In Tune With the Infinite Tune

Reality is an open system because the Godhead is an open system. 

Which is not the best way to put it, because God can't literally be a system, which is to say, composed of parts. We'll clean that up later. 

What is an open system? Last I checked, it is a spontaneous organization that emerges under far-from-equilibrium conditions. Such systems are open to the surrounding environment, exchanging matter, information, and/or energy, while dissipating entropy. 

Again, it makes no sense to regard God as a "process structure." Then again, there may be certain fruitful analogies to our situation herebelow. 

Back to the book we're discussing. It has a section on Karl Rahner's "transcendental pneumatology," and Rahner seems to be in the same not-so-strange attractor tugging at us in vertical phase space:

His basic thesis is that God reveals himself to every person in the very experience of that person's finite yet open (to God and revelation) transcendence (emphasis mine).

If we're on the right track, then the Godhead must somehow be infinite and open -- which sounds paradoxical until you realize it's quite orthoparadoxical after all, furnishing the key to many mysteries.

Rahner is notoriously obscure and even German, so he is perhaps not the best authority on himself. Nevertheless, let's kick the tires of the following passage and drive it around the block a couple of times:

not only are humans always by nature open to God, they are also always supernaturally elevated by God in that transcendental openness, so that such elevation becomes an actual experience of God in every human life (emphasis mine).

Not only is that refreshingly clear, it highlights all the conditions required for the evolution of a vertical process structure in celestial phase space. In other words, we are all -- by virtue of our humanness -- "pulled" up and into God, who

actually communicates himself to every human person in a gracious offer of free grace, so that God's presence becomes an existential, a constituent element, in every person's humanity.

Now, one thing we want to do is keep this discussion strictly scientific, and yet experiential. Of course, there is no "science of experience," since the very conduct of science presupposes experience. Thus, we're talking about a transcendent meta-level that somehow "feeds" experience from outside and above. 

And when we say "feed," we're being rather literal, because what does nourish the soul? Even people who believe in neither the soul nor God will concede that it dries up without the input of truth, love, and beauty, i.e., the transcendentals. We are always nourished from above. Unless we're malnourished from below. 

This is an unexpected sidestreet, but at the moment I am reading a biography of the immortal songwriter Johnny Mercer. In it there's a description of how he worked. His father wrote that during a visit in 1939, he asked Johnny to

"tell me how it is that a boy of your age [30 at the time] can write over 500 songs and does not know music and cannot play an instrument. How do you account for it?" 

After pondering and thinking for a few minutes, John turned to me and said, "Pop, to tell you the truth I simply get to thinking over the song, pondering over it in my mind and all of a sudden, I get in tune with the Infinite."

The Aphorist reminds us that 

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

 Again, very experience-near.

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Mercer's father sensed the footsteps and suggested that his son's inspiration came from "very high sources. That's why I believe that John's talent is from above and that he is a musical genius." 

Aesthetics cannot give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles.

And 

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Back to Kärkkäinen: "God's self-communication means that God makes his very own self the innermost constitutive element of the human person." God

has already communicated himself in his Holy Spirit always and everywhere and to every person as the innermost center of his existence (Rahner).

Always everybody everywhere? 

Only God and the central point of my consciousness are not adventitious to me.

Adventitious: Arising from an external cause or factor; not inherent; Of or belonging to a structure that develops in an unusual place. 

And nothing could be a more unusual place than human consciousness. Which is never "alone" but always "with": 

The experience of self and God is never an individualistic experience but rather something that takes place in relation to others. 

The very structure of consciousness is not a structure -- a static one -- but a dynamic and open process structure that again imports and "metabolizes" truth, love, and beauty.

You know the feeling / Of something half-remembered, / Of something that never happened, / Yet you recall it well. / You know the feeling / Of recognizing someone / That you've never met / As far as you can tell,

Well, it's like that. Hard to describe... 

I'll never find the words / That say enough, / Tell enough, / I mean they just aren't swell enough. --Johnny Mercer