Drunk on Truth and Lit Up From Within

I try to read a little Schuon every day. Why? Because there is simply no other author who in-spires and speaks to me the way he does: straight through the peripheral bobscurities and directly to the center. My center, anyway. Obviously I don't agree with everything he says. But that's no different than not liking every performance of a musical artist I otherwise love.

He speaks with such clarity and force about matters that are unclear to -- or at least expressed unclearly by -- others. For example, he states that any cosmos -- which is to say, any ordered totality -- "reflects the homogeneity of the principial order," but that the manifest universe "is woven of necessity and liberty, of mathematical rigor and musical play, of geometry and poetry."

Come to think of it, most theologians tend to give you one or the other, but any discussion -- or "performance" -- of (or in) O clearly requires both: words and music, melody and harmony, spirit and letter, rhythm and surprise.

Revelation is both "systemic" and beyond any system. Somehow one needs to balance both. He writes that a particular religious doctrine is like "a crystal that captures the divine Light, refracting it in accordance with a language that is at once particular and universal."

How precise! The Light is one thing, the form another. The Light descends and vivifies the doctrinal form from within, a within that can only be seen with the eyes of faith. Faith is like the light that causes a reflector on the back of a bicycle to become luminous in the dark.

As we have said before, religious literalists at both extremes -- atheists on one side, "fundamentalists" on the other -- cannot see this. But "in reality, a theoretical expression can only be an 'allusive indication,' the implications of which are endless" (Schuon).

It's quite the opposite of the linearity of science -- which is not to criticize science, which has every right and duty to be so. But it has overstepped its rightful bounds when it suggests that religion should reduce itself to the cognitive modalities of science.

And this is hardly to say that science is objective and true theology isn't. Rather, as Schuon says, objectivity is not only the true essence of intelligence, but its moral imperative: to see and describe something "as it is" is to be objective, whatever the domain.

Conversely, to see something "as it isn't," is a kind of lying, or bearing of false witness. But how easy to see a rock or tree as opposed to seeing God!

Note also that God is by definition "in the rock," even though we can still speak of rocks as if they have some sort of independent existence. But if we forget this -- if we separate intelligence from its ground and source -- it devolves to mere cleverness, which is in turn conformed to pride, power, or some other passion.

In short, intelligence detached from its principle and sufficient reason is no longer objective at all. Which is why scientism, atheism, and materialism are all pure subjectivity. Only the mystic or sage is truly objective, since only God is necessary. All else is contingent in his Light.

Another subtle point: as we have discussed in the past, language cannot possibly be what bonehead Darwinians and other materialists imagine it to be. Not only does it usher us into a world that is above and beyond the call of matter, but it is an emanation from that world. Truly, the medium is the message and the message is Truth!

According to Schuon, the prototype of language as such is "universal Existence," so that we are ontologically "enclosed," so to speak, in both.

Wish all you like, but you cannot wish yourself out of Being, short of suicide. Nor can you wish yourself out of language and remain human, short of cluelesside.

Thus, to undermine the foundations of language -- as do deconstructionists and other postmodernists -- is to attack the basis and possibility of human being itself. In other words, to injure language is to damage being (not Being, of course, which is impervious to the petty insults of the tenured).

Think about that: we are enclosed in truth by virtue of being enclosed in language, which is enclosed in Being. This is precisely in conformity with the existence of a logoistic principle that is prior to manifestaion and "with God" from before the beginning. Every thing is made of it, and not a thing can be made -- or thought -- without it. Man is condemned both to be and to know, but these are just two sides of the same coin: He exists -- or I AM -- therefore we think.

Everything short of God is woven of essence and contingency. Only God is pure essence with no accident. Thus, although we have an essence, or essential being, it is necessarily veiled and obscured by layers of contingency, and not just mind parasites.

Rather, there is the time into which we are born (since we are not eternal), there is culture, there is our particular language, there is our family of origin, and there are genetic quirks. Man is a "fragmentary totality" (•••) on the way to totality. To paraphrase someone, our task and duty is to heal the inevitable wounds made by history.

Thus, it is our earthly duty to realize our essence, which is to simultaneously realize our origin, our destiny, and our vocation. It is to realize the soul, which is to realize God, the one being literally un-thinkable without the other. To know the soul is to know that God exists, and vice versa.

It is not just love, truth, and beauty that connect us to our source, but pleasure too. I don't think it is accurate to say that animals experience pleasure in the way human beings do. There is analogy, of course, but not identity. For example, no animal knows the pure joy of learning, or the tingle of aesthetic arrest, or the unalloyed bliss of coming into contact with truth.

For Schuon, any normal pleasure "is a kind of reverberation and therefore anticipation -- quite imperfect, no doubt -- of a celestial joy..." This is the ananda of pure being. In Vedanta, the oneness of God, or ultimate reality, breaks into the trinity of sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-bliss. Or, one could say existence-truth-joy. Or Father-Son-and the Love that flows between. It's all Good.

Gotta run.