A River Runs Through Us

... again, what is it about truth? Why is she so darned attractive and lovable? And what is wrong with the sophisticated cretins who treat her so shabbily? Truth is something -- or someOne -- with whom we have a real and intimate relationship. Truly, it is philo-Sophia, who is the very essence of mystery. The archetypal mysteress, as it were.

For example, this is why, as Balthasar says, the person who opens himself up to truth never experiences its containment, of "comprehension and exhaustion." Rather, he "makes the paradoxical discovery that knowledge does indeed make authentic progress, which means that there is such a thing as certitude but that every new step displays the field of truth in ever greater, ever more infinite enlargements."

In an analogy I have used in the past, our knowledge is like a dot of light at the center of a black space. The more the dot enlarges, the greater the circumference of the dot as it shades off into the darkness. How can this have lead to a situation in which we quite obviously know more about the world than ever before, and yet, people seem to think this diminishes, rather than deepens, the mystery? For there is no scientific theory, from quantum physics to Darwinism, that doesn't open up whole new mystas of vistary; and not mystery in the sense of "ignorance," but in terms of awe before the numinous O, which tosses out scientific theories like grains of sand on the beach.

Thus, "the more of the truth the subject manages to master, the more the truth overmasters it." In other words, the more we contain (♀), the more it shatters (♂) the containers. "The more particular truth the subject comes to know, the higher and vaster the firmament of truth as a whole arches above him." You might say that truth, like love, radiates, but never encloses." Binds, yes, but not encloses.

When a patient comes in for therapy, it is not just that they believe things that cannot possibly be true. Rather, it is also that their area of colonized truth is so tiny. In a way, as this area is expanded and colonized in therapy, the persecutory mind parasites simply become "smaller" in comparison.

As a matter of fact, many longtime readers of this blog may have noticed this merely by virtue of the daily verticalisthenic of coontemplating these posts. They obviously require you to "stretch" the boundaries of your mind, so it shouldn't be surprising if, over the long haul, psychic knots that appeared large a couple of years ago now seem comparatively smaller. If we could harshly interrogate these parasites, they might even say, "I'm still big. It's the damn psychic cartography that got bigger!"

It reminds me of the AIDS virus, which is apparently quite old, but could not flourish until introduced to the... let us say, cramped quarters of the San Francisco bathhouse scene. Likewise, Islamic terror wasn't such a big problem until the physical worldspace got much smaller as a result of modern travel and communication.

The only solution, of course, is to literally expand the mental space in which the typical Muslim (and leftist) lives. After all, we've got medieval Palestinian savages murdering people over olive trees in a digital age that measures wealth in a far more abstract manner. Think of Adam Smith as the quintessential example of someone who opened up the infinite world of wealth, whereas our enemies -- including our domestic enemies of the left -- still see wealth as a tightly bound, zero-sum game. But it is obviously quite difficult to expand a leftist's mind, since they have a death grip on the educational establishment, not to mention media, pop culture, and higher locodemia.

No doubt you've all noticed the psychic pettiness of the left, the tiny container in which they live, move, breath, and think. I'll just leave it at that. I'm only up to page 50 of a 272 page book. We've got lots of space to expand and expound upin.

Speaking of which, I might add that Balthasar is similar to Bion, in the sense that both of them -- albeit in very different ways -- demonstrate while they elucidate. In fact, I actually try to do this myself, which is to say, provoke the actual experience of what it is I am writing about in these posts, i.e., engender the experience of O-->(n).

And, now that I think about it, this is how I distinguish true mystical writing -- i.e., theosophia -- from mere theology. The seal of authenticity of a genuine mystic is that they will be able, to a greater or lesser extent, to directly convey what it is they are trying to communicate with mere words. In my case, I really want you to have a kind of palpable experience as you read these posts. If you are only having an abstract intellectual experience, then im doin it rong. I suppose it helps that these posts are "fresh from the source," with very little interference from this Bob imposter.

Anyway, as for what Balthasar directly communicates in his writing, it literally feels as if I am very close to a kind of geyser of inexhaustible and uncontainable truth. He wrote only 100 or so books (or whatever it was), and if he had lived another 50 years, there would have been 100 more. Truly, he was a living example of what he is saying about the uncontainable nature of truth, and how there is only more of it the more you possess -- again, think of that image of a point with concentric circles around it, except that the closer you get to the point, the larger the territory, until you get to the point, which is infinite.

You could say that the central point is marked by the cross, sort of the way the flagpole shows you where the hole is in golf. The cross shows you where the Whole in Oneness is located.

Many implications follow from the above. First of all, being can never be grasped in its totality, because if it could, it wouldn't be true. Rather, we would be the truth, and we are nothing (since we are contingent), so that won't work. Relativism is always a dead end, or cosmic null de slack.

No. As Balthasar emphasizes, the illumination of being is not confined to our own little heads. Rather, in Truth, we are participating in the uncreated (and uncreateable) light that illuminates both subject and object, or being and consciousness. Yes, this may sound paradoxical, but it is true: our thinking "is embedded in an infinite thinking of being and so can serve as a measuring stick only because it itself is measured by an unmeasured, yet all-measuring, infinite measure."

Do you understand what he means? For example, let's take a gorgon-variety, ovary-tower academon who tries to take the measure of the Bible with her own puny intellect. What happens? Well, nothing, really. In reality, we can only understand the Bible because it understands us. Only a fool tries to measure the infinite, or contain the uncontainable, within himself.

Rather, we must become hosts for the uncontainable, a very different thing. In the latter case, we are like a river, but we do not confuse the river with the molecular state of the water flowing through it at any given time. Indeed, it is only human convention that separates the spring from the river and the river from the ocean. In reality, it is all one flowing process, from God to God -- except that it is a spiraling flow, not a strictly circular one.

In this way, we see that God is known implicitly in every explicit instance of truth: "It follows, then, that truth is indeed disclosed to the subject, and because it is truth, it always touches upon the sphere of the absolute, the infinite, and therefore, the divine."

To summarize: "[T]he more the subject grows by its knowledge in the certainty of the truth, the greater the distance between its own measured measure and God's measuring measure must appear to it. The truth proper to the creature is not so much the possession of the absolute truth as the readiness to receive it again and again."

To which I can only add, again and again and again and....