On Speaking In and Of Reality

Science has a lot of answers. Duh! But only to very narrow and specific questions. If you ask the wrong question, for example, "Why are truth and beauty so intimately related?", or "what happens after you die?", you get no answer at all. Worse, some questions just generate paradox, such as, "what was before the Big Bang?", or "how can the same Darwinism that supposedly explains man be explained by man?"

Now, here's the deal: various sciences abstract from the meaning of being as a whole, which is only possible because truth emanates from being -- which is itself a timeless truth which we may know with certainty on pain of the impossibility of knowing anything at all. But science alone can never explain the existence of the truth-bearing scientist, any more than you can give birth to yourself or kiss your elbow.

Or, let us just say that our encounter with being begins with the dual mystery of a cosmos that is intelligible to intelligence. In fact, this complementarity reduces to the single word cosmos, which simply means order. The cosmos is "the order of the whole," but that one word presumes both the intelligence and intelligibility, the one making no sense without the other. Furthermore, the intelligence and intelligibility point beyond themselves in two directions, to the Divine mind and the intellect, or God and man, or just O and (¶).

Sciences develop diverse and technical languages to convey the truth of Being to our intelligence -- for example, the language of quantum mechanics or the hyper-sophisticated coding of the human genome. But again, these languages aren't Being itself. The map is not the territory. The human genome project is not alive, you can't make a cosmos out of mathematics, and you certainly can't give a robot a human soul by programming it with psychoanalytic theory.

Being just is; or as the biggest wag of them all put it: don't kid the keter, I Am that I AM. We can describe it any way we like, but our description can never exhaust the infinite ocean of Being. It perpetually flows into our little vessel of human knowing without being diminished one iota.

Oldtomers will pardon the brief review, because otherwise, new catecoonemates will have no idea what we're talking about. But in the wholly Bobble, I use the symbol "O" to stand for the infinite and unknowable ground of ultimate reality from which our existence is derived, the latter being like a spark thrown from a central fire. You are a spark in the dark responsible for that nasty business in the park, but that is a subject for a different post.

O itself can never be known as it is. On the one hand, we can know "about" it, which I call (k), which refers to all of our profane, everyday knowledge up to and including the highest reaches of science. We can also know in O, so to speak, which I call (n). "Speaking in O" accounts for a number of human modes, such as poetry, intuition, prophecy, and cosmo-American soul music.

Now, we can most definitely experience the energies of O -- its warmth and light, or love and gnosis -- directly. In fact, we can know many things about O, just as I can know many things about you. But I can never know you in the same way you know yourself in an unmediated way, from the inside. Only you can have this kind of "inside information" about yourself.

Thus, observational or inductive science proceeds in the "upward" direction of (k)-->O, while logico-deductive science proceeds in the "downward" direction of O-->(k). Again, (k) is the realm of everyday dualistic knowledge about O. This knowledge may be known objectively and passed like an object from mind to mind, or from the tenured to their young victims.

For example, the theory of natural selection is (k) about the ultimate unknowable mystery of the living O. It is not to be confused with O itself. For surely, O is alive, and yet, it can hardly be reduced to a biological object, which is only a distant effect, not a cause. Life comes from Life, just as love comes from Love and truth from Truth.

At risk of pointing out the obvious, the theory of natural selection cannot tell you how O evolved to the point that it could hypothesize and know a truth about itself, any more than musical notation can account for the existence of music.

Music is completely unperturbed by all the efforts to capture and contain it. All the music that has been produced in the history of the world has not yet made a dent in it. We will never "run out" of music. Although rap comes close.

No, music will continue to flow on forever, just as will language. Language will never explain the ceaseless creativity of language. It just flows and flows and flows, regardless of your theory or system or particular language. It is truly a mirror of the infinite, since it is one of the primary modes of O. Remember, "the Word" was with O from the beginning, and the beginning is always now: Yes, When He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He drew a circle on the face of the deep.... I was beside Him as a master craftsman (Proverbs 8:27).

Science must console itself with (k), which is fine. Obviously, (k) has its place so long as we exist, as we must, in the "separative illusion" of the relative world. Indeed, since most cultures revolve around (-k), I am eternally grateful that I won the cosmic lottery and live in a time and place that mostly honors (k). For any method of science is correct, on its own level, to the extent that it submits to O and allows itself to be molded and determined by the limited object or domain it is attempting to describe.

But for most of history -- and in much of the contemporary world -- this direction is reversed, and reality is determined and molded by (k), which automatically converts it to (-k). For example, Islamists are rooted in a pernicious (-n), which never touched O to begin with. (Obama's hateful Trinity Church is another fine example of (-n), or "lies about God.")

Worse yet, when (k) replaces O, one then lives in the parallel loooniverse of -O, or what I call ø, which is where so much of standard issue leftism can be situated. Whenever you deny O, you will simply replace it with ø, and fall from essence to existence. Instead of being "condemned to the absolute" -- as a self-aware man must be -- you are just plain condemned.

In fact, you may even elevate yourself to O, as do so many secular fundamentalist lunafanatics. They do this in both trivial and profound ways, from dictating how the infinitely complex systems of the economy or weather should be "governed," to making it against the law to discuss O in public schools.

We in the West suffer from a different problem than the one that afflicts so much of the (-n) Islamic world (mostly the unsufirabble parts). Unfortunately, our culture does more than honor (k). Rather, it elevates it to the highest. The secular world tries to eradicate O and replace it with mere (k), which automatically places one in an abstract, substitute, and counterfeit world at least one degree removed from reality.

Religions, properly understood, attempt to restore our primordial relationship to O. Fundamentally, they contemplate the holy and manifest mystery of Being by trying to enter it directly -- not talk about it but from within it. And when they do talk about the mystery, it is not in the manner of (k)-->O (or at least it shouldn't be). Rather, the direction is reversed, and it is O-->(n).

Again, (n) is not to be confused with (k). To take just one obvious example, it would be a grave error to reduce the words of Jesus to mere (k). Rather, Jesus spoke in almost pure (n). Indeed, you will note that Jesus used no technical terms at all.

Obviously, specialized (k) can be quite technical. Most of it is well over -- or under -- your head. But (n) is often quite homespun and plain -- even rustic -- sounding. The Tao Te Ching, for example, also contains no technical terms at all. Nor do the Upanishads or the Talmud. Nor, for that matter, did most of the great philosophers of history employ any technical language: Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, Bob Dobbs. Only when (k) started to become conflated with O did we see this great confusion in philosophy, a confusion that pervades the contemporary academic world.

In fact, sad to say, most contemporary philosophy has detached itself entirely from O. It now consists of nothing more than (k) about (k), which, suffice it to say, is merely (-k) as it pertains to metaphysics, the latter of which being the science of the Real.

If revelation is an objective manifestation of O, the intellect as such is its subjective manifestation, the one mirroring the other (for scripture is not only addressed to the awakened intellect [nous], but cannot be understood without one).

The scientistic middleworld of (k ) --> O is a barren one that is unfit for human hobbitation. Being spontaneously gives itself to us, but in order to appreciate that, we must adopt an attitude of receptiveness, or what I call (o). If we do not maintain this receptive attitude, the world cannot open up and give of itself from within -- from Within to within. Can I get a withinness?! Amen!

Although the way of the jnani is not the way of the bhakti, being that it is primarily the path of Knowledge, there is considerable overlap, in that it is nevertheless a love relationship. For it is phil of the beautiful Sophia, a passionate longing for Truth and Reality, the one an eternal reflection of the other.