Glimpses of Infinitude

Like anyone, I get the occasional glimpse of the total inexplicability and utter gratuity of being, but the window no sooner opens than shuts again. 

It's hard to sustain that that vision, but also hard to describe, for it's not a question of what something is, rather, that anything is. It's the answer to the question, Why is there something rather than nothing?, only experiential rather than conceptual. 

Perhaps it's a brief left-brain capture by the right, when it's usually the other way around: the LCH bullying the RCH into submission. Come to think if it, what is meditation but the formal practice of silencing the endless chatter of the LCH?

I think it's safe to stipulate that mysticism must be an RCH phenomenon. Not to reduce it to neurology, any more than conceptual truth can be reduced to some LCH effluvia. Rather, truth is true, whether abstract and conceptual or concrete and experiential.

I see that I touched on this subject during our month-long dive into McGilchrist, in a post called In the Beginning is the Un-word: "Being," says McGilchrist, "is mysterious." In fact, if it weren't mysterious, there would be no reason ask questions of it. 

However, the fact that the questions yield answers only deepens the mystery -- recalling Einstein's gag that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is its comprehensibility.

Yada yada, 

We always know more than we did the day before, but we are nevertheless as plunged into mystery as we were the decade, century, or millennium before, which is to say, always. If anything, the world just keeps getting weirder, and yet, people behave as if all this is normal.  

   This is followed by some jolly good aphorisms:

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempt to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious.

If that's the case, then Meister Eckhart wasn't some goldbricking underachiever, but one of the most seriously ambitious individuals ever, more on which shortly. First let us cull any other useful bobservations from the old post:   

Problem is, the remystification of the world really is a kind of full-time job. But truly truly, someone has to do it, no? Most everyone else is employed to demystify things, and I thank them for their service, I really do. But what would happen if the world -- and human beings -- really were totally demystified?

Bor-ring. For the game would be over. 

Of the inexpugnable mystery, McGilchrist writes that

The problem is that if we are to say anything about it, we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe, almost certainly greater than whatever the human mind can comprehend.

Quite true. I suggest the empty symbol O, which accumulates meaning via direct experience:

It simultaneously conveys the no-thing of zee-ro and the eternity & everything of the complete circle. It is like a perpetual spiral of nothing --> everything --> nothing, carried out now and forever, i.e., the metabolism of being. 

Our symbol solves the problem raised by McGilchrist, of the need for "a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word." 

Here is the dilemma, and why I speak of an un-word: if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved.

Agreed. I also suspect that it was easier to grasp this unknown known in premodern times, prior to the hostile takeover of the RCH by the left. 

Which leads directly to this book on two medieval mystics, Ibn 'Arabi and Meister Eckhart. But where even to begin? For this is one dense text, full of contradictory and paradoxical descriptions of the enigmatic. Which inevitably happens when one tries to download the unsayable into speech. There's also the problem of who is speaking, since

the mystic must let go of the finite self and allow him- or herself to be conformed to the revealed, transcendent truth.

This is straight-up Gödelian: "Human reason is indeed powerful," but cannot "be its own ultimate authority." For, 

left to its own devices, it is liable to error and, most important, to confusing its own limited, finite and provisional formulations of the Truth with the infinite Truth itself. Human reason cannot grasp the finite without the help of the infinite. Reason is in need of illumination or an unveiling that frees it from finitude. 

Reason has its limits, and failure to recognize them again leads to the irrationalism of various desiccated LCH models that exclude the right (that's my way of expressing it, not Dobie's). First, 

there are limits entailed by the materiality or finitude of creatures: creatures, by their very nature as creatures, cannot reveal adequately the infinity of God.

Secondly, 

there is the finitude of the human mind: the human mind, in abstracting concepts from creatures, cannot think beyond what it can clearly conceive, and these concepts are necessarily limited and limiting. 

Nevertheless -- consistent with what we've been saying about a principle of openness -- "the human being is open, at least potentially, to all being as such." 

Well, good. Now what? Well, "In a wide and very fundamental sense, all that exists is revelation, because it reveals or uncovers in some way what God is," albeit in "a limited and finite way." 

Having said that, if literally 

everything is divine revelation, then it is very easy for the human mind to conclude that nothing is such a revelation or fail to recognize anything as revelation in the first place.

In other words, we take it for granted and act as if nothing weird is going on, what with all this revelation. Hence the need for a more specific revelation to supplement the general. With the latter, "the human mind is in a better position to understand the ends and purposes of creation and, most particularly, of creatures like ourselves."

It is a matter of disclosing "the inner meaning for the life of the soul and its ascent to God," and of showing how "all the sciences by which human beings know creatures refer back to God and to the Word of God as found in the sacred text."

[O]ne cannot, so to speak, step outside of God to know God and experience God. One must enter into God in order to know God. And to enter God is nothing other than to enter into his Word, or Logos.... Self-understanding is drawn out -- evoked... -- by something that is higher than itself or transcendent, i.e., by the revealed Word.

For the Sufi Ibn 'Arabi, it is a kind of higher imagination that is "the crucial faculty by which the seeker of God actually sees the spiritual in the material and is thus able to refer all things back to their one Source, God."

I suggest we pause for 24 hours. All this un-knowing is exhausting...