O and ʘ Tattooed Across the Knuckles of My Head

If only I could read my mind.

What a hell that would be! Life is only bearable because we do not and cannot completely know ourselves, or anyone else, for that matter. I love the sound of surprise in the morning. For us it is always Raccoon Day, never Groundhog Day.

Know thyself! But not completely. Leave that to the Creator.

This thoughtlet may have nothing to do with the post that is presently aborning, but it spontaneously popped into one of our brains upon reading the following words (by W. R. Mead) at American Digest:

"Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes. In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other."

You know, left brain, right brain, transcendent brain. The meadle way of the intersubjective third appears to be the *point* of the first two, given the impressive size of the corpus callosum, which is our suspension bridge between the she & hemispheres. This is similar to how man and wife do not constitute marriage, but rather, are a declension from this primordial condition.

Thus, it would be an error to say that the transcendent position is merely a "synthesis" or integration of left and right; rather, the left and right hemispheres are a declension from the "total reality" of the third.

Neither one hemisphere nor the other has the "carrying capacity" to contain the cosmos, which is why the scientist has one piece and the poet another piece of aseity. Still, the poet usually gets more.

Say, just what religion do you profess, Bob?

The religion the Almighty and me worked out betwixt us.

I don't know about you, but we are "composed" of soul and body, or form and substance, but here again, these are a declension from something higher. One might say that time is necessary in order for this higher whatever to disclose itself, which it could never do "all at once," any more than one could perform a symphony in an instant by playing all its notes at once.

Balthasar says something similar in writing that "the spirit is veiled from itself in order that it might seek and find itself, not in itself, but in the infinite spirit that created it and that alone is perfect self-possession." Thus, the seeking is, orthoparadoxically, simultaneously "exterior" to us, and yet, interior.

This goes to what we were saying yesterday about the dialectic of our individualism and social-ism. Note that Jesus' own kenosis, or self-emptying, must represent a kind of analogue of the kenosis represented by creation itself. The kenosis actually "takes place" within the Godhead, as it were, as one gives all to two, and two back to one.

Therefore, as Balthasar notes, "spirit's self-possession is inseparable from the primary self-dispossession, entailed in its dependence upon external objects. Receptivity is thus like a deep, unclosable breach opened up in the closed circle of being-for-itself."

In short, a kind of paradox: "Only by welcoming things from the outside and remaining open to them, only by being given over to the service of what is other than itself, can man's spirit lay claim to a being of its own" (ibid.).

So let's give it up for the Creator!

I hope this isn't sounding too lowdown heideggerical, but what this essentially means is that the "fuel" of the cosmic gyrescape is the "self-dispossession" that seeks completeness via incompleteness, or independence via dependence. Or, in the recreational pharmulation of the Beatles, "The love you take is equal to the love you make," as it were.

Now, we can only be open to one another (i.e., horizontally) if we are first open to God (i.e., vertically), whether we like to think of it that way or not. Again, I do not make the rules. But no matter how "close" we may feel to the other, our solitude is "sealed forever by the incommunicability of spirit."

However, I would qualify this by saying that there can be no true communion with others in the absence of the unifying "higher third" referenced above. Indeed, what is this blog but a site for soirees where we see together with the third eye?

The same goes triple for the transcendent "body of Christ" of which the universal church is composed (including the sheep not of our folderal).

Think of the (admittedly impossible) alternative, of a universe of all-knowing spirits. This would be as boring as a MENSA meeting or as tedious as any Ivy League fatuity lounge.

For one thing, it would be "devoid of mystery," such that "every conversation, every exchange between these freest of entities would be restricted to a communication of something already known and possessed; it would therefore be superfluous" (ibid.).

Yes, but what we all want to know is, how does this affect Bob? Well, I started blogging almost six years ago, in October 2005. By November 2005 it was getting to be a grind, because there was nothing left for me to say. At that point I gave up trying, and simply dispossessed my Self of myself. So you could say that it's been non-stop bullshitting since then, but never say that it hasn't been empty bullshitting.