Between Scientific Myth and Perennial Wisdom

That's more or less where man lives -- in that mysterious Between between immanent science and transcendent reality. So, it's not really a between -- which implies two -- rather, more of a "betreble," since there are three terms involved. 

It would be preferable to use abstract and unsaturated symbols to designate the three, since we don't know what any of them truly are, which is to say "God," "self," and "matter." Each is a kind of fathomless -- but fruitful -- mystery. In any event. our two little mysteries -- self and world -- are relative to the Big Mystery of Celestial Central.

If God and man are O and (•), what shall we call the world? How about ⬤, because it implies an inverse image of O, and its circularity (or sphericality) connotes earth or cosmos; it is God seen through a glass darkly, to coin a phrase. The heavens declare the glory of God, and all that.

But this relationship is only revealed in (•); or rather, (•) explicates the implicit intelligibility of ⬤. The intelligibility is always there, but it requires us to bring it out. 

You could even say these three are holographically copresent in each other, i.e., God in man, man in God, world in man, man in world, world in God, etc. This will require some explanation, but if it weren't the case, then nothing works, and the whole durn cosmic system collapses into postmodern gibberish or scientistic nonsense. 

Bob, what is the benefit of your hastily concocted symbols? What is their added value?

First and foremost to preserve the Mystery, and to prevent us from pretending to know what is 1) endlessly knowable, but 2) unknowable per se. They also help to avoid miscommunication, because when I, for example, use the word "God" in a sentence, the reader may have a completely different meaning from the one I intend. 

In the book we've been discussing, the interviewer suggests that a literal Theory of Everything is unattainable --  that "the bottom line is forever scientifically unknowable." Which is self-evidently true, for "any cosmology can only be a 'probable myth'" (Bérard).

Fightin' words!

The tenured can fight it out amongst themselves, but we (un)know better, that "the search for [any] limit is impossible, since, metaphysically, neither the beginning nor the end of space is part of it and, similarly, neither the beginning nor end of time is part of it, by definition" (ibid.) Any such model "comes up against Planck's wall," but even more fundamentally, Gödel's ceiling.

However, the latter is more of a glass ceiling, since it points to its own transcendence, so to speak. In other words, man -- or (•) -- cannot be enclosed in his own models of ⬤. 

Put more simply, Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End.

And 

The goal is as distant from any point that we reach as it is from our starting point.

This isn't a bad thing, rather, at the very least an interesting one that prevents us from dying of boredom:

Happily, the world is inexplicable. (What kind of world would it be if it could be explained by man?)

It would be the little world of academia, which tries to enclose the world in the patriarchy, or white supremacism, or transphobia, or the 1619 project, or some other Narrative of Power. 

Let's bring this existentialda down a couple of nachos. Of course, we want to know what ⬤ is, but in so doing we also want to know what -- or who -- (•) is. Clearly they share some kind of more fundamental relationship, or knowledge would be impossible:

[I]f we do not begin with faith and hope in reason itself, we will not begin to philosophize, for we will not trust our instrument (Kreeft). 

"Our fashionable intellectuals" -- in particular, the tenured kind referenced above -- 

are skeptical of all "metanarratives" or "worldviews," and of "logocentrism," or faith in any "reason" broader than computer calculation, or "analytics" (ibid.). 

Which, of course, is a logocentric metanarrative and worldview, only it encloses us in language instead of liberating us thereby. Instead of the truth setting us free, the truth is that our narrative myths are really about power, which necessarily brings Satan into the discussion, or at least someone like him. We need another unsaturated symbol for this perennial temptation, which in the book I called Ø. 

Probably the Worst Idea Ever is to reduce O to Ø, which is what I think Genesis 3 is all about. 

Turns out that philosophical arguments are "weapons in the intellectual dimension of spiritual warfare," which is worth saying twice: the intellectual dimension of spiritual warfare. Are we at war? Obviously. What are we fighting about? The same thing Socrates was fighting in his battle against the Sophists.

It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue.

The New Atheists are just the Old Sophists with tenure or a podcast. "Today's battlefield continues to host the same battles and many of the same essential arguments, pitting Socrates' children against the children of the Sophists." And "Most of the issues in modern philosophy are critiques or forgettings of common sense" (Kreeft).

Common sense is the father's house to which philosophy returns, every so often, feeble and emaciated.

Above we alluded to Gödel's ceiling, which is at once a limit and a liberation:

Philosophy has as its object above all to prevent the follies of the day from blocking the windows and walling up the doors. 

But the windows are translucent and the door is unlocked. We have only to look through the former and walk through the latter. Ah, but someone is trying to dirty the windows and bar the door, hence the intellectual -- or pneumacognitive -- warfare. 

All truths converge upon the one truth, but the routes have been barricaded.

It is not so much that man is entitled to free speech, as that speech is the means to the transcendent freedom to which we are entitled. Which now brings the Logos into the drama. We might say that this is at antipodes to Ø, or that Ø is the "anti-Logos." 

As Kreeft describes it, "there is more than just a 'connection' between the essence of Christianity... and the essence of philosophy," since they are one and the same Logos. Back to Bérard, "Let us recall that" the "vertical axis of the world is Christ," i.e., the Logos that "resolves the transcendence-immanence paradox." 

Being all in all, the Word is the divine Hologram throughout all Creation.... A hologram is only a three-dimensional image, but with the particularity that the whole (holos) is inscribed (graphein) in each part.

Or on plain unglish,

You haven't perceived the hologram to your private particle? Come in, open His presence and report for karmic duty. What in carnation?! Why, it's a Tree of Life for those whose wood beleaf. 

I wonder what Gemini makes of this queer passage?

Your query is a fascinating blend of esoteric symbolism and playful wordplay. It seems to reference a mystical or spiritual context, perhaps alluding to a higher power or divine knowledge.

The phrase "Tree of Life" is a potent symbol found in various religious and mythological traditions, often representing the interconnectedness of all things, the source of life, or spiritual enlightenment.

The phrase "those whose wood beleaf" is a clever pun, suggesting a belief in the power of nature and the cyclical nature of life and death.

Well, not any immanent power of nature, rather, a transcendent power that facilitates exit from the absurcular cycle of Ø.