What Contains Everything But Can Never Be Contained?

The nous or intellectus makes its first appearance on p. 548. In contrast to largely left hemispheric reason, it

is deeper and richer, more flexible and tentative, more modest, aware of the impossibility of certainty, open to polyvalent meaning, respecting context and embodiment, and holding that while rational processing is important, it needs to be combined with other ways of intelligently understanding the world (McGilchrist).

These may be a nice things to have, but clearly not what Schuon means by the intellect: for him it involves rather

a contemplativity which in no way enters into the rational capacity, the latter being logical rather than contemplative; it is contemplative power, receptivity in respect of the Uncreated Light, the opening of the Eye of the Heart, which distinguishes transcendent intelligence from reason.

It is also 

a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not “create,” it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective. 

I suspect the pure metaphysics of the intellect may share a distant analogy to LH and RH, in that it requires the complementary practice of a concrete religion: 

Remove the passional element from the soul and the intelligence -- remove “the rust from the mirror” or “from the heart” -- and the Intellect will be released; it will reveal from within what religion reveals from without.

BUT

This release is strictly impossible -- we must insist upon it -- without the co-operation of a religion, an orthodoxy, a traditional esoterism with all that this implies.

I myself would probably be happy to diddle around in my head all day if not for this insistence. Instead, I submit to an orthodox tradition to complement and incarnate my abstract diddling. 

Now that I think about it, perhaps it's a good practice to plunge into an ambiance that can in no way be subject to LH capture. The LH is pretty, pretty crafty, and can reduce almost anything to a kind of bogus understanding. 

We haven't cited Davila in awhile, but there are many aphorisms touching on this from various angles. Think about it:

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a [non-LH] theological vocabulary.

The simplistic [LH] ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

Nothing attracts me as much in Christianity as the marvelous insolence of its [non-LH] doctrines. 

Man calls "absurd" what escapes his secret pretensions to [LH] omnipotence.

He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself. [Wait, you put your faith in who?]

The Church's function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld to the [LH] world.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a [LH] proposition; it is perception of a special order of realities.

Truth is a person. [Try containing that with the LH!]

Christ is the truth. What is said about Him are mere [LH] approximations to the truth.

Again, it is totally irrational to try to reduce the world to LH reason. On p. 567, McGilchrist brings in our pal Hayek to make the point:

The most dangerous stage of the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. 

The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the powers of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.

And in the next post we will demonstrate -- we must insist upon it -- that the Progressive Matrix, destroyer of civilization, is built with bars of (mere) LH rationality, devoid of contact with a reality it can never know via its own resources.