It's a Mixed Up Muddled Up Shook Up World

Are animals free? From our point of view they aren't, but compared to rocks and trees they are -- which is to say that they manifest a divine archetype and participate in the Divine freedom, or the drama of creation.

Likewise, human beings are obviously free on their own plane, but one assumes that this freedom looks very different from the perspective of God -- perhaps analogous to how animal freedom appears to us.

Elsewhere I remember Schuon saying something to the effect that for animals instinct is their intellect, while for human beings the intellect is our instinct. I agree with this, in the sense that the intellect is not radically free, but simply has a larger domain of freedom. Or, one might say that it partakes of additional dimensions, not the least of which being the cosmic interior that discloses truth, beauty, virtue, being, essence, and unity.

Animals obviously don't have access to any of these dimensions. They can touch beauty -- for example, through the eyes and ears -- but that is all. They cannot "enter" it, let alone inhabit it.

One wonders if there is something analogous going on in certain humans who can touch truth or God, but not enter. For example, atheists who argue against the existence of the thing they call "god" must be "touching" it, so to speak. But to enter it would be to know it, precisely. Conversely, to remain exterior to it is to not know it, just as a blind man must forever be exterior to painting.

The purpose of human existence is to realize the Absolute. Either this is the purpose, or there is no purpose at all. Again: it is either theism or nihilism, with nothing in between. But this "nothing" is not a zero. Rather, it is very much a "something," but this something is the great realm of illusion.

Now, the theist also lives in this realm of illusion, but it makes all the difference in the world if one regards this illusion from the bottom-up or the top-down. If the world inhabited by human beings -- especially the subjective world -- is simply a prolongation of physics and biology (the latter of which being a prolongation of the former), then we know full well that the world is just an illusion resting on another illusion. It's illusions all the way down.

Since we live in an illusion, we can't even be sure that physics isn't an illusion, right? I mean, let's be honest. As J.B.S. Haldane put it, "If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms."

Everything changes if we invert the cosmos and set it back right side-up. Again, we still live in "illusion" -- for anything that is not God is less than real -- but now we see this realm of mayaplicity as an extension or prolongation of the One. Now we have solid ground over our heads and a cloud under our feet -- for example, Heisenberg's quantum cloud of blessed uncertainty, or Gödel's holy incompleteness, or Bohr's divine complementarity, or Matte Blanco's sacred bi-logic. That is the real world, which eludes any reductionistic explanation (except for technological purposes).

In short, our Reason -- and therefore reason -- is from above, not below. That being the case, creation is a hierarchical prolongation of divine energies. The central evil of the left lies in denying this reality, which leaves man orphaned in illusion and exiled from himself. It robs him of his sufficient reason -- his reason for being -- replacing it with what amounts to sensation without joy and rationality without truth. We become nothing but an animal, except with the disadvantage of knowing we are one.

In this scheme, we are quite literally a freak of nature with an accidental recursivity of consciousness that permits us to know with certainty that we don't know, but that is all. We know we are alive, but we don't know why. No reason for our existence can be located below -- at least no reason equal to what man is. In other words, in a wholly naturalistic view, all of the explanations for man are far less than man: truth is explained by illusion, the illusion that there is anything other than physics going on.

The difference between a proper humanist and a secular "humanist" is that the former seeks explanations that don't destroy humanness as a result of entertaining them. For in truth, nothing less than a human explanation can explain human beings -- just as nothing less than a biological explanation can explain Life. In other words, it's one thing to say that a living body is just a rare agglomeration of matter, but one doesn't go to a physicist when one is ill. Nor does one go to a biologist for human wisdom.

And yet, some people do, e.g., evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists. To call this "psychology" is an abuse of the term, being that psyche means soul. No psychologist understands how mind affects matter, let alone how soul affects mind or God affects soul. These are subtle causes that will forever elude any scientific explanation.

When we talk about faith, we are talking about being faithful to one's sufficient reason -- the reason for one's being, both in a general and particular sense. In other words, there is a reason for man's being, as well as a reason for one's own being. Again, man's sufficient reason is to realize God, which is predicated on the understanding that man is a bridge that spans the cosmos from top to bottom.

But the reason for your existence is that you are a unique "problem of God," so to speak. Look at your children, each one unique, and each one requiring a different approach to actualize his being. To parent each child in the identical way is to treat them as an object, not a subject.

Now the left, in abolishing hierarchy, also wages war on individuality. By definition, the state treats all people identically, profound differences notwithstanding. This is not a problem in the negative sense; indeed, it is a blessing -- the idea that we are all equal before the law.

Mischief arises when leftists begin creating positive rights, through which uniformity is imposed upon us by the state.

For example, most recently a judge in my state has declared that there are no essential differences between the sexes. This is a spiritually and morally insane cosmic egalitarianism by judicial fiat. It is the declaration that there is no heaven and earth, no celestial and terrestrial, no archetypal and phenotypal. Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, it's a mixed up muddled up shook up world. Especially for Judge Walker, who wishes to impose his own gender confusion on the rest of us in order to pretend it's clarity.

Thus materialism amounts to reducing man to the animal, and even to the lowest, since the lowest is the most collective; this explains the materialists' hatred for all that is supra-terrestrial, transcendent, spiritual, for it is precisely the spiritual by which man is not an animal. To deny the spiritual is to deny the human: the moral and legal distinction between man and animal then becomes purely arbitrary, like any other tyranny... --F. Schuon