Rendezvous with Truth

The head is loaded and ready to fire. In other words, I just read a brief and compact essay (not even two pages) by Schuon, and will proceed to disgorge what it triggered in me. Better back away from the screen.

Oh, by the way, lately I've been mildly susceptible to "automatic writing," or something. I first noticed this a few weeks ago, when I thought I was making some notes to myself, but it was as if my hand was hijacked and made notes to me. There was a clear sense of just surrendering to it and completing the sentences as they were given to me. 

Let's think about the minimum number of tools we need to think about ultimate reality, and where we stand with it. 

In order to do this, we need the most abstract possible terms or symbols, which cannot be reduced to anything more fundamental. 

These terms must also be imbued with certitude, which means, among other things, that we cannot explicitly deny them without implicitly affirming them -- for example, the statement that "man cannot know absolute truth," which is what eggheads call a performative contradiction: if it is true that man cannot know truth, then he absolutely can.

Let's begin. First and foremost we need a symbol for ultimate reality, and O seems to be as serviceable as anything else. Similar to the gag above about truth, who is bold enough to say that ultimate reality doesn't exist, even if we can't exhaustively describe it? 

Next, we'll need a symbol for man. I'm partial to (  ), reminiscent of O, but like an incomplete echo of it -- an image, perhaps, but not (yet, anyway) a likeness.  

Next, we definitely need two axes, a horizontal one and a vertical one.

Let the vertical axis stand for space, or the simultaneous copresence of everything, so to speak. If we could somehow stop time, then everything would be here and now. Am I right?

But we need to supplement this static axis with a horizontal, dynamic one, which encompasses time, and with it, development; which in turn involves the movement from potential to actualization, but also deterioration, death, and leftism.

In a certain sense we could think of the vertical axis as the Absolute, the horizontal as the Infinite. 

These two -- Absolute and Infinite -- are the first fruits, as it were, of O. They also suggest masculine and feminine, respectively, and all this implies, for example, principle (abbasolute) and mamafestation. This latter is as ambiguous and mystifying as any woman, and can be an obstacle and snare on the one hand or a vehicle and ladder on the other.

Somewhere in another essay Schuon alludes to maya as a both light veiled and a veil of light. Or maybe it was the Sphinx.

I'd like to think that all the time I spend collecting and listening to music isn't a total waste, rather, that it has genuine spiritual importance. Perhaps this contributes to my suspicion that the horizontal is melody while the vertical is harmonic structure. And life is jazz, baby, i.e., improvisation.

Here is a passage by Schuon that reminded me of jazz: 

Everything is in reality like a play of alternations between what is determined in advance -- starting from principles -- and what is incalculable and in some way unforeseeable (syncopation mine).

For "principles" substitute chordal structure, and for "incalculable and unforeseeable" say improvisation, AKA spontaneous composition. 

Reminds me of something maestro Keith Jarrett said the other day in some liner notes:

A master jazz musician goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is there (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness.

There's no doubt that it's a spiritual practice: 

It [music] must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.

Tell me about it -- about how this resembles blogging, I mean.  

The structure -- the basic form of the composition -- only

provides a layer of substance above or beyond which the player [blogger] intends to go. It's also possible to do this by going deeper into the material.

Since we're talking about the vertical, there is both height and depth. And certainly shallowness, which covers about 99% of the musicians and bloggers.

I guess this will be a short one, because I have something else I need to do. So we'll summarize by saying O, (  ), ↕, and ↔, bearing in mind that the dynamism of the vertical and horizontal results in a spiral. Whether it spirals up or down, in or out, depends upon how you exercise your freedom, which exists in the vertical space between O and (  ).