The Cosmos is a Love Shack & There's a Party in My Head

Looking for the latest on the Chinese Flu? You've come to the right place. You obviously need something else to think about.

For example, oh, a praxis of epistemological participation. Now that your life has ground to a halt, you finally have the luxury of contemplating such sublime realities instead of imagining that happiness or fulfillment are located in the future. They're not. If anything, they're in the past -- in particular, childhood -- but that's only because childhood is -- if you are lucky -- spent in the present.

But human nature itself is in neither in the past nor future. It's not even in the present; or rather, only in the present because it is ageless. Not to get ahead of ourselves... No, wait. In order to get ahead of ourselves, time is an invitation to our image to become the likeness.

Me? I'm hard at work on my second childhood. Then again, this has been the case since the first one ended. Nor am I alone in looking at it this way. The same has been said by better children than I:

Without a certain religious childishness, a certain intellectual profundity is unattainable.

The intelligent adult is one in whom the child has survived and the youth has died.

A fulfilled life is one that after long years delivers to the grave an adolescent whom life did not corrupt.

To mature is to transform an increasing number of commonplaces into authentic spiritual experience (Dávila).

I've always detested grown-ups, but it wasn't until I grew up that I realized why: these people aren't even really grown-ups at all, just pretending to be. I could list the Usual Suspects in their typical occupations -- the entertainment-media-academic-industrial complex -- but you know who they are: empty souls one and all. They are living proof of the aphorism that

The adult is a myth of the child (ibid.).

Come to think of it, how do we quarantine ourselves from the stupid? For it is a lifelong struggle, isn't it? Sr. Dávila had his way. It works for me, but not everyone is as childish as we are:

To live lucidly a simple, quiet, discreet life among intelligent books, loving just a few people.

In any event, to acknowledge that man is a fallen creature is to recognize that the mind parasites never stop mutating, and that we must constantly bat them away via our vertical immune system. AKA spiritual warfare. Ideational distancing. Handwashing, with no hands!

Stripped of their modern disguise they are always the same few guys and geists, i.e., deadly sins, character flaws, perennial temptations, and deviations from the vertical path.

With that asinine brayrlude out of our system, let's get back to the praxis of epistemological participation. I rate the following completely true:

If relationality is the basic form of the real, then it follows that the optimal mode of knowing is through relation with the thing or event to be known. If mutual participation is the fundamental form of intelligibility, then the subject's participation in the object, and the object's sharing in the subject, is the most correct epistemic method (Barron).

Here we see that things are neither objective nor subjective, but always both: which is the most objective way of looking at it. In another book I'm reading, (out of print and not recommended at the current prices), Brennan agrees that consciousness "implies two things":

first, a subject that knows; second, an object that is known. It also implies that there is a connection between subject and object. Indeed, the process of knowledge is nothing more than the establishing of this connection.

So obvious that only a grown-up could fail to see it. There's a party in your head. Or rather, there's a party in the cosmos, and it wants to come into your head:

Millions of things in the universe are constantly knocking on the door of our senses and asking to be let in. To give them admittance is to know them, to clothe them with a higher and more noble kind of existence, so they can be said to have their being, not only in themselves, but also in the world of consciousness which is the world of sensations, images, and ideas (ibid.).

So, the cosmos is ultimately structured like the love shack:

Bang, bang, on the door, baby!

Knock a little louder, sugar!

Or, to make it legal,

The union of object with subject in the act of knowledge is like a marriage.... [B]etween the thing known and the knower there is a bond by which they are made one reality in the act of generating knowledge.... [W]hen the form of the object fertilizes the subject, the result is an awareness of the object (ibid.).

That's enough childishness for today. I actually have some grown-up work I need to get to.