We're still on the subject of the soul, about which Clarke observes that
the lower cannot be the active source of higher actions proceeding from it; but the higher can well be the source of lower level actions. The lower can't contain the higher, but the higher can contain the lower without violating any principle of sufficient reason.
The first sentence goes to Sherlock Holmes' gag about ruling out the impossible, the second to whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. Okay, but how is it true? By virtue of what higher principle?
Note that Clarke is not defending any kind of mind/matter dualism here, rather, a hierarchy of levels which necessarily starts at the top or else loses its own sufficient reason. The Absolute is, and cannot not be. It is our ultimate container, but it is critical to understand that it is not an empty container, like abstract geometrical space.
Support for this view comes from an unlikely -- or likely, depending on how you look at -- source, this video of Terence McKenna posted by Vanderleun. I recommend watching the whole thing for its pure innertainment value, but several points stand out for me (https://americandigest.org/to-dream-perchance-to-awaken).
First, he alludes to alienation from the Matrix (which, if you don't feel, then don't worry about it, because you're not a thinker, just a utensil of the hivemind); second, that the final call is aesthetic, i.e., that "we live out the consequences of our taste"; third, that language (Logos) is the code for hacking virtual reality; and lastly, that "when we free ourselves we are not freed into a void," rather, into a dimension of great and even infinite beauty that serves as a compass pointing toward Truth.
Obviously, we are surrounded by bad taste -- not just in art but in culture more generally, in entertainment, politics, religion, everything. But it's worse than that: for we are not just victims of poor taste, but of human beastlings with no taste, and who are thereby lost in the cosmos because they've disabled the very epistemophilic compass mentioned in the paragraph above.
Sr. Dávila has many aphorisms that go to this unappreciated (in our time) dimension of reality, more than I could possibly track down. Indeed, it is one of his central preoccupations (as it is for Schuon and Balthasar, among others), although I don't believe we've ever explicitly discussed it. I'll limit myself to ten wise cracks:
Without aesthetic transfiguration all of reality is pedestrian.
Today having taste is enough to qualify one as a puritan.
The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.
The work of art is a covenant with God.
Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.
From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.
When religion and aesthetics are divorced from each other, we do not know which is corrupted sooner.
Only those who secretly propagate the admiration of beauty conspire effectively against today’s world.
Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.
I do not know whether in another world the devil punishes an irreligious society. But I see that here it is soon punished by aesthetics.
A key point is that this truly represents a new dimension of the cosmos, one which mankind definitively enters around 70,000 years ago, with the Big Bang of the soul. Not only do we see the sudden ingression of art and beauty, but abstract concepts, mathematics, discovery of the afterlife, and transcendence more generally.
So as Terence says, we are not freed into a void, but into a transcendent dimension -- which, if you are awake, should be a source of perpetual astoneagement. Again, this can't come from below, but rather, must somehow radiate from above, for
The laws of biology in themselves do not have sufficiently delicate fingers to fashion the beauty of a face (Dávila).
I'm just about out of time, so let's conclude by translating this trippy post into some practical advice, for example, follow the beauty (and unfollow the ugly); be in the horizontal but not of the horizontal; let the dead bury the tenured, and use the entrails of the latter to strangle the last gaslighting journalist; and although the spiritually impoverished matrix dwellers will always be with us, it is our duty always and everywhere to share the good, true, and beautiful nous in order to help them climb up and out.
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