Vertical Creation and the Rhythm of Eternity

Continuing with yesterday's post, as there are two cerebral hemispheres, there are naturally "two worlds" that result, given the truism that there can be no world but an experienced world.

The scientific world of abstract quantity is one world, true enough in its own way, but obviously not the real world. The scientific world is an abstract and artificial construct that sees things separately and serially, as if the world -- any world -- could ever actually be an agglomeration of discrete, atomistic particles. This metaphysic falls on the basis of its own discoveries, most notably, the wavelike sea of quantum energy that underlies our illusory experience of discrete matter (also the genome, which is much more nonlinear and holistic than biologists had assumed).

But is this sea of energy -- a sea that no human has ever seen or ever will see -- the real world? No, it is merely a physical world, an abstraction of science, a science that starts with the only world we can experience, the corporeal world of every day life. Scientists maintain that the corporeal world accessible to our senses is the secondary, derivative world, and that the abstract world of quantum physics is the more primary one.

Traditional metaphysics turns this upside-down picture back right-side up, which in turn resolves many of the paradoxes of “creationism.” The fact is, despite the best efforts of science, we remain engulfed in a Mystery -- the mystery of our origins, of our present being, and of our final destiny. Science searches outward, toward the periphery, looking at the data of the senses and into the mathematically projected past to find the answers (and in so doing abandons formal and final causation, and therefore any hope of understanding the purpose of our existence).

Mysticism reverses our gaze from the periphery to the center, looking for our source and origin in the mysterious withinness of the cosmos -- by following that withinness all the way back "upstream" to its vertical source above.

A traditional cosmology -- including Genesis -- is only secondarily about the creation of the horizontal world. It is primarily about the mysterious manifestation of reality from the darkness of nonexistence to the light of conscious experience. Out of the Great Unborn, the timeless womb of eternity, forms and beings are ceaselessly given birth and then vertically "sustained" by that same First Cause. As I hint at in the book, we are all beneficiaries of this voidgin birth.

This transcendent ground is the one place in the cosmos where we may truly gain first hand knowledge of the source of All, since the cosmos is psychic through and through. This is the real meaning of traditional cosmologies. On the one hand, they tell the story of the outward manifestation of the cosmos. But at the same time, they convey implicit knowledge of the inward vertical procession of phenomena from the great noumenal Within.

Consider it this way: the big bang didn't just happen once upon a timeless, some 14 billion years ago. Rather, a cosmos mysteriously explodes into being every moment, in every individual's consciousness. Likewise, an entire cosmos comes into being with each new birth, and a whole unrepeatable world withdraws over the subjective horizon with each death. And it's all happening now.

In this view, the vexing duality of mind and matter is resolved in the only way it can be -- by showing how both poles of the dialectic arise from a single, nonlocal source, outside space and time. Every moment -- that is, the ineffable now -- represents a ceaseless flowing out of eternity into time, accompanied by a simultaneous "flowing in" of time back to eternity. This is the cosmogonic cycle upon which grace allows us to hitch a ride, the pullmonistic rhythm of the breath of the eternal.

The beginning of my book -- through page seventeen -- attempts to convey in ponoetic language the "flowing out" of the absolute One into the Infinite many -- for example, The molten infinite pours forth a blazen torrent of incandescent finitude, as light plunges an undying fire into its own shadow; or He expectorated a mirrorcle, now you're the spittin' image. On the one hand, these statements could be about the big bang. On the other, they could be about our own consciousness.

The end of the book -- pages 252-266 -- simply reverses the process, taking us on the ascent from the many back to the One. Again, the reality of the situation is that this is occurring on a moment-by-moment basis. You might even say that this perpetual process represents the "interior life" of the Godhead (with certain modifications introduced by the Christian trinity or Jewish Sefirot that I won't get into here; both, in their own ways, are trying to describe this "interior life" of God.)

Thus, a sample from the end of my book reads as we approach the singularity at the bigending of cosmic history: Returning to the Oneself, borne again to the mysterious mamamatrix of our birthdeath, our winding binding river empties to the sea. Only here are we provisionally cured of plurality as we are Ones again back by oursoph before the beginning, before old nobodaddy committed wholly matterimany and exhaled himself into a world of sorrow and ignorance, no longer dispersed and refracted by so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One.

Traditional cosmologies -- like any other spiritual truth -- will not yield their meanings to the cognitively greedy accustomed only to linear, exterior, fragmented, and scientistic ways of knowing; one cannot simply grasp at them, but must approach the endeavor with open hands (and more importantly, open heart and mind). And whatever you do, don't be serious. Sincere, absolutely. Serious, never. For,

Could it be true that in jesting we are contemplating? Yes. As do all who jest, in jesting we contemplate. --Plotinus

Addendum: I just finished this book, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism, and it's remarkable how similar the arguments are to mine. Feser does an outstanding job of demonstrating how this guy named Aquinas absolutely demolishes the feeble and quite blatantly irrational arguments of the atheistic crowd. Unfortunately, the book is so abusive and polemical that it sometimes distracts from the brilliance of the arguments. I mean, I certainly don't mind sticking it to the adversary, but it should be done with a little style -- with a stiletto, not a sledgehammer.

In any event, look for this Aquinas fellow to gain some notoriety, although I can't imagine that any university would ever hire him, much less offer him tenure, given his thorough debunking of the fashionable materialism of the times.