This Morning I Am a Man!

"The first thing that should strike man" -- the Man in the title above -- "when he reflects on the nature of the Universe" is the incommensurability between "the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity" and "material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses" (Schuon).

Okay, let's give it a try: let us reflect upon the nature of the Universe. Hmm...

Yup. Human intelligence does strike one as a miraculous irruption of subjectivity transcending anything that comes into its purview. It is the one thing we rely upon to explain any- and everything, and yet, is itself unexplained, or at least taken for granted. But it is the sine qua non of everything human -- which is close to being a tautology, because it suggests that humanness is necessary for humanness (or personhood for persons).

But something cannot furnish its own explanation. Rather, things have causes outside themselves. What is the sufficient cause of human intelligence? If it were simply caused by the material world, it is impossible to explain how it can have powers that so transcend materiality.

In other words, a cause cannot give to an effect something it does not possess. There is an incommensurability between an objective cause and a subjective effect: in short: how could objects give a subjectivity entirely foreign to their nature?

There aren't really too many plausible or even implausible answers to this question. For example, consciousness might be just an illusory side effect of brain activity. But what does it mean for one illusion -- the teacher -- to say this to another -- the student? It means nothing, nor can anything mean anything. Rather, meaning and truth are denied a priori.

More generally, the affirmation that existence is meaningless is pregnant with meaning (although its issue is stillborn). Nihilism is not actually belief in nothing, if only because there is someone who believes it. A true nihilist would have to be an animal, since animals have no beliefs, nor any belief that they have none.

For most of mankind's history this question didn't arise, because it was assumed -- whether explicitly or implicitly -- that consciousness was built into the nature of things. Think of it: as Schuon says in paragraph one, the first thing that strikes us is the mysterious presence of a human interior that transcends -- and penetrates -- everything it encounters.

Now, for early man, objects didn't come first, rather, the subject. In other words, what we call "objectivity" has only been slowly teased out of subjectivity. Prior to the so-called scientific revolution....

Indeed, what was this revolution but a kind of systematic method for segregating the two? Premodern science -- because of its default toward subjectivity -- saw too much of it in the objects of nature. Things did this or that because they intended to.

Speaking of Things I Read a Long Time Ago that Have Always Stuck With Me, there is an essay about this in Hans Jonas' The Phenomenon of Life, called Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being. In it he observes that

"When man first began to interpret the things of nature -- and this he did when he began to be man [that same curious fellow in the title above] -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive." Who could blame him? To this day, all children go through this stage, until they learn that the world is safely dead and that consciousness has no meaning or even reality.

But maybe we can learn a thing or two from our distant furbears. For them, "Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter, that is, truly inanimate, 'dead' matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious."

You might say that a strict objectivity is profoundly unnatural. Think of a "natural" diet. One reason it is beneficial is that it contains all sorts of nutrients -- even ones we don't know about -- that cannot be replaced or reproduced in an unnatural diet. We can put some vitamin C back into frozen orange juice, but we have no idea as to all that is actually in a real life orange.

Just so, is it possible for artificial men weaned on scientism to ever recover the full richness of their desiccated subjectivity? Well, they can try -- hence the cult of art and other modalities to recover and resurrect something of the great Cosmic Interior.

But "That the world is alive is really the most natural view, and largely supported by prima-facie evidence." Nor is there really any sharp boundary between what is alive and what isn't.

Rather, "most of what we know to be inanimate is so intimately intertwined with the dynamics of life that it seems to share its nature" (ibid.). Indeed, we see an attempted recovery of this cognitive modality in radical environmentalists -- in tree-hugging gaia worshipers.

The point is, modern man, in learning to view the world scientifically -- or only scientifically -- must first unlearn this more right brained, integral way of seeing things. "[P]rimitive panpsychism, in addition to answering powerful needs of the soul, was justified by the rules of inference and verification within the available range of experience..." (ibid.).

Now, if we turn the cosmos back right-side up, we see that "it is not our personal thought that preceded the world, it was -- or is -- absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is a distant reflection precisely" (Schuon). In short, our own consciousness proves that "in the beginning was the Spirit." Or in other words, only Consciousness can be the sufficient cause of consciousness, just as only the Logos can be the sufficient cause of human language.

There are Mysteries and there are Absurdities, and it is vital not to conflate the two. And "Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be" (ibid.).

It would frankly have to be a miracle. And not the good kind!

Nevertheless, "tons of intelligence" -- not to mention billions of dollars -- "are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd" (ibid.).

Could the very essence of reality be the utter banality of scientism? Nah. "In the beginning was, not matter, but Spirit, which is the Alpha and Omega" (Schuon).

Modern thought which began with the Renaissance is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation. Death is the natural thing, life the problem.... Accordingly, it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and the explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless. --Hans Jonas

Similarly, we might say that tenure is an explanation of mind by the mindless.

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.

Utterly Personal and Completely Universal

A few posts back we mentioned a new scientific discovery pushing back the emergence of life on earth from 3.5 to 3.7 billion years ago.

Either way, since earth only cooled sufficiently to permit life something like 4.5 billion years ago, the emergence of life cannot have been random, because there simply wasn't enough time. Knowing this, researchers suggest that life must be "built in" to the nature of things, somehow bound to appear.

This is similar to the problem of predestination, only on a lower plane. That is, if predestination is the case, then there is literally no distinction between Creator and creature: everything is simply God acting. Not only does it render life pointless, one wonders why God would even bother.

Likewise, if life is built into physics, then biology doesn't really exist. Rather, it's just a kind of illusory extension of physics and chemistry. It never occurs to this type of mind that physics might be a downward projection of life, as opposed to life being an upward projection of matter.

In any event, this is the sort of bad nonsense that occurs when we fail to respect levels, boundaries, and dimensions.

If you will indulge me in a momentary zooming-out to a wide-angle vision, there is something intriguing about truth, or at least truth as I know it. Here it is 2016, and I am discussing an author -- Polanyi -- whom I first discovered around 35 years ago, when I was just starting my psychopneumatic journey, and knew next to nothing about anything.

I'm looking at my battered old copy of Meaning, which is heavily annotated, highlighted, and marked up. This must have been around the time I began the practice of annotating, highlighting, and marking up my books. For one thing, I never read any books before this, or at least not many. If you subtract the books I was forced to read... well, there can't have been many before my mid-twenties, and nothing serious.

Anyway, I first encountered Polanyi around the same time my mind was "coming on line," so to speak. Before this Great Event, I didn't know I had one, nor did I know what it was for. I was more beast than man. An amiable and frivolous beast, but still, not one marked out for anything more than obedience and semi-skilled labor.

Interestingly, I read in volume one of the Churchill bio that something very similar happened to him at around the same age. No, I am not comparing myself to Churchill, only drawing attention to an interesting phenomenon.

Like Bob, Winston was a terrible student. He wasn't nearly good enough to attend any kind of elite university, so ended up entering a military academy, ninety-second in a class of 102. "Even when seen through the kindest of eyes," writes Manchester, "he was a redheaded, puny little swaggerer who was always in trouble, always disobedient, always making and breaking promises." His father wrote in a letter that Winston had a gift only for "show off exaggeration & make believe."

It wasn't until he was around 22 -- finished with school and stationed in India -- that the Light inexplicably came on: "The transformation began with early pangs of intellectual curiosity." Looking back on it, that is around the time my own pangs began, at around 22, maybe 23. It is a Hunger, only for immaterial food.

At any rate, Churchill "found that he had 'a liking for words and for the feel of words fitting and falling into places like pennies in the slot.'" His vocabulary suddenly widened, to the extent that he began throwing out words "which I could not define precisely."

Equally suddenly, he became Curious: "It occurred to him that his knowledge of history was limited and something ought to be done about it" -- to put it mildly. He "resolved to read history, philosophy, economics, and things like that." He began devouring books like a liberal spends other people's money: all day long.

Henry Corbin talks about "openings," but we might as well say "invasions," because we can open all we want, but nothing will happen unless we are invaded by an Other.

Changing gears once again, I'm trying to describe a phenomenon that began for me when the Light came on, and has continued ever since. And the only reason I bring it up is because I assume something similar has occurred in other Raccoons. Indeed, I don't see how one could appreciate the blog unless it has.

First of all, there is a timeless quality to it. Something in the soul knows it is encountering a kind of truth that penetrates all the way to the core. It is an example of what I symbolize (?!), because it's as palpable as sticking your finger in a socket and receiving a jolt.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I experienced an opening in which I was invaded by Truth. This would account for my singular lack of qualification in being able to discern truth from falsehood. In other words, this extra-mental invasion is no respecter of persons. It can happen to any idiot. But for this particular idiot, it caused a complete reorientation -- literally, from the horizontal to the vertical. Words such as "repentance" and "born again" are intended to convey the same experience.

So, I was invaded and seized. And I'll bet if I examine some of my annotations and exclamations from 35 years ago, they might as well have come from my present self, even though, again, I was an idiot at the time. Naturally this will mean nothing to you if you consider me an idiot still. But if I'm not an idiot, then it is as if my past self was invaded by my future self. My future self seized the wheels of the cosmic bus, and steered me in an entirely unexpected direction.

Here is a note to mysoph on the front flap: "God as integrative and limiting factor." First of all: like anyone could know that! But what does it mean? That the infinite expresses itself in limited forms of finitude that point back to their divine source. Why? The next note says "truth not gained freely is worthless." So, God is in the ticklish position of giving truth in such a way that it can be discovered, not imposed. Movement toward God is characterized by integration on various levels.

"The act of understanding is more important than what is understood." Indeed, this is precisely what this post is about: this unending process of understanding. "Only the wise ones see beyond the limitations." Or in other words, they see the Unlimited toward which the limitations point and converge.

"Principles of each level are governed by the next highest level." This is certainly one that has stayed with me, right down to the statement in paragraph four above, that matter is a downward projection of life.

Here is another short note: "development is not wholly accountable by [the] past." This is full of metaphysical implications, ultimately the de-inversion of the cosmos, such that the future -- or upper vertical -- exerts an influence on the present/horizontal.

"Language as liberated DNA." That actually goes to what this post was originally going to be about before it was invaded and highjacked by other forces. That is, DNA is (obviously) a language. But it cannot function as a language if it is built into physics and chemistry.

By way of analogy, Prosch says that if rocks rolling to the bottom of a hill always spelled out English words, then we couldn't use the rocks to encode a message. Rather, the rocks must be neutral as to the message we want them to carry. Likewise, if physics and chemistry inevitably roll down into DNA, then DNA cannot carry information. Rather, it can only function as a code if its order is not necessary.

"Origins of DNA 'contained' far more meaning than we think." In other words, it is not just that DNA codes for "life." Rather, it ultimately points to meanings far surpassing mere life. It is really a cosmic opening that continues right up to the highest realization of integral unity. Or, as I put it in the book, life represents a luminous fissure in this heretofore dark, impenetrable circle, the dawning of an internal horizon, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world....

Not only does this fissure occur in matter, it occurs in us. Bottom line for today: be ye fissures of God!

A Mind Needs Truth Like a Feminist Needs the Patriarchy

To put it another way -- in reference to what God owes us -- it cannot be that he is so irresponsible as to, as it were, create cats with no mice, birds with no trees, or fish with no water. Man has his legitimate needs, one of which is truth. If the intellect is what distinguishes us from the beasts, then we have every right to expect that it can find its needs satisfied down here.

Having said that, cats do not try to eat lettuce, gophers don't nest in trees, and fish don't try to make it on dry land. Only man systematically chooses what is wrong and bad for him -- not just physically, but mentally and spiritually.

For example, consider this little exchange, via Happy Acres:

Here precisely are human beings demanding that cats be dogs or lions cows. So sad! Such a losing battle!

Note that these women are engaged in a battle against reality. Reality is prevailing, and this provokes sadness. One doesn't have to extrapolate far to see that this sadness can only be a result of the failure of omnipotence: reality should not be what it is, but what I wish it to be.

But this is the very structure not only of feminism but of leftism more generally. Because I enjoyed Why Race Matters so much, I've moved on to Levin's previous book on Feminism and Freedom -- which might as well be titled Why Sex (or what they now call gender) Matters.

I've only just started the book, but one point the author makes right away is that feminism and freedom are at antipodes: you can have one or the other, but not both. Especially if you take feminism seriously, it requires nothing less than a totalitarian state to compel reality to conform to its impossible expectations. Think of the example of the two bubbleheads mentioned above. What would it require in order to make their dreams of androgyny come true?

Now, if humans can get something as basic as sexual polarity wrong, what can't they get wrong? Which puts God in a bit of a jam, doesn't it? You'd think that some things would be too obvious to screw up, but never underestimate the power of the human mind to "know" falsehood.

Now, of the three transcendentals -- love, truth, and beauty -- only truth fails to be itself in the absence of the proper object. In other words, it is always possible to love what is unlovely or to be attracted to ugliness.

But one cannot really "know" falsehood, because falsehood is the essence of "non-knowledge." For example, I can know everything about, say, unicorns, but it doesn't mean I actually know anything. And it is no different than knowing everything about feminism. A BA in "women's studies" is a degree in nothingness; it confers expertise in a fantasy world.

However, Levin's book shows that one can learn a lot from feminism about what is wrong with the human mind, or the errors to which it is prone. For "A theory whose basic assumption about human nature is completely erroneous... is indeed bound to be wrong about everything else." As we've said before, if you get your anthropology wrong, then your political philosophy will rest upon a foundation of Jello.

If there are no differences between the sexes, then it can only be a result of oppression that, say, men tend to be the defenders of civilization while women tend to be its nurturers. In a random distribution, there should be as many male as female warriors and nannies. If a disproportionate number of women choose not to be warriors, that cannot be a consequence of free choice, but rather, compulsion. Therefore, we must fight compulsion with compulsion, and the only power big enough for such a task is the state. The state will see to it that our warrior class is equally distributed between men and women.

But it's not just the military, it's everything: men and women reveal their preferences in different choices, so "efforts to eradicate those [differences] must be futile and never-ending." "[P]eople will never freely act in ways which produce a world devoid of sexism," so "the equalization of the sexes in personal behavior demands implacable surveillance and interference."

In short, the outcomes demanded by (left) liberalism can only be achieved by the abolition of (classical) liberalism. Really, it can only be accomplished by the patriarchy, that is, by the mailed fist of the omnipotent daddy state. It reminds me of women who, when they get married, make a point of keeping their father's name in order to stick it to the patriarchy.

What God Owes Man

Knowledge is always personal, whether the knowledge in question is scientific or religious. Probably neither side likes the sound of that, because it implies that knowledge is subjective. Religious dogma is intended to be objective, as are scientific theories.

Polanyi explodes that myth as it pertains to science. Coincidentally, Henry Corbin (via al Arabi) does the same with regard to religion. But each is really just describing the deeper structure of any kind of knowing.

First of all, there is no knowledge without a knower: "There is no purely objective knowledge, because nothing can be called knowledge that is not personally accredited as knowledge. Facts do not force themselves upon us" (Prosch). Nor do facts speak for themselves, but rather, require "an act of judgment... that something is a fact" (ibid).

People exercise good and bad judgment in determining what is regarded as a Fact. At the same time, an explicit theory or implicit worldview will engender and limit the facts that come into view. For example, as a psychologist listening to a patient, I will perceive many facts that will escape the notice of the layperson. But that is true of any profession, from plumbing to nuclear physics.

Therefore, Augustine's gag about believing in order to know doesn't just apply to religion. Rather, it is a more general principle. A good theory is like a pair of spectacles that brings things into focus. However, a bad theory does the same thing, and thereby creates "false facts."

The left is famous for this, for example, with Marx's labor theory of value. If you put on Marxist spectacles, then a whole world of class oppression comes into view. Victims everywhere! Likewise racial oppression, or feminism, or the war on police, or global warming, whatever. Each is a fact-generating... parasite, really. It hijacks the machinery of the mind and cranks out the facts needed to support it.

Over the weekend I read one of the few books by Schuon I hadn't read before, Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism. In it he observes that "one cannot help but notice that there are men who lose their faith to the extent that they think and who no longer know how to think to the extent they have faith."

This being the case, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way people are thinking, because no such rupture should be cosmically possible.

Indeed, this is precisely the ontological and epistemological rupture that Polanyi attempts to heal. What he calls "personal knowledge" eradicates "the abstract dichotomy of the subjective-objective. It combines these opposed polarities and thus is the only kind of knowledge existentially possible."

You might say that all knowledge combines what is seen with a way to see it. Also, it is always dynamic, such that it deploys imagination and intuition to probe the world in search of an ever-deepening coherence.

Through all of this, our One Cosmos is both Alpha and Omega. In other words, we begin with the faith that the cosmos is indeed one, such that our knowledge of any part of it applies to the whole. Scientists no longer believe that one set of laws applies to the terrestrial world, another to the celestial. And although existing knowledge is always and necessarily fragmentary, it is nevertheless guided by a kind of teleological intuition, or intuitive teleology, toward greater unity.

"[I]magination sets actively before us the focal point to be aimed at, but it is intuition that supplies our imagination with the organization of subsidiary clues to accomplish its focal goal.... Intuition thus guides our imagination" (Prosch). Thus, we cannot always articulate the clues that underlie belief, for the grounds are hidden in subsidiary clues that are integrated into coherent belief.

But one can never achieve integral unity if one has severed subject and object at the outset. Or, one can do so for methodological purposes, so long as one doesn't forget that this severance is simply a human abstraction. Just so, we can sometimes treat an organism like a machine, but that doesn't mean it is one. We can pretend the brain functions independently of the soul, but that doesn't mean it actually does.

When we refer to O as the Great Attractor, we are adverting to its Omega function (in contradistinction to its Alpha/ground function). Prosch describes the phenomenon well: "Our search for deeper coherence is guided... by a potentiality: 'We feel the slope toward a deeper insight as we feel the direction in which a heavy weight is pulled along a steep incline.'"

This is what I mean when I say that the mindscape -- or soulscape or beliefscape -- is dotted with archetypal attractors that pull us this way and that, guiding the terrestrial journey, so to speak. What, for example, is the telos of human sexuality? Does it have one, or are we truly no different from the beasts?

That is what the left would like for us to believe. And if that is your belief, that is what you will see. Far more important, however, is what you will unsee with your leftist spectacles. This in turn explains why feminist women are so much more unhappy than normal women: feminist spectacles exclude a whole reality necessary for human happiness.

By way of comparison, imagine if a lion could put on spectacles that made it impossible to perceive zebras and gazelles.

Which raises a provocative question that came to me while reading the Schuon book mentioned above: to what are human beings owed by God?

When you just blurt it out like that, it may sound arrogant or ill-conceived, but I will insist that Man has his Cosmic Rights. Or in other words, when you bring something or someone into the world, it entails certain responsibilities. Every parent knows this, at least intuitively.

In my opinion, when God created Adam, he owed him Eve. In other words, he realized straightaway that it wasn't Good that man should be allone. In another reading he creates this primordial complementarity right out of the gate, such that the one refers to the other; each is intrinsically incomplete, a helpful reminder that we can never be independent and self-sufficient monads. Even -- or especially -- God can't do that, if Trinity.

Much of what Schuon says about what God owes man is in the context of the widespread Islamic belief that Allah is essentially pure will -- that he does what he wants, when he wants, with no constraints at all. A corollary of this is that Allah doesn't will things because they are good, but rather, something is good because Allah wills it.

But before you scoff at them, remember that many Protestants fall into the same theological omnipotentialism, such that there is no point in trying to understand God outside dogma, even if the consequences are absurd.

But God is constrained. He is first of all constrained by his nature, which is Good. To put it another way, to say that God cannot will evil is not a limitation; similarly, if we affirm that God is One, "we do not inquire whether is obliged to be so." To "say that God cannot not be God" doesn't imply that "He is 'forced to be God.'" And yet, certain "obligations" or entailments follow from the fact that God is who He is.

Did God "need" to create the world? Yes and no. He didn't necessarily have to create this particular world, but I don't see how he could fail to create, any more than he could fail to be Good. Indeed, the former follows from the latter: part of his goodness manifests in a desire to share or prolong or radiate his goodness with respect to creatures. It is in the nature of the Divine Perfection.

Bottom line, because we're out of time: "If God 'owes' us the truth, this is because He is perfect, noble, good, and truthful, and He cannot but wish to be what He is and to act in a consequential way; He does not have the 'power' not to be perfect, hence not to be God" (Schuon).

After all, it makes no sense to create a bee without "owing" it flowers. Likewise, it makes no sense to create human intelligence without the truth it needs in order to fulfill its mission.