Confused Possibilities & Clear Impossibilities

A reminder that we're on a mission to discover the source of the soul, or better, the human person. We left off the previous post with Sherlock Holmes' epistemological dictum that "Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth." So, let's eliminate some impossibilities and bat away some absurdities. 

According to Dávila,

A confused truth is worth less than a clear error.

In that spirit, let's stipulate that a confused possibility is worth infinitely more than clear impossibility. 

It's interesting that we are no closer to understanding the origins of the soul than we were, say, 500 or 2,000 or 10,000 years ago, and probably farther away, for

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.

This because our official collective metaphysic took a wrong turn some time back. Opinions diverge as to exactly when this was; Richard Weaver thought it was with the retreat of Thomistic realism and the upsurge of braindead nominalism after the 14th century or so. Schuon had a beef with Renaissance humanism. Others blame the scientific revolution -- not science per se, of course, but scientism -- for which reason

Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.

Or better, like a blunt autist treats blind date. But in just the past couple of decades we've learned that there exist ideo-pathologies even more impossible than scientistic autism, i.e., the whole twisted menagerie that comes under the heading of Wokeness. Fortunately, this postmodern hysteria may fade into history before we've even had the chance to figure out what it was.

What it was was just man -- man minus his divine source, who will necessarily veer in all sorts of unpredictable ways, since it leaves him deprived of his center, his source, and his direction. And you will have noticed that the in the late stages of this chaotic descent,

Militant irreligion gradually transforms the one possessed into a simple imbecile convulsed by hatred.

Now, neurdoscientists like to call our quest the "hard problem of consciousness," when they actually mean the impossible problem -- for it is soph-evidently impossible for them to solve or even properly formulate the problem while limiting themselves to the tools and categories of neuroscience. Aphorisms, each going to a certain kind of metaphysical impossibility: 

The psycho-physical parallelism is not a theory, but rather a manner of avoiding the problem.

Being only falsifiable, a scientific thesis is never certain but is merely current.

What is capable of being measured is minor.

 There isn't even a theory of how the first theory could work. Dualism is not an option. Or, if you're stuck in one, keep thinking, for there is light -- the One Light -- at the end of that manmode unreality tunnel. 

As to the second, it too is obvious. The real problem is that so many scientistic beliefs aren't even falsifiable, and therefore not even science -- e.g., climate catastrophism, gender ideology, Brandonomics, etc.

As to the third, consider, on the one hand, man as man, and on the other, man as measurable -- say, his weight, or his percentage of H2O, or his bodily temperature. Put conversely, the soul cannot be measured because it is the measurer. Ah, but who or what is the measure of the soul? Schuon:

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative....

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.

 Then, deprived of this God <--> Man tension, 

Man is an animal that imagines itself to be Man.

And 

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

Let's try another tack before we close out this post. It touches on proper pronouns, intrinsic order, and the metacosmic logos:

The universe is a useless dictionary for someone who does not provide its proper syntax.

A useless dictionary. What would make a dictionary useless in the ultimate sense?

I know: postmodern deconstruction, whereby words are detached from their objects and refer only to other words.

Speaking of clear impossibilities.

Here's another clue:

In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them.

Ontological levels. Why not? We all recognize them. It's merely a matter of recognizing them as real.

Then, once you've done that, 

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

Conversely, you can collapse the hierarchy into a horizontal flatland, in which case  

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive (all aphorisms by Sr. Dávila).