Where Are We Really?

Picking up the previous thread, the first freedom -- or at least its precondition -- is freedom from oneself, i.e., self-transcendence. This introduces a seeming paradox into the cosmos, which is to say, a Who and Whom in the same being. Just Who is free from Whom? Who is the who and who is the whom? And how?

Freedom necessarily leads all the way to the top: to say freedom is to say God. Conversely, to deny God is to eliminate even the possibility of freedom and of thinking (and therefore of man). Some people will say, problem solved! But Stanley Jaki speaks for me:

What is needed is merely an intimation that freedom or rather free will belies mere material existence.... For, in the final analysis, the elemental registering of free will almost exhausts whatever can be said about its reality.

Some things are irreducible: they cannot be reduced to anything but themselves. Freedom is one of these irreducibles. It is like a rope suspended from the source of being to the center of the soul. If it weren't there, then there would be no escape or inscape. We would be sealed under an impenetrable sheet of rock, or buried alive in our own neurology, or enclosed in absolute tenure.

Not to abruptly change the subject, but all weekend I was haunted (in a good way) by the question, Where are we? In the absence of God, it is impossible to answer this question in a non-relativistic way. You could say we are on earth, but earth is relative to the sun, the sun to the Milky Way, the Milky Way to some galactic cluster, etc., all the way up to a cognitive placeholder we call the "cosmos."

Below is a pneumagraph of the situation, with you at the center:

Says wiki, it depicts the "observable universe with the Solar System at the center, inner and outer planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri, Perseus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, nearby galaxies, Cosmic Web, Cosmic microwave radiation and the Big Bang's invisible plasma on the edge."

As far as we know, there is no freedom anywhere in this image except at the very center, where you and I dwell at the moment. But freedom itself is a kind of center; you might say that wherever freedom is, there is a subjective center. To a large extent, these two are synonymous: to say subjective center is to say space-of-freedom.

Back to the question of Where we are. Obviously, if this is a relativistic cosmos, then we are nowhere, precisely. You could say that we are relative to the cosmos, but then you've snuck an absolute in through the back door. Again, no one has ever seen the cosmos, and no one ever will. It is an abstract placeholder for a presumed unity of existence. And this presumed unity is just a horizontal shadow of the missing God. As if a shadow can exist without an object and light!

There is no question that we are relative. But relative to what? If we are relative to relativity, this equates to the absolute nothingness of the existentialists. The only other possibility is that we are relative to the Absolute, AKA God. Thus, in answer to the question of where we are, we are either nowhere or in the orbit of God. There are no other possibilities, so at least be honest with yourself.

But what does it mean to be honest with oneself? Now we've introduced a third term to the Who and Whom mentioned in the first paragraph: now we have Who, Whom, and Honesty. We could even say that the Who transcends the Whom in Truth.

Does this make any sense? Another way of outlining the terms is Subject, Object, Adequatuon. Indeed, this is the very structure of science. But it is also the structure of any inquiry of any kind. And the whole thing must circulate in Freedom, or it's just a pointless machine.

Where are we? Good question. Recall that it is the first thing God asks Adam upon his auto-exile: Where are you? It's a rhetorical question, of course. Up to this point Adam is in the orbit of God, i.e., relative to the Absolute. But Adam chooses to be his own pseudo-absolute, and is therefore plunged into the cold and dark of absolute relativity. No wonder he's naked and afraid!

If this post has been a little wooly, here is Schuon explaining it in a more straight upward way:

Human intelligence is, virtually and vocationally, the certitude of the Absolute. The idea of the Absolute implies on the one hand that of the relative and on the other that of the relationship between the two, namely the prefiguration of the relative in the Absolute and the projection of the Absolute in the relative.

Now, go back up to the pneumagraph above. Again, that's you at the center. But you are a projection of the Absolute, which is precisely the difference between being nowhere and somewhere, and even everywhere.

For this is the old circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. The only alternative is a scientistic/materialistic/atheistic circle whose center is nowhere and periphery everywhere. And if that were our situation, we could never know it. For we are at once in and out of the cosmos; in knowing it we transcend it in freedom and truth, like so: