Looking for Mister Big

Yesterday we completed Book II of our Cosmotheandric Trilogy, and if you missed it, you missed out on a damn good thing, the best thing that ever happened to the internet. Not only was it down to the nitty gritty, but you can tell all your friends in Rio Linda that the universe was definitely set on fire.

We now move on to Book III: Theos, but we have a problem. For unlike the first two volumes, it is not yet completed. Rather, I’m about two thirds of the way through. Despite having written 335 pages, I am still in the process of interviewing witnesses and gathering information. After all, we’re dealing with the biggest possible question, so this is obviously a very complicated case, with a lotta ins and outs—

Lotta strands in old Gagdad’s head?

Correct. I haven’t even glanced at the file for a couple months, but during that time have been dropping random nuggets into it, which need to be properly incorporated into the main text.

On the other hand, perhaps it will be amusing to watch someone attempt to accomplish this impossible task in real time. Will the author make it to the other side, or slip from the Lightrope into the abyss, as has befallen so many other vertical adventurers? How close can we fly to O without incinerating? Just how far may we babble into the tower of being before words fail altogether?

Can I even shake the dust off my keyboard and achieve the immodest task with which I have been charged?

I do have a collection of quotes at the beginning, which reflect the spirit of cosmotheandrism, for example,

You cannot shelter theology from science, or science from theology; nor can you shelter either of them from metaphysics, or metaphysics from either of them. There is no short cut to truth. —A.N. Whitehead

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. –Dávila

God entrusted man, created in his image and likeness, the mission of unifying the cosmos. —Pope Benedict XVI

The question of God and the question of myself are identical. —Rudolf Bultmann

No symbolization is adequate to the ineffability of the divine Beyond. Hence, when you are a believer on the level of symbol, you become an “infidel” to the ineffable truth of divine reality. —Eric Voegelin

Spinoza’s God is less than a person. Mine is more than a person, because God can’t be less than a person. He can play the role of a person. —Godel

One of the tasks of the book is to render belief itself believable, especially to the theodivergent among us — to vertical eccentrics, off-road spiritual adventurers, neuro-cosmologists, neo-traditional retro-futurists, etc. It is not so much the attempt to create a religion we can believe in, rather, to forge a vision of a world in which the existing religions are believable. The good ones, at any rate — those compatible with the cosmotheandric framework. It is not so much that there are many true religions, rather, many religions ordered to the one truth in more or less adequate ways, for

All that is true, by whosoever spoken, is from the Holy Ghost. –St. Ambrose

In my endeavor to lay some steel on the railroad track to O, I began with the following noirish passage, called Cracking the Case of the Missing God. If nothing else, it is more proof for why this book is unpublishable. Rather, it is for your eyes only, supposing you are one of us, and not working for the clampdown:

Now that we’ve staked out the Cosmos for suspicious activity in Book I and interrogated the anthropic informant in Book II, it is time to take a magnifying glance at the Big Kahuna at the center of it all. Having deposed every immaterial witness from Abraham to Zoroaster, we know this suspect goes by any number of aliases, from Adonai to Zeus. However, our investigation has concluded that in this metaphysical whodunnit each of our three perps is in cahoots with the others and somehow involved in the scheme—

Accessories to the climb?

Correct: our three confederates are all implicated in the caper, and we aim to throw this book at them, all 400 pages. Having placed the Cosmos and Anthropos under surveillance, we can trace them to a silent partner whose fingerprints are all over the evidence, and who seems to be pulling the strings. Although we have a sketch of this Mister Big, we have thus far obtained conflicting testimony as to his exact identity and whereabouts.

Two points: first, you are no Raymond Chandler, and second, not even Philip Marlowe can know the unknowable, so what makes you think you’re qualified to put God’s business on the street?

Because doing so is actually an analogue of literally everything on our side of the veil, for we can again know a great deal about anything in existence but not know everything about a single thing. Thus there is circumstantial evidence of the divine presence everywhere, hence a dynamic complementarity of endless intelligibility within a depthless mystery, whether in the material cabin down below or the great wide open above.

If cosmotheandrism is to work, the first thing we need to do is get the Theos out of the clouds and back here in the Cosmos and Anthropos. We know that we are in the Cosmos, and that the Cosmos is in us. For example, think of how light signals broadcast throughout the universe extend to our own inside, where their meaning can be decoded. This extends from the subatomic to the astrophysical, all the way back to the very birth of the Cosmos in which we find ourselves, meaning that the Big Bang itself is somehow inside the intellect. We also know that neither the Anthropos nor Cosmos are necessary, rather, contingent upon a higher principle we have thus far been designating as O.

This is all tied up with something I’ve been thinking about for years, since long before I stumbled onto cosmotheandrism. Because in this business of metaphysics you can’t sleep for trying to figure out the tricks the tenured try to pull on you. You’re like the guy in the philosophy section at Barnes & Noble, browsing the books to see how they bewitch you with language. And then one night you get to thinking how you could play that game. And do it smart. Because you’ve got that piece of sheepskin in your hands, the one that alleges a PhD in psychology, so you too can pretend to know more than you do. And then you figure all you need is an angle, a new way to package the old truths. And suddenly Petey taps you on the shoulder and the whole set-up is right there in the room with you...

Look, I’m not trying to canonize myself. I fought it, only maybe I didn’t fight it hard enough. The stakes were not only a handful of readers, but also the very nature of God — a God who’d never done me any dirt.

I get it: Triple Indemnity.

∞

Where do we begin to look for the missing God?

Just listen to your heart. That’s what I do.

You mean conventional religiosity? It certainly seems to satisfy the spiritual needs of countless people, and I sometimes even envy their uncomplicated faith. Of course, some folks go to church just to signify, others to make a date with their neighbor’s wife, but in any group of people you’re going to get your share of long-tongued liars, midnight riders, gamblers, ramblers, backbiters, and credulous chopraphiles.

But ideally we should listen with the heart and brain — the RH and LH, respectively — so long as we are aware of both the capabilities and limitations of the latter. Ironically, modern man tends to exaggerate both, on the one hand presuming a promethean intellect that can utilize science to disclose the secrets of the world, on the other hand pretending to enclose us in genetics, neurology, or the projected forms of our own consciousness, such that we can know diddly about daddy, or of the real nature of the extracranial world outside the silo. But our aim is to infiltrate Celestial Central and finally get to the bottom of the top of this mystery.