Breaking News and the Breakthrough of Eternity

Well, I wasted yesterday watching sports and news out of Israel. I could write about the latter, but one of the original purposes of the blog was to turn the cosmos upside down and report on the "eternals" instead of the news (or to interpret the news in light of the eternal). Instead of covering "breaking news," the idea was to report on eternity breaking into time. 

Come to think of it, there are moments in history when the two -- time and eternity -- converge, quintessentially so in the Incarnation. This is just an image, but I'm imagining time as a wave-like function that can be closer to, or more distant from, eternity (even though, properly speaking, eternity must be equidistant to all times). 

I think we can sense when eternity breaks through, or when we are somehow closer to it. Certainly we know this individually, but it happens collectively as well. When something real occurs, it temporarily wipes away all the lies, silliness, and distractions we typically call "news": "eternity is the measure of permanence, time the measure of change." 

The return of eternity can feel like a big change, but it has always been here, only more or less ignored. I suppose you could say that ignorance of it is the largest conceivable "intelligence failure," since it is the failure of intelligence as such -- a failure to bear eternal principles in mind.

Eckhart often uses the word "breakthrough" to describe God's relation to the soul, e.g., "just as he breaks through into me, so I break through in turn into him." 

What would be at antipodes to the bad breaking news of the day? I guess it would the good of eternity breaking into the nous, or something. This latter, AKA the intellective soul, is "untouched by time and corporality." It is the primordial Light referenced in John, only reflected in the mirror of the intellect.

There is nothing that the divine Intellect does not know actually, nor the human intellect potentially.

This appears to be the deepest possible interpretation of being made in the image of God -- only it's an inverse image, being that God is overflowing fullness, whereas we are relative emptiness and impoverishment. It is also why 

Our natural "intellectual desire," or unlimited will to know, "is never quieted until we know the first Principle, not from its reflection but directly by its very essence.... the ultimate end of rational creatures is immediate knowledge of the essence of God."

This is what Eckhart calls the birth of the Word in the very ground of the soul: "the eternal birth which God the Father effects unceasingly in eternity is the same birth he effected here in time, in human nature.... What is all-important is that it should happen in me."

Which would be good news indeed -- news from, in, and back to eternity. Conversely, at the other (temporal) end, 

The idea that social or political change can satisfy man's intellectual or spiritual needs is perhaps the "greatest deception" to which man is susceptible. 

The author is quick to add that "This in no sense means that society is to be ignored," rather that

Whatever social good is ever accomplished can only be the result of men and women who, in their intellectual ground, understand that there is something far more important to be actualized than just trying to save this world. 

After all, the world can no more be for its own sake than it can be the cause of itself. Rather, it both flows from and returns to its Principle, apart from which there is "strictly nothing." 

And "strict nothing" means contradiction, nonpossibility, the total absence of actual or possible being.

In a word, absurdity. In other words, manifestation minus its principle is like smoke without fire or a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, with no original image. Which is why "The world of manifestation must be inverted, for it, including ourselves in manifestation, is already 'upside down.'" 

Oaky, break through is over. Back on your heads.