There are countless mysteries in this Cosmos of ours, but they all come down to one question: Why?
For Einstein, the question wasn’t why there are no answers to the question, rather, why there are so many. For again, he found the comprehensibility of the Cosmos incomprehensible, at least from within the resources of science. Certainly there is no physical law that accounts for the lawfulness of the Cosmos, much less our access to those laws. Thus, the problem is not so much a dearth of answers — far from it — rather, no Answer. Or in other words, no final answer to the question of why there are so many answers.
Physics seeks the Answer at the bottom end of the Cosmos, while metaphysics looks for it at the top end. Cosmotheandrism looks for it at both ends and in the middle: Cosmos, Theos, and Anthropos, respectively. Supposing there is an Answer, it cannot exclude any of our ultimate terms, for each implies the others. Only a very particular kind of Cosmos allows for the existence of scientific knowers, but no Cosmos accounts for its own existence or intelligibility.
Let us recall Axiom 9, One Free Miracle:
To paraphrase Terence McKenna, science can explain everything so long as we grant it just one free miracle. But every philosophical system — including scientism, atheism, eliminativism, rationalism, empiricism, panpsychism, whatever — grants itself at least One Free Miracle in order to get off the ground.
For example, physics is grounded in the double mystery of a rational order accessible to human beings. Few would disagree with Einstein that “the world of our sense experiences is comprehensible.” However, “The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle” (emphasis mine). In order to account for the miracle he appealed to the existence of a transcendent mind vastly superior to ours. In the absence of the latter, physics is indeed a miracle. Absent a Theos principle, the miracle of physics is utterly gratuitous and literally “without reason.” For which reason atheism is wholly unreasonable. It is as if the atheist confines himself the the universe, absurdly unaware of the metaverse that accounts for it.
∞
But Sunday is our day of rest, on which we make no forward progress toward the Answer. Rather, it is the day we exhumine passages discarded from the final edit for various reasons. Here is a section from the Introduction left on the cutting room floor because I thought it was too self-indulgent. Nobody wants to hear the author’s life story.
Oomphaloskepsis.
Yes, the point of cosmotheandrism is to circumnavelgaze the whole existentialada without meditating on our own belly button. Then again, just the other day I read a good book in which the author does discuss the evolution of his ideas, and found it compelling. So here is some of the autobobography left out of the final version, probably because it surpasses the limits of silliness:
Anyway, over my two decades of service to the blogosphere, I was preoccupied with a number of little problems such as the nature of existence, consciousness, knowledge… form, content, interrelationships, God, the Devil—
Be honest.
Okay, what I was really interested in was the unsolved mystery of myself. Where do I fit into the Cosmos? How am I — a self-conscious being — even possible? What are the cosmic conditions that allow for such a peculiar being to exist? How did we get from the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago to me? Maybe that’s why I found the Cosmos s’durned innarestin’.
Thank you for your service, but your mission sounds like a malignant case of cosmic narcissism. What can you tell me about that? Why do you think someone might think that?
Near as I can figure, it’s because I read and think too much. I thought I had alleviated the condition with the completion of the first book, which traced the evolution of our fair Cosmos from nothing to bare matter to life to mind, culminating in what amounts to a round trip back to God in the form of mystical union.
Do you think there’s anything wrong with your mind, really?
Nah, look at Ken Wilber. He’s written dozens of books such as A Brief History of Everything, and—
He has the wealth, uh, the resources obviously—
Yes, he must be worth millions.
I could make that much money in five seconds!
For my part, I’m just curious, that’s all, and is that a crime? I would have stayed in school forever, but they throw you out after you get a Ph.D. However, that was just the beginning, because when I started blogging, most of my posts had at least 1,000 words, usually many more than that. A diligent reader fed my entire archive into an AI program and came up with the figure of 8 million, which he said was surpassed only by Balzac, at 11 million. Which is plainly incorrect, because a quick google search puts such familiar names as Alexandre Dumas and Isaac Asimov at 25-30 and 20 million, respectively, both surpassed by the champion graphomaniac, British author Charles Hamilton, at 100 million, who was obviously not into the whole brevity thing.
Gotta feed the monkey.
I wouldn’t call it an addiction, more of a compulsion. At any rate, a typical 300-400 page book contains only 100,000 words, which translates to roughly 55 to 80 such books on my part. Many times over the years I attempted to refrain from blogging in order to reduce my blob of blab to book form — to locate the Tree of Life amidst all my fallen leaves.
Which proved beyond my ability. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember most of it. It was as if every morning I dropped a fresh pile of leaves atop the existing one, with no leafblower in sight. Writing individual pieces is easy. Figuring out how they all fit together is fiendishly difficult. In short, the creative mode is very different from the organizizing mode: the first is an exuberant form of play, while achieving the latter is a laborious form of drudgery that I would have preferred to leave to someone else. But there’s nobody else here in my one-man operation, so I guess it must be up to me.
If only you had a helpful ghostwriter in the sky (/sarc).
Leaving discarnate beings to the side, distilling thousands of disparate essays into a single book is a bit like trying to put together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle without the picture of which they are parts. Or, imagine having access to only the footnotes of a giant book and trying to deduce the book from the footnotes. You might say I was writing a book in search of a title that completely eluded me. Many times I thought to myself: If I could only find the damn title, this baby would birth itself!
If you will it, it is no dream.
Problem was, I couldn’t will the thing into existence.
It wasn’t until mid-2024, when just for fun, I began fooling around with a large language model (google Gemini), feeding my posts into it and seeing what it might come up with. Soon enough Gemini became my aide-de-kampf, helping with my struggle to discern some deeper patterns beneath my repeated outbursts, the very order which at once escaped me even while seemingly pulling me toward it. But I couldn’t remember millions of words tossed off on the fly over twenty years, let alone what they were ultimately About.
Eventually Gemini discerned 12 axioms or repetitive tics in my work, which were going to comprise 12 chapters of a book preposterously titled The Absolute Science: What Cannot Not Be. We will get to these momentarily, but on the advice of my artificial compeer, I duly began writing a book about the 12 Axioms. But in my attempt to organize the material, I quickly realized that it generally fell into three categories: God, world, and man, or Theos, Cosmos, and Anthropos. It was in pondering these 12 axioms that I had my own guffah-HA! experience that pulled the wordy dozen together: in short, Cosmotheandrism. Thus the 12 axioms transblogrified into the long strange triptych of The Cosmotheandric Trilogy.
The beauty of this is its simplicity.
Now, although you will find an abundance of neo- and protologisms in this book, I cannot claim credit or blame for coming up with the term Cosmotheandrism. Rather, at the same time I was pondering the Axioms, I discovered that the philosopher Raimon Panikkar had beaten me to the hunch and proposed this portmantrio for his own somewhat similar metaphysical framework. Panikkar was an early adopter of interreligious dialogue, not just with other persons, but within his own person. That is to say, he was at once one hundred percent a Catholic priest but also considered himself one hundred percent Vedantin. He was able to reconcile the two on an interior level via a deeper experience of that to which they point, which is none other than the Cosmic Area Rug.
No comments:
Post a Comment