Friday, November 19, 2010

The Horror of Existential Shrinkage

It is only in the poetic imagination which is akin to that of the child and the mystic that we can feel the pure sense of mystery and transcendence which is man's natural element. --Christopher Dawson

Dawson felt that imagination was the most important mode of the metaxy (discussed in Wednesday's post), the divine ←→ human vertical bridge that is Man; and that creativity and imagination were "the greatest gifts God had bequeathed to the human person" (Birzer). Or, if you prefer the psychedelicized and mushroom cloud-hidden words of a raving ethnobotanist,

"The imagination argues for a divine spark in human beings. It is absolutely confounding if you try to see imagination as a necessary quantity in biology. It is an emanation from above -- literally a descent of the world soul" (Terence McKenna).

In order to know reality one must first be capable of imagining reality, something no animal can do. This kind of higher imagination is "the ability to see clearly beyond the here and now into the reality of eternal forms -- thus allowing one to order one's soul to the eternal community."

In the absence of the seer-view mirror of imagination, the human being loses the ability to order anything beyond his immediate sensations and appetites; reality flattens out, so that animals become indistinct from humans, men from women, gods from kings, kings from men, men from monsters, art from entertainment, superstars from benchwarmers. With 20/20 houndsight, all the world essentially becomes analogous to pornography, which is sex drained of eros, or matter drained of soul, or knowledge drained of wisdom.

In contrast, the task of the true Christian -- not unlike that of the improvisational orthoparadoxical bohemian classical liberal Judeo-Vedantin neo-traditionalist -- is to unite matter with soul in order to sanctify the world. Given the ontological fact of the two vertical arrows of existence, there is the possibility of an upword inscape from the world toward the Abbasolute; or a downward escape into the considerable charms and snares of Mamamaya.

But where we are supposed to live is within the innercourse of the two, or more precisely, the One, which can be trimorphically envisioned but not seen; or only seen with higher vision, which is to say, imagination. With our intelligence we may discern the contours of this reality, but with our imagination we may unite ourselves to it. The former is mind, the latter is heart, and their union is the basis of the higher I-mage -- the mage who imagines. That would be us. Like the three magi who discerned the celestial arrows and saw Christ in an anonymous baby in a manger.

As usual, Schuon says it best: "The vice of outwardness is the lack of harmony between the two dimensions: between our tendency towards the things that surround us and our tendency towards the 'kingdom of God which is within you.' What is necessary is to realize a spiritual rootedness that removes from outwardness its tyranny at once dispersing and compressing, and that on the contrary allows us to 'see God everywhere'; which means to perceive symbols, archetypes and essences in sensible things....

"Similarly regarding matter: what is necessary is not to deny it -- if that were possible -- but to withdraw from its seductive and enslaving grasp; to distinguish in it what is archetypal and quasi-celestial from what is accidental and indeed too earthly; hence to treat it with nobleness and sobriety. In other words, outwardness is a right, and inwardness a duty..." The superior man is always fishing for complements, such as heaven-earth or time-eternity.

A one-sided, unimaginative, and dryasdust outworldliness is an affliction that particularly afflicts the psychospiritual left. Even back in his day, Dawson could already see that most liberal statists were "simple-minded secularists and utilitarians who failed to understand truth, beauty and goodness" and "lacked the power of imagination. They were quantifiers and calculators, sophisticated men of the world, but not of the soul. They had been duped by worldly wisdom" (Birzer).

This low altitude is both a cause and consequence of the mechanization of man, and renders him "less than God intended him to be." To put it another way, the inevitable outcome of radical secularism is that one is free, but not free to realize one's spiritual potentialities, and therefore only free in the manner of an uncaged beast; or a beast with impenetrable barriers he cannot see, thus giving the illusion of freedom. But we are creatures and not beasts, for the same reason we are citizens and not subjects.

Imagination mediates between the possible and the actual, and converts walls into windows, windows to doors. It is what allows the infinite and absolute to become intelligible, i.e., to be re-presented in the finite and relative realm.

As Bolton writes, "each relative world contains only a cross-section of the universal possibilities," and each person is just such a relative world. This world can be quite vast and expansive or small and cramped, depending upon the individual case. In other words, the size of the exterior world in which one lives and moves is merely a projection of the human interior.

For example, when we consider the inconceivable vastness of outer space, only a materialized mind living under the "reign of quantity" fails to realize that he is really contemplating the relative infinity of his own soul, for the physical cosmos is neither large nor small, whereas the soul is all it knows. The world it encounters is just the canvas upon which we paint beautiful or ugly pictures with the materials available to us; or the darkwomb in which we develop our pneumagraphs.

Bolton writes that "it may seem strange to speak of the mind as though it were a thing having a physical size, but it undoubtedly has its own analogue of spatial capacity." Furthermore -- and this is a critical point as it pertains to scientism -- the ability "to grasp one part of reality brilliantly while being oblivious of the other things that human minds are capable of can be more opposed to the truth than the perceiving of all things equally dimly."

And this is why, as I have mentioned before, even the literal creationist is surely closer to the reality of the situation than the unimaginative and spiritually autistic atheist who has drained reality of its most essential ideas, archetypes, and principles. His mind contracts the cosmos in order to make it adequate to the cold and shrunken proportions of his own being. This is what the world looks like when you peer into the wrong end of the teloscope.

This existential shrinkage would be a great embarrassment to atheists if only they realized how silly they look to us in their misosophical nakedness, but like children and savages, they live in a kind of naive cognitive innocence without so much as a fig leaf of metaphysics. They have no idea why we laugh at them, which for them is a mercy.

Regarding the "intelligent error" of those shrunken secularists, Schuon writes that "It is only too evident that mental effort does not automatically give rise to the perception of the real; the most capable mind may be the vehicle of the grossest error. The paradoxical phenomenon of even a 'brilliant' intelligence being the vehicle of error is explained first of all by the possibility of a mental operation that is exclusively 'horizontal,' hence lacking all awareness of 'vertical' relationships."

In turn, this exclusively horizontal Ørientation "creates a void that the irrational necessarily comes to fill." And of course, there are not just scientific materialists but religious ones, those "whose intellectual intuition remains latent, this being precisely what constitutes the 'obscure merit of faith.'" In other words, even if one cannot understand Truth, one should still believe and have faith in it.

Reason can never arrive at reality, and it is the height of unreasonableness to imagine otherwise. At best, it can remove obstacles in the way of our imaginative vision. As Schuon explains, reasoning is analogous to "the groping of a blind man, with the difference that -- by removing obstacles -- it may bring about a clearing of vision; it is blind and groping due to its indirect and discursive nature." Reason is surely a gift, but a gift that gives -- or facilitates -- something beyond reason.

That is, reason "is a means of knowledge, but this means is mediate and fragmentary like the sense of touch, which enables a blind man to find his way and even to feel the heat of the sun, but not to see." To put it another way, it allows us to uncover the transcendent vision "which one possesses a priori," i.e., vertical recollection.

What does it mean to say that the cosmos is expanding? Again, if one is only referring to physical reality, the point couldn't be more banal. Who cares? In the absence of a stable frame of reference, expansion and contraction are just figures of speech.

In a very real way, the only thing that is actually expanding in the world is man's inwardness, is it not? And if you're not expanding, then you are contracting, for the mind cannot cease its dynamism, its metabolism of reality. You are what you eat, and if you eat the quantified and atomistic sawdust of secularism, you will inevitably be spiritually malnourished, just a shell of your future self.

Slowly, through grace, each Christian is sanctified, the debris of the world being gradually removed from the order of his soul, and then the human as the metaxy serves as the bridge between the spiritual and material worlds. --Bradley Birzer

42 comments:

Rick said...

Wonderful post.
It's very often that I think, Bob's thinking what I'm reading. Or, he's read the latest chapter in me crummy book.
It's pretty rare, if not the only time I think you're doing them all at the same time. I suppose it's "bound to happen" sooner or later. But what kind of coon thinks that way? Not this one.
So I just finished "The Way of the Pilgrim" and rereading "Man's Search for Meaning" and up to the elbow in that book o mine.

Yet all these things line up. How is that?

Rick said...

Good news! 4 out of 5 Americans are Perfectly Perfect!

Gagdad Bob said...

"Yet all these things line up. How is that?"

Same attractor beam in pneumatic phase space.

julie said...

the ability "to grasp one part of reality brilliantly while being oblivious of the other things that human minds are capable of can be more opposed to the truth than the perceiving of all things equally dimly."

Or as Heinlein put it, "Specialization is for insects."

Re. the alignment, that's one of the marvelous things about Truth - it resonates, such that one can be reading various books about seemingly disparate topics - say, music, neurons, cooking and the Tarot - and yet they illuminate each other to reveal not only each individual subject more clearly, but also the One from which all Truth radiates.

swiftone said...

Same attractor beam! I'm lifting again from the depths of despond, which are blessedly less deep these days. Imagination is the bridge I tend to travel, though I can't seem to figure the more fruitful way to show my imaginings. Now if I can keep it together and not go all manic...and into so many projects. The rich stuff all pulls you into that attractor beam. My reading is little samplings of the bible, via the Book of Common Prayer, with samplings of the Confessions of St. Augustine, and Talmudic studies. It all helps me to keep my backside working to cash the checks my mouth has written. Reading OC is something of a spiritual practice for me. Keep on keepin' on. Ditto Rick and Julie. Great post

julie said...

Rick - uh oh, according to that study women are far more likely to be, er, "ill" than are men. Let's hope this doesn't become an opportunity for the feminist community to rally for yet more special programs and womyn's studies...

Van Harvey said...

"A one-sided, unimaginative, and dryasdust outworldliness is an affliction that particularly afflicts the psychospiritual left. Even back in his day, Dawson could already see that most liberal statists were "simple-minded secularists and utilitarians who failed to understand truth, beauty and goodness" and "lacked the power of imagination. They were quantifiers and calculators, sophisticated men of the world, but not of the soul. They had been duped by worldly wisdom" (Birzer)."

Absolutely.

A couple years ago I went on at lengthhh for about 9 posts on that in 'Reasons of Reason' (starting here - heh, anyone remember Allotetraploid?), there is no Reason or Reasoning, without Imagination - none, zero, nada.

Without it, all that is left is mechanical calculation and logic chopping... as the left abundantly proves... and it ain't pretty, that's for sure.

julie said...

!
wv says "devil." Weird. I don't think I've done anything that bad yet today...

Anyway...
If you have an hour to listen, this lecture on history is quite good: Visions of History: Ways of Seeing the Past.

julie said...

Having just now come to the end of the lecture, it (of course) ties in quite nicely both with the post and with Rick's observation about how things line up.

The subject is narratives, and how history can be viewed through many disparate lenses. The one we are most often taught in formal schooling is the history of warfare, but of course that's only a tiny part of the story.

As I said, worth a listen...

JP said...

"For example, when we consider the inconceivable vastness of outer space, only a materialized mind living under the "reign of quantity" fails to realize that he is really contemplating the relative infinity of his own soul, for the physical cosmos is neither large nor small, whereas the soul is all it knows."

At one point in high school, I remember feeling profound despair when trying to comprehend the inconceivable vastness of outer space.

That was unpleasant and made me feel horrible.

JP said...

You know, it would be nice if I had ever encountered the concept of the "good, the beautiful, and the true" at some point in my life prior to this blog.

I mean, you spend years in church and stuff like this is never mentioned.

Although you do get lots of guilt and unhelpful thoughts such as:

"Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world."

and

"Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life."

and

"If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters--yes, even his own life--he cannot be my disciple."

It's hard to put things like that into practice.

julie said...

Time for a musical interlude...

Magnus Itland said...

Actually, JP, your quotes tie directly in with the topic of A and B influences recently.

The world is shot through with the glory of God, to put it theistically. But the world is temporary and ever changing, God is not.

Well, I should leave this to an actual spiritual teacher.

Open Trench said...

The objective is to divinise humanity.

Starting with the self, and then moving to others.

All raccoons keep the objective in mind at all times.

Your family, your job, your beliefs, your possessions, and your actions, are all means to an end--the divinisation of humanity.

They are important but they are not the objective. They are means. Your body is a means, not an end.
'
Only the spirit is an end.

When Bob writes:

"This existential shrinkage would be a great embarrassment to atheists if only they realized how silly they look to us in their misosophical nakedness" he is only half right. The existentialist is wrong, but he does not require ridicule but instead assistance.

No one is silly and needs to be laughed at. The WHOLE of humanity must be divinised. Stick to only that which moves us in that direction and forsake all else.

ge said...

one of the more profound areas of Sufism is their philosophers' explorations of the mundus imaginalis, nicely discussed in many of Henry Corbin's texts
eg
'Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn ‘Arabi'

al-Khidr!

Rick said...

Thanks for the link, ge.
Interesting perspective. And a lot in line with Bob's - just yousing different words.
Also, I don't know how many times I've run across Jung's name lately. I've never read a thing of his. Only rumors.

JP said...

Magnus says:

"The world is shot through with the glory of God, to put it theistically. But the world is temporary and ever changing, God is not."

My problem is that it trying to put some of this into practice seems to lead to what Shrinkwrapped is calling the "committed ideologue", as set forth in his blog as:

"Meanwhile the committed ideologue, who with his extra dollop of Narcissism arrives at his ideology via an intellectual process, may simply be someone who relates poorly to other people. In his case, while he might love mankind, he doesnt have any particular connection to the individual man. This is common in ideologues who love the people but despise (devalued) people."

I understand your point about A and B influences, I'm just pointing out that applying the plain langauge of the statutes to life (legal education ;) ), so to speak, results in some psychological weirdness.

walt said...

Rick -

About a month ago, Jack recommended The Undiscovered Self, by Jung, saying it seemed Raccoonish. It was one on the last things Jung wrote before he died, and as such, I presume, represents his most mature understanding. It's really an extended essay; only about 60 pages.

In it, he describes what he considers to be the crisis facing civilization. You'd think he had written it, er, just last month, given all the "issues" of the last election -- but no, it was written in 1956! He does not mince words, and for all the internet "heat" his name gets, it all seemed very pro-religion and pro-Christian to me. With a very Bob-like twist.

One interesting note: He said, as an aside, just one or two sentences really, that Freud had told him that he (Freud) had purposely linked his theories of the unconscious to sexuality because ... the unconscious was so weird that if he didn't tie it to something people could "relate" to, they would think he was describing the occult! But Jung did not elaborate.

Personally, I much prefer Bob's writing and ideas to what little of Jung and Jungian psychology I've read -- but Jack's suggested book would be an easy way to dip yer toe into it.

Stephen Macdonald said...

OT: I've never been completely comfortable on Airbus aircraft. Something about a hugely complex machine designed and built by European unionists...

Several of my pilot acquaintances from my days in the airline security business have quietly admitted that they turn down jobs involving Airbus (Bombardier are not loved either). Never heard anyone say anything similar about Boeing.

One thing is for sure: I'm avoiding the A380 "computerized flying bomb" indefinitely.

Rick said...

Thank you, Walt. Awful nice of you.
I'll check it out. Like movies these days, I tend to enjoy scenes, rather than expect it of every part or even the whole. There's got to be some good scenes in Jung. Maybe mostly.
Bob's mentioned him a number of times. Maybe a series of posts on him (if Jung's ideas have that sort of stamina) could be beneficial to the brotherhood.

Tigtog said...

To: JP
RE: "At one point in high school, I remember feeling profound despair when trying to comprehend the inconceivable vastness of outer space."

Think of the universe as the complete union of soul. It is an organism of everything and it exists in a vacuum of space. The good news is its growing.

Compare this thought to discussions on matter and anti-matter. Add a dose of chaos theory. Then read the apocalyptic visions in the bible and things start to stitch themselves together.

Magnus is pointing in the same direction. The universe is God and we merely exist within him. Our life is explained by people, tasks, and things. Of these three, things are the most inconsequential. People and tasks are what defines us.

Hi guys - I've been out of pocket lately. Hope all is well.

JP said...

Tigtog says:

"Magnus is pointing in the same direction. The universe is God and we merely exist within him. Our life is explained by people, tasks, and things. Of these three, things are the most inconsequential. People and tasks are what defines us."

Part of what has frustrated me about religion in general is that it seemed to be presented as:

1) You are born dead. You have a very short time to do the right things to esape or end up in hell or destroyed.

2) You have a limited and confused instruction set to use. You can't trust other people because almost all of them are dead.

3) All of your instincts are wrong. You have to figure out how to turn them all off so that you can escape.

4) Ideally, you want to be a poor saint who spends his life suffering. That's the lowest-risk way out of life alive.

Or at least, this is some of what I gleaned during my discussions with other people in high school.

All of this seemed to make life an extremely unpleasant and somewhat worthless endeavor and relatively terrifying.

It's ideas like this that don't seem to help much of anything.

julie said...

More on history:

I think it’s fair to say that most of us living in America today assume that, as we like to put it, “you can’t turn back the clock,” that history always and inevitably moves in a liberalizing direction. And we think that whether we consider such “liberalizing” as the epitome of good or the embodiment of evil or something in between. It seems to be endemic to Americans to embrace the “Whig interpretation of history”, that is, to see the whole of history as marching inexorably towards us, to see everything culminating in ourselves — whether we happen to like that culmination or not.

But when we seriously compare the social world of England in 1750 to the social world of England in 1850, it becomes harder to sustain the Whiggish model.

JP said...

From Julie's article:

" Yet practically everyone, in his own fashion, had faith. Much of it was a fig leaf of Christianity covering a body of inherited magic and superstition, little more than Nature worship (the polite, doctrinally correct form of this was known as ‘natural religion’)."

I have no idea what "Nature worship" and "magic" mean in this respect.

What in the world is "nature worship"?

Can anyone explain it?

JP said...

More from Julie's article:

"But when we seriously compare the social world of England in 1750 to the social world of England in 1850, it becomes harder to sustain the Whiggish model. As C. S. Lewis once commented, “as to putting the clock back”:

Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? But I would rather get away from that whole idea of clocks. We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

Of course, we can and will disagree about what counts as real progress — about whether the clocks are wrong at all, and, even when we agree that they are wrong, where they should be re-set. But the key point is that history does not move in a single, inevitable direction — or at least, has not done so thus far — and if we imagine our grandchildren’s world as nothing but a continuation of our own, an extension or our own values and inclinations, we may prove in the end to be as wrong as wrong can be."

Welcome to the world of generational dynamics/turnings.

www.fourthturning.com
www.generationaldynamics.com

julie said...

Re. nature worship and magic, I think it means just what it says. A little like the Wiccans of today.

JP said...

I know that, but I don't really understand Wiccans. I don't get "nature worship".

Does that mean that nature can produce magic if you chant the right words and burn the right plants?

Rick said...

I don't know much about wiccans. Not sure its all a "what's in it for me" attitude. But one could hardly blame another for awe of the Book of Creation. It's Idolatree, I guess. Can be harmful of course if not understood that that's what it is.

julie said...

Does that mean that nature can produce magic if you chant the right words and burn the right plants?

Sort of. There are certainly those who believe in casting spells, etc. From the couple of Wiccans I know, I think generally speaking it's more that they believe the supernatural can be accessed through specific rituals, using plant lore, the Tarot, etc. - and instead of being focused on the relationship between God and man it's more about appealing to nature spirits. This was probably particularly true back then, given that one's livelihood was much more explicitly dependent on the fertility of the fields and folds. Today's Wiccans may or may not believe in god as such, but instead of the Christian and human-centered focus, god is more purely in and pertaining to the world of plants and animals.

JP said...

I suspect that the core of nature worship has at it's root, the experience of the thinning of the psycho-spiritual membrane between the individual and the surrouding natural environment.

You feel it and voila, you have a "transcendent experience" that leads you to nature worship.

I'm fairly certain that this was covered in MOT and when I read it I said to myself "a-ha, that's where THAT EXPERIENCE comes from".

In any event, I suppose I could say that I understand where they are coming from, but I'm not as clueless as they are in that respect.

Yes, it's a neat experience. But so is drinking beer.

JP said...

Julie says:

" I think generally speaking it's more that they believe the supernatural can be accessed through specific rituals, using plant lore, the Tarot, etc. - and instead of being focused on the relationship between God and man it's more about appealing to nature spirits."

Well, the Tarot can help you talk to eregores(?) or demons (if demons acually exist or are simply eregores) or SOMETHING like that according to one of my suiritually attuned ex-girlfriends, so it does WORK, just not in a way that actually adds to the net good of the world.

Of course, me, being me, I would probably tell them that they are stupid (not using the word "stupid" of course, but they would get the gist of it).

Unlike Bob, I don't have a problem making people angry in person or in a public place by picking a verbal fight with them when I know I'm right.

I'm good like that. It's a me thing.

Mizz E said...

Film recommendation: "127 Hours".
An unrelenting tour de force thanks to Simon Beaufoy's clever script, Danny Boyle's inspired direction, and James Franco's amazing performance, 127 Hours is primarily an unforgettable examination of the human spirit under extreme duress. Liked the music-a lot!

Jack said...

Walt said: "In it, he describes what he considers to be the crisis facing civilization. You'd think he had written it, er, just last month, given all the "issues" of the last election -- but no, it was written in 1956!"

That is *exactly* the same experience I had reading it. It was pretty much uncanny the parallels e.g. statism vs the freedom of individual.

I read a bunch of Jung when I was, well, younger and many of his books just seemed to me to be long catalogs of him illustrating his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious. "The Undivided Self" is different. Very clear, concise and again, very pertinent.

Definitely worth the read.

USS Ben USN (Ret) said...

Great series of posts, Bob!

"But where we are supposed to live is within the innercourse of the two, or more precisely, the One, which can be trimorphically envisioned but not seen; or only seen with higher vision, which is to say, imagination. With our intelligence we may discern the contours of this reality, but with our imagination we may unite ourselves to it. The former is mind, the latter is heart, and their union is the basis of the higher I-mage -- the mage who imagines. That would be us. Like the three magi who discerned the celestial arrows and saw Christ in an anonymous baby in a manger."

Discern n' unite. Lotsa aye! candy in this post! :^)

ge said...

a song not onry magicar but arso
obscure

the clown with a crown
left & right
bereft of light

walt said...

Jack -

The Undivided Self was written by Theodore Dimon, and is an entirely secular but with seriously spiritual undertones description of the actual factual non-separation of mind and body, written from his own experience from the in-side out. He is considered one of the "Bigs" in the Alexander Technique field.

You meant, I'm purty sure, The Undiscovered Self, by C. G. Jung. But thanks for bringing up Dimon's book, which is a worthwhile read as well!

ge said...

a pretty amazing Jung related book happens to be Robert A. Johnson's
autobio
i'd never read him but devoured this sucker in a flash!

good old Strand books downstairs: a few minute walk and you can buy such at 1/2 price suddenly

Gagdad Bob said...

That book does look pretty interesting. I always enjoy spiritual memoirs of serious people.

SippicanCottage said...

Personally, I have no idea where the words come from. The vivisection never goes well, either. Kills the organism.

Rick said...

Archie Bunker says they come from the dictionary.

Jack said...

huh, "The Undivided Self"?? Where did that come from?

A Jungian slip I suppose!

Rick said...

Clarence says, every time a bell rings an angel gets no friggin credit whatsoever.

Theme Song

Theme Song