Jnani Come Lately

As we’ve mentioned before, man is the only creature in existence who not only asks questions, but literally never stops asking them, journalists excepted. 

But this questioning applies to interiority as well, which is why man is equally a mystery to himself. A man who pretends to fully understand himself is swimming in the shallow end of the ocean of being. 

This is why ideologies proliferate, both for the exterior and interior worlds (ideology here defined as a manmade structure superimposed on the phenomena). Back in the day, I ended up with a PhD in one of these ideologies. My life would have gone in a very different direction had I taken the map for the reality.

Then again, even a defective map is generally preferable to no map at all, for it is written:

Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but in the end they determine which reef one is shipwrecked on.

In the previous post we alluded to the Total Basic Inquiry; it is not so much that we “have” as are this inquiry. We exist as this Total Basic Inquiry, which is an inquiry into the totality. We encounter it first on our end, but we assume there is a reality which corresponds and answers to it, i.e., that our knowing is reflected in being, and that the infinitude proceeds in both directions.

The upshot is that the Total Basic Inquiry is correlative to knowledge of Everything About Everything: right down (and up) to the last answer to the last question, so to speak. 

Now, what if the Incarnation represents the last answer to the last question (or total answer to all questions)? 

If so, we will first need to properly formulate the question, and we’re not there yet.

Homo sapiens means “wise human.” We are a subspecies of this, called Homo sapiens sapiens. I frankly don’t believe the old homos were worthy of the sapiens, since they were a pretty unimpressive bunch. Nothing resembling wisdom comes onto the scene until we arrive around 60,000 to 75,000 years ago.

Matter of fact, among the gifts Santa brought me was this book called From the Dust of the Earth: Benedict XVI, the Bible, and the Theory of Evolution, which helpfully reviews the latest findings on our horizontal origins. 

I did the same in my book, but these things are always subject to tinkering, nor do the details matter in any ultimate sense, since they can only hint at our vertical origins. Vertically speaking, we’re here, we’re queer, and we’re not going away, no matter what the fossil record says. In other words, we explain it more than it will ever explain us.

In any event, the present evidence suggests that primates got here 65 million years ago, and that we split from the chimps about 6 million years back. Bipedal ancestors show up at least 4 million years ago, and 2 million years later we see evidence of tools. Don’t get excited, though. It’s not as if we find a fully stocked Homo Depot, rather, just a sharpened rock department.

Our direct ancestor, Homo sapiens, doesn’t appear until 200,000 years ago. You could say he’s just like a man, only minus the abstract symbolic thought, art, religion, culture, and ceaseless innovation. In other words, more like a liberal than a fully functioning human.

As we’ve said so many times and in so many ways, the appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens is another Big Bang, only an interior one, or an explosion of interiority. And like the other one, it will never stop expanding. Or, if these explosions do ever stop, knowing when is way above our pay grade.

Anyway, with that little review, we’re in a better position to situate man the question and questioner, AKA, Homo quaestio and Homo interrogantis, and consider whether the Incarnation has anything to do with these.