Total Truth and Integral Intelligence

There's a clarifying essay by Schuon called Esoterism as Principle and as Way in his book of the same title. I've read it many times, but it always turns out different. Or rather, I come at it with a different Bob.

First of all, it speaks to me on a deep level. It is as if, on the one hand, I understand it, but on the other -- and more deeply -- it understands me. Which makes me "happy," in the manner described in yesterday's post: 

if one says all of this to me, then I pay attention, I understand something, I feel happy. I feel attracted to God, I attach myself to the Divine.

You'd think this would be sufficient, but nevertheless, it makes me suspicious. Yes, of the author, but mainly of myself. Just because I understand something, that doesn't make it true. But is it possible to understand something that is false? If so, what does it mean to "understand"?  (To be clear, I'm thinking of Blake's gag to the effect that Truth can never be told so as to be understood and not believed.)

Perhaps we need a different word. For example, I understand progressivism, and it doesn't get more false than that. What is actually going on when we understand something?  

By way of analogy, I can hear some pop music crap and know in an instant that it is indeed irredeemable crap, even though millions of people call it art. Conversely, I enjoy forms of music that the average listener would regard as chaotic noise. Which of us is perceiving things aright? Do we shrug our shoulders and concede that "there's no accounting for taste"? Or is beauty an adequation, as I believe?

That's the word we're looking for: adequation. All knowledge, to the extent that it is true, is an adequation. If not, then there is no such thing as knowledge, since it has no measure outside itself. As they like to say on the left, perception is reality, and we're off to the racists.

Enough preliminary noodling around. Let's get on with it, beginning, as we always must, with definitions:

It is necessary, first of all, to be clear about the meaning of the word "eosterism."  

As with everything else in life, error exists because it is parasitic on truth. Counterfeit money presumes the existence of the real thing. As such, our discussion

presupposes that one is dealing with authentic esoterism and not its counterfeits or deviations, which can compromise the word and not the thing itself, and which merely serve to flatter a propensity for extravagance.

Boy and how. In those old westerns, a cowboy would bite a coin to make sure it was made of real gold. Along these lines, I invite our trolls to bite me.

Jumping ahead a bit, it just dawned on me why this material seems different this time around. It's because I've spent this past Year of Our Lockdown fully immersed in scholastic thought, such that I can now see the parallels with Schuon's thought, but also the ruptures, so to speak. 

As such, I am confronted with the question: where is the disconnect? Must we stop at the limits set by Aristotle, or Thomas, or Garrigou-Lagrange? Or is it safe to continue tripping our way on up where the buses don't usually run?  Is this crazyland? Or a deeper form of sanity?

Now you see why I don't trust myself. Yes, I'm driving this bus, and yes, I see the road clearly, and I see that ditch on one side and the cliff on the other. But crazy people see all sorts of things clearly, from microaggressions to white privilege to global warming. I don't exclude myself from mankind's universal tendency to see things that aren't there, or to look for the keys under the streetlight.

About those connections mentioned above:

Certainly all esoterism appears to be tinged with heresy from the point of view of the corresponding exoterism, but this obviously does not disqualify it if it is intrinsically orthodox, hence conforming with truth as such...

How do we know a theory is a good one? I can think of three main ways: first, it will connect to and organize our observations and experiences of reality; second, it will connect to other theories (or sometimes transcend them); and third, it will connect to as yet undiscovered observations.  

For me, esoterism does all these: it provides a framework to illuminate spiritual data and experience; it illuminates other frameworks; and it is expansive enough to account for new data as it comes along. 

If we're on the right track, then nothing should contradict our interpretive framework. This is what the mind wants and demands. The question is, are we entitled to such an explanation? In any event, 

only esoteric theses can satisfy the imperious needs for logical understanding that the philosophic and scientific positions of the modern world cause.

And "Just as rationalism can remove faith, so esoterism can restore it." 

We want answers.  Not absurd ones, crazy ones, partial ones, self-serving ones, or fashionable but ridiculously self-refuting ones such as materialism, scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, et al. And let's not give a pass to all man's goofy religious beliefs either. They may not be as silly and destructive as materialism, but they're still wrong (or partial). 

Do the answers exist or not? If not, then let's embrace nihilism and let the war begin: ignorant armies clashing by night, to the end of time. 

Again it comes down to something mentioned in the previous post -- that the conventional choices on offer "underestimate God just as they underestimate men." 

These two poles are complementary, because if one is detached from the other, we end in a monstrous and depraved humanism at one end, or a kind of mental slavery at the other. And extremists meet, as we see in our grotesque secular religion of soul-dead wokeism.

We never quite defined esoterism, which I think is a loaded term. I prefer truth, or let's say total truth in conformity to integral intelligence: this intelligence is proportioned to something vastly transcending, and it is the function of esoterism to illuminate these connecting links, symbolic points of reference, and universal principles.