Friday, January 29, 2021

You Have Answers, We Have Questions!

"The factor that sustains consciousness in its multidimensional concern with meaning is questioning" (Hughes). That's true as far as it goes, but it doesn't go very far if there are no answers. And even answers don't go far enough unless they are related to the Answer.  

Thus, one of our first principles around here that the first object of the human intellect is intelligible being. Or, as Schuon expresses it, "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." This is so because the human station is characterized by this implicit consciousness of the Absolute, precisely. Always has been, always will be. 

For which reason man cannot surpass the imperative to ceaselessly surpass himself -- until the lights go out. Here again, the man who fails to surpass himself is a failure at the one thing needful.  

I could trot out a batch of aphorisms, but you get the point. And you -- yes, you there -- never will. Unless you exchange paranoia for metanoia immediately.

Human nature -- obviously -- comprises both being and becoming. There is a word for any philosophy that defaults to one side of this complementarity: wrong. As God's essence is to exist, I suppose we could say that man's essence is to become who he is -- more deeply, integrally, luminously, etc. 

"The dynamic core of human consciousness," writes Hughes, is this "omnidimensional desire to know that unfolds in the uncountable variety of human interests," gorounded in "a desire to understand the origin and ground of meaning itself."   

Our omnidimensionality is vertically reminiscent of the tridimensionality of the Godhead -- in other words, you could say that our restless omnidimensionality -- which is ceaselessly engaged with unity -- is a distant analogue of the divine perichoresis. If your mind isn't dancing, it ain't right. 
Do the monkey bone, do the shingling, get your slack back and take trip, slip, lose your grip & turn a backover flip and say: not the god of the philosophers, not the god of the scholars! (author too embarrassed to take credit).

This "questing consciousness" of ours "seeks out and discovers 'eternity,'" thereby becoming what it quintessentially is. Ultimately, our quest for God is God's quest for man. 

Who said that!

Now, this questioning quest begins vaguely but becomes increasingly differentiated through history. To cite one of the most obvious differentiations, primitive man locates his multitude of gods in the exterior/immanent world. It takes some time -- and psychological development -- to integrate these projections and to locate the one God beyond space and time. So if you see a Jew today, thank him.  

Speaking of which, and with great irony, Sr. Dávila observes that Unless circumstances constrain him, there is no radically leftist Jew. The people that discovered divine absolutism does not make deals with the absolutism of man. Among other celestial violations, statism is idolatry.

For this and additional reasons, In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other. 

Why is that? Easy: antithetical first principles. If you think Judaism or Christianity are consistent with the first principles of the left, we have another aphorism for you: The theses of the left are rationalizations that are carefully suspended before reaching the argument that dissolves them.

True, there are plenty of "thinkers" on the left (too many!). It's just that their thinking isn't tall enough to reach the ground:
Consciousness is an emergence from the very ground of reality that is simultaneously the goal of its questioning concern (Hughes).

If this is starting to sound repetitive, I suppose it is, because in our Age of Stupidity it is necessary to repeat the fundamentals, since we are surrounded on all sides by a toxic culture that conspires to draw us away from them: from the ontological center to the existential periphery. 

Well, they won't get me! For our consciousness "constitutes an irruption of awareness of meaning," and is the site "where the 'cosmic process becomes luminous for its meaning.'" They can't reach their grubby hands into this space for the same reason that one can add an infinite number sides to a polygon without ever forming a real circle.  

Consciousness is the meeting place of man and God. If not, then it is the intersection of animal and contingency, or of primate and rationalization, AKA the Place of Tenure. Presumption + Stupidity, like MSNBC

Again, the divine presence is always here, but it unfolds and differentiates in the course of mankind's engagement with it. 

For example, it has always been true that All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights. But man is a little slow, dim, and thick. He still struggles with this questiondespite profiting so much (in multiple ways) from the answer.  

That's enough perfect nonsense for today. 

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