The Unexamined Post is Not Worth Writing

Well friends, it just done got too late to come up with a whole new post, so I'm republishing this one, which is sort of a continuation of the themes brought out in the last two.

I don't know about you, but I really don't mind the stale bobservations, because I'm always surprised at what's in 'em. It's as if it's my first opportunity to actually read them, i.e., to view them as an object external to me. It's like what that clever feller said about learnin': the only new thing is the history you don't know.

I've never really thunk on it before, but I can't really "see" 'em when they're a-comin' out my melon. I suppose it's analogous to the difference between dreaming and then interpreting the dream. If you don't interpret it -- or at least ponder over it -- or dwell in it for a spell -- it's just "gone," as if it never happened. I guess you might say the unexamined post ain't worth a-writin'....

A link was wanting between two craving parts of Nature and he was hurled into being as the bridge over that yawning need. --Emerson

Placed on the borders of Time and Eternity, he holds himself somehow erect at the horizon of nature.... Spiritual perfection is his true nature. --Giordano Bruno

Each man ought to say to himself, "I was the creator, may I become again what I was." --Upanishads

Due to the Creator's involution, the creation is truly a bridge to nowhere, that is, in its descending mode into relativity. However, for that very reason, it is also a meandering bridge to.... one cannot say precisely where, because that implies some sort of horizontal destination. Rather, the creation is an ascending bridge from nowhere to nothing, nothing being understood as the apophatic God beyond our comprehension, or the light so blinding that it looks like darkness.

Which reminds me. Future Leader loves to play a game in which we "hide from Mommy" while she's out walking the dog. When she returns, she pretends to not be able to find us, which has the effect of ratcheting up the tension in Future Leader's mind as in a horror movie. Anyway, we were hiding in the dark under the blankets, and he shrieked, "I can't see my eyes!"

So if you are one of those scientistic Darwinian fundamentalists living in metaphysical darkness, the first thing to locate is your eyes. No, not the evolved eyes, but the uncreated eye of spirit that knows truth and not opinion, i.e., your vision. Or, as Schopenhauer observed, "The experimental sciences, when one occupies oneself with them for their own sake, studying them without any philosophical aim, are like a face without eyes. They then represent one of those occupations suitable to middling capacities devoid of the supreme gifts which would only be obstacles to their minute researches."

It's a matter of soul vs. spirit, or psyche vs. pneuma. When our childish troll hides beneath his metaphysical blanket and cries, "I can't see my third eye!," he's obviously referring to the latter: "With his soul (psyche) man engages in scientific or philosophical inquiry, analyzing the data of his sense-experience by means of discursive reason" (Ware). But if this were the extent of man's intellectual capacities, we would be no different from any other tenured beast wallowing around in his filthy pen of absolute relativism and amoral moralism.

Rather, "With his spirit (pneuma), which is sometimes termed nous or spiritual intellect, he understands eternal truth about God, or about the logoi or inner essences of created things, not through deductive reasoning, but by direct spiritual apprehension or spiritual perception." And it would be a shame if man were to look at scripture, of all things, with the eyes of the psyche instead of pneuma, for then he is fundamentally no different than the Darwinist who chucks his nous and looks at the creation with his beady lizard eyes, seeing only surfaces.

Again, let others argue over whether natural selection could have resulted in something as fantastically complex as the eye. But argue with no one who believes it could have resulted in something as fantastically simple as a transcendental eye that has the ability to see the celestial light that radiates through, and shimmers upon, the surface of being.

As JB would say, take us to the bridge: "All creatures are balanced upon the creative word of God, as if upon a bridge of diamond; above them is the abyss of divine infinitude, below them that of their own nothingness" (Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, quoted in Ware).

What does that wise crack remind me of, aside from the soul power and cosmic funkmanship of James Brown? Oh yes, p. 89: Wandering along the precipice of non-being, one side down and back into dark death and material dissolution, the other side up and beyond, into more subtle regions of Mind and Spirit:


Perhaps the worst thing about a modern education is that it teaches only about surfaces, never the Depths, as if the latter do not exist and are not the soul's proper environment. This is because of our unwise founders, who created a constitution which mandates a "wall of separation" between surface and depth, and therefore outlaws conservatism.

Rather, the founders clearly intended for secular leftism to be our state religion, and explicitly wished to prevent human beings from discovering both their spiritual essence and the nonlocal source of their liberty, at least in any publicly funded school. The reason they did this is because a spiritually rootless nation of material automatons is much easier to control with dogma, slogans, bumper stickers, and promises of material well-being without effort. This follows from our Declaration of Dependence, which proclaims that human beings are endowed by the state with various privileges, such as healthcare, free abortions, and the pursuit of pleasure.

Nevertheless, this leftist state religion has a downside. As Ware writes, "Modern man has for the most part lost touch with the truest and highest aspect of himself; and the result of this inward alienation can be seen all too plainly in his restlessness, his lack of identity and his loss of hope." This, I think, is the deeper meaning of Obama's superficiality. He is here to raise the spiritually dead with his inspirational hope-a-dope rhetoric, AKA, the emperor's new empty suit of cliches.

Now, if Man is a bridge, it is in both a spatial and temporal sense. That is, he spans all of the vertical degrees of being; but the higher he ascends, the more encompassing the horizontal view, no different than when you look at the city below from the top of one of them big skyscrapers. I would go so far as to say that if you don't have your head in the clouds, it might very well be up your ass. If you're not scraping the sky, then you're creeping the earth.

Now I am reminded of Joyce, and neither will you, but here goes anyway:

".... If you are abcedminded, to this claybook, what curios of signs in this allaphbed! Can you rede its world?.... The meandertale, aloss and again, of our old Heidenburgh in the days when Head-in-Clouds walked the earth. In the ignorance that implies impression that knits knowledge that finds the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality...."

In fact, immediately after that passage is a quote that I used on the frontispiece of my doctoral dissertation, which you might say is "son of One Cosmos." Or I suppose it would be "father of One Cosmos." Anyway, When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. In a similar vein, Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifusion.

In a way, that summarizes the whole Doctrine, does it not? Which is fitting, because so does Man. He is the allforabit, a part so ptee who nevertheless does duty for the holos, no? And materialists try to divide and sumthelot, but that just ends in a fractured bog of a blob not a holygraphic blog of a bob. What I mean is, if you don't become spiritually whole again, you'll probably end up an intellectual hooligan.

Here, let's put it in plain English. As Ware writes, "Man stands at the heart of God's creation. Participating as he does in both the noetic and the material realms, he is an image or mirror of the whole creation, imago mundi, a 'little universe' or microcosm. All things have their meeting place in him." Yes, a part so ptee can do duty for the holos, but not without evolving there:

"Being microcosm, man is also mediator. It is his God-given task to reconcile and harmonize the noetic and the material realms, to bring them to unity, to spiritualize the material, and to render manifest all the latent capacities of the created order.... But in 'spiritualizing the body,' man does not thereby dematerialize it: on the contrary, it is the human vocation to manifest the spiritual in and through the material. Christians are in this sense the only true materialists."

Yes, this is indeed One Cosmos Under God. But only to the extent that we real-ize it, one youman beastling at a time.

The world is at once a passing shadow and a final fact....

The present is all that you have; and unless in this present you can find general principles which interpret the present as including a representation of the whole community of existents, you cannot move a step beyond your little patch of immediacy. --Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making

*****

Afterweird: I was thinking last night about how Sri Aurobindo measured his effect upon students, and it was mainly in their ability to compose "supramental poetry," which we won't get into here. However, I've noticed that I do something similar, in that I like to think that long-time readers begin to notice a new facility with language -- an ability to deploy language to make God present, so to speak. I certainly notice it in your comments. Sort of hard to describe, but if it has begun happening to you, then you know it. For those of you who are bobsequious enough to have the book, this transformation of language is discussed on pp. 107-109.

What comes down must go up: