Taking the Pulse of the Cosmos

To reset: we're considering the possibility that the cosmos is structured in such a way that the whole is present in the parts, both spatially and temporally. If it is, then infinitude is present everywhere, and eternity is available everywhen. 

Of course, you already know what I think. Sure, they laughed at me and made jokes, but I proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt and with... geometric logic, way back when I published my dissertation in 1991 and 1993. 

That was when I still hoped to become a respectable scholar, but I threw it all away in 1995, when I decided to take my own ideas seriously and plunge into the Mystery on a fooltome basis. Really, given what I'd already written, there was nowhere else to go but up, or at least I wanted to find out if there was an up.

Let's dig out that 1991 offering and see if there are any useful nuggets, the child being father to the man, and all that. You know how it is:

Every writer comments indefinitely on his brief original text. 

Is that what I'm doing? Just spending down my modest inheritance?

The peculiar properties of the hologram provide the model for a resonant order of information in which everything is internally related: the whole is somehow enfolded in each part of the hologram, and vice versa.

In fact, 

the very ability of the mind to form symbols so readily may rest upon its its holographic substrate, in which one image can contain many ideas and images... 

Lots of yada yada about implicate and nonlocal waves of potential meaningfulness, and explicate local particles of actualized meaning. I see that there's even a subsection called HIGHER DIMENSIONAL SPACE AND TIME, in which youngBob claims that  

three-dimensional euclidean space is not a given, but rather, a special limiting case of a far more extensive n-dimensional space...

Space and time can no longer be thought of merely as a priori categories (a la Kant), but rather matrices through which the universe has created the conditions for its further evolution.

The universe has created? Yeah, I wasn't about to deploy the G-word in a secular journal (Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought). Just as it took a long time to figure out that I was no longer a man of the left, it took an equally long time to realize I wasn't an atheist.  

Say, I wonder if that journal still exists, and what sorts of things they're writing about? Looks like it went belly-up in 2003. 

Enough gnostalgia. The next chapter of book we're looking at is not shy about the G-word. It is called The Idea of God. For it seems that the attempt to confine ourselves within the straitjacket of finitude

denies itself and impels our thought beyond all limits to the postulation of an infinite being, on which all else depends and in which everything lives, moves, and has its being. 

Rather, "There must be"

an infinite whole -- call it what you will -- in which alone anything can be, and through which alone anything can be conceived.

We no longer call it the universe. Or if we do, the realization is forced upon us that the universe isn't what we think it is. No need to apologize, for we know that "knowledge in science" involves

transcendence of the finite because the subject of that knowledge [can]not consistently be brought under the laws and categories by which all its objects [are] determined. That which transcends the merely finite object of a science of finite entities subject to causal laws is consciousness, and, especially, self-consciousness...

He's not wrong: 

The sheer objectivity of science proves incompatible with the sheer subjectivity of consciousness.

But not really, because

Reflection upon scientific knowledge finds these two aspects of knowledge to be mutually necessary and correlative and at the same time mutually irreducible. 

In ether worlds, Somedivide and sumthelot but the tally turns round the same balifuson -- the fusion of "an absolute subject of an absolute knowledge," AKA the God of whom we are fractal images.

We abide in a cosmic network of interrelationships, in which "the relation between man and God is analogous to that of cells in a living body to its mind," or -- extending the analogy to time -- "we might think of ourselves each as 'a pulse in the eternal life.'" 

Grace circulates through the arteries of the living cosmos, or something, in a vast spiral of

exitus-redditus, an exit from and a return to God, Who is both Alpha and Omega. God is the ontological heart that pumps the blood of being through the arteries of creation into the body of the universe (Kreeft).

So don't be a stupid clot, or coronary thrombonehead in the body of Christ.