Lizards and Mammals and Men, Oh My!

Yesterday while commenting at LGF, I couldn't help noticing how the reductionistic Darwinists practice a sort of inverse mysticism, in that they elevate what can only be ceaseless change into eternal truth. With reductionistic Darwinism, all is change; everything is "on the way" to something else that is equally temporary. In such a paradigm, not only can truth not exist, but we couldn't know it anyway; the quantification of knowledge undermines its only meaningful measure, which is the intellect in light of the Absolute.

In a way, this is a caricature of Buddhist metaphysics, as it too advances what amounts to a paradox, i.e., "all is flux," so that it is folly to become attached to the passing stream of maya. However, the Darwinists are missing a very important point, that being that it is possible to escape maya both from "above" and "below," and this makes all the difference, as the latter is actually a deeper plunge into its snares, a point that the -- let us say, less spiritually gifted -- LGF commenters never stop proving.

I'm currently reading this outstanding book on Buddhism by Schuon, and it makes this point with characteristic luminosity (the book is challenging in the usual Schuon way, so buyer beware; however, he really brings the subject alive for me in a way that the new-age Western Buddhists never do). I suppose I'll be posting on it in more detail later, but he points out that the saving renunciation of Buddhism "aims at preventing man from becoming imprisoned in an ephemeral illusion, from identifying himself with it and finally perishing with it; it aims at helping him free himself from the tyranny of dreams that leave no outlet."

In other words, the Buddhist transcends the flux of maya in order to know the eternal, the transcendent Absolute, whereas the Darwinist goes the other route and identifies eternity with matter. Naturally this makes no sense in a cosmos that is itself contingent and evolving, but there you go. Metaphysically consistent they are not. But they are angry. Not sure where that comes from, but I assume it is both a cause and consequence of the spiritual rut they're in. They all insist that their lives are just as fulfilled as the religious person, but one wonders how they could possibly know this, being that they a priori deny the vertical? They sure sound pretty bitter to this coonical pslackologist (check it out for yourself, if you're masochistic enough; I notice that Ben sailed by -- I waved at him, but he was vomiting over the side of the boat).

And markedly adolescent. Smells like the teen spirit of a false and grandiose nirvana, if you know what I mean. There is a rebellious streak in them that is very similar to the left (who also escape reality from "below," except in their case, instead of becoming Darwinian "monotheists" they descend into the fragmented polytheism of multiculturalism, moral relativism, deconstruction, etc.

In reality, they are two sides of the same worthless coin, just as, say, the Semitic and Eastern religions are two sides of an infinitely precious coin. I am disappointed that the head lizard can fall for this junk metaphysics -- just as he expressed disappointment in me -- but in my case I have an excuse, because I only want to be disappointed by the best. I do note that he clearly possesses a kind of peerless left brained, technological kind of intellect, and that may be the issue, for every gift carries a potential curse. Indeed, I may well be cursed with this dominant passion for wholeness and eternity, but if so, it's a blessed kind of curse. It beats walking, anyway.

Schuon writes that "When we contemplate a landscape, we absorb its main features without being distracted by details which, if they were too near, would imprison us as it were in their own special nature." Now, it goes without saying that any remotely advanced pneumanaut sees revelation as a whole and complete "spiritual system" that can only be comprehended inwardly. It is quite the opposite of Darwinism, which can only be understood outwardly, for the simple reason that it possesses no "inside."

And yet, we hear these metaphysical yahoos gratuitously affirming its truth with their own inside, a truth-bearing inside for which their theory can never account. At the same time -- and this would appear to be a logical corollary of their cosmic inversion -- they ask such "subtle" and "sophisticated" theological questions as: "Whom did the children of Adam and Eve marry?" Or "Who created the creator?" Or "If Jesus was God, why did he get baptized?" You can see how a certain type of intelligence is instantly converted to the most flagrant stupidity when it tries to grasp the higher planes within its own narrow orbit.

Again, a religious system applies to realms above, not below, the plane of maya. As Schuon explains, such a system is "a homogeneous ensemble of spiritual percepts, ordered in virtue of a metaphysical perspective. A traditional doctrine is never narrowly systematic, but it nonetheless constitutes a system, like every living organism or like the universe."

Which is again ironic, because the Darwinist pretends to understand "life," when life ipso facto exhibits the qualities of wholeness, interiority, non-linearity, internal connectedness, etc. And as I discussed at length in the Coonifesto, it does this because it mirrors the organismic nature of the cosmos, precisely. I will say it again: ordered totality is ontologically prior to natural selection. Which is why the laws of physics are a special case, not general. You prove this every time you voluntarily move your hand, bozo.

Again, reductionistic Darwinists seem to presuppose a paradigm of logical atomism, even though their empirical discoveries forbid it. For example, Harris writes that "The genome has been shown to act as a whole and not as a collection of separable effects." Or as the estimable Robert Rosen put it -- and he is probably my biggest influence in these purely biological matters, c.f. here and here; he is certainly no "Discovery Institute shill" -- the developing organism is

"governed and directed by the organized structure of the mature individual, which is immanent in every phase and differentiates itself in the process.... Each phase presents the whole, but in a different and contraposed degree of integration and articulation."

In any event, a divine revelation is the sine qua non of an "organismic system," only as applied to the spiritual plane. It can no more be comprehended in a linear, left-brained manner than can Consciousness or Life itself. "Traditions emerge from the Infinite like flowers; they can no more be fabricated than can the sacred which is their witness and their proof" (Schuon). They are alive -- and grant Life! -- something that is quite self-evident to the believer.

You might say that the unity of existence is "refracted" through each of its parts, or there could be no parts. Rather, in a universe of logical atomism, each part is its own private whole, so to speak -- like a collection of billiard balls. This is an example of absolute relativity, which is a contradiction, an absurdity, and an impossibility that even God could not create, for it would mean an infinite number of Gods.

One must try to imagine a gene pool table in which all the balls are members of one another; or which are internally related, not just externally related. So too with revelation -- for example, the deeply internal relationship between the Old and New testaments. Such deep truths cannot be conveyed in a literal sense; however, this is by no means to suggest that words cannot convey them. It's just that the words must simultaneously convey a presence and an absence that goes by the name of "mystery."

Mystery is not a negation, but a kind of dark plenitude that apparently completely eludes the myopic materialist, for whatever reason. Such truths are elliptical, suggestive, or provocative, and serve to "awaken" in the receptive soul a "resonant" response that signifies that the outer form corresponds with an inner certainty -- again, in a holisitc and non-linear way -- as a "flash of in-sight" or seeing the contours of the Within.

This inverts the cosmos (back right side-up), so one sees the emptiness of form and the form of emptiness, so to speak. It should go without saying that none of what I say applies to the non-Raccoon. Do not bother, because these truths are "not for you" -- through no fault of the Truth, I might add. Truth is like the sun. It's always there, irrespective of a reflective medium to "witness" it.

The discovery of this internal relationship on the human plane is none other than love, is it not? Marriage sanctifies this internal relationship, as the Two do not so much "become" one flesh, as realize it. And as the years go by, the two should deepen this realization of sanctified Oneness. Suffice it two say that neither billiard balls nor lizards fall in love. Or, to the extent that they do, its just a trick of the genes to get them to reproduce.

Watch the Darwinists be insulted by this admittedly infrahuman characterization, as if they do not pronounce the verdict upon themselves! For they are replicating machines, nothing more, but a lot less -- both biologically, but more tragically, intellectually and spiritually. Does this mean, like the Islamists, I want them dead? Hardly! I want them alive.

One cannot save a soul as one would pull someone out of the water, one can only rescue those who are willing to be rescued, and that is why it is ridiculous to reproach religions for not having succeeded in saving the world. --Frithjof Schuon