Homo Bangians and the New World

"With the advent of man," says Polanyi, "a whole new world of meanings burst into view." Absent this extraordinary Bang, it would be as if the others -- e.g., existence and life -- had never occurred. Certainly the latter two wouldn't mean anything. And in fact, nor do we Homo bangians mean anything unless we are converging upon the Singularity of singularities, AKA the Great Attractor.

A whole new world of meanings. What is the nature of this world? It is not merely the exterior world, for no meaning occurs there. Nor is it just the interior world, because with no anchor in reality, it is reduced to a dream. Rather, meaning takes place in the space between world and neurology, or between a ponderable exterior and pondering interior.

This world can only be known through personal participation; or just say persons. "Knowing of any sort," writes Prosch, "is the creation of a meaningful integration of subsidiary clues, dwelt in as a projection toward the achievement of a focally known whole -- even in the cases of perceptual objects of the sciences."

In other words, human perception is already the meaningful creation of an integrated whole. It is what humans do. In thinking about this, it must converge upon our mysterious ability to know universals. Almost as soon as we begin speaking, we are able to, for example, abstract dogginess from the dog or treeness from the tree. In other words, we organize the clues of this world into more abstract, universal, and meaningful categories.

"Perception does this, ordinary knowing does this, scientific knowing does this, poetry does this, religion does this."

Or in other words, we may regard knowing itself -- already an abstraction -- and appreciate an even deeper abstraction that unifies all its forms, from everyday perception to science to religion. If this is true, then "knowing the world" cannot be fundamentally different from "knowing God." Or, the data are different but the form is the same.

In a way, we already know this; for example, bio-logy is applying our reason to the data of life, as theo-logy is applying our reason to the data of God. Whether we are investigating bios, anthropos, or psyche, it is the same -logos that illuminates each.

Polanyi speaks of "conversion" from one worldview to another. While it applies to religion, the religious conversion represents a more universal phenomenon. Conversion as such "occurs when a person sees that a new world view would seem to open many more possibilities for a richer field of meaning than the one previously held" (Prosch).

This is why I conceptualize meaning as an attractor state in our psycho-pneumatic phase space. It is very much as if our minds are "pulled" into more stable attractors that integrate and harmonize more clues. This is very different from "imposing" meaning in a top-down manner, which always results in eliminating or obscuring important clues.

The latter involves a closed mind (and world), while the kind of exploration and discovery we're talking about requires openness and sensitivity to nonlocal (vertical) gravitational forces -- like surfing the invisible waves that flow between God and our local shores.

Speaking of gravitational forces, we are always "in the orbit" of God. In principle, thinking cannot occur without this attraction. Man is innately epistemophilic, meaning that he is a (the) truth-seeking being. No, he is the truth-loving being, hence the seeking. This accounts for the palpable joy of finding truth: it is what we are made to do.

Like any properly serious truth-loving being, Polanyi "took Gödel's theorems very seriously." Indeed, if only people would take him seriously, not only could we avoid an awful lot of philosophical mischief, we might even find a cure for tenure in our lifetimes. For it is written:

"No conceptual system can ever demonstrate within its system its own consistency." Rather, "Belief is always based on personal, tacit grounds, extraneous to the system..."

This comes very close to describing Adam's sin. For what is the Original Error to which man is always susceptible? Surely it must be imagining that his manmade system is sufficient unto itself; that it is both consistent and complete, thus having no need for that which transcends it, AKA God.

Note how this inevitably causes man to go off the cosmic rails. Again, in order for there to be be thinking at all, it must take place in the attractor space between man and Absolute. Deny this link -- this vertical trailroad -- and man only orbits himself in an act of cosmic onanism.

What we call "religion" is simply conscious participation in this orbiting; among other things, it allows us to "bring together events occurring in nature with a Cause that is not in nature," thus respecting Gödel and not incidentally the second commandment, for thou shalt have no other theorems before Gödel's.

The Psychic Vomitoreum of Politics

Continuing with our Dual Track Theory of Mind and Everything Else, the next place I stumbled upon the concept was in the works of psychoanalyst James Grotstein, who writes that "Only through integration of various experiential perspectives is the illusion of unitary experience created, much as an integrated visual depth is achieved through an integration of slightly different visual images perceived by each eye."

In his case, he's talking about the complementary relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds. In the older conception, it was as if the conscious mind were built on the ruins of an older and more primitive unconscious, and understanding the latter was something like an archaeological dig.

But in the newer conception, we see that it is more of a dialectic, such that there is "unconsciousness" in all consciousness, and vice versa.

Indeed, this is what lends reality its richness, depth, and mystery; it is what makes us poets and visionaries instead of atheists or computers. Thank God, we always see (implicitly) more than we can possibly say (explicitly), which is one of the main points of Polanyi's epistemology.

Furthermore, we can never rid the world of this mystery on pain of being slapped upside the head by the ghost of Gödel. You might say that, try as we might to encircle the world with our left brain, our right brain always escapes confinement. Unless we somehow disable the latter.

Which does happen. Again, consider an extreme case such as Marxism, which fully explains man and history. But then Gödel slaps Marx upside the head, and reminds him that a theory can be complete or consistent, but not both. Which is it then Karl?

And now you know why every form of leftism since then is laughably inconsistent.

Example.

Okay, here's one chosen at random from this morning on liberals and their bogus charges of racism. Like Marxism, the liberal theory of white racism and white privilege is a complete explanation. But it cannot be consistent on pain of attributing an even worse form of racist oppression and privilege to Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, and Persian Americans.

Do not expect liberals to be troubled by their inconsistency any time soon. This would require a tolerance of cognitive dissonance to which liberals are notoriously intolerant.

The same applies to all forms of feminism, a doctrine so liberating that it can only exist at the end of a gunpoint, i.e., via state coercion.

In California schools, for example, no one is "free" to accept or reject feminism on the merits. Rather, it is legislated into textbooks, as it is into sports, into the university system, and on into statistical disparities in employment. But only for pleasant jobs. It doesn't matter if men have all the physically demanding but low paying ones.

Once you start looking for them, Dual Tracks are everywhere -- for example, in men and women. Feminists ardently desire to wish that one away, but from where does this perverse ardency emanate? For example, within my lifetime men were once ardent for women, and vice versa. But a feminist is ardent to be a man. "They are, in the end, asking women to make themselves unattractive to men and forego love and children" (Levin).

Anyway, with no less than two tracks operating at all times, one would think that the attainment of unitary experience would be difficult -- that we would constantly be aware of a kind of "split personality" within. Well, to a certain extent we are. One thing I like about Bion is that he reduces it all down to its most abstract terms, in this case Container (which he symbolizes ♀) and Contained (symbolized ♂). You could even say psychic womb and explosive seed.

Looked at in this way, you might say that Life is an unceasing attempt at containment. We are constantly being bombarded by thoughts, impulses, and emotions. From where do they come? Who knows? And as we mentioned yesterday, sometimes the process can go entirely off the rails, such that containment becomes impossible. The person-container becomes swamped by the contained, with no unity or coherence.

It just occurred to me how this is happening to the Clinton campaign. Think of the "narrative" as the container. Since Sunday, all sorts of things have broken through the container, and liberals are feverishly attempting to repair it. But as usual, they can never be consistent, only complete, however implausibly.

Another interesting dual track is nature vs. nurture. We are never one or the other, but an unsettled dialectic of both/and. Now feminism in particular, but liberalism more generally, defaults to the environmental side, with consequences ranging from ridiculous to malignant.

In fact, the consequences would be only ridiculous if not for the fact that liberals enlist the state to enforce the ridiculousness, as per the above. Similarly, I have nothing against homosexuals per se, but when the state insists that two members of the same sex can exist in a state of marriage, it is mandating compulsory absurdity.

We are all called upon to metabolize disparate experience into a unitary self -- just as when we digest food, it somehow turns into the body. But there are alternatives to digestion. For example, we can vomit, as in bulimia; we can starve ourselves, as in anorexia; we can eat indiscriminately and become fat; we can have metabolic disorders such as diabetes; etc.

Shifting to the psychic plane, one extremely common form of indigestion is projection. I'll provide a typical clinical example. A woman is at work, and sees a male coworker playfully reach up the skirt of a female coworker. The female withdraws but doesn't seem to mind. Rather, she is more flirtatious than bothered by it. In fact, she herself dresses inappropriately at work, with excessively short skirts.

Yes, the behavior is no doubt inappropriate for a workplace. But the woman who witnessed it becomes overwhelmed with anger and anxiety. The anxiety is so intense that it manifests in sweating, headache, and the impulse to vomit. And once it breaks through, it doesn't go away. It morphs into insomnia, phobic avoidance of work, and other symptoms. As in a nuclear reactor, the core has been breeched and is uncontained.

What is going on? We hear so much ridiculous blather about "triggers," that we may fail to appreciate that they do exist. For this person, the experience resonated with previously quiescent memories of having been sexually abused as a child. The memories have become "uncontained" and are spilling over into the exterior world. It is analogous to a kind of psychic vomiting of indigestible experience.

Much of politics is just management of the uncontained, especially of more primitive emotions of fear, anger, and envy. Without feminist and black rage, there is hardly a Democratic party. Likewise apocalyptic environmental fears. And then there is class envy. If liberals could merely contain these primitive emotions, then they wouldn't be liberals. Or in other words, they would no longer need liberalism to contain their primitive emotions.

Of note, they also project primitive "loving" emotions, such as the need to feel nurtured and protected by the state.

All of this presumes a developmental telos in man. In short, we all start out as helpless and dependent infants. With "good enough parenting" we will go through various developmental stages, ending with what is called "mature dependency."

This is an I-AMbiguous station, because it must avoid immature dependency on one side, and a pseudo-mature independence on the other. Indeed, it is a middle ground between the dual tracks of dependence/independence, or social-ism/narciss-ism.

This is all by way of a preluminary to the granddaddy of all Dual Tracks, man and God -- or, you might say our divine and human natures. It seems to me that all other tracks must be fractals of that one.

Liberalism and Hyper-Psychosis

I'm not sure I remember when I first came across the idea of a Dual Track Mind, but it's definitely a thing, because it has subsequently popped up in numerous contexts.

It might well have been in Polanyi, who speaks of "dual control," "first by the laws that apply to its elements in themselves, and second, by the laws that control the comprehensive entity formed by them."

Such dual control is possible because "the principles governing the isolated particulars of a lower level, leave indeterminate their boundary conditions for the control of a higher principle."

This rules out reductionism, because "the operations of a higher level cannot be accounted for by the laws governing its particulars forming the next lower level." You can't deduce a novel's meaning by examining the grammar, syntax, spelling, or meanings of the individual words. Nor can any of these things account for good style, or artistry.

To be sure, there are "laws" of writing, but you can follow them to the letter, and this will not necessarily result in a good book, let alone artistry. The laws are necessary on their own level, but cannot account for the level above. Spelling or proper grammar are necessary to convey meaning, but obviously insufficient.

It is the same with organisms. The laws of physics operate within our bodies, but their boundary conditions are left open for the emergence of life. In turn, the boundary conditions of life are left open for mind. Although we rely upon the lower levels, it is "impossible to account for the operations of any higher level by the laws governing its isolated particulars."

This is why it makes no sense to reduce mind to matter, because it is identical in form to reducing semantics (meaning) to syntax (rules of word order). To the extent that a person does this, then it must equally apply to what he is saying. In other words, in order to be intellectually consistent, the reductionist must reduce his own meaning to nothing. But one cannot even affirm meaninglessness in a non-meaningful way.

Anyway, around the same time, I encountered the writings of psychoanalyst W.R. Bion, and saw the same principle at work.

Let's begin with the "raw stuff" of existence. What is it? We -- let's say I, to make it more immediate -- I am surrounded by phenomena, both outward and in. There are obviously things happening on the outside, but also things happening on the inside -- thoughts, impulses, emotions, sensations. Not to mention the fact that some of these external objects have their own interior -- persons and animals -- plus everything is situated in a flow of time from present to past or future to present.

That is a lot to juggle. How do I resolve this disparate phenomena into a unity? Sometimes it can be helpful to illuminate a process by considering what happens when it goes off the rails. Physicians, for example, learn a great deal about health by studying pathology. It is difficult to know, for example, what a pancreas is for until it stops doing it. You have no idea!

What is the mind for?

Hard to say, isn't it, when everything is going swimmingly?

First of all, the mind is an organ. Okay, what's an organ? It is "a part of an organism that is typically self-contained and has a specific vital function, such as the heart or liver in humans."

Note, however, the dual control as outlined above: a heart, for example, pumps away according to its own logic, unaware of the fact that it is situated in a higher organism that was recently asleep and is now banging away at a keyboard. The pumping is necessary for both activities, but obviously insufficient.

That most organs are physical shouldn't obscure the reality that they can be immaterial. Biological organisms are always four-dimensional, in that, in addition to their three spatial dimensions, they always operate in time. Should they cease doing so, that's how you know you're dead.

But our subjective organ -- I -- is characterized by the additional dimensions alluded to above: interior/exterior, past/present/future, I/Thou, not to mention all the many sub-categories in each of these. What could go wrong?

Coincidentally, a commenter recently alluded to having suffered a psychotic depression or depressive psychosis. What must that have been like? I would suggest that it is just an extreme example of What Can Go Wrong. In my opinion, mental illness in any form involves a "dismantling," so to speak, of meaning. At the same time, it generally involves the construction of "false meaning(s)" (for example, in paranoia).

The latter is not always true. For example, there is a form of psychosis in which each moment is a terrifying novelty, with no unity or continuity whatsoever. Interior and exterior unity are conflated, as are thoughts with impulses and ideas with environment. It's like a white-knuckle moment, only forever.

I'm remembering my first psychotic patient. One morning she told me that she had heard me outside her window speaking to her in the form of chirping birds. Obviously there was confusion between me, the birds, and the content of her own mind. I could think of additional examples, but you get the picture. There was a unity of sorts, but more like the unity of a Picasso painting.

Think of the mind as an organ for the purpose of making contact with reality. This presumes there is some pre-existent, unitary thing called reality, but the psychotic person demonstrates that this is not the case.

But so too does the reductionist demonstrate that this is not the case! Let's take a banal example that comes to mind, a high school sex education class. In the class the students are told everything about the biology and mechanics of sex. Perhaps this is all the teacher knows about the subject. Does his knowledge exhaust the subject, or is he missing something?

Another example comes to mind, "deconstruction," which you might say is a kind of institutionalized psychosis, in that it specializes in dismantling meaning and replacing it with something else. Or, it reduces meaning to power, which is about as helpful as saying that all blogging may be reduced to a beating heart.

Speaking of blogs, you might say that this one attempts to be the last word in reverse-psychosis, which is to say, hyper-sanity. How so? Well, think about it: at the very least, we are trying to perceive the unity behind -- or above -- science, religion, anthropology, metaphysics, political philosophy, economics, psychology, history, systems theory, aesthetics, you name it.

What could go wrong? Well, first of all, few people even attempt it. It's enough to harmonize the unruly phenomena of one's own mind!

And when it is attempted, instead of reverse psychosis, it generally results in (or from) hyper-psychosis. Remember, psychosis doesn't just involve the destruction of true meaning, but the construction of false. Thus, most intellectual systems -- a priori when they exclude interiority and religion -- are actually hyper-psychotic, say, Marxism. True, Marxism accounts for "everything," only by excluding everything it cannot explain (or even take cognizance of).

Just so, feminism is hyper-psychotic, as is any form or reductionism. Indeed, leftism is a kind of enforced collective hyper-psychosis. It doesn't reveal much about reality per se, except in the same way a heart attack tells you what a heart is for.

Really -- and this can definitely be true of certain conservatives as well -- it is more a system for managing the mind than for exploring reality. But it is preferable to the more active form of psychosis, in which nothing makes sense. In other words, false meaning is emotionally preferable to no meaning.

To be continued...

Just Sipping Coffee while Sifting the Ruins of Liberalism

No time for a post. As a consolation prize, how about a few aphorisms that you can easily develop into whole posts inside the privacy of your own head?

Here is a Polanyi-esque one:

To understand is to find confirmation of something previously divined.

This one goes to what I would call our irreducibly Dual Track minds:

Reason is no substitute for faith, just as color is no substitute for sound.

In fact, one might add that a single eye is no substitute for two, since the third dimension only comes into view with the slightly different perspective of each eye. We might say that scientism is the reduction of science from two eyes to one. Conversely, add ears to science, and we have natural philosophy, or the philosophy of science. The integration of all senses and dimensions is metaphysics. The object apprehended is God.

A Catholic should simplify his life and complicate his thought.

In contrast to the liberal, who complicates his life and simplifies his thought. And the simpleminded thoughts are guaranteed to result in more complications, because the world is nonlinear and human nature is not like that.

What is philosophy for the Catholic, but the way intelligence lives its faith.

What is intelligence? It is first and foremost light. When this light illuminates faith, it is as if one finds oneself in a huge cathedral. Conversely, one can shine the same light through materialism, but one finds oneself in a cramped hovel unsuited for man.

Which is why

Words are not enough for civilization to be transmitted. When its architectural landscape crumbles, a civilization's soul deserts.

Liberals always rely on the "youth vote." But

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists

That is all. Pleasant sifting!

The Energy Crisis of Leftist Thought

It seems that tension is everything; or that in the absence of tension, nothing can happen.

For example, the other day I overheard the wife homeschoolin' the boy, saying something about the positive and negative charges of H2O resulting in the surface tension of water. I chimed in that without the surface tension, it would be impossible to kill yourself by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Think of the epistemological tension between man and world: we call it curiosity, or wonder, or imagination. Or, the tension between men and women. Without it, culture is impossible. And without the tension between man and Absolute (as discussed in the previous post), religion is deprived of its motive energy.

Interesting that the left explicitly tries to undermine those latter two (normal sexuality and religion), but the first as well (if it contradicts leftist dogma). Feminists, for example, are dogmatically pro-androgyny, which is to say, anti- (sexual) tension. They're all for other kinds of tension, most conspicuously the tension between how the world is and how they would like it to be. This produces a kind of perpoutual (e)motion, being that reality will always be reality, and frustrate feminist attempts to make it something else.

Think I'm exaggerating? It's all beautifully laid out in Levin's Feminism and Freedom -- which was published in 1987. Since then the tension between reality and feminist fantasy has only intensified. One reason it intensifies is that there is simply no way to eliminate nature. You can't wish away innate differences in strength, intelligence, ability, and interests. You can only yell at them from your safe space.

I suppose feminists will argue that Levin is unfair, being that he uses logic and evidence, which are tools of the patriarchy. Worse, he quotes all the major feminist writers, and expects them to be intellectually consistent, another tool of oppression ("as if citing facts at odds with feminism were intrinsically presumptuous").

Hmm. Do I really want to go down this path this morning? I'd had something else in mind, but perhaps this dreary subject will shed some darkness on the main theme -- that being the ontological Tension alluded to in paragraph one.

About that ontological tension: its supreme case -- indeed, its very source -- is the ineradicable tension between Creator and creation. To say "Creator" is to give a nod to this fruitful and dynamic tension that underlies all other tensions in existence.

Interestingly, for the Christian there is even a "Divine tension," so to speak, within the Godhead, AKA Trinity. The tension, say, between Father and Son is replicated in the relation between Son and Church; the Mary-Church ceaselessly incubates and gives birth to the Son who is its Father. This same tension is what elevates the spousal relation from animal to sacramental polarity.

(Incidentally, Levin is a secular materialist, so I don't want to imply that he would have anything to do with my religious musings.)

The problem with Levin's book is that there is just too much to draw from. Here's a random example. He cites one major (male!) feminist, who writes that "Just as the normal, typical adult is virtually oblivious to the eye color of other persons for all major interpersonal relations, so the normal, typical adult in [a] non-sexist society would be indifferent to the sexual, physiological differences of other persons for all interpersonal relationships."

Alright then. As it so happens, there is a Simpsons episode in which Marge challenges Homer to remember the color of her eyes. In a perfect feminist world, she would do the same with regard to her gender. Except she wouldn't get angry at Homer for failing to notice whether she is male or female. Rather, she would be flattered.

Just as it is Democrats who are the racists, it is Feminists who belittle and devalue women. For example, give a listen to Iconic Feminist Simone de Beauvoir: "The great danger which threatens the infant in our culture lies in the fact that the mother to whom it is confided in all its helplessness is almost always a discontented woman: sexually she is frigid or unsatisfied; socially she feels herself inferior to men; she has no independent grasp on the world or on the future..."

So, almost all women are sexually frustrated male wannabe nincompoops. Project much?

Out of curiosity, I am perusing her wiki article. "The Second Sex, published in French, sets out a feminist existentialism which prescribes a moral revolution. As an existentialist, de Beauvoir believed that existence precedes essence; hence one is not born a woman, but becomes one. Her analysis focuses on the Hegelian concept of the Other. It is the (social) construction of Woman as the quintessential Other that de Beauvoir identifies as fundamental to women's oppression. The capitalised 'O' in 'other' indicates the wholly other."

There is actually some very important sense buried in this steaming pile of utter nonsense. Recall what was said above about the ontological tension between Creator and creation. Existentialists deny this tension -- or invert it, rather -- such that instead of a tension between appearance (existence) and reality (essence), there is a tension between what we are and what we wish to be. Since existence is prior to essence, we are free to choose any essence we like. Which is the recipe for nihilism, the "nothingness" referred to in Sartre's Being and Nothingness.

Being and Nothingness are not analogous to Creator and Created. That is, compared to the Creator, Creation is indeed nothing. But compared to Nothing, Creation is everything. It is infused with a being that is a prolongation of Being as such. Hence the fruitful tension between our being and God's. But for the existentialist there is only a horizontal tension between one desire and another.

Levin adverts to the "scientific sterility" of feminism, which essentially comes down to its a priori rejection of any scientific hatefacts that refute feminism. He has an ironic comment to the effect that "a case can be made that religious critics of Darwin display a stronger sense of the unity of nature than do scientific critics of innateness in man."

How so? Well, first of all intrinsically, since we have an a priori belief in the unity of nature; but also because a religious person can have no objection to Darwinian conclusions about the separate tracks of sexual selection followed by males and females which has redounded to our essential differences. Or to say "God created them, male and female," is much closer to the truth than "evolution created them but they somehow ended up with no essential differences."

Levin amusingly demolishes that latter argument, because if primordial females actually believed and behaved as modern feminists, the human race would have become extinct before it ever got underway. In a word, mothers were somewhat central to the story. They were by no means alienated Hegelian Others, but rather, the intimate other with whom the baby communes in order to discover its own selfhood.

Pretty much out of time, but let me present the passage that got this whole line of thought underway. It's about Polanyi, via Prosch, and goes to the more universal principle we're driving at:

"To see a problem and to undertake its solution is to see a range of potentialities for meaning that appear to be accessible. Heuristic tension in a mind, then, might seem to be generated much as kinetic energy in physics is generated by the accessibility of more stable configurations.... These choices resemble quantum mechanical events in that they are guided by a field that nevertheless leaves them indeterminate."

Tension + Freedom = Discovery.

This Morning I Am a Man!

"The first thing that should strike man" -- the Man in the title above -- "when he reflects on the nature of the Universe" is the incommensurability between "the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity" and "material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses" (Schuon).

Okay, let's give it a try: let us reflect upon the nature of the Universe. Hmm...

Yup. Human intelligence does strike one as a miraculous irruption of subjectivity transcending anything that comes into its purview. It is the one thing we rely upon to explain any- and everything, and yet, is itself unexplained, or at least taken for granted. But it is the sine qua non of everything human -- which is close to being a tautology, because it suggests that humanness is necessary for humanness (or personhood for persons).

But something cannot furnish its own explanation. Rather, things have causes outside themselves. What is the sufficient cause of human intelligence? If it were simply caused by the material world, it is impossible to explain how it can have powers that so transcend materiality.

In other words, a cause cannot give to an effect something it does not possess. There is an incommensurability between an objective cause and a subjective effect: in short: how could objects give a subjectivity entirely foreign to their nature?

There aren't really too many plausible or even implausible answers to this question. For example, consciousness might be just an illusory side effect of brain activity. But what does it mean for one illusion -- the teacher -- to say this to another -- the student? It means nothing, nor can anything mean anything. Rather, meaning and truth are denied a priori.

More generally, the affirmation that existence is meaningless is pregnant with meaning (although its issue is stillborn). Nihilism is not actually belief in nothing, if only because there is someone who believes it. A true nihilist would have to be an animal, since animals have no beliefs, nor any belief that they have none.

For most of mankind's history this question didn't arise, because it was assumed -- whether explicitly or implicitly -- that consciousness was built into the nature of things. Think of it: as Schuon says in paragraph one, the first thing that strikes us is the mysterious presence of a human interior that transcends -- and penetrates -- everything it encounters.

Now, for early man, objects didn't come first, rather, the subject. In other words, what we call "objectivity" has only been slowly teased out of subjectivity. Prior to the so-called scientific revolution....

Indeed, what was this revolution but a kind of systematic method for segregating the two? Premodern science -- because of its default toward subjectivity -- saw too much of it in the objects of nature. Things did this or that because they intended to.

Speaking of Things I Read a Long Time Ago that Have Always Stuck With Me, there is an essay about this in Hans Jonas' The Phenomenon of Life, called Life, Death, and the Body in the Theory of Being. In it he observes that

"When man first began to interpret the things of nature -- and this he did when he began to be man [that same curious fellow in the title above] -- life was to him everywhere, and being the same as being alive." Who could blame him? To this day, all children go through this stage, until they learn that the world is safely dead and that consciousness has no meaning or even reality.

But maybe we can learn a thing or two from our distant furbears. For them, "Soul flooded the whole of existence and encountered itself in all things. Bare matter, that is, truly inanimate, 'dead' matter, was yet to be discovered -- as indeed its concept, so familiar to us, is anything but obvious."

You might say that a strict objectivity is profoundly unnatural. Think of a "natural" diet. One reason it is beneficial is that it contains all sorts of nutrients -- even ones we don't know about -- that cannot be replaced or reproduced in an unnatural diet. We can put some vitamin C back into frozen orange juice, but we have no idea as to all that is actually in a real life orange.

Just so, is it possible for artificial men weaned on scientism to ever recover the full richness of their desiccated subjectivity? Well, they can try -- hence the cult of art and other modalities to recover and resurrect something of the great Cosmic Interior.

But "That the world is alive is really the most natural view, and largely supported by prima-facie evidence." Nor is there really any sharp boundary between what is alive and what isn't.

Rather, "most of what we know to be inanimate is so intimately intertwined with the dynamics of life that it seems to share its nature" (ibid.). Indeed, we see an attempted recovery of this cognitive modality in radical environmentalists -- in tree-hugging gaia worshipers.

The point is, modern man, in learning to view the world scientifically -- or only scientifically -- must first unlearn this more right brained, integral way of seeing things. "[P]rimitive panpsychism, in addition to answering powerful needs of the soul, was justified by the rules of inference and verification within the available range of experience..." (ibid.).

Now, if we turn the cosmos back right-side up, we see that "it is not our personal thought that preceded the world, it was -- or is -- absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is a distant reflection precisely" (Schuon). In short, our own consciousness proves that "in the beginning was the Spirit." Or in other words, only Consciousness can be the sufficient cause of consciousness, just as only the Logos can be the sufficient cause of human language.

There are Mysteries and there are Absurdities, and it is vital not to conflate the two. And "Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be" (ibid.).

It would frankly have to be a miracle. And not the good kind!

Nevertheless, "tons of intelligence" -- not to mention billions of dollars -- "are wasted to circumvent the essential while brilliantly proving the absurd" (ibid.).

Could the very essence of reality be the utter banality of scientism? Nah. "In the beginning was, not matter, but Spirit, which is the Alpha and Omega" (Schuon).

Modern thought which began with the Renaissance is placed in exactly the opposite theoretic situation. Death is the natural thing, life the problem.... Accordingly, it is the existence of life within a mechanical universe which now calls for an explanation, and the explanation has to be in terms of the lifeless. --Hans Jonas

Similarly, we might say that tenure is an explanation of mind by the mindless.

It Takes One to Know Oneness

Yesterday we spoke of the experience of being penetrated by truth: there is truth and there is the experience, but how do we know we aren't just like some conspiracy theorist for whom it all SUDDENLY MAKES SENSE!?

One thing I forgot to add about the experience is that it comes with a kind of implicit understanding that one has reached the end of thought; or that thought can proceed no farther than this.

For example, once you have conceived the Absolute, thought can venture no further. One still thinks, of course, but it is not as if there will be another Absolute behind or above that one. Thus, the Absolute is both the ground and goal, alpha and omega, of all thinking. Anything short of this is a mere caricature of thinking.

Perhaps a better way to think of the Absolute is in terms of Necessary Being. Thus, the Absolute is what cannot not be, on pain of denying the primordial unity (between subject and object) that renders thought possible. Without the Unity, we are adrift in a sea of multiplicity, of "absolute relativity."

Which, oh by the way, the left wishes to impose upon us. In short, it endeavors to codify and inculcate nothing less than compulsory absurdity in the citizenry. A public education simply prepares one for the greater absurdities that will follow with higher education. Public schools soften the battlefield. College kills the remaining inhabitants and salts the earth. The result is a Dead Mind Thinking, such as Obama.

Here is an example of a truth that can be no truthier, courtesy Schuon: "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." First of all, this doesn't mean we propose to do away with people who fall short of being conscious of the Absolute. But it does have immediate and practical consequences on a range of subects.

Before getting to those, let me quote the next thoughtlet: "Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny."

As for the practical considerations, consider the founders, who "saw" or "recognized" that all men are created equal, endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights yada yada.

This is an example of an absolute statement; or, it is a statement about absoluteness, i.e., about cosmic facts that cannot be surpassed, only affirmed or negated. And again, the negation plunges us down into leftworld. For when the left talks about equality and justice, what they really mean is inequality and injustice -- for example, treating the lion and rabbit the same, and calling it just.

Because the Absolute stands before us, our lives are necessarily "incomplete" or "fragmentary," so to speak. However, to engage the Absolute is the very means of healing the resultant fissure. Thus "the paradox of the human condition," that "nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet, nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

It's a straight-up orthoparadox, in that it sets forth conditions that cannot not be once we establish the (pre)existence of the Absolute. We can never "be" the Absolute; however, the Absolute can "be" us, so to speak -- which goes to the "fruit" alluded to by Schuon.

For us the distance between man and God is a kind of abyss. But for God, it is it is nothing of the sort. Rather, there is continuity from the divine side, which goes to his immanence. Therefore, when we step into the abyss, we are not plunging into nothingness, but rather, buoyed by mysteries that somehow float our boat and whose currents draw us up into the Great Attractor.

One more orienting principle from the same book: "One of the keys to understanding our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence." Rather, "Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing."

Nothing!

And not the good kind. For there are two kinds of nothing, the absurd and dead nothing of nihilism, and the living nothingness of our being before God. For God is necessary being, whereas we are contingent being. In the face of necessary being, it is as if we are nothing. This nothing is only rendered significant if it somehow shares in the necessary being of God.

Which, of course, is the purpose of any spiritual practice, whether by love, truth, beauty, virtue, or unity.

Out of time, so we'll leave off with this sound advice:

"Love of God is firstly attachment of the intelligence to the Truth, then attachment of the will to the Good, and finally the attachment of the soul to the Peace that is given by the Truth and the Good."

Peace out. Or in, rather. And up.

Utterly Personal and Completely Universal

A few posts back we mentioned a new scientific discovery pushing back the emergence of life on earth from 3.5 to 3.7 billion years ago.

Either way, since earth only cooled sufficiently to permit life something like 4.5 billion years ago, the emergence of life cannot have been random, because there simply wasn't enough time. Knowing this, researchers suggest that life must be "built in" to the nature of things, somehow bound to appear.

This is similar to the problem of predestination, only on a lower plane. That is, if predestination is the case, then there is literally no distinction between Creator and creature: everything is simply God acting. Not only does it render life pointless, one wonders why God would even bother.

Likewise, if life is built into physics, then biology doesn't really exist. Rather, it's just a kind of illusory extension of physics and chemistry. It never occurs to this type of mind that physics might be a downward projection of life, as opposed to life being an upward projection of matter.

In any event, this is the sort of bad nonsense that occurs when we fail to respect levels, boundaries, and dimensions.

If you will indulge me in a momentary zooming-out to a wide-angle vision, there is something intriguing about truth, or at least truth as I know it. Here it is 2016, and I am discussing an author -- Polanyi -- whom I first discovered around 35 years ago, when I was just starting my psychopneumatic journey, and knew next to nothing about anything.

I'm looking at my battered old copy of Meaning, which is heavily annotated, highlighted, and marked up. This must have been around the time I began the practice of annotating, highlighting, and marking up my books. For one thing, I never read any books before this, or at least not many. If you subtract the books I was forced to read... well, there can't have been many before my mid-twenties, and nothing serious.

Anyway, I first encountered Polanyi around the same time my mind was "coming on line," so to speak. Before this Great Event, I didn't know I had one, nor did I know what it was for. I was more beast than man. An amiable and frivolous beast, but still, not one marked out for anything more than obedience and semi-skilled labor.

Interestingly, I read in volume one of the Churchill bio that something very similar happened to him at around the same age. No, I am not comparing myself to Churchill, only drawing attention to an interesting phenomenon.

Like Bob, Winston was a terrible student. He wasn't nearly good enough to attend any kind of elite university, so ended up entering a military academy, ninety-second in a class of 102. "Even when seen through the kindest of eyes," writes Manchester, "he was a redheaded, puny little swaggerer who was always in trouble, always disobedient, always making and breaking promises." His father wrote in a letter that Winston had a gift only for "show off exaggeration & make believe."

It wasn't until he was around 22 -- finished with school and stationed in India -- that the Light inexplicably came on: "The transformation began with early pangs of intellectual curiosity." Looking back on it, that is around the time my own pangs began, at around 22, maybe 23. It is a Hunger, only for immaterial food.

At any rate, Churchill "found that he had 'a liking for words and for the feel of words fitting and falling into places like pennies in the slot.'" His vocabulary suddenly widened, to the extent that he began throwing out words "which I could not define precisely."

Equally suddenly, he became Curious: "It occurred to him that his knowledge of history was limited and something ought to be done about it" -- to put it mildly. He "resolved to read history, philosophy, economics, and things like that." He began devouring books like a liberal spends other people's money: all day long.

Henry Corbin talks about "openings," but we might as well say "invasions," because we can open all we want, but nothing will happen unless we are invaded by an Other.

Changing gears once again, I'm trying to describe a phenomenon that began for me when the Light came on, and has continued ever since. And the only reason I bring it up is because I assume something similar has occurred in other Raccoons. Indeed, I don't see how one could appreciate the blog unless it has.

First of all, there is a timeless quality to it. Something in the soul knows it is encountering a kind of truth that penetrates all the way to the core. It is an example of what I symbolize (?!), because it's as palpable as sticking your finger in a socket and receiving a jolt.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I experienced an opening in which I was invaded by Truth. This would account for my singular lack of qualification in being able to discern truth from falsehood. In other words, this extra-mental invasion is no respecter of persons. It can happen to any idiot. But for this particular idiot, it caused a complete reorientation -- literally, from the horizontal to the vertical. Words such as "repentance" and "born again" are intended to convey the same experience.

So, I was invaded and seized. And I'll bet if I examine some of my annotations and exclamations from 35 years ago, they might as well have come from my present self, even though, again, I was an idiot at the time. Naturally this will mean nothing to you if you consider me an idiot still. But if I'm not an idiot, then it is as if my past self was invaded by my future self. My future self seized the wheels of the cosmic bus, and steered me in an entirely unexpected direction.

Here is a note to mysoph on the front flap: "God as integrative and limiting factor." First of all: like anyone could know that! But what does it mean? That the infinite expresses itself in limited forms of finitude that point back to their divine source. Why? The next note says "truth not gained freely is worthless." So, God is in the ticklish position of giving truth in such a way that it can be discovered, not imposed. Movement toward God is characterized by integration on various levels.

"The act of understanding is more important than what is understood." Indeed, this is precisely what this post is about: this unending process of understanding. "Only the wise ones see beyond the limitations." Or in other words, they see the Unlimited toward which the limitations point and converge.

"Principles of each level are governed by the next highest level." This is certainly one that has stayed with me, right down to the statement in paragraph four above, that matter is a downward projection of life.

Here is another short note: "development is not wholly accountable by [the] past." This is full of metaphysical implications, ultimately the de-inversion of the cosmos, such that the future -- or upper vertical -- exerts an influence on the present/horizontal.

"Language as liberated DNA." That actually goes to what this post was originally going to be about before it was invaded and highjacked by other forces. That is, DNA is (obviously) a language. But it cannot function as a language if it is built into physics and chemistry.

By way of analogy, Prosch says that if rocks rolling to the bottom of a hill always spelled out English words, then we couldn't use the rocks to encode a message. Rather, the rocks must be neutral as to the message we want them to carry. Likewise, if physics and chemistry inevitably roll down into DNA, then DNA cannot carry information. Rather, it can only function as a code if its order is not necessary.

"Origins of DNA 'contained' far more meaning than we think." In other words, it is not just that DNA codes for "life." Rather, it ultimately points to meanings far surpassing mere life. It is really a cosmic opening that continues right up to the highest realization of integral unity. Or, as I put it in the book, life represents a luminous fissure in this heretofore dark, impenetrable circle, the dawning of an internal horizon, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world....

Not only does this fissure occur in matter, it occurs in us. Bottom line for today: be ye fissures of God!

A Mind Needs Truth Like a Feminist Needs the Patriarchy

To put it another way -- in reference to what God owes us -- it cannot be that he is so irresponsible as to, as it were, create cats with no mice, birds with no trees, or fish with no water. Man has his legitimate needs, one of which is truth. If the intellect is what distinguishes us from the beasts, then we have every right to expect that it can find its needs satisfied down here.

Having said that, cats do not try to eat lettuce, gophers don't nest in trees, and fish don't try to make it on dry land. Only man systematically chooses what is wrong and bad for him -- not just physically, but mentally and spiritually.

For example, consider this little exchange, via Happy Acres:

Here precisely are human beings demanding that cats be dogs or lions cows. So sad! Such a losing battle!

Note that these women are engaged in a battle against reality. Reality is prevailing, and this provokes sadness. One doesn't have to extrapolate far to see that this sadness can only be a result of the failure of omnipotence: reality should not be what it is, but what I wish it to be.

But this is the very structure not only of feminism but of leftism more generally. Because I enjoyed Why Race Matters so much, I've moved on to Levin's previous book on Feminism and Freedom -- which might as well be titled Why Sex (or what they now call gender) Matters.

I've only just started the book, but one point the author makes right away is that feminism and freedom are at antipodes: you can have one or the other, but not both. Especially if you take feminism seriously, it requires nothing less than a totalitarian state to compel reality to conform to its impossible expectations. Think of the example of the two bubbleheads mentioned above. What would it require in order to make their dreams of androgyny come true?

Now, if humans can get something as basic as sexual polarity wrong, what can't they get wrong? Which puts God in a bit of a jam, doesn't it? You'd think that some things would be too obvious to screw up, but never underestimate the power of the human mind to "know" falsehood.

Now, of the three transcendentals -- love, truth, and beauty -- only truth fails to be itself in the absence of the proper object. In other words, it is always possible to love what is unlovely or to be attracted to ugliness.

But one cannot really "know" falsehood, because falsehood is the essence of "non-knowledge." For example, I can know everything about, say, unicorns, but it doesn't mean I actually know anything. And it is no different than knowing everything about feminism. A BA in "women's studies" is a degree in nothingness; it confers expertise in a fantasy world.

However, Levin's book shows that one can learn a lot from feminism about what is wrong with the human mind, or the errors to which it is prone. For "A theory whose basic assumption about human nature is completely erroneous... is indeed bound to be wrong about everything else." As we've said before, if you get your anthropology wrong, then your political philosophy will rest upon a foundation of Jello.

If there are no differences between the sexes, then it can only be a result of oppression that, say, men tend to be the defenders of civilization while women tend to be its nurturers. In a random distribution, there should be as many male as female warriors and nannies. If a disproportionate number of women choose not to be warriors, that cannot be a consequence of free choice, but rather, compulsion. Therefore, we must fight compulsion with compulsion, and the only power big enough for such a task is the state. The state will see to it that our warrior class is equally distributed between men and women.

But it's not just the military, it's everything: men and women reveal their preferences in different choices, so "efforts to eradicate those [differences] must be futile and never-ending." "[P]eople will never freely act in ways which produce a world devoid of sexism," so "the equalization of the sexes in personal behavior demands implacable surveillance and interference."

In short, the outcomes demanded by (left) liberalism can only be achieved by the abolition of (classical) liberalism. Really, it can only be accomplished by the patriarchy, that is, by the mailed fist of the omnipotent daddy state. It reminds me of women who, when they get married, make a point of keeping their father's name in order to stick it to the patriarchy.

What God Owes Man

Knowledge is always personal, whether the knowledge in question is scientific or religious. Probably neither side likes the sound of that, because it implies that knowledge is subjective. Religious dogma is intended to be objective, as are scientific theories.

Polanyi explodes that myth as it pertains to science. Coincidentally, Henry Corbin (via al Arabi) does the same with regard to religion. But each is really just describing the deeper structure of any kind of knowing.

First of all, there is no knowledge without a knower: "There is no purely objective knowledge, because nothing can be called knowledge that is not personally accredited as knowledge. Facts do not force themselves upon us" (Prosch). Nor do facts speak for themselves, but rather, require "an act of judgment... that something is a fact" (ibid).

People exercise good and bad judgment in determining what is regarded as a Fact. At the same time, an explicit theory or implicit worldview will engender and limit the facts that come into view. For example, as a psychologist listening to a patient, I will perceive many facts that will escape the notice of the layperson. But that is true of any profession, from plumbing to nuclear physics.

Therefore, Augustine's gag about believing in order to know doesn't just apply to religion. Rather, it is a more general principle. A good theory is like a pair of spectacles that brings things into focus. However, a bad theory does the same thing, and thereby creates "false facts."

The left is famous for this, for example, with Marx's labor theory of value. If you put on Marxist spectacles, then a whole world of class oppression comes into view. Victims everywhere! Likewise racial oppression, or feminism, or the war on police, or global warming, whatever. Each is a fact-generating... parasite, really. It hijacks the machinery of the mind and cranks out the facts needed to support it.

Over the weekend I read one of the few books by Schuon I hadn't read before, Christianity/Islam: Perspectives on Esoteric Ecumenism. In it he observes that "one cannot help but notice that there are men who lose their faith to the extent that they think and who no longer know how to think to the extent they have faith."

This being the case, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the way people are thinking, because no such rupture should be cosmically possible.

Indeed, this is precisely the ontological and epistemological rupture that Polanyi attempts to heal. What he calls "personal knowledge" eradicates "the abstract dichotomy of the subjective-objective. It combines these opposed polarities and thus is the only kind of knowledge existentially possible."

You might say that all knowledge combines what is seen with a way to see it. Also, it is always dynamic, such that it deploys imagination and intuition to probe the world in search of an ever-deepening coherence.

Through all of this, our One Cosmos is both Alpha and Omega. In other words, we begin with the faith that the cosmos is indeed one, such that our knowledge of any part of it applies to the whole. Scientists no longer believe that one set of laws applies to the terrestrial world, another to the celestial. And although existing knowledge is always and necessarily fragmentary, it is nevertheless guided by a kind of teleological intuition, or intuitive teleology, toward greater unity.

"[I]magination sets actively before us the focal point to be aimed at, but it is intuition that supplies our imagination with the organization of subsidiary clues to accomplish its focal goal.... Intuition thus guides our imagination" (Prosch). Thus, we cannot always articulate the clues that underlie belief, for the grounds are hidden in subsidiary clues that are integrated into coherent belief.

But one can never achieve integral unity if one has severed subject and object at the outset. Or, one can do so for methodological purposes, so long as one doesn't forget that this severance is simply a human abstraction. Just so, we can sometimes treat an organism like a machine, but that doesn't mean it is one. We can pretend the brain functions independently of the soul, but that doesn't mean it actually does.

When we refer to O as the Great Attractor, we are adverting to its Omega function (in contradistinction to its Alpha/ground function). Prosch describes the phenomenon well: "Our search for deeper coherence is guided... by a potentiality: 'We feel the slope toward a deeper insight as we feel the direction in which a heavy weight is pulled along a steep incline.'"

This is what I mean when I say that the mindscape -- or soulscape or beliefscape -- is dotted with archetypal attractors that pull us this way and that, guiding the terrestrial journey, so to speak. What, for example, is the telos of human sexuality? Does it have one, or are we truly no different from the beasts?

That is what the left would like for us to believe. And if that is your belief, that is what you will see. Far more important, however, is what you will unsee with your leftist spectacles. This in turn explains why feminist women are so much more unhappy than normal women: feminist spectacles exclude a whole reality necessary for human happiness.

By way of comparison, imagine if a lion could put on spectacles that made it impossible to perceive zebras and gazelles.

Which raises a provocative question that came to me while reading the Schuon book mentioned above: to what are human beings owed by God?

When you just blurt it out like that, it may sound arrogant or ill-conceived, but I will insist that Man has his Cosmic Rights. Or in other words, when you bring something or someone into the world, it entails certain responsibilities. Every parent knows this, at least intuitively.

In my opinion, when God created Adam, he owed him Eve. In other words, he realized straightaway that it wasn't Good that man should be allone. In another reading he creates this primordial complementarity right out of the gate, such that the one refers to the other; each is intrinsically incomplete, a helpful reminder that we can never be independent and self-sufficient monads. Even -- or especially -- God can't do that, if Trinity.

Much of what Schuon says about what God owes man is in the context of the widespread Islamic belief that Allah is essentially pure will -- that he does what he wants, when he wants, with no constraints at all. A corollary of this is that Allah doesn't will things because they are good, but rather, something is good because Allah wills it.

But before you scoff at them, remember that many Protestants fall into the same theological omnipotentialism, such that there is no point in trying to understand God outside dogma, even if the consequences are absurd.

But God is constrained. He is first of all constrained by his nature, which is Good. To put it another way, to say that God cannot will evil is not a limitation; similarly, if we affirm that God is One, "we do not inquire whether is obliged to be so." To "say that God cannot not be God" doesn't imply that "He is 'forced to be God.'" And yet, certain "obligations" or entailments follow from the fact that God is who He is.

Did God "need" to create the world? Yes and no. He didn't necessarily have to create this particular world, but I don't see how he could fail to create, any more than he could fail to be Good. Indeed, the former follows from the latter: part of his goodness manifests in a desire to share or prolong or radiate his goodness with respect to creatures. It is in the nature of the Divine Perfection.

Bottom line, because we're out of time: "If God 'owes' us the truth, this is because He is perfect, noble, good, and truthful, and He cannot but wish to be what He is and to act in a consequential way; He does not have the 'power' not to be perfect, hence not to be God" (Schuon).

After all, it makes no sense to create a bee without "owing" it flowers. Likewise, it makes no sense to create human intelligence without the truth it needs in order to fulfill its mission.

The Cheap Splendor of Liberal Lies

There is no way to know with certainty that we have "made contact with reality." Even if all other knowers agree with us we could still be wrong; and no one might agree with us, yet we could still be right. Therefore, our conviction that we have reached truth "is always a fiduciary conviction, as are also the convictions of other people seeking to evaluate our vision" (Prosch).

Fiduciary is another word for trust, which is in turn closely related to faith: we trust what we have faith in, and vice versa. Whom do you trust? I, for example, no longer trust the left, to put it mildly. This is because I naively trusted them for half my life, and it turned out that most everything they told me was a lie or distortion or half-truth. They abused my trust. Which is a sin, especially when done to a child (which is more or less always, because it renders adults childish). As we said once before, liberalism is a Peter Pandemic

A passage in this article on feminist indoctrination reminded me of how it felt to be a leftist. It's important, because one reason why leftist thought takes root in the psyche is that it mimics truth in a compelling way.

As the author puts it, "When I first discovered women’s studies, I was lulled into a comforting sense that I had discovered the 'truth.' It was as if my veil of ignorance had been yanked away, and I was blissfully seeing the world for what it really was."

Exactly. Any intelligent person realizes -- for it is built into man -- that appearances are not reality. Indeed, what is intelligence but our ability to see beneath the surface of things and know their deeper principle? Science, for example, reduces multiplicities to unities, and the deeper the theory, the more phenomena it unifies. Quantum physics unites more than its Newtonian forerunner, as Darwin unites more than Lamarck or other purely biological alternatives.

Just so, it is not only that the left lies; rather, it must be the type of lie that mimics truth in bringing together disparate phenomena, providing us with a kind of counterfeit aha! experience. This is no doubt how all those intellectuals were pulled in by Marx. Here was a theory that explained everything (except how Marx could transcend class and know unconditioned Truth).

Freudian psychoanalysis accomplished the same thing. Speaking of Darwinism, it also serves this purpose for flatland ideologues such as Richard Dawkins and the like. There is something positively thrilling about a theory that liberates one from the appearances of things, and gives access to a deeper reality that "explains everything."

For this is precisely what truth is supposed to do: you know, set us free. Free from what? Well, from appearances, for starters. Truth is surprising, as we've been suggesting over these past several posts. It is not merely a logical operation, or deduction from first principles. To quote Dávila, Faith is not assent to concepts, but a sudden splendor that knocks us down. You could say that real truth palpably defeats our efforts to resist it.

Continuing with the article, "I have taken seven women’s studies classes.... After taking those classes, I realize that not only was I deluded, but I was led into an absurd intellectual alcove where objective truth is subordinate to academic theories used as political propaganda."

Yes: deluded and used. Weak and malleable women serve this purpose for the left, but not nearly to the extent that blacks do. Women of all ages are more likely than men to be on the left, but for blacks the ratio is usually higher than nine to one.

How is that? Again, it must be the satisfaction, the counterfeit thrill of a theory that explains everything. All you really need to know is that you are black, and all life's mysteries are revealed to you. Such is the meretricious beauty of identity politics, whether one is female, homosexual, Hispanic, Aryan, whatever. It is the key that opens the Cosmic Door.

Now, the real splendor is a prolongation of truth, as light rays are to the sun. Faith is its mode of receptivity -- like one of the five senses, only on a higher plane. How to tell the difference between this and its phony substitutes? Hmm, let's see. Let's think back to when Bob was a liberal.

Surely it must be important that I was not only irreligious but anti-religious, such that I explicitly excluded myself from any real graces, except the ones that could get past my defenses. Therefore, the only splendor available to me would by definition have to come from the left. And that it did.

Even today, for example, Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States is the bestselling work of history on college campuses. Thirty six years after its initial publication it is still #227 on Amazon, and must have made its Marxist author a small fortune (the wiki article on Zinn says it routinely sells in excess of 100,000 copies a year). Not bad for a torrent of lies.

In any event, I still remember the feeling upon reading Zinn and others like him. Again, like any good conspiracy theory, it explains everything. It also has a gnostic appeal, because now you are in on the secret. And it has a religious appeal, both because it saves (to be on the left is to be Good and therefore absolved of sin) and liberates one from appearances. It also provides meaning from evangelizing and converting those still living in darkness. Not incidentally, it also makes you a Superior Person, so the appeal to narcissism is transparent (no doubt accounting for its appeal to the featherbrains of Hollywood and the MSM).

I didn't intend to go in this direction, but here we are. Let's conclude with some aphorisms:

The only man who saves himself from intellectual vulgarity is the man who ignores what it is fashionable to know.

To feign knowledge of a subject, it is advisable to adopt its most recent interpretation.

Great stupidities do not come from the people. First, they have seduced intelligent men.

One Man's Floor is Another Man's Ceiling

Yesterday we came to the surprising conclusion that not only is a good problem already implicit foreknowledge of its solution, but that all knowledge is of this nature.

That is, any knowledge is a stepping stone to deeper comprehension, thus pointing beyond itself in ways we cannot fully predict or render explicit.

Indeed, "if all knowledge is explicit, i.e., capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution."

A good problem is a function of simultaneously not knowing and yet implicitly knowing: "somehow we are able to appreciate the wealth of its yet undiscovered consequences." If we knew its consequences explicitly, then it wouldn't be a problem.

Know them by their fruits: good problems are fruitful, whereas bad ones are like that barren fig true that irritated Jesus.

Again, the process of discovery doesn't function like a linear machine, or we'd already know everything. It would just be a matter of drawing conclusions from premises.

Having said that, this is what many thinkers do. For example, we can trace the known laws of physics back to a singularity some 13.7 billion years ago. That requires no "discovery," just an application of the math.

If we do treat this as a discovery, what exactly have we discovered? What we've actually discovered is that mathematics has built-in limits, and that we shouldn't confuse these limits with the limits of existence or being. In other words, just because math "ends" at the singularity, don't think this this means existence does. Please. Have a sense of proportion.

Even religious folk make this error, confusing the Big Bang with God's creation as such. But God's primordial creativity operates vertically, no less today than 13.7 billion years ago. This transcendent creative source is a metaphysical necessity irrespective of whether the cosmos is eternal or came into being at a specific point in time. If the Big Bang theory were disproved tomorrow, this would do nothing to negate the necessity of God.

Yes, the Big Bang was and is a creative act. But so too is everything else. Moreover, the Bang is still banging, and from God's perspective, it occurred just now. And now. And now.

Think of God's creativity as a lamp held at the end of a chain. No analysis of the chain will explain how it is held to the ceiling. God is the ceiling from which existence hangs, every moment, before, during, and after the so-called Big Bang.

The Big Bang is indeed a very curious event, such that it no doubt "points" to a Creator. But what isn't a Curious Event? Events themselves are curious. As Einstein said, physics has no explanation for why there is a Now from which to perceive these Events.

This is what I was trying to drive home in the book, that the sudden appearances of life and mind are no less mysterious and in need of a deeper explanation than can be provided by mere physics or biology. As with the Big Bang, we can trace the origins of life back (as of today) 3.7 billion years ago. Now, exactly what does this prove -- I mean in a meaningful sense, not just in terms of an abstract number?

For the researchers, whose minds are confined by their data, this pushes "the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth’s early history," and provides "support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe."

Whoa, slow down, partner! It does no such thing, for shaving off 200 million years does nothing to alter the inexplicable suddenness with which life occurred on earth. And the notion that life "may be commonplace throughout the universe" is really an assumption masquerading as a conclusion. What they're really saying is that there wasn't sufficient time for life to develop as a consequence of chance, therefore it must be built into the nature of things.

Well, yes. It might be a "cosmic imperative," as one person puts it. But what does this even mean? That it necessarily and inevitably appears, like an output from a linear machine or program?

Again, compare it to tracing physics back to the singularity. Biology can trace life back to an outer limit, but do not confuse this limit with the origin, which must be vertical. Life, like existence, is held by that same chain affixed to the ceiling.

We know this, because it is quintessentially true of the Mind that engages in physics and biology. Nothing about the mind makes sense if it isn't dangling, so to speak, from the Absolute. To remove God from the equation is literally like removing the ceiling and expecting the lamp to remain suspended in mid-air.

Now, the mind is what explains everything below itself -- for example, the Big Bang and the origins of life. Furthermore, this mind is explained by the God without whom the mind explains nothing, precisely. Our minds can peer downward and skirt around "origins" of various kinds. But in order to make sense of these, it must look "upward," on pain of the ceiling being indistinct from the floor, and therefore having no "space" for humanness to flourish.

The Endless Search for Questions to Our Answers

Reader Ted alerts us to this piece by Robert Barron on why the Catholic church continues to bleed souls: "for every one person who joins the Catholic Church today, six are leaving," many of whom are young, and often due to "intellectual objections."

Which is interesting in itself, because that cannot be literally true. Rather, it is simply exchanging one vapidity or superficiality for another; or fleeing the non-intellectual for the anti-intellectual. Really, it is leaving the surface of a bottomless ocean for the surface of a desert. But whatever it is, it isn't "intellectual" -- unless one is using that word ironically or as an epithet.

My wife tried to raise this issue with the parish priest (a very nice man), but he waved it aside, essentially saying that the heart is all that matters. Well, yes. Not the heart of sentiment, but the heart-intellect, two very different things. True, the heart of sentiment is sufficient for the bhakti, and there's nothing wrong with that form of practice.

But not everyone, to say the least, is a born bhakti. The intellect has its legitimate needs and rights, and it is wrongheaded and ultimately oppressive to reduce a full-service religion to just one of the items on its celestial menu. If the intellect cannot find satisfaction in religion, it will simply look elsewhere. It will continue searching for truth, but in all the wrong places.

But to say that "X (e.g., science, philosophy) is for truth, while religion is for Y (e.g., consolation, anxiety, meaning)," is to guarantee the development of Split Cosmos Syndrome. It creates an insurmountable bifurcation in the world and in the soul. One becomes an implicit or explicit cartesian, with no way to reunite body and soul, matter and psyche, subject and object.

This goes directly to what we've been saying about the imaginal realm. Corbin notes that "there has ceased to be an intermediate level between empirically verifiable reality and unreality pure and simple."

In other words, the three-storey cosmos of empirical-rational-imaginal has been reduced to a one-storey empirical shack surrounded by unreality. The latter is no longer a cosmos at all, or at least not the cosmos -- rather, just an impoverished declension from the real deal: "between the sense perceptions and the intuitions and categories of the intellect there has remained a void" (Corbin).

You could even say that sensory fullness equates to spiritual emptiness. Think of lower animals, for whom there is no space between perception and reality; or rather reality is perception.

This is never true of human beings, and Gödel forever liberated us from that nonsense (or puresense) in proving that we always transcend whatever empirical or rational box we try to enclose ourselves in. There is and can never be any manmade "theory of everything," for it can never account for the man who makes it. Rather, there is only one rational theory of everything, in the absence of Whom we plunge into un- or anti-reason.

This whole subject is fraught with paradox, but it is orthoparadox, which is really another way of saying that what appear to be irreconcilable opposites are really harmonious complementarities. If anyone is keeping track of the various Raccoon Principles I have annunciated over the years, Bohr's principle of complementarity, filtered through Hartshorne, would be one of them.

Actually, it goes back to my days in psychotherapy. My analyst was a brilliant but quirky punster with a deep appreciation of paradox, who helped me realize that the most important things tend not to be conflicts but complementarities. Indeed, if you try to resolve such a complementarity, you're setting yourself up for a life of conflict!

Transforming conflicts into complementarities. That's one of the tasks of cosmotherapy.

You can come at the problem via the path of science or of religion. Polanyi, for example, "thought a false idea of science has left us with a skepticism about the nature of man and his works. We must, therefore, revise one to restore the other." In short, man cannot be treated, or even diagnosed, with a false idea of science.

One complementarity that unites Polanyi and Corbin is that of invention and discovery, or of reality and imagination. For example, "there are no explicit rules for making a discovery and since no discoveries can be made 'without creative passion,' the individual scientist cannot be directed in his work by other authorities."

Discovery is obviously not merely a logical extension of what is already known, or we would already know everything. Rather, by dwelling in the known, we make leaps -- not into the dark, but into a twilit world of possibility. The scientist must start with a good problem, but there is no logical operation that can distinguish between good and bad (i.e., fruitful and unfruitful) problems.

Indeed, "there seems to be a *paradox* involved in the very notion of a 'good problem,'" first gnosissed by Plato. That is, "To search for the solution to a problem... would seem absurd, since, if you know what you are looking for, then there is no problem." And if you don't "know what you are looking for, then you cannot expect to find anything."

Paradoxically, to (explicitly) conceive a good problem is to already (implicitly) perceive its solution: "to see a problem is to see something that is hidden. It is to have an intimation of the coherence of hitherto not comprehended particulars." It is as if the right brain runs ahead of the left, the latter of which searches for confirmation of what the former has intuited.

It gets more paradoxical, for "if all knowledge is explicit, i.e., capable of being clearly stated, then we cannot know a problem or look for its solution." So again, to recognize a good problem is already a kind of deep (fore)knowledge of its solution. Ultimately -- and this is pretty weird -- "all knowledge is of the same kind as the knowledge of a problem." Thus, there are no "solutions," only better or worse questions!

Can this possibly be the case? Well, as Dávila said in yesterday's post, Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level. Furthermore, Catholicism does not solve all problems, but it is the only doctrine that raises them all.

In any event, you will have no doubt noticed that most of our political problems are a consequence of good answers to bad questions and bad answers to good ones.

To be continued...

Middle Earth and the Cosmic Palace

It just popped into my head that "middle earth" would be a good name for the imaginal world discussed yesterday.

Again, there is the empirical/material world we encounter via sensation, and the intelligible world we negotiate via math and reason. In between is the imaginal world where vision, gnosis, theophanies, and other *interesting* phenomena take place. Just as the physical world is disclosed by (and clothed in) our senses, the imaginal world comes to us in the form or our religious sensibilities (in image, myth, archetype, etc).

This is really quite similar in structure to how Polanyi envisions science. One of the points of his philosophy is to demonstrate that the ideal of strict objectivity is an unrealizable abstraction, and that we can only know that from which we are not detached.

Rather, the object of knowledge emerges "only through our actual dwelling in its particulars," i.e., its subsidiary clues. There is no mechanical operation that can accomplish this. Rather, it requires a subject in order to dwell in and integrate the clues.

Yesterday I cited a few aphorisms that reflect this same approach, thus making for a surprising Polanyi-Dávila-Ibn Arabi nexus. Indeed, we might even surmise that if we dwell in all three long enough, perhaps a new reality will emerge from their joint integration, a la Polanyi.

Let's first dwell in a few more aphorisms. From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints. Or in other words, it is as if one has "touched" (or been touched by) the noumenal, which is clothed, as it were, in the art form. This is identical to how the imaginal works, in that, just as no one "sees" the realm of art as such, likewise no one sees God face-to-face. Rather, in both cases we have access to the forms which testify to the Formless.

Allusion is the only way to express what is intimate without distorting it. Allusion has a from-to structure, in that dwelling in the from gives access to an implicit and unstated to. This is precisely the structure of poetry, and why poetry reduced to prose generally becomes banal.

Ah, Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything. Such an intelligence consists of explicit knowledge only. It points to nothing and nowhere; it is enclosed within itself, or rather, it is the precipitate or crystallization of a mind that has closed itself to reality. Consequentially it is both dead and endeadening. It is experience reduced to a dogma -- or scientism elevated to religion.

Related: Man believes he is lost among facts, when he is only caught in the web of his own definitions. Has this ever happened to you? It happens to stupid people, but may become aggravated in bright people like yourselves who are more capable of abstraction. They are perhaps capable of building a bigger prison, but it's a prison nonetheless.

There's a gag by Kierkegaard to the effect that the philosopher builds a beautiful palace but is condemned to live in the shack next door. This goes to the essential grandiosity of such factsimians, whose imaginative eyes are always bigger than their existential stomachs. There is a palace, but you can't reside there without God's Moving Company.

Speaking of which, Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level. Or in a bigger house, as it were.

Nor does Christianity deny the splendor of the world, but rather invites us to search for its origin, to climb towards its pure snow.

That is straight-up Ibn Arabi, for it is "the world to which the ancient Sages alluded when they affirmed that beyond the sensory world there exists another universe with a contour and dimensions and extension in space, although this is not comparable with the shape and spatiality as we perceive them in the world of physical bodies."

It is not that this higher world is "in" the lower, rather, the converse. The ontological direction -- involution you might say -- runs from imaginal, to rational, to empirical.

And that is all we have time for this morning.

The Direction of Truth

Meaning "is always lost, sometimes for good, when in order to inspect them [tacit particulars] focally, attempts are made to withdraw ourselves from those feelings and perceptions, those particulars, within which one is dwelling in an act of knowing" (Prosch).

In other words, by rendering what is implicit explicit -- by turning it into the object of perception -- its meaning is lost: we see at instead of through, like a pair of dirty eyeglasses.

An aphorism or two pop into mind: for example, There exists no truth in the humanities that does not need to be rediscovered each week. And When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they appear to be even less.

Consider the first: it explains why religious truth can never be discovered just once; rather, faith is more like a continuous process of discovery; indeed, you could say that the endless discovery is the discovery, right? You can never really arrive at the (explicit) place toward which the (implicit) clues are pointing, or you would be God. Thinking otherwise is a little like looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Likewise, consider the second: to focus on the appearance instead of the reality toward which it points is to literally reverse the direction of the human vector. It is the quickest and most efficient way to bar or undo meaning. Not to bag on the left, but this is what they do, and why their worldview is so unavoidably nihilistic (because it flees from real meaning).

In fact, it brings to mind another aphorism: The left's theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them. They must not go to where the facts and clues lead, or they would be paralyzed. Thus, if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor. Period.

"B-b-but..." Zip it!

Along those same lyin's, The atheist devotes himself less to proving that God does not exist than to forbidding Him to exist. For one thing, it is strictly impossible to disprove the existence of God, so why waste time trying? This is why atheists construct their false gods which they then go about disproving. But in reality, if God doesn't exist, only He knows it.

While looking for those aphoristic nuggets of joy, I found several others, each looking at the phenomenon from a different angle:

To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which the poet sang. The scientistic/materialistic type must believe that the photograph is more "real" than the poem, but this only testifies to their own inadequacy, or lack of conformity, to the nonlocal object. It's like dogs, who presumably cannot hear melodies, rather, just noise. They cannot perceive, let alone appreciate, what the noise is pointing to.

Here is another malady that afflicts the left: Reducing another's thought to its supposed motives prevents us from understanding it. Misunderstanding is one thing. That is obviously susceptible to correction. Disunderstanding is another thing entirely, and it is what the left specializes in. It is why they do not deal in arguments, only slander.

Here is how it works, courtesy Happy Acres:

Everything is trivial if the universe is not committed to a metaphysical adventure. Again, the adventure takes place in the space between tacit and focal knowledge, or between matter and (ultimately) God, if you like. As it so happens, this is precisely Ibn `Arabî's view, albeit expressed in slightly different terms.

That is, there is the empirical/material world and there is the intelligible/rational world. In between is what Corbin calls the imaginal world, and this is the space were religion "takes place," as it were. Importantly, it is not "imaginary," for which reason Corbin coined the term "imaginal."

We don't have sufficient timelessness to give a full airing of the subject -- that's a coming attraction -- but this space is where spiritual knowledge, visions, and theophanies take place. It is where (k) shades off into (n). And no, you cannot take a photograph of it. However, icons, cathedrals, and sacred music, for example, point to it. As does scripture, of course.

Which is why scripture functions in a manner similar to the Aphorisms: My brief sentences are dots in a pointillist painting. The difference is that no single mind can comprehend -- i.e., wrap its mind around -- scripture, and "see it whole," like a painting. Again, it provokes an adventure of endless discovery in its imaginal space.

Humanizing humanity again will not be an easy task after this long orgy of divinity. Oh my! You could say that when human beings are seen as merely human, they soon become even less. There is a kind of infinite space -- the imaginal space, to be exact -- between merely biological human beings and our innate deformity. But the distance between man and beast is but a single step. Or vote.

To deny God is to divinize man, because again, only a being with divine capacities can know that God doesn't exist. But man without God is no longer man, rather, just a randomly evolved primate. Man "takes place" in the space between biology and O. Which is why anti-religion leads to a toxic and destructive religiosity, every time. It brings about another kind of dystopian imaginal space we call Hell.

What Does Meaning Mean?

"The modern mind must continue to work its own destruction," says Polanyi, "so long as it fails to reach a vision of itself -- and of the universe itself -- within which the unlimited demands of the modern mind can be seen to require their own framework of intrinsic limitation."

This is what I meant by venturing through and beyond postmodernism as opposed to retrenchment to a pre-postmodernism that is never coming back. Traditionalism, for example, is fine on a retail basis, but the culture at large is not going to return to a premodern mentality. Rather, the task before us is to bring the past into the future: neotraditional retrofuturism. Failing that, then we are, as Polanyi warns, on a path toward inevitable destruction.

What are the "unlimited demands" of the modern mind? They reduce to two, "our unbridled demands" for objectivity and for moral perfection. Right away you see the irony, because the left believes in neither intrinsic truth nor objective morality, and yet, who is more blindly dogmatic and shrilly moralistic than the unhinged leftist? Their stance is utterly incoherent -- which is why it requires force to make people comply with it, right down to bathroom usage (because they even presume to control biosocial reality).

It is noteworthy that the science Polanyi knew and revered is not the science of today. Even it has been infected by the left, at least in disciplines outside physics, chemistry, and engineering. I forget the exact figure, but something like 70% of scientific studies cannot be replicated, meaning they are less than worthless, because people may take them for true.

Are all of these the result of the left? I can only speak of my own field, psychology, which is so pervaded by leftist biases masquerading as scientific conclusions, that it is pretty much beyond repair. Certain conclusions are mandatory, while others are not even to be wondered about. Curiosity is forbidden. I would be surprised if a psychologist with politically incorrect opinions about homosexuality, IQ, motherhood, daycare, and feminism could be hired in a liberal university. Or even survive grad school.

Science was once guided by a prescientific morality founded upon a love of truth. Science can no more function in its absence than a democracy can survive with an ignorant and immoral citizenry. Consider, for example, how science functioned in the Soviet Union: the conclusions were already known; only the details needed to be worked out. Scientific Marxism was correct, period. Conclusions consistent with it were welcome, while those running counter to it were a threat to one's health.

What a soul-deadening enterprise! And why? It starts with the denial of the soul and its innate epistemophilic drive, i.e., love of truth. "Such views as these thus set men free to subvert and destroy the old order of things with all the fervor of their subterranean moral passions." The point is, we cannot actually be detached from commitment, from moral passion, from subjectivity.

Much of this centers around Polanyi's concept of tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge has a from-to structure, such that we perceive what it is pointing to without taking cognizance of the pointers, so to speak. Take an obvious example, the human face. We perceive the face holistically, such that it is always more than the sum of its parts. We do not additively see lips, nose, and eyes, and come to the conclusion that this is indeed a face.

And we can "know" or remember a face without being able to describe the parts of which it is composed. There can be no face without the features that constitute it, so we are obviously cognizant of them in some manner, but it is a tacit cognizance. As Polanyi would say, perception is constituted by a non-conscious seeing-from to a conscious seeing-to.

A useful way to think about it is to imagine what it must be like for an autistic individual who may perceive only parts but be unable to recognize the whole. Or, think of obsessive-compulsive disorder, which causes the individual to obsess over the trees to the exclusion of the forest. They literally lose the Big Picture.

More generally, perception is always "a meaningful but non explicit integration of many clues." This goes to why "artificial intelligence" is impossible in principle, because this is something no machine can ever do.

There is always a kind of living dialectic between parts and whole, between proximal and distal perception, between tacit and focal knowledge. Thus, there is always an element of subjectivity, because only a subject can dwell in the particulars in order to achieve an integration. Scientists who are committed to naturalism apparently don't like this idea, but there it is. There is no way around it.

Another key point is that focal perception is the meaning to which the tacit clues point. You might say that we look through and beyond the clues in order to perceive the meaning to which they point. Analogously, "brush strokes are meaningless, except as they enter into the appearance of the painting."

This applies to the distinction between semantics (meaning) and syntax (order) in language. Obviously, as you read this sentence, you are not consciously focussed on the letters or the words; rather, they are only tacitly present as you endeavor to grasp the meaning toward which they are aiming. "Without their bearing upon the distal they would be meaningless" -- literally just words.

Which opens up a whole can of wormholes vis-a-vis religious communication. I will stipulate, for example, that my words make no sense to our current troll, or even a kind of "negative sense," or destruction of meaning. I produce nothing of value except perhaps to weak minds, such that my "net contribution to humanity is deeply negative."

Suffice it to say that he not only doesn't see what we see, but generally sees in my words things I am not saying. In other words, he hallucinates things that aren't present. Meaning is surely present for him, only not the meaning I intend. He is like a dog sniffing my finger instead of looking at that to which I am pointing.

Now, meaning is really "a triadic term in that, in addition to the functionally different proximal and distal factors, there must always be a person, a user, an intender involved." Some people say that life is "meaningless." Is this true? Well, it's certainly true for them, as they do not see that to which all the clues are pointing.

Certainly we can agree that life is either meaningless or meaningful. There can be no middle ground, for if it isn't meaningful as such, than what we call "meaning" is just a trick of perception. If "God is dead," how did that happen? How did we un-meaning existence?

Polanyi says that meaning can be lost when, for example, we withdraw from focal awareness and focus instead on the particulars. Again, "brush strokes lose their meaning when studied focally," as do notes when taken in isolation from the performance -- by looking at instead of dwelling in.

Now, I take the position that God is that to which a multitude of diverse particulars are pointing. Thus, God is the meaning of things. Furthermore, I turn things around, such that because meaning obviously exists, therefore God does. The only alternative is to insist that God and therefore meaning do not exist. But that has no meaning, precisely. The One Cosmos we all see points to the one God we don't.