Eternal Life, While You Wait!

We shall start with another orthoparadoxical invOcation from the Meister. You may not understand it today, but you will hopefully undergo it by the end of this series, for it maketh perfect nonsense:

Distinction comes from Absolute Unity.... Absolute Unity is the distinction and the distinction is the unity. The greater the distinction, the greater the unity, for it is the distinction without distinction.

In Self and Spirit, Bolton relates the idea of the "philosopher's stone" to the eternal, uncreated, and uncreateable part of ourselves. In fact, he references Eckhart on the matter: "There is an agent in the soul such that if the soul were wholly this, it would be uncreated, and [furthermore], without the above-mentioned agent, God acts not at all. Whatever God gives, he gives through it...."

Thus, "it is only in the innermost realm of the human spirit that the image of God can be said to reside." Also -- and this is a key point -- "This is immovably part of us, so that failure to live in harmony with this divine principle must result in an ultimate inner conflict and self-contradiction" (emphasis mine).

This, don't you know, is why I would now find it virtually impossible to conduct psychotherapy with a fully and irredeemably secularized person. This is not because I am a bigot -- or only a bigot -- but because there would be no possibility of helping them identify with, actualize, and assimilate this divine principle (or at least I can't help them). Such a person is indeed condemned to live in ultimate conflict and self-contradiction, not to mention at the periphery of the cosmos, where I rarely hang out.

Meanwhile, Raccoons are only condemned to the Absolute, which is a much better thing to be condemned to. It's what gives us our passion for eternity, not to mention our susceptibility to ec-stasy -- which literally means to "stand outside." But this is how God stands inside. You might say that our ecstasy is His enstasy. Indeed, Eckhart said as much in his inimitable way: "I have often said, God's going-out is his going-in." (Bear in mind that Eckhart's language often directly bears the characteristic of ecstasy, in that it is beside itself with joy, or bubbling over with divine glee.)

According to McGinn, Eckhart conceived of this divine movement "as the fundamental law of reality taught by the Bible...." He variously described this primordial emanation and return as a "bursting-forth" or a "breaking-through" within the ground of existence; furthermore, "the pulse of this universal circle of activity provides a key for presenting the systematic perspective behind Eckhart's disparate works."

Perceptive and/or obsessive-compulsive readers will have noticed that the pulse of this universal circle is also a key to understanding Gagdad's desperate works, for if God isn't a cyclical rhythm, I don't know what he is.

Here, this explains it: "The first grace consists in a type of flowing out, a departure from God (↓); the second consists in a type of flowing back, a return to God himself (↑)" (Eckhart, minus the arrows). This circle proceeds vertically from Cosmogenesis to Cosmobliteration, hence the absurcular structure of my book -- which begins, by the way, with an Eckhart quote about the negation of negation that eternally precedes the creatio ex nihilo -- you know, the absolutely BLACK PAGE on p. 6. That BLACK PAGE is by far the most informative part of my book, for it is there that we meet in the muddle of the mount. Nobody's ever seen the face of God, and you're looking right at it!

The rivers return to the place from whence they flowed, so that they may flow again. Can I get a wetness? Or do you just need an adult diaper?

Now, Eckhart was far from alone in his perfect nonsense. Just yesterday evening I cooncidentally stumbled upon a passage by Balthasar in reference to the great Origen. It goes a little like this: "If 'spirit' is participation of the soul in God, then its ultimate essence is determined precisely by this participation. Only in orientation towards God is it immortal, only in derivation from God is it ever new in being, only through relationship to him is it good and blessedly happy.... Thus the soul must strive for this participation with the most absolute of commitments, and build its life on the foundation of this unmerited grace."

Therefore, it appears that immortality is optional, or, if not optional, then like that hole in your dashboard where the cigarette lighter used to go. It's still there, but nobody uses it anymore. No, wait, it's like the plastic exejesus for the darshan your vehicle, that's the crux of the master (Coonifesto, p. 255).

Ahem. Let's break this down a little father, son. Bolton notes that there is a "part" of us that mediates between God and creation. In my case, I call it "Bob," but you can call yours what you want. Now, it can equally be seen as the base or ground of our ascent to God, or "as the apex of an integrating movement in the natural order"; in other words, as a sort of crystalized kernel outside time (¶), or as a kind of integrative process within time [O-->(n)].

Each kernel is "unique," and yet, none other than a particular mode of the universal: "it exists in as many instances as there are persons, so that something qualitatively equivalent to the Whole exists in every being which forms part of the Whole, giving special meaning to the idea that 'all is one.' In this case, the Whole would in some sense be present in every part of the All...."

So at least we have that going for us.

Now, incarnation and ascension are the penultimate examples of (↓) and (↑), respectively -- the ultimate examples again being Cosmogenesis and Cosmobliteration, Creation and Apocalypse. Furthermore, this incarnation and ascension are not just God's business but our isness, insofar as we are true to our microcosmic deustiny.

And with that, I think I'll just patiently wait for this year to O-bliterate before my very I.

In ether worlds, just like any other day.