Vertical Rawdoggin' in the Counterworld

Word of the day: rawdoggin'. The term

has been hilariously repurposed by the internet to describe submitting to grueling life experiences without the benefit of modern distractions, luxuries, technology, and conveniences. 

The meme seems to have been popularized by a fellow

who posted TikToks of himself on 15-hour flights doing nothing but staring straight ahead at the flight map on the screen in front of him; no headphones, earbuds, phone, laptop, movies, music, books, or magazine. Not even a crossword puzzle.

"Extreme rawdoggers will even forgo food and water during the flight." 

I guess I like to think of these posts as a form of vertical rawdoggin': just staring straight ahead at the screen and seeing what kind of religion the Almighty & me works out betwixt us this morning.   

Aw, who am I kidding? I'm usually interacting with another text, while real vertical rawdoggin' is Abraham dropping everything and taking off for parts unknown, or Moses going alone up the mountain, or Jesus in the desert, or the apostles lighting out for the territories with nothing but a pair of flip flops, or the desert fathers leaving everything behind....

Then again, 

We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

And Schuon says that "man's vocation and duty is to become what he is, precisely by freeing himself, inwardly, from the encroaching shadows of this contingent, imperfect, and transitory world."

Therefore, the luminous and noble peace of the desert must have something to do with leaving the contingent, imperfect, and transitory for the necessary, perfect, and permanent. A reminder that 

The Church's function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld to the world.   

This counterworld needn't be a literal desert. Rather, as mentioned in a different context in yesterday's post, "I suppose it's the direction from which you look at these things that determines almost everything." Thus, according to Schuon, 

If one looks at the universe exclusively with the eyes of relativity, one will see only relative things and the universe will be reduced in the final analysis to an inextricable absurdity.

This follows necessarily from the bottom-up perspective. But if we look from the top down, or if "one sees it with the eyes of absoluteness," then "one will essentially see manifestations of the Supreme Principle," which you could say is the very ground of the counterworld.

About the bottom-up perspective, AKA materialism, Schuon says that

nothing is more contradictory than to deny the spirit, or even simply the psychic element, in favor of matter alone, for it is the spirit that denies, whereas matter remains inert and unconscious. The fact that matter can be conceptualized proves that materialism contradicts itself at its starting point...

The same is true of the claim that man cannot know truth, or that all is relative except for relativism, or that subjects could arise from objects. Nevertheless, that's the horizontal world for which we need the vertical counterworld mentioned above:

Contingency on the one hand and presence of the Absolute on the other; these are the two poles of our existence.

Which goes precisely to the top-down / bottom-up dispute in All Things are Full of Gods.

One problem with the bottom-up perspective is that in it there can't actually be an "up." Calling it "up" is just in a manner of speaking, because any up is reducible without remainder to the lower level.

Not so for the top-down approach, which doesn't dismiss matter as an epiphenomenal illusion. True, in Vedanta it is regarded as mere appearance, but nevertheless an appearance of reality. As Schuon describes it,

Atma is conceivable without Maya, whereas Maya is intelligible only through the notion of Atma. 

In other words, there can be reality without appearances, but no appearances without reality. "Relativity is a projection of the Absolute, or it is nothing." But it's not nothing. It's just not everything.

Back to Hart, the next chapter is called Spirit in Nature, which expresses the same top-down argument that

the mind pervades all things, and expresses itself in countless degrees and in endlessly differing but kindred modes...

In this vertical counterworld, "we all belong to a vast community of spiritual beings," and why not? The spiritual is ontologically prior to the material, so "Nervous systems appeared in evolutionary history not as fortuitous vehicles for a new organic power; they were fashioned by a prior operative disposition."

I'm talking about a pervasive reality of organic life, at every level.

Yes, but are you just deepaking the chopra? No, because

The issue remains: which narrative is logically consistent, the bottom-up story that says mindless matter somehow became mind or the top-down story that says mind operates as formal and final causality on the whole material realm?

"I believe that nature is already mind," which seems indisputable given the infinite intelligibility of the world, which is just the shadow of intelligence. 

Again, it's a matter of the direction from which we look: "I stake myself to the top-down causal narrative," of "mind 'descending' into matter and raising matter up into itself as life and thought." 

There is "an essential creative impulse within the very structure of nature, quickening it from within itself, driving it into ever more diverse and more complex forms."

This is beginning to sound like the Evolutionary Paradigm of the new age vulgarians.

Yes, perhaps a word of caution is in order before we proceed any further: 

We do not deny that evolution exists within certain limits, as is indeed evident enough, but we do deny that it is a universal principle, and hence a law which affects and determines all things, including the immutable....

[W]hat has to be categorically rejected is the idea that truth evolves, or that revealed doctrines are the product of an evolution (Schuon). 

Evolution is one thing, but evolutionism 

is the very negation of the archetypes and consequently of the divine Intellect; it is therefore the negation of an entire dimension of the real, namely that of form, of the static, of the immutable; concretely speaking, it is as if one wished to make a fabric of the wefts only, omitting the warps (ibid.). 

And we're back to the nature of the cosmic area rug, which is woven from strands of verticality and horizontality -- or immanence and transcendence, absolute and relative, stasis and change, appearance and reality, world and counterworld, etc., depending on the direction from which we look.

In any event, that's the end of the chapter.