Your Outside is In When Your Inside is Out

Moreover, The deeper you go the higher you fly. In the end, 

Everybody's got something to hide except for me and my monkey.

The question is, what is this song doing in my head this morning? Petey?

I don't know. Ask Charlie Manson.

Very funny.

What is the difference between a monkey and a person? Why is a monkey not a person? Just how did we, in the course of evolution, draw three hearts -- a royal flesh -- in the genetic card game and thereby cash in our chimps? 

I suppose the mainstream view is that we didn't -- that the perceived discontinuity between man and monkey is just a pre-critical holdover from premodern times, when man sat atop the animal kingdom. 

Thanks to Darwin we know there's nothing special about man except for the persistent illusion that we are special -- the great Cosmic Exception.

Like everything else in the Cosmos, we are an accident. How then do we know necessity? 

the knowledge that we gather through the senses, transmuted into ideas, is an immaterial treasure which can nourish our spirits forever (Robert Brennan).

That's what we call a fact, but by virtue of what principle? Perhaps there's a clue in the title of the book just referenced: The Image of His Creator:

between the thing known and the knower there is a bond by which they are made one reality in the act of generating knowledge. 

There's another fact, but how? Here again the mainstream view is that our so-called knowledge is but the illusory form of our own sensibility -- the inside projected out -- but these tenured apes

remind us of a person who paints pictures on the windows of his house and then mistakes the pictures for the landscape outside.

Clearly, these monkeys need to get outside the zoo more often. Or even once. 

there are two surfaces to the human body: an exterior one which is usually call the outside of the body, and an interior one which is also outside the body.

In other words, even our inside is out, in the sense that that our bodies are just tubes with a surface "inside" ourselves. To the extent that our inside is out, that's just projection. But if it's possible for the outside to be in, that's what we call knowledge. 

Let's get back to our book on Theological Anthropology and try to figure out how the outside gets in (if it does). Again, we have senses which are ordered to the outside world, but there is no knowledge per se at the level of the senses. 

At the moment I am touching -- sensing -- my keyboard, but not only touching it. If I were, then -- speaking of Beats -- I would be no better than Jack Karouac, of whom Truman Capote said That's not writing, that's just typing. 

Yes, I am typing, but the typing is being conditioned from the top-down, in that I am somehow putting my interior thoughts into the keyboard, such that my inside is out. To the extent that you understand what I'm saying, then my outside is back in (in you, the reader). 

A monkey randomly banging at its keyboard might produce a coherent sentence, but doing so would require more time than the Cosmos has been in existence. Even the cleverest monkey couldn't actually produce even the first sentence of On the Road. Go ahead and try:

I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split ux.

D'oh! So close. And even Kerouac couldn't type it with proper grammar. 

The classic definition of person -- courtesy of Boethius -- is an individual substance of a rational nature. That's good but not good enough, because it still encloses us in reason, and you know what Gödel says about that. 

Let's put our cards on the casino table and say that man is an individual substance of a relational nature, i.e., substance-in-relation. Which is how the outside gets in, via the mysterious category of relation -- specifically, of interior relations. 

Aquinas finds that in God the word "person" signifies a relation...

Well, good for God and Aquinas, but what about us?

while creatures are contingent and do not necessarily exist, if they do exist then they must be constituted relationally..., constituted by a relation to God that is analogous to the relational distinction between the divine persons.

Now, I exist. Even I know that. But prior to this -- or at least co-arising -- we exist. Coming full circle back to John Lennon, 

I am he as you are he and you are me and we are all together.  

Or as an earlier -- the earliest -- Wordsmith put it,   

I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you.

Either way, it seems that this is how the outside gets in -- whether it's I and my Father or me and my monkey or we and our walrus. We're in this together!