Retirement involves a great deal of goofing off. Frankly, it takes all day just to get nothing done.
But a helpful comment from yesterday reminded me that, just because I live like some kind of sad-asssed refugee from the f*cking sixties, it requires little effort on my part to simultaneously type and goldbrick.
What's it like to be a non-organized vertical ObOspontaneously abiding in the moment and typing whatever drifts into his head? Keep reading to find out.
True, there are a lotta strands to keep in the head, but I find that if I pursue them one by one, they have a way of pulling themselves together without my having to force the issue. One warp leads to awoofer.
I don't want to jump down another rabbit hole, but something G-L said prompted me to pull a few volumes of Polanyi from the shelf and weave his thoughts into the magic carpet. It may or may not prove relevant as we proceed:
Theological accounts of God must, of course, appear meaningless and often blatantly self-contradictory if taken to claim validity within the universe of observable experience. Such a result is inevitable, whenever a language that is apposite to one subject matter is used with reference to another altogether different matter (Polanyi, emphasis mine).
To take an obvious example, using Newtonian terms and concepts to describe subatomic processes inevitably generates paradoxes and absurdities.
Come to think of it, it isn't possible to describe a dream with wideawake language or cutandry aristotelian logic; rather, one must supplement symmetrical with assymetrical logic. Bomford shows how this nighttime logic can help us understand infinite, atemporal, and suprasensible realities that are described in the more concrete and ready-to-hand modality of scripture (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1853434388?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=1853434388).
Although everyone moves, thinks, and has his being in an implicit metaphysic, not everyone is a metaphysician. Indeed, hardly anyone in the extra-Coon world.
Bomford is another tempting rabbit hole, but let's stick with Polanyi. The basic problem, I think, is how to describe a higher level with the means of the lower level from which it has emerged? This is a recurring motif of verticality -- for example, using only physics and chemistry to describe the biosphere will result in an impoverished model and generate insoluble paradoxes; likewise reducing mind to brain or soul to psychology.
This has always suggested to me that -- being that we are a very new species, only around 50,000 years old -- we're still struggling to map the nonlocal and immaterial territory we find ourselves inhabiting. For this reason, God has reached down to us in various ways to assist us in the task of pneumography and vertical navigation. But obviously, in so doing he must meet us where we are.
Anyone can see that we aren't where we were two or three thousand years ago. Does this invalidate the divine message?
Here we circle back to the question of historicism raised in yesterday's post. Was the old revelation so historically and culturally conditioned that maybe we need a new one for our cosmically stupid times?
Suffice it to say that G-L's purpose in writing The Philosophy of Being and the Development of Doctrine is to explain why the old revelation was ahead of its time then and remains so today. Moreover, we only are where we are because of the gradual historical assimilation and exteriorization of the old message.
Just as the achievements of biology can never be exhaustively represented by physics or chemistry, nor can man's spiritual adventures ever be reduced to words. Recall yesterday's image of the oppressive grid made of crisscrossing bars of journalism and tenure. Contrast this with an organic tapestry with intertwined threads of the natural and supernatural.
Backing down to where we lifted off yesterday, G-L wants to vindicate the proposition...
Too formal... Put it this way: why is there so much idiocy among the educated -- or credentialed, rather -- and so much wisdom in revelation and scripture?
One immediately flashes back to Paul's gag to the effect that the wisdom of the tenured is so much lunatic babbling to the Creator. Pick any atheistic philosopher from the past 300 years, and you'll understand what he means. For in the words of the Aphorist,
He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.
That's just a fact. The question before us is the relationship between language and reality. One side (the idiocracy) would enclose us in language, while our team makes the outrageous claim that words ultimately refer to real things exterior to us (and interior to us, come to think of it). We will expand upon this insult as we delve deeper into the book
Sure, sometimes it can sound as if one is talking nonsense, when one is merely speaking of the nonsensuous with the available vocabulary. Looking back on it, this is how I made the prodigal journey home from East to West: the simple realization that the concept -- or better, the experience -- is one thing, the vocabulary another. The map is not the territory, nor can one eat the menu. The bottom upshot for today is this:
Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.
The objectivity of mystical experience cannot be demonstrated. Just like that of any other experience.
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