Lifting the Veil and Peeking Under the Cosmic Area Rug

Here’s where things get a little dicey, because if Schuon is correct, -- and more than a few Christian mystics & meistics would endorse his view -- then what most folks typically think of as “God” is not God at all, in the sense of the Absolute Absolute. Rather, any God we can imagine or conceive of must be relative -- not in the sense of the radically stupid relativism of postmodern cretins, but rather, the Relative Absolute (RA).

The moment we use that word -- “relative” -- it sounds like a downgrade, but it is not intended to be. It reminds me of how so many overeducated midwits think Einstein’s theory of relativity somehow implies that “everything is relative,” when it means the opposite: if most everything in physics is relative, it is relative to certain absolutes, including the absolute speed of light. 

This is not to conflate absolutes of physics with the Absolute as such (AA). Indeed, it requires years of postgraduate  training to believe such an idiocy. 

I will resist the temptation to make this post about physics, and just reaffirm that the reason why we can anchor our thinking in certain absolutes is because these are grounded in the AA. Absent the latter, then everything would indeed be purely relative, which is another way of saying Absolute Absurdity, at which point you might as well work for Disney, or worse, Harvard.

Still, people generally don’t like the idea that their God isn’t the AA, full stop. My pushing this line of Coon droppings no doubt contributes to my increasingly selective audience, but it is what it is, and more to the point, isn’t what it isn’t. And the RA isn’t the AA.

Such seemingly arcane distinctions are important for the vertical adventurer, because they help to maintain intelligibility in the celestial world as far as possible, until the moment all intelligibility vanishes. No, I’m not talking about death, rather, about precisely what goes on inside the Godhead.  

There is a membrane between us and the AA, and thank God, because this is God -- the RA God. 

This is getting a little difficult to explain, but perhaps it will help if I SHOUT! It goes to the idea -- metaphysical idea -- of the Veil, for example, that one in the temple that was shredded in two from top to bottom. To quote Beavis, This means something, and it certainly means more than a piece of cloth being torn in half. The deeper point is that the very membrane that separates us from the AA has been breeched.  

Now, about this membrane. I am hardly a biblical expert, but I do have an index, and there’s a most mythterious passage in Exodus 34:33-35 that reads:

When Moses was finished speaking to them, he put on a veil to cover his face. Whenever Moses came before the Lord to speak with him, Moses took off the veil until he went outside. 

When he went outside, he told the children of Israel all that had been commanded them. The children of Israel saw that the skin of his face had become radiant. Then he put the veil on over his face again, until he went in to speak with the Lord again.

I don’t know about you, but that passage fries my solenoids. But there’s more, because again, I have an index, and I’m not afraid to use it. 

In 2 Corinthians 3:12-16, Paul deploys “great boldness of speech,” bolder even than the Rabbi, for "the veil is taken away in Christ.” This is followed by an oh-by-the-way comment that “the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty."

Surely this must be a reference to the vertical liberty that occurs when we lift the veil and peak under the rug.

We are at a crossroads: quit now or dive further in. Let’s compromise and try to maintain the same flight level. I don’t feel like melting my wings this early in the day. 

At the moment we’re eight miles high, and we want it to stay that way. This is but an airplane of a post, not a rocket, which would necessarily take on a different coontour. Among other things, language would start to disintegrate on your nerves, as we’ve seen all too often on this blog.  

For now, let’s try to steer crystal clear of sudden ascents. Of the RA, Schuon writes that 

We have alluded more than once to the seemingly contradictory, but metaphysically useful and even indispensable, idea of the “relatively absolute,” which is absolute in relation to what it rules, while pertaining to relativity in relation to the “Pure [or Absolute] Absolute” (emphasis mine).

That emboldened word again goes to maintaining God’s intelligibility as far up as we possibly can. For at a certain point we have to leave words behind and below. True, we can bring back souvenirs, but it’s hard to put them into words. But every once in awhile someone brings back a nice song. To be played at maximum volume.

What the heck, it’s the weekend. One more -- crank it & ride upstream on the coltrain:

Lifting the Veil and Peeking Under the Cosmic Area Rug

Here’s where things get a little dicey, because if Schuon is correct, -- and more than a few Christian mystics & meistics would endorse his view -- then what most folks typically think of as “God” is not God at all, in the sense of the Absolute Absolute. Rather, any God we can imagine or conceive of must be relative -- not in the sense of the radically stupid relativism of postmodern cretins, but rather, the Relative Absolute (RA).

The moment we use that word -- “relative” -- it sounds like a downgrade, but it is not intended to be. It reminds me of how so many overeducated midwits think Einstein’s theory of relativity somehow implies that “everything is relative,” when it means the opposite: if most everything in physics is relative, it is relative to certain absolutes, including the absolute speed of light. 

This is not to conflate absolutes of physics with the Absolute as such (AA). Indeed, it requires years of postgraduate  training to believe such an idiocy. 

I will resist the temptation to make this post about physics, and just reaffirm that the reason why we can anchor our thinking in certain absolutes is because these are grounded in the AA. Absent the latter, then everything would indeed be purely relative, which is another way of saying Absolute Absurdity, at which point you might as well work for Disney, or worse, Harvard.

Still, people generally don’t like the idea that their God isn’t the AA, full stop. My pushing this line of Coon droppings no doubt contributes to my increasingly selective audience, but it is what it is, and more to the point, isn’t what it isn’t. And the RA isn’t the AA.

Such seemingly arcane distinctions are important for the vertical adventurer, because they help to maintain intelligibility in the celestial world as far as possible, until the moment all intelligibility vanishes. No, I’m not talking about death, rather, about precisely what goes on inside the Godhead.  

There is a membrane between us and the AA, and thank God, because this is God -- the RA God. 

This is getting a little difficult to explain, but perhaps it will help if I SHOUT! It goes to the idea -- metaphysical idea -- of the Veil, for example, that one in the temple that was shredded in two from top to bottom. To quote Beavis, This means something, and it certainly means more than a piece of cloth being torn in half. The deeper point is that the very membrane that separates us from the AA has been breeched.  

Now, about this membrane. I am hardly a biblical expert, but I do have an index, and there’s a most mythterious passage in Exodus 34:33-35 that reads:

When Moses was finished speaking to them, he put on a veil to cover his face. Whenever Moses came before the Lord to speak with him, Moses took off the veil until he went outside. 

When he went outside, he told the children of Israel all that had been commanded them. The children of Israel saw that the skin of his face had become radiant. Then he put the veil on over his face again, until he went in to speak with the Lord again.

I don’t know about you, but that passage fries my solenoids. But there’s more, because again, I have an index, and I’m not afraid to use it. 

In 2 Corinthians 3:12-16, Paul deploys “great boldness of speech,” bolder even than the Rabbi, for "the veil is taken away in Christ.” This is followed by an oh-by-the-way comment that “the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty."

Surely this must be a reference to the vertical liberty that occurs when we lift the veil and peak under the rug.

We are at a crossroads: quit now or dive further in. Let’s compromise and try to maintain the same flight level. I don’t feel like melting my wings this early in the day. 

At the moment we’re eight miles high, and we want it to stay that way. This is but an airplane of a post, not a rocket, which would necessarily take on a different coontour. Among other things, language would start to disintegrate on your nerves, as we’ve seen all too often on this blog.  

For now, let’s try to steer crystal clear of sudden ascents. Of the RA, Schuon writes that 

We have alluded more than once to the seemingly contradictory, but metaphysically useful and even indispensable, idea of the “relatively absolute,” which is absolute in relation to what it rules, while pertaining to relativity in relation to the “Pure [or Absolute] Absolute” (emphasis mine).

That emboldened word again goes to maintaining God’s intelligibility as far up as we possibly can. For at a certain point we have to leave words behind and below. True, we can bring back souvenirs, but it’s hard to put them into words. But every once in awhile someone brings back a nice song. To be played at maximum volume.

What the heck, it’s the weekend. One more -- crank it & ride upstream on the coltrain:

The Accidentally On Purpose Cosmos

The Absolute Absolute (AA) is relatively easy to comprehend, since everybody’s got one, whether religious or even moreso, i.e., radical secularists. 

I still remember the day this key opened my lock, because it’s one of those primordial ideas which, once seen, can never be unseen.

I don’t mean to descend into treacly gnostalgia, but I first sighted it while reading a book called The Restitution of Metaphysics by a philosopher named Errol Harris. He was a stepping stone to even stonier things, but just what I needed at the time. 

I suppose Harris suffers from a low-grade case of pantheism, but he is correct that a prior wholeness is pervasively present at every level of the cosmos, from physics to biology to psychology and beyond. To cite a random example vis a vis evolution, he writes that 

there must be some principle of unity, creating and maintaining coherent wholes, already inherent in the process of the world from which life originally emerged.

The same wholeness recurs on the psychological plane because this is, after all, a fractal universe (according to me): in consciousness there is the implicit presence of an

organizing principle of the whole, active in my finite subjectivity -- the whole which embraces both me and my world. Consciousness is both finite (and temporal) and transcendent...

Or horizontal and vertical, yada yada. A note to myself says The moment of eternity is the universal ordering principle which constitutes the processual flow into serial structure. Another claims that History is the time taken by humans to explicate humanness, and a third poses the eternal question, Can I buy some pot from you, Sphinx?

Back to the AA. One of the enduring philosophical and theological questions is how anything but the AA can exist, or in plain English, how creation or manifestation can exist apart from the Creator. 

Everywhere and everywhen man seeks Unity. It is how we roll, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it because we are instances of the very anterior wholeness that pervades and precedes the Cosmos. We are indeed mirrorcles of the One and lonely.

Seen in this Light, reductionism is just a sterile search for unity at the wrong end. It literally turns the teloscope back to front, such that the furthest things look near and the nearest & dearest disappear altogether. Consciousness is reduced to matter, so nothing sees nothing at all. Let those with eyes hear!

So the AA simply cannot not be, no matter how one tries to square that absurcularity. It is Necessary Being, and this is the very Ground we stand upon, and without which we could never arise a'tall and be upright citizens of the cosmos.  

But because there is Necessity there is Contingency. Here things get a bit subtle if not tricksy, but it means there is a largish dimension of -- how to put it -- necessary contingency. 

Don't grab this the wrong way, but one might say that ours is an accidentally on purpose universe, and if it weren’t this way, it simply could not be. For us, anyway.

Rather, it would be the strictly Ab'allasolute universe of Islam, or a scientistically deterministic one, or a Luthero-Calvinistic one of double predestination and ontological occasionalism, or a neo-Marxist one of pure tenured bullshit. No freedom for you!

Now, how do we escape from this closed circle of strict nonsense? Easy: via the principle of the Relative Absolute. But this is my short morn, so to be continued. 

One of my favorite songs is In the Garden by Van Morrison. It’s on a short list of songs to played at my funeral. There are so many versions, I don’t know which to pick, so surprise me. 

 

The Accidentally On Purpose Cosmos

The Absolute Absolute (AA) is relatively easy to comprehend, since everybody’s got one, whether religious or even moreso, i.e., radical secularists. 

I still remember the day this key opened my lock, because it’s one of those primordial ideas which, once seen, can never be unseen.

I don’t mean to descend into treacly gnostalgia, but I first sighted it while reading a book called The Restitution of Metaphysics by a philosopher named Errol Harris. He was a stepping stone to even stonier things, but just what I needed at the time. 

I suppose Harris suffers from a low-grade case of pantheism, but he is correct that a prior wholeness is pervasively present at every level of the cosmos, from physics to biology to psychology and beyond. To cite a random example vis a vis evolution, he writes that 

there must be some principle of unity, creating and maintaining coherent wholes, already inherent in the process of the world from which life originally emerged.

The same wholeness recurs on the psychological plane because this is, after all, a fractal universe (according to me): in consciousness there is the implicit presence of an

organizing principle of the whole, active in my finite subjectivity -- the whole which embraces both me and my world. Consciousness is both finite (and temporal) and transcendent...

Or horizontal and vertical, yada yada. A note to myself says The moment of eternity is the universal ordering principle which constitutes the processual flow into serial structure. Another claims that History is the time taken by humans to explicate humanness, and a third poses the eternal question, Can I buy some pot from you, Sphinx?

Back to the AA. One of the enduring philosophical and theological questions is how anything but the AA can exist, or in plain English, how creation or manifestation can exist apart from the Creator. 

Everywhere and everywhen man seeks Unity. It is how we roll, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it because we are instances of the very anterior wholeness that pervades and precedes the Cosmos. We are indeed mirrorcles of the One and lonely.

Seen in this Light, reductionism is just a sterile search for unity at the wrong end. It literally turns the teloscope back to front, such that the furthest things look near and the nearest & dearest disappear altogether. Consciousness is reduced to matter, so nothing sees nothing at all. Let those with eyes hear!

So the AA simply cannot not be, no matter how one tries to square that absurcularity. It is Necessary Being, and this is the very Ground we stand upon, and without which we could never arise a'tall and be upright citizens of the cosmos.  

But because there is Necessity there is Contingency. Here things get a bit subtle if not tricksy, but it means there is a largish dimension of -- how to put it -- necessary contingency. 

Don't grab this the wrong way, but one might say that ours is an accidentally on purpose universe, and if it weren’t this way, it simply could not be. For us, anyway.

Rather, it would be the strictly Ab'allasolute universe of Islam, or a scientistically deterministic one, or a Luthero-Calvinistic one of double predestination and ontological occasionalism, or a neo-Marxist one of pure tenured bullshit. No freedom for you!

Now, how do we escape from this closed circle of strict nonsense? Easy: via the principle of the Relative Absolute. But this is my short morn, so to be continued. 

One of my favorite songs is In the Garden by Van Morrison. It’s on a short list of songs to played at my funeral. There are so many versions, I don’t know which to pick, so surprise me. 

 

Queer Theology

Alright ramblers, let’s get ramblin’: we’re going to attempt to articulate the four possibilities mentioned (or implied) in yesterday’s post, from the Absolute Absolute (AA) to Absolute Relative (AR) to Relative Absolute (RA) and all the way to Relative Relative (RR). In so doing, we should be able to uncover the waterfount, i.e., every mode and possibility of Celestial Central.

AA is the easiest of the four, so easy that I can hand the job over to Schuon while I factcheck last night’s SOTU. I’m curious to find out if there were any. 

By the way: have you noticed that any imbecile can check the facts, but nobody ever checks the principles?

But if they did, they would soon enough discover that many if not most if not all of the principles of the left are literally impossible. I’m thinking, for example, of Mises and Hayek, who make this abundantly clear vis-a-vis the Fatal Conceit of socialist economics.

We'll bite: just what is the Fatal Conceit of socialist economics? Easy: that it is possible. 

Same with “social justice”: since it’s just a nonsense term, it too is strictly impossible. Which is the whole appeal: for progressive losers and activists (BIRM), this horizontal adventure in absurdity replaces the properly human spiritual / vertical adventure. 

Same too with the Equity Agenda, except it is all too possible. I was about to say it is the old “boot stamping on a human face, forever” of fascism, but it’s more like a pervert in a sundress pushing his crotch into a child’s face for as long as the show lasts. It just feels like forever.

Let me preface Schuon's description by suggesting or even guessing that AA is the radically apophatic Godhead about which nothing can be said except to say that it utterly transcends language. 

Silence! No uttering allowed. Even so, this total apophasia isn’t the end of it, but this won’t become clear until we’ve surveyed the whole cosmic scheme from top to bottom to sideways to inside & out.

Let me also say that Schuon’s “controlling paradigm,” so to speak, is Vedanta and not Christianity. He seems even to imply that this is self-evident, and later I’ll put on my old Psychologist’s Hat and speculate why this might be the case -- i.e., why someone might be attracted to a totally impersonal Spocklike Godhead. 

It has a certain appeal -- indeed, I myself dabbled in Zen, Taoism, and Advaita Vedanta at one point, before making the paradigm shift to the personal God, or the “God of persons,” more on which as we proceed. 

At any rate, Schuon is a big enough person to overlook my metaphysical personalism. Besides, it's nothing personal, just isness as fusional, as we hope to prove.  

I suppose Schuon’s most important point is the distinction between AA and RA, the former going more to pure metaphysics (and pure eosterism), the latter more to conventional religion -- not to this or that religion, but to exoteric religiosity as such. 

Imagine a kind of Cloud of Unknowing (imagination being the membrane between here and there). 

Again, this is the apophatic Godhead, the primordial reality of which nothing can be positively said or known. It is the AA -- total and absolute, not to mention eternal, infinite, translinguistic, beyond name and form. No tongue has soiled it, and no one sees its face and lives. I was about to say its name is I AM, but even that is too clear, or insufficiently obscure rather.  

Perhaps the most adequate term is Beyond-Being, because Being is the most abstract, general, and universal term we can possibly imagine, and yet, it is beyond that. It is literally the great Queerer Than We Can Suppose, so whatever we manage to say about it, it is queerer still. It is so queer that it is infinitely beyond Liberace, or Don LeMón, or even Barack Obama.

Anyway, here is Schuon’s description of AA:

In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute, and that being absolute it is infinite. That is absolute which allows of no augmentation or diminution, or of no repetition or division; it is therefore that which is at once solely itself and totally itself....

In the Absolute, I am not, and you are not, and God (in His personal determination) is not, because He (the Absolute) is beyond the reach of all word and all thought.

I might add that it is at once the Silence out of which music flows, and mirrored in the silence between the notes. It is the Magnificent Void, as empty as Brandon’s head, and yet, unlike it, conscious.

Queer Theology

Alright ramblers, let’s get ramblin’: we’re going to attempt to articulate the four possibilities mentioned (or implied) in yesterday’s post, from the Absolute Absolute (AA) to Absolute Relative (AR) to Relative Absolute (RA) and all the way to Relative Relative (RR). In so doing, we should be able to uncover the waterfount, i.e., every mode and possibility of Celestial Central.

AA is the easiest of the four, so easy that I can hand the job over to Schuon while I factcheck last night’s SOTU. I’m curious to find out if there were any. 

By the way: have you noticed that any imbecile can check the facts, but nobody ever checks the principles?

But if they did, they would soon enough discover that many if not most if not all of the principles of the left are literally impossible. I’m thinking, for example, of Mises and Hayek, who make this abundantly clear vis-a-vis the Fatal Conceit of socialist economics.

We'll bite: just what is the Fatal Conceit of socialist economics? Easy: that it is possible. 

Same with “social justice”: since it’s just a nonsense term, it too is strictly impossible. Which is the whole appeal: for progressive losers and activists (BIRM), this horizontal adventure in absurdity replaces the properly human spiritual / vertical adventure. 

Same too with the Equity Agenda, except it is all too possible. I was about to say it is the old “boot stamping on a human face, forever” of fascism, but it’s more like a pervert in a sundress pushing his crotch into a child’s face for as long as the show lasts. It just feels like forever.

Let me preface Schuon's description by suggesting or even guessing that AA is the radically apophatic Godhead about which nothing can be said except to say that it utterly transcends language. 

Silence! No uttering allowed. Even so, this total apophasia isn’t the end of it, but this won’t become clear until we’ve surveyed the whole cosmic scheme from top to bottom to sideways to inside & out.

Let me also say that Schuon’s “controlling paradigm,” so to speak, is Vedanta and not Christianity. He seems even to imply that this is self-evident, and later I’ll put on my old Psychologist’s Hat and speculate why this might be the case -- i.e., why someone might be attracted to a totally impersonal Spocklike Godhead. 

It has a certain appeal -- indeed, I myself dabbled in Zen, Taoism, and Advaita Vedanta at one point, before making the paradigm shift to the personal God, or the “God of persons,” more on which as we proceed. 

At any rate, Schuon is a big enough person to overlook my metaphysical personalism. Besides, it's nothing personal, just isness as fusional, as we hope to prove.  

I suppose Schuon’s most important point is the distinction between AA and RA, the former going more to pure metaphysics (and pure eosterism), the latter more to conventional religion -- not to this or that religion, but to exoteric religiosity as such. 

Imagine a kind of Cloud of Unknowing (imagination being the membrane between here and there). 

Again, this is the apophatic Godhead, the primordial reality of which nothing can be positively said or known. It is the AA -- total and absolute, not to mention eternal, infinite, translinguistic, beyond name and form. No tongue has soiled it, and no one sees its face and lives. I was about to say its name is I AM, but even that is too clear, or insufficiently obscure rather.  

Perhaps the most adequate term is Beyond-Being, because Being is the most abstract, general, and universal term we can possibly imagine, and yet, it is beyond that. It is literally the great Queerer Than We Can Suppose, so whatever we manage to say about it, it is queerer still. It is so queer that it is infinitely beyond Liberace, or Don LeMón, or even Barack Obama.

Anyway, here is Schuon’s description of AA:

In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute, and that being absolute it is infinite. That is absolute which allows of no augmentation or diminution, or of no repetition or division; it is therefore that which is at once solely itself and totally itself....

In the Absolute, I am not, and you are not, and God (in His personal determination) is not, because He (the Absolute) is beyond the reach of all word and all thought.

I might add that it is at once the Silence out of which music flows, and mirrored in the silence between the notes. It is the Magnificent Void, as empty as Brandon’s head, and yet, unlike it, conscious.

The State of the Cosmos

The state of the cosmos is... fallen, I guess, so, same as it ever was: We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 

As for my microcosmos, i.e., the disordered order of Bob, you’ve probably noticed the annoying uptick in productivity or blowhardity since I was baptized and confirmed last April. Not only do I have more to say, every day I fall further behind in saying it. 

Moreover, used to be the posts spontaneously structured themselves into a beginning, middle, and end, whereas nowadays they end in the middle or sometimes even the beginning. Could this simply be due to age and its inevitable wooliness? Grangag's never-ending stories? State of the cosmos or state of the onion?

I count about 250 posts since taking the plunge, so if we continue at this rate, it may end up being the most productive 12 month period in the blog's existence, although even I don't care about the quantity, rather, the immortality, i.e., deluding myself that if I write enough, it will be as if I cheated death. You know, like Joyce:  

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

There must be literally thousands of gags in here that no one will ever get. But hold on… If no one laughs, did the joke ever happen? You call that immortality? 

Let’s get back to our subject, or at least try to gain some ground on it and close the gap between (¶) and O.  

As I recall, we were talking about limitations on divine omnipotence, at least in a manner of speaking. We’re not presuming to tell God what he can or can't do, rather, only trying to make him a tad more intelligible. We get it:

Wisdom comes down to not instructing God on how things should be done.

And

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

Understood. I give up already! 

Nownow, don't get carried away. For

God does not  ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission. 

Indeed, Raccoon Science is just like any other science or ology -- in this case, logology, or Oology. 

Note that the Logos as such is, among other things, the Reason of the cosmos. Thus logology, our reasoning about the Divine Reason (or perhaps vice versa).  

Either way, the cosmos is a surprisingly reasonable place despite its many enigmas and puzzles that will keep us busy for centuries arguing over what it all means.

Focus!

Okay! No need to yell.

Let’s get to what this is all leading to, which is the “relationship” between Relative and Absolute. 

The reason I put "relationship" in quotes is because it is already an attribute or entailment of the Relative as such. And the "reason" I capitalize Relative is because I think there is an aspect of it, or a way of thinking about it, that puts it on the same lofty plane as the Absolute. I would even argue suggest that the two -- Absolute and Relative -- may possibly be the Mother of all complementarities.  

And the reason I capitalize Mother is because… 

We’ll get to that?, but it has to do with the mega-complementarity of them all, which I suspect will come back to Mother, Father, and Child -- or, more abstractly, Beyond-Being, Being, and Logos, in what amounts to an intrinsic and eternally fertile tri-complementarity which is reflected down here, and come to think of it, may go back to Paul’s wise crack in the first paragraph about the the whole darn creation trying to give birth to something. 

Certainly Meister Eckhart thought in these maternal terms, and right there you see the problem, as I could easily jump down that hole and bring back a whole drove of hares. 

What, like Hare Krishna?

Shut up, Donny.

Let’s sketch out the possibilities: Absolute Absolute, Relative Absolute, and Absolute Relative. I don’t think we need to posit a “Relative Relative,” since that seems redundant, or at least not immediately intelligible. Let me think about it for a sec….

Hold on, I think it might make sense, in that it goes to the relations that exist in the cosmic harearchy, in which everything is relative to something above and below. For example, man is relative to animals below and angels above. In turn, there are hierarchies of animals and angels. It's a fractal cosmos.

Now, this scheme of Absolute Absolute / Relative Absolute / Absolute Relative / Relative Relative — how does it relate to Everything? Or is it the very scheme, skeleton, and framework itself?

I suspect the latter. That’s a solid lead. We’ll follow up on it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, our prayer:

The State of the Cosmos

The state of the cosmos is... fallen, I guess, so, same as it ever was: We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. 

As for my microcosmos, i.e., the disordered order of Bob, you’ve probably noticed the annoying uptick in productivity or blowhardity since I was baptized and confirmed last April. Not only do I have more to say, every day I fall further behind in saying it. 

Moreover, used to be the posts spontaneously structured themselves into a beginning, middle, and end, whereas nowadays they end in the middle or sometimes even the beginning. Could this simply be due to age and its inevitable wooliness? Grangag's never-ending stories? State of the cosmos or state of the onion?

I count about 250 posts since taking the plunge, so if we continue at this rate, it may end up being the most productive 12 month period in the blog's existence, although even I don't care about the quantity, rather, the immortality, i.e., deluding myself that if I write enough, it will be as if I cheated death. You know, like Joyce:  

I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.

There must be literally thousands of gags in here that no one will ever get. But hold on… If no one laughs, did the joke ever happen? You call that immortality? 

Let’s get back to our subject, or at least try to gain some ground on it and close the gap between (¶) and O.  

As I recall, we were talking about limitations on divine omnipotence, at least in a manner of speaking. We’re not presuming to tell God what he can or can't do, rather, only trying to make him a tad more intelligible. We get it:

Wisdom comes down to not instructing God on how things should be done.

And

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

Understood. I give up already! 

Nownow, don't get carried away. For

God does not  ask for the submission of the intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission. 

Indeed, Raccoon Science is just like any other science or ology -- in this case, logology, or Oology. 

Note that the Logos as such is, among other things, the Reason of the cosmos. Thus logology, our reasoning about the Divine Reason (or perhaps vice versa).  

Either way, the cosmos is a surprisingly reasonable place despite its many enigmas and puzzles that will keep us busy for centuries arguing over what it all means.

Focus!

Okay! No need to yell.

Let’s get to what this is all leading to, which is the “relationship” between Relative and Absolute. 

The reason I put "relationship" in quotes is because it is already an attribute or entailment of the Relative as such. And the "reason" I capitalize Relative is because I think there is an aspect of it, or a way of thinking about it, that puts it on the same lofty plane as the Absolute. I would even argue suggest that the two -- Absolute and Relative -- may possibly be the Mother of all complementarities.  

And the reason I capitalize Mother is because… 

We’ll get to that?, but it has to do with the mega-complementarity of them all, which I suspect will come back to Mother, Father, and Child -- or, more abstractly, Beyond-Being, Being, and Logos, in what amounts to an intrinsic and eternally fertile tri-complementarity which is reflected down here, and come to think of it, may go back to Paul’s wise crack in the first paragraph about the the whole darn creation trying to give birth to something. 

Certainly Meister Eckhart thought in these maternal terms, and right there you see the problem, as I could easily jump down that hole and bring back a whole drove of hares. 

What, like Hare Krishna?

Shut up, Donny.

Let’s sketch out the possibilities: Absolute Absolute, Relative Absolute, and Absolute Relative. I don’t think we need to posit a “Relative Relative,” since that seems redundant, or at least not immediately intelligible. Let me think about it for a sec….

Hold on, I think it might make sense, in that it goes to the relations that exist in the cosmic harearchy, in which everything is relative to something above and below. For example, man is relative to animals below and angels above. In turn, there are hierarchies of animals and angels. It's a fractal cosmos.

Now, this scheme of Absolute Absolute / Relative Absolute / Absolute Relative / Relative Relative — how does it relate to Everything? Or is it the very scheme, skeleton, and framework itself?

I suspect the latter. That’s a solid lead. We’ll follow up on it tomorrow.

Meanwhile, our prayer:

I Want to Speak to the Manager!

I don’t always disagree with Schuon, but when I do, Dupree asks me what I’ve been smoking and if he can buy some pot from me.  

I exaggerate. Let’s just say Dupree has never paid retail for pot.

But I do hesitate to disagree with Schuon, since he seems to have a source he doesn’t tell us about. A kind of Intrinsic Authority, if you will. Of course, every cult leader comes off as an unquestioned authority, and sends out a vibe to vertical cronies such as myself to Back off man, I’m a Shaykh, or Einstein of Consciousness, or 11th Degree Peltmaster.

That Schuon was a cult leader is neither here nor there. Rather, the question always and everywhere comes down to what is true, for there are good cults and bad cults. 

Jesus was a cult leader too, and indeed, every big-box religion starts out as a cult with a single person at the center, from Abraham to Moses and everyone in between, e.g.,  Gautama Buddha, Lao Tse, Mohammad, Martin Luther, Phineas Quimby, Clarence 13X, The Báb, Sai Baba, Bob Dobbs, et al.

I just now remembered a book I read back in the day, that day being in the late 1990s, called The Book of Enlightened Masters. The title is only quasi-ironic; as I recall, the author goes back and forth between a gentle skepticism and a freewheeling, indulgent benefit-of-the-doubt, vertical libertarianism.

And why not? Just because we don’t know, it doesn’t mean someone else might not know, especially when that someone speaks with such charismatic authority!

This may sound a bit odd, but I often extend this indulgent attitude to myself. How to explain it… 

Hold on a sec -- did this insolent Gagdad person just call me a cult leader? Ouch!

As to my own Intrinsic Authority, it’s like this: when I (The B'ob) really want to drill down into a primordial subject, -- which is most of the time -- I just begin writing about it, and at some point it’s like what I imagine it must be like for a lead guitarist, say, Derek Trucks, who is my favorite, since he combines so many influences. 

Suddenly the solo begins taking off, as if it has a mind of its own. Did I do that? Yes, but with the cooperation of some x-factor that wasn’t me at all. Come to think of it, pretty much every songwriter I’ve ever admired describes something similar. Is it grandiosity? Or humility? Or megalomodesty, AKA the Ultimate Humblebrag?

Matter of fact, just last night I was reading a book about The Beach Boys. Before trying to write a song (in this case with Randy Bachman), Carl Wilson would light a candle, put his hands together, and say, “Oh Great Spirit of Music, we are together as two souls and we ask for your guidance that we make good music together.” 

Say what you want, it often worked, for example, with the great song Feel Flows, which, as Dupree can tell you, “with its jazzy solos and mystical aura,” is "great stoner music.”

Anyway, more often than not, I don’t know what I think about something until I write about it. But that’s only half of it, because once it’s written, I have to either agree or disagree with it. Yes, but based on what? By virtue of whose authority? Who died and left you in charge, Bob? 

This whole question of “authority” is a big one, and I probably haven’t discussed it enough. Out of 4,000+ posts, probably fewer than five have been on this subject. I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER!

There is no manager. No one's in charge. Obviously, because the post got away from me. Encasing, all-embracing wreath of repose engulfs all the senses, imposing, unclosing thoughts that compose... or tried to compose, anyway. Next time I'll light a candle to the Great Spirit of Blogging.

Musical consolation. Best I can do:

I Want to Speak to the Manager!

I don’t always disagree with Schuon, but when I do, Dupree asks me what I’ve been smoking and if he can buy some pot from me.  

I exaggerate. Let’s just say Dupree has never paid retail for pot.

But I do hesitate to disagree with Schuon, since he seems to have a source he doesn’t tell us about. A kind of Intrinsic Authority, if you will. Of course, every cult leader comes off as an unquestioned authority, and sends out a vibe to vertical cronies such as myself to Back off man, I’m a Shaykh, or Einstein of Consciousness, or 11th Degree Peltmaster.

That Schuon was a cult leader is neither here nor there. Rather, the question always and everywhere comes down to what is true, for there are good cults and bad cults. 

Jesus was a cult leader too, and indeed, every big-box religion starts out as a cult with a single person at the center, from Abraham to Moses and everyone in between, e.g.,  Gautama Buddha, Lao Tse, Mohammad, Martin Luther, Phineas Quimby, Clarence 13X, The Báb, Sai Baba, Bob Dobbs, et al.

I just now remembered a book I read back in the day, that day being in the late 1990s, called The Book of Enlightened Masters. The title is only quasi-ironic; as I recall, the author goes back and forth between a gentle skepticism and a freewheeling, indulgent benefit-of-the-doubt, vertical libertarianism.

And why not? Just because we don’t know, it doesn’t mean someone else might not know, especially when that someone speaks with such charismatic authority!

This may sound a bit odd, but I often extend this indulgent attitude to myself. How to explain it… 

Hold on a sec -- did this insolent Gagdad person just call me a cult leader? Ouch!

As to my own Intrinsic Authority, it’s like this: when I (The B'ob) really want to drill down into a primordial subject, -- which is most of the time -- I just begin writing about it, and at some point it’s like what I imagine it must be like for a lead guitarist, say, Derek Trucks, who is my favorite, since he combines so many influences. 

Suddenly the solo begins taking off, as if it has a mind of its own. Did I do that? Yes, but with the cooperation of some x-factor that wasn’t me at all. Come to think of it, pretty much every songwriter I’ve ever admired describes something similar. Is it grandiosity? Or humility? Or megalomodesty, AKA the Ultimate Humblebrag?

Matter of fact, just last night I was reading a book about The Beach Boys. Before trying to write a song (in this case with Randy Bachman), Carl Wilson would light a candle, put his hands together, and say, “Oh Great Spirit of Music, we are together as two souls and we ask for your guidance that we make good music together.” 

Say what you want, it often worked, for example, with the great song Feel Flows, which, as Dupree can tell you, “with its jazzy solos and mystical aura,” is "great stoner music.”

Anyway, more often than not, I don’t know what I think about something until I write about it. But that’s only half of it, because once it’s written, I have to either agree or disagree with it. Yes, but based on what? By virtue of whose authority? Who died and left you in charge, Bob? 

This whole question of “authority” is a big one, and I probably haven’t discussed it enough. Out of 4,000+ posts, probably fewer than five have been on this subject. I WANT TO SPEAK TO THE MANAGER!

There is no manager. No one's in charge. Obviously, because the post got away from me. Encasing, all-embracing wreath of repose engulfs all the senses, imposing, unclosing thoughts that compose... or tried to compose, anyway. Next time I'll light a candle to the Great Spirit of Blogging.

Musical consolation. Best I can do:

The Lèse-Majestiést Man in L.A. County

Continuing with our theme of what God is really like when we get to know him (and vice versa), let’s veer back to that essay by Hans Jonas, A Concept of God After Auschwitz. 

Again, “Auschwitz" is just a synecdoche for the inconceivable suffering that goes on down here. It can even be a bit misleading, because the mere mathematical fact can obscure the existential fact that 6 million is equal to 1, or rather, that 6,000,000 x ∞ is still ∞, each of the 6,000,000 individuals being infinitely precious. 

One of the strangest characteristics of man is that he is a “species” of utterly unique and unrepeatable instances, which would seem to be a contradiction in terms. I, for example, am a human being, but I'm still waiting to meet someone who reminds me of me.

This is a bit of a side point, but the reason for this is our theomorphism. In other words, God is the principle of absolute uniqueness, or Uniqueness as such, and since we are in his image, we participate in this uniqueness. 

Moreover, a trinitarian metaphysic implies that our "reflected uniqueness" must be reflected within the Godhead (i.e., as Son to Father). At any rate, you might say we are “relatively unique” whereas only God is absolutely unique. 

We human beings are relative to each other, but ultimately to God. It is why the people who detach themselves from the Principle of Uniqueness tend to become such horizontal clones of each other, i.e., statistics, conformists, sheep, lemmings, the swarming anthill of NPCs. There are even Aphorisms for this:

For God there are only individuals.

Inversely, for the left there are only statistics, races, sexual preferences, etc. Or just say Identity Politics.

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

The two poles are individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

As in mankind enclosed in progressive ideology. There is a circularity at work here, in that progressive ideology is indeed a sufficient explanation for the idiot who adopts it: feminism explain feminists, as queer theory explains queers and CRT explains the low IQ racists who are stupid enough to believe it.

Only for God are we irreplaceable.

That is indeed a bold statement, for it is easy enough for any intelligent person with sufficient curiosity to believe in God, but another thing to imagine he cares about us, of all people. 

Let’s try to rein Bob in and refocus on the essay. In it, Jonas sketches out his own myth of God and creation. I won’t say it’s as unhinged as my own huge mythunderstanding presented on pp. 6-17 of the bOOk. Still, my meta-myth is a kind of parallel looniverse to his, but let’s start with Jonas's and comment on it as we go along:

In the beginning, for unknowable reasons, the ground of being, or the Divine, chose to give itself over to the chance and risk and endless variety of becoming. And wholly so...

Several things can be said about this: first, that the beginning is always now, as in the vertical principles that uphold the cosmos in every moment (AKA continuous creation). Second, I’m not so sure the reasons are entirely unknowable, in the sense that, What does a Creator do all deity? Hmm. I know: create! 

You are correct, sir: creators gonna create. Perhaps we can best understand this with recourse to our own creativity, which is at once inexhaustible and a bit compulsive or addictive, so to speak. Not to attribute these latter to God, but if man can’t help himself from ceaseless creativity, what must God be like? He must toss out universes as readily as we do greeting cards and sitcoms.

Come to think of it… nah, never mind. Two words: Divine Sitcomedy. Unless its a Theodrama, in which case you deicide.  

Third, that word “becoming” can be a bit of a snare if we’re not careful. We love Whitehead, but we are not Whiteheadians, i.e., process philosophers in the literal sense. 

Rather, while being and becoming are always seen together -- i.e., they are complementary -- becoming must nevertheless be anchored in, or subordinate to, being. If not, then there is no avoiding a descent into the pantheistic absurdity of an “evolving God.” 

If we're going to talk about “change” in the Godhead -- and we are -- then we have to proceed very cautiously and respect the metaphysical guardrails. We’re not new age vulgarians. 

Back to Jonas’s whale of a myth: in giving itself over to creation and becoming, and

entering into the adventure of space and time, the deity held back nothing of itself: no uncommitted or unimpaired* part remained to direct, correct, and ultimately guarantee the devious working-out of its destiny in creation (*I frankly don't understand his use of that word).

A few comments. First, Jonas comes close here to the Christian concept of divine kenosis, which, in the words of Prof. Wiki, refers to "the 'self-emptying' of Jesus. The word is used in Philippians 2:7: '[Jesus] made himself nothing,’ or '[he] emptied himself.’”

There are more or less extreme versions of this, and I prefer the more extreme -- for example, the idea that this principle of kenosis extends all the way up and in, to the Father’s kenosis in engendering the Son, and the kenosis of Father and Son in breathing forth the Holy Spirit, or something. The point is, there’s a whole lotta kenosis going on up there.

We shall continue tomorrow. As usual, I never know the point at which I am overtaxing the reader. Just because I enjoy emptying my head, it doesn't imply that you should enjoy filling yours with my kenotic verbiage.