Blindness Isn't Just Another Kind of Vision

We'll start with a couple of aphorisms:

The scientific encyclopedia will grow indefinitely, but about the very nature of the universe it will never teach anything different from what its epistemological assumptions teach.

And 

Today we require a methodological introduction to that vision of the world outside of which a religious vocabulary is meaningless. We do not talk of God with those who do not judge talk about the gods as plausible.

The first shows how in one sense, science never stops discovering all sorts of new things, when in another sense, these are really just elaborations of the Same Old Thing. 

In other words, no number of scientific discoveries will cause the scientist to say that God has been proved (or disproved) unless he already believes it. While science advances by attempting to disprove hypotheses, it never tries to disprove its own metaphysic or implicit vision of reality.

The second aphorism is related to the first, in that it is a relatively new problem in history that religion has become unintelligible to people, even though the human nature to which it applies obviously hasn't changed. Note that it’s not just religion per se, but the fact that these volks live in a restricted universe in which “a religious vocabulary is meaningless.” 

In fact, these are two different vocabularies for two different dimensions of reality that are ultimately one. Analogously, physics has one vocabulary, biology another, but no one who studies physics thinks it makes biology unintelligible, nor that the latter exists in some impossible world.

Yes, man has lost a sense of the vertical without which he isn’t even man. Literally, for 

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe.

And

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

But not just any religious vocabulary, for reality is one and so is man. This vision can differ at the margins, but if two visions fundamentally contradict each other, then one person is just speculating, fooling himself, or misinterpreting the data or experience. Just as we differentiate between astronomy and astrology or chemistry and alchemy, we should be able to distinguish between true and false accounts of this perpendicular dimension.

Okay, how? Well, let’s go back to those two aphorisms at the top: how about starting with an accurate vision of the universe per se, and with a means to fruitfully think and talk about it?

Is this asking too much? Because the way I see the universe, God fits in quite nicely; or rather, it into God. Indeed, if I didn’t see the universe this way, it would eclipse so much data and deny so much experience that the world would become utterly unintelligible. 

Yes, it is always One Cosmos, but at the same time, it is always “becoming” One Cosmos, so to speak. We are the nexus between time and eternity, and the “new dimension” alluded to above isn’t just a space but a measure, with “up” involving integration and union, “down” equating to dis-integration and dispersal. 

The latter is traditionally thought of as the devil’s handiwork, but such an observation is now rendered unintelligible to people whose horizontal vision of the world excludes it. Here again, we cannot begin with the existence of diabolical forces opposed to man, but rather, with the transmission of a cosmic vision in which such realities become both intelligible and plausible. 

I think it’s fair to say that anyone with a nodding acquaintance with the vertical perceives the truly grotesque civilizational dis-integration we are undergoing. Naturally, the people at the leading edge of the disintegration do not see it, since they have rendered themselves blind to it. This blindness is a cause and consequence of the vertical plunge into nihilism, barbarism, and despair.

Nor can you convince them that some pervert in a dress shoving his crotch in the face of a child violates the most rudimentary sense of human decency. To say that we just have “two visions” of the world doesn’t begin to convey the gravity of what’s going on. For it is as if our cosmos -- the real one -- is literally being declared illegal. 

This is certainly the upshot of the ongoing twitter revelations -- the extent to which the state isn’t just banning ideas, candidates, and thinkers, but a whole vision of the world. 

But at the same time, this totalitarian drive reveals a decrepit weakness, in that they can’t even pretend to defend their grotesque and insane ideas. 

Reality is that which doesn’t go away when we stop believing in it. But nor do the psychic forces arrayed against reality go away when we stop believing in them. You may not care about this battle, but it cares about you.