Vertical Gnosis and Horizontal Noises

Big news day, no? Which is distracting me from the essential. Which actually goes to the subject of this post, for most news is essentially noise, and noise is precisely what we must ignore in order to discern the Message.

What I really want to say is that the subject of this post requires intense focus, but my focus is being dissipated by the noise of the day. So it's a little abbreviated. We'll pick it up again on Friday.

What exactly is a shock of recognosis? The word is obviously a portmanteau of Recognition + Gnosis, thus connoting the discovery of an a priori truth. But not just any truth; specifically, not contingent but necessary truths: truths that cannot not be.

Contingent truths can also be a ladder of ascent, but only so long as there is a reality toward which to ascend, AKA Truth as such. Deny the latter and the ladder literally falls to the ground: in the absence of the Absolute, there is nothing against which to lean your relativity. Contingency must participate necessity, or it is cut off from its own source.

Indeed, a truth detached from Truth can no longer justify the claim of being true.

Analogously, if my hand is amputated, does it really make any sense to still call it "my" hand? Certainly it "was" my hand, just as, say, our rights to life and liberty were true when they were still connected to the principle that the Creator endowed us with these. To remove the Creator from the equation is to amputate our rights from their living source.

Which is precisely when our heretofore intrinsic rights become alienable instead of unalienable. This is also the point where truth devolves to opinion, where reality becomes perception, and where veils no longer reveal. Truly, it is the ground of the left. In the end times, Wisdom degenerates to the impassioned noise of real tenure and fake news.

Gnosis, of course, is not to be confused with gnosticism, the latter essentially involving manmade opinion, only on a higher plane. But the higher the plane, the bigger the error.

Gnosticism always involves a usurpation, a storming of heaven. For it is written: knock and the door shall be opened. Not: barge right in and make yourself at home.

Here again, Voegelin famously regarded the left as a modern form of gnosticism. It presumes to have a knowledge of things which is strictly impossible given its assumptions. Honest leftists don't pretend that man has access to truth. True, but why then call them honest? Honesty presumes the existence of truth.

But we're beginning to stray into the periphery when we're trying to focus on the Center: Celestial Central, from where truth emanates. It is the Cosmic Tree, the Ocean of Wisdom, and the nonlocal Spring of the Water of Life.

Now, there are immanent truths that dwell within man. Or not. But if not, how is it that we recognize them when we see them? "Stupidity," writes Schuon, "is the inability to discern the essential from the accidental: it consists in attaching oneself to mere facts and in considering them simply in themselves, that is, without the least induction."

When we speak of man's fallenness, we can do so with regard to an ambiguous moral failing. That will work.

But at the same time and on another level it is an intellectual failing. How so? Well, let me think. At the very least -- in order to think at all -- we must posit a kind of two-story cosmos: there are many ways to conceptualize the cosmic building, among which are Principle and Manifestation, Substance and Accident, Essence and Existence, Absolute and Relative, Brahman and Maya, Creator and Creation, O and ( ), etc.

This is not a dualism, mind you. We are not positing two Absolutes. As such, one of these must be an artifact or prolongation of the other, and of course the second term must follow from the first in each example in the paragraph above.

Therefore, come back Friday and we'll find out where all this is leading.