Yesterday's post on our weird-woven universe brought to mind...
Well, a number of things, beginning with Haldane's suspicion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that
I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.
Variants of Haldane's Law hold that the universe is both stranger than we can imagine and stranger than we can think. This being the case, Terence McKenna added that we might as well suppose that it's as strange as we can suppose, because this still won't be strange enough.
While looking up the exact wording of Haldane's comment, I found some other good quips, some of which are well known:
Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination.
The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.
The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.
Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.
Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public.
It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.
The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.
I also thought of my own modest effort to forge a sufficiently queer language to convey the queerness of things:
In The Beginning was the weird, and the weird was with God, and the weird was God.... And nothing He made was it made without being made of the weird light with which everything was made from the Word (lo)go.... And the weird light shines in the dark, but the dorks don't comprehend it. For truly, the weirdness was spread all through the world, and yet, the world basically kept behaving as if this were just your ordinary, standard-issue cosmos.
I suspect that a big part of the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it.
Now, Christianity is pretty weird. Indeed,
Nothing attracts me as much to Christianity as the marvelous insolence of its doctrines.
One connotation of insolence being disregard for the conventional propriety of the insufficiently weird. Thus,
Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.
Ultimately,
The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.
A weird counterworld to the banal world of scientistic materialism.
Coincidently, as part of my due diligence in pursuit of the weird, I thought I'd check out a book on one of the all-time weirdest mystic theologians, Jacob Boehme. Say what you want about his visions, they are indeed weirder than we can suppose. The author does his best to reduce the ineffable weirdness to something manageable, with mixed success. It's certainly not for the faint of head.
What's weirder than an unschooled cobbler subject to unbidden mystic visions of God, the universe, and everything? Was he just crazy, and if so, was he crazy enough?
Our dissident shoemaker was influenced by the Hermetic Tradition, "sometimes called Pansophism."
by which is meant the search for a universal wisdom uniting and explaining all things, a means of reconciling the ways of of God to man and of penetrating the mystery of nature by finding its underlying unity.
Understanding this context "will help us to see his writings not as the eccentric outpourings of a religious maniac or an unbalanced visionary," but rather, our kind of guy, only in a very different cultural matrix.
Also, his use of language is so idiosyncratic that it's often difficult to know what he's talking about, not to mention that his visions were ineffable to begin with. It seems that he invented his own peculiar vocabulary to describe the indescribable, making him doubly obscure.
"Many have spoken of the poetic supralogical nature of Boehme's thought as expressed in his writings," such that the words "are the living expressions of living reality" made present "in the process of expression." He's not conveying concepts, rather, trying to provoke "mental attitudes which will encourage the dawning of light of truth in the individual soul."
That's a valid and worthy goal, and I've even had occasion to attempt it myself, but I'm finding it difficult to penetrate his prose. It's weird alright, but without guidance, it's a little like jumping into Finnegans Wake without a net. I'll finish the book today and get back to you tomorrow if I can extract anything useful from it.
No comments:
Post a Comment