In the previous post we alluded to the Great and/or Divine Attractor to Whom we are ultimately ordered. Later that day I read an essay by Schuon which describes the same reality from a slightly different perspective (from The Symbolism of the Hourglass, in Logic and Transcendence):
in reality there are two poles, one earthly and one heavenly, so that heavenly attraction should be represented by an ascending movement of the sand toward the upper compartment....
Spiritually, a movement toward the higher is always a sort of turning upside down, for the soul turns away from the world, which imprisons and disperses it, thus reversing the movement of its will or love.
The expression "pole of attraction" calls to mind the image of two magnetic centers, one above and one below....
[T]he world attracts like a magnetic center, but at the same time it is diverse and it disperses; the "Kingdom of Heaven" also attracts like a magnet, but at the same time it is infinite and it expands.
In this latter space, "time becomes a circular or spiral river flowing around a motionless center." In an earlier essay in the same book (Evidence and Mystery) he describes this dynamism in similar terms as
a spiral with centripetal movement progressing indefinitely toward a center that is never reached but that can nonetheless be grasped...
Grasped via intellection, which is our very own link between the above and below.
Let's try to reconcile this with Clarke's Person and Being, the book we've been discussing: "the human being, because of its dual nature as embodied spirit," is properly seen as the "microcosm," i.e., "a synthesis of the whole universe":
by his spiritual soul he rises above the dispersion of space and time to live in the spiritual horizon of supra-material meanings and values and to set his sights on the Infinite and the Eternal.
The reason why I've emboldened those words is to highlight the precise similarity to Schuon, indicating that these two are indeed describing -- better, inhabiting -- the very same nonlocal attractor.
This is life at the leading edge of the divine-human spiral described above by Schuon: "to be a human being," writes Clarke, is to live "on the frontier of matter and spirit, time and eternity." It is "to be an amphibian"
able at will to direct himself in either direction, down toward matter or up toward spirit. [Our] destiny is thus to journey through matter toward a fulfillment beyond matter (Clarke).
In Raccoon argot we refer to this as our "I AMphibious" nature, but you get the point, supposing your not one of our illuminate trolls confined to the lower chamber of the hourglass.
What else can we say on this fine Sunday morning, or have we already said enough for one post?
The latter. Let's save something for Monday.
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