Cosmic Man and the Source of Certitude

Last night the Dreamer gave me a series of vivid dreams that confirmed most everything I wrote in my post yesterday, including, most importantly, the existence of the Dreamer himself. That's a form of confirmation and a source of certainty, but it obviously isn't "scientific" certainty. In fact, whatever I write, I feel as if it is backed by the full faith and credit of forces greater than myself, hence, the certainty that is so bobnoxious to trolls.

On the other hand, I often wonder at the source of the scientific materialist's certainty, since it is a metaphysic that doesn't permit man access to any certainty at all. Only revelation can do that, understood in its three senses as the Cosmos, the uncreated Intellect, and Scripture. So why is the materialist so insistent about his beliefs? It makes no sense. Of all people, they should be the ones to not only confess ultimate ignorance, but the impossibility of exiting that impoverished, third-world state in any absolute way that transcends matter.

But they don't. Rather, they are filled with certainty, which is only a disguised form of pseudo-faith. Today at American Thinker there is a piece that touches on this, The Left's Theft of the Open Society and the Scientific Method. It goes into a topic we have discussed here in the past, that is, the curious fact -- Orwellian, even -- that George Soros, one of the sweetest sugar daddies of the sour infantile left, claims to be an advocate of Karl Popper's "open society," when his leftist philosophy represents its single greatest threat. It is strictly impossible to believe in the open society and to be a man of the left. Impossible. Popper was a liberal, not a leftist. How can someone be so stupid -- unless they aren't stupid at all, just evil? Yes, that was ratorical.

But this is hardly anything new. Carson writes of the truism that "the Left misappropriates intellectual capital for perverse ends, in order to lend itself a veneer of respectability and befuddle its critics." I'm not a big fan of Popper's philosophy -- I much prefer his coontemporary, Polanyi, who covered the same ground as Popper, but in a deeper way that is entirely compatible with religion. In fact, to my knowledge, Popper was a materialist, which automatically makes his philosophy ungroundable, and rooted in the same metaphysical error as his opponents. To blame Plato for Marx is like blaming Moses for Chomsky.

As Carson notes, Popper's main villain was "Marxist historical inevitability and its pink cousin Western progressivism. We cannot predict scientific discoveries. Otherwise, they would not be discoveries. Scientific discoveries have an enormous influence on the future. Therefore, we cannot predict the future. Marxists and progressives who think that they represent the future are dangerous and deluded."

But Popper was ultimately wrong because man does have access to certainty, just not the horizontal certainty of scientism or leftist historicism. Rather, he has access to a realm of "vertical certainty" that comes clothed in various symbolic or exoteric forms that must be "decoded" to reveal their essential harmony and their unitary source in the Cosmic Dreamer.

In this sense, religion is certainly "falsifiable," just not in the scientific/materialistic sense of the word. For example, to say that "God is evil" is easily falsifiable on the plane of a priori metaphysical certitude, just as "all men are created equal" is easily confirmable. Besides, to say that "falsifiability" is the key to knowledge is like saying that "no" is the key to "yes." Again, as per Gödel, man has a source of certainty that cannot be reduced to any logical system.

You can never vanquish the left on its own materialistic level, otherwise you have made the central concession that matter is the only level. It is fighting ire with fire. A Popperian would have to say: we hold the following hypothesis to be untrue because unfalsifiable, that all men are created equal.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled program about the human body. Speaking of which, is it really possible that biology and natural selection tell us everything we need to know about the human body? What a moronic belief. It's like suggesting that physics tells us everything we need to know about music or architecture. I suppose in a way it does, being that architecture is "frozen music," just as quantum physics suggests that the ponderable world is a kind of "solid energy." Therefore, man's body is a combination of geometry + music. And we are once again back to Male and Female, or the Absolute and the Infinite.

Obviously, everything we know can only be known within the "environment" of our human form, both in its objective and subjective modes. Nevertheless, the human form is absolute, being that man, unlike any other animal, is capable of transcendent truth. In other words, as Schuon points out, "the human form cannot be transcended, its sufficient reason being precisely to express the Absolute, hence the untranscendable." Critically, this cuts off any purely evolutionist, reductionist viewpoint at the knees -- or ankles, really. For if man could be reduced to the forces of natural selection, his form "would be the result of a prolonged elaboration starting from animal forms; an elaboration that is at once arbitrary and unlimited." No final truth could be known, including that one.

Do you see the point? In this context, there could exist no truth-bearing animal. The ontological gap between the highest animal and the lowest man is so great as to be quite literally infinite, as infinite as the gaps between being and non-being, or between a living and non-living cosmos. In fact, to even say "cosmos" is to say life and mind, no? Here's a hint:

"The word Cosmos... meant originally 'order,' and this order is perceived as harmony, as consonance between ourselves and the Universe. This idea was developed as the correspondence between the Macrocosmos (the World) and the Microcosmos, or Man, with sometimes the Temple as link, as 'proprotional mean' between the two" (Perry).

Thus when you "go to church" -- in whatever form -- you are attempting to reconcile the Micro- and Macrocosmos; or, to be perfectly accurate, to personally experience their a priori unity. You know, One Cosmos. Under you-know-who, the only thing it could possibly be under. Call it 1 under O, if you like. It's certainly not "one cosmos over matter," much less "one mind over Darwin." That is strictly impossible.

Rather, you can only know about a unitary cosmos to the extent that you yourself are one: if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light. Again, obvious, is it not? The human mind intuits the prior oneness of existence because that is the human privilege. It cannot be surpassed by "evolution," because it is already ultimate. "The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made" (Rom: 1:20).

By this we know, that all human properties proceed from one; that they all have but one only root and mother; otherwise, one man could not understand another.... Man has indeed all the forms of all the three worlds lying in him; for he is a complete image of God, or of the Being of all beings. -- Jacob Boehme

Of this you may be certain. For it is the certainty without which there can be none, and to deny it is to deny the very roots of knowledge. Plus, Petey said so, and that should be enough for anyOne.