I am feverishly making my way through 2023, but ran into a bottleneck with our lengthy review of McGilchrist's 1,500 page The Matter With Things, which must be almost as long as the book itself. Lots of good material there that will mesh nicely with the Absolute Science. Gemini is proving invaluable in helping me organize this mess.
The following preliminary summary won't be of much interest to you, but it sure helps me. It's not a final template, but it's a miracle there's any template at all. I need to preserve it somewhere, so it might as well be here:
This is an ambitious attempt to organize the "Bewilderness" into a coherent structure. Since we are essentially building the Summa Raccoonologica, we can’t just use a linear list. We need a structure that reflects the Open Spiral and the Double Movement (↑↓).
Here is a draft Table of Contents for your 5,452 Footnotes: The Absolute Science and the Open Spiral.
🌌 Part I: The Vertical Ground (Ontology)
The fundamental structure of Being at the heart of the world.
The Dipolar Absolute: Understanding Absolute (O) and Infinite.
The Cosmic Area Rug: Necessity vs. Possibility and the Weaving of Freedom.
God as the Non-Deconstructionist: Why the Absolute is Bound by Truth and Love.
The Smile of the Absolute: Why Reality is a meaningful "Yes" rather than an "Absurd No."
🪜 Part II: The Double Movement (Epistemology)
How the Truth-Bearing Primate navigates the gap between Intelligence and Intelligibility.
The Lonergan Spiral (↑↓): The Way of Discovery (Analysis) and the Way of Doctrine (Synthesis).
The Perpetual Notion Machine: Why Insight is an endless expansion of the Cosmos.
Systematic Ignorance: Knowing how to "stay in the not-knowing" until the Light breaks in.
The Absolute Science: A "Rendezvous with Music" vs. a collection of dead facts.
🧠 Part III: The Hemispheric Matrix (Neurology of the Vertical)
The architecture of the brain as a mirror of the architecture of the Cosmos.
The Master and His Emissary: The RH’s Beholding vs. the LH’s Modeling.
The Narrative Industrial Complex: Diagnosing "Metaphysical Cancer" and LH Capture.
The Hall of Mirrors: How Nominalism turns the world into a closed loop of symbols.
The Bullshit Detector: The RH as our anchor in the First Bank of Reality.
🧱 Part IV: The Walls of Paradise (Orthoparadox)
The "Stereo Vision" required to perceive the highest levels of Truth.
The Coincidence of Opposites: Why Deep Truths look like contradictions to the LH.
The Orthoparadoxical Trinity: Intersubjectivity as the ground of Being.
The Open Spiral: Why every logical container must be transcended (Gödel in the Vertical).
Degrees of Truth: Why Flatland reductionism is a functional brain lesion.
🎨 Part V: The Metaphorical Cosmos (Semiotics)
Reality as a communication between the Creator and the Subject.
The First Metaphor: The Son as the Image and Message of the Father.
Betweenness and the Transitional Space: The Winnicottian Nexus.
The "AND": Why relationship is prior to the things related.
Intellection vs. Reason: The "Supernatural Ray" and the Eye of the Heart.
🧬 Part VI: The Physics of Meaning (Biosemiotics)
From the Holographic Universe to the Anticipatory Organism.
The Holographic Heart: Why the Whole is truly in every Part.
Life as the Ontological Primitive: Beyond the "Machine Model" with Robert Rosen.
The Fire in the Equations: Who breathes life into the math?
Top-Down Causation: Meaning as a physical force in the Bewilderness.
📝 The "Author's Note" to the Future
"Your cosmos is as large as that which interests you." This book is not a solution; it is an apprenticeship to a Truth that has no end. It is a guide to remaining "puzzled, confused, and open to surprise" until the final Rendezvous.
Bob, does this structure capture the "Groove" of the work so far? It seems to turn your 5,000 fragments into a single, massive "Stereo Image" of Reality.
Nice try, but still a long way to go.
