The Hologram to Your Private Particle

We try to make a little progress every day, even if we are coming up against the hard limit of an important football game. 

Which reminds me of our neighbors down the street. We were once over there for dinner, when the wife called to the husband to come to the kitchen. He said, "Wait a minute -- there's an important game on." She responded that "there's no such thing as an important game."

Suffice it to say, they are divorced. 

Back to Augustine for a moment -- while still on the subject of holofractal time -- he writes of how "I cannot totally grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is not large enough to contain itself." But

how can it not contain itself? How can there be any of itself that is not in itself? As this question struck me, I was overcome with wonder and almost with stupor (in Louth). 

Well, good: a Christian koan!

Let's try to think this koan through -- to the stupor and beyond. First, if you're not a mystery to yourself, either you're not trying or you're a bit thick. No offense, because if you fall into the latter category, you're not reading this blog anyway, trolls excepted.

Most words function as "containers" for a "contained": the word "dog," for example, contains the essence of "doginess," and even babies know how to do this (albeit implicitly).

But some words attempt to contain what cannot be contained; their content cannot be "tamed," so to speak, the word "God" being the quintessential case, for it can only pretend to circumscribe the Mystery.

Likewise "transcendence." As Voeglin says, it is more a directional pointer than a destination; it ultimately points to what he calls the Apeiron, the

Unlimited, indefinite, unbounded..., the "unlimited" source of all particular things. Because it transcends all limits, it is in principle undefinable (Webb).

So it seems that human consciousness partakes of the Apeiron in the very sense described by Augustine, for it cannot contain itself, and (ortho)paradoxically is both itself and not itself. 

Which is another way of saying that the part is in the whole and the whole in the part, even while the part cannot be the whole per se. 

The first step to God is discovery of self, discovery of the self as a spiritual being that contains and transcends the material order (Louth).

Louth then quotes Pascal to the effect that 

It is not in space that I should search for my dignity.... There is no advantage to me in the possession of land. As space, the universe encloses me and swallows me up like a little speck, [but] by thought I understand (or embrace) it.

So, in understanding the cosmos, thought embraces what embraces us. Louth continues: "though the self"

is a vast and wonderful thing, it is not God, nor does it contain God. And yet, in a way it touches God, it strains beyond itself to God....

For the mind longs for the truth, for reality, for true joy, joy that endures, that abides in the truth; in this is reaching beyond itself. Truth is not something that man possesses: it is like a light that shines in his mind and that he apprehends, even if only dimly (emphasis mine).

In this experience, we are "collected and bound up into unity within oneself, whereas we had been scattered abroad into multiplicity." About which I will have much more to say, and in fact, already said:

In the end, we are no longer a scattered, fragmented multiplicity in futile pursuit of an ever-receding unity, but a Unity that comprehends and transcends the multiplicity of the cosmos.

Thus "the end of our spiritual destiny is really an origin... a return to the beginning, a veritable re-ascent of time back to its non-temporal source."

We are Ones again back by oursoph before the beginning, before old nobodaddy committed wholly matterimany...

Yada yada. Suffice it to say that if you haven't perceived the the hologram to your private particle, it was probably just lost in the mail.