Thinking About Thinking About God

Where were we? Yes, passive and active in the intellect. The senses, for example, are mostly passive, at least until worked over by the mind and transformed into something thinkable, a concept. 

But concepts are quite alluring, so much so that they can become detached from the empirical reality from which they are derived and take on a death of their own: the fall into ideology and ideolatry is complete, and we are sealed in tenure.

As a commenter commented yesterday, there are "7 billion minds out there that create their own worlds at the speed of thought.” Actually, faster than that, because properly speaking no thinking is involved. Rather, all they see is what their idea permits them to see. This idea is active, but in a dysfunctional way, in that it is actively superimposed on phenomena, reducing the world to some stupid idea about it. This culminates in a "Ph.D.," as in "Dr. Jill Biden." 

Happens all the time, and can’t not happen if we aren’t vigilant about what we let into our heads. Rather, we must always remain open-minded except insofar as we have arrived at a principle that cannot not be. Then it's not only okay to be close-minded, it’s mandatory, for this is the rock on which we shall built our perch, AKA the transcendent view from nOwhere.

Science has the right approach, in that its every idea about the world is tentative and falsifiable, except principle ideas such as falsifiability, the intelligibility of the world, and the mind’s adequation to a reality independent of it, without which there can be no science. 

In addition to the active/passive complementarity there is one of analysis/synthesis. Analysis is essentially active, except it may operate on concepts that have been passively assimilated, for example, “critical race theory,” which is critical about everything except the initial delusion which has been passively internalized by the "Ph.D." 

The same is true of any discipline ending in Studies, for what is studied and scrutinized is some gratifying projection, even if it’s hard for normal folks to understand why it’s gratifying. 

For example, it is somehow gratifying for them to believe the world is so racist that even black police officers in a black-run department are white racists. Likewise, here in California Larry Elder is our black face of white supremacy. We scarcely know whether to laugh or laugh harder.  

Active and passive, analysis and synthesis. Anything else? Yes, there are the distinctions between Absolute and Relative, Infinite and Finite, Reality and Appearance, Eternity and Time, and Principle and Manifestation. However, I suspect these are all just different ways of looking at and thinking about the same thing, which comes down to “Creator and Creation” or “God and World.”

But if we really want to remain openminded about this, we should use empty and unsaturated symbols such as O and (  ) for God and world, respectively.  

Everything, it turns out, partakes of this “empty dialectic,” so to speak, even God himself. (For reasons I no longer recall, I thought it was a better idea to symbolize the world as )( in the book, probably because I thought it conveyed an inversion or something. That’s too cute by half.)

Now, the only other guy who comes close to thinking about this subject as I do is Schuon, although he still sticks with words and not symbols. Perhaps Guenon went there, but it will take too much time to check.

My point is that this O <—> ( ) dialectic is irreducible, even in God, or in divinas, as they say when they want to sound more serious. But I think you’ll find that thinking about God this way resolves a lot of problems, paradoxes, existential absurdities, and ontological nul-de-slacks that occur if we try to think about God in the usual way. Tune in tomorrow to find out why.