How to Tell a Worthless Layabout from a Serious Idler

 "To speak of the Absolute," writes Schuon,

is to speak of the Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from the "dimension" of Infinitude that the world springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being as such, implies Infinitude.

I understand this description perfectly. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is correct. As it so happens, I believe it is correct "as far as it goes," but it doesn't go far enough, nor does it account for, or delve into, what I regard as the most important meta-principle of all, which is to say, Person, and all this implies (e.g., relation, love, intelligence, freedom, creativity, etc.).

We'll get into it more deeply as we proceed, but I don't see how we can ever arrive at Personhood unless we begin there. 

While I gather my thoughts, let's what Sr. D. has to say.

--If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago. 

--The existence of God is indemonstrable, because with a person the only thing we can do is bump into him.

--For God there are only individuals.

--The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man. 

--God exists for me in the same act in which I exist.

Perhaps it's a left brain-right brain thing, or words and music: Schuon's account is almost mathematical in its precision, whereas Davila is always more poetical.  

And while looking for those, I found an aphorism that touches on our primordial Slack, another important cosmic principle, or better, mode, since this mode apparently isn't for everyone:

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born predestined to be one. An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

I am one of those people who not only doesn't need a busy life, but would experience it as a living death. It's one of the reasons I could never be a proper psychologist. I literally cannot relate to the sorts of problems that beset the average man. I'm not bragging. After all, an autistic person could say the same thing, and we don't praise autism as the ideal way for a man to be.

But I must have been predestined to be an idler, since I'm never bored. Except when circumstances force me to be busy. 

As for stupidity, I was no doubt less stupid twenty years ago. They say a man reaches his intellectual prime at midlife. Well, first of all, I've always been a little behind my peers -- i.e., immature -- and second, I think I was actually kind of "brilliant" when I was 40 or so. Problem is, I was nevertheless an idiot. Defective software. In other words, I was still a liberal, among other defects. 

Along these lines, here's something from Rob Henderson's latest newsletter: 

According to both the Talmud and Solon, only at age 30 does a man attain full strength, and “plant his feet firm upon the ground,” according to Confucius. 

From 30 to 40, a man often has great strength and energy. But has not yet reached full maturity and wisdom.
 
And in the Talmud, 40 is the age for “understanding” and 50 for “giving counsel.”
 
From 42 to 56, says Solon, “the tongue and the mind are now at their best.” In the next phase, 56 to 63, a man “is able, but never so nimble in speech and in wit as he was in the days of his prime.”
 
Similarly, Confucius wrote, “At 40, I no longer suffered from perplexities,” and “At 50, I knew what were the biddings of heaven.” Although it was not until he was 60 that Confucius says he “heard them with a docile ear.”

Likewise, the Talmud states that the full wisdom and dignity of being an elder begins at 60. This is also the age, says Confucius, that men enter into a new relationship with life and death, with the ultimate source of personal values, and with the self.  

Back to the subject at hand, which comes down to a priori metaphysics vs. revelation. On the face of it, it would appear that man is in need of the latter because he is incapable of the former.

ALL men? Or are there a few serious idlers who retain the capacity for drilling right down to the core of things and envisioning the naked truth? This latter invites all sorts of frauds and abuses -- call it the yung pueblo syndrome, as discussed a couple of posts back. For it is easy to think one has all the answers. I certainly remember when I did. You know, back in my intellectual prime, when I was so brilliant and all.

Humility. In its absence you are most certainly headed for a fall. 

While we're idly milling around, how about we define some terms? For example, what do we mean by the Absolute?

If we were to be asked what the Absolute is, we would reply first of all that it is necessary and not merely possible Reality; absolute Reality, hence infinite and perfect, precisely (Schuon).

I agree with that: the Absolute -- whatever it is and however else we conceptualize it -- is that which must be and cannot not be, on pain of cosmic absurdity and performative self-contradiction. It's what is left when we eliminate all the bullshit: self-evident truths, and all that.

FREE SPEECH, FREE WILL, FREE MARKETS, and FREE THOUGHT in our FREE TIME (slogan for imaginary campaign)

But as Dávila says, The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.

Here are some of my bottom-line attributes of the Absolute: the Absolute is Person-Love-Creativity.

Okay, now do Infinitude:

the Infinite is that which, in the world, appears as modes of expanse or of extension, such as space, time, form or diversity, number or multiplicity, matter or substance (Schuon).

This certainly goes to the "many-ness" of things, where as Absoluteness goes more to their sheer existence -- moreover, their existence as this rather than either that or nothing; for "compared to empty space, each grain of sand is a miracle." And thanks to Infinitude, we'll never run out of grains of sand.

I don't recall Schuon ever discussing person or personalism. To the extent that he does, he regards the personal God as already a relative term, specifically, relative to the impersonal Beyond-Being. 

As we've discussed before, I like to look at these in a complementary way, similar to how we conceptualize the Trinity as being a single substance despite the relations of the three persons. Analogously, there is a relation between the impersonal and personal, but it's all one divine substance. 

In fact, I agree with Norris Clarke that God is ultimately substance-in-relation: there is no substance "behind" or "above" the relations, nor are there relations absent the substance. It's an irreducible complementarity, like man-woman, or time-eternity, or creator-creation. 

How to Tell a Worthless Layabout from a Serious Idler

 "To speak of the Absolute," writes Schuon,

is to speak of the Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from the "dimension" of Infinitude that the world springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being as such, implies Infinitude.

I understand this description perfectly. But that doesn't necessarily mean it is correct. As it so happens, I believe it is correct "as far as it goes," but it doesn't go far enough, nor does it account for, or delve into, what I regard as the most important meta-principle of all, which is to say, Person, and all this implies (e.g., relation, love, intelligence, freedom, creativity, etc.).

We'll get into it more deeply as we proceed, but I don't see how we can ever arrive at Personhood unless we begin there. 

While I gather my thoughts, let's what Sr. D. has to say.

--If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago. 

--The existence of God is indemonstrable, because with a person the only thing we can do is bump into him.

--For God there are only individuals.

--The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man. 

--God exists for me in the same act in which I exist.

Perhaps it's a left brain-right brain thing, or words and music: Schuon's account is almost mathematical in its precision, whereas Davila is always more poetical.  

And while looking for those, I found an aphorism that touches on our primordial Slack, another important cosmic principle, or better, mode, since this mode apparently isn't for everyone:

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born predestined to be one. An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

I am one of those people who not only doesn't need a busy life, but would experience it as a living death. It's one of the reasons I could never be a proper psychologist. I literally cannot relate to the sorts of problems that beset the average man. I'm not bragging. After all, an autistic person could say the same thing, and we don't praise autism as the ideal way for a man to be.

But I must have been predestined to be an idler, since I'm never bored. Except when circumstances force me to be busy. 

As for stupidity, I was no doubt less stupid twenty years ago. They say a man reaches his intellectual prime at midlife. Well, first of all, I've always been a little behind my peers -- i.e., immature -- and second, I think I was actually kind of "brilliant" when I was 40 or so. Problem is, I was nevertheless an idiot. Defective software. In other words, I was still a liberal, among other defects. 

Along these lines, here's something from Rob Henderson's latest newsletter: 

According to both the Talmud and Solon, only at age 30 does a man attain full strength, and “plant his feet firm upon the ground,” according to Confucius. 

From 30 to 40, a man often has great strength and energy. But has not yet reached full maturity and wisdom.
 
And in the Talmud, 40 is the age for “understanding” and 50 for “giving counsel.”
 
From 42 to 56, says Solon, “the tongue and the mind are now at their best.” In the next phase, 56 to 63, a man “is able, but never so nimble in speech and in wit as he was in the days of his prime.”
 
Similarly, Confucius wrote, “At 40, I no longer suffered from perplexities,” and “At 50, I knew what were the biddings of heaven.” Although it was not until he was 60 that Confucius says he “heard them with a docile ear.”

Likewise, the Talmud states that the full wisdom and dignity of being an elder begins at 60. This is also the age, says Confucius, that men enter into a new relationship with life and death, with the ultimate source of personal values, and with the self.  

Back to the subject at hand, which comes down to a priori metaphysics vs. revelation. On the face of it, it would appear that man is in need of the latter because he is incapable of the former.

ALL men? Or are there a few serious idlers who retain the capacity for drilling right down to the core of things and envisioning the naked truth? This latter invites all sorts of frauds and abuses -- call it the yung pueblo syndrome, as discussed a couple of posts back. For it is easy to think one has all the answers. I certainly remember when I did. You know, back in my intellectual prime, when I was so brilliant and all.

Humility. In its absence you are most certainly headed for a fall. 

While we're idly milling around, how about we define some terms? For example, what do we mean by the Absolute?

If we were to be asked what the Absolute is, we would reply first of all that it is necessary and not merely possible Reality; absolute Reality, hence infinite and perfect, precisely (Schuon).

I agree with that: the Absolute -- whatever it is and however else we conceptualize it -- is that which must be and cannot not be, on pain of cosmic absurdity and performative self-contradiction. It's what is left when we eliminate all the bullshit: self-evident truths, and all that.

FREE SPEECH, FREE WILL, FREE MARKETS, and FREE THOUGHT in our FREE TIME (slogan for imaginary campaign)

But as Dávila says, The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.

Here are some of my bottom-line attributes of the Absolute: the Absolute is Person-Love-Creativity.

Okay, now do Infinitude:

the Infinite is that which, in the world, appears as modes of expanse or of extension, such as space, time, form or diversity, number or multiplicity, matter or substance (Schuon).

This certainly goes to the "many-ness" of things, where as Absoluteness goes more to their sheer existence -- moreover, their existence as this rather than either that or nothing; for "compared to empty space, each grain of sand is a miracle." And thanks to Infinitude, we'll never run out of grains of sand.

I don't recall Schuon ever discussing person or personalism. To the extent that he does, he regards the personal God as already a relative term, specifically, relative to the impersonal Beyond-Being. 

As we've discussed before, I like to look at these in a complementary way, similar to how we conceptualize the Trinity as being a single substance despite the relations of the three persons. Analogously, there is a relation between the impersonal and personal, but it's all one divine substance. 

In fact, I agree with Norris Clarke that God is ultimately substance-in-relation: there is no substance "behind" or "above" the relations, nor are there relations absent the substance. It's an irreducible complementarity, like man-woman, or time-eternity, or creator-creation. 

Too Much Manichee Business

Some people say existence itself is a miracle, and they are most certainly correct: for the gap between nothing and anything, let alone everything, is infinite, and can therefore be mediated only by (an) infinite being.

However, I think we can all agree that even more miraculous is the consciousness that notices the miracle of being, AKA, the primordial WTF?!

Happily, the cosmos is big enough for both perspectives -- for the cosmic extrovert and the cosmic introvert. But best of all is to maintain a balance between these two perspectives, which is to say, cosmic ambiversion. 

Now, my nonlocal sources tell me that the Incarnation is the last Word in cosmic ambiversion, being that it -- obviously -- takes up both matter and spirit, exterior and interior. 

At the time, there was far less difficulty accepting God-as-consciousness than God-as-flesh, and in fact, there still is. There is something in us that more readily tilts toward a Gnostic, or Manichaean, or neoplatonic devaluation of matter. 

Put conversely, the resurrection of the body is still a scandal -- foolishness to the geeks and a bumble to the blockheads & tools. For it is, among other things, a way of descent -- or of ascent-via-descent, so to speak, more on which as we proceed.  

In contrast, for Plato, the way out of this mess is up, i.e., pure ascent:

Our physical, natural, material world, the world in which we live our lives and that we perceive through our senses, is a world of constant change, flux, and decay....

But there is another, higher world, Plato believed, where all exists in a state of eternal and changeless perfection (Markos).

The question is, how do we exit the former (becoming) and enter the latter (being)? Central to this approach is the image

of the golden steps that lead the initiate out of the world of illusion and error into a higher realm of light and truth. A rising path is also an ex-odus, a road out, a movement from slavery to freedom, ignorance to knowledge, darkness to light, the shadows on the cave wall to the piercing and revealing rays of the sun (ibid).

So yes, we can ascend out of the cave, and there are even said to be people who have accomplished it without drugs, although I've never met one.

But I don't think it ever occurred to Plato that the One ever could or would assume flesh and voluntarily enter the cave. Why would anyone do such a thing when the whole point of the philosophical life is to leave the shadows of the cave behind and below?

Shifting gears a bit, another way of conceptualizing the cosmic ambiversion mentioned above is to say that we are existentially amphibious, in that man qua man is always consciously aware of inhabiting two realms, whether we call them matter and psyche, nature and grace, flesh and spirit, tenure and reality, conspiracy and slack, etc.:  

Over our heads there hovers a perpetual question mark: What exactly am I? What shall I become? 

Unlike the beasts and the angels, who are fixed in their respective spheres, we belong to neither the earth nor the sky. We are truly amphibians, with a foot in each world, and so in our breasts there is a perpetual struggle, an agon [conflict]: down or up; lower or higher; fall or rise (ibid).

Well, there's a better way. First of all, we can't consider our amphibious nature in a linear manner, as if there are two disconnected lines, one leading up & out, the other down & in. Rather, what if the two lines are actually a single continuous line, so that down is up and up is down? (I might suggest reviewing the Sermon on the Mount ⇆ Plain for the orthoparadoxical details.)

Plato's conception of God as removed, immutable, and wholly untainted by contact with our shifting corporeal World of Becoming cannot, finally, be reconciled with the biblical revelation of a merciful Savior-God who so loves humanity that he willingly leaves the World of Being, takes upon himself the "prison" of human flesh, and suffers a very physical and bloody death.

Plato would regard such a scheme as nonsensical ("a great plan, Walteus, f-ing ingenious, if I understand it correctly, an Athenian f-king sundial"). 

Let's stop ramblin' and get to the point:

man is by definition situated between an Intellection which connects him to God and a world which has the power to separate him from God (Schuon).

Certainly prior to the Incarnation, this kind of dualistic Manichee business makes perfect sense. But not afterword. For as Thomas noted, man is a substantial unity of matter and spirit, such that he

exists on the brink of two worlds, the spiritual and the corporeal, combining the qualities of both; he is their horizon, their common frontier.

So, if we are to be saved, we can't actually flee from matter into divinity, since our nature is a substantial unity of both; rather, matter itself must somehow be divinized. I guess we'll leave off with this passage by Richard De Smet:

(N)othing was healed by Christ that was not assumed by him. To maintain this position against Marcion and the Manichees had meant accepting man's vegetable life as an essential part of him.... it had meant understanding man as at once body, soul, and spirit, a natural unity of the spiritual and the psychical and the physical....

Thus like every man (Jesus) is a microcosm and a frontier being but... he is the horizon and the bridge between the created macrocosm and the uncreated Divinity.

Hmm. Looks like this rescue mission involves a kind of ever spiraling dual-teleology, in that God becomes the perfect man in order for man to become a more perfect likeness of God; Jesus is simultaneously God's icon of man and man's icon of God, and we are situated somewhere on that spiral betwixt & bethreen.

Too Much Manichee Business

Some people say existence itself is a miracle, and they are most certainly correct: for the gap between nothing and anything, let alone everything, is infinite, and can therefore be mediated only by (an) infinite being.

However, I think we can all agree that even more miraculous is the consciousness that notices the miracle of being, AKA, the primordial WTF?!

Happily, the cosmos is big enough for both perspectives -- for the cosmic extrovert and the cosmic introvert. But best of all is to maintain a balance between these two perspectives, which is to say, cosmic ambiversion. 

Now, my nonlocal sources tell me that the Incarnation is the last Word in cosmic ambiversion, being that it -- obviously -- takes up both matter and spirit, exterior and interior. 

At the time, there was far less difficulty accepting God-as-consciousness than God-as-flesh, and in fact, there still is. There is something in us that more readily tilts toward a Gnostic, or Manichaean, or neoplatonic devaluation of matter. 

Put conversely, the resurrection of the body is still a scandal -- foolishness to the geeks and a bumble to the blockheads & tools. For it is, among other things, a way of descent -- or of ascent-via-descent, so to speak, more on which as we proceed.  

In contrast, for Plato, the way out of this mess is up, i.e., pure ascent:

Our physical, natural, material world, the world in which we live our lives and that we perceive through our senses, is a world of constant change, flux, and decay....

But there is another, higher world, Plato believed, where all exists in a state of eternal and changeless perfection (Markos).

The question is, how do we exit the former (becoming) and enter the latter (being)? Central to this approach is the image

of the golden steps that lead the initiate out of the world of illusion and error into a higher realm of light and truth. A rising path is also an ex-odus, a road out, a movement from slavery to freedom, ignorance to knowledge, darkness to light, the shadows on the cave wall to the piercing and revealing rays of the sun (ibid).

So yes, we can ascend out of the cave, and there are even said to be people who have accomplished it without drugs, although I've never met one.

But I don't think it ever occurred to Plato that the One ever could or would assume flesh and voluntarily enter the cave. Why would anyone do such a thing when the whole point of the philosophical life is to leave the shadows of the cave behind and below?

Shifting gears a bit, another way of conceptualizing the cosmic ambiversion mentioned above is to say that we are existentially amphibious, in that man qua man is always consciously aware of inhabiting two realms, whether we call them matter and psyche, nature and grace, flesh and spirit, tenure and reality, conspiracy and slack, etc.:  

Over our heads there hovers a perpetual question mark: What exactly am I? What shall I become? 

Unlike the beasts and the angels, who are fixed in their respective spheres, we belong to neither the earth nor the sky. We are truly amphibians, with a foot in each world, and so in our breasts there is a perpetual struggle, an agon [conflict]: down or up; lower or higher; fall or rise (ibid).

Well, there's a better way. First of all, we can't consider our amphibious nature in a linear manner, as if there are two disconnected lines, one leading up & out, the other down & in. Rather, what if the two lines are actually a single continuous line, so that down is up and up is down? (I might suggest reviewing the Sermon on the Mount ⇆ Plain for the orthoparadoxical details.)

Plato's conception of God as removed, immutable, and wholly untainted by contact with our shifting corporeal World of Becoming cannot, finally, be reconciled with the biblical revelation of a merciful Savior-God who so loves humanity that he willingly leaves the World of Being, takes upon himself the "prison" of human flesh, and suffers a very physical and bloody death.

Plato would regard such a scheme as nonsensical ("a great plan, Walteus, f-ing ingenious, if I understand it correctly, an Athenian f-king sundial"). 

Let's stop ramblin' and get to the point:

man is by definition situated between an Intellection which connects him to God and a world which has the power to separate him from God (Schuon).

Certainly prior to the Incarnation, this kind of dualistic Manichee business makes perfect sense. But not afterword. For as Thomas noted, man is a substantial unity of matter and spirit, such that he

exists on the brink of two worlds, the spiritual and the corporeal, combining the qualities of both; he is their horizon, their common frontier.

So, if we are to be saved, we can't actually flee from matter into divinity, since our nature is a substantial unity of both; rather, matter itself must somehow be divinized. I guess we'll leave off with this passage by Richard De Smet:

(N)othing was healed by Christ that was not assumed by him. To maintain this position against Marcion and the Manichees had meant accepting man's vegetable life as an essential part of him.... it had meant understanding man as at once body, soul, and spirit, a natural unity of the spiritual and the psychical and the physical....

Thus like every man (Jesus) is a microcosm and a frontier being but... he is the horizon and the bridge between the created macrocosm and the uncreated Divinity.

Hmm. Looks like this rescue mission involves a kind of ever spiraling dual-teleology, in that God becomes the perfect man in order for man to become a more perfect likeness of God; Jesus is simultaneously God's icon of man and man's icon of God, and we are situated somewhere on that spiral betwixt & bethreen.

Hot Dog, Love's a' Winnin'!

In turning our gaze within and rummaging around for an a priori metaphysic, I found an example -- and what is a bad man but a good man's teacher? -- that makes us want to scurry back out in the opposite direction. 

I stumbled on it while idly surfing around amazon. It has the pretentious title Clarity & Connection, by the even more pretentiously named yung pueblo. You might want to skip the bio if you gag easily:

During a silent Vipassana meditation course in 2012, he saw that real healing and liberation were possible.

Woo hoo! Then what?

He became more committed to his meditation practice while living in New York City. The results he witnessed firsthand moved him to describe his experiences in writing.

Five stars on 3,848 ratings?! Could I have written this book? Absolutely. As you could have, although it would pose a challenge to appear so stupid and banal. That's hard to fake. Nor do I have reason to believe mr. pueblo is faking it. His idiocy appears genuine:

The pen name yung pueblo means “young people” and is meant to convey that humanity is entering an era of remarkable growth and healing, when many will expand their self-awareness and release old burdens.

A new enlightened era of universal wokeness, as it were. What could go wrong?

Let's look at a few excerpts, so we too can experience some real growth and healing, expand our self-awareness, and release those old burdens:

it is not easy

healing yourself

building new habits

observing reality without projection

Now you tell us! 

Here's a riddle: what do you and Vladimir Putin have in common?

all human beings

are united by

birth,

life,

death, and

every emotion

in between 

Dude. Forget the Vipassana. Can I buy some pot from you? 

Again, we're reviewing this masterpiece in the context of the possibility of an a priori metaphysic. Have we come to the right man? More to the point, does he have strong enough pot?

the biggest shift in your life happens when you

go inward

I suspect the biggest shift in yung pueblo's life would be the discovery of the shift key. 

Anyway, what happens after we look inward? Easy, just

step in and observe all that you find with 

acceptance;

the love you bring lights up your self-awareness;

you start seeing how the past is packed into your

mind and heart --

patience, honesty, and observation start the

healing process.

And we're off to the races: look inside with love and acceptance, and before you know it, the healing process has begun.

Say what you want about yung pueblo, it's not easy to make even Deepak cringe or Oprah gag.

He makes Frank Costanza's serenity now!!! sound complicated: "next time you feel agitated" 

remember that simply being aware

that you are repeating the past

is a sign of progress

Oh: stagnation is progress. If only I had known this when I was a psychologist...

Scrolling down through the sample, it actually gets worse, but I'll spare you. 

The question is, where do we begin if we want to tap into this vast audience?

Obviously with a gimmick. I know: instead of no caps, ALL CAPS. 

I'll also need a pen name.

How about... OLD BIRD. 

TIMELESS PLATITUDES from an OLD BIRD channeled through GAGDAD BOB

Let the healing begin!

TRULY TRULY 

THE OLD BIRD 

DOES NOT KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN.

FOR HE WHO BEGAN THIS BOOK

PARADOXICALLY NO LONGER EXISTS

BY VIRTUE OF 

HAVING WRITTEN IT. 

BUT WAIT -- 

HE CAN ALWAYS REREAD & EDIT 

WHAT HE WROTE BEFORE --  

YOU KNOW, JUST LIKE ANY OTHER AUTHOR -- 

NO NEED TO BE SO FUCKING POMPOUS ABOUT IT.

End of channelling. For now. The OLD BIRD has MUCH MORE to say. But I want to return to a less serious subject, that is, the possibility of an a priori metaphysic, which would be as close to a universal religion as we could imagine. 

My other question is whether revelation would have to be subordinate to it, or vice versa. I could go either way, depending on the day.  

Anyway, according to Schuon,

If one starts from the recognition of the immediately tangible mystery that is subjectivity or intelligence, then it is easy to understand that the origin of the Universe is, not inert and unconscious matter but a spiritual Substance which from coagulation to coagulation and segmentation to segmentation -- and other projections both manifesting and limiting -- finally produces matter by causing it to emerge from a more subtle substance, but one which is already remote from principial Substance.

That is one looong sentence.  I am tempted to simplify it. Or as the OLD BIRD might put it,

THE MYSTERY OF SUBJECTIVITY

IS LIKE AN INFINITE HORIZON

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE

GRAND CANYON

LEADING INTO THE

RABBIT HOLE

OF CONSCIOUS SUBSTANCE

BETWEEN THE DREAMER WHO DREAMS THE DREAM

AND THE ONE WHO IS

DREAMT. 

I CALL IT THE RELIGION 

THE ALMIGHTY AND ME

WORKS OUT

BETWIXT US. 

AH, LITTLE COONS,

I SEE YOU'RE STARIN' AT MY FINGERS.

SHALL I TELL YOU THE STORY OF RIGHT HAND - LEFT HAND --

THE TALE OF GOOD AND EVIL?

 

Hot Dog, Love's a' Winnin'!

In turning our gaze within and rummaging around for an a priori metaphysic, I found an example -- and what is a bad man but a good man's teacher? -- that makes us want to scurry back out in the opposite direction. 

I stumbled on it while idly surfing around amazon. It has the pretentious title Clarity & Connection, by the even more pretentiously named yung pueblo. You might want to skip the bio if you gag easily:

During a silent Vipassana meditation course in 2012, he saw that real healing and liberation were possible.

Woo hoo! Then what?

He became more committed to his meditation practice while living in New York City. The results he witnessed firsthand moved him to describe his experiences in writing.

Five stars on 3,848 ratings?! Could I have written this book? Absolutely. As you could have, although it would pose a challenge to appear so stupid and banal. That's hard to fake. Nor do I have reason to believe mr. pueblo is faking it. His idiocy appears genuine:

The pen name yung pueblo means “young people” and is meant to convey that humanity is entering an era of remarkable growth and healing, when many will expand their self-awareness and release old burdens.

A new enlightened era of universal wokeness, as it were. What could go wrong?

Let's look at a few excerpts, so we too can experience some real growth and healing, expand our self-awareness, and release those old burdens:

it is not easy

healing yourself

building new habits

observing reality without projection

Now you tell us! 

Here's a riddle: what do you and Vladimir Putin have in common?

all human beings

are united by

birth,

life,

death, and

every emotion

in between 

Dude. Forget the Vipassana. Can I buy some pot from you? 

Again, we're reviewing this masterpiece in the context of the possibility of an a priori metaphysic. Have we come to the right man? More to the point, does he have strong enough pot?

the biggest shift in your life happens when you

go inward

I suspect the biggest shift in yung pueblo's life would be the discovery of the shift key. 

Anyway, what happens after we look inward? Easy, just

step in and observe all that you find with 

acceptance;

the love you bring lights up your self-awareness;

you start seeing how the past is packed into your

mind and heart --

patience, honesty, and observation start the

healing process.

And we're off to the races: look inside with love and acceptance, and before you know it, the healing process has begun.

Say what you want about yung pueblo, it's not easy to make even Deepak cringe or Oprah gag.

He makes Frank Costanza's serenity now!!! sound complicated: "next time you feel agitated" 

remember that simply being aware

that you are repeating the past

is a sign of progress

Oh: stagnation is progress. If only I had known this when I was a psychologist...

Scrolling down through the sample, it actually gets worse, but I'll spare you. 

The question is, where do we begin if we want to tap into this vast audience?

Obviously with a gimmick. I know: instead of no caps, ALL CAPS. 

I'll also need a pen name.

How about... OLD BIRD. 

TIMELESS PLATITUDES from an OLD BIRD channeled through GAGDAD BOB

Let the healing begin!

TRULY TRULY 

THE OLD BIRD 

DOES NOT KNOW WHERE TO BEGIN.

FOR HE WHO BEGAN THIS BOOK

PARADOXICALLY NO LONGER EXISTS

BY VIRTUE OF 

HAVING WRITTEN IT. 

BUT WAIT -- 

HE CAN ALWAYS REREAD & EDIT 

WHAT HE WROTE BEFORE --  

YOU KNOW, JUST LIKE ANY OTHER AUTHOR -- 

NO NEED TO BE SO FUCKING POMPOUS ABOUT IT.

End of channelling. For now. The OLD BIRD has MUCH MORE to say. But I want to return to a less serious subject, that is, the possibility of an a priori metaphysic, which would be as close to a universal religion as we could imagine. 

My other question is whether revelation would have to be subordinate to it, or vice versa. I could go either way, depending on the day.  

Anyway, according to Schuon,

If one starts from the recognition of the immediately tangible mystery that is subjectivity or intelligence, then it is easy to understand that the origin of the Universe is, not inert and unconscious matter but a spiritual Substance which from coagulation to coagulation and segmentation to segmentation -- and other projections both manifesting and limiting -- finally produces matter by causing it to emerge from a more subtle substance, but one which is already remote from principial Substance.

That is one looong sentence.  I am tempted to simplify it. Or as the OLD BIRD might put it,

THE MYSTERY OF SUBJECTIVITY

IS LIKE AN INFINITE HORIZON

AT THE BOTTOM OF THE

GRAND CANYON

LEADING INTO THE

RABBIT HOLE

OF CONSCIOUS SUBSTANCE

BETWEEN THE DREAMER WHO DREAMS THE DREAM

AND THE ONE WHO IS

DREAMT. 

I CALL IT THE RELIGION 

THE ALMIGHTY AND ME

WORKS OUT

BETWIXT US. 

AH, LITTLE COONS,

I SEE YOU'RE STARIN' AT MY FINGERS.

SHALL I TELL YOU THE STORY OF RIGHT HAND - LEFT HAND --

THE TALE OF GOOD AND EVIL?

 

Just How Screwed Are We?

Once again I don't have much time this morning. Best I can do is raise a bunch of questions that we'll have more time to properly unpack tomorrow, when things will return to normal around here, and the usual vast, untracked panorama of slack will unfold before us. 

In short, we have sufficient time to pull out a lot of toys and make a big mess, but not nearly enough time to clean up after oursoph.

As to the title of this post, what we mean is: to what extent are we able to think our way out of this mess, this mess being Life Itself, specifically, human life? 

If not for human beings, there would be no problems in the cosmos. Certainly if not for me, I would have no problems. Does this mean Camus was correct when he made that crack about suicide being the only serious philosophical problem? Or Stalin: no man, no problem.

They're wrong about that, but why are they wrong? Then again... 

Folks like the Buddha took the question seriously but not literally. You could say that for Buddhism the only serious metaphysical question is whether or not to commit ego death. 

But that question is also very much at the forefront of Christian metaphysics, in that the whole point of Baptism is to die with Christ and be reborn in him.

As it so happens, yesterday I was re(rerere)reading Meditations on the Tarot, because I'm still waiting for the postman to bring me a new book to sink my teeth into. Tomberg says that our rebirth reestablishes "the state of consciousness prior to the Fall," and why not? "This is Christian yoga," which "does not aspire directly to unity, but rather to the unity of two."

Anyway, Change My Mind: man is always and by definition the only problem in all of existence. Except for the Godman. He is supposedly man's solution to the problem of man. 

Now, what is it that constitutes man, i.e., sets him apart from every other being in existence? That's right, thinking; we are the "rational animal," meaning not just that we reason -- every animal has a crude or inchoate version of reason -- but that it is self-reflexive. Humans alone are Life ², in that we are able to think about thinking and know about knowing, not to mention love beauty and virtue, discern good from evil, inquire into the causes of things....

That's what we're driving at: causes of things, not forgetting the cause of causation. Being that this is a hierarchical cosmos, there are degrees and modes of causation. You could say that science investigates the little causes while metaphysics investigates the big ones, including the causes of science, i.e., conditions by virtue of which it is possible. 

Conditions such as, oh, an intelligible cosmos. Science can't take a single step in the absence of intelligible being, but nor can it take a single step in addressing the question: hey, why is being so darn intelligible? In particular, why is it intelligible to us, i.e., to our intelligence? These two -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are so perfectly matched that it looks like a conspiracy between them.

It reminds me of Gondwana. I remember in grade school, looking at the coasts of Africa and South America, and noticing how well they fit together. But I was just a moronic kid with more important things to think about, mostly having to do with music and baseball. 

I just googled the subject, and it was first hypothesized by Dr. Suess back in the mid 1800s, but the later theory of continental drift (proposed in 1912) had to await confirmation by the science of plate tectonics. If my grade school teachers ever discussed the latter, I wasn't paying attention. 

Anyway, they no doubt laughed at Dr. Suess, just like they're laughing at me, but again, I can't help noticing how well our intelligence is fitted to the deep intelligibility of the cosmos. Is there a reason?

Or no reason at all? And if the latter, like anyone could know that.

Here are some leftover nuggets from brother Lao-tzu: 

--In the beginning was the Tao. All things issue from it; all things return to it.

--How do I know this is true? By looking inside myself.

--To those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense.

--Without looking out your window, you can see the essence of the Tao.

--The unnameable is the eternally real.

--The Tao is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities.

--All things are born of being. Being is born of non-being.

--When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn't laugh, it wouldn't be the Tao.

--The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things.

Next, a passage from the Gospel of John (from Christ the Eternal Tao, by Heiromonk Damascene):

In the beginning was the Tao, 

And the Tao was with God,

And the Tao was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by Him....

And the Tao became flesh,

And dwelt among us

In the previous post I alluded to an unwritten book that ascends to, and descends from, the middle/top. Well, according to Schuon,

Metaphysics has as it were two great dimensions, the one “ascending” and dealing with universal principles and the distinction between the Real and the illusory, and the other “descending” and dealing on the contrary with the divine life in creaturely situations.

Let's toss a few observations by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner into our metaphysical crockpot: 

Every mystery points to a higher reality. / The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery. 

The Hebrew word for universe is Olam. / Comes from the word for hidden.

There is no place on earth without the Presence.

From the notebooks of Petey: Strictly speaking, we do not comprehend religious truths; rather, they comprehend us. Nor do we so much look at these truths but through them in order to see what religion is all about; we apprehend an intelligible truth by looking through it and gnosising what it pulls out of an otherwise 2D blandscape.

Knowledge is a relation between knower and known; a fundamental change in the knower changes the known far more than changes in knowledge change the knower. 

There are only two points in the cosmos: man and God, or person and Person, respectively. The shortest line between them is a spiral. 

Now,

When God commands Abraham, "Go forth to the land I will show you," the Zohar insists on reading the words hyperliterally: "Go to yourself," search deep within and thereby discover the divine.

What are the very first words of the Bible? Everyone knows that: In the beginning God created.... But for the Zohar, which insists on interpreting the original Hebrew words in their precise order, the verse means something radically different: With beginning, It [Ein Sof] created God (Daniel Matt).

In the beginning God creates; with beginning creates God. I like to look at these in a complementary way:

To be continued....  

Just How Screwed Are We?

Once again I don't have much time this morning. Best I can do is raise a bunch of questions that we'll have more time to properly unpack tomorrow, when things will return to normal around here, and the usual vast, untracked panorama of slack will unfold before us. 

In short, we have sufficient time to pull out a lot of toys and make a big mess, but not nearly enough time to clean up after oursoph.

As to the title of this post, what we mean is: to what extent are we able to think our way out of this mess, this mess being Life Itself, specifically, human life? 

If not for human beings, there would be no problems in the cosmos. Certainly if not for me, I would have no problems. Does this mean Camus was correct when he made that crack about suicide being the only serious philosophical problem? Or Stalin: no man, no problem.

They're wrong about that, but why are they wrong? Then again... 

Folks like the Buddha took the question seriously but not literally. You could say that for Buddhism the only serious metaphysical question is whether or not to commit ego death. 

But that question is also very much at the forefront of Christian metaphysics, in that the whole point of Baptism is to die with Christ and be reborn in him.

As it so happens, yesterday I was re(rerere)reading Meditations on the Tarot, because I'm still waiting for the postman to bring me a new book to sink my teeth into. Tomberg says that our rebirth reestablishes "the state of consciousness prior to the Fall," and why not? "This is Christian yoga," which "does not aspire directly to unity, but rather to the unity of two."

Anyway, Change My Mind: man is always and by definition the only problem in all of existence. Except for the Godman. He is supposedly man's solution to the problem of man. 

Now, what is it that constitutes man, i.e., sets him apart from every other being in existence? That's right, thinking; we are the "rational animal," meaning not just that we reason -- every animal has a crude or inchoate version of reason -- but that it is self-reflexive. Humans alone are Life ², in that we are able to think about thinking and know about knowing, not to mention love beauty and virtue, discern good from evil, inquire into the causes of things....

That's what we're driving at: causes of things, not forgetting the cause of causation. Being that this is a hierarchical cosmos, there are degrees and modes of causation. You could say that science investigates the little causes while metaphysics investigates the big ones, including the causes of science, i.e., conditions by virtue of which it is possible. 

Conditions such as, oh, an intelligible cosmos. Science can't take a single step in the absence of intelligible being, but nor can it take a single step in addressing the question: hey, why is being so darn intelligible? In particular, why is it intelligible to us, i.e., to our intelligence? These two -- intelligence and intelligibility -- are so perfectly matched that it looks like a conspiracy between them.

It reminds me of Gondwana. I remember in grade school, looking at the coasts of Africa and South America, and noticing how well they fit together. But I was just a moronic kid with more important things to think about, mostly having to do with music and baseball. 

I just googled the subject, and it was first hypothesized by Dr. Suess back in the mid 1800s, but the later theory of continental drift (proposed in 1912) had to await confirmation by the science of plate tectonics. If my grade school teachers ever discussed the latter, I wasn't paying attention. 

Anyway, they no doubt laughed at Dr. Suess, just like they're laughing at me, but again, I can't help noticing how well our intelligence is fitted to the deep intelligibility of the cosmos. Is there a reason?

Or no reason at all? And if the latter, like anyone could know that.

Here are some leftover nuggets from brother Lao-tzu: 

--In the beginning was the Tao. All things issue from it; all things return to it.

--How do I know this is true? By looking inside myself.

--To those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense.

--Without looking out your window, you can see the essence of the Tao.

--The unnameable is the eternally real.

--The Tao is like the eternal void: filled with infinite possibilities.

--All things are born of being. Being is born of non-being.

--When a foolish man hears of the Tao, he laughs out loud. If he didn't laugh, it wouldn't be the Tao.

--The Tao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to all things.

Next, a passage from the Gospel of John (from Christ the Eternal Tao, by Heiromonk Damascene):

In the beginning was the Tao, 

And the Tao was with God,

And the Tao was God.

The same was in the beginning with God.

All things were made by Him....

And the Tao became flesh,

And dwelt among us

In the previous post I alluded to an unwritten book that ascends to, and descends from, the middle/top. Well, according to Schuon,

Metaphysics has as it were two great dimensions, the one “ascending” and dealing with universal principles and the distinction between the Real and the illusory, and the other “descending” and dealing on the contrary with the divine life in creaturely situations.

Let's toss a few observations by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner into our metaphysical crockpot: 

Every mystery points to a higher reality. / The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery. 

The Hebrew word for universe is Olam. / Comes from the word for hidden.

There is no place on earth without the Presence.

From the notebooks of Petey: Strictly speaking, we do not comprehend religious truths; rather, they comprehend us. Nor do we so much look at these truths but through them in order to see what religion is all about; we apprehend an intelligible truth by looking through it and gnosising what it pulls out of an otherwise 2D blandscape.

Knowledge is a relation between knower and known; a fundamental change in the knower changes the known far more than changes in knowledge change the knower. 

There are only two points in the cosmos: man and God, or person and Person, respectively. The shortest line between them is a spiral. 

Now,

When God commands Abraham, "Go forth to the land I will show you," the Zohar insists on reading the words hyperliterally: "Go to yourself," search deep within and thereby discover the divine.

What are the very first words of the Bible? Everyone knows that: In the beginning God created.... But for the Zohar, which insists on interpreting the original Hebrew words in their precise order, the verse means something radically different: With beginning, It [Ein Sof] created God (Daniel Matt).

In the beginning God creates; with beginning creates God. I like to look at these in a complementary way:

To be continued....  

Metaphysics and God's Waiting Room

Maybe I'm a little slow, but yesterday it occurred to me just how radically opposed are Schuon's and Thomas's approaches to metaphysics. I mean, I've noticed it before, but only now do I have sufficient familiarity with Thomas to raise my hand and venture an opinion.

I'm not saying that one is right and the other wrong; it may even be that the two approaches are complementary, which is always our default position in these ultimate questions, where the One necessarily bifurcates into two, with the result that Philosophical Man generally tries to reduce one to the other.

For example, the One is presumably beyond our categories of subject and object, but bifurcates into them on contact with existence and finitude, so to speak. 

Thus, it can appear as if ultimate reality is pure subject, but this approach congeals into the cosmic heresy of idealism; alternatively, we can equate the One with the cosmos, a la Spinoza, and thereby commit the intrinsic heresy of pantheism. 

There is of course truth in each, and in general we can say that such ultimately partial crocktrines are true in what they affirm but false in what they deny: pure transcendence denies immanence, and vice versa. We need a doctrine that affirms both without reducing one to the other, nor compromising the essential unicity of God.

Anyway, if metaphysics is literally what comes after physics (in the classic Aristotelian scheme), then it seems to me that Schuon very much approaches it from the other end, in that metaphysics comes first, not last. Call it antephysics, or something.

In the Aristotelian framework, metaphysics concerns those things after the ones about the natural world. Prof. Wiki adds that it is the doctrine that he refers to sometimes as Wisdom, sometimes as First Philosophy, and sometimes as Theology. One only ventures into it once one has explained the visible and tangible world, and wishes to proceed over its horizon to their ultimate cause(s), i.e., the perennial questions of 

What is existence, and what sorts of things exist in the world? How can things continue to exist, and yet undergo the change we see about us in the natural world? And how can this world be understood?

This seems like a lot of work for a lazy man such as myself. Indeed, such a man wishes to believe he has access to ultimate reality without having to deal with the hassle of leaving the slackatoream and mastering real subjects. Our exemplars are folks such as, oh, Lao-tzu, who was able to capture the whole existentialada in an immortal pneumagraph consisting of a mere 81 stanzas (the Tao Te Ching). 

Of the actual man Lao-tzu we know next to nothing -- or about as much as will be known about the mysterious Gagdad Bob (GB to his imaginary friends) in 2500 years. Neither left any traces of what was going on behind that beatific and/or idiotic smile. As for LT,

Like an Iroquois woodsman, he left no traces. All he left us was his book: the classic manual on the art of living, written in a style of gemlike lucidity, radiant with human and grace and largeheartedness and deep wisdom: one of the wonders of the world (Stephen Mitchell).

Of GB, it was said that he spent 12 years happily toiling as a retail clerk (apocryphally on the "graveyard" shift) before "they" (the conspiracy) put him on the dayshift, and he spent nearly three decades pretending to be a "psychologist" before disappearing entirely into the night and fog of primordial slack. 

GB left us two books, the first one an essentially frivolous monument to perpetual juvenilia, the second an unfinished symphony of truth, so to speak, which one can read from either end and which culminates in the middle (or "top"), where there is a page that says ?! and nothing more. 

It is difficult to say whether this primordial questiomation point -- ?! -- is a cry for help, a plea to be left alone, or perhaps even a medical emergency. We just don't know.

Of the two halves of this mysterious artifact, one side proceeds from the material/objective/empirical world "up to" this (?!), while the other half proceeds in the opposite direction, from the (?!) back down to our familiar world of time and space. 

Thus, like the first book it is not so much circular as spiroidal. What other form could possibly be adequate to the subject? Obviously linearity wouldn't cut it, nor did GB pretend to be a poet, nor even gay. 

A few more features are known of GB's manual, or at least can be pieced together from hurriedly scribbled notes in books from his vast library. At times these notes appear contradictory, but whatever. Here is one example, and don't be surprised if you have no idea what he's driving at, since he probably didn't know either. Did his reach exceed his grasp? Or was it the other way around? I suppose it depended on the day.

Before the first --> view from inside cosmos --> ascent

  First part of the first part --> reality of appearances

   Second part of the first part (limits of science)

     Middle Earth (Incarnation / new Word Order / Resurrection) 

    First part of the last part --> descent --> science of the limitless

   Last part of the last part --> reality of appearances

Beyond the last --> view from outside cosmos

So, yeah, this is the type of nonsense we're dealing with. 

Let's get back to our main subject, which is Schuon's infra- or pre- or antephysics; the foyer of the Creation, as it were. I'm going to have to leave in a few minutes, so we'll get as far as we can. Perhaps the time constraint will spur us to make it less wooly.

God's waiting room. That's where we are. How long before we see God? Is he overbooked? Never mind. Please fill out these forms, and one of his nurses will be with you shortly.

I would like to write a sentence this simple, this lucid, this universal, and this effingcacious: 

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

Reminds us of an aphorism:

The sentence should have the stone’s hardness and the branch’s trembling.

Schuon further describes "the primacy of thought -- hence of consciousness or of intelligence -- in relation to the material world surrounding us" (emphases mine).

So again, while a Thomist would say that all knowledge begins in the senses, for Schuon it begins with the bare phenomenon of thought itself, a position with which I would tend to agree, since there can be nothing weirder or more unexpected -- literally miraculous, really, -- than its appearance in a not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead universe:

Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence, is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be (ibid.).

(?!), literally. 

Metaphysics and God's Waiting Room

Maybe I'm a little slow, but yesterday it occurred to me just how radically opposed are Schuon's and Thomas's approaches to metaphysics. I mean, I've noticed it before, but only now do I have sufficient familiarity with Thomas to raise my hand and venture an opinion.

I'm not saying that one is right and the other wrong; it may even be that the two approaches are complementary, which is always our default position in these ultimate questions, where the One necessarily bifurcates into two, with the result that Philosophical Man generally tries to reduce one to the other.

For example, the One is presumably beyond our categories of subject and object, but bifurcates into them on contact with existence and finitude, so to speak. 

Thus, it can appear as if ultimate reality is pure subject, but this approach congeals into the cosmic heresy of idealism; alternatively, we can equate the One with the cosmos, a la Spinoza, and thereby commit the intrinsic heresy of pantheism. 

There is of course truth in each, and in general we can say that such ultimately partial crocktrines are true in what they affirm but false in what they deny: pure transcendence denies immanence, and vice versa. We need a doctrine that affirms both without reducing one to the other, nor compromising the essential unicity of God.

Anyway, if metaphysics is literally what comes after physics (in the classic Aristotelian scheme), then it seems to me that Schuon very much approaches it from the other end, in that metaphysics comes first, not last. Call it antephysics, or something.

In the Aristotelian framework, metaphysics concerns those things after the ones about the natural world. Prof. Wiki adds that it is the doctrine that he refers to sometimes as Wisdom, sometimes as First Philosophy, and sometimes as Theology. One only ventures into it once one has explained the visible and tangible world, and wishes to proceed over its horizon to their ultimate cause(s), i.e., the perennial questions of 

What is existence, and what sorts of things exist in the world? How can things continue to exist, and yet undergo the change we see about us in the natural world? And how can this world be understood?

This seems like a lot of work for a lazy man such as myself. Indeed, such a man wishes to believe he has access to ultimate reality without having to deal with the hassle of leaving the slackatoream and mastering real subjects. Our exemplars are folks such as, oh, Lao-tzu, who was able to capture the whole existentialada in an immortal pneumagraph consisting of a mere 81 stanzas (the Tao Te Ching). 

Of the actual man Lao-tzu we know next to nothing -- or about as much as will be known about the mysterious Gagdad Bob (GB to his imaginary friends) in 2500 years. Neither left any traces of what was going on behind that beatific and/or idiotic smile. As for LT,

Like an Iroquois woodsman, he left no traces. All he left us was his book: the classic manual on the art of living, written in a style of gemlike lucidity, radiant with human and grace and largeheartedness and deep wisdom: one of the wonders of the world (Stephen Mitchell).

Of GB, it was said that he spent 12 years happily toiling as a retail clerk (apocryphally on the "graveyard" shift) before "they" (the conspiracy) put him on the dayshift, and he spent nearly three decades pretending to be a "psychologist" before disappearing entirely into the night and fog of primordial slack. 

GB left us two books, the first one an essentially frivolous monument to perpetual juvenilia, the second an unfinished symphony of truth, so to speak, which one can read from either end and which culminates in the middle (or "top"), where there is a page that says ?! and nothing more. 

It is difficult to say whether this primordial questiomation point -- ?! -- is a cry for help, a plea to be left alone, or perhaps even a medical emergency. We just don't know.

Of the two halves of this mysterious artifact, one side proceeds from the material/objective/empirical world "up to" this (?!), while the other half proceeds in the opposite direction, from the (?!) back down to our familiar world of time and space. 

Thus, like the first book it is not so much circular as spiroidal. What other form could possibly be adequate to the subject? Obviously linearity wouldn't cut it, nor did GB pretend to be a poet, nor even gay. 

A few more features are known of GB's manual, or at least can be pieced together from hurriedly scribbled notes in books from his vast library. At times these notes appear contradictory, but whatever. Here is one example, and don't be surprised if you have no idea what he's driving at, since he probably didn't know either. Did his reach exceed his grasp? Or was it the other way around? I suppose it depended on the day.

Before the first --> view from inside cosmos --> ascent

  First part of the first part --> reality of appearances

   Second part of the first part (limits of science)

     Middle Earth (Incarnation / new Word Order / Resurrection) 

    First part of the last part --> descent --> science of the limitless

   Last part of the last part --> reality of appearances

Beyond the last --> view from outside cosmos

So, yeah, this is the type of nonsense we're dealing with. 

Let's get back to our main subject, which is Schuon's infra- or pre- or antephysics; the foyer of the Creation, as it were. I'm going to have to leave in a few minutes, so we'll get as far as we can. Perhaps the time constraint will spur us to make it less wooly.

God's waiting room. That's where we are. How long before we see God? Is he overbooked? Never mind. Please fill out these forms, and one of his nurses will be with you shortly.

I would like to write a sentence this simple, this lucid, this universal, and this effingcacious: 

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

Reminds us of an aphorism:

The sentence should have the stone’s hardness and the branch’s trembling.

Schuon further describes "the primacy of thought -- hence of consciousness or of intelligence -- in relation to the material world surrounding us" (emphases mine).

So again, while a Thomist would say that all knowledge begins in the senses, for Schuon it begins with the bare phenomenon of thought itself, a position with which I would tend to agree, since there can be nothing weirder or more unexpected -- literally miraculous, really, -- than its appearance in a not only merely dead but really most sincerely dead universe:

Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence, is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be (ibid.).

(?!), literally. 

Empires of Time, Prisons of Space

In his Light on the Ancient Worlds, Schuon makes a number of points that go to our clear-as-muditations on progress, history, and the divine-human relations therein. 

For example, he writes of the inevitability of imperialism, whether for good or ill or worse:

Imperialism can come either from Heaven or simply from the earth, or again from hell; be that as it may, what is certain is that humanity cannot remain divided into a scattering of independent tribes; the bad would inevitably hurl themselves upon the good, and the result would be a humanity oppressed by the bad and hence the worst of all imperialisms.

This goes to the incessant tribe-on-tribe violence among native Americans we've been discussing. Note that it's not so much the Indians who are the problem, as a fragmented organization in which it only makes sense to be wary of strangers: more tribes, more conflict.  

Come to think of it, I have a big book called The Parable of the Tribes, which I've never actually read, but believe this to be its thesis. (How's that for a scholarly reference!)

Best I can do is quote Professor Backflap, who may be able to provide a clue as to why I purchased this book way back in 1980s. He begins with one of those gedankenexperiments:

Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one {cough Putin cough} choose peace?

The question answers itself: every tribe needs to be armed to the teeth and paranoid to the hilt. More generally,  

Why is the world so beset by alienation, tyranny, and destruction? The parable of the tribes is a theory of social evolution that offers answers to these and myriad related questions....

When human beings became the first creatures to invent their own way of life, their societies appeared to become free to develop as people might wish. But what may have been freedom for any single society adds up to anarchy in the interacting system of societies. 

In this anarchy, civilized societies were condemned to engage in a struggle for power.... And the earth became a place where no one is free to choose peace, but anyone can impose upon all the necessity for power (italics in original).

Just as it takes only one bad driver to create gridlock, it takes only one assoul to bring about a World Crisis, even if this assoul is basically in charge of a gas station with nuclear weapons. I read that even Switzerland -- which remained neutral in World War II -- is going to start charging Putin a hefty checking fee or something.

Anyway, I suppose imperialism is the best of crimes and the worst of crimes. Think of India. Before the arrival of the British, they were burning widows, even the good looking ones. Thus,

What may be called the imperialism of the good constitutes therefore a sort of inevitable and providential preventative war; without it no great civilization is conceivable (Schuon).

You could say that the motto of such great civilizations is: E Pluribus Unum. Or else. There's an element of force, but I guess it's preferable to the old Hobbesian war of all against all. 

Which in turn goes to our contemporary progressive barbarians, i.e., the Great Leap Backward of multicultural tribalism and identity politics.

Empires of Time, Prisons of Space

In his Light on the Ancient Worlds, Schuon makes a number of points that go to our clear-as-muditations on progress, history, and the divine-human relations therein. 

For example, he writes of the inevitability of imperialism, whether for good or ill or worse:

Imperialism can come either from Heaven or simply from the earth, or again from hell; be that as it may, what is certain is that humanity cannot remain divided into a scattering of independent tribes; the bad would inevitably hurl themselves upon the good, and the result would be a humanity oppressed by the bad and hence the worst of all imperialisms.

This goes to the incessant tribe-on-tribe violence among native Americans we've been discussing. Note that it's not so much the Indians who are the problem, as a fragmented organization in which it only makes sense to be wary of strangers: more tribes, more conflict.  

Come to think of it, I have a big book called The Parable of the Tribes, which I've never actually read, but believe this to be its thesis. (How's that for a scholarly reference!)

Best I can do is quote Professor Backflap, who may be able to provide a clue as to why I purchased this book way back in 1980s. He begins with one of those gedankenexperiments:

Imagine a group of tribes living within reach of one another. If all choose the way of peace, then all may live in peace. But what if all but one {cough Putin cough} choose peace?

The question answers itself: every tribe needs to be armed to the teeth and paranoid to the hilt. More generally,  

Why is the world so beset by alienation, tyranny, and destruction? The parable of the tribes is a theory of social evolution that offers answers to these and myriad related questions....

When human beings became the first creatures to invent their own way of life, their societies appeared to become free to develop as people might wish. But what may have been freedom for any single society adds up to anarchy in the interacting system of societies. 

In this anarchy, civilized societies were condemned to engage in a struggle for power.... And the earth became a place where no one is free to choose peace, but anyone can impose upon all the necessity for power (italics in original).

Just as it takes only one bad driver to create gridlock, it takes only one assoul to bring about a World Crisis, even if this assoul is basically in charge of a gas station with nuclear weapons. I read that even Switzerland -- which remained neutral in World War II -- is going to start charging Putin a hefty checking fee or something.

Anyway, I suppose imperialism is the best of crimes and the worst of crimes. Think of India. Before the arrival of the British, they were burning widows, even the good looking ones. Thus,

What may be called the imperialism of the good constitutes therefore a sort of inevitable and providential preventative war; without it no great civilization is conceivable (Schuon).

You could say that the motto of such great civilizations is: E Pluribus Unum. Or else. There's an element of force, but I guess it's preferable to the old Hobbesian war of all against all. 

Which in turn goes to our contemporary progressive barbarians, i.e., the Great Leap Backward of multicultural tribalism and identity politics.

Hope, History, Boredom, and Melancholy

Although I strongly agree with much, if not most, of what Schuon has written, I could never have been a formal student, and besides, he would never have had me. For where we disagree, we really disagree. 

A case in point is on the question of Progress. Let's start with whether or not it exists, and in what sense. Certainly it doesn't exist in the "progressive" sense, but progressivism nevertheless ironically proves the existence of progress, in that it causes it to go backward, precisely (whether in academia, aesthetics, aberrant sexuality, antiracism, autocracy, illegal aliens -- and that's just the A's). 

A case in point would be energy production and all it entails (and it entails a great deal more than you might realize, cf. the highly raccoommended The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein; I see that he has a sequel coming out in April, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas -- Not Less).

Under President Trump we made tremendous progress in this area, while under Brandon we have executed a U-turn and careened backward in the name of "progress" in order to combat the wholly imaginary Existential Crisis of Catastrophic Climate Change. 

This post could veer in any number of insultaining directions, but let's stay focused.

For Schuon, progress "is the very negation of any celestial origin"; it tends to give with one hand what it yoinks with the other, and he's not wrong: 

All too often things which some people call “useful” are anything but useful in their results. “Progress” is healing a paralytic while depriving him of his sight.

More often than not progress is simply 

the exchange of one evil for another, otherwise our age would be perfect and sanctified. In the world of man, as it is in itself, it is scarcely possible to choose a good; one is always reduced to the choice of a lesser evil, and in order to determine which evil is the less, there is no alternative but to relate the question to a hierarchy of values derived from eternal realities, and that is exactly what “our age” never does.

But the question is whether this eternal standard is in past or in the future; ultimately it goes to the nature of time itself, and whether time brings only deterioration and distance from this ideal, or whether this ideal is in the future.

Now we're getting somewhere, i.e., this post is making a bit of progress.

I've been thinking about this question as a result of reading a book called The Lord of History, which I cannot recommend. Another placeholder, as it were, while I wait for the mailman to bring me something better. Nevertheless, let's make the most of the teacher God has given us: give us this day our daily bread.  

I suppose it really comes down to whether time is reversible or irreversible. Interestingly, physics itself can't fully account for time's irreversibility, at least last time I checked. 

I just googled this: 

While we take for granted that time has a given direction, physicists don’t: most natural laws are 'time reversible' which means they would work just as well if time was defined as running backwards (https://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-time-and-why-does-it-move-forward).

Nevertheless, as we all know from everyday experience, time

has a direction, you always move forward, never in reverse. So why is the dimension of time irreversible? This is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.

The second law of thermodynamics is relevant, as is the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics. Still, these don't get us very far in explaining the gap between baboons and Beethoven. 

At any rate, when Christianity first made its appearance on the world stage, it was antagonistic to Greek thought, wherein the divine "consists in the unmoved eternal order of Ideas":

Immutable law, whether of nature or of society, represents to the senses the changeless eternity of the intelligible world. The phenomenon of movement itself is an imitation of immobility, being conceived as cyclical, both in the regular motions of the heavenly bodies and in the eternal recurrence which governs the course of history, so that the same events will be everlastingly repeated. 

By going round in a circle, even change thus conforms to the stable eternity of the ideal world, and no longer implies innovation (Danielou).

In ancient thought, there's no way around this depressingly absurcular roundness of temporality. No progress for you! 

The opposition is fundamental between this conception and the Christian belief in a unique, irrevocable value belonging to the historical Incarnation. 

It seems that the Incarnation includes and redeems history, which is convenient, since man cannot be man without existing in and as history. Moreover, 

It is this belief in the irreversibility of salvation that gives rise to the Christian virtue of hope, in contrast to the characteristic melancholy which flows from the Greek acceptance of an endless repetition. 

Speaking of which, this reminds me of something Champlain observed about the Indians, who, like other pagan peoples, were condemned to Nietzche's Eternal Return: on the one hand, Champlain "always regarded them as human beings like himself, and remarked on their intelligence. Often he commented on their physique and appearance, which was superior to European contemporaries." And yet... 

"And yet they are somewhat saturnine." 

By saturnine, writes Fischer, Champlain "meant that they had an undertone of melancholy." This "interested him, and he reflected much on it." I don't know what he concluded, but depression and hopelessness are always conjoined. 

I don't recall Schuon writing anything about hope and history, but Dávila provides a number of helpful hints:

For history to be of concern to us, there must be something in it that transcends it: There must be something in history more than history.

Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes.

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.

If history made sense, the Crucifixion would be superfluous.

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference. 

Hope, History, Boredom, and Melancholy

Although I strongly agree with much, if not most, of what Schuon has written, I could never have been a formal student, and besides, he would never have had me. For where we disagree, we really disagree. 

A case in point is on the question of Progress. Let's start with whether or not it exists, and in what sense. Certainly it doesn't exist in the "progressive" sense, but progressivism nevertheless ironically proves the existence of progress, in that it causes it to go backward, precisely (whether in academia, aesthetics, aberrant sexuality, antiracism, autocracy, illegal aliens -- and that's just the A's). 

A case in point would be energy production and all it entails (and it entails a great deal more than you might realize, cf. the highly raccoommended The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, by Alex Epstein; I see that he has a sequel coming out in April, Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas -- Not Less).

Under President Trump we made tremendous progress in this area, while under Brandon we have executed a U-turn and careened backward in the name of "progress" in order to combat the wholly imaginary Existential Crisis of Catastrophic Climate Change. 

This post could veer in any number of insultaining directions, but let's stay focused.

For Schuon, progress "is the very negation of any celestial origin"; it tends to give with one hand what it yoinks with the other, and he's not wrong: 

All too often things which some people call “useful” are anything but useful in their results. “Progress” is healing a paralytic while depriving him of his sight.

More often than not progress is simply 

the exchange of one evil for another, otherwise our age would be perfect and sanctified. In the world of man, as it is in itself, it is scarcely possible to choose a good; one is always reduced to the choice of a lesser evil, and in order to determine which evil is the less, there is no alternative but to relate the question to a hierarchy of values derived from eternal realities, and that is exactly what “our age” never does.

But the question is whether this eternal standard is in past or in the future; ultimately it goes to the nature of time itself, and whether time brings only deterioration and distance from this ideal, or whether this ideal is in the future.

Now we're getting somewhere, i.e., this post is making a bit of progress.

I've been thinking about this question as a result of reading a book called The Lord of History, which I cannot recommend. Another placeholder, as it were, while I wait for the mailman to bring me something better. Nevertheless, let's make the most of the teacher God has given us: give us this day our daily bread.  

I suppose it really comes down to whether time is reversible or irreversible. Interestingly, physics itself can't fully account for time's irreversibility, at least last time I checked. 

I just googled this: 

While we take for granted that time has a given direction, physicists don’t: most natural laws are 'time reversible' which means they would work just as well if time was defined as running backwards (https://www.sciencealert.com/what-is-time-and-why-does-it-move-forward).

Nevertheless, as we all know from everyday experience, time

has a direction, you always move forward, never in reverse. So why is the dimension of time irreversible? This is one of the major unsolved problems in physics.

The second law of thermodynamics is relevant, as is the collapse of the wave function in quantum physics. Still, these don't get us very far in explaining the gap between baboons and Beethoven. 

At any rate, when Christianity first made its appearance on the world stage, it was antagonistic to Greek thought, wherein the divine "consists in the unmoved eternal order of Ideas":

Immutable law, whether of nature or of society, represents to the senses the changeless eternity of the intelligible world. The phenomenon of movement itself is an imitation of immobility, being conceived as cyclical, both in the regular motions of the heavenly bodies and in the eternal recurrence which governs the course of history, so that the same events will be everlastingly repeated. 

By going round in a circle, even change thus conforms to the stable eternity of the ideal world, and no longer implies innovation (Danielou).

In ancient thought, there's no way around this depressingly absurcular roundness of temporality. No progress for you! 

The opposition is fundamental between this conception and the Christian belief in a unique, irrevocable value belonging to the historical Incarnation. 

It seems that the Incarnation includes and redeems history, which is convenient, since man cannot be man without existing in and as history. Moreover, 

It is this belief in the irreversibility of salvation that gives rise to the Christian virtue of hope, in contrast to the characteristic melancholy which flows from the Greek acceptance of an endless repetition. 

Speaking of which, this reminds me of something Champlain observed about the Indians, who, like other pagan peoples, were condemned to Nietzche's Eternal Return: on the one hand, Champlain "always regarded them as human beings like himself, and remarked on their intelligence. Often he commented on their physique and appearance, which was superior to European contemporaries." And yet... 

"And yet they are somewhat saturnine." 

By saturnine, writes Fischer, Champlain "meant that they had an undertone of melancholy." This "interested him, and he reflected much on it." I don't know what he concluded, but depression and hopelessness are always conjoined. 

I don't recall Schuon writing anything about hope and history, but Dávila provides a number of helpful hints:

For history to be of concern to us, there must be something in it that transcends it: There must be something in history more than history.

Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes.

History would be an abominable farce if it were to have a worldly culmination.

If history made sense, the Crucifixion would be superfluous.

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference.