Inner Space: The Final Frontier

The pupil of the eye performs a function on the physical level which aptly symbolizes that of the self, inasmuch as the latter is the nexus through which all experience and all kinds of knowledge must pass. None of the contents of experience can be unaffected by this relation, since things received always take on the qualities of the receiver.... For this reason, misunderstandings of the self lead to misunderstandings of everything else. --Robert Bolton, Self and Spirit

The first thing we must understand is that the cosmos is always refracted through a modified primate brain -- that the world comes into being in the transitional space between subject and object. The world is not experienced directly, but is always a form of our sensibility, and is therefore limited by our ability to comprehend it. This is why our understanding of the world can evolve and deepen, unlike any other animal, for whom the world is just "given" in an inalterable way. Only humans can "see beneath the surface" in an inexhaustible way, since they are not limited to their physical senses.

Now, the same thing applies ipso facto to the transcendent planes. We are able to see of them what we can, but quite obviously, not everyone sees as much or as deeply or as far, any more than all men are Wayne Gretzky. This is why two people can read the Bible and arrive at such radically different interpretations -- which will not just differ "horizontally," but vertically.

But as I was saying a couple of days ago, this is where metaphysics can be helpful, as it eliminates interpretations that just cannot be -- what Schuon called intrinsic heresies, those conclusions that are "contrary not only to a particular perspective or a particular formulation, but to the very nature of things, for [they] result, not from a perspective legitimate by nature and therefore 'providential,' but from the arbitrary judgment of a mind left to its own resources and obliged to 'create' what the intellect when paralyzed -- fundamentally or accidentally -- cannot transmit to it."

This is why I say that religious fundamentalism is analogous to scientism, in that both severely restrict O to their own narrow manmade judgments, which they then naively absolutize. Neither one recognizes that their image of the Real is restricted to their ability to know it. If one wishes to penetrate more deeply into reality, "it is essential that it be 'upwards' and not 'downwards': dogmatic form is transcended by fathoming its depths and contemplating its universal content, and not by denying it in the name of a pretentious and iconoclastic ideal of 'pure truth.'" In other words, more often than not -- in science, in psychotherapy, and in religion -- "truth" is the greatest barrier to the evolution of Truth, or O-->(n).

Bolton makes an important point that serves as a good segue back to our discussion of Taylor, which is that "Exoteric religion, however sincere, allows people to go on believing themselves to be solely what they appear to be to other people. Deeper insights into the self lead outside the exoteric, and are usually resisted in a mistaken belief that this must be a danger to orthodoxy." This often results in a situation directly antithetical to the purposes of religion, in that the most conventionally devout can have the least insight into the nature of the self. These are the grinning robots who give us the Jesus, Krishna, Buddha, Joseph Smith, or Ken Willies.

Jesus famously asked, "who do you say that I am?" The answer partly depends upon what we mean by "I" as applied to Jesus and to ourselves. There is always going to be a gap between the I AM and what we can say about it, which is true of the relation between any two subjectivities, or I AMs. The better you know someone, the more you can say about them, but there is always a limit to what you can say, since you are not them. Nor are you even fully yourself, as that relationship is subject to evolution as well. When you were a child, you understood as a child, but even today, you are hopefully a child in relation to the man you'll someday be. Who, with luck, will also be as a little child in relation to its own manchildish future.

In A Secular Age, Taylor goes into great detail about the contextual limits to the imagination of the self, limits which have changed drastically over the centuries (I just don't have time to cite 700 pages of documentation). A few readers keep insisting in the teeth of this evidence that "folks is folks, everywhere the same." To the extent that they truly believe this, even after examining the evidence, then it's just a statement about themselves, not about reality.

For example, people who live in the modern West just take the idea of the individual as a given -- as if it has always existed, or as if it exists for everyone, say, in the Muslim Middle East, instead of being an exceptional deviation from all mentalities that came before. But in its own way, the difference between reflective individual minds and the unreflective group mind is as striking and unexpected as the difference between man and animals (and no, I am obviously not equating primitive groups with animals, or diminishing their humanity -- I'm explaining the phenomenon instead of explaining it away in the manner of cultural relativists).

In the West, we first experience ourselves as individuals (i.e., "all men are created equal"), and only then "become aware of others, and of forms of sociality" (Taylor). But in all human groups until quite recently, this formulation was literally unthinkable. So much was your identity embedded in the group, that you wouldn't know who you were in its absence. You would be utterly lost, a nothing and a nobody. Banishment from the group was existential death. It's somewhat like trying to imagine if you were the opposite sex. For example, so much does the normal male identify with his sex, that he can't imagine what it would be like to be John Edwards.

Again, Taylor traces this unprecedented change from immersion in the group-mind to the ability to conceive of ourselves as free individuals and "to have our own opinions, to attain our own relation to God, our own conversion experience." But ironically, Taylor believes that this was actually a sort of "delayed reaction" to the implicit metaphysics hidden in plain sight in scripture. For example, in the New Testament there are numerous calls "to leave or relativize solidarities of family, clan, society, and be a part of the Kingdom." This is actually a mind-blowing idea, especially in the context of the times (not to mention a culture- and state-blowing idea, as you are called to solidarity with a higher mind, i.e., the "body of Christ"; nothing could be more radical and subversive to the "powers that be").

In fact, it would be hard to imagine a more radical idea, because this "new inwardness" was going against the grain of all human and religious organization prior to that time. No wonder individualism only arose in the West, and that it took another 1600 or 1700 years for it to begin happening on a widespread scale! It was literally like trying to evolve a third eye or some other new organ. Because that's what the Self is: a new immaterial organ (to be perfectly accurate, it's a subtle material) for navigating around the hyperspace of human subjectivity, which is infinite at its outer inner reaches. You might say that religion tracks the outer reaches of inner space, while science tracks the inner reaches of outer space, whereas my book shows how the two meet in the muddle of the mount, if you'll just be an accomplice to my literary climb.

That's what I meant when I wrote in the introduction, "The aim of this book is to bore through the cosmic mountain from both sides: from the inside out, where science explores a world of diverse material objects and forces to which we are subject, and from the outside in, where the teeming multiplicity of the world is synthesized in the transcendental human subject. Is there a center where these two shafts could possibly meet?"

Well, yes. But only if you understand the mystery of who I AM.

For the more one discovers of God, the more one finds one has to learn. Every step in advance is a return to the beginning, and we shall not really know him as he is, until we have returned to our beginning, and learned how to know him both as the beginning and end of the journey. --Fr. Bede Griffiths, The Golden String