Heading Back for Provisions

We can admit when we're wrong. Looks like we underestimated what we’re going to need for this journey, so we’re heading back for supplies. 

We’re still going to be traveling light, but there are certain provisions we can’t do without, and it might even be demented to try. Schuon thinks so, anyway: "To wish to replace reasoning by experience"

on the intellectual and spiritual plane, as the empiricists and existentialists wish to do, is properly speaking demented."

Besides, why toss out all the maps drawn by previous vertical explorers? Columbus still relied on maps, even though they become increasingly useless the further he ventured. 

Man is the rational animal, or so they say. If so, then reason is here for a reason, and we can only pretend to eliminate it -- or worse, become an "enlightened animal." Which, come to think of it, does happen -- I’m thinking of all those gurus who successfully detach from the world of illusion until the moment they’re surrounded by adoring females, and untransformed human nature takes its vengeance.

For Schuon, there is ultimately one religion because God is one and so is man. As is reality. But reality is also diverse, and as always, the question is how to reconcile the One and the many. 

It seems there are two ways to go about it: down and back, prior to the bifurcation of subject and object, or up and ahead to their transcendent synthesis. In Christendom

the absolute is unveiled in the person of God, who created other persons in order to summon them toward their deification (Clement).    

That’s from a book I just finished called Transfiguring Time. Not very good, but it will do. 

Long story short, time itself is a creature (i.e., created), and is one of the things assumed and redeemed by the Incarnation. Absent this, time is universally regarded by premodern peoples as tending toward entropy and deterioration. There is and can be no progress. Best we can do is stasis, or restoration of primordial paradise via various rituals such as human sacrifice. 

Yes, the left has always been with us: between now and utopia is always a thin membrane of genocide. The global warming cult has a long and exceedingly bloody lineage. As Clement says, "The modern myth of progress is a naive secularized form of biblical expectation of the Messiah.” 

Since time is part of our unredeemed nature, it cannot be transfigured except on a retail basis, one assoul at a time. But in the past two or three centuries “Western literature has been filled with a nostalgia for paradise akin to that of ancient times.” Here comes the New Age, same as the Old Age: both 

are animated by a nostalgia for paradise that leads them to consider history as a fall, preventing the return to the original condition, a return to the paradise that dwells on the other side of the material world, that is the obverse of the material world and of time....

The pursuit of practices that achieve an escape from time and the poetic magic of wonderland converge into a new atheism…

Good news/bad news: we can eliminate time, but man lives in time, so we can’t eliminate one without eliminating the other. So, we are in time. But we also touch the timeless:

It is indispensable to know at the outset that there are truths inherent in the human spirit that are as if buried in the “depths of the heart,” which means that they are contained as potentialities or virtualities in the pure Intellect: these are the principial and archetypal truths, those which prefigure and determine all others (Schuon).

Back to the first paragraph, these are the provisions we’ll be bringing along for the journey.