon standing in front of it... funny, he doesn't strike me as the sort of person who would have been interested in visiting Disneyland).
The physicist David Bohm used an even better analogy. Imagine a rectangular fish tank with a fish swimming around in it. There are two video cameras trained on the tank at right angles to one another. The resulting images are projected on to two separate video monitors in a different room. Looking at the two monitors, one would see what looks like two different fish. Nevertheless, there would appear to be some correlation between their movements. What might not occur to the person is that the images on the screens are two-dimensional projections of a three-dimensional reality; while they appear separate, they are in fact unified at a higher dimension.
This is precisely how I would understand O, which revelation is here to illuminate -- dazzlingly so, I might add. For example, scripture is a lower dimensional representation of a reality with more dimensions than three or four. Two "four dimensional" stories can easily be reconciled in five dimensions. And before you dismiss this as speculative or overly abstract, I would redirect your attention to the unconscious and to the dream, which are also hyperdimensional and operate free of the demands of aristotelian logic. (See for example here, here, and here.)
Well, that's about all I have time for now. For a while, you can probably expect my posts to appear a bit later in the day, although today I surprised myself and got off a blast by the usual time.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Theme Song
