Spiritual Illness and Cosmic Idiocy

Longest post ever?  

Or just more click bait promising more than it can deliver?  

Too soon to tell, but I slept a little late, so let's get after it, beginning at the end of the previous post, vis-a-vis the difficulty engaging in debate with ideo-illogical matrix dwellers: 

behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurks the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared (Vogelin).

How convenient that everyone who disagrees with you is out of touch with reality! Must be nice.

Remind me why you're here? I have friendlier voices in my head, you know.

The Common Ground of Existence in Reality. What is it, and does it exist? If it doesn't, then this post is over. If it does, then somebody needs to do something about it! 

We'll provisionally go with the latter: that there is a Common Ground of E. in R. 

In fact, I would say that it exists necessarily as the very basis for rational thought and communication. It is another way of characterizing the Absolute that is of necessity ontologically prior to the relative. Invert this relation and you end in the absurdity of absolute relativism, which of course obliterates the very possibility of reason (and abolishes man in the process). 

With such an interlocutor, rational argument cannot prevail, because 

the partner to the discussion [does] not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted...

Instead, this infracosmic bounder "has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence" which Voegelin calls second reality. Moreover, what appears obvious to the person living in a second reality will appear more or less irrational or delusional to us, while we will appear anywhere from naive to malevolent to them.

The first thing to notice is how this all takes place in a kind of "projective space," which means that we have to dig down a little deeper and investigate the very nature of the psyche. For example, is this projective process pathological in itself, or are there healthy forms of projection? If so, what would constitute "healthy" projection? 

These questions will take us somewhat far afield. We'll address them more thoroughly as we proceed, but at this juncture I will just say that projection is a kind of side effect of the very intersubjectivity that makes us human. 

And this will take us veryvery far afield, but this in turn is grounded in the "projection," so to speak, that goes in in the immanent Trinity. Don't take it literally, but looked at this way, the Son is a kind of "projection" of the Father, as the Incarnation is a projection of the Son into human nature. All in a manner of speaking. Don't worry, we'll tuck in this loose shirt as we proceed. 

Voegelin is so verbose that sometimes I just want to blurt it out and cut to the chase. Let's just stipulate that there is Common Ground of Existence in Reality, which is both infinitely intelligible and ultimately unknowable. Let us call it O.

Again, the existence of O is not on a scale of probability, for either it exists necessarily or is necessarily impossible (and what is necessary is also eternal, and how do we now that?!). 

Not only must we pick one -- call this binary O or Ø -- but should we choose the latter, we must live with the consequences and entailments (or deny them). Expressed in mythopoetic terms, it is the choice every man faces at every time in the Garden referenced way down in Genesis 3.  

Now, man is a "hierarchical being" spanning every mode of existence, and let us count the modes, from the bottom to the top of the scale. For starters, there is something like O at both ends of the spectrum -- unless you happen to know where the Big Bang comes from (for it bangs yet), or how life sprouts from matter, or how the spirit blossoms from animality (and vice versa). 

Voegelin uses the clunky term "apeiron" for the depth of being. Freud called it the "unconscious," but it's not as if he discovered it, rather, just reduced it to something far less than what it is. Among other epistemic sins (chief of these being reductionism), he committed the old fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

I won't bore you with the whole story, but (speaking of my old racket) the conception of this depth evolved over the decades, at least for some psychoanalytic thinkers.

For example, my late pal, James Grotstein -- actually, we've only become pals since his death. Prior to that he was my psychoanalyst, this being back in the '90s. Here is something I wrote about it way back in 2006, in a post called  On Slipping the Surly Bonds of the Ego and Giving Birth to the Living God (https://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/11/on-slipping-surly-bonds-of-ego-and.html).

Sorry about the length, but it it kept my interest, and besides, I'm under a time constraint anyway. It's a little too romantic for our current tastes, but we'll just let it fly and tuck in the loose shirt afterwards:  

The psychoanalyst James Grotstein has attempted to rescue the concept of the unconscious from its unfortunate reduction to a mere cauldron of uncivilized desires and impulses, and restore it to its true place as a mysterious alter-ego, or “stranger within” that shadows our existence in a most intimate, creative, and mysterious way. Far from being merely “primitive and impersonal” (although it surely includes primitive “lower vertical” elements as well), it is “subjective and ultra-personal,” a “mystical, preternatural, numinous second self” characterized by “a loftiness, sophistication, versatility, profundity, virtuosity, and brilliance that utterly dwarf the conscious aspects of the ego.”

Like his teacher Bion, Grotstein appreciates the spiritual implications of the unconscious as it manifests in our moment-to-moment experience. Understanding this higher aspect of the unconscious enriches one’s spiritual life, if for no other reason than it represents such a comparatively larger aspect of consciousness itself. Otherwise, it’s a little like living your life in a tiny boat and never looking around to appreciate the immense ocean upon which your insignificant vessel is floating -- of which your vessel is actually composed, because in reality there is no “ego” and "unconscious.” 

Rather, there is more of a wave-particle complementarity between them, so it is a mistake to either deny one half of the complementarity or to blend them together. The wave belongs to the ocean, while the ocean does not belong to the wave (with at least one rare exception).

Grotstein conceptualizes the unconscious as a sort of “handicapped” god who needs a partner in order to accomplish its mission. The goal of psychotherapy is not merely knowledge of, or insight into, the unconscious, but to establish a sort of dynamic collaboration between the phenomenal ego -- our conscious self -- and the “ineffable subject of being” (O) upon which the ego floats and into which it infinitely extends.

Through a creative resonance between these two aspects of ourselves, we are much more spontaneously alive, creative, and “present.” It is like adding another dimension (or two or three) of depth to our being, through which we become something that has never actually been, but is somehow more real than what we presently are. In this ceaselessly trinitarian dynamic, a new entity emerges, a “transcendent subject” that lives harmoniously in the dialectical space between our foreground self and the mysterious background subject that surrounds and vivifies it.

This novel way of looking at the unconscious has much in common with another one of my favorite spiritual cartographers, Meister Eckhart. Eckhart, like Petey, often relies upon various rhetorical devices such as paradox, pun, and oxymoron in the effort to use language to transcend language. Language cannot ultimately capture God, and yet, it is all we have to try to mark out the torahtery and communicate the experience to others. As a result, Eckhart said many things that are easy to misunderstand and which landed him in some trouble during his lifetime.

For example, Eckhart wrote that “In my birth all things were born, and I was the cause of myself and of all things... And if I did not exist, God would also not exist.” Just what did he mean by this? (the Catholic authorities asked!). In fact, it was something very similar to Grotstein’s description of the unconscious. That is, the God that we can know cannot exist without our first “conceiving” and giving birth to him -- God needs our assistance, or cooperation, to manifest in the herebelow.

First, it goes with unsaying, since it cannot be said, that God in his essence so surpasses our conceptual categories that he is beyond being or knowing, beyond the very horizon of knowability. What he actually is in himself, we cannot say, and he certainly doesn't require us to not say it. Apophatic theology holds that the only true things we can say about God are what he is not. Therefore, only by achieving the “negative capability” of unknowing, can we paradoxically know him in his essence.

Perhaps this is why, as Grotstein writes, God is the only true atheist, “because only He knows for sure that He doesn’t exist.” Furthermore, we are His children.

But we can certainly know God in his energies and activities on this side of the manifestivus. That is, in Eckhart’s understanding of the incarnation, God is eternally taking on human nature, not just once, but for all time, in the ground of our being. Eckhart adheres to the ancient Christian idea that God became man so that man may become God -- not literally, but in Grotstein’s sense of transforming the ineffable, nonlocal God-beyond-being into a local manifestation of his presence. 

The reason we may know God is because he is perpetually being born in the depths of our soul, but only if we cooperate and act as “midwife” to the process. God gives birth by speaking the word, but we are only born (from above) by hearing it and conforming ourselves to it.

Our absecular friends have it backwards. It is not God that requires explanation, but us. God alone properly has real being. God does not understand us because he exists -- rather, he ex-ists by our understanding of him, which is ultimately his self-understanding. That is why Eckhart said that the eye with which we see God is the same eye by which he sees us. We are each of us an opportunity for God to exist. Or perhaps more accurately, without us, God is orphaned in the cosmos, with no earthly parents to (p)raise him, just atoms with no evolution.

In other words, we must actually negotiate a “cyclopean” or “double worldview” between imagination and reality, something that the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott emphasized as well, with his idea of the “transitional space” of consciousness. We can never actually be just one or the other. We are perpetually giving birth to God, while God is perpetually giving birth to us. Both statements are equally true. Otherwise, we live in the dry desert hell of egoic separation from our source, or the alternate "fluid" hell of engulfment in symmatriarchal being with no way to express or communicate it -- no way for anything to "evolve" out of the formless and infinite void.

Creation means "giving existence to," or bringing something out of nothing. God’s creativity gives existence to us, but we give existence to God in our creative response to his actively present absence. That is, in both Judaism and in Eckhart’s thought, God actually must withdraw from the world in order to create it -- otherwise, the world is simply identical to God, and there is no freedom. (Of course, he cannot completely withdraw, as he leaves an immanent trace in every “part,” which in turn is a metaphysically transparental theophany that proclaims his glory.)

We are a creation of the absent God-beyond-being, but in making present our potential and becoming who we are, we take part in God’s creation of us, which paradoxically gives birth to both God and to ourselves. In surrendering to, and cooperating with, our own mysterious ground of being, our self-knowing and God’s self-knowing become a single act of essential knowledge. We give birth to the living God.

All in a manner of spooking (boo!). There are some category errors in there, and some statements that are easy to disunderstand, but it's okay, so long as we draw the distinction between the height and the depth, between O at the top and the apeiron at the bottom.

We'll make some real progress tomorrow, when I have more time.