Wandering through God's Dreamscape

What I was driving at yesterday is that perhaps more real than God or man alone is the relationship between them. This would be consistent with theologians such as Norris Clarke and John Zizioulas, who speak of Being as being in relation; there is no "substance" that is not substance-in-relation (which is in turn reducible to "self-communicating love").

We've discussed this idea extensively in the past, but Corbin comes at it from a slightly different angel, speaking of "the revelation of God to man" as a theophany that is not only mirrored in man's conversion toward God, but is ultimately the same thing.

Or in other words, as hinted at in yesterday's post, a "religious conversion" takes place in the space where man turns toward God and God toward man, in a single embrace.

Which is why Corbin says that God appears in the form of our ability to comprehend him, even though God is still God and man still man. God is always "the same," and yet, necessarily different for each man, because God's sameness is a sameness-in-relationality, not substance.

Let me say that I am not necessarily advocoting this idea, just spontaneously interacting with the text. We shall see where it all leads as we proceed.

Corbin speaks of a "divine passion for man... motivating the 'conversion' of the divine being toward man," complementing a corresponding "sympathetic state in man, a state in which the divine pathos is revealed." You could say that we cannot know God except in the form of our response to God.

Which makes a lot of sense, if you think about it. For even straight-up scripture requires a response on our part; it is not soph-evident. Animals, for example, don't respond to it. Which implies that scripture is already God's response to man, in that it is in a form man can comprehend and assimilate. You know what they say: if English was good enough for Jesus, it ought to be good enough for us.

The response on our end "depends on the degree to which man renders himself 'capable of God,' for it is this capacity which defines and measures sympathy as the necessary medium of all religious experience."

Incidentally, I symbolize this sympathy with the wavy equal sign, (≈). However, up to now, I had only considered the resonance from our end; but apparently, (≈) is as much God as man. Which again makes a lot of sense; I'm thinking of an aphorism to the effect that The Bible is not the voice of God, but of the man who encounters Him (Dávila). It is neither God nor man, but man and God in eternal communion.

While looking up that one I found another: The history of Christianity would be suspiciously human if it were not the adventure of an incarnate god. Christianity assumes the misery of history, as Christ assumes the misery of man.

By entering history, God transforms it to salvation history -- it is no longer just "the actions of man," so to speak, but of the man who encounters God, and the God who encounters man, in history. History is the residue of this transaction (or of its refusal).

Which is why Radical sin relegates the sinner to a silent, gray universe, drifting on the surface of the water, a lifeless shipwreck, toward inexorable insignificance (ibid.).

About this trans-action, I was thinking of this as I walked through the Departed's house yesterday. Every object in it -- not excepting the house itself -- was chosen by a particular soul for a particular reason; it had a personal meaning and significance that only he would know. As such, it is a little like walking through someone else's dreamscape -- through all the little "meanings" that illuminated and guided his life, but also revealed himself to himself -- and to others. It is like one big text.

I suppose you could say that I was struck by a vision of intimate communication. The communication is still occurring, even though the Communicant is no longer with us. Which is no doubt why we are spontaneously reverent toward the Stuff of the Dead. To the Dead it wasn't just stuff, but a cartography of their inner horizon. Which is why the final scene of Citizen Kane is so unsettling, when the workmen are carelessly chucking his stuff into the furnace.

I remember reading of some writer who donated his papers to a university, and they included everything from shopping lists to toenail clippings. That's taking it a little too far. But why? I would say because it doesn't imply any divine encounter -- or any externalization of the soul -- just an absurd and indiscriminate inflation of the mundane, like Hillary Clinton's campaign manifesto.

Orthoparadox: "I was a hidden Treasure and I yearned to be known. Then I created creatures in order to be known by them." The divine passion is the "desire to reveal Himself and to know Himself in beings through being known by them."

If we are in the image of the Creator, then our tendency to exteriorize our soul via objects and relationships is much like God's tendency to do so. For just as Uncle Jack's house is a kind of self-communicating dreamscape, so too is existence as such. Jesus is God walking through and interacting with his own exteriorized pneumatosphere. Salvation history is its residue.

God describes himself to himself -- and to us -- through ourselves in communion with him. Thus, "by knowing Him I give Him being." And vice versa, because it is the same inspiraling movement.

Our Conversion, and God's

Consider this an open thread with a bit of Bonus Material tacked onto the end. Insufficient time to actually complete our line of thought. Attending a funeral this morning for... is there a word for your wife's step-uncle?

No, it is not what you would call a tragic situation, being that he lived an extremely full 92+ years and was high functioning until the very end -- just a slow fade over a few weeks and a peaceful death at home and in bed. No one wants to go, but if you have to go, well...

You'll notice that he was a war hero who managed to repeatedly cheat death during WW2, with 27 missions in the Pacific theater. Says here that "In 1942-43 it was statistically impossible for bomber crews to complete a 25-mission tour in Europe."

I don't know what the equivalent stat was for the Pacific, but the men surely knew with each mission that they were flying straight into the jaws of death. Surviving that must have made one feel literally bulletproof. Either that or wracked with survivor guilt.

Speaking of full lives, there is a haunting statement in the third volume of Manchester's Churchill biography. If you add it all together, Churchill is arguably the most accomplished man who ever lived.

Indeed, it seems impossible that one man could have been granted so many diverse gifts and exercised them all to the full. And yet, in 1954, when one of his daughters "expressed wonderment of all that he had seen and done in his life," he thought for a moment before responding, "I have achieved a great deal to achieve nothing in the end." (I believe he was especially thinking of how the Cold War was simply an extension of WWII, which was an extension of WWI, ad infinitum.)

Dude. I don't know that that was his considered opinion, but still. It is as if he had cheated death on so many occasions -- nor did Churchill have any conventional fear of death -- that Death simply adopted a different tactic by eroding meaning.

How do we get around that one? Unless *we* do something to transform death itself, it seems that it is indeed the Last Word in meaninglessness. Death, where is thy sting? That's where, pal, in its pretensions to absolute nihilism. It is the anti-Word.

Obviously, getting around Death isn't something we could ever do. We can try, but then we simply end up looking like Cher, or Kenny Rogers. Entropy gets us all in the end.

However, what -- or who -- is God but the Great Negentropic Attractor?

If man has a "spiritual" conversion, you might say that God has an "anthropic" one. That is, as man turns to God, God apparently turns to man: "God becomes man that man might become God." So, not only does God die, but he must die in order to undo Death.

Put it this way: physics mathsplains to us that order is parasitic on entropy. But Christian metaphysics tells us it's the other way around -- that entropy is parasitic on order.

Life becomes death that death might become Life. One hopes...

Churchill, God, and Baseball

We have an early appointment tomorrow (Wednesday), so there shall be no post. But this is today. Get on with it!

We left off with the idea that we are the measure of what we can understand; and that our understanding includes a nonlocal organ "which perceives, and at the same time confers existence upon, a reality of its own" (Corbin).

We compared this latter to the historical imagination. Coincidentally, for several months now I've been immersing myself in WinstonWorld, a remarkably expansive and imaginative place. Churchill wrote four volumes on the History of the English Speaking Peoples, ending at the threshold of WWI. He carried the story forward by writing five volumes on that little dispute, and then six more on its continuation in WWII.

My point is that he essentially imagined all of history and situated himself within it. Contrast this with the average lofo voter, whose historical horizons scarcely extend past the last meal and beyond the next. Or maybe you've never seen Watter's World.

Not only did he imagine history, but he assimilated it, such that it was woven into his very substance. Manchester says something to the effect that for Churchill, English history was more akin to what childhood memories are for you and I, or lunch for the lofo.

Here is the exact passage. I include it because I think it parallels what Corbin says about God and the imaginal space (emphases mine):

"Memorizing dates and place-names has always been the bane of schoolchildren." But "for a few," including Churchill, "history, by way of imagination and discipline, becomes part of personal memory, no less than childhood recollections of the first swim in the ocean or the first day of school."

"Churchill did not simply observe the historical continuum; he made himself part of it." The distant past, extending to Greco-Roman times, "informed his identity in much the same way" as did memories of his childhood home.

Even so, "He did not live in the past." Rather, "the past lived on in him." He had a "mystical relationship" with it, such that the present resonated with the past in a deeply personal way. You could say that this is how and why he recognized Hitler the moment he saw him: same play, new actor.

Yesterday we spoke of the distinction between history and memoir; a memoir, although "in" history, isn't history, in that the latter involves a more transcendental, comprehensive, and disinterested view. However, in a fascinating twist, it is as if Churchill transforms history into memoir -- as if it all happened to him personally.

Now, how might this help inform what we've been saying about the imaginal space?

Somewhere our Unknown Friend writes of the importance of imagining various events of the Bible -- is if intimately participating in them.

On a more banal level, I'm thinking of the great announcer of the Dodgers, Vin Scully, who will be retiring this week after 67 years with the team. I've been listening to him since 1965, and it is difficult if not impossible to describe his magical ability to facilitate one's imaginative participation in the game.

Through the '60s and '70s in particular, few games were televised, so radio was the only option. But he made the games so vivid, that most everyone attending them held transistor radios to their heads, listening to Vin describe what they were seeing with their own eyes. In fact, you didn't even need a radio. There were so many, that you could hear his voice in the stands without one -- even on the field.

Again, this may strike one as a trivial example, but think of the implications: Scully's imaginative description of the game was somehow more real than the game itself; or, it revealed a deeper dimension of reality via one's personal participation in the imaginal.

By the way, the wife discovered a download of Vin reading the rosary. I am informed by an 11 year old witness that it made her cry -- just as he made me cry in 1966, when the Dodgers lost to the Orioles in the World Series, even though the eyes tell us it's just a bunch of grown men playing a child's game.

There is something similar going on with scripture. For example, "the story of Adam in Genesis" reflects "the invisible history of the 'celestial' and spiritual man, enacted in a time of its own and always 'in the present'" (Corbin). As with Churchill, the stage is the same, and even the roles; only the actors change.

We're almost out of time. Let's conclude by suggesting that "mere reality" is lacking a dimension or two, which can only be perceived via the imaginal. "Is it possible to to see without being in the place where one sees?" Imaginal visions "are in themselves penetrations into the world they see."

It's little like how a magnifying glass gathers the sun's rays into a focal point which burns through the surface.

You are the Problem

The problem with the gap between Friday and Monday isn't so much the gap itself but the frame of mind -- the state more than the content. Recovering the content is easy enough, but more important is figuring out where -- or who -- I was when I wrote it. Now, where was I? And who?

Right. Recipherment and decipherment (bearing in mind that a cipher is nothing). So we're halfway there, being that I feel completely re-ciphered, or freshly enzilched, this morning. As usual, lost in the bewilderness and searching for questions.

In the ultimate sense, it would appear that mysticism is to philosophy as form is to content. Corbin writes that "a philosophy that does not culminate in a metaphysic of ecstasy is vain speculation," while "a mystical experience that is not grounded on a sound philosophical education is in danger of degenerating and going astray."

This truism finds perhaps its quintessential expression in St. Thomas, who, toward the end of his life, had a mystical experience compared to which all the prior philosophizing was nothing; no man has ever deciphered more than Thomas, and it seems that his re-cipherment was on the same scale.

But this is a cross-religious experience. Think, for example, of the Buddha, who, in realizing the poverty of speech in conveying the experience, simply held up a flower.

Now, if man is in the image of God, each man's image of God must be at least "relatively unique," being that each man is himself unique.

Imagine invisible light passing through a prism, only in this case, the prism reveals an infinite number of colors (which I suppose it does anyway, for it is we who place the boundaries between violet and blue or yellow and green). Bearing in mind what was said above, this implies that each man must not only know his God but realize him. In his own living color.

In short, God is revealed -- or reveals himself -- in a form to which each man is individually capable of seeing. To add biofuel to the living paradox, God is at each end of the enterprise, such that -- in the words of Meister Eckhart -- "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which he sees me."

What I've written so far probably seems either stupid or pointless. But I say: why can't it be both?

Buddhists also say something to the effect that another man's dharma -- AKA path -- is a grave danger. Or in other words, you can't take the journey for someone else, nor can they take it for you. Rather, you have to simultaneously find and forge your own path; and also imagine and discover where it leads.

Which does not devolve to a hopeless subjectivism, because the finding is no less important than the forging. It's an orthoparadox. Deal with it.

"Imagine" and "discover" would appear to exclude one another, but if so, then Corbin pretty much wasted his life in trying to explain how and why each necessitates the other.

Think of the relationship between DNA and environment. Even if DNA is the "code of life," it isn't Life Itself. It also codes for the environment, or better, for a kind of dialectic between the organism and the expected environment. The code for wings obviously anticipates the atmosphere in which they are operative. Likewise, the code for human intelligence anticipates truth, as the code for religiosity anticipates God.

There is empirical reality and there is intelligible reality; but there is also spiritual reality. Furthermore, our standard equipment includes the apparatus for knowing each, i.e., senses, reason, and... what? In other words, we can sense the physical world and reason about the intelligible. What is the equivalent activity vis-a-vis the spiritual?

"Imagination" is apparently the best word we have, although Corbin draws a sharp distinction between the imaginary and imaginal. Referring back to the forge/find dialectic, the imaginal takes place in the space in between, whereas the imaginary would imply no real discovery (or discovery of the Real).

In order to imagine the imaginal, think of the analogy of "historical imagination." Obviously, history is only something that can be imagined, but that hardly means it didn't occur.

Rather, too much occurred for any man to ever fully imagine. So, history is always one man's representation of what occurred. And there are capacious historical imaginations, just as there are narrow or shallow ones. There are inevitable scotomas, not to mention perspectives and dimensions.

For example, one could write a history from the perspective of economics, of religion, of science, of liberty; or from the standpoint of women, or slaves, or children. No one could possibly see everything from all possible perspectives.

The other day I was explaining to the boy the difference between history and memoir. To back up a bit, I'm trying to find a way to get him interested in history. I read quite a bit about World War II, but I was thinking that perhaps an eye-witness memoir of a soldier on the ground might better capture his imagination.

Odd, isn't it, that being an eye-witness to history is not the same as history? But nor is being an eye-witness to "religious facts" the same as religion.

Corbin cites the example of the Burning Bush, which "is only a brushwood fire if it is merely perceived by the sensory organs." Likewise, in the absence of a "trans-sensory" organ, the Crucifixion is just some rabble rouser getting the death penalty. Nothing about religion makes a great deal of sense if not transmuted by this organ of perception.

I read somewhere yesterday that Trump's detractors take him literally but not seriously, whereas his followers take him seriously but not literally. Scott Adams said something similar this morning, that Trump

always takes the extreme position on matters of safety and security for the country, even if those positions are unconstitutional, impractical, evil, or something that the military would refuse to do. Normal people see this as a dangerous situation. Trained persuaders like me see this as something called pacing and leading.

This reminds me of some of Jesus's more extremist statements about selling all one has and giving it to the poor, or hating one's parents, or returning love for hate. I don't know about you, but I take such statements deadly seriously if not always literally.

Let's say Jesus is the incarnation of the Second Person of the Trinity. The senses would say "I don't see it," while logic might respond, "so what?" You might say that the whole thing is a stumbling block to the senses and folly to our reason.

"Abstract monotheism and literalist religion do not suffice to permit an effective divine encounter." Rather, we need something like "active imagination," which is "that organ of prophetic inspiration which perceives, and at the same time confers existence upon, a reality of its own" (Corbin).

Moreover, "each man is the measure of what he can understand" (ibid.). Or, each of us is an imaginal space for God's self-understanding -- where the divine light is refracted through a unique problem which you call I and others call You.

Deciphering and Re-ciphering the Mystery

Back to Polanyi for a moment, who was a critic of the notion that "true knowledge must be something detached and utterly objective," and that science alone is capable of meeting these criteria" (Prosch).

Rather -- as we've been discussing vis-a-vis al-'Arabi -- "World views are imaginative projections" and "are not products themselves of scientific investigations" (ibid.).

Indeed, a world view implies both perspective -- and therefore lack of objectivity -- and participation. Imagine trying to see the room where you are sitting from all possible perspectives. Then throw in all possible subjects, including the ant now crawling up my leg. Now consider something larger -- history, or the cosmos, or God. As I mentioned the other day, such things can only be imaginatively envisioned.

I believe I've mentioned before that when I read a good history book, it is as if a previously unnoticed scotoma is filled in. A scotoma is a blind spot where, for example, the optic nerve connects to the eyeball. This produces a "hole" in the field of vision of each eye, which our brains don't notice. But if you stare straight ahead while moving an object at the periphery, there is a point at which it disappears.

I see that the wiki article includes a section on neuropsychological, psychological, and intellectual scotomas. To which we might add historical and spiritual:

"The common theme of all the figurative senses is of a gap... in the mind's perception, cognition, or world view." And "in psychology, scotoma can refer to a person's inability to perceive personality traits in themselves that are obvious to others.... [A]t the highest abstraction level are what have been called intellectual scotomas, in which a person cannot perceive distortions in their world view that are obvious to others."

This concept of psycho-pneumatic scotomas is full of implications. The most important scotoma of all, as we've been saying in recent posts, is God. How is that? Well, recall what was said a couple of posts back about how "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension." I would say that this High Incomprehension is actually an accurate perception of the ontological scotoma at the heart of existence -- or in other words, of our radical incompleteness.

And yet, reality itself cannot be "incomplete." That would be an absurdity. Therefore, our ontological scʘtʘma is, as it were, a "placeholder" we fill with God. Conversely, you might say that the atheist simply papers over the hole, filling it with "matter" or "math" or "natural selection," or whatever. But thank God for that hole in the ground of being, without which we would be sadly complete.

Come to think of it, Gödel's theorems certainly go to this. For example, if you imagine that your scientific theory is somehow "complete," it is only because you are overlooking the Gödelian hole at its center -- i.e., the metaphysical assumption(s) for which the theory cannot account.

It is simply a truism that knowledge of God begins and ends in Not Knowing, if only because the finite can never contain the infinite. Yes, the finite can represent the infinite, but we must never forget the scotomatous abyss between the two.

Analogously, what is the "space" between a circle and a sphere? Think of the old gag to the effect that God is as close to you as your jugular vein. Likewise, from the perspective of the circle, the sphere couldn't be any closer, since the latter contains an infinite number of circles. And yet, there is nevertheless an unquantifiable abyss between circle and sphere -- a dimensional scotoma, so to speak.

To change if not grind our gears for a moment, this also applies to our politics. Our founders, for example, were quite careful to create a system of negative liberties, and what is a negative liberty but a kind of empty space free from government intrusion? Thankfully there is a big nothing at the very heart of the American ideal.

Unless you are a liberal, in which case you wish to eliminate the Nothing with an infinite number of laws, regulations, speech codes, and political correctness, right down to the most intimate behavior. And I use the term "infinite" advisedly, because there is no limiting principle to the ever-growing regulatory state cherished by liberals.

It is vital to understand that "negative liberty" is inconceivable -- or at least unworkable -- in the absence of "positive obligations." As we've said before, only a person who is a priori responsible is fit for liberty. One thing -- the most important thing -- an American education should do is help form responsible citizens who are fit for -- i.e., can tolerate -- negative liberty.

How's that working out? You will have noticed that the whole catastrophe comes down to those who can tolerate the scotoma of responsible negative liberty vs. those who want to empower the state to make it go away.

Think of "scientific Marxism." No scotomas there! It only explains everything, with no gaps or mysteries. Likewise scientism, metaphysical Darwinism, or any other ideology. To paraphrase Arthur Koestler, these are men without umbilical cords grounding them to the Womb of Being.

This is all by way of a meandering prelude to a discussion of Henry Corbin, who writes of "a plane of consciousness distinct from that of rational evidence; it is the 'cipher' of a mystery, the only means of saying something that cannot be apprehended in any other way." (Cipher: a zero; a figure O.)

You might compare it to the circle and sphere alluded to above. The symbol is to God as circle is to sphere: it is "never 'explained' once and for all, but must be deciphered over and over again, just as a musical score is never deciphered once and for all, but calls for ever new execution."

So, you might say that the metabolism of God involves a never-ending re-cipherment for the purposes of de-cipherment. Because again, no number of circles will ever fill up the sphere, let alone that Sphere.

The Waystation Between Must Be and Can't Be

There are three sorts of existence: there is Necessary Being, "which cannot not be." Then there are things that cannot be under any circumstances: necessary not-being, you might say, or just plain impossibility (although the Cubs are posing a challenge to that one). Then there is the realm of the Possible, of things that might or might not be. That would include you and I, "whose relationship to existence and nonexistence is equal."

D'oh! This means that we always have one foot in existence and another on a banana peel. It is what makes life so... bracing. We are situated smack dab between Must Be and Can't Be, so there is an inherent degree of absurdity, or at least ambiguity.

To choose atheism or scientism or existentialism is to essentially say we are either children of the Can't Be or an extension of the Must Be. If the former, then our lives are indeed absurd and nothing more. And if we have no free will, then it is as if everything is preordained, and we Must Be who and what we are.

It seems that people are uncomfortable with the ambiguity and enigma of the Possible. One immediate implication is that there is a lot of Luck involved. Why did that white guy in Charlotte get dragged from his car last night and brutalized by the rioting savages? Wrong place at the wrong time. Bad luck.

I'm thinking of Curtis Mayfield, who was just standing on stage at an outdoor concert when a lighting scaffold blew over and crashed down on him, breaking his neck and rendering him quadriplegic. A couple of years ago an enormous tree broke in half and crashed into my back yard. If anyone had been standing there, it would have killed him. Who knows how many close calls we have in a given day? We generally only know about the bad things that happen, but not all the near misses.

The point is, we are always perched between existence and nonexistence, and although we can take precautions, there is nevertheless an element of randomness we can't eliminate. If we could, then we would be in the realm of necessity, not possibility.

In fact, for Schuon, God's All-Possibility is the whole explanation of evil. Evil is something that ought not be, but is nevertheless possible. What Schuon would say is that God doesn't will evil, of course, only possibility. But possibility includes the negation of God's will, hence, evil.

"Infinitude, which is an aspect of the Divine Nature, implies unlimited Possibility and consequently Relativity, Manifestation, the world. To speak of the world is to speak of separation from the Principle, and to speak of separation is to speak of the possibility -- and necessity -- of evil; seen from this angle, what we term evil is thus indirectly a result of Infinitude, hence of the Divine Nature..."

Therefore, "The nature of evil, and not its inevitability, constitutes its condemnation; its inevitability must be accepted, for tragedy enters perforce into the divine play, if only because the world is not God; one must not accept error, but one must be resigned to its existence." Haters gonna hate, and all that.

This latter goes to man's fallen nature (or to the tragic vision of life, if you prefer), and it is precisely this Lamentable Fact that the liberal denies (c.f., Sowell's A Conflist of Visions and Vision of the Anointed).

So, the world is a tapestry of necessity and contingency, which is precisely what makes it the world. If not for the contingency, it would be heaven. Schuon says somewhere that it is also product of geometry and music; and what is architecture but frozen music, and music but flowing architecture?

This means that to perceive reality we must, as it were, see the geometry and hear the music. In a certain sense, science is about the former, art and religion the latter. But there is also a kind of intuitive hearing in science, and a kind of hierarchical structure in God.

Now, one of the purposes of religion is to render us more "real" by participating in the Real -- in Necessary Being. In our own way, we participate in Necessary Being simply by virtue of our uniqueness: "each human being is a unique reflection of God, since 'Self-disclosure never repeats itself.'"

So, on the one hand, we might or might not have been; but once we are, then there can be no repetition. Our "true self" -- or soul -- must be a kind of fragment of Cosmic Necessity, of the Divine I AM, but again, woven with contingency.

And "man is not man until he brings the divine attributes latent within himself into actuality." But most people -- you will have noticed -- are closer to "animal man," or "animals in human form, since they have not actualized the divine form which would make them human."

So, it appears that the human station is the very possibility of participating in human being or in non-being: your call. If you've never met a human non-being, then you need to get out of the house more often. Or just turn on the news.

"'Animal man' is the opposite of perfect man," whether the latter is limited to Jesus or is widened out to encompass the saints. From my perspective, I think the saints "participate" in Jesus, hence the (relative) perfection.

Jesus is "the way," but also the "waystation." For "A 'waystation' is a station to which God descends to you, or within which you alight upon Him.... He desires to descend to you and places within your heart a seeking to alight upon Him" -- the old (⇅).

Well, that's about the size of it.

Round About the Queer God

For any curious human being -- and a human without curiosity is scarcely worthy of the name -- the existence of God is the Question of questions. But merely answering the question in the affirmative is insufficient. Rather, "having answered it," writes Chittick, human beings "must then set out to verify the truth of their answer by finding God in fact, not in theory."

This is precisely what we mean by (k) vs. (n): our "main concern is not with the mental concept of being [k] but with the experience [n] of God's Being," whereby "finding," "perceiving" and "being" are united in "that which truly is."

This constitutes what we call the Bewilderness Adventure: "To find God is to fall into bewilderment, not the bewilderment of being lost and unable to find one's way, but the bewilderment of finding and knowing God and of not-finding and not-knowing Him at the same time."

You could say that (k) is mere knowledge, the sort of thing that can be easily passed from mind to mind. But (n) requires a wide-I'd state of blunderment, in which we first empty ourselves of what we know in order to make room for what we don't.

Thus the orthoparadox: "Incapacity to attain comprehension is itself comprehension." So, be wary of those who only know. As the saying goes, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.

A gag by Kierkegaard just popped into my head, so perhaps it is relevant: "Only a strange gospel can differentiate itself from the culture around us." Conversely, imagine if the gospel were as assimilable as any other form of (k). In the end, it would render us equal, if not superior, to God, because it would mean we could contain him (rather than vice versa).

Indeed, the fact that we can know God but never contain him is guaranteed to generate an endless stream of partial answers -- as no amount of two-dimensional circles can add up to the three-dimensional sphere. Thus, our answers can and will be completely true and yet utterly false. To tweak a famous saying, "Why do you call it truth? There is no one true but God allone."

Any extreme seeker knows that "the answer to every significant question concerning God and the world is 'Yes and no.'" Whatever Yes you can come up with simply isn't big enough for God. Indeed, there are certain gods so puny -- and you know who they are -- that the No! is far preferable to any Yes. Saying Yes to them would be an insult to God and man. Give me an honest naytheist to a narrow-minded yeatheist.

"'Finding,' it needs to be repeated, is never just epistemological. It is fundamentally ontological. Being precedes knowledge knowledge in God as in the world" (ibid.).

In God, of course, knowledge is Being, and vice versa; in giving existence to the world, God literally gives being, but this being is at the same time not-being. If you don't know that, then death is here to remind you. You might say that the purpose of religion is to bridge that otherwise unbridgeable gap between being and Being.

And when I say "unbridgeable," I mean of course from our end: again, we can never contain the Container. But "what if" -- "I'm just thinking out loud here," said God -- "what if the Container were somehow to become the content?" What if the Timeless were to enter time, the Infinite the finite, the Author his story? Wouldn't that be a kick in the godhead?

To paraphrase the early Fathers, The Container becomes contained so that the contained might become Container.

Is any God-spiel down here adequate to accomplish this? If so, it would have to be a strange spiel indeed, not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.

"None knows God but God." True enough, even self-evidently so. And if not for the Incarnation, it would be an impenetrable tautology.

But as a human individual who has come into existence and then returned to his Creator, he has tied together the Origin and the Return.... He is the part and the Whole, the many and the One, the small and the Great, everything and All. Just as he turns round about God, so the cosmos turns round about him. --William Chittick

Seeing the Light in our Prismhouse

We are in the process of cross-referencing some insights from a celebrated 13th century Sufi Cosmonaught with everything else we know to be true of reality. Why? Because it is always intriguing when people separated by centuries, cultures, languages, and religions nevertheless perceive the same invisible things. For me, anyway.

Perhaps it's fundamentally no different than two explorers -- say, Vikings and Spaniards -- discovering the same land mass. Of course there will be differences, since Newfoundland is not central America. Nevertheless, it's a Place, and in any event, the Place wasn't Europe. Same with nonlocal/vertical reality: it is quite diverse, despite the underlying unity (same house, many mansions).

Indeed, al-'Arabi is Allahbout describing that place: it is "the realm where invisible realities become visible and corporeal things are spiritualized. Though more real and 'subtle' than the physical world, the World of Imagination is less real and 'denser' than the spiritual world, which remains forever invisible as such."

You might say that, just as the material world is transmuted through our senses into a ponderable reality, so too is the spiritual world transmuted through the imaginal into the world of religion. As they say, water takes on the color of its container. Compare pure spirit to invisible water, and religious imagery its container: different colors, same water.

I was thinking about this yesterday; or rather, vice versa, since the thought just popped unbidden into my noggin. But we use the word "reality" rather loosely. Reality is one thing, our ideas about it another. Is any human idea actually adequate to reality? Clearly not. Rather, reality is something we can only imagine -- even when we use scientific concepts to do so.

A critical point, however, is that this is not to be confused with a Kantian dualism that denies us access to reality. For Kant, we are essentially trapped in the phenomenal representations of our nervous system, with no access to the noumenal-Real. Our esteemed Shaykh would insist that we do indeed have access to the noumenal via imaginal representations of it.

Go back to what was said above about the place where invisible realities become visible and corporeal things are spiritualized. In particular, think of how we inevitably "spiritualize" reality.

For example, most people, in the presence of virgin nature -- the ocean, rivers, forests, mountains, etc. -- don't just see H20, or trees, or a pile of dirt. Somehow it is transmuted into a spiritual perception -- or perception of spirit -- such that a kind of metaphysical light shines through. This is another thing no artificial intelligence would be able to accomplish, whereas for humans it is hard not to accomplish it.

Note that there must be a difference between "spirit" and the thing it is clothed in, e.g., the river or mountain. This again goes to the idea of spirit taking on the color of its container. We don't reduce water to its container; nevertheless, we couldn't see it without the container. (Perhaps a better analogy is invisible light through a prism.)

Now, shift gears and apply the same principle to the upper vertical. It is pervaded by the same invisible spirit, but how do we capture it? The customary way is through religious containers, e.g., myths, symbols, icons, archetypes, commandments, etc. These are how we "clothe God" (or the sacred), so to speak.

This is an idea that is present in all religions. What distinguishes Christianity is that God literally clothes himself in man, a man who then becomes the "way" to think about God.

In what we might call Primordial Religion, there are three great Revelations. There is existence as such, which is transparent to the Light alluded to above. There is also revelation proper, the book or prophet who speak for God.

For Schuon, there is also the human intellect, which can have no sufficient reason outside God. In other words, nothing short of God can account for a Reason that so transcends everything under its purview. Just as the Light shines through matter and through written revelation, so too does the same Light shine on and through the intellect-nous.

This happens in sometimes surprising and unexpected ways. For example, in the Churchill bio there are many extracts of his prose, and there is something magically luminous about it. I don't know how he does it, but it just rolls out of him. Well, go back to the Light and the Container. I can't help thinking that the key lies in his contact with the Light, which then becomes clothed in his words.

It is very, very different from mere intellectualism. Indeed, Churchill was not an intellectual, in the sense of being interested in abstract ideas. Likewise, he preferred short and common words, and plain meaning. But there is no doubt that these words stirred a civilization to defend itself from a barbarous darkness that nearly succeeded in extinguishing it. Some how he "spoke" on behalf of the very Light for which Western Civilization is the container.

If this sounds like hero-worship, well, yes.

Conversely, think of how his anti-type, Hitler, did the same thing. He too clothed an invisible reality in powerful language. But what a difference! Hitler is truly "darkness visible," the lower vertical incarnate. And wouldn't it be nice if he were the only person capable of clothing "luminous darkness" in speech. Fat chance.

In any event, "imaginal existence allows abstract meanings to take on concrete form," whether that form is in matter or in the intellect.

Now, the radiation of spirit is closely tied to the presence of "openings." Or, spirit is always there; it is up to us to create the opening. It is "a near synonym for several other terms, such as unveiling, tasting, witnessing, divine effusion, divine self-disclosure, and insight." Each "designates a mode of gaining direct knowledge of God" which "comes to the aspirant suddenly [?!] after he has been waiting patiently at the door.'

To paraphrase Woody Allen, 90% of life is just showing up. In this case, you have to be there for the Light to break through. You don't necessarily have to do anything in particular, and indeed, there is nothing you could do on your end to force it to happen. However, there are a lot of things you can not do which will allow it to happen. Which is precisely what we mean by the "bewilderness adventure of higher non doodling."

Having said that, one must always coonsider the Source. I just left a comment on yesterday's post about Schuon's critique of what he calls "realizationism," which essentially involves a lack of discernment of the spirits to which one has opened. Spirit is neither here nor there; or rather, both here and there, i.e., up and down.

How to tell the difference? We're almost out of time, but al-'Arabi suggests that one test involves -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- the unity, or integrity, or harmony, or interconnectedness of it all. It should all Make Sense in a higher and deeper context.

Think of, say, St. Thomas vs. secular scientism. Both "explain everything," but the latter only does so by first explaining away everything that matters.

Imagining Reality

One thing leads to anauthor, in this case, Henry Corbin to Ibn al-'Arabi via William Chittick's The Sufi Path of Knowledge. I'm as dubious of Islam as the next guy, but there are always exceptions, most notably Schuon, whom I probably quote more than any other author.

Indeed, it is fair to say I that am far closer to a Schuon-style Sufism than to certain strands of moonstream Christianity -- just as if Lena Dunham were the only alternative, I don't know that I could call myself heterosexual.

Nor was Schuon himself without the same ambivalence: "Formerly, the prince of darkness fought against religions above all from without and apart from the sinful nature of man; in our age he adds a new stratagem to this struggle, with regard to emphasis at least, which consists of seizing religions from within, and he has largely succeeded, in the world of Islam as well as the worlds of Judaism and Christianity."

After all, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama call themselves Christian (as Nancy Pelosi and John Kerry are "Catholic"), and some 75% of Jews are reliable Democratic voters. All of these trends should be "impossible," but, as Schuon would say, evil is the possibility of impossibility (or presence of nothingness), so to speak. Some things cannot -- or at least should not -- be, and yet, there they Are.

In any event, this satanic ruse "is not even very difficult for him... given the prodigious lack of discernment that characterizes the humanity of our epoch..." This absence of discernment is precisely what renders the impossible possible and gives it the appearance of reality.

Speaking of possible impossibilities, I am currently reading volume 2 of Manchester's magnificent Churchill bio. It is rather more slow moving than the first and third volumes (which I have already read), and provides an almost hour-by-hour (and sometimes minute-by-minute) account of the three year lead up to World War II, from Hitler's 1936 yoinking of the Rhineland to his 1939 invasion of Poland.

While historians tell us World War II broke out in August of 1939, in actuality it started no later than 1936. It's just that the allies finally acknowledged it in 1939. Why did they (excepting Churchill) fail to notice they were at war before then? Well, why does the left not acknowledge that we are at war with Islamic terror? Rather, we are in a Narrative Fight with folks who call themselves Muslim. My narrative can beat up your narrative!

But you can't actually even say that, because the whole idea of narrative comes out of a subreal literary theory that says one narrative is no better than another, and that they are all rooted in power, not truth. Thus, just as the P. of D. seizes religions from within, so too does he seize English, history, philosophy, and psychology departments, not to mention political parties, TV stations, and newspapers.

I see we've already opened a multitude of possible avenues to explore in this post. I hadn't intended to veer off into Churchill, but my main point is the singular lack of discernment -- blindness, really -- in his opponents in the 1930s.

Conversely, Hitler wasn't at all blind, at least insofar as he saw exactly what he wanted to do and how to go about doing it. But just as liberals today blind themselves to troubling aspects of Islam, intellectuals of the 1930s skimmed right past the, er, troubling parts of the Mein Kampf narrative.

In comparing attitudes of the 1930s to contemporary times, the parallels are even more striking than I had realized. For example, liberals don't want to refer to terrorists as "Islamic" for fear of offending them. Just so, the whole policy of the Chamberlain government revolved around not angering Hitler.

Bear in mind that this was before "appeasement" had been discredited -- before it became a pejorative term. Rather, Chamberlain openly and enthusiastically embraced the policy of appeasement -- which is why the last thing he wanted to do was bring Churchill into the government, as this would have undoubtedly made the Fuhrer "cross." The logic is the same: just as angering terrorists creates more of them, Churchill was the Nazi's best recruiting tool.

But let's get back to matters at hand, al-'Arabi. I can't say I would recommend the book. Rather, I'm only here to extract the useful and throw away the rest. And the main thing I find useful is cross-referencing some of his insights and experiences with people like Meister Eckhart, who popped into history a little bit later (he was born about 20 years after al-'Arabi died in the 13th century).

Is it possible that those two had a common Source? Yes, I believe so, but nothing "exterior." Rather, it seems to me that they were orbiting around the same Attractor, and therefore seeing and experiencing some of the same things. You could say they were battling for the same Narrative.

I'm not going to pretend to be any kind of expert, nor to give any kind of tidy summary (which is impossible anyway, since he wrote some "700 books, treatises, and collections of poetry." You could say that he stood knee-deep in O with the firehose on full blast -- a ceaseless torrent of mystical insights. And as is always true in such cases, it is left to us to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Shifting gears rather violently for the moment, Churchill was the same way, at least in regard to his writing. The spigot was always on. Lately I've been trying to figure out the peculiar power of his words. What's his trick? Whence the magic?

Of note, one of the reasons he was ignored in the 1930s is that everyone acknowledged his "genius." It was his judgment they questioned. In short, it was widely believed that his prudence was not equal to his intelligence, such that there was an awful lot of indiscriminate balderdash tossed into the undeniably brilliant mix.

Which is sometimes true. You might say, the bigger the genius, the greater the error. One of his defenders said "Winston was often right. But when he was wrong -- well, my God.”

I think the "problem," if it can be defined as such, was his prodigious imagination. Now, as we've been discussing lately, reality takes place in the imaginal space between world and soul. Imaginal is not the same as imagination, but they certainly share similarities. Which we will no doubt get to as we proceed, because this is one of al-'Arabi's (and Henry Corbin's) central ideas.

This unruly post just refuses to settle down!

Let me begin with some highlighted passages from Chittick's introduction:

"Many important thinkers have concluded that the West never should have abandoned certain teachings about reality which it shared with the East.... In putting complete faith in reason, the West forgot that imagination opens up the soul to certain possibilities of perceiving and understanding not available to the rational mind."

Analysis: true. I entered western Christianity via the eastern door, and found there everything I had been looking for in yoga, only in a different garb, AKA veil.

At any rate, "Once we lose sight of the imaginal nature of certain realities, the true import of a great body of mythic and religious teachings slips from our grasp."

Speaking of which, in my ongoing effort to understand the Churchill magic, I'm reading his sprawling History of the English Speaking Peoples. In it he discusses the legendary Arthur, who may be imaginary but is none the less real for being so: he "takes us out of the mist of dimly remembered history into the daylight of romance." There he "looms, large, uncertain, dim but glittering," such that "around his name and deeds shine all that romance and poetry can bestow."

Not to push the envelope too far, but what was Churchill but a modern-day incarnation of this same mythic and quintessentially British archetype? Certainly he was the only man in 1940 capable of pulling the imaginal sword from the stone of modern sophistication, and wielding it to rouse dreams and visions of light conquering darkness and good vanquishing evil.

Well, we're out of time. To be continued...

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!