My Head is a Landing Strip

Being that I am no longer subject to the constant deustraction of the Conspiracy, my head has become a full time landing strip for vertical murmurandoms. They're constantly buzzing my tower, but I'm just the air traffic controller. 

Here comes one now! 

Wait. I think this one must have been diverted from Deepak International. It's requesting to land in my head because his is completely full of it.

Let's see... Translating from the original sans-wit, it's telling me life consists only of moments, and that the human moment -- every oneavum for everyoneavus -- is the conscious bisection of time by eternity. 

Here comes another. It's been taxiing around up there for over 15 years, but no one will listen: 

Cap'n Huxley speaking: here & now, boys, here & now. Reverse worldward descent and cross the bridge of darkness to the father shore; on your left is the dazzling abode of immortality, on your right the shimmering gate of infinity. Return your soul to its upright position and exsanguish all (me)mories, we're in for a promised landing. Touching down in shantitown, reset your chronescapes and preprayer for arrisall. 

I don't know whether to be embarrassed or mortified. Better check for drugs. 

Now that this thought is siting on the tarmacbook, it occurs to me that most of the truly memorable moments we recall from life are recalled as moments for precisely this reason, i.e., because of the vertical crosscurrents that blew through them. It's what makes them memorable.

And it works both ways, for what is trauma but an irruption from below, perpetuating a hellish moment that retains echoes of hell long after the moment has ended? 

No one knows where thoughts come from, because such knowledge would constitute another thought and thus really bug the quester. 

But let's propose an answer anyway and suggest that to entertain true thoughts -- AKA Truth -- is to participate in God, which is to say, Ultimate Reality. 

According to Thomas, "The human soul possesses such an abundance of various powers because it dwells on the borders of spiritual and material being," and "our intellect in understanding is extended to infinity." Putting these together, we might say that Infinitude (the first side effect of the Absolute) passes the border between pure spirit and matter, and extends down into man. And here we are.

This is precisely why, as Thomas says, "the intellect is therefore naturally capable of knowing everything that exists" -- to which I would only add supernaturally naturally capable.

Indeed, to say nature is to say supra- or transnature, otherwise we could never say it. No joke! In other words, to recognize nature is to have transcended it -- analogous to the recognition that even the itsiest bitsy of living matter represents a shocking ontological break from the mayaterial world. From the perspective of vertically, not only does Life = Matter + X, but more importantly, Matter = Life - (minus) X.

So, what is X? Y, wouldn't U like to Z! 

I suppose I first encountered this way of looking at things in E.F. Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed, which I must have read waaaaay back when this whole adventure started around the late discolithic era. 

Not only was I a puerplexed lad of 25, but I was a coors-carrying idiot, in the literal sense of being rude, simple, ignorant, unskilled, and unschooled. Indeed, I was literally an unskilled laborer, laboring in a supermarket until I was 33 years old. Or as they say today, a hero.

Of course, in the long run, my utter vacuity turned out to be an asset, in that I had little in the way of faulty programming to deprogram or indoctrination to undoctrinate. That actually came later, once I made contact with Planet Higher Education. There were... let's see... over seven years of overlap between the supermarket and graduate school, in that I paid for the latter via the former. 

Speaking of which, it turns out I worked long enough as a retail clerk to qualify for a pension, for which I just put in the paperwork. This will amount to an additional $700 a month. To celebrate this modest windfall, I used the first installment to upgrade my subwoofer in the slackatoreum, from an SVS-2000 to the SVS-3000. The former already changed my life, so I can't imagine what the latter will do. It arrives today. I'll keep you posted. 

I frankly don't understand how people can live without a subwoofer -- not any old thump-thump subwoofer, but a musical one which, among other things, renders the music present to the body. The music then reaches the soul via both the ears and the skin. 

Let's redirect Bob's wavering attention and dig out his old G. for the P'ed. Lots of notes in the margins & end pages, meaning it must have stimulated the noggin. Any notes worth mentioning, or are they all embarrassing juvenilia? 

Interesting: here are the traces of a sentiment that has haunted me up to the present, where I scribbled to myself:

Why start with physics? What is the essential difference between animate and inanimate?

What this signifies is the dawning awareness that physics isn't metaphysics, nor can metaphysics be derived from it. Rather, the other way around. Oh, it's round alright. But there's no logical reason to begin at the bottom of the circle, and every reason to begin at the top. 

And once we turn the cosmos back right-side-up and outside-in, we see that there is no rational reason whatsoever to believe that Life is reducible to physics. Nor is there any reason to elevate physics to our paradigmatic science -- as if anything that isn't physics isn't real, or that the most real reality is what is given to the senses. Nonsense! And not the perfect kind.

True, knowledge begins in the senses, but it doesn't end there unless you have a particularly nasty case of tenure. In fact, matter requires something immaterial -- in a Word, form -- to render it intelligibly real.

Let's end with some aphorisms from the Master, relating to our original theme of celestial thoughts and terrestrial airports:

God is the guest of silence.

In man’s extreme solitude he perceives anew the touch of immortal wings.

In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday.

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

We only dig the channels for flash floods.

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

At a given moment, the most important place on earth can be a palace, a pigsty, or a cell.

Man only has importance if God speaks to him, and as long as God speaks to him.

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners. 

The steps of grace startle us like the footsteps of someone passing by in the fog.

                                                        Boo!