The Strawberry Walrus Never Knows

As I've mentioned in the past, one of the influences on the One Cosmos method -- Method? I don't see any method at all, sir.

Ahem. One of the influences on the One Cosmos method (not content) was the free-ranging fertile egghead and stoned philosopher, Terence McKenna, whose peculiar late-night riffing first alerted me to the centrality of language to transdimensional communication, while I was otherwise occupied stocking shelves on the graveyard shift at Malibu Market Basket, store 81.

The above -- "language is central to transdimensional communication" -- is a tautology, of course, like saying that language is important to language. Nevertheless. We live in so many different intelligible worlds, that it's easy to forget -- or to imagine that just one type of language is sufficient to cover the waterfront and back, both inside and out.

There is more or less horizontal, person-to-person communication, which can be exterior and superficial, or which can take on degrees of interiority, depth, and intimacy.

Then there is scientific communication, say, of what goes on down there in the micro world of atomic and subatomic reality, or the language of DNA. There is artistic communication, either in word, sound, or image, "body language," even just good or bad vibes.

And yet, it's all word in some form or fashion, i.e., something transmitted and received, something intelligible to intelligence.

McKenna often spoke of the development of what he called a "more perfect logos." I just googled the phrase, and in this talk, he says that

"the world arrives at the surface of our skin as a seamless body of electromagnetic and acoustical and pheromonal data. It’s just that our eyes, our nostrils, our ears, our skin, we break up this incoming flow of data. And now we’re close to McLuhan country here: I think what this hints at is that print skewed our perceptual apparatus, our style of parsing perceptual data, toward the acoustic space. So that for us, thought became a voice… you know? And very early in the Western tradition, this is so. Jehovah is a voice in the Old Testament; the Logos is a voice. In Hellenistic philosophy, we are the People of the Voice. But apparently, you know, there is a passage in Philo Judaeus where he talks about the etymology of the word Israel, and he says “Israel means He who sees God” -- he who sees God. And then he poses the question to himself: “What is the more perfect Logos?” And then he says, “The more perfect Logos is that Logos which goes from being heard to being seen, without ever passing over a moment of noticeable transition.”

Elsewhere in the talk he speaks of encountering "linguistic objects" during his chemical adventures, which he compares to "three- and four- and five-dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it is… it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B; it’s that it’s simultaneously A and B, and when the pun is really funny it’s an A, B, C, D pun; and it’s simultaneously all these things… well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which stands for an acoustical output -- in other words, a printed pun -- in the DMT world, objects can do this. Objects can simultaneously manifest more than one nature at once. And, something like a pun, the result is always funny. It’s amusing! You cannot help but be delighted by this thing doing this thing."

So if you want to trace the origin of our annoying freevangelical pundamentalism, McKenna would be it (although he in turn was greatly influenced by Finnegans Wake). However, he and I parted ways with his reliance upon chemistry to develop the method of 5-D linguistics. I, on the other hand, not only wanted to see if it might be possible for a punformational techgnosistry to be accomplished on the natch, but wanted to, in a manner of speaking, transmit a kind of "contact high" via my exalted and hopped up wranting.

I mean, what are they going to say, man, when he's gone, huh? Because he dies, when it dies, man, when it dies, he dies. What are they going to say about him? What, are they going to say, he was a kind man, he was a wise man, he had plans, he had wisdom? Bullshit, man! Am I going to be the one, that's going to set them straight? Look at me: wrong! You! You were the one!

Weird, I know, but there it is. Another big influence was John Lennon, who was uniquely capable of translating his chemical adventures into word and sound, at least in 1966 and 1967, e.g., Tomorrow Never Knows, Strawberry Fields, and I Am the Walrus.

Just as it is possible to consider the evolution of science as the evolution of language, so too is it possible to regard the evolution of Spirit in this manner.

Consider the language spoken by the biosphere. According to standard Darwinism, what really "evolves" is just the genetic code, which speaks new and different organisms. Thus, a human being is just a more complicated sentence. In one sense this is surely true, since it obviously takes a lot more time and trouble to speak a man than a worm.

Likewise, the physical world speaks to us in mathematical equations, or the periodic table of elements. Here it is difficult to know which is more shocking, the communication or the comprehension, but the truth is that the one cannot exist in the absence of the other.

The evolution of science itself can be seen as the evolution of language, which gradually penetrates more deeply into phenomena. For example, the language of quantum physics proceeds deeper than the language of Newtonian physics, but no one pretends that we have reached the end of the line. For one thing, physicists haven't yet discovered a meta-language that unifies the languages of relativity and quantum theories, or macro with micro.

But as soon as one thinks about it, nor is there -- supposedly -- any language that unifies, say, the interior and exterior worlds, the worlds of quantity and quality, the subject and the object. Or is there?

Revelation, for example, is supposedly a language that reconciles Absolute and relative, Creator and creation, God and man. Now, irrespective of one's personal opinion of this or that scripture, the interesting question -- as far as we are concerned -- is whether this kind of language is possible. For if it is possible, then we have to do something about it! And this blog, of course, is my best shot.

Another way of saying it is that if this type of language is possible, then it is necessary. In other words, if it didn't exist, then we'd have to invent it, if only to maintain our sanity. And that is precisely what our secular sophisticates tell us: that we simply make this s*it up. So smoke another J, Bob. Keep it flowing.

There are two main sections of the bʘʘk in which I attempt to develop a better logos, one of them "saturatedly unsaturated," the other "unsaturatedly saturated." In other words, in both cases there is an intentional dialectic between symbols and suprasensible things. The former applies to the Cosmogenesis and Cosmobliteration sections, in which we are attempting to go where words cannot (supposedly) take us, which is to say, "before" and "after" language, into the Word itself.

The latter applies to subsection 4.2, Building a Better Logos: Insert Your Deity Here. This is because the abstract symbols are "empty categories," emphasis on both empty and category. In other words, their purpose is to clear a space where suprasensible meaning is then free to coalesce. But this is not just "any old meaning," as in the case of, say, existentialism. Rather, this is the space of "vertical recollection," in which we receive a memoir of the future or premonition of the past.

Now, if we consider the world from the vertical perspective, and posit a kind of spectrum from infraconscious Ø to ultraconscious O, then the question of whether there are discontinuities will depend upon our point of view. Looked at from the bottom up, then there are indeed a number of shocking discontinuities, for example, from matter to life, or life to mind.

But considered from the top down, these discontinuities not only disappear, but the diverse degrees of being are necessary implications of having a manifestation at all. In other words, since the cosmos is not the Absolute, but a reflection thereof, it necessarily includes every degree of being, from the lowest to highest.

Just as there are (obviously) beings that exist between matter and man, there are beings who exist between man and God. We call these "angels," but if that term disturbs you, we can call them archetypes, or Platonic ideas, or universals.

However, if you agree with the premise that the source of Life is at the top, not bottom, of the cosmos, then it is no great leap to infer that they are "alive." Rather, it would require some sort of discontinuous leap to explain how the archetypes can be there at all, can interact with us, and yet, be "dead." How did these nonlocal attractors get there? And why are they so compelling? Why do they order our lives, even if we try to escape them?

In Theo-Logic, Balthasar discusses these entities, which, in our opinion, must exist in any full-employment cosmos. He writes that "An angel's word must be like the work of an earthly artist, which rises above every convention of its expressive medium and bears on its brow the sign of creative uniqueness. Just as this symphony can be only by Haydn or Mozart, so too an angelic word can be spoken only be this angel."

Here we begin to converge upon the mysterious source of our own cosmic uniqueness and individuality, which, again, cannot come from "below," but only above. It is another way of saying that each person is an absolutely unique word -- or sentence, or paragraph, or novel -- that is both spoken and heard (which are again two sides of the same complementarity).

Balthasar continues: "Corresponding to the freedom to speak there is a freedom to hear that we must bear in mind: the attitude of self-surrender on the part of the speaker presupposes a corresponding attitude of surrender in the listener. Without an element of confident faith that relies upon the truth, it is inconceivable that even a pure spirit could hear and listen."

If you have followed me this far, then you now understand why it is necessary for us to surrender to the one who is speaking us, in order to receive and comprehend the message, or unpack his presence.

That is all. You can exhale now, neighbor.