Diving into the Now with Logos Sutra

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time. --Davila

Challenge accepted!

Being that I was never any good at practical science as a kid, I was impressed by the Professor on Gilligan’s Island, who could build a transistor radio out of seaweed and a couple of coconuts. 

But now that I’ve grown up to be an antisocial media vertical influencer, I wonder what we can do with even less, basically a brain and the now, or just abiding here at the intersection of intelligence and the moment. After all, this is all we ever ultimately have, is it not? Everything else is just a footgnosis on it. 

Supposing this is the limit of our toolbox, what can we come up with? Well, first of all, we can’t strip things down quite that far, since we have language. But let’s try not to get carried away with it, because it can easily end up serving the opposite purpose, i.e., escaping from the now with unnecessary and stupid verbiage:

Wordiness is not an excess of words, but a dearth of ideas.

If we venture too far from the Idea, the same language that clothes it will betray us:

--Only ideas save us from adjectives.

--The deluded are prolix.

--Words to not communicate, they remind.

--Words to not decipher the mystery, but they do illuminate it.

What about the senses? Not only is it safe to ignore them, it's mandatory, insofar as there is no knowledge at the level of the senses. The eye doesn’t know what it sees or even that it sees, but we not only know sensory data, we know that we know. 

In a way, what we’re attempting to do is ignore the usual flow that carries information upward and inward from the senses to the intellect, and instead continue upward and inward from the intellect to its source. After all, it comes from somewhere. If the self were self-explanatory, we’d be enclosed in solipsism. In reality, we’re just the light, not the sun. Then again, sunlight is not not the sun, is it? 

Speaking of which, there’s nothing new under the sun, whether we look to the east of the west. In the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, it says here that

A yoga is a method -- any one of many -- by which an individual may become united to the Godhead, the Reality which underlies this apparent, ephemeral universe.

And consistent with what was said above about the direction of thought, for Patanjali 

The waves of the mind can be made to flow in two opposite directions -- either toward the objective world or toward true self-knowledge.

But I don’t want to get bhagged down in the Yoga Sutras. Suffice it to say that nothing in the Yoga Sutras doesn’t find its analogue in the Logos Sutra of Christianity. For example, in Christ the Eternal Tao it says that

An understanding of the human spirit is not dependent on Divine revelation: it can be arrived at, at least in part, by silently observing one’s inward being.

At least it’s a good start, because it means detaching from and floating above the nonsense, both outward and inward. This is never a bad idea, and should become as routine and brushing one’s teeth or screaming at the TV.

The following is helpful, because it again goes to the inward and outward flow of the intellect, which can make it feel as if we’re talking about two different entities:

It is not that there are two beings inside us; rather, the spirit and the lower soul are different aspects of our one inward being. 

So, the same organ that looks out upon the world is that which -- if we’re lucky — perceives divinity. Then again, even the seeking is a consequence of the finding, is it not? We’ll come back to this, but it will have to be tomorrow. The game just got interesting.