¡¿ Out of This World ?!

The world is not of this world. Or, the world has an exit out of itself. This exit is called Man.

You no doubt recall page 181, where man is confronted with the option of being pulled back into the hivemind or moving upward, into a "new dimension beyond the boundaries of the senses."

Yes, our uptight furbears "began envisioning and longing for the whole, for an ideal existence located somewhere in the past, an eden, or in the future, a heaven, where all tensions are resolved, the circle is unbroken, and we are returned to the source from whence we came."

Blah blah blah, the earliest definitive documentation of conscious human awareness of the exit appears in the Upanishads, which were probably composed between 1,000 and 600 BC.

Looks like Voegelin concurs: "The finest early explorations of the movement in this second [read: vertical] direction are certain dialogues of the Upanishads," which take the reader up and out of the horizontal, to what the Vedic seers call Brahman.

Which is what now?

"It is not a further knowable thing; it rather is the reality at which the questioning has to stop, not because the movement has been futile, but because this reality, by its position beyond the knowable hierarchy of things, reveals itself as the answer to the questioning ascent."

The movement of history results in further differentiation of this compact truth, for example, in Augustine's insight "that the super-reflective truth, when reached by the reflective ascent, illuminates the questioning as a response to the movement of divine presence in the soul."

By now you will have gnosissed that the very quest-ion which motivates the quest for the aeon -- which we symbolize (?!) for the sacred WTF -- "leads to the Beyond of the world because it is not altogether of the world in which it is asked."

In other worlds, not only does (↑) evoke (↓), but in the end -- or top -- it turns out that (↑) and (↓) were allone allalong.

Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain!

Note however that this is a differentiated one, "a movement of revelatory appeal from the divine side and a countermovement of apperceptive and imaginative response from the human side." In other words, "Both appeal and response belong to the one reality that becomes luminous in the experience."

So we really have a threesome here, although it is more difficult to conceptualize the Third than it is the first two. I am reminded of a passage by Eliot: Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you.

This touches on the famous space we have discussed in the past, where it all goes down. It is the immaterial space inhabited and colonized by humans. When my seven year-old asks why he has to go to school, I respond as any parent would: "Why do you think? So you can colonize hyperspace and not be a moron."

It goes without saying that many things can go wrong with this space, for the simple reason that they can go right.

For example, as Voegelin describes, the space can become "eclipsed" if our two partners -- divine and human -- are reified into a rigid duality, or compressed into a single entity. Doing so destroys "the dynamics of movement and counter-movement in the event of reality becoming luminous," resulting in "a wasteland of static objects."

Respect the space!

Voegelin makes another subtle point about the relationship between language and the Space. Because this space is a kind of living byproduct of the divine-human encounter, it is a mistake for the serious pneumanaut to try to overburden it with a lot of predigested language.

Rather, give this space some space. Let it breathe. Enter it and let language take care of itself, as I am doodling at the moment. Otherwise you run the risk of superimposing the lower on the higher, or the terrestrial on the celestial, i.e., deepaking the chopra.

Eh, that's it for today. Gotta get some work done.