Nice While it Lasted

To put it briefly, civilizations always die of a drying up of their religious sap, of an antagonism which grows up between the fundamental aspirations of the human soul and the frameworks in which societies seek to confine those aspirations. --Henri Daniel-Rops

Yesterday was one of those days in which I thought to myself -- and said to my son -- Life would be great if it weren't for fucking history. 

Conversely, the flowchart which we are proposing must be in but not of history; responsible for change, but itself unchanging:

not in time, but above it, and, far from arresting the progress of history, rather accelerates its course and the progress of knowledge (Maritain).

Naturally, if your map is accurate, you'll get to your destination more quickly. It is at once why the United States progressed so rapidly when it was grounded in such principles, and why it is now well into decadence and decline.

I once comforted myself by saying that What can't go on won't go on, not realizing that what can't go on is in fact the ordered liberty of a nation founded upon immutable principles of natural law; that fallen humanity not only could but did upend paradise, every time. 

And that was way before the Bidens got here. Barbarians are not only inside the gates, they are inside every institution and holding all the reins of power against which truth...

They don't need no steenking truth!

Thaaaat's right Petey. 

After all,

To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution. 

Now I have to comfort myself by remembering that

The truth does not share the defeat of its defenders,

and that

Today the conservative is merely a passenger who suffers a shipwreck with dignity.

For under the best of circumstances 

Civilizations are the summer buzzing of insects between two winters.

I don't hear any buzzing, and if this is global warming, why is it freezing in here? 

In place of the vertical cosmic flow chart, we now have the static two-tiered leftist system in which

Leveling is the barbarian's substitute for order.  

Now, it's not just the news of the day, year, or millennium that has me reaching for the black pill. I also happen to be reading a history of The Church of the Apostles and Martyrs, which takes place during the transition from a 200 year period of unprecedented peace, order, and (relative) tranquility, to an eerily similar period of cynicism, decadence, and decline. 

Yes, people are always comparing every period to the end of the Roman Empire, but someday someone will be right. Let me find a couple of passages that made my ears perk up.

One paradoxical point the author highlights is that -- I'll paraphrase here -- we usually think of a revolutionary situation occurring during times of tumult, chaos, and uncertainty. 

However, the seeds of revolution require stability in order to be sowed and nurtured. Think of our own recent period of unprecedented stability, and the destructive ideas that were being propagated and imbibed right under the surface. A

doctrine needs a certain period of stability in which to permeate society thoroughly. 

Here is one of the paradoxes of human government: by establishing order and peace within its boundaries a society makes it easier for forces within its bosom which are attempting its destruction to act, despite all the precautions it may take to prevent this (Daniel-Rops).

In hindsight, obvious. Liberal democracy, insofar as it remains liberal, sows the seeds of its own eventual destruction by its liberality toward the progressive and tyrannical enemies of liberalism. Should have seen it coming, but it's too late now. 

I was one of those people who scoffed 15 years ago, when we first heard rumblings about the left's assault on the first amendment. "Never happen," I said. "Stop sounding so paranoid, you're just giving ammo to the left to depict the right as a bunch of unhinged conspiracy theorists."

I don't know enough about history to know about the inevitability of these things, but this guy writes with a great deal of authority and confidence. He's clearly smarter than you -- just look at him:

And he says 

the fundamental causes which, later on, from the beginning of the third century onwards, were to push Rome more and more rapidly towards the abyss were already present in the Empire's Golden Age.

History is obnoxious enough, but does it happen faster in our day? This is what Terence McKenna thought in his chemically aided visions, and it sounds plausible. 

Certainly affluence cuts both ways, and not just today, for it

was to cause the disintegration of Roman society in exactly the same way as, fifteen centuries later, it brought about the collapse of Spain, after the American expeditions of the Conquistadores.

All that gold flowing in merely enabled people to stop working and

the idle rich to spend riotously on dwelling-houses, food and drink and material pleasures of all kinds.

But enough about the Bidens.

Well, a little more:

Cowardliness and cruelty went hand in hand.... Men no more wanted to defend their frontiers than to till their soil.... Roman society was attacked in its most vital spot, at the source which sustains all societies; the structure of the family was shaken to the roots, and the birth-rate began to fall.

Fourth trimester abortion was rampant, "the 'exposing' of new-born babies acquired terrifying proportions," and divorce "became so commonplace that no one attempted to provide reasonable justification for it anymore: the simple desire fore a change sufficed."

This French snob makes rather sweeping claims, but again, I don't know enough to refute him: 

States have always shown themselves completely incapable of restoring their moral foundations once they have allowed themselves to weaken. The Roman authorities were far from being unaware of the peril, but their good intentions were absurdly useless, in view of the forces which were driving their society to ruin.

Oh well.

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.

The First Decision in the Cosmic Flow Chart

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we're trying to draw up a cosmic flow chart -- a vertical one, since we already have a good horizontal one, more or less. 

The details of the latter are always being tweaked and fine-tuned, but it begins 13.8 billion years ago. Highlights since then include the unexpected emergence of life some 4 billion years ago, followed by the equally sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens as recently as 50 to 100 thousand years ago, an event so catastrophic that we're still getting used to it. I know I am, anyway.

Knowing what we know about this 13.8 billion year journey from nothing to Bob -- to this post -- the question is, in what do we situate it? 

You can't just say "nothing," i.e., the nothing that is "prior" to the Big Bang. From nothing, nothing comes. But look around, and I think you'll agree that, whatever it is, it isn't nothing.

Is this a conundrum, or worse, an absurdity? Or are we just looking at it the wrong way? 

The latter. For one thing, you need to open your cranium and look with both hemispheres. We just spent like SIX WEEKS explaining how and why you not only have to supplement an LH with an RH view, but how the RH is primary.

In my opinion, LH is to horizontal as RH is to vertical. The question now becomes whether vertical and horizontal are just Kantian projections of our neurology, or if LH and RH are adequations to a reality that is richer than what can be apprehended with one hemisphere alone.

Naturally we hold to the latter, since there is a more fundamental principle involved, this being the mind's adqeuation to reality as such. In other words -- speaking of the cosmic flow chart -- either we can or cannot know reality. 

If we can know reality, then this post continues. If we can't, then we shoot it in head and admit that we can never escape from our dreams of what is actually out there in the extra-mental world. 

If that's the case, then there is no controlling authority over our thoughts and perceptions, and all hell breaks loose:  the 2020 election wasn't rigged, Lia Thomas really is a man, and we have no rights the White House is bound to respect. Who can say otherwise, once there is no reality and no one to know it?

If we can't know reality, then unreality is not only in the driver's seat, it occupies all the seats of power. All this because of one little metaphysical choice at the top of the cosmic flow chart. Of course, for them it is the bottom of the cosmic flow chart, since there is no top. 

In a word, the tyranny of relativism which follows upon absolute subjectivism.

Let's call in some reinforecements from a book I'm reading called The Angelic Doctor, by Jacques Maritain. 

The greater grow the powers of illusion, the more will lovers of truth feel drawn towards the vast light of [Thomas's] wisdom [which] does not want to destroy but to purify modern speculation and to integrate all the truth that has been discovered since the time of St. Thomas.

It is an essentially synthetic and assimilative philosophy which attempts... a work of continuity and universality. It is also the only philosophy which, while rising to the knowledge of the supra-sensible, first requires from experience an unqualified adhesion to sensible reality. 

We'll get to the flow chart. I'm still workin' on it... 

Prolegomena to a Cosmic Flowchart

That term just popped into my head, but what exactly is a flowchart? It has something to do with business, but I flunked out of business school, and besides, I'm thinking more of isness. 

The first definition that comes up calls it "a diagram that illustrates the steps, sequences, and decisions of a process or workflow." However, mine will be a verbal diagram, plus we're talking less about work- than slackflow: what is its principle, and what steps does it take to end up down here?  

I guess we're talking about an actual map of the vertical, but I certainly wouldn't be the first to take a crack at this. 

Over the centuries there have been any number of vertical cartographers, but most of their maps turn out to be pretty unhelpful as far as I am concerned. They range from the complex to the simple (which I don't mean pejoratively) to the simplistic (which I do mean pejoratively) to the annoyingly baroque and idiosyncratic (by whom I mean a Ken Wilber).

I just googled "ken wilber map of reality," and look at this hideous thing. At least it's not in English, so we don't have to endure his hamfisted prose:

An example of the simplistic would be a one-substance and single-level pantheistic monism, but nothing is that simple, let alone everything. 

An example of the simple kind would be a straight-up two-storey Creator / creature version of Islam or various strands of evangelical Christianity. In the words of the song,

Well, me and Jesus got our own thing goin'
Me and Jesus got it all worked out
Me and Jesus got our own thing goin'
We don't need anybody to tell us what it's all about

Problem is, I guess I'm just not that simple. Sometimes I wish I were, but then there would be nothing to blog about. 

Back to our flowchart. In a sense, we're talking about "the flow of flow," so to speak. I'm thinking of the gramatically unflowing Dr. Csíkszentmihályi and his theory of flow: 

a flow state, also known colloquially as being in the zone, is the mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. 

In essence, flow is characterized by the complete absorption in what one does, and a resulting transformation in one's sense of time. Flow is the melting together of action and consciousness; the state of finding a balance between a skill and how challenging that task is. It requires a high level of concentration; however, it should be effortless (wiki).

Sounds very much like slack, but there are important differences. In my map, Slack is anterior to flow; it is something like the Tao, or the Chinaman's wu-wei, or maybe the Oriental Jazzman's favorite record, Music for Zen Meditation and Other Joys, by Tony Scott.  

Now, the more I write about this, the more I think it actually deserves a serious post. Let's consult a book we were discussing before McGilchrist came along and diverted our attention, one called Philosophy of Science in the Light of Perennial Wisdom, specifically, chapter 3, The Degrees and Modes of Reality. 

I like what the authors have to say, because they strike a balance between the excessively complicated and the overly simple.

Some, considering the essential identity of Creation with the Principle, may describe total reality as being one indivisible Unity.

For example, did you ever read or listen to, say, Krishnamurti? I dabbled in his ideas back in the day, but ultimately found them to be unhelpful. And irritating:

I'm also distracted by the flow of his combover.

As alluded to above,

Some may divide it up into two degrees, the Divine Order, and that of all that is created, namely, Creation.

At the other end, "some have proposed forty states," but there has to be an easier way. I actually have to think about this, so we'll try to plot it out in the next installment.

Beyond Speculation

As the late fifth-century mystic Dionysius the Areopagite says, God is "the cause of being for all, but is itself nonbeing, for it is beyond all being" (McGilchrist).

1) I couldn't agree more, and 

2) Like anyone could even know that.

Well, which is it, and why? 

It sounds like some kind of annoying koan. Is Denys speaking sense, nonsense, trans-sense, metaphorically, literally, or what? 

Let's find out! Or try, anyway, for there are still readers to alienate. 

Schuon would say literally, such that even God -- or the One whom we call God -- is its product, or emanation, or first determination, similar, in a way, to how the Son is the one & only begotten of the Father: 

It should not be forgotten that God as Beyond-Being, or suprapersonal Self, is absolute in an intrinsic sense, while Being or the divine Person is absolute extrinsically, that is, in relation to His manifestation or to creatures, but not in Himself, nor with respect to the Intellect which “penetrates the depths of God” (Schuon).

Let's suppose the Father is Beyond-Being, the Son Being, except eternally, such that there is no Beyond-Being without Being, and vice versa. 

The main problem with Schuon's formulation is with the adjective "suprapersonal." Is this adjective gratuitous or essential? Or is it contradictory to say that the Self could be suprapersonal? What I am asking is: is person a species of self, or vice versa?

I'm gonna go with the ontological priority of Person, except that Personhood implies its Other, such that the ultimate Ground is this very relationship. 

This notion of primordial Relation is difficult to describe and hard for people to conceive, so they -- at least implicitly -- think of it as Beyond Being (or at least beyond words and conception), but such a designation is nominal and not ontological.

What I mean by that last crack is that the ontology of Beyond-Being is Substance-in-Relation. 

Now, this Substance-in-Relation appears to be a closed circle or private party, but it seems that the Relation itself is a Person too, and that this is our point of entry into the Mystery. 

The purpose of the Incarnation is clearly to introduce us into this Mystery via the Spirit:

It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you.

That's pretty clear. 

Then, "when He, the Spirit of truth, has come, He will guide you into all truth" -- the metacosmic inter-Personal Truth of "I in them, and You in Me." 

In the final analysis of the upshot of bottom line, I would speculate that RH is to Beyond-Being as LH is to Being, but that the mysterious Relation between is equally important, i.e., the Holy Corpus Colossum, or something, all chasing each other in a dynamic perichoresis in which dancer, dance, and music interpenetrate one another. Or something.

Well, at least we're finished with this 1,579 page beast. What next?

Stalking the Wild & Watery Godhead

Problem:

[T]he word God is obfuscated and overlaid with so many unhelpful accretions in the West that it is not surprising that people recoil from this idol (McGilchrist).

Solution? He doesn't give one vis-a-vis the need for a new & unsaturated un-language for Celestial Central (see yesterpost), but he does advocate an apophatic theology.  

Now, apophatic theology has always been with us, and not just in the East (e.g., Tao, Moksha, Nirguna Brahman, et al, each of these being translinguistic experiences that shatter or repel speech). 

For example, real Jews don't say the G-d name for fear of idolatry, and for Thomas,

This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know.

I read somewhere that Thomas never deploys irony -- hey, nobody's perfect -- but that right there is a pretty ironic statement. He also speaks of "the necessity of calling God by many names," 

since we cannot know God naturally except from his effects, so it is necessary to designate his perfection by different names.... If, however, we were able to comprehend his essence in itself and give him a name proper to his essence, then we would express him in a single name.

Now, we can certainly know of God's essence even if we can never comprehend our knowledge of this bare fact, i.e., truly know what we're talking about. 

On the one hand, we all know that God's essence is to exist. But what this essential existence means from the inside out, God -- or whatever -- only knows. 

Incomprehensible! 

Damn right:

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence.

There are hints, however, and these hints are situated in such a manner that we can -- or rather, must -- spend our lives endlessly deepening them, if only because compared to this vertical adventure, anything less is a little borr-rring. 

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

This is just another way of saying that the depth -- the very depth that makes life worth living, or even a truly human life -- is real, and at a right angle to things (this is indeed what's The Matter With Things, insofar as they become mundane things only).   

Let us trot out a few more aphorisms, which, if nothing else, disprove the arboreal principle that no-one else I think is in my tree, because someone else is out on a limb with me after all:

The moment arrives in which one is only interested in stalking God.

I do not speak of God in order to convert anyone but because it is the only subject worth speaking of. 

If is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously. 

Put conversely, show me what you take seriously and I'll show you your religion. 

See?!

Each one sees in the world what he deserves to see.

Oh. Well, look again, waaay up there. No, not at my finger. That:

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

I get it: a nonlocal map. Just don't confuse the cataphatic LH map with the apophatic RH territory. But you need both words and grammar, which is to say, semantics and syntax:

The universe is a useless dictionary for someone who does not provide its proper syntax.

Now, what is the proper cosmic syntax? 

He doesn't say, because an aphorism is not a dissertation or even a blog post. Therefore, I'll say it: the grammar of the universe is hierarchical in the same way language is, e.g., letters tacitly point to words, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to story, story to theme, all conditioned from the top down, even though we can't communicate anything in the absence of those downright letters.

It's almost like everything alludes to something vertically adjacent, or something. Thus, 

What I say here will seem trivial to whoever ignores everything to which I allude.

Speaking of trolls, this reminds me of something I read yesterday, that Thomas's philosophical output includes no less than 10,000 objections. Best auto-troll ever!

I too anticipate objections, except in my case I lived them. In other words, I used to be all the things I now hope to ridicure. But I must not have been rotten to the core, or I wouldn't be here laughing at myself. Oh well. The Mystery works in mysterious ways.

Speaking of boredom, you're starting to get a bit repetitive.

There is no spiritual victory that is not necessary to win anew each day. 

Meanwhile, stay thirsty my friends:

The thirst for the great, the noble and the beautiful is an appetite for God that is ignored.  

And 

Thirst runs out before the water does.

In the Beginning is the Un-word

"Being," says McGilchrist, "is mysterious."

"McGilchrist," says BOb, "is durn tootin'."

We always know more than we did the day before, but we are nevertheless as plunged into mystery as we were the decade, century, or millennium before, which is to say, always. If anything, the world just keeps getting weirder, and yet, people behave as if all this is normal. 

This is your excuse?  

Aphorisms:

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

Bum? Underachiever? Goldbricking deadbeat? I think not:

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious.

In other words, a hee-ro. For our times. And at least I'm housebroken.

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempt to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Problem is, the remystification of the world really is a kind of full-time job. But truly truly, someone has to do it, no? Most everyone else is employed to demystify things, and I thank them for their service, I really do. But what would happen if the world -- and human beings -- really were totally demystified? 

Seriously, think about it. Would that not be another name for hell? At the very least it would make for a good Twilight Zone episode -- a reverse Kafka, in which everything makes perfect sense:

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneventful dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into an innocuous professor of entomology. 

Who wants to watch The Fully Illuminated Zone? 

I like daylight as much as the next guy, but what if there were no night? Some people are afraid of the dark, and I get it, but what about those monsters of the light, e.g., rationalism, scientism, Marxism? Exponentially more people were murdered in the broad ideological daylight of the 20th century than in the so-called Dark Ages.

It's like we need an explicit program for the remystification of the world. In the larger scheme of things this is what the sabbath is about: like the Creator, we devote one day a week to... to what exactly? 

The problem is that if we are to say anything about it, we still need some sort of placeholder, within language, for all those aspects of Being that defy direct expression, but which we sense are greater than the reality which language is apt to describe, almost certainly greater than whatever the human mind can comprehend (McGilchrist). 

Hmm, a placeholder for noplace, an empty variable for the Mystery of Being, an unsaturated translinguistic pneumaticon to say what can't be said and unsay what can...

O!

I like it. It simultaneously conveys the no-thing of zee-ro and the eternity & everything of the complete circle. It is like an endless spiral of nothing and everything and nothing, etc. 

What we need, in fact, is a word unlike any other, not defined in terms of anything else: a sort of un-word (ibid.).

O! 

Here is the dilemma, and why I speak of an un-word: if we have no word, something at the core of existence disappears from our shared world of awareness; yet if we have a word, we will come to imagine we have grasped the nature of the divine, pinned it down and delimited it, even though by the very nature of the divine this is something that can never be achieved (ibid.).

Agreed. Even the greatest achiever can never achieve divinity. 

But an un-word is not enough. Rather, someone needs to develop an unsaturated un-language in order to map what goes on up there... someone who perhaps can look back on a life of achievement, but whose career has, uh, slowed down a bit lately... not a goldbricking deadbeat, exactly, but not an everyday achiever either...

I Believe in Miracle

 We left off yesterday with a little problem:

Just as the emergence of consciousness is a miracle, brute emergence of Being from non-Being is either the miracle of all miracles or a straight impossibility.

The problem is where to situate our miracle. 

What exactly is a miracle? Whatever else it is, it usually involves a violation of the known laws of nature. Now, even the existence of laws of nature violates the known laws of nature, since there is no law that can explain how they got here.

Natural laws are irreducible to explanation, like any mystery.

On a more or less serious note, it seems to me that whatever your metaphysic -- from religious nut at one end to atheistic nut at the other, and everyone in between -- you will have to sneak in no less than one axiom or principle that cannot be reduced to anything else, and just is. For a theist it is God (whatever that means); for a materialist it is matter (whatever that means). 

Just as no one knows what God is, nor does anyone know what matter is. Regarding the latter, it seems the more we know, the less we know:

Matter itself is an abstraction that no-one has ever seen: we have only seen elements of the world to which we attribute the quality, within our consciousness, of being material.... 

Materialism derives the only thing we undeniably know, the concreteness of experience, from an unknown abstraction: matter (McGilchrist).

He quotes a physicist on the matter:

Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. 

And another:

On many matters, such as experience, physics is simply silent. If you're not clear on this limitation, you have no idea what physics is. 

At this point in my cosmic adventure, I find such arguments boring and tedious. Of course materialism, naturalism, and physicalism are irredeemably stupid and inadequate. The question remains--

What are you gonna do about it? 

You asked that yesterday. This predictable and unproductive argument between matter and consciousness has been going on since the second philosopher arrived on the scene to disagree with the first. Is there anything new we can add, a novel way to approach the question?

Yeah, what he said!

Challenge accepted. As alluded to above, people who claim to be materialists presumably do so because it is less weird and miraculous than religion, but it turns out to be equally weird. It makes me want to elevate weirdness itself to a principle, and why not? 

In the beginning was the Weird, and the Weird was with God, and the Weird was God. 

Something like that. 

What some call religion hardly astonishes us more than what others call science.

There are two ways of going about this: there is the ascending (or analytic) approach that proceeds from the senses to the Principle (we won't yet say God, because it assumes too much, and is too saturated with arbitrary and idiosyncratic meaning); then there is the descending (or synthetic) approach which begins with the Principle and deduces consequences and entailments therefrom.

Hmm. It makes me think that the first is an LH specialty, the second an RH. In fact, this seems pretty clear, since the LH specializes in analysis, the RH in synthesis and integration. And let's not forget the mysterious third, the corpus collosum that unites them.

Now, although we can tackle it from either side -- top or bottom -- the fact remains that reality is one. This suggests that there is only one miracle, the rest being consequences of it. It makes no sense to situate the miracle at the bottom, because, supposing you do, it's not going to be enough; rather, you will need a multitude of miracles.

For example, the first miracle will be that there is something instead of nothing. I say "miracle," because you simply have to assume it as first principle. But then, after a few billion years of so-called matter just doing what it must, it suddenly comes to life. How did that happen? Miracle, I guess.

Okay, but then rational souls appear on the cosmic stage. What explains this miracle? 

Nothing explains it. It's a miracle!

What about the principle of parsimony -- the one that says we shouldn't multiply hypotheses? Occam, and all that? 

Why don't we reduce all the miracles to one big one -- one that is, say, eternally subsistent -- alive, conscious, intelligent, free... one, true, beautiful, creative... intrinsically related in love to its consubstantial other...

Sure, it's a little weird, but is it weird enough?

This leads to a related subject, but it's different enough to deserve a post of its own.

Original SINO

 "To be human," writes McGilchrist,

is to feel a deep gravitational pull towards something ineffable, that, if we just for once get beyond words and reasons, is a matter of experience..., something outside our conceptual grasp, but nonetheless present to us through intimations that come to us from a whole range of unfathomable experiences we call "spiritual."

This is a superficially attractive view of religiosity, and it comes close to what I might have said a couple decades ago. But is it true, and is it enough? For it places the primacy on our end of the deal, with "experience," rather than the reality of the object of experience, and the next ineluctable cosmic bus stops are subjectivism --> relativism --> nihilism --> tenure.

On the one hand, "experience" is unarguable -- unless you want to argue that it should be spelled inarguable. 

But what if one's experience suggests that murdering Jews is the shortest path to paradise? Or that the "something ineffable" toward which we are drawn is called Gaia, or that maybe the Aztec were onto something with their system of human sacrifice? 

No, there's gotta be something objective in the equation, otherwise it's SINO: Subjectivity In, Nihilism Out. 

I have a better idea, or rather, Dávila does: 

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter.

Now, I believe this aphorism with ALL MY FEELINGS, but this doesn't matter if it isn't true that man may know truth, i.e., that what we call Truth consists mainly of three things: first there are the universal metaphysical principles, or the first immutable truths of common sense, which inhere in intelligence as such.

Second -- because it is one of those first immutable truths -- is the principle that truth is the adequation of mind to world, not merely of mind to "experience," which can literally be anything. For example, I can experience myself as a woman, but that doesn't make it so, because it does not conform to reality. 

(Thus, as an asnide, one can appreciate the centrality of a metaphysics of subjectivism and relativism for the left: everything for them hinges on the non-existence of objective reality and our ability to know it. Ironically, for them subjectivism is objectively necessary, otherwise they will inevitably fall into reality.)

The third Truth comes to us directly from God, i.e., revelation. It is at once more controversial than the first two, but no less necessary, for if there is no communication of truth from outside the closed circle of human opinion, then we are well and truly f.... subject to the tyranny of relativism.

In another aphorism which I feel is totally correct, Dávila suggests that 

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow is to make fun of the rest.

He has too much respect for our intelligence to name them, but maybe he gives us too much credit, so I will: these must include, at a minimum, the principle of identity (or non-contradiction), of sufficient reason, and of efficient causality. 

Is it asking too much that a theory not contradict itself, and be adequate to explain the phenomenon without resorting to magic?

Magic, for example, that the human intellect just sprouted from matter (boo!). Unless we revise our opinion of what matter is. But if matter is both material and immaterial, it violates the principle of non-contradiction, and renders reality unintelligible at the foundation.

But wait: matter is both material and immaterial at the foundation, otherwise it would be unintelligible. 

Which is another way of saying that we never encounter matter in the raw, rather, as form + matter. If there exists formless matter, then truly truly, it is none of our isness. 

Literally, for it can have no innersection with Being. Formless matter is the first word of non-being, therefore no word at all, in a language no one can speak or hear.

Let's get back to what McGilchrist says up there in paragraph the second: is there some way to preserve what is helpful, or perhaps to tweak his conclusion to render it sound? 

Let us flip ahead a couple of pages, to p. 1198, where there is a section called Denying the Ground of Being, which he claims not to do: 

ultimately there must just be an uncaused cause, or an ungrounded ground....

OK Thomas. 

In whatever way we recast it, we are faced with an exception, and an exception that cannot be rationalized so as to be safely packed away again within our familiar categories. 

I'm not entirely sure what he means there by "exception," for surely the Ground of Being must be the rule. Nor can we be an exception to the rule, rather, an adequation to it (otherwise we couldn't even know if it).

To his credit, McGilchrist rejects scientistic McMagic -- i.e., "brute emergence" -- as some kind of plausible escape from God, as if Being -- which is to say, intelligible reality -- just 

emerged out of Nothing: nothing here to explain.... in this strategy the miracle is not denied, but confirmed: one miracle is simply recast as another.

It's just substituting one word -- "emergence" -- for another -- "God" -- and certainly attributing godlike abilities to a supposedly godless process:

Just as the emergence of consciousness is a miracle, brute emergence of Being from non-Being is either the miracle of all miracles or a straight impossibility.

Agreed.

Well, what are you gonna do about it? 

Oh, we'll do something about it alright. Tomorrow.

A Few Words by the Graveside of Anyone Who Dares to Disagree With Me

Given how much time we devoted to it, I feel like we haven't given a proper sendoff to The Matter With Things, and that maybe we ought to say a few words and give it a decent burial, or at least a Celebration of Life, before moving on to the next same old thing. 

There are certainly many points on which I agree with McGilchrist, even if we part ways in the upper pneumasphere, he stopping at a monistic evolutionary panentheism, I proceeding to infinitude and beyond, toward a more traditional metacosmic trinitarian creationism (minus the "-ism"). 

Regarding the latter, Thomas speaks for me:

An error concerning the Creation ends as false thinking about God.

Elsewhere he maintains that

an error regarding creatures reacts in a false knowledge of God. 

So, one can begin at either end -- with creatures or creative Principle, with little nounlings or Big Verb, AKA creative Logos -- and rearrive at the same nobodaddy noplace.

For in the end -- of my bOʘk at any rate -- reality ultimately ascends to the same Principle from which it descends: there is (↓) and there is (↑), but these are a continuous spiral, not two discontinuous lines. 

If Creation is synonymous with the world, then God is synonymous with... well, technically with nothing, but I was thinking of "source of the world." 

The divine trifurcartion is a firstandlast principle, by which I mean that any thinking, to the extent that it deserves the title of Thinking, and follows itself all the way up, ends in a conception -- whether implicit or explicit -- of the Absolute.

Truth the Second: you needn't think long about this Absolute to understand that it is of necessity Infinite, i.e., unbound, and admitting of no limitation or final determination.

Where the Absolute excludes nothing, the Infinite includes everything, and yes, these are subtly different -- why, as different as LH and RH, respectively, come to think of it (LH : Absolute as RH : Infinite).  

Concur with Schuon:

To say Absolute, is to say Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from this “dimension” of Infinitude that the world necessarily springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.

This doesn't imply that this world is necessary, since it is obviously contingent; rather, that there is a "necessary" principle of creativity in God, and that to say necessary is to say eternal. I won't say this is a mandatory Raccoon principle, only that it sure makes a lot of sense. To me.

And while looking up the above comment by Thomas, I stumbled on some additional relevant one- and two-liners to help light the Way, for example,

Each single being is perfect in the measure in which it reaches up [↑] to its own origin [O].

The highest perfection of human life consists in the mind of man being open [o] to God [in his mode of  (↓)].

Every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge [truth = Truth, so be careful what you believe].

The natural desire for knowledge cannot be satisfied in us until we know the first cause.... God, however, is the first cause. Hence, the last end of the creature endowed with a spiritual intellect is to see God in his essence.

O and ʘ:not one, but not exactly two, either. 

Pebbles in Your Pond

I'm a little burned out, and I blame McGilchrist. For those of you keeping score at home, we began our review of The Matter With Things on April 27, over a month ago, only for it to end in a whimper of indiscriminate new age panentheism. That's it?  

Anyone feels suffocated inside anyone else’s intelligence.

I'm aware of this, for which reason I try to leave a little air for readers, and not fill every cavity with my idle speculation. Not only is this blog inneractive,

Sentences are pebbles the writer tosses into the reader's soul. The diameter of the concentric ripples that spread out depends on the dimensions of the pond. 

The last chapter is called A Sense of the Sacred, and along the way there are references to folks I haven't taken seriously since I first got involved in this racket, such as Alan Watts, D.T. Suzuki, Rupert Sheldrake, Wendell Berry, and Teilhard de Chardin, sprinkled in with Hegel, Spinoza, Whitehead, and especially Bergson. 

Now, Bergson is as wrong as wrong can be, even though I understand the appeal, since he offers an intellectual cure for scientistic reductionism and atheistic spiritual retardation. 

Except it's not a true cure, since the fundamentally untrue can never be a permanent cure for anything. I suppose it's more of a palliative: an opiate for the tenured, or for folks trying to extricate themselves from scientistic LH capture.

Again, I can relate. You first have to think your way out of materialism and give yourself permission to believe. Then you start embracing socially acceptable things such as Yoga or Zen, the latter so totally free of dogma that all you have to do is pay attention to your breath for the rest of your life. 

After you've fooled around with your breath for a few incarnations, you can dive into gloriously unhinged countercultural practices such as orthodox Christianity, and let God do the heavy lifting:

Nothing attracts me as much in Christianity as the marvelous insolence of its doctrines.

Some people say you can't prove the existence of God. Maybe you can't prove it to them, but you can certainly prove the existence of the left, and the left hates Christianity. Now,

Evil has only the reality of the good that it annuls.

Therefore, without us -- without Racist White Supremacist Christian Patriarchal anti-LGBTQ+ Haters -- their whole universe collapses. No wonder they can't leave us alone.

What does that have do do with anything? 

I don't know, but if we've learned one thing from The Matter With Things, it is that the LH is ground zero of Dunning Kruger, in that it is insanely confident about what it thinks it knows (which mostly consists of abstract models of reality) and totally dismissive -- not to say ignorant -- of what it does not and even cannot know, e.g., nonlocal wholeness, nonlinear complexity, metaphor, and the vertical more generally.

This principle of verticality is of critical importance, because -- among other reasons -- it was here before we arrived on the scene fifty or a hundred thousand years ago; it is not something "invented" by the RH, rather, discovered by it. 

Ultimately it is why we have this bilateral asymmetry of the hemispheres in the first place. But reality is one, so in spiritual health both hemispheres should be dialectically involved with one another. 

True, it is far worse to have a missing, underactive, or dysfunctional RH, but it's a little like choosing between sight and hearing when health, or normality, means possessing both. 

Nor is there Sightworld separate from Soundworld, rather, one world with sights and sounds: the five senses are integrated by a higher one called common sense; likewise, we might say that the RH and LH are unified in a higher hemi-pneumasphere called intellect.

The closest McGilchrist gets to the intellect is Bergson's intuition, which is a very different function in a radically different system -- a system of pure becoming rather than being. I don't know how much time I want to spend on the primordial incorrectness of this view. Of Bergsonian evolutionism, Garrigou-Lagrange writes that it

is true from the perspective of the senses. However, from the perspective of the intellect, it remains true that the imperfect exists and is determined only in view of the more perfect.

Bearing in mind that ultimate reality is Absolute-Infinite-Perfect. 

Evolutionism turns the cosmos upside-down, such that

self-creative evolution is ascending, and then, in it, the more comes from the less, the more perfect from the less perfect. It rejects the mystery of creation..., in order to substitute absurdity for it, now placed at the root of things...

God "goes from surprise to surprise" while being fully plunged into and identified with the surprises, as opposed to being -- in my view -- the very principal of Upside Surprise, AKA Continuous Creation. 

Panentheism is okay but Creation is better. Having said that, the former at least "represents an admirable reductio absurdum proof of God's existence, for it leads one to choose between the True God and radical absurdity" (ibid.). 

The above noted cosmic ne'er-do-wells such as Alan Watts often appear on the same page with luminaries such as Dionysius, Augustine, Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and Josef Pieper. (I suppose I shouldn't hit too hard on this, since I used to be prone the same indiscriminate approach to the vertical.)

Some of these thinkers are not like the others, and in more ways than one. Yes, the Catholic ones listed in the paragraph above are members of an organized religion which McGilchrist otherwise rejects. They are also much deeper and more serious thinkers than the others, and I wonder why? 

Many aphorisms came to mind. I'm looking for one in particular but can't find it -- something to the effect that modern man seeks a religion without grace. To which I would add the original sin which is the shadow of our original grace and justification.

Now that I think about it, I would have absolutely loved The Matter With Things back in the 1990s, when I was just kid with a crazy dream, a suburban shaman wingin' it in the vertical and trying to invent his own religion. But now I say:

Originality must adhere to the continuity of a tradition.

There's a particular kind of music I like, which is... how to put it... right on the border between adventurous post-bop and avant-garde free jazz, structure and chaos, a musical now out of which novelty flows. 

Now that I think about it, it's also between LH and RH, memory and anticipation, being and becoming -- like the religion the Almighty & me works out betwixt us, it is endlessly becoming but always in the orbit of the celestial attractor in vertical phase space, the Being Without Whom....

Time Sickness and Historical Consciousness

The nature -- or at least appearance -- of time changes as a result of certain temporary states, but also certain acquired traits. 

By the latter, for example, there is "historical consciousness," which animals do not possess, and which some humans barely possess at all. Or, to the extent that they do possess it, it's a kind of expansive projection of the momentary. 

Like journalists, who simultaneously know nothing while pretending at omniscience. Which is one of the reasons why they are so irritating. Reason for hope, however: a majority of Americans now agree that the media is an "enemy of the people," the rest being bereft of historical consciousness themselves.

Imagine someone who watches a national news broadcast and doesn't want to vomit. What a strange person, almost a different species of human!

Symmetry: note how, for the left, history is an enemy of the people. Which is why they're forever rewriting (or better, de-writing, censoring, and distorting it based again on the Fierce Urgency of the Now, or what we call Historical Retardation). 

Just to reset, we're up to chapter 22 of The Matter With Things, called simply Time. I have my own ideas about the subject, but we'll never finish the book if I go off on every tangential squirrel.

Now, history is in the right hemisphere, journalism (or the Narrative) in the left hemisphere. That's a good example of a tangential squirrel in Bobville, since McGilchrist doesn't say that. But he makes me think it when he discusses these two modes of time:

In the first, time is frozen, and spatialized in its representation by the analytical intellect and by language, delivering a world which is sliced and fragmented; in the second, it is forever presencing to our intuition and our embodied cognition.... 

In the first, time is effectively denied, and life drained of meaning; in the second, both time -- and, with it, life -- are affirmed and celebrated.

Again, LH and RH, respectively. 

This is another one of those concepts that I've thought about before, but just never thought about grounding in neurology. 

More generally, I think we're talking here about a convergent reality that different thinkers simply approach with different vocabularies and nomenclatures. Way back in grad school I learned to characterize this distinction as PS <---> D, and it is central to what we call "psychological maturity."

I shall be brief: you could call PS <---> D a kind of metabolism of the mind that forms the basis of insight: the movement from PS to D "gives coherence to what is dispersed and introduces order into disorder," and represents an integration of more fundamental or primordial elements.

Now, imagine someone -- a journalist, for example -- inhabiting some rigid and dysfunctional D-world narrative. For him, he will have to undergo a period of confusing PS in order to reassemble himself (and reality) at a higher and deeper level. In short, he'll have to get worse before getting better.

Then (we're still back in grad school) I stumbled upon another thinker who applied this scheme to historical consciousness. Long story short, this is why a mature person will have a much more accurate and integrated narrative about his own past, but also (I think) about history more generally (at least in potential).

For certain immature patients, "History is instantaneously rewritten" and "The present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present" -- which sounds exactly like what McGilchrist would characterize as an RH ---> LH movement. Sorry about all these symbols, but it is very much as if PS <---> D = LH <---> RH.

Come to think of it, the D in PS <---> D actually stands for Depressive, and McGilchrist also happens to situate both subclinical (or realistic) and clinical depression in the RH. 

Why might this be? I would say because reality is a bit sobering, to say the least, if not a bit depressing per se. My people (psychoanalytic folk) would say that maturity involves tolerating depression as opposed to running away from it (which is called mania, or a manic defense).

And sure enough, McGilchrist notes that in mania, "the left frontal pole is dominant," "whereas in melancholy... the right frontal pole is dominant." So, neurology confirms the folk wisdom of my people.

Conversely, PS may be more "persecutory," but it is preferable to tolerating the depression that would occur if the person were honest with himself. You've no doubt noticed the emotional immaturity of progressive activists of various kinds, from Greta Thunberg to AOC to Keith Olbermann. 

Yes, they are constantly paranoid and persecuted and angry (PS world) but imagine what would happen if they were to stop projecting their primitive psychic elements and had to tolerate them instead: depression.

That's enough of that squirrel.  

In another passage, McGilchrist compares time to music, which we've done on many occasions. In fact, I've likewise suggested that we are drawn to music because it reflects the nature of temporal reality. Think of how each note

is only understandable as part of a melody or musical sequence which is appreciated as whole, and where any one note, and those before and after, interpenetrate (McGilchrist).

It's as if the individual notes are PS, the melody D. And yes, music appreciation is very much an RH affair. People with RH damage may even have difficulty recognizing melodies. Which I suppose is why the Narrative is so jarringly discordant to folks like us with sensitive RH hearing.