A Conspiracy So Vast: The Homosapiential Tendencies of the Cosmos

We left off with our feet in the horizontal and head in the vertical; one could also say concrete and abstract, exterior and interior, surface and depth, senses and intellect, etc. The point is, there are always no fewer than two worlds, but they fit together so harmoniously one begins to suspect a plot.

But here we must proceed cautiously for the very reason that it is so easy for us to understand -- and therefore misunderstand -- things, which is to say, link them together in a causal manner. Patterns and pseudo-patterns are everywhere. 

I remember a patient with PTSD who would see projected flashbacks in the patterns of the cottage cheese ceiling when laying in bed. It seems that the same psychological process underlies both creativity and paranoia -- or that the latter is parasitic on the former. Paranoia is creativity in a foul mood, or something. Or foul and stupid, like MSNBC.

So let’s refrain from calling it a COSMIC CONSPIRACY SO VAST….

Instead, let’s stay classy and call it The Raison d’être of the Cosmos, as does De Koninck. Sounds more elegant and less insane, or worse, journalistic. 

Oh, let’s just come out and say it, and clean up the mess afterwards:

Man is manifestly the raison d’être of the whole of nature. Moreover, nature could not be ordered to God except through man. God being the end of the universe, it is necessary that the universe be capable of a return to the Universal Principle…. But only an intellectual creature is capable of such a return.

In other words -- and this is just Bob speaking -- man is the missing link in existence. After all, the existence of something like matter is entirely self-evident, and the existence of the Absolute, the Universal Principle, isn’t far behind. Where's the connection? 

I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but what else could it be but Man, since 1) we are the only creature that comes equipped with matter and an immaterial rational soul that bends back upon itself, and 2) we have the entirely credible testimony of literally countless mystics, saints, and acidheads who have completed this cosmic roundtrip, precisely. 

I might add that in the absence of this roundtrip, our existence makes no sense whatsoever, for it would be analogous to a wire through which electricity passes but which is plugged into nothing, a skyscraper with no top floor, an endless joke with no punchline, or just a bad infinite in general. 

I would also say that our own self-consciousness is a circle that finds its principle in the circularity of God, not just in the extroverted sense of creation returning to itself, but in the interior sense of the Son returning to the Father via the Holy Spirit. But we’ll deal with these folks later.

In any event, “only rational created nature is immediately ordered to God.” And if you don’t like that word, just say, for example, that the intellect is intrinsically ordered to a metacosmic Truth without which it is little more than a cancer on the surface of being. 

Which, come to think of it, it all too often is: because we can know truth, we can know and even love falsehood, but let’s define spiritual health before getting into cosmopathology. Things can only go wrong if it is possible for them to go right.

Lesser animals “do not attain the universal but only the particular.” Yes, self-evident, but what is the principle by virtue of which you and I attain the universal?  

Correct: the Uni-versal as such (literally, one turn): "rational nature,"

because it knows the universal formality of the good and of being is thereby ordered immediately to the universal principle of being.

In other words, only a creature capable of making a tour of being can rejoin the source of being.

After all, if something has occurred, then it was possible for it to occur, but by virtue of what principle was it possible? 

This is where things get a little obscure even for Petey, but what if man was originally plugged into the Vertical Socket, so to speak, but for reasons we won’t argue about unplugged himself from the source and decided to go it alone, which resulted in a kind of blackout, or a long, cold winter with only wind and solar instead of fossil fuels.

I mean, there’s still plenty of electricity down here, even if its rather weak, like static electricity compared to current electricity. The Great Electrician created both, but supposing he comes down and repairs the line, such that the current once again flows all the way to the top?

I AM, a lineman for the cosmos.

A conspiracy so vast…

To be continued.