It Takes One to Know Oneness

Yesterday we spoke of the experience of being penetrated by truth: there is truth and there is the experience, but how do we know we aren't just like some conspiracy theorist for whom it all SUDDENLY MAKES SENSE!?

One thing I forgot to add about the experience is that it comes with a kind of implicit understanding that one has reached the end of thought; or that thought can proceed no farther than this.

For example, once you have conceived the Absolute, thought can venture no further. One still thinks, of course, but it is not as if there will be another Absolute behind or above that one. Thus, the Absolute is both the ground and goal, alpha and omega, of all thinking. Anything short of this is a mere caricature of thinking.

Perhaps a better way to think of the Absolute is in terms of Necessary Being. Thus, the Absolute is what cannot not be, on pain of denying the primordial unity (between subject and object) that renders thought possible. Without the Unity, we are adrift in a sea of multiplicity, of "absolute relativity."

Which, oh by the way, the left wishes to impose upon us. In short, it endeavors to codify and inculcate nothing less than compulsory absurdity in the citizenry. A public education simply prepares one for the greater absurdities that will follow with higher education. Public schools soften the battlefield. College kills the remaining inhabitants and salts the earth. The result is a Dead Mind Thinking, such as Obama.

Here is an example of a truth that can be no truthier, courtesy Schuon: "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." First of all, this doesn't mean we propose to do away with people who fall short of being conscious of the Absolute. But it does have immediate and practical consequences on a range of subects.

Before getting to those, let me quote the next thoughtlet: "Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny."

As for the practical considerations, consider the founders, who "saw" or "recognized" that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights yada yada.

This is an example of an absolute statement; or, it is a statement about absoluteness, i.e., about cosmic facts that cannot be surpassed, only affirmed or negated. And again, the negation plunges us down into leftworld. For when the left talks about equality and justice, what they really mean is inequality and injustice -- for example, treating the lion and rabbit the same, and calling it just.

Because the Absolute stands before us, our lives are necessarily "incomplete" or "fragmentary," so to speak. However, to engage the Absolute is the very means of healing the resultant fissure. Thus "the paradox of the human condition," that "nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet, nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

It's a straight-up orthoparadox, in that it sets forth conditions that cannot not be once we establish the (pre)existence of the Absolute. We can never "be" the Absolute; however, the Absolute can "be" us, so to speak -- which goes to the "fruit" alluded to by Schuon.

For us the distance between man and God is a kind of abyss. But for God, it is it is nothing of the sort. Rather, there is continuity from the divine side, which goes to his immanence. Therefore, when we step into the abyss, we are not plunging into nothingness, but rather, buoyed by mysteries that somehow float our boat and whose currents draw us up into the Great Attractor.

One more orienting principle from the same book: "One of the keys to understanding our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence." Rather, "Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing."

Nothing!

And not the good kind. For there are two kinds of nothing, the absurd and dead nothing of nihilism, and the living nothingness of our being before God. For God is necessary being, whereas we are contingent being. In the face of necessary being, it is as if we are nothing. This nothing is only rendered significant if it somehow shares in the necessary being of God.

Which, of course, is the purpose of any spiritual practice, whether by love, truth, beauty, virtue, or unity.

Out of time, so we'll leave off with this sound advice:

"Love of God is firstly attachment of the intelligence to the Truth, then attachment of the will to the Good, and finally the attachment of the soul to the Peace that is given by the Truth and the Good."

Peace out. Or in, rather. And up.