Where the Action Is

Yesterday we discussed the first two of six themes of the Cosmic Symphony, 1) the unrestricted dynamism of the mind toward being, and 2) existence as an act of presence. 

Put these two together and we see a complementarity between the intellect's unrestricted desire to know the world, and the world's equally unrestricted intelligibility, which reduces to a luminous space of experience, and how convenient is that! 

We already have it on authority -- Voegelin's -- that EXPERIENCE as such is a "'luminous perspective' within the process of reality," and that's good enough for me. But we'll shed further light on the Subject of Experience in next post.  

Next up is what Clarke calls participation but I would call the holo-fractal structure of being. 

For example, he describes how "the immanent One in many is also a many from a transcendent One," or in other words, this is a weblike cosmos in which everything participates both in and with everything else, both horizontally and (because) vertically. 

Or, you could say that this is an interiorly related cosmos, but whence this mysterious interiority? I mean, here we are, experiencing the inside of the Cosmos. Here again, we'll save the definitive answer for next post. But don't worry, there's still lots to cover and uncover in this one.  

As to the horizontal worldwide web, we don't have to deepak the chopra to know that "An instant of time, without duration, is an imaginative logical construction," and that "each duration of time mirrors itself in all temporal durations" (Whitehead). Same with space:

In a certain sense, everything is everywhere at all times. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus every spatiotemporal standpoint mirrors the world (ibid.). 

I could cite many similar passages from The Book of the Same Name, for example, "If the whole did not participate and serve as the ground for the existence of the parts, the parts would not exist," and

Simply put, the classical assumption that the collection of parts constitutes the whole has proven invalid. We now know that the properties of parts can only be understood in terms of the dynamics of the whole, and that what we call a "part" is a pattern in the inseparable web of relations.

Back to Clarke, "Thus the whole universe appears as a vast participation system, a One in many which is also a many from One," and why not? "To be is to be together," such that "Togetherness and community are woven into the very stuff of all being, as being."

Again, convenient if we want to think about reality: "For if psyche mirrors nature and nature mirrors psyche," then "either can illuminate the other," and we're back to that mysterious Light to which we alluded at the end of the previous post. 

What is the source of all this luminosity? Why aren't we in the dark, or rather, how does experience become the sensorium of transcendental light? How many beings does it take to create an existential light bulb?

Good question. I'm gonna guess three, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

Supposing two mirrors facing each other, we still require light in order to see anything in them. We'll hold that question in reserve and move on to the next theme, which Clarke calls Action, which strikes me as similar to our second theme, which was the idea of Existence as the Act of Presence.  

Action refers to 

the activity by which the various centers of existential energy in the universe pour over into self-expression and self-communication with each other. 

Without it -- inconveniently -- "all we would have would be a collection of isolated beings" bound up within themselves, "with no connections or communication with others, and hence no way of knowing them." A total eclipse of O, so No philosophy for you!

Every being would be plunged in total silence and darkness... a total "black hole," so to speak....

It is action alone that enables beings to come out of their isolation, connect with each other, influence each other, and communicate to each other. 

Indeed,

It is action that truly allows there to be a universe, that is, a turning of all towards oneness, togetherness.  

So, that's a relief: to even say Cosmos is to have assumed a great deal. Clarke says a great deal more about it, but you get the point. We'll move on to our next theme of the Cosmic Symphony, which is The Good, which -- surprise surprise -- is also "woven into the very fabric of being itself," just as God said all those years ago. 

It seems that there is an Ought built into the nature of things, which is conformity to the Good: "Being and value are inseparable," in that action is "dynamically drawn or magnetized by the good." 

Why, he's talking about Celestial Central, AKA the Great Attractor! And here again, I thought I was the only one. 

The last -- and for me, most important -- theme is The Person. We are going to save this for a separate post, because it is the principle that unifies all the others, and without which there wouldn't be any others. Truly truly, it is the very ground of being -- why you are and I am and we are.