The Latest in Boredom Extension

I overslept for some reason. However, I awakened with a post on my mind. Or at least I thought it was a post. As it stands, it's more of an idea for a post, with insufficient time to flesh it out. If only I had endless time!

Instapundit often links to articles on the latest ideas in life extension. I'll admit to having dabbled in it since my early 20s, ingesting various antioxidants, phytochemicals, anti-inflammatories, microbrews, and other magic potions.

Do they work? Well, it's difficult to conduct a randomized double-blind controlled study on oneself. But I mainly do it for reasons of general health and hypochondria, not because I want to live forever. Also, I try to do anything that can give the old melon a boost, even if it's at the margins.

It seems to me that the desire to live forever must relate to the decline in religiosity. There is a widespread belief among atheists that people are religious mainly because they fear death -- or in other words, it's just a secret desire to live forever, or life extension by another name.

I can say without hesitation that if I were given the choice of a greatly extended life without God, or of the usual four score and change with God, I would choose the latter. Why?

Because a life without God, no matter how long, would be intolerably boring. Nothing would mean anything. The life of the spirit, which is the most interesting adventure there is, would be off the table. Therefore, what would I do with myself?

By the way, this presupposes that if I were an atheist I would be an honest one. I would understand the implications, which, if seriously entertained, lead to futility, despair, and pointlessness. Basically you are reduced to a life of raw sensation. Anything above that would just be pretending. But that gets boring rather quickly.

Interesting how that works. I'm a big baseball fan, and the Dodgers are having their best year since I've been alive. In fact, they're doing so well that it's almost... boring, something I would never say if they were in second place, or a few games out of a wild card spot. Similarly, pursuing terrestrial immortality can be interesting. But having it? Boring!

What would I do with my mind if I couldn't use it to explore the wild Godhead? I have a painfully low threshold of boredom. Frankly, almost everything bores me. And yet, I am almost never bored. But that is thanks to God. So, if there were no God, I would die of boredom. In that context, life extension would only rub it in.

Put it this way: because God exists, I'm getting a kick out of this terrestrial life. But for the same reason, I wouldn't want it to go on forever. Conversely, if God didn't exist, life might not go on forever, but it would sure feel that way.

A Preposterous Cosmos and How it Gets that Way

It seems to me that one cannot begin to understand the nature of reality without recourse to the principles of horizontality and verticality. These two are very much like the Yin and Yang of the Tao, and just as primordial. In truth, every phenomenon partakes of both.

Are they iterations of something else, or are they truly fundamental? Just off the top of my head I would say that verticality implies absoluteness, interiority, form, and essence; while horizontality goes to infinitude, exteriority, (prime) matter, and accident.

Other ways of expressing this complementarity are male/female, wave/particle, heaven/earth, purusha/prakriti, noumena/phenomena, brahman/maya, semantics/syntax, container/contained, etc. I'll bet you a dollar you can't even think without partaking of both.

And always, if we attempt to understand the world with only half the complementarity, its partner will inevitably slip in through the back door. It's like the old gag that you can throw nature out with a pitchfork, but she always returns, probably in a bad mood and looking for vengeance.

Speaking of which, what is the left but an organized movement with degrees instead of pitchforks, trying vainly to remake nature into what it isn't? Redefining marriage, for example, is throwing out nature with a blow torch.

As we've mentioned before, what we call "science" is the method par excellence for investigating the horizontal. But to imagine this can be accomplished in the absence of verticality is preposterous.

Which I mean literally, for pre-posterous means to reverse the order of pre and post -- in this case elevating the material world above the mind that comprehends it. Only a human being can engage in science, but a human being cannot be reduced to the horizontal categories of the scientific method.

Conversely, religion as such is all about verticality. But if it forgets horizontality, then it too becomes idiotic. You will notice that dopey religion is often a reaction to dopey science. For example, the fundamentalism of the early 20th century was a reaction to equally kooky scientific ideas, e.g., that Darwinism is adequate to explain man.

But this descent into metaphysical dopiness should not be unexpected, because man is man, irrespective of whether or not this man calls himself religious or irreligious. Indeed, if I were irreligious I would nevertheless call myself religious just to avoid grotesque metaphysical errors. I would search out my own covert religiosity, because I would know it's hiding in there somewhere.

Yesterday I was listening to Rush on the way to work, and he brought up the case of Stephen Hawking, who ought to get some kind of prize for simultaneously being the Smartest Man in the Universe and the Dumbest Ass in Creation. Here is what he was referring to:

On his 75th birthday, renowned physicist Stephen Hawking told the BBC that President Donald Trump’s climate policies could permanently destroy the Earth’s livable climate. “We are close to the tipping point where global warming becomes irreversible,” explained the world’s most famous scientist. “Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250º” C (482°F).

I can't even. Or won't, at any rate. I'm almost out of time. Only three years left to blog before Trump burns us all alive.

The other day I read something equally foolish from Einstein, who said a lot of foolish things. Outside physics -- and sometimes even inside -- Einstein was clearly no Einstein.

Anyway, all of the above was provoked by a brief passage by Schuon. I began discussing it a couple of posts back, but here it is in toto:

There is, in man, a subjectivity or a consciousness that is made for looking outwards and for perceiving the world, whether this world is earthly or heavenly; and there is also a consciousness that is made for looking inwards, in the direction of the Absolute or Self, whether this vision be relatively separative or unitive.

In other words, and more to our point about verticality and horizontality, "there is in man a consciousness that is descending and obeys the creative intention of God, and another that is ascending and obeys the divine intention that saves or liberates."

I don't know of a more concise way to symbolize these two directions than (↑) and (↓).

In short, if there is a vertical dimension in the cosmos, then there is an up and a down. Because of this, we can be closer or more distant from truth, from beauty, and from virtue. Furthermore, verticality is precisely what entails the category of obligation or duty or loyalty.

For if there is truth, then are we not obligated to know and conform ourselves to it? If there is beauty, oughtn't we do our best to create and celebrate it? And if we have the gift of distinguishing between good and evil, don't we owe our allegiance to the former?

Out of time. To be continued...

The Miracle of Slack

Today of course is "Independence Day." From what? From Great Britain? Yes and no, in that the main purpose of our little rebellion was to restore the supernaturally natural rights to which an English gentleman is entitled.

I have a pile of heretofore unblogged books that touch on this subject, including The Political Theory of the American Founding: Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom; Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate's Defense of Liberal Democracy; and After the Natural Law: How the Classical Worldview Supports Our Modern Moral and Political Views. Perhaps I can weave them into something appropriate for the occasion.

Independence is another word for freedom, or at least it presupposes free will.  Our freedom is prior to the state, such that "no one is entitled to take that freedom away," and "everyone is rightfully free of the violence of others."  "Liberty," writes West, "means being left alone, not being coerced by others."

I was thinking about this yesterday, as I had an unusually enslackened day. I was completely caught up with my work, while wife and child are on a parkouring adventure in Utah. As such, the day spread out before me like a vast and trackless mindscape, and I found myself slipping into eternity or something. A bit of satchitananda, AKA BeingConsciousnessBliss: Advanced Leisure Studies.

As it so happens, I'm reading a book that touches on this very subject, a biography of the mystical pioneer Evelyn Underhill, who wrote on the subject way before it became fashion- and profitable. And although there are significant differences, I was struck by the many ways in which her personality is similar to mine.

"Underhill's life was 'quiet'; it was not marked by adventurous acts and deeds." However, recall what was said yesterday about the "recovery of self" (and with it, God) being a kind of "vertical adventure."

Likewise, for Underhill "The adventure here is the inner one, the reconciliation of mind and heart, the development of individual consciousness and its ultimate transcendence." She regarded "the mystic life as the life of adventure with the Real."

I know of no more compelling adventure than extreme seeking. At least it's never boring.

By the way, there is a good line in the book by Nicholas of Cusa that goes precisely to what I mean by orthoparadox: "I have learnt that the place wherein Thou art found unveiled is girt round with the coincidence of contradictories; and this is the wall of Paradise wherein Thou dost abide." So, paradise is encircled by paradox.

For Underhill, perception of spiritual reality is more often "caught" than "taught." We "most easily attain it by sympathetic contagion." This is exactly how it is for me: two authors may discuss the same subject, but one is contagious while the other is... antiseptic.

I touched on this in the book, using the symbol (≈) to stand for the phenomenon. Certainly I always get lots of (≈) from Schuon, which suggests to me that he is a genuine man of spiritual stature (Although "suggests" is not quite right, being that it's an experience and not a thought.) Of course, I do my level best to transmit whatever little bit of (≈) I can to my readers.

Obviously it's not something I have control over, since it can only come through me, not from me. And I can never know if it has happened unless someone is a Witness and lets me know. In any event, I really want people to have an experience with my writing. I've never wanted it to be just about the transmission of information. I'm certainly no scholar, but not an artist either. Apparently there is no name for the practice. Although I suppose verticalisthenics and mental gymgnostics come close.

But Underhill was up to the same thing. She claimed that "she was not primarily a writer, that she was something more and something less." Her lifework (one word) "was a medium through which spiritual reality was revealed; and if that could be shown to be helpful to others, she wanted it made available." Me too! I just want to help. If it's not helpful, I certainly don't want to push it on anyone. As I've said many times, I never recommend the blog. I only offer it.

Underhill spoke "in ordinary language to ordinary people about the deepest human realities." Writing for her was only the means to an end, the end being "the development of a consciousness of the transcendent, the eternal, the absolute, the infinite."

When I speak of dwelling on the threshold of the transdimensional doorway and trying to peer over the subjective horizon, I mean something similar to Underhill: "Like a plain," her life "extends in all directions joining sky and mountains and the very edges of the land itself. It is open terrain across which the eye travels toward the outer boundary of vision where the visible and invisible meet."

And guess what? "The life of Evelyn Undersell points to this outer boundary and seeks to know what lies beyond. It is here at the edge that she camped out and took up her work, attesting that just beyond the seen lies the infinite..." It is "a landscape so rich and great that no one person can explore, apprehend, still less live in all of it." It is a kind of translation of O, which is what makes it similar to art.

Yesterday we spoke of the two worlds -- interior and exterior -- which are somehow One. That One is just over the walls of paradise, but we nevertheless get glimpses of unity all the time. Underhill "always looked for this unity of matter and spirit," which is both "beyond, but embodied in the ordinary."

Speaking of liberty, does religion detract from it? Hardly. It provides a map of vertical space, without which one is reduced to stumbling and bumbling around aumlessly. Just so, "One does not lose one's intellectual liberty when one learns mathematics, though one certainly loses the liberty of doing sums wrong, or doing them by laborious methods."

The trick is to discern, and live from, the Center: problem is, we spend "so much time in running round the arc" while taking "the center for granted."But "it is at the center that the real life of the spirit aims first; thence flowing out to the circumference..." -- a point we've been belaboring for several weeks now.

A fine Indepence Day post this turned out to be! Is there a way to rescue it? Let's just say that real freedom must be lived from, or in light of, the Center, or you're just fooling yoursoph.

Is There Anyone In Here?

I'm not sure how many people are reading the blog anymore, but it seems like Not Many.  Therefore, if the writing seems more introspective, it is probably because I'm mostly talking to myself, just drilling down to see what I can find.... Of course, you are welcome to listen in.

It is difficult to conceive of something more miraculous than the emergence of consciousness in a theretofore non-conscious cosmos -- unless it's the emergence of life in a theretofore lifeless cosmos (we don't say "dead" because death presupposes life).  Every subsequent miracle -- and prior, come to think of it -- is an iteration or fractal of these two, of... what to call it... "living truth."

Wait -- I saw that.  You just conflated consciousness with truth.  Why?

Because consciousness is proportioned to the truth which is its sufficient reason.  In other words, even if we can never say what consciousness "is," we can know what it is for: to know truth. Therefore it must be a kind of prolongation of truth from the center to the periphery;  you could call it the Spark of Divinity at our core -- our terrestrial pilot light.

On the one hand, we possess "a subjectivity or a consciousness that is made for looking outwards and for perceiving the world, whether this world be earthly or heavenly" (Schuon).  At the very least we have consciousness of ponderable empirical realities and of invisible rational ones (e.g., the worlds of logic and mathematics which transcend the senses).

However, note that we can never have "raw" empirical knowledge. Indeed, that is an oxymoron, for sensation is not knowledge.  Rather, we have sensations that are spontaneously "taken up" into knowledge, usually in a completely non-conscious way.   Our five senses work together harmoniously to present us with a World Sensorium, an image of the totality.

That's weird enough.  Weirder still is that "there is also in man a consciousness that is made for looking inwards, in the direction of the Absolute or the Self."  First of all:  how can this be?  A metaphysical Darwinian, for example, regards consciousness as an adaptation to the exterior world -- a world that is obviously prior to the consciousness that somehow emerges out of it.

But Schuon implies that there is also an interior world that is prior to consciousness, and to which we must adapt.  The main point is that consciousness is not just a kind of "empty space."  It is a space, to be sure, but it is an ordered space.  In some ways this order is explicit -- for example, vis-a-vis gender (male or female) -- while in other ways it is implicit.

Regarding the implicit (or implicate) order of the mind, much of this cannot be grasped outside the temporal dimension.  In other words, there are permanent elements in the psyche that nevertheless require time in order to unfold.   Indeed, Raccoon doctrine insists upon the orthoparadox that the ultimate purpose of Life is to become who you are.   This is simultaneously a discovery and recovery, the former going to a vertical excavation, the latter to a horizontal adventure.

So, life is a kind of archaeological dig.  Except this dig extends up and down, inside and out.  You could say its image looks like this: (†).   Except in time:  it is dynamic, not static;  in four (at least) dimensions, not just two or three.

These two worlds -- the interior and exterior -- are quite incommensurable, in the sense that there is no way -- Darwinism notwithstanding -- to derive the former from the latter.   Darwinism can only presuppose a consciousness it can never explain.  Even so, "there is a region between" the two worlds "in which they overlap and give rise to a single subjectivity, and to an existential equilibrium between the two diverging consciousnesses."

In other words, despite the radically incommensurate nature of these two worlds, we somehow experience a unity, at least much of the time. But there are problems, both personal and collective.

For example, Modern Man can't figure out how these two worlds could be unified, so he bifurcates them, AKA dualism.  But this doesn't solve anything, for reality is nevertheless one, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

But that is just an example of a more pernicious tendency on the part of man to superimpose his own fantasies upon reality, AKA ideology, AKA Genesis 3 All Over Again.

Let's see how Schuon gets  us out of this existential corner.  "[T]he spiritually realized man can see God in things, and also the principial prototypes of things in God. The psychic and mental consciousness perceives appearances; intellectual or heart consciousness perceives the Essence."

In other words:  to "see God in things" is to see the interior in the exterior, while to "see things in God" is to see the exterior in the interior.   In ether worlds, there exist archetypes and principles that are as it were "two way" phenomena that simultaneously illuminate the inside and out, upside and down.

I'm probably still not explaining it adequately -- whatever "it" is supposed to mean.  Put it this way:  "the purpose of human subjectivity," writes Schuon, is "to be, in relativity, a mirror of the Absolute, at the same time as being a prolongation of Divine Subjectivity."

You could say that the "purpose" of the Son is to be a mirror and prolongation of the Father.  Therefore, the purpose of the Incarnation is to allow us to participate in this circular prolongation-and-mirroring. Which is to say, "To manifest the Absolute in contingency, the Infinite in the finite, Perfection in imperfection" (ibid.).

Not to mention Eternity in time, objectivity in subjectivity, Spirit in matter, Light in darkness...

God has a Bridge to Sell Give Away

"To say man," writes Schuon," is to say form; man is the bridge between form and essence, or between 'flesh' and 'spirit.'"

I was explaining this concept to the young master yesterday -- that human beings, without anyone ever teaching them how, can spontaneously discern the treeness of trees, the dogginess of dogs, and the humanness of humans. Conversely, animals are nominalists: there is only this tree or that tree, but no concept or essence of treeness.

Along these same lines, we've had a number of recent discussions on What the Dog is Thinking. In truth, we can have no idea what it is like to be a dog, since we would have to remove language and conceptualization from the equation. A human can no more "think like a dog" than he can live like a tree. If we did so, we would no longer be men.

Without question, language is what sets us apart from the rest of creation. As with our spontaneous ability to discern essences, no one has to teach us how to speak. Rather, it happens as naturally as instinct does in lower animals.

In the case of animals, instinct is always a limiting principle, e.g., eat this and not that. But language for man is a liberating principle; or rather, it deploys limits in order to open out to the limitless.

There are three possibilities with language: first, it could be a purely horizontal phenomenon, simply assigning arbitrary symbols to concrete realities. Or, it could be reducible to something lower, as in how the ultimate purpose of birdsong is usually related to mating. Or again, it could open out to something higher, as in how, say, poetry uses words to express the wordless.

In reality it accomplishes each of these, for reasons outlined by Schuon above: man is the vertical bridge between form/flesh and essence/spirit. Language is a reflection of the universal Logos, and it seems to me that the Logos is this bridge, precisely. Thus, to the extent that man participates in the Logos, he makes himself the bridge between worlds.

Recall our recent posts on radial vs. circumferential knowledge. If you don't recall them, just imagine a circle with radii extending outward from the central point. Each radii is a celestial memo that carries the Logos with it, from the center to the periphery.

Now, everything is just such a radii, on pain of non-existence. A thing that exists completely apart from the center would be utterly unintelligible and absurd. For our purposes it might as well not exist.

And yet, this is the counter-philosophy of nominalism: that everything is a unique instance with no essential principle. Another name for this misosophy is "logical atomism," which denies wholeness and centrality. It retains a kind of totality, but this totality is just an agglomeration rather than synthesis.

Let's consider the words of our esteemed St. John the Apostle. Not through the eyes of faith, but, just for kicks, through the third eye of pure metaphysics. Wasting no time, he puts forth several essential principles at the outset:

1. In the beginning is the Word (a translation of the Greek Logos).

2. The Logos is with God.

3. The Logos is God.

4. All things are created through the Logos.

5. The Logos is a Him, therefore a person.

6. In the Logos is life, and this life is a kind of light for men.

7. But men have a tendency not to comprehend any of this.

How to make sense of this perfect nonsense? To jump ahead a bit, what if the Logos-Center, instead of merely radiating toward the periphery via centrifugal Logoi, actually incarnates at the periphery? In other words, what if, instead of mere prolongations of the Logos, we can have the real thing, right here, dwelling among us?

Analogously, this would be like the sun itself traveling to our planet instead of just showering us with its rays -- or maybe like Sun Ra somehow visiting planet earth.

It goes without saying that no mere animal can comprehend any of this. Rather, only a logocentric being can -- one who not only possesses language but understands where language comes from.

In effect, Genesis 1 speaks of the prolongation of the Logos to the periphery, AKA the Creation (without which -- or whom -- nothing is created). But John simultaneously parallels this passage while making the more startling claim that the creative principle decides to visit his creation.

I'll just conclude with a passage by Schuon, and hope it Wraps Things Up:

[H]uman subjectivity is such an amazing miracle that it is enough to prove both God and the immortality of the soul; God, because this extraordinarily profound and comprehensive subjectivity can be explained only by an absolute which substantially prefigures it and which projects it into accidence; and immortality, because the incomparable quality of this subjectivity has no sufficient reason, no reason proportionate to its excellence, within the narrow and ephemeral framework of this earthly life.

If it is merely to live like ants [or leftists -- G.B.], men have no need of their intellectual and moral possibilities, which amounts to saying that they have no need to be men; the very existence of man would then be a luxury as inexplicable as it is useless. Not to understand this is the most monstrous as well as most mysterious of blindnesses.

Mysterious perhaps, but ineveateapple. For the spirit shines in the flesh, but the fleshbound don't see it. For them, God has a bridge to sell. No, it's worse: He can't even give the bridge away!

To the Unknown-Known, and Beyond!

I suppose we could say that the materialist (or any ideologue) naively reduces the world to the known-known, or conflates what is known with what is. For the flatlander, what is obvious obscures what is subtle, thus rendering him oblivious to the great unKnown that both surrounds and transcends him.

A real scientist -- e.g., not the AGW kind -- always bears in mind the known-unknown. In other words, he understands that science is never -- and can never be -- complete, but is surrounded on all sides by Mystery. (This Mystery is up, down, inside, and out.)

From Gödel we learn that any system of thought contains assumptions unprovable by the system, while from Hayek we learn that in a complex system such as the economy, information is widely dispersed and far beyond the scope of any single actor.

From psychology -- my kind, anyway -- we also appreciate a mysterious realm of the unknown-known, AKA The Unthought Known. I won't spend a great deal of time on this one... although maybe I should, because it also has profound religious implications, going to objects that awaken our vertical recollection.

For example, a few weeks ago we mentioned the experience of Kallistos Ware when he first entered an Orthodox Church. On the one hand it was completely unfamiliar, and yet, there was a shock of recognition. BANG!: the unknown (but somehow) known. Specifically, the "bang" occurs when the implicitly known becomes explicitly so.

According to Frank, something similar happens between two human beings: How little we know / How much to discover / What chemical forces flow / From lover to lover.

Then there is the biggest realm of them all, the unknown-unknown. That would be God -- or ultimate reality -- as he is in himself. Whereas cataphatic theology speaks to the unknown-known God, apophatic theology (un)speaks to the unknown-unknown God.

As it so happens, I'm reading what amounts to a little primer in apophatic theology by Henri LeSaux (Swami Abhishiktananda), called Prayer. There are better examples, but this one will do fine for our purposes. Here he speaks of the distinction between unknown-knowns and the unknown-unknown:

[M]ental images and ideas of God which we form when we study or meditate.... are signs pointing to the Reality they represent, but they are forever unable to comprehend that reality, which stands in its aloneness far beyond the reach of any conception or imagination of man.

Furthermore, to reduce the unknown-unknown to the unknown-known is to engage in idolatry: "The day in which we attempt to identify them with with the Reality they become simply idols." A proper approach to the unknown-known "tends always towards the Beyond where alone Reality abides in the unfathomable silence of the Godhead."

Orthoparadox: on the one hand, "there is nothing in the universe, or indeed in the whole of creation which is not itself a revelation, a manifestation of God." On the other, "He is beyond every form.... Nothing 'comprehends' him, but he shines through everything and makes himself known in everything." Truly, O is the great Nothing-Everything, or as Meister Eckhart expresses it,

"There is something in the soul which is above the soul, divine, simple, an absolute nothing; rather unnamed than named; unknown than known," yada yada. Only like can know like, and God is like nothing.

These two attitudes or stances -- the cataphatic and apophatic -- are complementary and not antagonistic. But as in all complementarities one is prior, in this case, apophasis, for

If God is present in the tiniest portion of what manifests him, he is at the same time beyond anything in which he manifests his presence, beyond the whole universe and beyond every part of it, beyond everything mental and beyond everything material.

Again, ideologies such as rationalism completely forget what they don't (and can't) know. As Schuon puts it,

The danger of pride intervenes with rationalism, that is, with the prejudice of relying on a simply reasoning intelligence, and even in defiance of indispensable data, the absence of which is not even suspected.

One Lie, Infinite Errors

Another brief blast, as I'm pressed for time...

As discussed in the previous post, if ultimate reality encompasses both immanence and transcendence, then man is perpetually tempted to exclude one in favor of the other. However, he doesn't really "exclude"; rather, covertly lends to one the properties of the other, even while denying those properties up front.

This is similar to how the scientific materialist tries to reduce subject to object, but in so doing inevitably contaminates the latter with properties of the former. But a subject attempting to cram himself back into objecthood is about the stupidest thing imaginable: it is literally like proclaiming "I am as dumb as a box of rocks."

No, you are dumber, because rocks cannot make false metaphysical pronouncements. "Systematic reductions to single terms," says the Aphorist, "fabricate likenesses of intelligibility that seduce the ignorant." But especially the tenured

Now, pantheism and idolatry are "sins against transcendence," so to speak. Both attempt to confine God to this plane; they mistakenly conclude that God is the world just because the world is (ultimately) God.

Which is why the Bible is so explicit on the subject. Right out of the gate it says that God creates the heavens and the earth, the celestial and terrestrial, transcendence and immanence. You might say that God transcends the dynamic complementarity of transcendence <--> immanence.

Why is this important? Because God is simply another word for Reality, and human happiness depends upon being in conformity with it.

Note that one popular alternative to being in conformity with reality is to rebel against it. But this rebellion is simply the tribute unreality pays to Reality, or Ø to O. Human ideologies are maps, except they are like those premodern maps that are more imagination than reality. Use them to navigate the sea and you will end up lost or shipwrecked.

The left is this rebellion writ large. It is always reactionary, in that the Lie us dependent upon the Truth to which it is a reaction.

Conversely, truth does not require the lie, just as light does not require the shadow (even if it makes shadows inevitable on this plane). One could cite thousands of examples, but consider CNN: their peddling of the Russia conspiracy is founded upon the realization that it is false.

Cue the Aphorist to bail me out:

The lie is the muse of revolutions: it inspires their programs, their proclamations, their panegyrics. But it forgets to gag the witnesses. The Resistance is on the verge of devouring itself, now that the Russia investigation is moving on to Obama, Lynch, and Clinton.

Revolutions have as their function the destruction of the illusions that cause them. Which is why Obama's function was the destruction of the infantile hopenchange that caused him.

This one is apropos: In society just as in the soul, when hierarchies abdicate the appetites rule. Usurpation, by one of the terms in the system, of the liberties of the others.

Thus, for example, when transcendence is reduced to immanence, then man is reduced to matter and the genocide is on. Which is why The leftist screams that freedom is dying when when his victims refuse to finance their own murders. White Christian males in particular must vote for their own extinction or be taken out by other means.

The egalitarian passion is a perversion of the critical sense: atrophy of the faculty of discrimination. For them, discrimination is the original sin, while for us it is the original act of consciousness, i.e., to discriminate between immanence and transcendence, appearance and reality, existence and essence. (Note that the creation begins with God's own discrimination between heaven and earth, transcendence and immanence; we would do well to imitate him.)

The most reliable conservative is the lapsed leftist, "the man who has known the reality of the problems and has discovered the falseness of the solutions."

Now, man is made to know Truth, but not without certain qualifications. One must be a servant of Truth, never presume to be its master. As Schuon puts it, "whoever should wish to use his intelligence without the risk of erring must possess the virtue of humility." Specifically, "he must be aware of his limitations" and "know that intelligence does not come from himself."

But in this context, humility is just another word for objectivity toward oneself. To be objective is to know we are creature and not creator.

Which goes to the title of the previous post, in that the flatland materialist living in a one-story cosmos pretends to objectivity even while committing the greatest error possible, which is to elevate one's own subjectivity to godhood. You can't get more wrong than that, although the ways of expressing this wrongness are without number.

Adam's Mistake: Having Your Cake and Going Hungry

Just a short post because Time.

As mentioned in the previous post, the world is a tapestry of radial and circumferential lines emanating from, to, and around the Center; you might say they are the warp and weft of the primordial area rug that pulls the cosmos together. And again, do not visualize a flat and static surface, but rather, a spheroidal and dynamic one.

For example, it is critical to understand that the radial lines between the center and periphery aren't just one-way. Rather, they are always circular, which is precisely why they simultaneously veil and reveal God.

I wonder if this is why, as Einstein discovered, the spacetime of the universe itself is spheroidal -- i.e., curved -- such that if you travel in a straight line forever, you will eventually return to where you started? Same with God: wherever He goes, there He is.

We could also say that the world is woven of appearances and reality, or, as they say in the East, Maya and Brahman; and in the final unalysis, Maya is not other than Brahman.

How can this be? Well, if the world were only circumferential, it couldn't be. Rather, like lower animals and Kantians, we would be confined to a particular ring around the center, and that would be that.

But in the case of radial -- i.e., vertical -- knowledge, it is always an appearance of reality, precisely. Conversely, with circumferential knowledge there are only appearances of appearances of appearances, AKA Turtles All the Way Down.

Which is why modern "philosophy" -- which isn't really deserving of the name -- is such a hot mess. For it is literally the case that it wants to have its cake and go hungry at the same time.

By which I mean that it wishes to pretend that reality doesn't exist and that only science can know it. In other words, it tries to situate absolute truth within an absolute relativity, which is obviously quite impossible.

There is nothing wrong with relativity. Indeed, without it we wouldn't even be here! Just don't elevate it to the absolute, that's all we're saying.

Why does someone elevate the relative to the absolute? Passion and pride, for starters. For reasons lost in the mysts of timelessness, Genesis 3 is inscribed in our bones. It seems we just can't stop ourselves from idolatry, hence the second commandment. It's so clear, and yet, humans still rebel.

Schematically, the first and second commandments can be expressed thus;

1. O = O.

2. Ø ≠ O.

And yet, although Ø ≠ O, it is not the case that O ≠ Ø. In other words, because God is both transcendent and immanent, we say that God is not the world, and yet, the world is not other than God.

To say that "the world is God" is the error (whether implicit or explicit) of pantheism, atheism, and scientism, while to say that "the world is not God" is the error of idealism, manichaeism, and Gnosticism. The former are monistic, the latter dualistic. The secret, of course, lies in God's own trialism.

Now, the two distinguishing principles of Christianity are Trinity and Incarnation (with Resurrection following in tow). Note how Incarnation in particular deals with all the issues raised above. As the Fathers say, "God becomes man that man might become God." And this can only happen in a radial cosmos. So we got that going for us.

Images and Artholes of God

A few days ago we spoke of the two kinds of knowledge and how they relate to God. In one it is as if God is at the center of a series of concentric circles:

In the second, God is still at the center, only now related to the periphery by an infinite number of radii:

To the right is an image that combines both:

To review, the first image depicts discontinuity between knower and known, and ultimately between man and God.

Indeed, if we were a Kantian, there would be a black hole at the center, about which we can know nothing. That would be the famous noumena (or better, noumenon). Kant thought he was saving religion by placing this unknowable black hole at the center of everything. Thanks for nothing! No, literally.

The second image goes to knowledge that is continuous with what it knows. In fact, it goes to one of our foundational principles: that any truth is a function or reflection of the one Truth. It shows in a straightforward manner how "all truth leads to God," being that any conceivable radius leads both from and to the center.

The third image suggests that the world is a tapestry of circles and radii. Which it is. You could even say that the left cerebral hemisphere knows the circles, while the right knows the radii. (I would only add that the image should be spherical and dynamic instead of flat and static.)

Which is also why all left-brained knowledge is ultimately circular. It is necessarily exterior, self-enclosed, and tautologous. Gödel's theorems are merely a formal way of expressing this.

Ultimately, if you confine yourself to circular knowledge, you cannot say how you can actually know anything at all. Rather, you are just chasing your tail around the noumenal center.

Mysticism involves radial knowledge par excellence. The whole point of mystical experience is that it is one with what it knows. But if the real world is depicted in image #3, this means that everyone is a mystic and cannot help being so.

This explains a lot.

Please note that I didn't say they were good or even adequate mystics.

Who are my favorite mystics? Let's see. Meister Eckhart. Henri Le Saux (AKA Swami Abhishiktanada). I would say Schuon, but I wouldn't want to reduce him to one category.

Come to think of it, although Michael Polanyi was not a mystic per se, he essentially demonstrated how all circumferential knowledge is actually radial knowledge. His theory of personal knowledge gives us a "post-critical" philosophy that shows the way out of scientistic tautology.

Just yesterday I was thumbing through a few books by Abhishiktanda, and then ordered one I haven't read before, Prayer. It had been out of print for awhile, but has been republished. I'm pretty sure that for Abhishiktananda, the purpose of prayer is to hop on board one of the radii leading back to God.

There is an excellent biography of Abhishiktananda called A Christian Pilgrim in India. I notice that some guy named Ted gives it his highest endorsement while namedropping a prominent Raccoon.

Oldmeadow cites some passages from Prayer that precisely describe what we mean by radial knowledge: "Truly speaking, there is no outside and no inside, no without and no within in the mystery of God and in the divine Presence." It is because God is beyond form that "he can reveal and manifest himself under any form."

Oldmeadow quotes another perennialist, Jean Bies, who makes an orthoparadoxical statement that describes image #3 above: "Every form shows Him because He is in every form. None show Him because he is beyond forms." Perfect nonsense!

This is all prelude to discussion of another distinct kind of knowledge we call faith. As Schuon explains, "Faith amounts to an objectivized heart knowledge" which helps "awaken in us as far as possible the remembrance of innate truths."

Note the (ortho)paradox: "objectivized" implies circumferential, as in image #1. But "the remembrance of innate truths" is radial, as in image #2. Therefore, faith is a gift from God -- from the center to the periphery -- that allows the periphery to know the center in an "indirectly direct" way.

Was that clear? It is to me. Similarly, what is sacred art -- AKA art -- but the "recollection" of the center in the periphery? Or, it is like a hole in the circumference leading back to the center. Light from the center is radiated through the arthole.

Now, when man falls, he falls from the center to the periphery. Or, one might say that he goes from spontaneous radial knowledge of God to self-enclosed absurcular knowledge of the (or a) circumference.

Which goes to the purpose of revelation, which is a memo from Celestial Central that allows us to get right with the radius: it shows from the inside-out (or upside down) what we need to know from the outside-in (or downside-up).

That's about it for today. Extra duties, since the wife is out of town visiting her mother.

On Speaking Truth to Power, Light to Shadows, and Principles to Principalities

Another slow news day. Or rather, "eternals day." Slow but nevertheless foundational. Maybe we can pick up the pace tomorrow...

This morning I had an original thought: the truth sets us free.

I know. No, you can't buy some pot from me.

First of all, free from what? Second, toward what? Analogously, imagine you are trapped inside four walls with no exit. I install a door. You're free! But you still have to open the door and walk out, which points to the link between truth and will: in order to be free, you can't just know the truth but must do the truth. Truth is to freedom as knowledge is to will.

In the previous post we mentioned Kant, who effectively maintains (whether he knows it or not) that freedom isn't possible since truth is inaccessible to us. The "four walls" in the paragraph above are the forms of our sensibility (phenomena), beyond which is the noumenon we cannot know. In short, there may or may not be a reality, but there is certainly no door that leads to it.

Note the crude trick that has kept philosophers in the dark ever since -- as if to say: "man cannot know truth, and that's the truth."

Ironically, the Critique of Pure Reason was published in 1776. One can only thank God that our founders hadn't read it, and wouldn't have taken it seriously anyway. For Kant there can be no self-evident truths about ultimate reality except that we can't know it. Whatever. Go found your own nation based on the principle of unreality.

Better yet, just wait another century and progressives will have begun eating away at our founding truths. In The Political Theory of the American Founding, West writes that the founders had the audacity to claim knowledge of "living principles based on timeless truth." The nerve! Quick, find me a safe space from these fascists who presume to know ultimate truth and want to lord it over me!

Going back to our analogy in paragraph three, it is like saying: how dare you claim there is a doorway out of my little prison! Don't even think about installing one, or I'll sue!

Well, the door is there and there's not a thing you can do about it. You might say that the role of government is to maintain and protect the door. The state cannot compel you to actually use it. Rather, you have the right to leave, but no one can force you to do so.

Really, it's a very old story. One of our founding myths is Genesis 3. Another is Plato's allegory of the cave. You have the right to stop being fascinated by the shadows on the cave walls and turn toward the light. But that requires an act of free will. The state will not compel you to leave your cave.

That was before the progressive left took over the educational establishment. The purpose of education used to be to help us leave the cave -- toward the Light of universals truths -- whereas now the purpose is to rivet the mind to the shadows while denying access to the Light that produces them. Mention the Light and you are guilty of violating the "separation between church and state."

Which is a pretext for the left to enforce the separation between appearances and reality, phenomena and noumena, truth and opinion. Which is to literally efface any distinction between freedom and slavery. Which is the whole point. For if you do not possess a priori rights that the first duty of the state is to protect, then the state can do anything to you.

"Most scholars," writes West, agree with uber-moonbat Supreme Court Justice William Brennan "that the founders ideas belong to a 'world that is dead and gone.'" But how can timeless and self-evident truths ever die or go anywhere? If their world is "dead and gone," it wasn't a natural death. Rather, murder. And -- "ironically"-- Brennan was one of the murderers.

The current academic fashion is that man cannot know timeless truths. Therefore, any idiot with a Ph.D. in political science knows that it was equally fashionable in late 19th century America to naively believe in such fancies as "truth" and "freedom." Now we know better that "there is absolutely no foundation for deciding what is right or wrong," even "for preferring democracy over Nazism."

As Richard Rorty libsplains, "there is nothing deep down inside us except what we have put there ourselves..., no standard of rationality that is not an appeal to such a criterion" (in West). We are sealed inside the Cave, with only competing narratives. And may the most powerful win.

Truly, the left is an organized cosmic inversion that speaks power to truth.

Doubting Doubt and Ironizing Irony

This post didn't get very far. Still, it's quite foundational. If you want to build a mansion, don't skimp on the foundation.

In the previous post we discussed the difference between cranio-psychic vs cardio-pneumatic knowledge. We didn't use those words, but we're using them now because they sound more sophisticated than head and heart.

Now, it is popular to believe that there is only one kind of knowledge, or at least only one that counts. In short, there is knowledge and there is opinion, the latter not really knowledge at all. Real knowledge resides in the head. How do we know this? Our heads told us so.

Which is a transparent case of special pleading. No one should be a judge in his own cause, and here we have the cranium judging the merits of its own content. Not fair! You will notice that the head has slipped a principle in through the side door while pretending it is simply being "objective." Clever bastard, that left brain!

There are actually two buried principles: first, that "I can prove what is true," and second, that "What I can prove is all that is true." The first simply assumes what it needs to prove, while the second assumes that other forms of knowledge aren't true. How convenient. It's like saying "only quantifiable claims are true." Okay, prove it!

In reality, the knowledge we cannot prove dwarfs the knowledge we can. None of us could get through a single day if we demanded proof of everything. A stranger is putting material into my mailbox. He says he's the mailman, but how do I know?

Here is how Schuon explains it:

"Kantians" -- a metonym for the modern mentality -- "will ask us to prove the existence of this [our cardio-pneumatic] way of knowing; and herein is the first error, namely that only what can be proved de facto is knowledge; the second error, which immediately follows the first, is that a reality that one cannot prove -- that is to say which one cannot make accessible to some artificial and ignorant mental [read: cranio-psychic] demand -- by reason of this apparent lack of proof, does and cannot exist."

Again, our cranio-psychic friends simply forget all about their assumptions, pretending to find them at the end instead of loading them in the beginning. Sneaky!

Recall the two images from last Friday: Kantian "head knowledge" is always of a circle around the center. This is because Kant limits man to phenomenal knowledge of his own categories. He can have no knowledge of the center, AKA the noumena. But why assume this? (In other words, why assume there is no "radial knowledge" through which we have direct access to the center?)

Indeed, isn't Kant's assumption really an unwarranted claim about ultimate reality? More to the point, how can one use the mind to place limits around the mind? Every boundary has territory on each side. Imagine building a wall between, say, Mexico and the US, but then pretending there's nothing south of the border.

Note the Kantian trick: pretending to have no access to ultimate reality, while affirming such knowledge at the same time. This is the precise trick pulled by my friend in the previous post. It is one of the the most popular head games of the head.

In the book Socrates Meets Kant, our premodern hero makes the founder of modern philosophy's head explode. "Suppose," asks Socrates, there is "a logical contradiction inherent in the demand for a rational justification of reason itself?"

In that case: D'oh!

All you have to do is critique the Critique and the whole thing tumbles to the ground. At which point Socrates innocently asks, "Which of us, then, is the more critical thinker, and which of us the more naïve?"

Now, if there's one thing a modern sophisticate hates being called, it is naïve. Recall my friend's anti-religious screed from the previous post. Imagine just chuckling in response to its childlike naïveté.

Imagine the same response to a Bill Maher, or Sam Harris, or even a scientific genius such as Bill Nye. But that is precisely the response they deserve. It's not intended to be snarky; rather, rich with Socratic irony.

Really, you have to out-irony the ironic, of which Socrates was the master. Truly, in our equally Athens- and Jerusalem-ized minds, he stands with Jesus as a fountainhead of Western Irony. I keep intending to delve into this important subject in a systematic way, but it will require more time than I have at the moment.

Here is Socrates again, toying with Kant: my dear Manny, have you ever wondered whether it might be self-contradictory to suggest "that reason can get outside itself and validate itself, that it can be both judge and accused prisoner, as it were?"

Indeed, "You called your book The Critique of Pure Reason, but I wonder whether you ever turned your formidable critical powers on yourself?"

In short, there are reasons for being skeptical of your cynicism. A suitable quip by the Aphorist comes to mind: Man’s moment of greatest lucidity is that in which he doubts his doubt.

Here are several more good ones. Each one smashes countless idols:

Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything. Scientism, Darwinism materialism, all felled with a single blow.

Reason is no substitute for faith, just as color is no substitute for sound. Habitually deploy your head when your heart should be in charge, and you'll be pretty miserable. Or maybe you've never met a woman.

We believe in many things in which we do not believe we believe. Every normal human believes in truth, free will, and objective morality, no matter what they say.

Faith is not assent to concepts, but a splendor that knocks us down. It is vertical recollection of an objective reality, more as we proceed.

Point, Center, Circumference, and Radii

"Heart knowledge," writes Schuon, "is one with what it knows." This is in contrast to merely mental knowledge, which is necessarily more or less distant from the object of knowledge.

The first mode is analogous to the radii extending from the center of a circle to the periphery, the second to a series of concentric circles around the same point. Note that the first is continuous, the second discontinuous.

Recall the old gag that God is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. In the visual given above, we might say that the central point is radiated and prolonged "everywhere" (this going to the immanence of God) whereas the concentric circles assure that the circumference is "nowhere" because they go one forever (this going to the transcendence of God from the perspective of any particular circle).

We could say the circles end in matter (the matter of physics), although this is not entirely true on the human plane, since man can continue falling right through matter and into various "negative" spaces. Or maybe you haven't seen CNN or MSNBC. Recall that Dante, for example, numbers nine dimensions of hell. Nor is it necessary to believe in an afterlife to perceive these infrahuman circles! Or maybe you've never been to college.

It seems to me that various disciplines address themselves to one of the concentric circles -- physics, biology, psychology, anthropology, etc. Now, a major error of anti-BoBs everywhere is to elevate one of these outer circles to the central point.

The worst offender, of course, is physics, which deals with the shell and pretends it is the kernel. Other disciplines fall in line, bowing to King Physics when push comes to shove. For example, the typical biologist will insist there is nothing in biology that cannot be reduced to physics. Which is just plain stupid.

Likewise, the same sort of gnosis-all denies free will because BIOLOGY, just as he denies religion because NEUROLOGY or DARWIN or whatever. Again, the point is that in each case, the periphery is elevated to the center, which is another way of acting out Genesis 3 all over again. It's what man does, but only every time.

I... No, I shouldn't. Should I? I'm conflicted. I don't mean to ridicule anyone. It's just that... It's such a fine example of what we're talking about. Besides, it's public knowledge. Presumably he wants his views to be noticed. I certainly don't care if someone wants to hold me up as a bad example. Indeed, I wish it would happen more often. It's fun.

Maybe if I just whisper it. Between you and me. First let's provide some context. For many years we had a couple of good friends who banished us when Mrs. G converted to Catholicism. Turns out their adult daughter is a lesbian, and we all know God Hates Fags, so the wife had effectively joined the biggest Hate Crime Family on earth or something.

This despite the fact that my wife loved their daughter, and we had never even had a conversation touching on homosexuality -- which I rarely think about anyway except when homosexuals want to force me to pretend they can exist in a state of matrimony, which is impossible for obvious reasons. I mean, just for starters, anyone who believes in biology knows they cannot actually "have sex," unless sex is defined in a completely unbiological way.

The other day I was wondering what had become of these erstwhile friends -- for whom there are no hard feelings at all -- and stumbled across this post on the subject of religion. You might say that it consists of an indiscriminate anti-religious rant by a cranky old spot on the periphery yelling at the Center while denying it exists.

All religious faith, for example "consists of ridiculous magical fantasies -- by actual grown-ups." And "although faith may be idiotic, it is also entirely normal for most human beings to embrace it." Why? Because "magical thinking may be instinctual to human beings," such that "our brains are broken."

Now, if religion is instinctive, then we can no more escape it than birds will fly north for the winter or salmon swim downstream to spawn. And if our brains are broken (compared to what?), well, why would someone imagine that we can use it to think, let alone know truth?

Our innate defect is such that it "behaves exactly like actual brain damage. Brain tumors, strokes and degenerative neurological / psychological diseases are known to occasionally cause the strangest side effects. Cases such as 'mistaking one’s wife for a hat' or being completely unaware of the left half of your environment or losing all memory of an experience just minutes after it occurs have come to us through many non-fiction books and films."

Presumably, the more religiosity, the more evidence of damage. So, Aquinas' Summa Theologica, for example, is like the diary of a massive stroke victim. Interesting. In the sense that the worse one's logic, the more interesting the conclusions to which it gives rise.

The real problem? Only a religious person "would deliberately initiate a world-killing nuclear holocaust if given the chance." Those hundred million killed by godless ideologues in the 20th century? Hey, mistakes happen. Nobody's perfect.

What he says about Islamists is no doubt true, but to lump them in with Christians is like saying that cancer cells are no different from healthy ones because both are alive.

"We humans are intelligent as animals go, and we enjoy the gift of consciousness. But in no way does that make any of us rational."

Any of us? You don't say. The whole thing reminds me of how a little philosophy inclines one to atheism, while a lot of it takes one to the threshold of religiosity. Unless one just stops thinking at an arbitrary point -- or, better, confines oneself to one of those outer concentric circles and pretends it is the center.

"Levels of religious delusion vary in individuals, all the way from the suicide bomber to someone who may describe themselves as simply believing in a 'higher power.' But SOME degree of delusion is present in every case of faith." Except faith in matter, of course. That's rational. Those who don't share his faith in matter "should be crushed wherever they are encountered."

I'm a little confused: "We dehumanize those with different beliefs," which often leads to brutality and murder.

What about dehumanizing "bat-shit crazy right wing religious nuts"? No worries: that never ends in violence. Just ask Steve Scalise.

More proof that Democrats are never violent:

Vertical Gnosis and Horizontal Noises

Big news day, no? Which is distracting me from the essential. Which actually goes to the subject of this post, for most news is essentially noise, and noise is precisely what we must ignore in order to discern the Message.

What I really want to say is that the subject of this post requires intense focus, but my focus is being dissipated by the noise of the day. So it's a little abbreviated. We'll pick it up again on Friday.

What exactly is a shock of recognosis? The word is obviously a portmanteau of Recognition + Gnosis, thus connoting the discovery of an a priori truth. But not just any truth; specifically, not contingent but necessary truths: truths that cannot not be.

Contingent truths can also be a ladder of ascent, but only so long as there is a reality toward which to ascend, AKA Truth as such. Deny the latter and the ladder literally falls to the ground: in the absence of the Absolute, there is nothing against which to lean your relativity. Contingency must participate necessity, or it is cut off from its own source.

Indeed, a truth detached from Truth can no longer justify the claim of being true.

Analogously, if my hand is amputated, does it really make any sense to still call it "my" hand? Certainly it "was" my hand, just as, say, our rights to life and liberty were true when they were still connected to the principle that the Creator endowed us with these. To remove the Creator from the equation is to amputate our rights from their living source.

Which is precisely when our heretofore intrinsic rights become alienable instead of unalienable. This is also the point where truth devolves to opinion, where reality becomes perception, and where veils no longer reveal. Truly, it is the ground of the left. In the end times, Wisdom degenerates to the impassioned noise of real tenure and fake news.

Gnosis, of course, is not to be confused with gnosticism, the latter essentially involving manmade opinion, only on a higher plane. But the higher the plane, the bigger the error.

Gnosticism always involves a usurpation, a storming of heaven. For it is written: knock and the door shall be opened. Not: barge right in and make yourself at home.

Here again, Voegelin famously regarded the left as a modern form of gnosticism. It presumes to have a knowledge of things which is strictly impossible given its assumptions. Honest leftists don't pretend that man has access to truth. True, but why then call them honest? Honesty presumes the existence of truth.

But we're beginning to stray into the periphery when we're trying to focus on the Center: Celestial Central, from where truth emanates. It is the Cosmic Tree, the Ocean of Wisdom, and the nonlocal Spring of the Water of Life.

Now, there are immanent truths that dwell within man. Or not. But if not, how is it that we recognize them when we see them? "Stupidity," writes Schuon, "is the inability to discern the essential from the accidental: it consists in attaching oneself to mere facts and in considering them simply in themselves, that is, without the least induction."

When we speak of man's fallenness, we can do so with regard to an ambiguous moral failing. That will work.

But at the same time and on another level it is an intellectual failing. How so? Well, let me think. At the very least -- in order to think at all -- we must posit a kind of two-story cosmos: there are many ways to conceptualize the cosmic building, among which are Principle and Manifestation, Substance and Accident, Essence and Existence, Absolute and Relative, Brahman and Maya, Creator and Creation, O and ( ), etc.

This is not a dualism, mind you. We are not positing two Absolutes. As such, one of these must be an artifact or prolongation of the other, and of course the second term must follow from the first in each example in the paragraph above.

Therefore, come back Friday and we'll find out where all this is leading.

Shocks of Recognosis

Beneath every veil is another veil, all the way up to God. And God cannot be fully unveiled for the same reason we can't be. Supposing you wanted to unveil your consciousness, how would you go about doing that? And how do you distinguish between the one doing the unveiling and the one unveiled?

How does the soul actually unveil and thereby reveal itself? Via its spontaneous attraction to various objects and subjects (persons). The world presents us with a panorama of potential choices, each veiling a deeper truth. So long as the choice is free and not compelled or conditioned, it reveals to us something about ourselves. You could say that our spontaneous attractions are like contrails of the soul.

But there are vertical degrees of attraction. For example, we are all attracted to food, but this hardly defines the soul. Rather, for a human being, this type of preference is accidental and not essential. If you prefer vanilla and I chocolate, it is of no consequence to the soul.

Perhaps the primary purpose of civilization is to disclose and preserve a range of higher choices for the soul. Take, for example, the Muslim middle east. There the soul is not given many choices. Indeed, no one there even chooses to be Muslim, since no other choice is permitted.

Although there are relatively few conversions to Judaism, I remember reading somewhere that not every Jew is born into Judaism. Rather, one may have a "Jewish soul" but not realize it until one encounters Judaism, which results in a shock of recognition -- of oneself.

This is obviously quite common with Christianity, and in a way, is behind every conversion. In particular, think of the response to the first evangelists. Somehow, people heard the message and said to themselves, Yup, that's me. This is a quintessential example of vertical recollection, or what we call recognosis.

I can think of many similar examples. Kallistos Ware writes of his "personal journey to Orthodoxy," which "happened quite unexpectedly on a Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1952." He was walking past an old church he'd never noticed before and decided to wander in.

As a service began,

My initial impression of an absence was now replaced, with a sudden rush, by an overwhelming sense of presence. I felt that the church, so far from being empty, was full -- full of countless unseen worshipers, surrounding me on every side. Intuitively I realized that we, the visible congregation, were part of a much larger whole, and that as we prayed we were being taken up into an action far greater than ourselves, into an undivided, all-embracing celebration that united time and eternity, things below with things above.

Vertical recollection, big time. Which implies that atheists and other wayward souls are literally suffering from a form of vertical amnesia -- or what we call I AMnesia (more on which as we proceed).

More to the point, as Ware left the church, he said to himself

with a clear sense of conviction: This is where I belong; I have come home. Sometimes it happens -- is it not curious? -- that, before we have learnt anything in detail about a person, a place or subject, we know with certainty: This is the person that I shall love, this is the place I need to go, this is the subject that, above all others, I must spend my life exploring.

As alluded to in the book, it is as if the world is a complex phase space filled with nonlocal attractors of various kinds. We know the attractors are there, because we are routinely pulled into them.

And of course, not all attractors are positive! Seductions and snares are everywhere, i.e., Powers, Principalities, Thrones, Dominions, all pulling us this way and that.

Back to Ware for a moment. I've read that if one attempts to convert to Judaism, the rabbi will initially discourage the seeker. It's a test. Ware encountered the same sort of resistance, but the more he learned about it, "the more I realized: this is what I have always believed in my inmost self, but never before did I hear it so well expressed" (emphasis mine).

So, that is the ultimate recognosis: the vertical re-collection of oneself, and with it, God. The two -- the inner and outer -- are simultaneous.

Faith itself is not supposed to be a passive acceptance of static propositions. Rather, as Schuon says, its real purpose is "to inform us concerning that of which our soul is urgently in need, and to awaken in us as far as possible the remembrance of innate truths."

The remembrance of innate truths.

Om, now I remurmur!

And "Religious revelation is both a veil of light and a light veiled" (ibid.).

Have you heard the One about Light from Light? Viveka la Reveilation!

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities. --Dávila

Heaven Veiled and Hell Unveiled

Back to our hacking expedition into the upper vertical. In truth we're already there. It's just that it's veiled. But a veil simultaneously veils and reveals, at least if your third eye is open. Or better, the veil will either obscure or reveal, depending upon how you look at it.

For example, in the final analysis, everything is a veil of God -- which is precisely why everything reveals him.

Our world is drenched in symbolism, and what is a symbol but a wall to the unworthy but window to the woke?

This notion of the Veil keeps popping up. "Revelation," for example, is "a Latin word that means 'to draw aside the veil'" (Jackson). Similarly, the "visible church" is there to signify the Invisible Church. Everything in the former "ought to be firmly rooted here, but point to there -- to what is beyond this world."

"The outward appearance of sacred things tells us little about their inward nature. It is the veil that tells us.... By visible beauty we may be led to invisible beauty" (ibid.).

Over the weekend I read an essay be Schuon on The Mystery of the Veil. In it he notes that the veil "evokes the idea of mystery, because it hides from view something that is either too sacred or too intimate." This can be conflated with mere curiosity, but curiosity goes more to an absence, whereas mystery testifies to a real presence (or presence of the Real).

And what is the world itself but a most mysterious presence? "The cosmic and metacosmic veil is a mystery because it has its roots in the depths of the Divine Nature" (ibid.). In short, the world is simultaneously a veil, a mystery, and a presence.

Nor can one actually get "beneath" the veil, at least in this life. What did God say to the Rabbi? You cannot see My face; for no man shall see Me, and live.

However, Moses is permitted to see God's backside, which is a symbol of the Veil. Analogously, you can't look straight at the sun, but everything is veiled in its Light. One cannot comprehend the Absolute "because its luminosity is blinding." Nevertheless, its light is everywhere.

I've been thinking about this subject a long time, maybe almost an hour, and I've come to the following conclusion. How to put it.... Let's say that God isn't just God, but rather God + Veil -- at least from our standpoint. And probably his as well, because what is Creation but the veil of the Creator?

In fact, here is where we differ from the anti-Coon in all its hydra-headed manifestations: we all believe in relativity. However, for us, the relative is not self-sufficient but a manifestation of the Creator: "To be the vehicle of the Absolute, while veiling it, is the purpose of the Relative" (Schuon).

There is no other way to have an intelligible cosmos, is there? "Absolute relativity" reduces to absurdity and nihilism, while "Absolute-Absoluteness" renders our own existence entirely beside the point. The real action takes place in the dynamic space between Absolute and Relative. But it's not an empty space; rather, a veiled space.

In fact, Schuon makes the intriguing point that there is no such thing as "unveiled space." Rather, the veil is precisely what brings space into being:

Thus it is that space has no existence except through what it contains; an empty space would no longer be a space, it would be nothingness.

In like fashion, cosmic Relativity is only real by virtue of its prolongation of the Absolute; it (and we) becomes unreal when sundered therefrom.

Shifting gears for the moment, this is the whole idea of the Koon Klassic Ideas Have Consequences. These are some notes to myself that may or may not be direct quotes from the book: "Without imagination the world is simply a brute fact -- there is nothing to spiritualize it." "When matter is placed over spirit, quantity is placed over quality; but quality is not just another quantity."

Forms are the ladder of ascent. Every group regarding itself as emancipated is convinced its predecessors were fearful of reality, looking upon the veils of decency as obstructions it will strip aside. But behind the veils is a reality of such commonplaces that it is merely knowledge of death.

Genesis 3 all over again? Hmm, let's consult the Aphorist.

Without aesthetic transfiguration all of reality is pedestrian.

The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world but encourages us to seek its origin, to ascend to its pure snow.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities.

Also, Unbelief is not a sin but a punishment. You could say it represents exile to an infrahuman world of brutish relativism, hypnotic appearances, and unalloyed tenure. Or just say Hell.

Fantasies of Finitude & Dreams of Reality

Every morning, upon washing ashore on this side of consciousness, the first thing I do is review the dreams that occurred on the dark side of the cʘʘn. One thing I've noticed over the past decade or more is that my dreams have become increasingly... pleasant. Wondrous. Definitely surreal, but in an enchanting and not alienating way.

This is very much in contrast to before, when my dreams were generally more persecutory in nature. There was always a problem of some kind, with an undercurrent of tension, danger, and an irritating lack of resolution. I don't mean nightmares. Rather, just being hassled by something or someone. I still occasionally get one of those, but not often.

An idea popped into my head. A theory. To the extent that religion is "true," it is true in a way that is much deeper, wider, and more expansive than, say, scientific or mathematic truth. As we know, it speaks to a "deeper" and "higher" part of ourselves. In terms of attachment theory, science is the Wire Mother, while religion is the Cloth Mother, the latter providing another kind of nourishment that is just as vital to survival.

At the same time, dreams obviously speak from a deeper part of ourselves. I wonder if there is some relationship between the speaking-to of religion and the speaking-from of dreams?

Yesterday we spoke of hacking God; perhaps hacking the upper vertical would be a more felicitous way of expressing it. I wonder if religion hacks into the unconscious -- or better, the non-conscious, which extends vertically up and down -- in such a way that the unconscious then hacks into the upper vertical? If so, this would explain the transformation in my dream life.

We've all heard variations of the expression "feeding the soul." It refers to a common experience, and goes to the reality of both the food and the soul: if the soul didn't exist then we wouldn't hunger for (nor be nourished by) the food, and if the food didn't exist we wouldn't be aware of having a soul.

Put it this way. I think we've used this example in the past, but compare it to the sex drive. How do we know we have one? Because we are attracted to certain objects exterior to us. Likewise, how do we know we have a soul? Among other reasons, because of its spontaneous attractions: the attractor and attractee are mutually illuminating.

Yesterday we spoke of Dante's Divine Comedy. What is it but a kind of vivid waking dream of heaven, hell, and purgatory? Countless souls have been nourished by its imagery -- for example, Bob Dylan:

She lit a burner on the stove / And offered me a pipe

I thought you'd never say hello, she said / You look like the silent type

Then she opened up a book of poems / And handed it to me

Written by an Italian poet / From the thirteenth century

And every one of them words rang true / And glowed like burnin' coal

Pourin' off of every page / Like it was written in my soul

From me to you / Tangled up in blue

Then there is this: He [Jacob] lay down to sleep. Then he dreamed, and behold, a ladder was set up on the earth, and its top reached to heaven; and there the angels of God were ascending and descending on it.

Like me, Jacob wakes up, reviews his dream, and says, Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.

And How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven!

Wait. What place are we talking about? Is it outside, in some object? Or inside, in the soul? Obviously it is both, the one illuminating the other. At once Jacob perceives God and is awakened to a deeper experience of selfhood.

In The Symmetry of God, Bomford suggests that "the mystics' God be called 'The Unconscious of God' and that any other aspect of God be attributed to 'The Consciousness of God.'" This is a helpful way of looking at it: dogma, for example, goes to the Consciousness of God. You could say that it is addressed to the left brain.

Even so, it inevitably spills over into the right, due to its archetypal symbolism. It has a more "mechanical" effect on the left, a more "organic" one on the right; in the latter it is as if seeds are planted, which grow in unexpected ways.

Bomford quotes the Jesuit William Johnston, who writes that "the consciousness gradually expands and integrates data from the so-called unconscious while the whole personality is absorbed into the great mystery of God."

That sounds about right: left and right spur a mutual growth in one another, which in turn spurs an expansive growth in God. Or you could leave God out of it and just say O: we metabolize O via a kind of psychic metabolism between the conscious and supraconscious realms of the soul.

Two Big Errors: "The first is to infinitize the finite, the second to finitize the infinite. In religious terms both are idolatrous" (ibid.).

With certain qualifications. I would say that it is always an Intrinsic Cosmic Heresy to infinitize the finite, which is Genesis 3 all over again. It is Marxism, materialism, relativism, deconstruction, and any number of other pneumopathologies. It is the Left.

However, we must in some sense finitize the infinite, or we can't think about it at all. It's just that it must not remain static but be deployed as... as what, exactly?

Somewhere Schuon expresses it perfectly. Let me see if I can find it...

"We are here at the limit of the expressible; it is the fault of no one if within every enunciation of this kind there remain unanswerable questions.... [I]t is all too evident that wisdom cannot start from the intention of expressing the ineffable; but it intends to furnish points of reference which permit us to open ourselves to the ineffable to the extent possible, and according to what is foreseen by the Will of God" (emphasis mine).

The Points of Reference represent conscious knowledge of God, but we don't leave it at that. Rather, they are God-given grist for metacosmic dreaming.

Hacking into God

Is that possible?

I don't know, the thought just popped into my head. I was over at Instapundit and noticed a link to a book called Language Hacking French: A Conversation Course for Beginners. Sure, I wish I knew French, but that's not my point. Besides, I still have so much English material to get to that hacking another language seems frivolous.

And in any event, what I really want to do is hack into God, and that can be done in any language. If it can be done at all.

Come to think of it, Pentecost Sunday was just a few days ago. What was that all about? I mean originally?

I'm no expert, but it seems the main point was the transmission of a preternatural ability to proclaim God in any and all languages. I suppose that's a case of God hacking the brain's language center so we can in turn hack God (and what is the Incarnation itself but God hacking mankind? "God hacks man so that man may hack God," you might say).

That's an intriguing point, because it is often said that it is impossible to translate the Koran. Rather, one must hear it in the original Arabic, such that any attempt at translation inevitably betrays it.

Not so with Christianity. No one believes you have to speak Aramaic or Greek or Hebrew to get the essential message. Pentecost announces this principle loud and clear, that language is no barrier. Any language can transmit the Word.

Back to the hackery. Note that many if not most philosophers don't even believe it is possible to hack into reality, let alone ultimate reality. Kant, for example, famously claimed that we can know only phenomena. But the noumenon -- whatever reality is behind the appearances -- is forever closed to us. It is the one completely unhackable system.

Lately we've been discussing Gödel's theorems, about which opinions vary. Some people think they mean we can only use logic to chase our own tails, i.e., that we can never escape our absurcular systems of thought. Others -- myself included -- think they mean we can indeed hack the wider reality beyond logic.

Remember the logical positivists? Even though this philosophy has been thoroughly debunked, there are still many implicit or unconscious positivists who maintain that only empirically verifiable statements are true. This despite the fact that the belief that only empirically verifiable statements are true cannot itself be empirically verified. So that's the end of that.

Postmodernists also insist that reality can't be hacked, even while presuming to have discovered the ultimate hack. It is another form of cheap omniscience attainable by anyone, hence its popularity among the tenured.

For example, instead of engaging in the hard work of ascending toward Shakespeare, one just dismisses him as an exemplar of white privilege. One can do the same thing with math, physics, history, any discipline: instant intellectual supremacy. (This guy has countless examples of such systematic idiocy masquerading as scholarship.)

Back to hacking God. I recently read Jennifer Upton's The Ordeal of Mercy: Dante’s Purgatorio in Light of the Spiritual Path. Recall that we spent a month or so blogging about the prequel, which covered Dante's Inferno. Ironically, I enjoyed Hell more than Purgatory.

Note that Dante was so bold as to attempt to not only hack heaven, but purgatory and hell to boot -- or in other words, to provide a comprehensive map of the vertical. All in Italian, of all languages!

That book must have popped into my head for a reason. Let's try to find out what it was.

Ah, here we go. Not only did Dante hack the above three nonlocal localities, but in so doing hacked death itself! For "he presents himself in the Purgatorio as a living man engaged in a pilgrimage through the postmortem states" (Upton).

In fact, these states aren't even that far away, rather, just a micron or quark to the north: "in reality these postmortem states are even closer to us than the impressions brought to us by our five senses."

Which is very close, even touching. Indeed, each of our five senses involves a form of touch, whether of solid matter, lightwaves, air vibrations, or air-/foodborne molecules. Evidently there is a vertical version of each of our senses. Or so we have heard from the wise.

For example, once Dante exits hell and stands on the shore of purgatory, he can see a lot more: "now, when he lifts his eyes, he sees not only Purgatory but the starry sky above. This is deeply renewing to him; through the physical forms perceived by his senses the celestial archetypes are beginning to shine."

But guess what? I think Dante is us and that Purgatory is here. Therefore, we can -- and must -- in this life raise our inner eye upward toward the spiritual horizon and thereby perceive how those celestial archetypes shine herebelow. You know -- metaphysical transparency, or celestial translucency. Subtle vibrations are everywhere.

Conversely, think of how the postmodernist fixes his gaze downward and creates his own hell -- a spiritually opaque world of raw absurdity and naked power.

To be continued...

Inside the Mind of Godlessness

Even more than usual I have nothing to say but a compulsion to say it. Therefore, if the posts strike you as more elliptical and wandering, you're no doubt right. We're just casually wondering and blundering around O, taking in the fauna and looking under branches and rocks, with one eye on the subjective horizon. Like a river that can't find the Sea...

Must everything have a point?! No, of course not. Far from succumbing to nihilism, man is dying from the freaking Point of Everything. No longer does he do nothing for the sake of Nothing, which is the only sure way to God (or God's way to man: you have to give him a little space to operate).

For it is literally the case that the Highest Things have no point. What is the point of love? Reduced to some kind of utilitarian calculation it becomes perverse. Same with truth, beauty, and virtue... and this blog. Its point is always the higher pointlessness of being-with-God...

If we could attain complete comprehension of reality, we would have the mind of God; or in other words, only God -- irrespective of whether or not you are a believer -- can conceivably have such total understanding. God is, among other things, the One Who Gets It (and us).

Interesting that we can posit the idea of "total understanding," which makes me suspect someone has it. Just not us.

Hegel certainly thought he had it. Marx took from Hegel the parts he liked -- in particular, the cheap omniscience -- and here we are. But nowadays the omniscience of dialectical materialism has transformed into a kind of omniscient stupidity on the part of the left.

I say this literally because, to paraphrase Schuon, to claim that relativism is the case is to (omnisciently) assert that man's stupidity is total. Like anyone could know that!

Frankly, nothing is that stupid, let alone everything. Even rocks have intelligibility built into them.

"Hegel seriously believed he had reached ultimate truth," meaning that he had managed "to contain all of reality in the conceptual net of his system" (Watts). Nor was he the last. Freud comes to mind. He was especially clever about it, because any criticism of his theory served as proof of the theory -- for example, that you are just acting out a father complex toward the Master.

The left has its own diabolical version of this trick, such that criticism of it is evidence of White Privilege, or the patriarchy, or heteronormativity, or homophobia, whatever. Indeed, this is one of the appeals of the left: a few simple tricks allows one to feel superior -- morally and intellectually -- to one's betters. Any idiot from an elite university with an IQ of 85 can shut down Charles Murray by calling him a racist. QED.

There is no soul so cosmically great that a leftist can't take him down with a single blow. You know the drill: George Washington? Slaveowner. Churchill? Imperialist.

Now, as we know, what makes God omniscient is that in him existence and essence are one; or in other words, his essence is to exist: he alone is necessary being, while the restavus are contingent. Contingency cannot be necessity, but it can know of it (at least humans can). And thanks to revelation, we can know about it as well.

But again, Hegel imagined he knew both of and about the absolute, without any upside assistance, which is surely the last word in pseudo-omniscience. I take that back. One only wishes it were the last word. In a way, it is the first word -- those first human words in Genesis 3, where man presumes to become as God.

Interesting that the first things man says and does involve a rejection of transcendent truth. Which is close to the classic definition of fascism: the violent rejection of transcendence. I suppose we have to wait for Cain to achieve that in the second generation. He is our first homegrown terrorist.

"Hegel did not believe that self-realization and ultimate truth was dependent upon the 'outside assistance' of divine grace." As he put it, "God is only God in so far as he knows himself and he can only know himself through man."

Now, that's a bold statement. In reality it's the converse: Man is only Man in so far as he knows himself and he can only know himself through God. This is self-evident: man and God are complementary; to say one is to affirm the other, at least from our perspective. And when God says Christ, he is affirming his idea of Man, just as when we do, we are affirming our idea of God. Christ is God's icon of man and our icon of God.

It's not that God can only know himself through man, but that he can know himself through man. Not in Hegel's way, but Jesus's way. Or so we have heard from the wise.

Nevertheless, Hegel tries to think his way into God, positing him as pure being. In his personal myth of cosmogenesis, he imagines that God tried to think of himself but failed. Why? Because "it is impossible to think of pure Being." Therefore God "thought nothing, which is the opposite of Being." For Hegel, this goes to the symbolism of the fall.

Eh, I don't buy it. Here is my alternate cosmic fairy tale; naturally it is all "in a manner of speaking," just my own little dream of the Dreamer. But in my dream, the Father-beyond-being "tries" to think of himself and begets the Son, and they in turn beget the Spirit. Ironically, ultimate reality is a kind of eternal trialectic, just not Hegel's kind, whereby God "evolves" in time. For him, the above-noted dialectic between Being and Nothing engenders the Becoming of God-in-history.

You might say that the thesis of Father-Being marries the antithesis of Mother-Nothing, which gives birth to the synthetic Son of Historical Becoming. This latter would be the whole creation, including us. Reality is simply the repetition of this pattern of thesis-antithesis-synthesis.

The good news: eventually "society will reach its final, perfect stage of development, 'reflective unity.'"

The bad news: "For Hegel, this will be manifested by the State, in which individual human will coincides perfectly with the will of the Nation -- personal desires and feelings of personal significance and fulfillment will be rooted in, and perfectly compatible with, one's social existence and duty to the nation." Submission to the State "is to lose one's bourgeois freedom, but to gain a higher freedom."

America's founders, who had the misfortune of being born before Hegel, set in stone the bourgeois freedom guaranteed by the Constitution. But for the past hundred years or so, progressives have been trying to get around this and give us the Higher Freedom of Hegelian statism.

Woodrow Wilson, our first progressive leftist president, studied Hegelianism in Germany. Let's use the google machine to tie this all up into a neat synthesis. This ought to be just the ticket: a review of Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism by the PowerLine boys.

Question: "How did the metaphysical speculation of a 19th century German historicist, whose teachings were congenial to Marxists but are anathema to modern analytic and positivist philosophers -- as well as proponents of the Constitution as originally understood -- come to influence our constitutional law?"

"The answer lies in the concept of the 'living constitution' -- and in the influence of Woodrow Wilson." Ironic, isn't it, that the so-called "living constitution" was conceived in order to murder the real one.

It's very much as if left and right posit competing Absolutes: ether our inalienable rights or Hegel's Absolute Idea, and this cosmos isn't big enough for both:

Hegelians believe that, until we reach the end of History, "enduring" rights exist only to be negated by future generations. Thus, Wilson wrote, "Justly revered as our great constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws."

The left has been throwing it aside ever since. Wilson "derided what he referred to as the 'Newtonian' underpinning of the Constitution.... Disputing the applicability of fixed laws (other than his own) to History, Wilson wound up opposing the concepts of limited government, separation of powers, and checks and balances."

Soon enough this leads to a government of, by, and for the Worstuvus. So it's a dialectal progression. Straight down.