Phall If You Will, Rise You Must

I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. --Rev. 22:13

Again, down here in time -- in the horizontal -- Alpha and Omega appear distinct.

But to say "I am" Alpha and Omega means that the two are unified in the atemporal (vertical) ground of being, for "before Abraham was, I AM." In ether worlds, before time and history is the ahistorical being-ness of the Cosmic Person.

I think of Alpha and Omega as semantic containers, almost like algebraic variables -- in fact, let's call them α and Ω -- that express a complementary relationship.

Thus, as implied above, they signify first <--> last and beginning <--> end; to which I might add outer <--> inner, existence <--> essence, ego <--> self, letter <--> spirit, and perhaps even exoteric <--> esoteric.

Note also that it is only a linear "relationship" in the horizontal; in the vertical it must be a kind of circle, or spiral, or maybe just a kind of generative play.

Here again, think of the yin/yang symbol. I wonder what this symbol would logolike in three, four, or more dimensions? Let's find out.

Hmm. Here is a fractal version:

This I like: reflects the old ghagavad the cosmos being a tree, its nonlocal roots aloft, its local branches down below:

This is good: ♀, ♂, and †:

This too:

Funny. I thought I was just a crank, not a nerd.

I searched "four-dimensional yin yang" and came up with these. No time to check them out, however.

So, as Davie says, "we must always be able to understand first as last and last as first." He notes that in the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas, "the extenstion of the Kingdom is the 'making outer' of that which is 'inner.'"

Now, this sounds very much like "thy will be done, on earth (i.e., horizontal) as it is in heaven (vertical)."

In the upper reaches of the vertical, it must be the case that the "divine intention" is already realized. "But clearly the realization cannot be earthly as yet," and the making inner what is outer -- or celestial what is terrestrial -- must be none other than the eschaton.

Thus, we're really talking about the cosmic eschalator, teloscape, or attractor at the end -- which is to say, fulfillment -- of history.

Looked at this way, history really is the shadow of the Cross, where "it" -- whatever "it" is -- is already accomplished. I think I'll just quote Davie here, because he seems to know what he's talking about:

"Hence the divine intention has a protological [meaning the antonym of eschatological, i.e., the beginning of things] realization that is coextensive with its earthly realization, and by 'heaven' we mean no less than a universe transfigured by divine energies, a universe to which the miraculous [what I call a vertical ingression] in human experience gives us momentary access."

This sounds to me like what I reefered to in the book as cosmotheosis -- and no, you can't buy any -- whereby the cosmos is fulfilled whenever a single person shares in, or communes with, or dwells in, this realization. You might call it (?!) on stilts.

At any rate, if you have made it this far, all the way to the beginning, then you understand how the "congruence of heaven and earth is the destination towards which history moves," but "also the origin from which history moves" (Davie).

Fall and Redemption. Same as it ever was. Or in joyceful author words,

The fall... of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy.

And the oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where askes lay.

So don't sweat it, because just as Gricks may rise and Troysirs fall, Phall if you but will, rise you must!

Obama and Anti-American Personality Disorder

Alpha and Omega: while these two are more or less distant in time -- in the horizontal -- in vertical space they must not only be proximate but ultimately two aspects of one being. With this in mind, Davie makes the orthoparadoxically correct 〇bservation that "we must always be able to understand first as last and last as first."

But this highlights a more general principle, to the effect that our intellect must adhere to our faith, and vice versa.

Which reminds me of a particularly cluminous essay in a new collection thereof called Splendor of the True: A Frithjof Schuon Reader. For me, the Schuon scale of luminosity runs from bright to blinding, but in this piece nearly every sentence is highlylighted or wonderlined.

The essay is called Understanding and Believing (it originally appeared in his forcibly raccoomended Logic and Transcendence).

Schuon begins with the truism that it is possible for a man to believe without understanding. At the looooow end this is just bovine stupidity, but at the high end this is mature faith, which is quintessentially an intuitive perception of an unfathomable truth experienced subjectively as a generative mystery (i.e., as an active presence, not a mere absence).

But what people generally don't realize is that the opposite is equally true, "that one can understand without believing" (Schuon).

How can this be so? Didn't Blake say that "truth cannot be told so as to be understood and not believed"?

Yes, but the operative word there is truth. Evidently, one of the hallmarks of falsehood is that it can indeed be understood (so to speak) but not actually believed -- for it is written, who would believe that shit?

There appears to be something paradoxical here, because why would one need faith if one has understanding? Isn't faith just a kind of booby prize for those who lack understanding, a glorified fig leaf over our naked ignorance?

That's one way of looking at it.

Schuon goes on to say that a form of hypocrisy arises whenever there is a disjunction between certainty and behavior, and here is where we see the gulf between understanding and faith. This is because genuine belief -- or faith -- involves "identifying oneself with the truth one accepts" -- and then waiting for the truth to be realized or actualized within.

When I read this passage, the first thing that occurred to me is that secular materialists of all kinds -- proglodyte liberals, assorted purveyors of blind scientism, kosher darwienies, atheistic sales reptiles -- do not actually believe what they understand, or their behavior would be entirely different.

In short, materialists are devoid of real faith, for they do not put into practice what they screech, nor do they exhibit the courage of their concrocktions.

Consider: if I understand myself to be nothing more than a wild animal who has no possible contact with anything transcending matter -- e.g., truth, morality, beauty, wisdom, etc. -- then my behavior should comport with my understanding.

Such an animal will frankly meet the diagnostic criteria for a Sociopathic Personality Disorder, except they would not be ill. Rather, they would be "awakened" or "enlightened," like a reverse Buddha, or an inscapee to Plato's mancave.

Let's look at those criteria, and see if the shoe fits up their ass.

"A pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15 years."

Well, sure. But why 15? Isn't that a little arbitrary? Why not birth? Rights are for suckers -- Christians, constitutional conservatives, "civil" libertarians, homos.

"Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest."

I know. Give Obama credit. There's a leftist whose faith is in conformity to his understanding.

"Impulsivity or failure to plan ahead."

One word: Obamacare. Okay, two more: Arab spring. Three? Fast and Furious. Four? I will close Gitmo. Five? That idiotic reset button gift.

"Deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying."

Yeah, I see your point. Maybe the left isn't so hypocritical after all, because the media-academic complex certainly embraces such hopenlie antisocial behavior:

"The new Western media, products of the fully propagandized Western university, have broadly succumbed to the sympathy with totalitarian ethics and intentions that Revel warned was the West's imminent danger, and the communists' long-term strategy....

"Having morally weakened the West by exploiting the legitimate free press to their clever advantage, and at last having converted that press itself into a de facto ally, the enemies of freedom could begin their work on the inside of the Western establishment in earnest. It was now time to bring the ideological war home."

Meanwhile, "The Western media has been factionalized into the totalitarian propagandist majority and the searching, skeptical minority which forms the last remnant of the true calling of that free press which was once supposed to be a bulwark of liberty" (Jonescu).

But in the inverted world of the sociopath, we are the sick folks, for which reason those regular folkers sic the IRS on us.

Yes, the left directly attacks what freedom they haven't yet eroded. But at this point, what difference does it make? What's good for the state is good for you. You don't know that?

The next criterion: "consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to honor financial obligations."

Too easy. Let's move on.

"Lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another."

At this point, what difference does it make?

"Irritability and aggressiveness."

ARE YOU DEAF? AT THIS POINT, WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE, FUCKWIT? LET'S JUST HOPE YOU KEPT THOSE RECEIPTS FOR 'CHARITABLE GIVING' BACK IN 2006! AND NO, I DON'T CARE THAT YOUR CHURCH DOESN'T ISSUE RECEIPTS.

Okay, you got me. But at least this proves that I can keep an open mind. I hereby withdraw my charge of leftist hypocrisy.

A Borne Again Man of Dustinction

Don't know if I have time to spell- or even basic sensecheck, so you're on your own...

To say there is a human nature is to say there is an archetype of our humanness, a "cosmic man." It has to be cosmic, because everything about the cosmos has to be tweaked just so in order for us to existentiate the archetype.

For example, imagine if I have the idea for a palm tree. If I live, say, in a subarctic zone, no matter how perfect the idea, the palm tree cannot take root there outside the archetype.

Both Kabbalah and Vedanta posit a Cosmic Man from whom we are descended: Adam Kadmon and Purusha, respectively.

A google search for the two yields some arresting images, although I didn't spend any time looking for the best ones. For example, here is Adam Kadmon and his holo-hoops, the one below descending from the one above:

And here (see below ↓) is Adam Kadmon bifurcating into Adam-and-Eve, the archetypal terrestrial parents (recall that in Judaism, the proper unit of mankind is not man or woman, but man-and-woman, 1 and 0):

Down here (↓) is another shot of the cosmic man, as if emerging out of O (or vice versa):

Here's a shot of Purusha, kicking back and enjoying his cosmic slack. Note that the world seems to be a product of his creative imagination:

Here's another that captures the relationship with O -- a humandala, as it were:

Ultimately, the positing of the Cosmic Man helps us to unvert the cosmos, and to understand the nature -- which is to say, end -- of evolution. The Cosmic Man is both alpha and omega, and thus, both the ground and destiny of evolution. In between is this little nightmirror we call "history." In the night it is hard to see the image, which is precisely what Finnegans Wake is allabout. Yes, Obama is an uncommonly lightless loafer, but it's always the Dark Pages down here. You can look it up. With a little light.

I want to shift gears momentarily, because for the past two weeks I have been flooded with Baader-Meinhof phenomena revolving around the Cosmic Man -- as if he's dropping hints everywhere. Look out below!

For example, in Bouyer's The Christian Mystery, he discusses the idea of "Christ as the Second Adam, or rather the last Adam, that is, the heavenly man whose radiant image, as First Corinthians tells us, we have to put on," because "we have borne for too long the disfigured image of the first man."

Also, the neophyte Raccoon cultist or even advanced stalker will be reminded of the obscure references on pages 254/f. 17; 261/47; and 264/58. I know. They're funny because they're true!

Now, this is intriguing. "Son of man" appears in the the Hebrew Bible over 100 times, so it is a very common construction, and one that would have been familiar to Jesus (in other words, he obviously didn't coin the term, except of course he did). But what does it mean, exactly?

Here is Kabbalist interpretation, which may or may not be kosher: "the essential meaning of Ezekiel's vision, then, is that the son of man, the human son of God, is he who has achieved the mystical capacity to see the divine nature of his own higher self."

This comports with what Bouyer says about the matter. He adds that in his letters, Paul rewords the concept in order to get away from Jewish esoterism, and make it "more accessible to non-Jews." Thus, the phrase "Son of Man... disappears from a preaching to the Gentiles, in spite of its central place in the preaching of Jesus. All its content" is "now transfered into the figure of the heavenly Man, which Paul introduces when he contrasts with the first man another man, who is not just a second Adam, but the final Man."

This gets very dense, and I'm running out of time. But Bouyer quotes Paul who wrote of a "psychical body" and a spiritual one: "the first man, Adam, became a living soul; the last Adam a life-giving Spirit." And "the first man was from the earth, a man of dust, the second man is from heaven." Therefore, "Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven."

But there's an additional twist here, because it was a common belief in antiquity that "the primordial man was a quasi-divine being and that man as he is now only a degenerate form of this being, fallen into matter and multiplicity..."

However, this is not the Jewish understanding; rather, it is unalloyed Gnosticism, for if you will note the image above of Adam and Eve, they do not represent an a priori fall from Adam Kadmon. In short, the fall occurs to Adam & Eve, not in them.

And again, "humanity" is both source and goal for human beings. We must "become reintegrated into the second Adam" in such a way "that it becomes more than a second beginning -- for Humanity is its final goal" (Bouyer). The Body of Christ? Yes, you could say that, because that would seem to represent the real instantiation, or existentiation, of Adam Kadmon/Purusha herebelow: body of Christ, mind of Slack.

I Am. Not Myself. But Maybe Somedeity...

Continuing with Davie's thesis that Christianity represents a synthesis of Judaism and Vedanta, he writes that under Christianity (C), the two different views of God -- continuous (V) and discontinuous (J), immanent (V) and transcendent (J), "are placed together in the perception of identity-in-difference."

This particular orthoparadox "informs the entire theology of C: thus, Christ is God and man; the bread is the body; One God is three persons, etc. In short, the boundary relations of absolute identity, on the one hand, and infinite difference, on the other, combine to yield identity-in-difference..."

And as mentioned a couple of posts ago, it is as if C embodies a balance between predominantly left (J) and right (V) cerebral hemispheric approaches to the divine.

Again, one doesn't want to oversimplify or push the analysis too far, but I think it is fair to say that a law-based approach is more exterior/objective, whereas the experiential approach of Vedanta (or Zen, or Mahayana Buddhism) is more subjective/interior.

Just as there is no monastic tradition in Judaism -- radical withdrawal from the world being considered mishuggah (except on the Sabbath, and even then the slaccent is on being with the world more intimately) -- Vedanta is in many ways a lawless religion, so to speak.

Or in other words, remove all of the laws from the cosmos -- which are ultimately spun from maya's web -- and what you are left with is God.

Along these lines, Davie goes on to suggest that Judaism's "main concern" lies with "finding an answer to the question, Who? (who is this God revealed to Abraham, Moses, and the prophets?...)," whereas the central concern of Vedanta "is identity-with" the ultimate principle. In Judaism there can be no identity with God, just as in Vedanta our apparent separation is only a stubborn illusion.

As it so happens, if we dig a little deeper, we see that the same dialectic obtains within Hinduism, between the rival ganges of Shankara and Ramanuja, or nondualism vs. qualified nondualism.

And Davie points out that in the Old Testament there are numerous references to the godmensch. Still, there is a certain line one cannot cross in Judaism, for which reason (among others) Jesus-as-God is a non-starter, and more generally, "what H takes to be saving truth, J regards as blasphemous."

Another interesting contrast between Judaism and Vedanta has to do with creation. J is famous for taking a lot of pointless speculation out of the grubby hands of the tenured, and insisting that creation has a beginning, so deal with it.

Conversely, Vedanta maintains that creation has no beginning, and that this particular cosmos is just one in an endless series of emanations.

Likewise, with J, creation involves divine choice, whereas with V it is somewhat "automatic," in the sense that Brahman cannot not create, because this would violate its own nature.

Because of this, it seems that Judaism cannot help but be eschatological, or future-oriented, most particularly, with regard to the messiah or savior. But in Vedanta there can be no end, because any end will just be a new beginning. To be perfectly accurate, beginning and end are always now.

Davie reminds us that Jesus is called Alpha and Omega, first and last, beginning and end, which permits of two perspectives which are unified in the one person.

The whole thing becomes a little confusing because of our immersion in time. Because God is in eternity, beginning and end must by definition be the same in him; or, what we call beginning and end are the serial instantiation -- the "moving image" -- of eternity in time.

As we have said on a number of occasions, herebelow eternity takes time, whereas thereabove it takes all day to get nothing done. But nobody minds, because you've got forever to do it.

Now, a religion provides the cure for the particular spiritual disease it diagnoses. The cure is what we call redemption in Christianity, or holiness in Judaism, or moksha in Vedanta. But is there a way we can see these three as different symptoms of the same underlying disease?

At least superficially, it appears not. For what is the disease? In Judaism, identity with God would be a fatal spiritual sickness, whereas in Vedanta the very same thing is the cure!

But we need to make some more subtle linguistic distinctions, or at least find a way to bullshit our way out of this metaphysical nul-de-slack.

For example, in Vedanta the point is not to elevate the local ego to godhood. Rather, there is a lower self (jivatman, [•]) and a higher self (atman, [¶]), and we dis-identify with the former in order to identify with the latter. And for Davie, the lower self "approximates to the Hebrew nephesh," while ruah does duty for the higher, more subtle being. (And as always, we are happy to be corrected by brother Gandalin for our hamhanded analysis.)

There is also the distinction between local image and nonlocal likeness that is emphasized by both Judaism and (Eastern) Orthodox Christianity. Thus, our "fallenness" is essentially a measure of the distance between image and likeness, lower self and higher self, jivatman and atman, nephesh and ruah, slack and conspiracy, etc.

In each case, redemption, or sanctity, or liberation, or slack, is an eschatological movement from the one toward the other. There is an "immaculate manhood" (Davie), so to speak, at the end of our seeking, which "draws us on by offering glimpses of ourselves in our ideal nature."

And in the case of C, "the likeness which was lost through Adam is fully restored in Jesus," who is uniquely image and likeness; whereas for the subgenius, we would measure the same distance on a logarithmic scale of 1 to Bob.

In fact, I believe it was Schuon who said something to the effect that Jesus is both man's icon of God and God's icon of man (man-as-such).

And what -- or who -- is man-as-such?

Ah, that leads us into a deuscussion of this purusha character, more on whom tomorrow.

Original Synthesis

We're still cogitating this provocative Jesus Purusha isness. I haven't actually finished the book, as I need to think about what the author has said thus far before proceeding further. At times he gets either a little murky or else doesn't clearly explain what he means in plain lowman terms.

I imagine that being a shut-your-trappist monk in an ashram can do that to a guy. Without an interlocutor to occasionally squinch up his face and go dude, whaaaaa?, you might not get the feedback you need in order to know when you're starting to sound chopraesque, which is to say, either too vaguely gaseous or too idiosyncratically solid. You need to have some meat in the muddle and be able to speak with a pliable substance that is neither too unyielding nor falls apart as soon as you chew on it.

Davie speculates that instead of just the usual distinction between primitive Palestinian-Jewish and Hellenistic stages -- or layers -- of Christianity, we need to supplement them with a third. Primitive Christianity could have ramified in different directions, and did ramify in different directions, hence all those early struggles to define orthodoxy and exclude heterodoxy.

Speaking of tossing, we may need to coin a neologism, "orthoheterodoxy," for those elements of Christianity that are considered outwardly heterodox but are inwardly -- which is to say esoterically -- necessary in order to make sense of the faith.

I would suggest that this whole book is exploring such orthoheterodox territory -- things that must be acknowledged as true, but which the authorities would prefer to keep quiet due to the danger of misunderstanding. I can't say I blame them. Milk and meat and all that.

Meister Eckhart, for example, might be the most important orthoheterodox theologian, and it is quite easy for the illwilled or smallbrained to make mischief with him. The best defense for this is to understand orthodoxy, and to always place what he says in that context. He's definitely not trying to venture outside the faith, but simply providing imaginative ways to explore it.

Same with Davie. He is quite clear in affirming that he is not trying to challenge orthodoxy, but illuminate it with some novel pneuumatic tools.

Here's the deal: the Christ-event is, yes, an event, but it is first and foremost a non-event, in the sense that it transcends history. You might say that it is much larger than history -- indeed, is the source of history -- and yet, must play out in time.

Therefore, whatever we might say about it is always attempting the impossible, like trying to describe a three-dimensional reality in two dimensions. If we forget this, we are inevitably drawn into a form of concretized mythological idolatry, worshiping a god of our own invention.

Davie suggests that there is a kind of implicit dialectic between Judaism and Hinduism, as if they represent two tendencies of the religious brain. Indeed, this idea converges nicely with our recent series of posts on the differing worlds of the right and left brain. Naturally, it is not a matter of either/or, but both/and (and more!), and Davie suggests that Christianity is precisely this both/and original synthesis.

Remember, you can just play with the idea. You don't need to believe or disbelieve at this early juncture.

Truth is one, of course. But it is also uncontainable (by man) in the sense alluded to above. Thus, Davie speculates that two major halves of this truth are emphasized by Judaism and Hinduism (also remember that neither is absent in the other; it's just a matter of emphasis).

Let's begin with the Creator/creature distinction. In Judaism the stress is on their differences, while in Hinduism the stress is on their identity, i.e., Atman is Brahman. The Ultimate is present to both, one via identity, the other via difference:

"This apparent opposition will in turn reflect the inability of the unaided human mind to think them both together," at least until encountered in the form of "the Incarnated One." Then the inference is that Hinduism is in fact true, albeit for one person. But in any event, this is a stumbling block to the left brain.

In Judaism you might say that the emphasis is on God's transcendence, while in Hinduism it is on his immanence. In the case of the former, "the only way in which [God's] transcendence of the world can be demonstrated is by divine suspension of, or irruption into, the processes of nature, and by divine acts of intervention in human history" (Davie).

Conversely, with the immanentized deity of Hinduism, we have the perception that "Nothing is external to God." Creation here is a kind of "self-projection" or emanation, as opposed to a distinct act of separation (and some would say "divine withdrawal," or tsimtsum, just to emphasize the God/world distinction). In Hinduism continuity subordinates discontinuity, but this also brings with it the potential danger of pantheism that Judaism so jealously guards against.

Which, as the crock ticks down, reminds me of a story Schall Turner tells in his On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait. I'll just summarize. Regarding the seeming opposition between God's omniscience and our free will, he suggested to a friend that Protestants are "either/or" while Catholics are "both/and."

However, his perceptive colleague reminded him that if this is the case, then it's a choice between either "either/or" or "both/and," so either/or wins.

Therefore, it must be a choice between "either/or," or "both/and," and/or "both/and and either/or," and only the latter is fully ortho-hetero-paradoxical.

So Many Worlds, So Little Time

Davie writes that "Although Christian theologians have frequently spoken of the Unacknowledged Christ of the Vedanta, they have been strangely silent about the Unacknowledged Vedanta behind Christianity."

This is unfortunate, because, as alluded to yesterday, the metaphysical principles embodied in Vedanta -- i.e., the Upanishads -- "can be shown to supply the logical precondition of orthodox Christianity."

Certainly they provide a better fit than, say, the dualistic Platonism that some of the early fathers over-relied upon in order to make sense of their new revelation.

More generally, if Christianity is truly universal, there can be no objection to assimilating ideas and concepts from other cultures in ardor to advance our understanding.

True, Christianity is also a historical religion, which can at times work counter to the idea of universality. For example, if the arc of salvation runs only from Jerusalem to Rome, that excludes an awful lot of history. Perhaps we need to reframe the command to preach to the four corners of the world.

World.

There is the exterior world, of course, but more importantly, there is also the interior world. If you take the command literally, you might as well stand alone on top of a mountain in some far off corner of the earth, yelling into the wind.

No, the point is, you have to reach the people who inhabit those corners.

We've all heard about the "first world," "second world," "third world," etc. Every once in awhile it occurs to me that I need to write a post about how there are also various internal worlds in different stages of development.

Starting back-to-front, Professor Wiki says that the 4th world consists of socially excluded sub-populations (even if living in the first world), and hunter-gatherer, nomadic, pastoral, and subsistence farming peoples living beneath the modern industrial norm.

Third world peoples have entered history, and are at least starting to develop, while first world countries are completely there. The second world might be thought of as an attempt to arrest time -- as in the case of contemporary progressives -- via a planned economy.

But as we know from baneful expedience, any effort to control a self-organizing structure from the top down results in chaos, so the second world ends up tending toward the third, as we see in Obamaworld -- e.g., record numbers of people on food stamps and disability, millions giving up on finding work, etc.

How would the above scheme apply to the interior worlds? I suppose you would say that progress in this domain represents a conquest of dimensionality, as we have discussed in the past.

I'm starting to run out of time, but it occurs to me that the interior analogue of the second world would also tend toward the third and fourth, as it involves a rejection of time and of verticality. As we know, there is nothing progressive about progressivism.

Hmm. While searching for something else, it occurs to me that I might have adequately discussed all this in the past, e.g., Pimp-Slapping Obama and Conserving Our Metaphysical Dream of Progress, Universal Religion and the Many Worlds Hypothesis, and Just One Thing I'd Like to Know, How You Stay High, and Live So Low.

Down to 12 minutes. Time enough to say that the fourth world is diffuse mythological/magical, the third world centralized mythic/magical authoritarianism, the second world progressive / leftist / fascist / socialist / atheist statism, and the first world the vertically informed horizontality of American-style classical liberalism.

No time to read them, but probably some more relevant posts under this heading.

And now 5 minutes to spielcheck.

Render unto Lois Lerner what Belongs to Obama... or Join Apparatchiks Anonymous!

In a chapter on Islam, Caldecott points out that -- very much in contrast to Christianity -- it endeavors to overcome "the gulf between man and God" via politics, i.e., "by attempting to establish a theocratic state."

Conversely, "the very fact that Christians were not 'under the law,' made possible the modern conception of a purely secular state..." Indeed, many writers locate the foundation of the secular state in Jesus' advice to fork over to Caesar what belongs to Caesar.

However, I wouldn't be so quick to link Jesus to a particular political philosophy, at least based on that crack alone. Clearly, he is making a statement about spiritual priorities and about the overall purpose of life. He's not enunciating a theory of governance. Besides, context is important. What would he say in Nazi Germany? "Render unto Hitler what belongs to Hitler." I don't think so.

Anyway, I think we can all stipulate that there is, by definition, a gulf between man and God. How to bridge it? First of all, it is axiomatic that man cannot do it from his side alone, otherwise he would be God (or God would be him, to be precise).

The diverse religions are essentially defined by their differing methods of divine linkage. Both Islam and Judaism do so via conformity to the Law. Buddhism and Vedanta do so by illuminating and eliminating one of the partners from the law firm, i.e., satori and moksha, respectively. Christianity bridges the gap from the other end, via the Incarnation.

Thus, in a way -- and I don't intend this as a critique, just a description -- only Christianity can literally do the job (at least for one person), since again, no matter how perfectly we conform to the law, we will not somehow be transformed into God. What distinguishes Christianity is the claim that the task has been accomplished, and that we may participate in it via divine adoption.

About that ontological gap between heaven and earth. It is interesting how similar leftism is to Islamism, because both approaches attempt to force salvation on us via politics. Obama is just the latest nitwiteration, nor is he the last, since leftists, by definition, do not learn. Leftism cannot be corrected or cured, only awakened from.

But every "from" implies a "to," so I might add that -- similar to alcoholism -- there is no non-spiritual cure for leftism. Note that the alcoholic shifts his allegiance from the bottle to a "higher power" that can restore him to sanity -- to O, as it were. Just so, the leftist must transfer his allegiance from the state to that very higher power who created us free and equal to begin with, prior to the state.

(Reminds me of an old post called Apparatchiks Anonymous, reprinted at the end for your amusement.)

This might be an opportune time to discuss another recent (for me) book, called Jesus Purusha: A Vedanta-Based Doctrine of Jesus. Caldecott mentions it in The R of B, so I picked up a copy. For only 57¢. Yesss!

The incongruous cover of the book makes it look like some kind of vaporous new age crock of native American Choprababble, but it is anything but. Almost all books are too long. This is one of the rare exceptions that is too short. It's rather dense and concentrated, and some of his definitions are on the idiosyncratic side.

In any event, it's not so much a Vedanta-based doctrine of Jesus -- in which Jesus is demoted to guru, swami, divine salesman, or even avatar -- but rather, a Christian assimilation of the Upanishads. It strikes me as completely orthodox, and does no violence whatsoever to the creed in order to make it fit into a vedantin metaphysic. Thus, it is not some shallow attempt at ecumenism, integralism, or synthesis, but a real metacreative brainwave.

However, I'll just stick with the parts I understood, since this guy seems to be above my praygrade.

The book takes the form of a series of letters "from the ashram of Jesus Purusha" to an English monk, setting out the theological position of the former. In so doing, he attempts to explain to the monk that his approach is not only orthodox, but highlights previously unappreciated implications of orthodoxy, since Vedanta provides the linguistic tools to do so.

Indeed, Davie shows that the metaphysical underpinnings of Vedanta supply "the precondition of orthodox Christology" -- the metacosmic principles by which something as flat out strange as Christianity is even possible, let alone true. It definitively relieves us of the need to appeal to myth or miracle in order to pull it all together. Which most Christians don't seem to mind doing, but that's no way to convince the rabble in the skeptic tank.

Davie speculates on the possibility of contact between India and ancient Palestine. Why not? Then again, who knows? Given the very nature of vertical murmurandoms, they will obviously strike down in distant temporal and geographical locales. Thus, we shouldn't be surprised that the Vedas announce that "In the beginning there was only Prajapati. His word was with him. This word was his double." Same memo, slightly different formulation.

This I found most provocative. Let's say that Jesus, instead of appearing in Palestine, had been born in India. He is gathered with the disciples, and asks the question, "Who do you say that I am?"

How would "an Indian Simon Peter" have responded? Yes, "thou art the Son of the living God." Except that in India, this would have been something of a commonplace, owing to the avatar principle.

No, this would have to be something different from your garden variety mangod. Davie suggests that the title "Christ" can mislead, since it is wedded to a specifically Jewish worldview. Is it possible that this title is part of a larger category?

Davie suggests that Simon Peter would have responded with something to the effect of, "You are the eternal Purusha," which is to say the "cosmic man" made flesh. This is very different from the usual Atman = Brahman available to all mortals as part of our standard equipment.

You might say that this realization (of Atman = Brahman) is equivalent to the Judeo-Christian doctrine that we are created in the image and likeness of God. That being the case, every man is ultimately God (i.e., is "not other" than God), even while God is obviously no man.

But to say that Jesus is the Purusha is another thing entirely. He is not a mangod, but rather, the Godman.

And with that, I'd better stop for the day. To be continued.

*****

As promised, the Apparatchiks Anonymous 12-step Program:

1. We admitted we were powerless over the intoxicating dreams of socialism, and that our lives and governments had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a power far greater than our own omnipotent egoic fantasies of total control could restore us to true liberalism.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the Source and Guarantor of our liberty.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of the well-intentioned failures and frank evils of socialism.

5. Admitted to the Creator of our Liberty, to ourselves, and in a live phone call to C-SPAN, the exact nature of socialism’s wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have the Creator of Our Liberty undo our college education and remove all these defects of ideology.

7. Humbly asked Him to cancel our subscription to the Times.

8. Made a list of all races, genders, and classes our government programs had harmed, and became willing to make amends by ignoring their constant whining, and preferably laughing at them.

9. Made direct amends to such people by realizing we have nothing to apologize for.

10. Continued to take a personal inventory, and when we were again tempted to abuse ideology for the purposes of blotting out reality, just got drunk instead.

11. Sought to improve our conscious contact with the Source of our Liberty through prayer, meditation, and listening to Rush Limbaugh.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to other leftists, even if it meant being denied tenure, disinvited to dinner parties, unfriended, and generally slimed by our intellectual inferiors.

Cosmic Desire: What Make a Bulldog Hug a Hound

I want to articulate some lust wishes before moving on from Being Alive. Caldecott asks the key question: could Life itself "be a transcendental" in the manner outlined by Christopher Alexander? I don't think there's any doubt about it, because otherwise who or what is Good, True, Beautiful, and One? Something dead?

"Of course, for Life to be regarded as a transcendental, it would have to be in everything, not just biological organisms" (ibid).

I frankly don't see this as a huge conceptual problem, or requiring any kind of great ontological leap. Rather, the converse: you actually need a leap of faith and a heap of credulity to imagine this whole manifestivus comes from, and returns to, death, truthlessness, ugliness, and ir-irreducible multiplicity.

"If God is life in the highest sense," then this life revolves around "self-giving and self-receiving" (ibid.). As we have already discussed, this is exactly how a living system maintains life: one doesn't want to stretch the analogy, but life itself is always rooted in exchange with the other. It's just that in God, the self is the other and the other is the self -- or, they are distinct but undivided.

But here again, it is possible to look at the ecosystem through the same spooktacles. I've mentioned before Alan Watts' quip that there can be no radical distinction between, say, the honey bee and the flower. So intertwined are they, so interdependent, that the one cannot live without the other. It is as if each is an external organ of the other -- except there must be some sort of "interior glue" holding them together.

Which reminds me. One afternoon in... let's see, must have been 1986. I had just passed some sort of written exam for my doctoral program, and was having a little celebration with myself. Not a major buzz, just a few be-ers while sitting on the balcony of my apartment in Pacific Palisades. (I even remember the soundtrack of the moment: REM's dreamy Fables of the Reconstruction.) It was springtime, and the birds were quite active, darting in and out of the trees. You know. Randy. Libidinous.

While contemplating the scene I fell into a sort of light trance, as it occurred to me that it wasn't the birds who were doing this. How to explain... It was as if I intuited the underlying "desire" of nature, just flowing through the birds at that moment. After all, nature revolves around this abstract desire, filtered through everything from bacteria to Bach.

And what is this desire? Yes, it is in the service of life. And it's a self-giving, or self-abandonment, except it doesn't become conscious until it reaches the human plane.

Think of all those Medieval stories of courtly love; or come to think of it, Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.

Again: self-abandonment seems to be the essence of love, and would therefore be the inverse of narcissistic self-love. Which is why the encirclopedia says that everything about God must be completely unnarcissary (p. 10).

Bottom line: Brofessor Dixon was quite right about the generalized nature of this metacosmic desire:

Why do all these men

Try to run a big-leg'd woman down?

Why do all these men

Try to run a big-leg'd woman down?

Must be the same old thing

What make a bulldog hug a hound

So, God's interior activity "must be reflected throughout the creation. The existence of a thing is a receiving and a giving of itself" (Caldecott, emphasis mine).

And interestingly, while the self-giving High Life becomes articulate in man, so too does its inapposite mumbler, for only lowlife humans can "fail to be fully what they are or should be, and fall short of the real" (ibid.).

I just thought of a bumper sticker. That no one will understand. Still, here it is: Entropy: Don't Fight it, Join it!

In other words, as Caldecott explains, the essence of human life is not to simply "exist passively" or "merely to resist entropy," but to love actively, which ultimately implies -- well, if Jesus is the cosmic person (we'll be swimming this Ovocative nocean at length later), the human quintessence, then the implication is Jesus; or, more precisely, the self-abandoning -- and therefore, other-serving -- contours of Jesus's life.

Since the transcendentals converge, being alive would have to be an expression of truth, and vice versa. We all know phonies, don't we? But Caldecott suggests that (he's actually quoting Alexander here) most human beings "are not fully true to their own inner natures or fully 'real.'" Thus, "When you meet a person who is true to himself, you feel at once that he is 'more real' than other people are."

And not only. For I myself am more real in the presence of a real person, and indeed, will have a hard time being myself, or selfing my being, should I fail to discover those person(s) without whom I am not real.

God is the Superglue

We're still discussing what it means to be Alive.

Now that I think about it, I don't know that we can know what it means to be alive, for the same reason we can't know what it means to be conscious (or the eye can't see vision). The categories of being alive and conscious are simply the conditions of knowing anything.

Nevertheless, even if the problem isn't soluble, it's thinkable, at least with the proper tools. Caldecott suggests that life "unites, binding many parts into a single whole." I might add that it is both a dynamic wholeness and a timebound wholeness.

In other words, a nonliving entity can still be a whole -- a unit -- but it is a whole in space only. When the body becomes a corpse, it has made the transition from spatiotemporal wholeness to mere spatial wholeness -- until even that decays and dissipates, since there is no longer any interior principle -- the soul -- holding it all together.

Bearing this in mind, Caldecott goes on to say that the "secret of life" must have something to do with "memory, understanding, and love," to which I would add the very important and expensive category of anticipation, in order to account for the future-orientation of life, to go along with past (memory) and present (understanding). And again, each of these must be dynamic, not static.

That is to say, as alluded to in the previous post, our lives must be open systems at each level of existence. Obviously we will die if we do not exchange matter and energy with the environment, but the same holds true of information and emotion. Babies will literally die -- or at least become sickly and stunted -- in the absence of love, and what is sickness but an absence of wholeness (health and whole being cognates)? And the typical low-information liberal is dead from the neck up and the heart in. Stupidity kills!

Now, "When Christians speak of immortality, we are referring to the existence we receive when God remembers, understands, and loves us" (ibid). Tomberg makes the same point somewhere -- that just as death is related to sleeping and forgetting, life is related to awakening and remembering. Brings to mind the second criminal, who said to Jesus: "Lord, remember me when You come into Your kingdom" (Luke 23:42).

Reflecting on love and memory, Caldecott says that "in our own love for others is revealed that interior dimension through which we ourselves are renewed and resurrected." Not so sure about that last one, since human love, in the absence of divine intervention, is also the most painful kind of crucifixion.

An elderly Catholic neighbor of mine told me the story of losing his five year old son to leukemia back in the early 1960s. That's crucifixion, and it is precisely the dilemma that urgently introduces the need for renewal and resurrection. But how?

I wish I could remember the whole story -- it's probably been 10 years -- but he told of how, in the hospital, he had the experience of a kind of unimaginable peace descending from above. That doesn't mean he didn't grieve -- even Jesus cries at Lazarus's grave -- but it does mean that the ingression of divine Love and Recollection assured him that somehow everything was going to be alright in the end.

I'm also now remembering a patient who worked in a jewelry store and was involved in a robbery. While one monster was ransacking the place, the other monster had her on her knees with a gun stuck in the back of her head. She began praying, and again described the descent of a kind of total peace. Whereas before she had been thinking about her orphaned children and widowed husband, now it was as if she were being offered a preview of heaven.

Could it have simply been shock? I don't think so, because I've seen plenty of traumatized people whose minds shut down in the midst of the trauma, and it is more analogous to a photographic negative of the above; instead of widening, there is restriction; instead of vivid feeling, there is numbness; instead of peace, there is deadness.

In these latter cases the trauma isn't healed, but is merely kept in psychic escrow for later processing. The person has the traumatic experience, but it comes out later in piecemeal fashion, in the form of symptoms of PTSD.

But the woman referenced above didn't even need treatment. I saw her once, and that was it. I informed her of all the usual symptoms of PTSD, and instructed her to call me if she were troubled by any, but I never heard from her again. (I might add that I didn't have the sense that she was merely in denial; rather, it seemed to me that her preemptive healing was deep and robust, not brittle and superficial.)

Caldecott next goes into a discussion of Christopher Alexander, whose works we toyed with during the month of March. Alexander believes -- as does The B'ob -- that Life Itself is not, and cannot be, just a highly improbable concentration of local complexity in defiance of Big Entropy, but that it must be a more general property of the universe. It's frankly everywhere. It's just that it is brought out more intensely and vividly under certain local conditions.

I see that I said as much on p. 61: "Thus, while life arose through the universe, by no means are we justified in saying that it was a dead universe" -- if only because in a relativistic cosmos we must look at the time dimension in a different manner. If time is spatialized, then it becomes obvious that life is everywhen. You might say that the cosmos spent nine billion years just clearing its throat before uttering LIFE! some four billion years ago.

To quote the B'ob again, in order to comprehend our metacosmic egosystem, "we must read the fine print represented by Life itself, not just the large-print, condensed version produced by physics" for the consumption of cardiomyopic flatlanders.

I mean, I just don't see how one gets from non-life to Life in any other way: "Alexander argues that matter and space are not 'dead' but possess degrees of life..." (Caldecott). Only because the cosmos is already a field-like structure can we have the field-like structure of life -- which again forms a field in space and time.

Temporal glue. That's what life is. Regular glue only holds together things in proximity, but temporal glue holds together everytime from embryo to old man. And transtemporal glue affixes the latter timestream to O. Come to think of it, you could say the Trinity is a kind of dynamic glue, the glue being a very frisky love eternal.

On Being Alive

Time enough only for a dashed-off, stream-of-consciousness metaphysical bleat...

Being Alive: that's the title of our next chapter, which reflects on the question of What is life? It begins with Goethe's aphoristic attempt at an answer: "Where subject and object touch, there is life."

I would agree. Except this just kicks the definition down -- or up? -- the semantic road, since we then have to inquire into the meaning of "subject" and "object." I define the former as the cosmic interior, the latter as the cosmic exterior; or, one might say "vertical" and "horizontal."

Only living things have both an interior and an exterior, and the evolution of life charts the progressive exploration and expansion of the interior horizon. The human interior is much wider, higher, and deeper than that of any animal. And in the competition between human philosophies, the most expansive wins.

Now, having said that, Whitehead believed -- and science confirms -- that everything has an interior, however attenuated, otherwise it wouldn't be a thing.

In other words, everything is form + substance, else it couldn't exist. There can be no form without substance, nor any substance without form. It's just that the human form is both conscious of itself and capable of virtually infinite expansion.

Conversely a rock or a reptile or a Reverend Sharpton simply is what it is. (Although humans, and humans alone, can also be what they are not, which is a-hole nether slobject.)

I've been looking at this new Portrait of Aquinas, and he makes the same point vis-a-vis the human soul.

Note the predicate "human." For Aquinas, everything has a soul (i.e., form), for reasons alluded to above. Human beings are pure animal from top to bottom, except they have a very different sort of soul-interior, i.e., a rational one (and rational here implies much more -- and less -- than just logic).

Caldecott reviews some of the scientific explanations of Life. For example, life represents a "local reversal of entropy," which reduces us to mere fugitives from the second law of thermodynamics. And like the Mounties, entropy always gets its man.

A living thing resists entropy by maintaining an open system, exchanging matter, energy, or information with the environment. As it so happens, my doctoral dissertation was on just this subject (among others), applying insights from the study of dissipative structures to the mind. Little did I know that 25 years later I'd be blah-blah-blogging about it.

So, life is, in one sense, entropy-resistance, and as one wise revtile once put it, resist we much!

Caldecott poses a coonundrum for us: "Of what is death the absence?" "For someone facing the prospect of his own extinction, the answer must be more than a simple description of what happens when his body turns into a corpse."

For one thing, that's not death, that's after death. Can we even experience our own death? Apparently not, because only life can experience anything; in a sense life is experience.

For Aquinas, "a dead body is only a 'body' in a manner of speaking.... A dead person is not a person in the unfortunate condition of being dead. A dead person is what was once a person, but now is not.... Likewise, an animal body is what the corpse was before it died" (Turner).

So the corpse, really, is neither human body nor human soul, since those two always appear together.

So... what happened to Jesus on the cross? Did he experience death? This is discussed in chapter IX of this fascinating (and challenging) little book I'm reading, Jesus Purusha (which is later referenced in Caldecott's book). In it, the author asks how there can "be continuity of consciousness, if Jesus really died? Are we not demanding the logically impossible?"

No. Davie resolves this question by noting that the essence of Jesus's consciousness revolves around "surrender to the Father," so that "continuity of consciousness is preserved in the Other to whom the surrender is made."

It very much reminds me of Hindu and Buddhist doctrines to the effect that if we die before we die, then we do not die. What Davie is suggesting is that Jesus represents the real historical embodiment of the mythological dream. Much more on Davie's book later.

Way out of time. To be continued....

The Horizontally Warped and the Vertically Weft Behind

Chapter 3 of The Radiance of Being is called Vertical Evolution, a title I will steal if I ever get around to to a cirquel.

Then again, maybe I don't need to steal it. Let's see... a quick search of vertical evolution yields ten wordy posts, which I suppose is nearly enough for a book. Out of curiosity, I counted the wordys: 17,199. Enough for a children's booky. Hmmm. A Young Person's Guide to Vertical Evolution....

Although there can be no conflict between true religion and real science, the materialists don't see it that way because they can't -- or refuse to -- see it that way. Caldecott:

"The tendency in the evolutionist camp is always to turn the theory of evolution into something more than it is, indeed to transform it into a religion..." (He cites a book by that title which I'd never heard of.)

My only quibble is that the problem isn't with the fact of evolution but with the theory of evolution by natural selection alone. Why limit onesoph in such a way, when there can be nothing in the theory itself that excludes other factors. It's analogous to, say, promulgating a theory of human development via nature alone or nurture alone, when there is obviously an interplay of the two.

Caldecott makes the point that for a certain type of mind, the theory "has to be true, for no other type of explanation would be acceptable..."

In other words, as we have said many times, it's really an a priori conclusion pretending to be a theory -- like the frog (pardon my French) that says "I have a theory that all insects are alive," when dead insects simply don't register in the frog's perceptual field. Or, a child might say, "I have a theory that when I walk down the street at night, the moon follows me." The supposedly neutral perception is really a subjective projection -- or a projection of subjectivity.

And even leaving aside the theory -- or the subjective projection -- that all biological diversity may be reduced to random copying errors, it vastly exceeds any rightful claim -- and any sense of proportion -- by insisting that "all life on earth can be traced back to one primitive organism, developing spontaneously and by chance, probably from a primordial soup of electrified chemicals" (Caldecott).

How is this different from any other degenerate creation myth? It is what I call the "godlessness of the gaps" approach, whereby, when confronted with an irreducible mystery, the person banishes it by fleeing into the comforting delusion of either scientistic necessity or blind fortuity. Both "solutions" simply eliminate the problem by a kind of special pleading.

Paradigms matter. For example, can we understand more about the cosmos by employing a machine metaphor or an organism metaphor? The Raccoon says: why limit ourselves to one or the other? Complementarity, baby. Almost always, when one reaches a metaphysical paradox, it is simply an orthoparadox -- for example, form vs. substance, or wave vs. particle, or time vs. eternity, or boxers vs. briefs.

Why pretend we know what consciousness is, when it is strictly impossible to do so? I say this for the same reason that it is strictly impossible for the eye to know what vision is like. Caldecott quotes the philosopher Jerry Fodor, who correctly points out that "Nobody has the slightest idea how anything material could be conscious."

I mean, right? And not only:

"Nobody even knows what it would be like to have the slightest idea about how anything material could be conscious." I, however, do have a slight idea of what it would be like to have the slightest idea of what it would be like to have such an idea. Problem is, I haven't the slightest idea how to express it.

Speaking of which, Caldecott suggests that "God speaks to us not in human words but through whatever happens to us, moment by moment."

To be clear, this doesn't exclude words, it just places them in the total context of one's life. We may regard the statement "as a reference to another kind of causality, at right angles to the kind investigated by science but not in contradiction to it" (ibid.).

Exactly -- like contextual and relational right brain vs. linear and particulate left brain. Thus, the events of our lives "have their normal (efficient, material) causes, the kind studied by science, but they also have a higher explanation..." The vertically aware simply recognize "a higher level of order or meaning, supervening upon and assuming the lower-level of material cause and effect" (ibid).

Material science is (or pretends to be) entirely time-bound, using material and efficient causes to predict in the direction past-to-future, or to deduce the past from the present. Conversely -- no, complementarily -- religion uses formal and final causes in order to intuit top-down explanations and to apprehend future-to-present causation.

Bottom line? "Horizontal and vertical causality are like the warp and weft making up a single fabric" (ibid), the very fabric we use to weave the cosmic area rug that ones to pull twogather the threeds in this vast womb of souls.

Science is Unscientific and the Constitution is Against the Law

In chapter 2 of The Radiance of Being, called A Science of the Real, Caldecott makes the point that --

Well, first of all, consider those two words, "science" and "real." In our post-Kantian world, science cannot be "of the real," since there is an unbridgeable gulf between what is -- whatever that is -- and what we may know about it. The world is bifurcated into two domains, with science essentially reduced to what we can say about what our neurology says about a rumored "world" out there. To paraphrase Whitehead, the world is reduced to a dream at one end and conjecture at the other.

Yes, it sounds more than a little psychotic, but people will go to any length to avoid certain avenues of thought that lead to certain unwanted conclusions -- in this case, that no science of the real can exclude the Creator, or reality as such.

Anyway, Caldecott says that "In order for anything like modern science" -- I would just say "science" -- "to arise, it was necessary to believe in both the intelligibility of the cosmos and its contingency -- both the fact that it made sense, and the fact that it might not have existed."

So we see that science involves an element of absoluteness, which derives from the necessity of truth; but also of contingency, which derives from the infinite plenitude of the Creator. Thus, the world IS; but this IS cannot be self-sufficient, else it wouldn't be contingent (i.e., the world would be God).

Therefore, we see that the Isness of the world must be a kind of borrowed being, i.e., dependency on a higher principle.

Caldecott goes on to say that "Intelligibility alone would lead to the priority of deduction over induction, as in the ancient philosophies of nature where an observed reality... had to be conformed to a priori structures..."

This is why I do not call such an approach "science" per se, because it actually renders science impossible. Modern science is really something quite new, not traceable to ancient Greece.

In fact, I recall Rodney Stark making just this point in his For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery. You hafta sorta not know what science is in order to believe the Greeks had it.

Note also that merely learning from the world empirically -- as helpful as that is -- isn't science either. Rather, real science -- or a science of the real -- must involve both: empirical observation of the world (of particulars) dynamically interacting with a more general logico-deductive system. This did not exist until the scientific revolution, which in turn only occurred in one place and at one time: in the Christian west.

Retrograde postmodernism is actually a rebellion -- or reactionary counter-revolution -- against the scientific world. Caldecott writes that "By separating real from rational entities, science from faith and God from nature, the via moderna of the nominalist philosophers from the 14th century onwards undermined natural philosophy and metaphysics."

In other words, the world is reduced to the world, so to speak, which has the perverse effect of elevating appearances to reality. But in the words of Davila, "The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality." If the world is the reality, then it is nothing.

Here is the key point: "By arguing that nothing can exist but individual objects," the postmodern approach "effectively eliminated the 'vertical' or 'interior' dimension of reality -- the dimension of metaphysical form, final causality, and divine providence..." (Caldecott).

I would emphasize that the vertical IS the interior, and vice versa, so that to exclude one is to make nonsense of the other. Indeed, everything science can say about the world is rendered absurd by its own dim lights.

Truly, it is intellectual, or psychopneumatic, suicide -- except that it then leads to homicide and genocide. This is because the intellectual Zombies of Death convert their flatlandian superstitions into a religion, and persecute those who fail to recognize their strange gods.

Seriously, what is the IRS scandal but the leftist state-god systematically persecuting that half of the population which doesn't worship at that altar? This is why it is easily the worst scandal in the history of this country, because never before has this government -- which derives its just powers from the consent of the governed -- declared war on that half of the country which has the audacity to still believe such insolent nonsense.

Thus, for example, to teach the Constitution makes one an enemy of the state. But this is merely making fully explicit what has been implicit since Woodrow Wilson.

Aaaaaaaand, we're out of time.

God is a Geometer. If Geometry is Frozen Music.

One more point about chapter one of The Radiance of Being. In the course of a discussion on the meaning of infinity, Caldecott quotes the mathematician Georg Cantor, who said that "the essential nature of the infinite is one of an inherent passing-beyond itself, while the infinite is also a primal reality whose nature is participated in by all forms of being as much as they participate in the finite."

This reminds me of several hOMe truths -- or of several ways of uttering the same primordial Truth. First, it is very much reminiscent of Meister Eckhart's notion of the Godhead-ground, which ceaselessly "boils over" into creation.

McGinn describes this big boomerang as "the dynamic reciprocity of the 'flowing forth' of all things from the hidden ground of God, and the 'flowing back,' or 'breaking through,' of the universe into essential identity with this divine source."

Elsewhere Caldecott writes of how "Creation is not a change; it is a more radical beginning than that. It takes place 'outside time,' because time itself is a creature, or a dimension of created things..."

This helps to make sense of some of Eckhart's typically orthoparadoxical statements such as "Now the moment I flowed out from the Creator, all creatures stood up and shouted: 'Behold, here is God!'"

And where Cantor says that every finite participates in, or is infused with, the infinite, this reminds me of Eckhart's cracks that "Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God," and "heaven invades the earth, energizes it, makes it sacred." For "God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop."

Furthermore, creation is not a once-upon-a-time event, but a One's-upin-his-timeless reality. Eckhart: "Now God creates all things but does not stop creating."

Rather, "God forever creates and forever begins to create." Because God's creation is necessarily fractal and holographic, the creation itself never stops creating: exploring, discovering, playing, improvising.

Speaking of which, one of the most accomplished analogues of God's creativity was surely J.S. Bach. I'm reading a fascinating book about him, and the dimensions of his creativity are, I think, literally impossible to comprehend in human terms.

You could say he was an "idiot savant" minus the idiocy, but that's just a name, not an explanation. Elie calls him "a technician of the sacred," which is a good start, if understood in light of Eckhart's above description of how heaven "invades the earth" and "makes it sacred." It certainly invaded Bach and made his music -- which is otherwise just horizontal air vibrations -- sacred.

Elie: "The music of Bach, it seems to me, is the most persuasive rendering of transcendence there is; and its irreducible otherworldliness, its impress of eternity... are there for us to encounter in our lives if we are open to them."

Elsewhere Elie quotes Albert Schweitzer, who wrote that "what speaks through [Bach's] work is pure religious emotion.... It is the emotion of the infinite and exalted, for which words are always an inadequate expression..." His are "sermons in sound" and "visions of eternity."

I think you could say that it's like music, only more so, in the sense that Bach is only capitalizing on an intrinsic capacity of music and an innate capacity of man.

In The Music of Creation, the authors write that music itself affords "a rich reservoir of models and metaphors for explicating God's continuous creative activity and presence." They attempt to develop an "image of God as the supreme Creator-Composer, the incomparable Improvisor" (you might say I-AMprovisor).

The book includes a CD with vivid examples of music-as-revelation. A couple of selections -- one by Haydyn, another by Wagner -- aurally depict not so much the Big Bang, but cosmogenesis itself, i.e., vertical creation from nothing.

This is exactly what I attempted to do, only with hyperlinguistic metalanguage, on pp. 6-17 of the book; and when writing it, I even considered providing musical recommendations to convey the same ideas.

Been awhile, so I don't recall the details, but I remember considering Steve Roach's Magnificent Void for pp. 6-7, and parts of Wayne Shorter's All Seeing Eye for pp. 12-14. And parts of Robert Rich's Rain Forest for Biogenesis.

Yeah, I'm a cretin compared a Bach appreciator, but we're not elitists here.

Gotta sign off. Have to finish some work before a dental appointment.

Just My Lux

So, Caldecott, like your humble correspundant, is just a (¶)lay theologian, a soph-taught auto-deidact, not a credentialed pneumacrat.

Which is a good thing, in my opinion, for the most tedious books on theology are generally written by those who have the academic right to do so, but no divine obligation or mandate. I mean, no one asks Michael Jordan to show us his Ph.D. in basketballogy.

"There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures" (Dávila). Just so, there can be a hunger in the body that no amount of food can appease -- an insultaining formulation which explains the existence of both fatheads and fatasses.

Besides, in the words of Dávilagain, A dentistry degree is respectable, but a philosophy degree is grotesque. So a theology degree is just plain nauseating. For if you know what you're doing, you can't really be theologizing, because it's just coming from you, right? Thus, "the most lucid writer spends a lot of time doing what he does not know how he knows how to do" (ibid). I know I don't.

And what truly counts "is not what comes from the depths [↑] of the soul, but what invades [↓] it." (↑) can only take one so far. Even Aquinas -- one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived -- said that all his (↑) was "so much straw" in comparison to the overpowering infusion of (↓) he was vouchsafed toward the end of his life.

Not to mention the fact that "Prose is corrupted when it proposes to be convincing rather than simply intelligible" (ibid). In other words, I think the effective theologian must show, not argue, let alone "prove." It takes a lot of intelligence to not pretend to know what one is talking about, especially when one has a lot of education.

The first and last temptation of the tenured is the "solution." If this country fails, it will be due to the deadly solutions of the left, which mostly involve the manipulation language so as to try to alter reality.

Obama daftly illustrated this in his speech the other day at the National Defense University -- for example, "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us."

This is a quintessentially postmodern sentiment, analogous to saying, "reality must comport with our truth, or else truth will be a reflection of reality." Can't have that!

As mentioned in the previous post, Caldecott's book is divided into three parts, the first one revolving around the "nature of nature."

Now, we all know that nature herself is supernatural, otherwise it would make no sense at all. I would say that, just as the intellect is "supernaturally natural," nature is "naturally supernatural." And to "know nature" is a form of mystical union -- to say nothing of loving nature, i.e., perceiving the beauty all around us.

So although the third section of the book is on "divine Wisdom," one is reminded of the fractal-trinitarian structure of the world, through which everything dynamically interpenetrates everything else. In order to depict this visually, one would need a trinitarian yin-yang symbol rendered fractally, only in a spherical form -- like the lower two combined into the shape of a ball:

The first chapter is on the nature of light. As we know, in a properly oriented, bright-side up cosmos, the light we perceive with our eyes is an analogue of spiritual and intellectual light, not the converse. And here is something I did not know: Caldecott (quoting Thomas Torrance) notes that

"Clerk Maxwell's belief in the God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ made him question whether the universe created by the Wisdom of God did really behave in the way described by Newtonian mechanics.... It was through allowing Christian thought (such as the understanding of interpersonal relations derived from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity) to bear upon his scientific thinking that he came up with the conception of the continuous dynamic field, to which Einstein was to point as introducing the most far-reaching change in the rational structure of science and our understanding of nature."

So light comes from Light (just as life from Life, intelligence from Intelligence), for the converse could never be true -- nor could there even be truth in such a backassword cosmos, for that matter.

Later in the essay -- and I'm just flipping around -- Caldecott suggests that "the whole world" might be "a product of zero and infinity, in a sense poised between these two extremes."

I don't think there's any doubt about that, regardless of what the physics shows. Man is without question suspended between O and Ø -- we are spirit and dust, or matter that may transcend itself and touch truth, beauty, love, virtue, etc. The ambiguity of this in-between space is the source of all this tension and drama, because compared to God we are nothing.

And yet, compared to nothing, we are everything.

That's it for today. To be continued...

Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity

That's the subtitle of a new book by Stratford Caldecott, The Radiance of Being: Dimensions of Cosmic Christianity. No, I haven't overcome my recent word-weariness, but since I received a free copy from the publisher, I feel honorbound to write a review, even though there is no obligation to do so. I'm just not used to getting free stuff.

First of all, did he steal the book's title from me? Nah, we're just on the same page and in the same attractor. Just when no one I think is in my tree, here comes another sap in the same branch. I just now looked it up, and I see, for example, Christianity and the Cosmic Thing, Cosmic Christianity, or Adam & Evolution, and Incarnating the Cosmic Person, but I think the overall trend of the blog over the course of 2,181 posts has been toward the development of a "cosmic christianity."

Attractor? For Caldecott, the Holy Spirit is a "magnetic field" that "draws all men to Christ" and arouses "the love of man and [gives] it a direction." Man is always oriented to the Cosmic Center, if only he prays attention to the interior compass deivoice inside his head.

In truth -- and I've probably said this before -- Christianity has always been cosmic in its scope and its consequences. It's just that our understanding of the cosmos is very different today than it was one or two thousand years ago.

Actually -- and this is a key point -- the cosmos hasn't changed all that much, being that man hasn't changed all that much. It is a conceit of modern man to imagine that he lives in a kind of light that was denied earlier generations, when the Light doesn't belong to man to begin with.

Rather, the Light that lights the world is always available to man as such, which is why, for example, Whitehead could make the remark that all philosophy is just a footnote on Plato, or why Aristotle and Aquinas will always be relevant, to put it mildly.

Not to go all Kant on you, but he did latch on to a partial truth in suggesting that, in some sense, the cosmos is a form of our sensibility. As Caldecott expresses it, "not only is the eye sun-related, the sun as well is eye-related."

In other words, we are both liberated and limited by our human station -- we don't perceive the world as does a bat, a cat, or an angel, let alone as does the Creator. Rather, we see the world as a human does, and any man, at any time, can circumnovelgaze the the limits of the soul, whether via philosophy, art, or virtue.

Man is in the image of the Absolute, which is why we may become "adequate" to it, even while not actually becoming it. Caldecott makes the same point: "Since there are orders of infinity, everything that exists can partake of infinity in a certain respect."

This is also why man may achieve terrestrial (i.e., relative) "perfection," but also why perfection cannot surpass itself and fully identify with the source of perfection. In the words of Schuon, "Man is made in such a way that he is never fully actualized within the limits of his possibilities except with the help of constraints, otherwise he would be perfect..."

Just as one perfect poem does not cancel out or negate another perfect poem -- or painting or musical composition -- we have to stop believing that one manmode belief system can cancel out all the others.

Rather, it's all true!, as it were. It's just a matter of properly situating everything in the cosmic hierarchy. Everything has its place, even materialism. Even leftism! Just not as a form of government. I run my family on thoroughly communist grounds, in that we all share everything, and everyone is equal, except some people are more equal than others, and if anything goes wrong, I investigate myself.

Hey, what about the book!

Right. It is actually a collection of essays -- what I call "blog posts" -- divided into three main sections, Nature, Divine Nature, and Sophia. It's all one, but one is three, as it were:

"In the Beautiful Logos all things cohere. In the Word of words all threads of meaning are drawn together, and the notes and noises of our lives add up to parts of a symphony or a song we could never have guessed" (Caldecott).

Where have we heard that tune before?

Right. Page 21: "The universe is like a holographic, multidimensional musical score that must be read, understood, and performed.... For at the end of the day, we are each a unique and unrepeatable melody that can, if we only pay close enough attention to the polyphonic score that surrounds and abides within us, harmonize existence in our own beautiful way, and thereby hear the vespered strains of the Song Supreme."

And on p. 248: "In the end, we are no longer a scattered, fragmented multiplicity in futile pursuit of an ever-receding unity, but a Unity that comprehends and transcends the multiplicity of the cosmos."

I would now put that differently, and say a Unity³, but this is nevertheless the dynamically "still point between the vertical and horizontal, where eternity pierces the present moment and we are unborn again."

Caldecott: "The ultimate resolution of the manifold tensions of existence is not the silence of the One, but the music of the Trinity," where "the unity is the distinction, and the distinction is the unity" (Eckhart, in Caldecott).

Well, I can't really compete with the pounding going on above my head. To be continued, maybe Friday.

The Birds & the 'Bats

Meditations on the Tarot has a lengthy account of the nature of guardian angels. It's pretty straightforward, and I don't want to just rewordgitate what Tomberg says. All I can really add is that if you don't think you have a guardian angel, just fake it for awhile. There is no one lonelier than an angel with nothing to do.

Out of curiosity, I looked it up on wikipedia, and it says that "A guardian angel is an angel assigned to protect and guide a particular person or group.... Christian mystics have at times reported ongoing interactions and conversations with their guardian angels, lasting several years."

I also just read in Gilson that "Angels are creatures whose existence can be demonstrated," and that "To disregard them destroys the balance of the universe considered as a whole."

Tomberg writes that "The Angel depends on man in his creative activity. If the human being does not ask for it, if he turns away from him, the Angel has no motive for creative activity. He can then fall into a state of consciousness where all his creative geniality remains in potential and does not manifest. It is a state of vegetation or 'twilight existence' comparable to sleep from the human point of view. An Angel who has nothing to exist for is a tragedy in the spiritual world."

I'm just going to reflect on whatever strikes my attention, such as the following: "the formation of wings" depends upon "a current from above [read: (↓)] which moves to meet that from below [(↑)]. Wings are formed only when the two currents -- that of human endeavor and that of grace -- meet and unite." Thus, identical to the manner in which earthly wings are formed by natural selection, the need evokes the function.

Tomberg goes on to say that all forms of radical secularism "can create only the wings of Icarus." I am immediately reminded of Michael Novak's outstanding On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding, in that our Fathers -- perhaps because they were listening to the counsel of their better angels -- got the formula exactly right for our extraordinary national flight of the past two and a quarter centuries.

As always, when we say that the left in general and Obama in particular are "anti-American," we do not mean it in an insulting or polemical way. Rather, we mean it in this precise way: that the left explicitly wishes to clip one of our wings, which, as God is my witness, will cause us to plummet to the ground like bags of wet cement, no different than any other turkey of a nation.

When the flightless birds of the left squawk about "separation of church and state," what they really mean is the violent dismemberment of one of our wings. It makes no more sense than cutting off the thumb to spite our hand. The hand will remain, but it won't be able to grasp much, just as the single-winged bipeds of the left are unable to achieve vertical liftoff. It has nothing to do with politics, but with a pre-political choice. The politics follows logically from the anterior soph-mutilation.

True, the leftist may develop wings of a sort, but we all recognize these appendages for what they are, for they are "the wings of a bat, i.e., those of darkness which are organs by means of which one can plunge into the depths of darkness" (Tomberg).

These are the worldly wings that allow them to navigate through their dark and dreadful 'batmosphere, AKA the Culture of Death. Most contemporary art and literature is of this nature, which is why the autists who produce it cannot soar upward but only can sink downward and confuse it with flight (which it is, until one hits bottom). The Waste Land comes to mind:

And bats with baby faces in the violet light / Whistled, and beat their wings / And crawled head downward down a blackened wall / And upside down in air were towers / Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours / And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Yes moonbatman, you may flip and flap your two vestigial left wings of hope and change, but you will never achieve true flight, for there is no such thing as a free launch. Rather, you will simply turn on your own axis in a tight little spiral, and then drill down into the abyss. Nor will you grow, for you are trying to subsist on your own waste, incessantly churned out by the media-university complex.

Our "vastly enlarged perspectives of knowledge should open up fresh vistas of religious faith" (Eliot), not close off the frontier of unKnowing. Remember, human knowledge is like a little expanding circle placed in the center of Being. Thus, the more we extend our boundaries, the greater the area we do not know. In the past, the problem was a paucity of knowledge. For us, a surfeit. Much of the latter needs to be tossed overboard in order to leave the ground and soar upward.

Russell Kirk writes that no Christian belief is "more neglected today... than the concept of guardian angels," which is "no less credible than many other dogmas which Eliot had learned to accept.... Imperfect though it may be, evidence for the existence of intermediary spiritual beings is no less intelligible than the proofs for various theories of natural science.... [F]or him, there was nothing repugnant or incredible in conceiving of tutelary beings of another order than human."

Hey, why not? Kirk mentions Yeats, "who believed that some great dead man watches over every passionate living man of talents." I believe this. I believe that through a kind of "passionate resonance," we may enter the interior mansion of a great person and borrow a portion of his precious mʘjʘ. Greater men than I just steal it.

As I sit here at this moment, I have several iconic photographs and pneumagraphic icons sitting on my desk, so I may look to them for a little cosmic inspiration (↓) -- or be scared straight up if need be. You really do become what you venerate; or, what you spontaneously venerate reveals your true nature.

Which is again why the unreal ideologies of the left are so spiritually catastrophic. Should one truly believe and assimilate those worthless braindroppings, one ends up batshit crazy.

Who are those hooded hordes swarming / Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth / Ringed by the flat horizon only / What is the city over the mountains / Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal --Eliot