Just Say NO to the Matrix

"Everything in Corbin's thinking," writes Cheetham, "follows from the epiphany that reveals the soul to itself as a being of light whose presence illuminates the world."

When we speak of being born again from above, this is what we're talking about: a reorientation such that the soul turns itself inside out and switches attractors. It is also the archetypal Exodus, or Resurrection, or Awakening, or Recollection, or Beer O'clock buzz.

The soul is a being of light whose presence illuminates the world. It reminds me of those premodern theories of vision, whereby the eye shoots a beam of light onto the landscape.

Well. Got a better idea? By the way, the word theory comes from the Greek theoria, the act of viewing, so even a modern theory of vision is still "seen" in the old-fashioned way. In other words, you haven't really solved the problem of sight, just hidden and displaced it to another level. The real problem isn't vision, but how we see it.

Last night I was watching the Dodgers game, and the announcer asked the analyst (a former player) how the batter avoids flinching when a 100 mph fastball whizzes under his chin. He said that the ballplayer simply doesn't see the same ball you or I see. Rather, he processes infinitely more information from the time the ball leaves the pitcher's hand to the moment it arrives at the plate. He didn't say this, but it has the practical effect of slowing down and dilating time. You might say that it is the creation of slack. For you or I, facing Clayton Kershaw would be a slackless experience.

We've discussed this same idea from various angles in the past, but mastery in any field ultimately comes down to the rapidity of information processing, which is mirrored in the brain by the density of neural connections ("neurons that fire together wire together"). And if it's good enough for baseball, it ought to be good enough for God.

To "get good at" religion means to see a richness and depth in the world that is denied the a-theist and a-gnostic who are trapped in what Blake called single vision ("May God us keep From Single vision & Newtons sleep"). And many people are good at religion -- or some aspect of it -- without necessarily calling it such, including various poets, musicians, and scientists (even Newton himself, who pursued science insofar as it illuminated God).

But here we are not just talking about the soul shedding its light on objects and landscapes, but rather, illuminating itself. Indeed, we even call it in-sight. How does that work? Well, if we turn the cosmos right-side up, we see... hard not to use that word, isn't it? Anyway, we see that vision of the exterior world is actually the analogue of a more fundamental interior vision, for it could never be the other way around.

What this ultimately means is that the deeper the soul, the deeper the world.

Depth? What does that mean?

Jumping way ahead in All the World an Icon, we read that to follow the raccoomended path "is to acquire as it were an extra dimension, for this path is nothing other than the dimension of depth.... Or of height, which is the complementary aspect of the same dimension" (Martin Lings). Or in other words, it is the Vertical Adventure of Raccoon lore.

We're really rambling all over the place. Better call this meeting to order, if there is one. What I mean is that we may not be able to tackle this subject in any linear way. Rather, it may be like -- in the words of Don Colacho -- "dots of color in a pointillist painting" or "pebbles tossed into the reader's soul. The diameter of the co[o]nentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond."

Page 5: "Our understanding of purportedly 'objective facts' expresses a mode of our being." I would suggest that this is truly the astonishing hypothesis, for it changes everything.

(Very briefly, I followed the image above to its source, which is a typical perversely scientistic attempt to deploy the light of consciousness in order to enclose it in darkness. Very strange. He even attempts to shove us into a little box of computation that Turing proved impossible. To say nothing of Gödel, not to mention the widely available experience of pneumagenesis, i.e., the Big Bang of spirit.

Cheetham calls it a "reversal of perspective." This is interesting, because the psychoanalyst W.R. Bion uses the same phrase to describe a certain pathological but common psychological maneuver.

To cite a very disturbing contemporary example, consider how the left is actually blaming Pam Geller for the savages who wish to murder her. It's so triggering for me that I can't think about it, or its will hijack the post. Suffice it to say that no matter how low the left sinks, it can always sink a little lower. Which proves the point of this post in a roundabout way.

Facts. "By granting 'all reality to facts' we have 'let ourselves be trapped in the system of unrealities that we have ourselves constructed ...'" Remember what I said yesterday about making a home for Judaism (or Vedanta, or Taoism, etc.) in the soul? Well, it is fundamentally no different with science. Man can never be at home in a scientistic / mechanical / reductionist world, unless he ceases being man.

But this hardly means we can't make a home for science in the soul. We just have to keep our priorities straight, and recognize that science is posterior to the soul, not vice versa. Don't use the soul to extinguish the soul, you tenured apes! That's what we call cluelesside. Instead of being born again, you're unborn again and promptly aborted.

Science is a "dimension of the person." If man were just a dimension of science, then science wouldn't even be possible. Rather, your job -- and it is the hardest job you will ever love -- is "'to embrace the whole of life... [and] totalize in [yourself] all worlds' in the dimension of the present."

This is again because reality is Person and Person is Relationship. If the number of persons is finite, then the possible relations are infinite, just as in the brain, such that the brain quickly overtakes the physical cosmos in terms of "size." Which goes to how the soul contains the cosmos rather than vice versa.

Thus, Corbin's personalism "multiplies realities in a plurality of concrete persons in perpetual dialogue." Conversely, "The abstract time of 'everyone and no one' abolishes pluralism and makes totalitarianism possible."

Bottom line for today: just as we have to never stop saying Yes to God, we must also never stop saying No! to the conspiracy, to Egypt, to the Matrix, to the spiritual retards of the left. This NO

"draws its energy from the [vertical] lightning flash [which] joins heaven with earth, not from some horizontal line of force that loses itself in a limitlessness from which no meaning arises."