Vertical Man the Microcosm, Horizontal Man the Microchasm

I'm trying. Save. To remumble. Save. Yesterday's lost post. Save. But it's not. Save. That easy. Save.

For one thing, as always, I was in a sort of half-dream state when I wrote it, so not only do I have to remember the barmy content, but to try to re-enter the "state" from which it arose. But you can never really have the same dream twice, although the left never stops trying (no, that wasn't only gratuitous -- see here for details. This book has entered my list of foundational raccoomendations).

This is a G-rated blog, so I'll try to keep it clean, but let me just add that entering this fertile state sort of involves simultaneously penetrating and being penetrated. But there's a big payoff at the end.

Let me also add that the Boy is still recovering. His sleep has been disrupted, so he could wake up at any moment. That's not exactly conducive to sleeping in and out of my usual trilit hypnopomposity.

I know I started off yesterday with several quotes from The Spiritual Ascent, which always gets me "in the mood." If Mini-me should wake up prematurely and we lose contact, just meditate on these while repeating "there's no place like OM," and you'll get the point of the whole post. The rest is just commentary:

And do you say 'God is invisible'? Speak not so. Who is more manifest than God? For this very purpose has he made all things, that through all things you may see him. --Hermes

This world is verily an outer court of the Eternal... --Theologia Germanica

If you do not know the way, seek where his footprints are. --Rumi

There are many ways to prove the existence of God, but these come down to two broad categories, mysticism and intellection. The former involves union with the object (or Subject), while the latter involves a resonant symbolic understanding which fertilizes and "illuminates" the higher mind (i.e., the nous, buddhi, "psychic being," etc.), drawing us upward and inward to the very source of our understanding, which is none other than Truth itsoph.

You might say that science knows in order to understand, while intellection understands in order to know. But various misosophic pseudo-philosophies also engage in a caricature of the ladder, which, as we shall see, leads to the annoying paradorks of "false understanding," who are more rung than height, or dung than light.

Another way of saying this is that man, although mortal, may know the immortal; although he is relative, he may know the Absolute, because he shares the Absolute. Looked at one way, you could compare it to a venn diagram in which our crazy little bercircles intersect with the sanosphere of the Creator (a sphere "contains" an infinite number of circles, but can never be reduced to their sum). Or, you could say that our deepest center is the center of All, "the still point of the turning stomach," for those of you whom I make ill.

Now, importantly, this is something which the atheist believes no less than the theist. One of the reasons we know that Darwinism cannot be true, is that if it were, it could never account for how natural selection has produced beings capable of understanding the truth of their origins (as always, when I speak of "Darwinsim," I am referring to the simple-minded, reductionistic, all-explaining version; likewise, whenever I criticize science, I am not referring to the limited claims of the scientific method, but to the abject philosophistry of scientism).

Whenever someone uses their transcendent intelligence to dismiss intelligent design, don't even bother with them, because there's a bug in their design. Or, you could say that in their case, their little minds are indeed fully explained by natural selection, and leave it at that. For whatever reason, they simply lack the evolutionary accoutrement to transcend their genetic programming. But it takes all kinds to make a biosphere -- let alone psychosphere -- so we bear them no ill will except for when they try to force their silly two-dimensional religion on the rest of us.

For human beings, Truth is the sufficient reason of intelligence. In other words, our intelligence is ultimately a function of Truth; indeed, it is truth "prolonged" into the horizontal. If you invert this formulation and attempt to arrive at truth through purely Darwinian means, you simply cannot get there. Or, if you do, you have disproved your own Darwinian assumptions.

Likewise, if a physicist can comprehend the origin of the cosmos, the cosmos is "contained" within his comprehension, not vice versa. No equation can contain our conscious understanding, any more than an EEG can reveal the content of your mind, much less whether or not said content is true.

God may be known through the psycho-morphic resonance engendered through the archetypes of revelation. Again, we posit three broad categories of revelation, 1) the cosmos itself, or existence, 2) the human subject, or Man as Such, and 3) what is commonly known as "revelation," or direct divine-to-human murmurandoms. Being that these are always necessarily human, they will be subject to some degree of distortion, even if the distortion only exists on the receiving end. But the more we calibrate and cleanse our own instrument, the more we can see into it and get out of it.

Theists and atheists agree on at least one, and implicitly two, of the forms of revelation. For example, science begins with the assumption that the cosmos reveals its own truth to human beings. Oddly, most of them do not take the next logical step, and realize that Man as Such is the key to the cosmos, or the Whole Existentialada. But obviously he is, so long as he is capable of understanding and therefore transcending its appearances with Real knowledge.

What is commonly called "revelation" simply fleshes out the implication that man is a both a bridge to, and symbol of, the divine reality. Man alone traverses all of the degrees of creation, at least in potential. In this regard, he is an inverse image of God, in that you might say that God is an empty fullness, while man is a full emptiness. Thus, both are potentially inexhaustible, only our emptiness is dependent upon God to fill it. Or, to put it another way, God and man "kenotically" fulfill one another: God empties his fullness into man, and man fills his emptiness with God.

Into the blisstic mystic, no you or I, nor reason wise, a boundless sea of flaming light, bright blazing fire and ecstatic cinders, Shiva, me tinders, count the stars in your eyes. Fulfilled, filledfull, what a shakti ma system!

You see, mathematical symbols are not exactly like archetypal religious mythsemantical symbols, in that the latter are simultaneously more precise and inexact. As Guenon explains, "It is the function of symbols to be the support for the for conceptions where the possibilities of extension are truly unlimited, while all expression is itself but a symbol; therefore one must always make allowance for that part which is inexpressible, and which in the realm of pure metaphysics is precisely that which most matters."

Do you see the dilemma? We are using symbols to precisely express that which transcends precision, which is why we can express this fulsome truth in such a rich diversity of ways, including my last 973 posts. All emanate from the one truth, except that truth is refracted through various layers and modalities before it comes out in the form of a post. On a good day, it is like a magnifying glass, which gathers the rays of the sun and creates a beam of intense light that can set fire to an insect or troll.

Right?

Right.

So man is either the hypermeaningful microcosm or a meaningless microchasm; he either contains the cosmos within his understanding, or he is an abyss of ultimate ignorance and a chasm of existential naughtiness -- a nihilistic bridge from nowhere to nothing, because the bridge only goes out but not up.

As a matter of fact, man is indeed a circular bridge from nothing to Nothing, as I attempted to non-verbally explayn in my book, through its circular form. At the end of the deity, we are the nothing-everything that is the source of the whole he & shebang. For as Sri Aurobindo wrote, our ultimate state "is a zero which is All or an indefinable Infinite which appears to the mind a blank, because mind grasps only finite constructions." This is why perceptive readers will have noticed that my posts are always shooting at blanks.

There is a rounding out of the circle in which the beginning and end, the primal Origin of creation and the ultimate Consummation of the creative process, meet and touch in Christ... --Josef Pieper

...[T]here is something even beyond this Word. It is the silent vastness out of which everything, even the Word, arises. It neither exists nor does not exist. --Richard Smoley, author of Inner Christianity & A Blurb for Bob