In the Beginning is the Un-word

"Being," says McGilchrist, "is mysterious."

"McGilchrist," says BOb, "is durn tootin'."

We always know more than we did the day before, but we are nevertheless as plunged into mystery as we were the decade, century, or millennium before, which is to say, always. If anything, the world just keeps getting weirder, and yet, people behave as if all this is normal. 

This is your excuse?  

Aphorisms:

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

Bum? Underachiever? Goldbricking deadbeat? I think not:

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious.

In other words, a hee-ro. For our times. And at least I'm housebroken.

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempt to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Problem is, the remystification of the world really is a kind of full-time job. But truly truly, someone has to do it, no? Most everyone else is employed to demystify things, and I thank them for their service, I really do. But what would happen if the world -- and human beings -- really were totally demystified? 

Seriously, think about it. Would that not be another name for hell? At the very least it would make for a good Twilight Zone episode -- a reverse Kafka, in which everything makes perfect sense:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneventful dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an innocuous professor of entomology. 

Who wants to watch The Fully Illuminated Zone? 

I like daylight as much as the next guy, but what if there were no night? Some people are afraid of the dark, and I get it, but what about those monsters of the light, e.g., rationalism, scientism, Marxism? Exponentially more people were murdered in the broad ideological daylight of the 20th century than in the so-called Dark Ages.

It's like we need an explicit program for the remystification of the world. In the larger scheme of things this is what the sabbath is about: like the Creator, we devote one day a week to... to what exactly? 

The problem is that if we are to say anything about it, we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe, almost certainly greater than whatever the human mind can comprehend (McGilchrist). 

Hmm, a placeholder for noplace, an empty variable for the Mystery of Being, an unsaturated translinguistic pneumaticon to say what can't be said and unsay what can...

O!

I like it. It simultaneously conveys the no-thing of zee-ro and the eternity & everything of the complete circle. It is like an endless spiral of nothing and everything and nothing, etc. 

What we need, in fact, is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word (ibid.).

O! 

Here is the dilemma, and why I speak of an un-word: if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved (ibid.).

Agreed. Even the greatest achiever can never achieve divinity. 

But an un-word is not enough. Rather, someone needs to develop an unsaturated un-language in order to map what goes on up there... someone who perhaps can look back on a life of achievement, but whose career has, uh, slowed down a bit lately... not a goldbricking deadbeat, exactly, but not an everyday achiever either...