A Few Words About the Wordless

If we -- Homo sapiens sapiens -- are 75,000 years old, and philosophy doesn't get underway until a few thousand years ago, what did we argue about for 70+ thousand years? 

We all know about the so-called "axial age," which involved "broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE." New symbols for new experiences, apparently.

I remember reading a book by William Irwin Thompson called The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, in which he claims that "at the edge of history is myth," such that "the matrix out of which events arise does not appear to be an event at all." 

Which reminds me of dreaming, which we can also never trace to a "beginning." Rather, we always already find ourselves in the middle of the dream, before which is.... 

Whatever it is, words can't go there. Rather, they can only come out of there. It is pregnant with language, even while being beyond speech. Like the Logos-Tao or something: once you name it, it is no longer the thing -- or experience -- named.

Or Eckhart's ground, which he symbolizes in various paradoxical ways, for example "The naked God is without a name and is the denial of all names and has never been given a name." And "For the intellect to be free, it must become naked and empty and by letting go return to its prime origin."

But let's not get carried away, at least yet. Supposing we could drill down to the bottom of the psyche, what might we find there? Or is it like quantum physics, whereby our perceptions are conditioned by what we expect to see, i.e., wave or particle?

Grad school was much like this, involving various theories of the mind which were all plausible and consistent within themselves, even if they contradicted every other theory.

Now do religion.

It's difficult to do religion for the same reason one cannot know the beginning of a dream. Dreams must start somewhere, or come out of something, but we cannot go there, at least while awake. Joyce of course tried, but that's another post.

Voegelin refers to this mysterious and inexhaustible matrix as the unKnowable depth which we symbolize in more or less adequate ways. 

The depth itself is "beyond articulate experience"; it is "the one depth underlying all reality experienced in the primordial field of God and man, world and society," and "a mode of participation in the process of reality as a whole." This participation is the "site" where the depth "becomes consciously luminous."  

Now, is any of this helpful? Does it have any practical implications? Or is writing about this just a weird way to spend one's retirement? Back before Mr. Google changed the comment box, there was a quote there by Voegelin to the effect that

The quest has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable. 

If this is true, then we need to do something about it, because man has been going about things in the wrong way.