Is There Anyone In Here?

I'm not sure how many people are reading the blog anymore, but it seems like Not Many.  Therefore, if the writing seems more introspective, it is probably because I'm mostly talking to myself, just drilling down to see what I can find.... Of course, you are welcome to listen in.

It is difficult to conceive of something more miraculous than the emergence of consciousness in a theretofore non-conscious cosmos -- unless it's the emergence of life in a theretofore lifeless cosmos (we don't say "dead" because death presupposes life).  Every subsequent miracle -- and prior, come to think of it -- is an iteration or fractal of these two, of... what to call it... "living truth."

Wait -- I saw that.  You just conflated consciousness with truth.  Why?

Because consciousness is proportioned to the truth which is its sufficient reason.  In other words, even if we can never say what consciousness "is," we can know what it is for: to know truth. Therefore it must be a kind of prolongation of truth from the center to the periphery;  you could call it the Spark of Divinity at our core -- our terrestrial pilot light.

On the one hand, we possess "a subjectivity or a consciousness that is made for looking outwards and for perceiving the world, whether this world be earthly or heavenly" (Schuon).  At the very least we have consciousness of ponderable empirical realities and of invisible rational ones (e.g., the worlds of logic and mathematics which transcend the senses).

However, note that we can never have "raw" empirical knowledge. Indeed, that is an oxymoron, for sensation is not knowledge.  Rather, we have sensations that are spontaneously "taken up" into knowledge, usually in a completely non-conscious way.   Our five senses work together harmoniously to present us with a World Sensorium, an image of the totality.

That's weird enough.  Weirder still is that "there is also in man a consciousness that is made for looking inwards, in the direction of the Absolute or the Self."  First of all:  how can this be?  A metaphysical Darwinian, for example, regards consciousness as an adaptation to the exterior world -- a world that is obviously prior to the consciousness that somehow emerges out of it.

But Schuon implies that there is also an interior world that is prior to consciousness, and to which we must adapt.  The main point is that consciousness is not just a kind of "empty space."  It is a space, to be sure, but it is an ordered space.  In some ways this order is explicit -- for example, vis-a-vis gender (male or female) -- while in other ways it is implicit.

Regarding the implicit (or implicate) order of the mind, much of this cannot be grasped outside the temporal dimension.  In other words, there are permanent elements in the psyche that nevertheless require time in order to unfold.   Indeed, Raccoon doctrine insists upon the orthoparadox that the ultimate purpose of Life is to become who you are.   This is simultaneously a discovery and recovery, the former going to a vertical excavation, the latter to a horizontal adventure.

So, life is a kind of archaeological dig.  Except this dig extends up and down, inside and out.  You could say its image looks like this: (†).   Except in time:  it is dynamic, not static;  in four (at least) dimensions, not just two or three.

These two worlds -- the interior and exterior -- are quite incommensurable, in the sense that there is no way -- Darwinism notwithstanding -- to derive the former from the latter.   Darwinism can only presuppose a consciousness it can never explain.  Even so, "there is a region between" the two worlds "in which they overlap and give rise to a single subjectivity, and to an existential equilibrium between the two diverging consciousnesses."

In other words, despite the radically incommensurate nature of these two worlds, we somehow experience a unity, at least much of the time. But there are problems, both personal and collective.

For example, Modern Man can't figure out how these two worlds could be unified, so he bifurcates them, AKA dualism.  But this doesn't solve anything, for reality is nevertheless one, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

But that is just an example of a more pernicious tendency on the part of man to superimpose his own fantasies upon reality, AKA ideology, AKA Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Let's see how Schuon gets  us out of this existential corner.  "[T]he spiritually realized man can see God in things, and also the principial prototypes of things in God. The psychic and mental consciousness perceives appearances; intellectual or heart consciousness perceives the Essence."

In other words:  to "see God in things" is to see the interior in the exterior, while to "see things in God" is to see the exterior in the interior.   In ether worlds, there exist archetypes and principles that are as it were "two way" phenomena that simultaneously illuminate the inside and out, upside and down.

I'm probably still not explaining it adequately -- whatever "it" is supposed to mean.  Put it this way:  "the purpose of human subjectivity," writes Schuon, is "to be, in relativity, a mirror of the Absolute, at the same time as being a prolongation of Divine Subjectivity."

You could say that the "purpose" of the Son is to be a mirror and prolongation of the Father.  Therefore, the purpose of the Incarnation is to allow us to participate in this circular prolongation-and-mirroring. Which is to say, "To manifest the Absolute in contingency, the Infinite in the finite, Perfection in imperfection" (ibid.).

Not to mention Eternity in time, objectivity in subjectivity, Spirit in matter, Light in darkness...