Just How Screwed Are We?

Once again I don't have much time this morning. Best I can do is raise a bunch of questions that we'll have more time to properly unpack tomorrow, when things will return to normal around here, and the usual vast, untracked panorama of slack will unfold before us. 

In short, we have sufficient time to pull out a lot of toys and make a big mess, but not nearly enough time to clean up after oursoph.

As to the title of this post, what we mean is: to what extent are we able to think our way out of this mess, this mess being Life Itself, specifically, human life? 

If not for human beings, there would be no problems in the cosmos. Certainly if not for me, I would have no problems. Does this mean Camus was correct when he made that crack about suicide being the only serious philosophical problem? Or Stalin: no man, no problem.

They're wrong about that, but why are they wrong? Then again... 

Folks like the Buddha took the question seriously but not literally. You could say that for Buddhism the only serious metaphysical question is whether or not to commit ego death. 

But that question is also very much at the forefront of Christian metaphysics, in that the whole point of Baptism is to die with Christ and be reborn in him.

As it so happens, yesterday I was re(rerere)reading Meditations on the Tarot, because I'm still waiting for the postman to bring me a new book to sink my teeth into. Tomberg says that our rebirth reestablishes "the state of consciousness prior to the Fall," and why not? "This is Christian yoga," which "does not aspire directly to unity, but rather to the unity of two."

Anyway, Change My Mind: man is always and by definition the only problem in all of existence. Except for the Godman. He is supposedly man's solution to the problem of man. 

Now, what is it that constitutes man, i.e., sets him apart from every other being in existence? That's right, thinking; we are the "rational animal," meaning not just that we reason -- every animal has a crude or inchoate version of reason -- but that it is self-reflexive. Humans alone are Life ², in that we are able to think about thinking and know about knowing, not to mention love beauty and virtue, discern good from evil, inquire into the causes of things....

That's what we're driving at: causes of things, not forgetting the cause of causation. Being that this is a hierarchical cosmos, there are degrees and modes of causation. You could say that science investigates the little causes while metaphysics investigates the big ones, including the causes of science, i.e., conditions by virtue of which it is possible. 

Conditions such as, oh, an intelligible cosmos. Science can't take a single step in the absence of intelligible being, but nor can it take a single step in addressing the question: hey, why is being so darn intelligible? In particular, why is it intelligible to us, i.e., to our intelligence? These two -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are so perfectly matched that it looks like a conspiracy between them.

It reminds me of Gondwana. I remember in grade school, looking at the coasts of Africa and South America, and noticing how well they fit together. But I was just a moronic kid with more important things to think about, mostly having to do with music and baseball. 

I just googled the subject, and it was first hypothesized by Dr. Suess back in the mid 1800s, but the later theory of continental drift (proposed in 1912) had to await confirmation by the science of plate tectonics. If my grade school teachers ever discussed the latter, I wasn't paying attention. 

Anyway, they no doubt laughed at Dr. Suess, just like they're laughing at me, but again, I can't help noticing how well our intelligence is fitted to the deep intelligibility of the cosmos. Is there a reason?

Or no reason at all? And if the latter, like anyone could know that.

Here are some leftover nuggets from brother Lao-tzu: 

--In the beginning was the Tao. All things issue from it; all things return to it.

--How do I know this is true? By looking inside myself.

--To those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense.

--Without looking out your window, you can see the essence of the Tao.

--The unnameable is the eternally real.

--The Tao is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities.

--All things are born of being. Being is born of non-being.

--When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn't laugh, it wouldn't be the Tao.

--The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things.

Next, a passage from the Gospel of John (from Christ the Eternal Tao, by Heiromonk Damascene):

In the beginning was the Tao, 

And the Tao was with God,

And the Tao was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by Him....

And the Tao became flesh,

And dwelt among us

In the previous post I alluded to an unwritten book that ascends to, and descends from, the middle/top. Well, according to Schuon,

Metaphysics has as it were two great dimensions, the one “ascending” and dealing with universal principles and the distinction between the Real and the illusory, and the other “descending” and dealing on the contrary with the divine life in creaturely situations.

Let's toss a few observations by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner into our metaphysical crockpot: 

Every mystery points to a higher reality. / The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery. 

The Hebrew word for universe is Olam. / Comes from the word for hidden.

There is no place on earth without the Presence.

From the notebooks of Petey: Strictly speaking, we do not comprehend religious truths; rather, they comprehend us. Nor do we so much look at these truths but through them in order to see what religion is all about; we apprehend an intelligible truth by looking through it and gnosising what it pulls out of an otherwise 2D blandscape.

Knowledge is a relation between knower and known; a fundamental change in the knower changes the known far more than changes in knowledge change the knower. 

There are only two points in the cosmos: man and God, or person and Person, respectively. The shortest line between them is a spiral. 

Now,

When God commands Abraham, "Go forth to the land I will show you," the Zohar insists on reading the words hyperliterally: "Go to yourself," search deep within and thereby discover the divine.

What are the very first words of the Bible? Everyone knows that: In the beginning God created.... But for the Zohar, which insists on interpreting the original Hebrew words in their precise order, the verse means something radically different: With beginning, It [Ein Sof] created God (Daniel Matt).

In the beginning God creates; with beginning creates God. I like to look at these in a complementary way:

To be continued....