You Are Here: Your Ultimate Map of Reality

It seems to me that because there are "two sides to every story," people often conclude that objective truth is unattainable by man. 

But it actually proves the opposite, because the logic of argument implicitly assumes the object of its search. In other words, no one -- assuming sanity and intellectual honesty -- argues for the existence of "things that are not," much less "things that can never be."

Here at One Cosmos we symbolize the implicit-but-always-present object of this search "O." In our view, one is free to deny the existence of O, but never in a self-consistent way. For on what rational basis can one deny the potential conformity of mind to reality? One is in effect saying: there is no possibility of truth, and that's the truth.

This goes to one of the more subtle "proofs" of (or ways to) God. The problem, of course, is that Proofs for the existence of God abound for those who do not need them (NGD), while no amount of proof is sufficient for the person without a knack for these things, i.e., vision, intuition, gnosis, common sense, pneumacognition, and/or infused contemplation. 

Ultimately -- and this is not a tautology -- The sole proof of the existence of God is His existence (ibid.). 

The reason this isn't a tautology is that proof of God is the experiential realization of his necessity, bearing in mind that this realization has many horizontal and vertical degrees and modalities, e.g., truth, beauty, love, mystical union, vertical recollections, eschatological murmurandoms, and various other Magic Moments of theophanic breakthrough -- for which we use the "empty symbol" (?!).

Even the most spiritually bereft and psychically desiccated atheist has been privileged to experience at least one episode of (?!), and probably more, for Celestial Central radiates and can't help radiating its presents down and out. 

Exactly what is happening during a theophanic breakthrough? In virtue of what principle is the breakthrough both possible and even inevitable if you would only get out of your own way and open yourself to the divine energies?

As it so often happens when (?) meets (!), I've been reading all about it in a book called Transcendence and History: The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity, by Glenn Hughes (see sidebar below).

No, there's nothing really new in it for the seasoned One Cosmonaut, but it's always gratifying to run into even a single individual who sees the world as we do. I won't say it can get lonely inhere, because with God one is never allone. Also, Hughes comes at it with a very different sensibility -- i.e., scholarly sobriety as opposed to loosey-nousey divine comedy and metaphysical mischief. 

Let's first jump to conclusions and lay out the under- and overall vision with a sample passage:

First of all, the timeless ground is real. The structure of reality includes the transcendent ground of meaning [O], which we experience through participation. It is a "flow of presence" in all human consciousness, whether we attend to it or not, and however sophisticated or unsophisticated our imaginative or conceptual portrayals of it. 

So, the irreducible structure of reality is an experiential and participatory flow of presence, in case you haven't gnosissed. How to symbolize this flow in the most abstract and universal way possible? Easy for me to say: O --> (k) and O --> (¶), the first more epistemological, the second more ontological.

Or better, these should be visualized as vertical relations, and with the arrows going both ways; oh, and in such a manner that the flow of presence is a spiraling movement toward increased depth and richness, sponsored at every step of the journey by the always complete but unattainable (by man, in this life) O.

Like the following: read s-l-o-w-l-y and see that the divine presence 

is understood precisely as the nonfinite condition for the existence and good of every finite thing. Every place becomes the place of the intersection of the timeless with time. And human being is where that intersection comes to self-recognition and self-realization, where the flow of eternal divine presence orients temporal existence, through human consciousness, toward timeless meaning and truth.

Orients. Where are we? I mean ultimately? Correct: we are "in" reality. What is the nature of this place we call reality? Correct again: it is at the crossroads of vertical and horizontal energies:

Human beings, then, always "remain in the 'in between,' in a temporal flow of experience in which eternity is nevertheless present.... at every point of the flow there persists the tension toward eternal being transcending time [O]." 

What is our ultimate "point of reference?" Is it O? Yes and no. Although Hughes doesn't express it this way, my view is that in a trinitarian cosmos -- or a cosmos everywhere stamped with the imprimatur of the Trinity -- the point of reference is more properly understood as (↑↓), not so much a "place" as a relation, or a "place of relation. Why so?

So as to avoid the twin errors of a radical transcendence or immanence. The former error persists in Buddhism and Vedanta, while the latter error is at the heart of scientism, Marxism, and any manmade ideology more generally.

I guess we'll leave off with this passage, because we agree with every word of it: 

History is not simply the unfolding of time; it is the intersection of the timeless with time. Historical progress, consequently, is not simply movement forward on a time line. It is, most essentially, success in attuning social and personal life to the truths of timeless meaning, a success that waxes and wanes...

And with our self-styled progressives in charge, we are of course seeing this progress wane before our very eyes. It's wane's world now. We just live in it. Oh well. What cannot continue will not continue. And in reality the waxing is always already underway, if you know where to lOOk.