A Passion for Wholeness and a Vision of the Cosmic Area Rug

We left off the previous post with the idea that there are "two poles" in existence -- or better, one pole with two ends, i.e., the human person and God.

Each of these is a kind of absolute in its own way: God literally, and man vis-a-vis creation. God is the transcendent absolute, while man is a kind of "immanent absolute," in that he is the measure of all things down here. Nevertheless, man cannot not be this relative absolute unless he is understood to be a lawful deputy of the celestial sheriff, i.e, the absolute Absolute. If not, then man himself usurps the absolute, and you know the rest, at least if you're not a history professor:

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god (Dávila).

From whence comes man's absoluteness? What is its basis, its origin or source? Again, it cannot be from within himself (cosmic narcissism), or from evolution (which is anchored in the gelatin of contingency), or from logic (i.e., in a naive pre-Gödelian tautology). Rather, it is because man

is essentially capable of knowing the True, whether it be absolute or relative; he is capable of willing the Good, whether it be essential or secondary, and of loving the Beautiful, whether it be interior or exterior. In other words: the human being is substantially capable of knowing, willing, and loving the Sovereign Good (Schuon).

For those living in Rio Linda, the S.G. is another name for God, which is another name for the Personal Absolute.

This being the case -- since man is essentially composed of intelligence, freedom, and beauty -- it follows that he

is made for the Truth, the Way, and Virtue. In other words: intelligence is made for comprehension of the True; will, for concentration on the Sovereign Good; and sentiment, for conformity to the True and the Good.

Let's get back to Clarke's Universe as Journey. Right away we see that the universe isn't a thing but a process, a process in which man is intimately involved. Indeed, as we shall see, man's involvement in the cosmic journey is the whole point of there being a cosmos at all.

Of course, you may not relate to what follows. If so, it is because, like most people, you don't have a metaphysical bent. It would be easy enough for me to tell you get bent, but it seems that, like any other gift, from math to music to humor, it is dispersed in a seemingly random way. Michael Jordan did nothing to deserve his basketball gift. He just ran and jumped with it. It's the same with metaphysics. Or certainly seems to be. I just run and jump with it, and slam-dunk on my detractors.

Clarke speaks of "a personal psychological predisposition toward metaphysical thinking." During the course of his journey, Clarke came to realize that "not everyone has the aptitude or the inner attraction to become a self-propelling, self-motivated metaphysician in the fuller sense."

I don't know about you, but I don't run into people who share my interests, certainly not with the same level of passion, intensity, and endurance. Irrespective of whether you think it says anything about reality, 15 years and 3,380 posts surely say something about me and my peculiarities -- peculiarities I was born with, since no one ever taught or encouraged me to be this way. To the contrary, my parents wanted normal children.

As to the metaphysical bent, Clarke cites two main constituents, each one as familiar to me as my own fingers. The first is -- and I've even used this descriptor myself --

A passion for unity, for seeing how the universe and all things in it fit together as a whole, a meaningful whole, a longing for integration of thought and life based on the integration of reality itself.

Love him or hate him, that's Bob. Like Bob, Clarke

always had to get away periodically by myself to think, always alone, and if possible, in the highest place around.

Drinking beer by the dilapidated satellite towers in Upper Tonga... so many vertical recollections and memoirs of the future. So many warnings by the police to "move along." So many beer cans hastily tossed into the brush. I wonder if they're still there?

"From higher up," writes Clarke, one can "see how it all fits together, making a single overall pattern." Up here we see how the cosmic area rug "weave[s] together to form a whole," such that "the higher viewpoint yields the unity."

By the way, in any materialist/scientistic/leftist worldview there is no up or down, which tells you everything you need to know about how their minds got so bent. For such an impoverished metaphysic denies "the inner spitiual synoptic vision of how all things in the universe somehow fit together to make an integrated meaningful whole."

The second metaphysical trait is "a sense of some kind of overall hidden harmony of the universe" that sounds suspiciously musical. Can one be predisposed to metaphysics without loving music? I don't really know. But Clarke was aware of

something great going on under the surface of things, some hidden kind of music, some harmony of all things that I could not quite hear but somehow knew was there and longed to lay hold of in my consciousness.

Ditto. "The philosopher seeks to hear the echoes of the World Symphony and reproject it into concepts (Nietzsche, in Clarke). Poor Nietzsche. He heard the music but imagined there was no composer. At any rate, I said something similar, albeit more fruity, on p. 23 of Raccoonica Esoterica, that

The universe is like a holographic, multidimensional score that must be read, understood and performed. Like the score of a symphony, it is full of information that can be rendered in different ways. The score can support diverse interpretations, but surely one of them cannot be "music does not exist."

Moreover, at the end of the deity,

we are each a unique and unrepeatable melody that can, if only we pay close enough attention to the polyphonic score that surrounds and abides within us, harmonize existence in our own beautiful way, and thereby hear the vespered strains of the Song Supreme.

(FYI, to clarify what might otherwise seem a stupid attempt at poetry, it's actually a stupid pun between end of the deity and vespers, the latter being the sunset evening prayer service that occurs at day's end.)

To be continued...