Here’s Another Post

The title is in reference to a live album I was listening to the other day by R.E.M., in which Michael Stipe introduces each song by drily announcing “here’s another song.” At the other extreme of the irony spectrum is someone like Barbra Streisand, who reads her stage banter from a teleprompter, in a simulation of spontaneity.

Likewise, at one end of the musical spectrum is jazz, which is created on the spot, at the other end the Eagles, who endeavor to recreate their records without so much as a whiff of spontaneity. The former is transcendentally open to the thing we call music, the latter as tightly closed as a syllogism or mathematical equation.

Petey, I know what you’re thinking, but Creedence was pretty much the same — in concert they were more a jukebox than a jam band.

Cosmotheandrism adopts a jazz approach to metaphysics, because this mirrors the Creator’s approach to creation. For who bothers to create the already known, when the whole point of creation is to bring something novel and unanticipated into being? Otherwise it’s just manufacturing: industry, not art.

Leonard Cohen once said that religion is the most exalted form of adult entertainment. In an interview discussing his spiritual practice, he asked

What [else] would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine? I don’t know. This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.

He goes on to describe his practice as a “profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment…. Nothing touches it.”

Speaking of music, a disciplined spiritual practice — and Cohen spent five or six years practicing in a Zen Monastery — is much like the transition from knowing all about musical theory to picking up an instrument and learning how to play. Religion is an instrument for engaging the vertical.

Maybe, but there have been as many as 10,000 distinct religions in the world.

Good point. It’s easy enough to prove that a reductive or material explanation of existence is insufficient, for it is much like pretending to read reality off a telepromter. But it is not altogether clear what to replace it with. We know that horizontal and vertical are complementary down here, and we can even deduce that the vertical must be ontologically prior, since no amount of time or horizontal shuffling could have given rise to it. Beyond this, the sages diverge.

Man has been trying to map the transcendent pole since before Keith Richards took his first stumbling steps. It reminds me of European explorers who discovered the “new world.” One lands in modern day El Salvador, another in Canada. Both return to their respective monarchs and describe what they found:

“Balmy weather, palm trees, and little regard for clothing.”

“No, a frozen landscape, fur-clad natives, and the occasional moose.”

Of course both are correct, and I wonder if something similar could apply to the upper vertical, based upon the testimony of countless sages and mystics who have landed on different shores of the same nonlocal continent?

My house has many mansions.

You can say that again. There are said to be 45,000 distinct denominations within Christianity alone, meaning there are more intra-Christian variants than the total number of extra-Christian religions in history. So, on what basis do we choose which mansion to inhabit?

You know what they say: two rabbis, three opinions.

Analogously, it is like trying to decide where to go on vacation without having any knowledge of the destinations involved. Rather, you just pick one at random and hope you don’t end up in Fresno. No wonder people reject the whole notion of religion and take flight into secularism.

The problem is, you may not care about the Absolute, but the Absolute cares about you. In other words, you can only pretend to ignore it, because you will inevitably put a false absolute in its place. But are there any features of the Absolute about which all reasonable people could agree? Here again, it is somewhat analogous to science, for example, in the widespread disagreement about the nature of the quantum world, with dozens of ways to explain what the equations actually mean for reality.

The house of physics has many mansions.

And not just physics. The higher up the vertical scale, the more diversity and less agreement on fundamentals. In my old racket, there are over 500 schools of psychotherapy, one reason being that a human being is much more complex than a subatomic particle, so naturally explanations multiply as we ascend the vertical hierarchy.

But even supposing we acknowledge some kind of Absolute, it results in a rather threadbare religion. What is It — or He or She or They — really like? What even are Its pronouns? Is there a way to get to know It better? And does It give a hoot about us?

Yes, there is revelation, but which one is truly the big reveal? Is he none or one or three or more? What are his rules? Is he actively involved in the world — a helicopter Theos — or more like the deist conception, in which he creates the world but leaves it to us to FAFO through history?

Here’s a thought: if our own subjectivity is grounded in his, then perhaps the most central features of our subjectivity may reveal something of his. If this is the case, then features of our consciousness may reflect features of his.

It’s worth a shot.

Let’s think about this... Ah ha! Thinking. Certainly this is the main feature of human consciousness, in that we pretty much never stop thinking — or at least “thinking.” Nor does our consciousness resemble that of lower animals, since we inhabit an immateriaal world of ideas, essences, and abstract concepts that is totally inaccessible to the beasts.

And why do we do this? Here again, reduced to horizontal resources, there is no why. But supposing we think, it is in order to know. Know what? Truth. Just try denying this property of thinking and see how far it gets you.

Could it be that the Absolute is not only the source and ground of truth, but Truth itself? If so, this would explain why there are so many seemingly contradictory truths down here — even those thousands of religions, sub-religions, and anti-religions — because a truth can never be the Truth.

But we are finite while the Absolute is Infinite, so we know going in that none of our finite 3D maps are going to be adequate. Just look at a flat map of the earth, on which Greenland appears almost as large as Canada, when in reality Canada is nearly four times larger. Now, imagine what happens when we try to transpose a hyperdimensional reality into the key of man, and you understand the problem. Some things are necessarily distorted and stretched, while others might be left out entirely.

Here’s an idea: what if we could take all of these human maps of the Absolute and somehow put them together — like a religious sketch artist who uses the descriptions of all the witnesses to come up with a likeness of the suspect?

This is what Frithjof Schuon essentially attempted in his Transcendent Unity of Religions. In his view, the principle orthodox religions — Christianity, Judaism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism, et al — do indeed share certain features beneath their superficial differences. Not to necessarily say he was correct, but he felt that the differences were on the exoteric plane, while the unity was on the esoteric plane — the inner dimensions of metaphysics and mysticism. For example, a Christian and Buddhist mystic might actually have more in common than do two Christians, say, Meister Eckhart and Claude Osteen.

The name is Joel. You’re thinking of the baseball player.

Nevertheless, Eckhart knew no more about baseball than Joel Osteen knows about mysticism or metaphysics.

In any event, Schuon compared our hyperdimensional object or Principle to a mountain. Imagine the diverse religions situated at the base of the mountain, where they are widely separated and may not even know of each other. But as they ascend the mountain, the space between them necessarily shrinks, until they meet at the top and bear witness to the same infinite reality. Up there, the account of a Christian mystic sounds quite similar to a Buddhist, Hindu, or Taoist mystic.

Example.

Consider the astrophysicist and cosmologist Robert Jastrow, who had this to say:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

More generally, as scientific and horizontal knowledge proceeds in a forward direction, while philosophical and religious — which is to say, vertical — thought partakes of depth and height. Here again, we know from St. Paul that even Christianity can be understood superficially or deeply — milk for the former, meat for the latter.

Or consider Thomas Aquinas, who arguably created the most consistent and complete map of the vertical ever conceived by man. And yet, at the end of his life he was vouchsafed an earth-shattering mystical experience that made his own map appear as “so much straw.” In other words, the most comprehensive map of total reality proved to be totally inadequate — and that’s saying something.

What does it say?

Nothing.

Wait, nothing?

Yes, nothing. For even before his mystical experience, he wrote that “This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know him.” Not to mention Eckhart, who uttered such orthoparadoxes as “God is nothing. No thing. God is nothingnesss; and yet God is something.”

In fact, this knowing and unknowing of something and nothing constitutes another dynamic complementarity, in that while the finite can never exhaust the Infinite, it never stops trying — this being what we call the “metabolism of God.” For example, how many circles are in a sphere? Correct: ∞. Likewise, how many points in a line?

Yes, but what’s the point?

So, how many religions, doctrines, and theologies in God?

I’m guessing a lot?

Well, Aquinas also said that “Although uncreated truth exceeds all created truth, yet there is nothing to prevent created truth from being better known to us.” Just don’t pretend the created can ever exhaustively map the uncreated, for “God is one in reality but multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him.”

Like that giant disco ball in the sky mentioned yesterday, with millions of reflections?

In the end, “God is honored by silence, not because we may say or know nothing about him, but because we know that we are unable to comprehend him” (Aquinas). Therefore, “The most beautiful thing which a person can say about God would be for that person to remain silent from the wisdom of an inner wealth” (Eckhart).

But there is also this: supposing God is no-thing, and we are the image and likeness, what does that make us? A double nothing, or nothing squared? Here’s a thought: “If humanity alone is described as made to God’s image and likeness..., there must be a sense in which the deepest meaning of being human is that homo, that is, human nature, is also ‘no-thing’..., not just in a privative but also in an eminent sense” (McGinn).

Homo nihil?

Hold that unthought.