Reality Comes in Threes

THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS RECYCLED MATERIAL

What else is new?

Well, to paraphrase Harry Truman, there's nothing new in the world except the posts we don't remember, in this case a couple from ten years ago, edited in light of subsequent developments, if any. 

In other words, in this weekly exercise in Looking Back, I'm curious to find out if my overall approach has evolved or progressed. If so, then we will edit accordingly:

Way back in my early twenties I read Herman Hesse's Glass Bead Game (AKA Magister Ludi), even though much of it was impenetrable to my only recently activated and mostly content-free mind. I'd begun reading in a random manner, and this book came across my radar because Hesse was a popular author among the hippie set.  

This experimental novel "is set in a 23rd-century utopia in which the intellectual elite have distilled all available knowledge of math, music, science, and art into an elaborately coded game." One reviewer says the book is an intricate bildungsroman--

Bildungwut?

Yes, that's "a novel dealing with one person's formative years or spiritual education." Thus, it played a small part in my own bildungsroman. It is 

about humanity's eternal quest for enlightenment and for synthesis of the intellectual and the participatory life.... Since childhood, [the protagonist] has been consumed with mastering the Glass Bead Game, which requires a synthesis of aesthetics and scientific arts, such as mathematics, music, logic, and philosophy. This he achieves in adulthood, becoming a Magister Ludi (Master of the Game).

So, the folks who play the game presume that all truth is related, and that this is indeed One Cosmos after all. And although I didn't understand the book, I've been playing the game ever since. It goes like this: take two or more subjects or disciplines that appear to have nothing to do with each other, and then show how they are related.

Along these lines, yesterday I began reading a Pocket Guide to Interpersonal Neurobiology (IPNB for short). The book draws upon "a wide range of traditionally independent fields of research," including neurobiology, genetics, memory, attachment, complex systems, anthropology, and evolutionary psychology, in the effort to find a "unity of knowledge, or consilience" of "numerous domains of study into a common language and conceptual framework." 

I've been doing the same thing -- i.e., rummaging around for the multi-undisciplinary Unity of Knowledge -- since my latent cʘʘnvision was activated on March 4, 1985. Most everything I've written since then is a variant of the GB Game.

One thing that motivated me was the suspicion that subjectivity is not reducible to objectivity, but rather, that the former is an irreducible category of being. In reality, the two are complementary, not contrary, so any metaphysic that tries to eliminate the subject or reduce it to something less is a non-starter.

Siegel too writes of how he was motivated to create "a common ground in which to bring science and subjectivity into" a fruitful dialogue. The dialogue revolves around "finding the universal principles across many academic fields," and "discovering the consilience that emerges when usually independent research endeavors are explored together" (emphasis mine).

As we shall see, I have some slight and/or significant differences with Siegel, one of which would be the idea that the consilience only "emerges" as opposed to being an antecedent condition for the unity. But like me, Siegel "longed to find a way to connect the power of objective science with the centrality of our subjective mental lives."

Likewise, he wondered, for example, whether "the molecules I had been studying in the lab that allowed salmon to transition safely from fresh to saltwater" could "be in some way connected to the equally important reality that the way we communicate with another person in crisis can mean life or death" (at the time, he worked on a suicide prevention help line).

Now, seeking a connection between suicide and salmon molecules would be an example of Extreme Glass Bead Gaming. 

Eventually Siegel formed a group of forty scientists from a diversity of disciplines, including "anthropology, molecular biology, cognitive science, education, genetics, linguistics, neuroscience, neurosurgery, physics, psychology, psychiatry, mathematics, computer science, and sociology."

Most scientists won't even try to define the mind, but instead, simply use the word "as a kind of placeholder for the unknown." This is actually not a bad strategy, since it is difficult to know how the mind, utilizing its own resources, could define itself, any more than the eye can see itself, unless we are somehow able to view the mind from a higher, outside perspective, which science naturally excludes.

Siegel writes of how, "when we differentiate concepts from each other and then link them, we integrate knowledge." Not only that, but we integrate the person who has differentiated and then re-integrated the concepts. 

I would say that this is actually a two-way process: that it takes an integrated person to synthesize the diversity, while synthesizing the diversity makes us more integrated. Which is one of the points of life, for who wants to exist as a bunch of incoherent and disconnected fragments?

It seems to me that mental health can be defined along two axes: integration and actualization, the former giving momentum to the latter. As Siegel writes, "when we move energy and information flow toward something called integration, we move toward health." This "makes a stronger, healthier, more flexible, and resilient mind." 

Now, Siegel is at pains to emphasize that human beings are always embodied and embedded. What he means by this is that we have a brain which, via the nervous system (which is just the periphery of the brain), extends throughout the body. Where is the brain? Only partly in the head. It's really "in" the whole body (although it is more accurate to say that the body is in the mind, i.e., a representation of it).

But at the same time, "Our mental lives are profoundly relational," and really take place in the space between our neurology and other persons. Thus, "Embodied and embedded is the fundamental nature of mind."

And guess what this made me think of? Yes, the second person of the Trinity, who indeed becomes "embodied and embedded" with the restavus. We explicitly focus on the embodiment -- incarnation -- but it is for the purpose of embeddedness, i.e., the offer of relatedness. If Christ is God's icon of man (and man's icon of God), this should not surprise us. Rather, shock us.

However, Siegel's ideas are metapsychological but not metaphysical, so no consideration is given to the wider meta-cosmic context in which the mind is situated.

Rather, the cosmos is assumed, as if just any cosmic conditions could give rise to something as strange as persons. Siegel mostly stays within the boundaries of science, but in so doing, expands those boundaries by including the subject in an irreducible way.

For example, read the following, and I'll bet you're thinking what I'm thinking: the triad of mind, brain, and relationships composes "one reality with three independent facets."

As Siegel describes it, "This is not splitting the three aspects." Rather, they "are three aspects of one reality.... With this view, we have one reality with three facets -- not three distinct domains of separate realities."

Siegel is speaking of science, not theology. However, the Raccoon would like to know what kind of cosmos this must be in order for such an irreducibly trinitarian and intersubjective science to exist? 

In any event, within this trinity of mind-brain-intersubjectivity it is as if there are arrows of influence in all directions, such that "the mind is influenced by both relationships and the brain; relationships are influenced by both the mind and brain; the brain is influenced by both mind and relationships." From the IPNB point of view, "this triangle embraces our ground of being."

To which we naturally want to ask, "what came before that?," or "What is beneath this scientific ground?" Which is like asking a physicist, "What came before the big bang?" The physicist cannot answer the question, not because there is no answer, but because his model cannot venture beyond its own horizon. Which is entirely appropriate, since we do not demand that science be religion, nor that stones of tenure turn into the bread of life.

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, we'll probably be discussing the Trinity a great deal in forthcoming weeks, because I just ordered a giant book called On Classical Trinitarianism: Retrieving the Nicene Doctrine of the Triune God. I suspect that the doctrine of Trinity furnishes a key to winning the Glass Bead Game, but we'll see. 

In fact, Peter Kreeft has a book called Why Does Everything Come in Threes?: A Short Book about Everything, which I haven't read, but I think I know the answer.

Dabbling in Gnosis and Flirting with Heresy

From time to time Schuon plays the stupid card, as in the passage quoted yesterday:

leaving aside mere stupidity, we would say that intelligence may be extremely acute on the rational level alone, while being quite inoperative beyond that level...

Or, perhaps he's just flattering his fanbase. Clearly he was not only a brilliant man, but possessed a highly unusual form of brilliance -- what we might call "vertical vision." Or at any rate, he saw things that others -- no matter how intelligent in a worldly way -- do not, or perhaps cannot, see.

Which raises a number of issues, for it is always possible to see things that aren't there. For example, I remember a psychotic patient who enjoyed watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, because he would "pull Bugs out of the TV" and play with him in his apartment living room.

It also raises the question of gnosis, the purportedly bad kind -- bad because it restricts the transpersonal message to a pneuma-cognitive elite, whereas revelation is addressed to Here Comes Everybody. Or, it is addressed to a collective and its Average Man to whom metaphysics is a closed book:

Metaphysics cannot be taught to everyone but if it could there would be no atheists (Schuon).

The Average Man is decidedly not a metaphysician, so revelation conveys the essential points of universal metaphysics, only clothed in a way that can be assimilated by Joe Sixpack. "Revelation is the means by which the Absolute is made known to all mankind." This facilitates "a downward descent of the Divine Principle," and "a vertical ascent back to the Divine" (Oldmeadow), AKA (↓) and (↑). Thus,

When a man seeks to escape from dogmatic narrowness it is essential that it be "upwards" and not "downwards": dogmatic form is transcended by fathoming its depths and contemplating its universal content (Schuon).

Which is to say the Substance conveyed by the form; put conversely, no form can exhaust the substance, whether images of triangles or of God.

For Schuon,

What falsifies modern interpretations of the world and of man at their very base... is their monotonous and obsessive ignorance of the suprasensible degrees of Reality...

As we've been discussing, the Intellect is precisely that sense which allows us to sense the suprasensible to which it is both a prolongation and adequation. 

In some religions, e.g. Christianity, the metaphysical teachings are more or less veiled, while in others, such as Vedanta, they are more direct. 

Central to Schuon's metaphysic is the distinction between Being and Beyond-Being. The former is the highest metaphysical level in exoteric monotheisms, with its Personal Creator God. But even some Christians go one step further, for example, Meister Eckhart. His impersonal "ground" is analogous to the Nirguna Brahman of Vedanta, the unqualified Absolute. 

I'm trying to figure out how to reconcile this with the Trinity, but I'll have to get back to you on that... it's a big book.

Above we alluded to another important distinction for Schuon, that between the form and substance of religion. Revelation provides us with adequate forms to render the suprasensible intelligible, but the form is not the substance, which is supraformal and hence formally inexhaustible.

In itself, this is not so far from Christian orthodoxy, which maintains that -- and this should be self-evident -- no finite image of God can adequately represent him, for "Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite" (Thomas), so that "every image [of the Absolute] is at the same time true and false" (Schuon).

And yet, Thomas implies that there is indeed something in us that is conformed to the Infinite, similar to what Eckhart says, to the effect that "There is something in the soul which is uncreated and uncreatable," this being none other than the Intellect. 

Likewise, for Thomas "The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing other than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light," and "the light of our intellect... is nothing other than an imprint of the first truth." 

Moreover, "Our intellect is understanding extended to infinity," and this "ordering of the intellect to infinity would be vain and senseless if there were no infinite object of knowledge."

Hence the Philosopher [Aristotle] says that the soul is in a certain manner all things. 

So, the Intellect is "the faculty which perceives transcendence"; it "receives intuitions and apprehends realities of a supra-phenomenal order":

This transcendent faculty, capable of direct contact with Reality, is to be found, under various names, in all traditions (Oldmeadow). 

Having said that,

Fallen man, and thus average man, is as it were poisoned by the passional element, either grossly or subtly; from this results an obscuring of the Intellect and the necessity of a Revelation from outside. 

Here again this is problematic, because it seems to imply that there are superior men whose intellects are not subject to the fall -- which goes back to Gnosis, the bad kind. However, Schuon is quick to point out that an intellectual understanding of metaphysics is not enough, and that the spiritual life "is concerned with cleansing the subjective psyche," and with integrating and assimilating the Divine Message.  

Well?

I'm thinkin'...

'Bout what?

Mainly about the problem of evil and suffering. For me, the traditional explanations just don't cut it, hence, one of the appeals of Schuon's approach. 

If the world is the world, this is because it is not God; unable to be either Absoluteness or Infinity, it is relative and finite -- hence the presence of evil...

So, it's nobody's fault. Or, it's everybody's fault, to the extent that we are finite and relative. Hence,

If there is a cosmos, a universal manifestation, there must also be a fall or falls, for to say "manifestation" is to say "other than God" and remotion (Schuon).

I suppose Schuon would say the whole Garden of Eden thing is intended to convey this ineveateapple metaphysical truth. Which, if I'm not mistaken, would be considered a heretical interpretation. Nevertheless, it makes sense, for if the creation is a kind of radiation of, or projection from, God, 

to say radiation is to say distance, hence alienation or impoverishment: the solar rays dim and become lost in the night of space. From this arises, at the end of the projection, the paradoxical phenomenon of evil...  

Well?

Still thinkin'... Gemini, what do you (pretend to) think?

It's important to note that Schuon's ideas are complex and nuanced. While he draws on traditional religious and philosophical sources, his synthesis of these ideas is unique. His perspective offers a compelling explanation for the problem of evil and the nature of reality, but it also raises questions about the relationship between intellect and spirituality, the nature of revelation, and the potential for elitism. 

Further exploration of his work and comparisons with other metaphysical traditions would be beneficial. What specific aspects of Schuon's thought are you most interested in discussing further? Perhaps we could delve deeper into his understanding of specific religious traditions or explore his views on art and symbolism.

Thinking About Thinking

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions. --Dávila

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we're ultimately talking about how far thought can go. Kant, for example, would say it can't go very far -- not even as far as reality, rather, only to appearances.

A symmetrical pair of errors is believing: that beyond what we can know there is nothing, or that what we know is what there is.

Schuon is raising his hand:

on what grounds would it be possible to judge when one denies, implicitly or explicitly, the possibility of objective judgment, thus of judgment as such?

If intelligence can never exit "the vicious circle of thinking," then truly truly, we are sealed in tenure. But "it is absurd to present the inaccessibility of truth as being a truth," for "all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap," claiming

that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking into account of the fact that this is an assertion which... is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error. 

Schuon has a better idea:

The intellect is a receptive faculty and not a productive power: it does not "create," it receives and transmits; it is a mirror reflecting reality in a manner that is adequate and therefore effective.

Which is another way of saying that intellect and intelligibility are as it were mirrors of one another; that what we call knowledge is an adequate reflection of being; and

If there were not something absolute in man -- he is "made in the image of God" -- he would be only an animal like other animals.... Man alone can step outside the cosmos, and this possibility proves -- and presupposes -- that in a certain way he incarnates the Absolute.

However, at the same time, Schuon acknowledges that in our day, "the intellect is atrophied to the point of being reduced to a mere virtuality." 

Use it or lose it?

It would seem:

One man can spend his whole life in searching and looking, and still know nothing, "see" nothing; another may arrive without trouble at intellectual certainties, and this proves that his ignorance was only accidental and not fundamental.

Why this difference?

leaving aside mere stupidity, we would say that intelligence may be extremely acute on the rational level alone, while being quite inoperative beyond that level...

In other words, even the best method for approaching the horizontal is entirely inappropriate for grasping the vertical. 

Analogously, a degree in physics doesn't help your vet understand what's wrong with your dog, nor a degree in veterinary medicine help to understand one's wife. Reality has its degrees, modes, and dimensions, and one doesn't bring a knife to a gunfight.

Any "science of the finite has need of a wisdom that goes beyond it," for

what could be more naive than to seek to enclose the Universe in a few mathematical formulae, and then to be be surprised to find out there always remains an elusive and apparently "irrational" element which evades all attempts to "bring it to heel"?

After all,

the man who is intelligent enough to grasp nature in its deepest physical aspects, ought to know that nature has a metaphysical Cause which transcends it, and that this Cause does not confine itself to determining the laws of sensory existence....

That's about it this morning. 

In All Humility, Is There a Higher Self?

Schuon makes a fundamental distinction between reason and intellect, the latter transcending but including the former. I took this idea on board many years ago, even before I was exposed to Schuon, as it's a prominent feature of various eastern religions. 

For example, in the model of Sri Aurobindo's metapsychology to the right (click to embiggen), we see a higher self at the center (in three dimensions it would be at the top), and an "inner being" in the "field of ego-desire" which itself can be higher or lower.

Now, I don't pretend to understand all the distinctions in the model, nor is the model the reality anyway. As I said, I long ago accepted the idea of a higher and lower self, and yet, I've never pondered the ontological status of this higher self, nor even wondered if I'm being literal.

After all, from the Christian perspective, the soul is immaterial and therefore both undivided and indivisible. We can talk about "parts," even though parts are specifically what an immaterial entity cannot have.

It does, however, have specific powers we can enumerate, from appetite to sensation to abstraction, but they're all features of the same package. These features are at once hierarchical but interconnected, which implies a kind of complementarity between continuity and discontinuity: for example, we can recognize our power to abstract form from matter, even if it is never present without a body, with its senes and appetites.

Angels have intellect without body.

True, but even you mast have something analogous to a body, otherwise you'd be as diffusely omnipresent as God. But we'll leave that discussion for another day.

Here's something I find problematic with the ego/intellect distinction: it is an invitation to pride, in that I can say, for example, that the Cosmic Skeptic (Alex O'Connor) is only an atheist because he's operating out of his lower ego, whereas I can see much further and deeper because of my supposedly higher intellect. It is not only condescending but sounds like a kind of special pleading. 

However, Schuon would be the first to say that the intellect is inseparable from the virtues, such that a "proud intellect" would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, it is the lower ego that is filled with narrow-minded pride -- for which reason, in terms of yesterday's post, it takes the limits of its vision for the limits of the world.

We'll try to sort out these questions as we proceed, but I'd first like to lay out Schuon's vision, mostly from his book Stations of Wisdom, and in particular from an essay called Orthodoxy and Intellectuality that cuts to the heart of the matter.

In the preface, he discusses our contemporary scission between faith and science, attributing this to a loss of the sapiential dimension. Deprived of the latter, we are "bound in the the end to turn against it, though 'from below' and on a purely rational, material level." This is similar to what we said yesterday about the power of reason closing in upon itself -- or, in neurological terms, right brain capture by the left.

For Schuon, this results in an "intellectual worldliness" and a "weakening of contemplative intelligence and religious instinct." But as we said yesterday, the latter instinct is actually as active and annoying as ever, only in the form of political religions -- or even the "secular religion" of atheism (to the extent that it presumes to make any apodictic claims about ultimate reality).

Schuon even describes the venerable Way of the Raccoon:

To be able to combine the religious symbolism of Heaven with the astronomical fact of the stellar galaxies in a single consciousness, an intelligence is needed which is more than just rational...

Not irrational, of course, but somehow transrational. We won't yet say how we do it, only that we do it -- or try to at any rate -- for what it's worth.

Conversely, skepticism -- and we're alluding to the Cosmic Skeptic -- "is a breach through which" the "spirit of doubt and of denial of the supernatural is made welcome." Like a fall, or something. But as a consequence,

most men are incapable of grasping a priori the compatibility between the symbolic expressions of tradition and the material discoveries established by science.

Such a man -- even man as such -- wants and deserves an explanation, but the ego

wants this "why" to be as external and as easy as that of "scientific" phenomena; in other words he wants answers on the level of his own experiences; and since these are purely material, his consciousness is closed in advance to all that goes beyond them. 

Boom. This "is to shut oneself off from the truth," "merely for reasons of dialectic." Or in other words, one's method determines what one perceives. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute? 

Well, one must first appreciate the metaphysical fact that the Absolute is what cannot not be, and that any truth we utter necessarily partakes of it. Conversely, "man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational."

In short, nothing could be more irrational than a reason enclosed in rationalism. Again, reason has its limits, so an "unlimited reason" is a contradiction of terms, an absurdity even. 

Here we could bring in Gödel's Hammer, but you get the point. In such a totalitarian rationalism, "an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality." 

"The modern mind 'moves on the surface'"; "living on husks," it "no longer knows what fruit is like." The consequence is a "false lucidity" that only replaces the old sentimentalities with new ones, i.e., with novel passions, intoxications, and projected ideological mirages.

Should we continue, or is that enough for one post?

A little more. We're not quite sick of you yet.

Okay. Schuon begins and ends with those immutable principles "which govern the Universe and fashion our intelligence," one of which is the Absolute referenced above. I would say that this Absolute bifurcates herebelow into subject and object, or intelligence and intelligibility, but that's just my opinion. 

Now, "logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything." 

Which checks out: no matter how stupid or evil the doctrine, there is a philosopher somewhere who thinks he can prove it. Schuon calls these tenured absurdities "esoterisms of stupidity," and says that when worldly intelligence 

joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth.

That's some fine insultainment, but the deeper point is that 

when man has no "visionary" -- as opposed to discursive -- knowledge of Being, and when he thinks only with his brain instead of "seeing" with the "heart," all his logic will be useless to him, since he starts with an initial blindness.

So, where should we start? Perhaps this is a good place to press the pause button.

Vertical Instincts and Meta-Needs

In yesterday's post we mentioned that the Cosmic Skeptic, Alex O'Connor, would like to believe, but that his intellect will not permit him to do so. Which is to say, the intellect can only assent to the truth, and neither can can nor should believe what is repugnant to it.  

But this account does a disservice to the powers of the intellect, which must be distinguished from the reason which is only one of the instruments in its toolbox. If man were literally confined to reason, he could never know it, because such knowledge obviously transcends reason. 

Thus, although man is the rational animal, he also has access to a "view from above," through which he is aware of his own rational powers. At the same time -- obviously -- he can sink beneath reason, which is to say, think and behave irrationally.

Now, even the rationalist will admit to the latter, which is to say that man can descend beneath himself. But what he will not acknowledge is that man can rise above himself, even though the one implies the other.

As to falling beneath himself, this is usually handled by the psychology department, specifically, clinical psychology, AKA my old racket. 

However, by mid-century (the 20th), a number of psychological theorists began to address the upper vertical as well, e.g., Abraham Maslow and his "hierarchy of needs," with meta-needs such as self-actualization at the top. 

Notice that man also has aesthetic needs, which is to say, an instinct for beauty:

This would consist of having the ability to appreciate the beauty within the world around one's self on a day-to-day basis.... [T]o progress toward Self-Actualization, humans require beautiful imagery or novel and aesthetically pleasing experiences.

So there is something in man that allows him "to extract the world's beauty," and this clearly isn't reducible to reason, otherwise it could be fulfilled by pondering syllogisms or working out math problems. Not to say that math isn't beautiful in its own way, only that it is inaccessible to the likes of us who dropped out of Algebra 2. I found no beauty there, only toil, tears, and sweat.

Now, it's easy to see that the lower vertical has "content," generally ascribed to the unconscious. And as indicated above, it is self-evident that man transcends reason, the question being "into what?" 

In other words, it seems to me that modernity is characterized by the loss of content, so to speak, of the upper vertical, or by an inability to perceive it via intellection.

It is a kind of forgetfulness, or perhaps it's just plain carelessness. Whatever the case, it seems there is an attenuation in man's ability to perceive the upper vertical, even though his need for it -- just like cognitive or aesthetic needs -- remains the same.

Just this morning Andrew Klavan touched on this:

We’ve been talking about recovering our ability to see the miraculous in the everyday. “To see a world in a grain of sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” so to speak. And the general feeling I get is that this ability slipped away when the medieval mindset was more or less particlized by the ray gun of science.

"People refer to this as the 'disenchantment of the world,'" but in reality, man is "built to know the infinite in the everyday." 

In the past we've discussed this in terms of right brain capture by the left, through which a totalitarian scientism is superimposed upon the world, thus eclipsing the upper vertical. But the same occurs with the internalization of any ideology.

You could say that ideology functions as a counterfeit substitute for Maslow's transcendent needs mentioned above. Which also accounts for the irrational passion of politicized vertical needs, i.e., secular religions.  

Here's a timely meme from a perhaps unlikely source:

In order to brush up on the subject this post, I reread an essay by Schuon called To Refuse or Accept Revelation. In Schopenhauer's case, he indeed accepted revelation, just not the Christian one, rather, the Vedantic, enthusing that "In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads."  

Indeed, they were even his favorite bedtime story (he read them every night before bed), "a source of great inspiration and means of comfort to my soul.... The Upanishads have been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death."

Speaking of man's meta-needs, he wrote that

Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which, strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need.

Likewise, similar to what we said above about ideological counterfeits, this vertical need "sometimes allows itself to be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales."

Having said that, it seems to me that Schopenhauer conflated the upper and lower vertical, as if the Upanishads were speaking of nothing more elevated than his concept of the world as blind will.

Just to remind ourselves what this post is supposed to be about, it began with the Cosmic Skeptic's inability to accept revelation, specifically, the inability of his intellect to assent to it. 

But for Schuon, "The objection of agnostics and other skeptics is too facile." That is, the "excuse of the moderns" is "easy enough" for a "people who believe in nothing and who are unaware of the plenary nature of man."

This understanding of man's full range of abilities and potentials is obscured by a lower vertical "passionate attachment to the here-below," and a "chaotic and even exclusive love for earthly goods," which prevents the person from intuiting what is "inscribed in the very substance of the heart." 

We've barely scratched the surface, but I'm running out of gas, so, to be continued....

Religion: The Big Picture

Last night I watched a debate between the Cosmic Skeptic Alex O'Connor and an assortment of Christians. I don't know what the format is called, but he was in the hot seat in the center, surrounded by a tag team of 25 Christians (and one Mormon) who took him on one at a time.

Any fair minded person would say that O'Connor politely ran the table, although, of course, he wasn't contending with the Thomas Aquinas Society. Probably the only unanswerable objection came from a woman (starting at about 1:01) who said that Jesus appeared in her room and literally gave her a hug and lifted her up, which was accompanied by an otherworldly joy. 

That has never happened to me, but I would certainly like for it to happen. Indeed, one thing that bothers me -- or the rational mind in general -- about such apparent vertical interventions is their seemingly arbitrary nature. In fact, supposing such an experience were vouchsafed to me, one of the first things I'd wonder about is, why me? Why not someone more deserving, or more devout, or more desperate? 

Yes, God presumably has his reasons that reason cannot comprehend, but why then did he give us reason, and why does St. Paul advise believers to always be prepared to give a presumably rational defense of one's faith? 

O'Connor is refreshingly honest in acknowledging that he would very much like to believe, but that his intellect will not permit him to do so. The intellect can only assent to the truth, or, put conversely, cannot and should not believe what is repugnant to it. 

O'Connor also has more detailed knowledge of scripture than most Christians, including me. He is courteously relentless in highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts. 

For my part, I assume there's an expert somewhere who is capable of reconciling them, but I'm more of a big picture guy. I take revelation to be true in the general sense, but don't have much interest in the fine points. He has an analytic mind, whereas mine is more synthetic. 

For example, if there's a troubling passage in the Old Testament that, taken literally, makes God sanction, say, genocide, I know there are traditional exegetes capable of contextualizing them -- for example, a while back I read a book on these called Dark Passages of the Bible that does just this.

I am much more troubled by the question of how to square a loving and omnipotent God with the existence of so much evil and suffering. Sure, growth and maturity require a degree of suffering, but much suffering is purely meaningless. 

Likewise, I can see how evil must exist in a creation that is separate from God, but the Holocaust? Even if God can draw some good from it, that's like the doctor tossing you off a building so he can manifest the good of offering medical treatment. 

Nevertheless, God exists, and the purpose of religion is to know him and conform our intellect and will to his -- which is to say, to the ultimate Real. In the Big Picture, 

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: religion is union. It is union with God (Schuon).

So, knowing reality and attaining union with it:

Everything in religion has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union. Man is intelligence and will, and religion is discernment and concentration (ibid.).

 Elsewhere Schuon writes that 

Religion is discernment between the Everlasting and the ephemeral, and union with the Everlasting. In other words, religion is basically discernment and concentration; separation from evil, which is illusion, and union with the Divine Good, which is Truth and eternal Reality.

Again, this is only the Big Picture, with no details as to who God is or how to go about union with him. In order to know these things, they would have to be revealed from Godside. 

Although there's a twist: supposing we are created in the image and likeness of the Creator, then there must already be something in us that mirrors him. Thus, for Schuon, 

Revelation is none other than the objective and symbolic manifestation of the Light which man carries in himself, in the depths of his being; it reminds him of what he is, and of what he should be since he has forgotten what he is.

This being the case, there must be some congruity between the revelation given to us from the outside, and the interior revelation "in the depths of our being." Problem is, this latter revelation has been distorted, weakened, and forgotten due to some sort of primordial calamity, which we don't know much about but can infer from its effects. Schuon compares our post-lapsarian state to   

something like that of fishes unknowingly enclosed in a block of ice. Revelation is then the ray of Omniscience which teaches us that this ice is not everything, that there is something else around it and after it, that we are not the ice and that the ice is not us.

Elsewhere he characterizes revelation as "a kind of cosmic Intellection, whereas personal Intellection is comparable to a Revelation on the scale of the microcosm." Or, "pure Intellection is a subjective and immanent Revelation just as Revelation properly so called is an objective and transcendent Intellection." 

Here again, this must be anchored in the principle of Image and Likeness mentioned above. Man -- in particular, the intellect -- is already a revelation of God, but the Fall accounts for the rupture between the reflection and its source. 

In this context, the purpose of revelation is to heal this rupture, or to clean the mirror of intellect. Looked at this way, the Bible "expresses complex truths in a language that is indirect and full of imagery," disclosing "a sphere of reality that transcends" the empirical, rational, and psychological planes:

It is the intellect that comprises in its very substance the evidence for the sphere of reality that we are speaking of and that thus contains the proof of it....

Indeed the “classical” prejudice of scientism, or the fault in its method if one wishes, is to deny any mode of knowledge that is suprasensorial and suprarational, and in consequence to deny the planes of reality to which these modes refer and that precisely constitute the sources both of revelation and of intellection.

But again, 

What the Bible describes as the fall of man or the loss of paradise coincides with our separation from total intelligence; this is why it is said that “the kingdom of God is within you,” and again: “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” 

The Bible itself is the multiple and mysterious objectivation of this intellect or Logos. It is thus by way of images and enigmas the projection of what we carry in a quasi-inaccessible depth at the bottom of our heart; and the facts of sacred history... are themselves cosmic projections of the unfathomable divine truth.

So, that's what I would say to O'Connor in response to his niggling over this or that little contradiction of inconsistency. Pull back and look at the bigger picture. 

To be continued...

The Three Note Symphony

I remember way back before the internet...

Wait. I actually don't. I mean, I do, but I don't recall how I filled the spacetime -- or rather, what spacetime was filled with.

Instead of having instant access to millions of books via amazon, I had to make the physical trek to a metaphysical bookstore in West Hollywood called The Bodhi Tree. It was the only way to forage for vertical supplies, i.e., coon chow. The store was even organized into eastern and western wings, oriental religions and philosophies to one side, occidental to the other.

I even bumped into George Harrison there one time. Of course, I didn't bother him, but there he was, just like me, scrounging around for information about the unnameable. 

One obscure book that made an impact on me at the time was called Nature, Man, and Society. It's actually a compendium of essays from an interdisciplinary journal called Main Currents in Modern Thought. As for why it made an impact, check out its mission statement: 

A cooperative journal to promote the free association of those working toward the integration of knowledge through study of the whole of things, Nature, Man, and Society, assuming the universe to be one, intelligible, harmonious.

The journal was founded by F.L. Kunz in 1940. If I recall correctly, its editorship was taken over by Ken Wilber at some point, and presumably went downhill from there, into Chopraville, Franklin Jonestown, and Andrew Coheny Island. But it was once a seriously wacky forum for the sorts of things we discuss here.

I can't imagine how difficult it must have been back then, in the days long before the internet, for scattered members of vertical diaspora to connect. How did these goddballs find each other?

Probably in the usual way, via nonlocal attractors synchronistically drawing them together into the same vertical phase space, only much less efficiently.

Before Amazon opened the floodgates and put every kookbook at our fingertips, the Bodhi Tree was the only place in town for all types of spiritual weirdness, high, low, and in between. Whereas the typical chain store might have a couple of books on such matters, the Bodhi Tree had whole sections devoted to obscure subjects from UFOlogy to Tibetan Buddhism to Wicca. They also had entire sections devoted to Christian mysticism, Vedanta, the occult, weird and wacky science, etc.

In an essay from Nature, Man, and Society called The New Dimensions of Nature and Man, a Donald Andrews writes that the behavior of the fundamental entities of the world "is characterized less by a particle-like and more by a wave-like nature."

Of course, particles and waves are irreducibly complementary, analogous to notes and melodies. He concludes that "both the universe as a whole and we in particular are not matter but music." Because music is "pure dynamic form, I think that it is both suggestive and meaningful to say that the atom now appears to be music."

Now, music has the interesting property of being simultaneously continuous and discontinuous: a flowing melody is composed of discrete notes. And outside the context of the melody, the notes have no meaning, but without the notes the melody cannot be composed or played. 

The Buddhist monk-scholar Lama Govinda writes of how past, present, and future are equally present in music. Although we hear it in the present moment, we are implicitly aware of the notes leading up to this moment, while the moment anticipates what is to come, i.e., its fulfillment in the future.

This complementarity of notes and melody implies that it isn't a question of being or becoming, but rather, being as becoming, and vice versa. "Both are ever united, and those who try to build a philosophy upon only one of them, to the exclusion of the other, lose themselves in verbal play" (ibid.).

Which I can't help thinking relates to the Trinity, which, in its eternal perichoretic dance, is like three notes in a single endless melody, or something.